'No. I wish now I had. And I very much wish he had never painted that memory portrait of Mildred. You'd almost think he was trying to be found out.'
'Perhaps he was, unconsciously,' I said. 'Certainly Fred was doing his best to find him out. No doubt Fred borrowed the painting from the Biemeyers partly for professional reasons. He wanted to establish whether it really could be a Chantry. But he had personal reasons, too. I think he may have connected it with pictures he had seen in the past in the Johnson house on Olive Street. But he failed to make the final conscious connection between his foster father, Johnson, and the painter Chantry. Before he could do that, Johnson-Chantry took the painting from Fred's bedroom. And the Biemeyers hired me to get it back for them.'
Betty tapped the horn. We were moving down the long inland slope behind Camarillo. There were no cars immediately ahead of us. I looked at her and she looked back. She raised her right hand from the wheel and touched her mouth. I got the message. I had talked more than enough, and I subsided.
A few minutes later, Mrs. Chantry said, 'It wasn't his first memory picture of Mildred. He painted several others, long ago, in our days together. One of them was a pieta.'
She was silent for a long time, until we were on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. Then I heard her crying softly. There was no way to tell if she was crying for Chantry or herself, or perhaps for the long-dead partnership that had held their young lives together and spawned his work. When I looked sideways at her face, I could see the bright tears on it.
'Where do we go from here?' Betty said.
'The police station.'
Francine Chantry let out a cry that subsided into a groan. 'Can't I even spend the night in my own house?'
'You can go back there and pack a bag if you want to. Then I think you should go to the police, with your lawyer.'
Much later, in the pre-dawn chill, I woke in a dark bed. I could feel Betty's heart and hear her breathing like the quiet susurrus of a summer ocean.
A harsher bedroom scene came into my mind. I had last seen Francine Chantry in a hospital room with specially screened windows and an armed guard outside the door. And just outside the half-open door of my partly sleeping mind another woman seemed to be waiting, a short lame white-haired woman who had been beautiful.
The word 'pieta' came back into my mind. I woke Betty up with my hand on the curve of her hip. She sighed and turned over.
'Lew?'
'What's a pieta?'
She yawned deeply. 'You ask the darnedest questions at the darnedest times.'
'Does that mean you don't know?'
'Of course I know what a pieta is. It's a traditional picture of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of her son. Why?'
'Francine Chantry said her husband painted one of Mildred Mead. I assume she was Mary.'
'Yes. I've seen the picture. They have it in the local gallery, but they don't exhibit it publicly. It's slightly embarrassing, or so some people think. Chantry painted the dead man as a self- portrait.'
Betty yawned and went to sleep again. I lay awake and watched her face emerging in the slow dawn. After a while I could see the steady blue pulse in her temple, the beating of the silent hammer that meant that she was alive. I hoped that the blue hammer would never stop.
XLIII
When I woke up a second time, Betty had gone out. She had left four things for me on the kitchenette table: a carton of granola, a bottle of milk, a safety razor, and a cryptic note, which said: 'Had funny dream-Mildred Mead Chantry's mother-is this possible '
I ate my breakfast food and drove across town to Magnolia Court. Mildred Mead failed to answer my repeated knocking on her door. An old man came out of the next cottage and looked me over from the distance of a generation. Eventually he volunteered the information that Mrs. Mead, as he called her, had gone out.
'Do you know where she went?'
'She told the taxi-driver to take her to the courthouse.'
I followed Mildred there, but she wasn't easy to find. The courthouse and its landscaped grounds occupied a city block. I soon decided that I was wasting my time walking up and down its graveled paths and tiled corridors looking for a small old limping woman.
I checked in at the coroner's suite of offices and found Henry Purvis there. Mildred had come to his office within the past half-hour.
'What did she want from you?'
'Information about William Mead. He was her natural son, apparently. I told her he was buried in the Santa Teresa cemetery, and I offered to take her out to visit his grave. She didn't seem interested in that. She got off on the subject of Richard Chantry. She claimed she had been his model at one time, and she wanted to get in to see him. I told her it simply wasn't possible.'
'Where is Chantry being held?'
'District Attorney Lansing has him here in a special cell with round-the-clock guards. I couldn't even get in there myself-not that I particularly want to. Apparently he's gone completely off the rails. They have to sedate him to keep him quiet.'
