His smile faded. 'Are you investigating us?'
'I have no interest in you at all, now that the girl is out of here.'
'We did her no harm,' he said quickly. 'I'm not suggesting you did.'
'But I suppose the sheriff will be bothering us now. Simply because we gave shelter to Biemeyer's daughter.'
'I hope not. I'll put in a word with him, if you like.'
'I would like, very much.' He relaxed visibly and then audibly, letting out a long sighing breath.
'In return for which,' I said, 'you can do something for me.'
'What is it?' He was suspicious of me again.
'Help me to get in touch with Mildred Mead.'
He spread his hands, palms up. 'I wouldn't know how. I don't have her address.'
'Aren't you making payments to her for this house?'
'Not directly. Through the bank. I haven't seen her since she went to California. That was several months ago.'
'Which bank is handling the account?'
'The Copper City branch of Southwestern Savings. They'll tell you I'm not a swindler. I'm not, you know.'
I believed him, provisionally. But he had two voices. One of them belonged to a man who was reaching for a foothold in the spiritual world. The other voice, which I had just been listening to, belonged to a man who was buying a place in the actual world with other people's money.
It was an unstable combination. He could end as a con man, or a radio preacher with a million listeners, or a bartender with a cure of souls in Fresno. Perhaps he had already been some of those things.
But I trusted him up to a point. I gave him the keys to the blue Ford and asked him to keep it for Fred, just in case Fred ever came back that way.
XXII
We drove back down the mountain to the substation and found Fred sitting inside with the deputy. I couldn't tell at first glance whether he was a prisoner or a patient. He had an adhesive bandage across the bridge of his nose and cotton stuffed up his nostrils. He looked like a permanent loser.
The sheriff, who was a small winner, went into the inner office to make a phone call. His voice was a smooth blend of confidence and respect. He was making arrangements to fly Doris home in a copper-company jet.
He lifted his head, flushed and bright-eyed, and offered me the receiver. 'Mr. Biemeyer wants to talk to you.'
I didn't really want to talk to Biemeyer, now or ever. But I took the receiver and said into it, 'This is Archer.'
'I've been expecting to hear from you,' he said. 'After all, I'm paying you good money.'
I didn't remind him that his wife had paid me. 'You're hearing from me now.'
'Thanks to Sheriff Brotherton. I know how you private dicks operate. You let the men in uniform do the work and then you step in and take the credit.'
For a hotheaded instant, I was close to hanging up on Biemeyer. I had to remind myself that the case was far from over. The stolen painting was still missing. There were two unsolved murders, Paul Grimes's and now William Mead's.
'There's credit enough for everybody,' I said. 'We have your daughter and she's in reasonably good shape. I gather she'll be flying home tomorrow in one of your planes.'
'First thing in the morning. I was just finalizing the arrangement with Sheriff Brotherton.'
'Could you hold that plane until late morning or so? I have some things to do in Copper City, and I don't think your daughter should travel unaccompanied.'
'I don't like the delay,' he said. 'Mrs. Biemeyer and I are very eager to see Doris.'
'May I speak to Mrs. Biemeyer?'
'I suppose you can,' he said reluctantly. 'She's right here.'
There was some indistinct palaver at the other end, and then Ruth Biemeyer's voice came over the line. 'Mr. Archer? I'm relieved to hear from you. Doris hasn't been arrested, has she?'
'No. Neither has Fred. I want to bring them both home with me tomorrow on the company plane. But I may not be able to get out of here much before noon. Is that all right with you?'
'Yes.'
'Thanks very much. Good night, Mrs. Biemeyer.'
I hung up and told the sheriff that the plane would leave at noon tomorrow with me and Doris and Fred. Brotherton didn't argue. My telephone conversation had invested me with some of the Biemeyer charisma.
On the strength of this, I put in a word for the people in Chantry Canyon, as I had promised, and offered to assume responsibility for Fred. The sheriff agreed. Doris, he said, would be spending the night at his house.
Fred and I checked into a double room in the motel. I needed a drink, but the store was closed and not even beer was available. I had no razor or toothbrush. I was as tired as sin.
But I sat on my bed and felt surprisingly good. The girl was safe. The boy was in my hands.
