'I know that she did, and I want to know why.'
'What makes you so sure that Chantry might possess the information?'
'I think he and Mildred are closely connected. Incidentally, I feel sure that Jack Biemeyer will be interested. Biemeyer hired me, you know.'
Lansing said in a voice that seemed to be testing itself for firmness, 'If Mr. Biemeyer has any suggestions, or any questions, I think he should communicate them to me directly.'
'I'll tell him that.'
The Biemeyer house had a deserted look, like a public building that had been emptied by a bomb scare. I got the painting of Mildred Mead out of the trunk of my car and carried it up the flagstone walk to the front door. Just before I got to it, Ruth Biemeyer came out. She put a finger to her lips.
'My husband is very tired. I've been trying to get him to rest.'
'I'm afraid I have to talk to him, Mrs. Biemeyer.'
She turned toward the door, but all she did was pull it closed. 'You can talk freely to me. I'm really your principal in this case. The picture that was stolen belongs to me. That is my picture that you have there, isn't it?'
'Yes. I wouldn't say it was stolen, though. Let's say Fred borrowed it, for scientific and biographical purposes. He wanted to establish who painted it, and when, and who the subject was. It's true the answers to these questions had personal meaning for Fred. But that doesn't make him a criminal exactly.'
She nodded. Her hair shifted in the wind and made her suddenly prettier, as if light had blown into her head.
'I can understand why Fred did what he did.'
'You should be able to. You had your own personal reasons for buying the painting. Mildred Mead had moved to town, and your husband was seeing her again. Didn't that have something to do with your hanging that picture of her in your house? As a reproach to him, perhaps, or a kind of threat?'
She frowned. The light in her eyes shifted, turning inward like a flashlight exploring a dark room.
'I don't know why I bought it. I didn't even realize at the time that it was Mildred.'
'Your husband must have.'
There was a silence between us. I could hear the sea marking time far down at the foot of the hill.
'My husband isn't in very good shape. He's aged in the last few days. If all this got out it would destroy his reputation. And maybe destroy him.'
'He assumed that risk when he did what he did a long time ago.'
'Exactly what did he do?'
'I think he made the Chantry imposture possible.'
'The Chantry imposture? What do you mean by that?'
'I think you know what I mean. But I'd rather discuss it with your husband.'
She bit her lower lip. With her incisors bared, she looked a little like a watchdog at the door. Then she picked up the painting and led me through the house to her husband's study.
He was sitting in front of the photograph of his copper mine. His face had come apart. He pulled it together and smiled uncertainly with one side of his mouth.
'What do you want from me? More money?'
'More information. This case started in 1943. It's time it was closed.'
Ruth Biemeyer turned to me. 'Exactly what happened in 1943?'
'I can't tell you all of it. I think it started when William Mead went home to Arizona on leave from the army. Home isn't exactly the word. Mead had a young wife and an infant son waiting for him here in Santa Teresa. But his mother was still living in Arizona. Where exactly was Mildred living, Mr. Biemeyer?'
He pretended not to hear me. His wife answered for him. 'She was living in Tucson but spending the weekends in the mountains with my husband.'
Biemeyer gave her a shocked look. It made me wonder if his affair with Mildred had ever been directly spoken of till now. I said:
'That probably came as no surprise to William. His mother had lived with other men, notably the painter Lashman. Lashman had been a father to him, and taught him to paint. When William came home to Arizona on leave he found that his so-called half brother, Richard, had taken some of his work and assumed the credit for it. The Chantry imposture really started with Richard Chantry himself, when he stole William's paintings and drawings, and incidentally married William's girl Francine.
'The two young men had a fight over these matters. They fought to the death. William killed Richard and left his body in the desert, dressed in William's own army uniform. He was an illegitimate son who had probably dreamed all his life of taking Richard's place. This was his chance to do it, and incidentally to get out of the army and out of a forced marriage.