'What happened to Mildred?'
'She walked out. I sort of hated to let her go. She seemed pretty upset, and she'd been drinking. But I had no reason to hold her.'
I went outside and made another circuit of the grounds and courtyards. No Mildred. I was getting nervous. Whether or not there was truth in Betty's dream, I felt that Mildred was in some way central to the case. But I was losing her, and losing the morning.
I looked up at the four-sided clock on the courthouse tower. It was ten. There was only one person visible on the observation platform, a white-headed woman whose rather clumsy movements caught my eye. Mildred. She paused and turned and gripped the black iron fence. It was almost up to her chin. She peered over it, down into the stone-paved courtyard.
She was extraordinarily still. She looked like a woman staring down into her grave. The life of the city seemed to freeze in widening circles around her.
I was nearly a hundred yards away and a hundred feet below. If I raised an alarm, it might only trigger the action she seemed to have in mind. I walked to the nearest door and took the tower elevator up.
When I stepped out on the observation platform, she had turned to face me, her back against the iron fence. She turned again and tried to clamber over the fence into empty space. Her lame old body failed in the attempt.
I put my arms around her and held her securely. She was breathing as if she had climbed the tower hand over hand. The frozen life of the city resumed, and I began to hear its sounds again.
She struggled in my arms. 'Let me go.'
'I don't think so, Mildred. Those flagstones are a long way down and I wouldn't want you to take a fall on them. You're too pretty.'
'I'm the hag of the universe.' But she gave me an up-from-under look, the automatic mannerism of a woman who had once been small and beautiful and was still handsome. 'Will you give me a break?'
'If I can.'
'Just take me down and turn me loose. I won't do anything-not to myself or anybody else.'
'I can't take a chance on that.'
I could feel the heat of her body through her clothes. Sweat gathered on her upper lip and in the blued hollows of her eyes.
'Tell me about your son William.'
She didn't answer me. Her makeup was eroding, and her gray face peered at me through it like a death mask.
'Did you trade in your son's dead body on that big house in Chantry Canyon? Or was it somebody else's dead body?'
She spat in my face. Then she went into a fit of passionate weeping. Then she was still. She didn't speak as I took her down in the elevator, or when I handed her over to the D.A.'s men and women.
I told them that she should be carefully searched and kept under observation as a determined potential suicide. It was just as well I did. District Attorney Lansing told me later that the woman who searched her found a brightly honed stiletto wrapped in a silk stocking and tucked under her girdle.
'Did they find out what she was carrying it for?'
The D.A. shook his head. 'Presumably,' he said, 'she intended to use it on Chantry.'
'What was her motive?'
Lansing pulled alternately at the ends of his handlebar mustaches, as if he were using them to steer his mind through the complexities of the case. 'This isn't generally known, and I'll have to ask you to keep it to yourself. Chantry seems to have murdered Miss Mead's son in Arizona, thirty years ago. To give credit where credit is due, I got that from Captain Mackendrick. He's been doing some excellent spadework in this case. I think he'll be our next chief of police.'
'Good for him. But how does the revenge theory fit in with her suicide attempt?'
'Are you certain it was a real attempt?'
'It looked real to me. Mildred wanted out, and the only thing that stopped her was that iron fence. That and the fact that I happened to see her up there.'
'Well, it's not inconsistent with the revenge motif. She was thwarted in her attempt at revenge, so she turned her anger against herself.'
'I don't quite follow that, Mr. D.A.'
'No? You're probably not as familiar as some of us are with recent developments in criminal psychology.' There was an edge on his smile.
I gave him a soft answer because I wanted something from him. 'It's true I never went to law school.'
'But you've been of real assistance in spite of that,' he said reassuringly. 'And we're certainly grateful for your suggestions.'
His eyes went distant on me, and he stood up behind his desk. I stood up, too. I had a nightmare vision of my case moving inexorably away from me.
'Could I possibly have a minute with your prisoner, Mr. D.A.?'
'Which one?'
'Chantry. I want to ask him a couple of questions.'
'He isn't answering questions. The public defender has advised him not to.'
'The questions I have in mind aren't connected with these murders, at least not directly.'
'What are they?' Lansing said.
'I want to ask him what his real name is, and get his reaction. And I want to ask him why Mildred Mead tried to kill herself.'
'We don't really know that she did.'