Fred had stretched out on his bed with his back to me. His shoulders moved spasmodically, and he-made a repeated noise that sounded like hiccuping. I realized he was crying.
'What's the matter, Fred?'
'You know what's the matter. My career is over and done with. It never even started. I'll lose my job at the museum. They'll probably put me in jail, and you know what will happen to me then.' His voice was dulled by the cotton in his nose.
'Do you have a record?'
'No. Of course I don't.' The idea seemed to shock him. 'I've never been in trouble.'
'Then you should be able to stay out of jail.'
'Really?' He sat up and looked at me with wet red eyes.
'Unless there's something that I don't know about. I still don't understand why you took the picture from the Biemeyer house.'
'I wanted to test it. I told you about that. Doris even suggested that I should take it. She was just as interested as I was.'
'Interested in what, exactly?'
'In whether it was a Chantry. I thought I could put my expertise to work on it.' He added in a muffled voice, 'I wanted to show them that I was good for something.'
He sat up on the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. He was young for his age, in his thirties and still a boy, and foolish for a person of his intelligence. It seemed that the sad house on Olive Street hadn't taught him much about the ways of the world.
Then I reminded myself that I mustn't buy too much of Fred's queer little story. After all, he was a self-admitted liar.
I said, 'I'd like your expert opinion on that picture.'
'I'm not really an expert.'
'But you're entitled to an informed opinion. As a close student of Chantry, do you think he painted the Biemeyer picture?'
'Yes, sir. I do. But my statement has to be qualified.'
'Go ahead and qualify it.'
'Well. It certainly doesn't go back any twenty-five years. The paint is much too new, applied maybe as recently as this year. And the style has changed, of course. It naturally would. I think it's Chantry's style, his _developed_ style, but I couldn't swear to it unless I saw other late examples. You can't base a theory or an opinion on a single work.'
Fred seemed to be talking as an expert, or at least an informed student. He sounded honest and for once forgetful of himself. I decided to ask him a harder question.
'Why did you say in the first place that the painting had been stolen from your house?'
'I don't know. I must have been crazy.' He sat looking down at his dusty shoes. 'I guess I was afraid to involve the museum.'
'In what way?'
'In any way. They'd fire me if they knew I'd taken the picture myself the way I did. Now they'll fire me for sure. I have no future.'
'Everybody has a future, Fred.'
The words didn't sound too encouraging, even to me. A lot of futures were disastrous, and Fred's was beginning to look like one of those. He hung his head under the threat of it.
'The most foolish thing you did was to bring Doris with you.'
'I know. But she wanted to come along.'
'Why?'
'To see Mildred Mead if I found her. She was the main source of the trouble in Doris's family, you know. I thought it might be a good idea if Doris could talk to her. You know?'
I knew. Like other lost and foolish souls, Fred had an urge to help people, to give them psychotherapy even if it wrecked them. When he was probably the one who needed it most. Watch it, I said to myself, or you'll be trying to help Fred in that way. Take a look at your own life, Archer.
But I preferred not to. My chosen study was other men, hunted men in rented rooms, aging boys clutching at manhood before night fell and they grew suddenly old. If you were the therapist, how could you need therapy? If you were the hunter, you couldn't be hunted. Or could you?
'Doris is having a hard time maintaining,' Fred said. 'I've been trying to help her out of it.'
'By taking her on a long drive to nowhere?'
'She wanted to come. She insisted. I thought it was better than leaving her where she was, sitting in an apartment by herself and gobbling drugs.'
'You have a point.'
He managed to give me a quick shy smile that twitched and cowered in the shadow of his mustache. 'Besides, you have to remember that this isn't nowhere for Doris. She was born in Copper City and spent at least half of her life here in Arizona. This is home for her.'
'It hasn't been a very happy homecoming.'
'No. She was terribly disappointed. I guess you can't go home again, as Thomas Wolfe says.'
Remembering the gabled house where Fred lived with his father and mother, I wondered who would want to.
'Have you always lived in Santa Teresa?'
He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, 'Since I was a little boy, we've lived in the same house on Olive Street. It wasn't always the wreck that it is now. Mother kept it up much better-I