'But he couldn't have done it without the help of other people, three other people to be exact. First he had the help of Francine Chantry. She was obviously in love with him in spite of his marriage to Sarah and his killing of Francine's husband. She may even have incited that killing. In any case it didn't prevent her from coming to Santa Teresa with him and living here as his wife for seven years.
'I don't know why he took the risk of coming back here. Perhaps he had some idea of keeping an eye on his son. But so far as I can tell, he didn't see Fred in all that time. It may be that his living here, so close to his wife and son but invisible to them, was part of the game of doubleness he was playing. He may have needed that kind of tension to keep him in orbit and sustain the Chantry illusion and his art.
'The main thing was to get out of Arizona free and clear, and it was his mother who made that possible for him. What Mildred did was probably the most difficult thing of all. She looked at young Richard Chantry's dead body and identified it as the body of her own son, William. It was a bold action, and not her last. She loved her bastard son, no matter what he was guilty of. But it was a fierce and tragic love she had for him. This morning she tried to reach him with a stiletto.'
'To kill him?' Ruth Biemeyer said.
'Or to let him kill himself. I don't think it would have made much difference to Mildred. Her own life is pretty well finished.'
Jack Biemeyer let out an involuntary sigh. His wife turned to me. 'You said William had help from three people.'
'At least three.'
'Who was the third?'
'I think you know. William Mead never would have gotten out of Arizona, or succeeded in staying out, without some help. Somebody had to turn off Sheriff Brotherton's investigation and see that the case was closed.'
Ruth Biemeyer and I looked at her husband. He lifted his heavy arms as though our eyes were guns.
'I wouldn't do a thing like that.'
'You would if she told you to,' his wife said. 'She's been telling you what to do ever since I can remember. You'll be going down to the county jail to ask her what to do next. And she'll tell you to spend a fortune defending her murdering son, and you'll do it for her.'
'Maybe I will at that.'
He was watching her face. She looked at him in surprise and sudden fear.
Biemeyer stood up slowly, as if he was lifting a great weight on his shoulders. 'Will you drive me down there, Archer? I'm feeling a bit shaky.'
I said I would. Biemeyer started out of the room ahead of me. He turned at the open door and faced his wife.
'There's something you need to know, Ruth. William is my son, too. My illegitimate son by Mildred. I was just a kid in my teens when he was born.'
Desolation crept over her face. 'Why didn't you tell me before? It's too late now.'
She looked at her husband as if she was seeing him for the last time. He took me out through the empty echoing spaces of the house. He walked uncertainly, staggering a little. I helped him into my car and started down the hill.
'It was an accident,' he said, 'just one of those accidents that happen to people. I met Mildred after a high-school football game. Old Felix Chantry threw a party in his mountain house. I was invited because my mother was his cousin. You know, a poor relation.'
He sat for a while with his head down, then spoke in a stronger voice. 'I scored three touchdowns that day, four if you count Mildred. I was seventeen when William was conceived, eighteen when he was born. There wasn't much I could do for him. I had no money. I was trying to make it through college. Mildred told Felix Chantry that the child was his, and he believed her. He gave her money for the boy's support until she broke with him and went to Simon Lashman.
'She did what she could for me, too. She helped me get a football scholarship and when I graduated she saw that Felix gave me a job at the smelter. She helped me up the ladder. I owe her a great deal.'
But there was no warmth of gratitude in his voice. Perhaps he sensed that his life had been mislaid when he was young, and even in his age was still loose in his grasp. He peered out at the city we were driving through as though its shadowed streets were alien.
I felt the strangeness, too. The halls of the courthouse were like catacombs. After an elaborate proceeding that reminded me of the initiation rite into a tribe of aborigines, the D.A.'s men ushered us into the presence of the man I had taken.
He didn't look like a mass murderer, in spite of the armed guards who stood one on each side of him. He looked pale and weak and worried, as violent men so often do after the event.
'William?' I said.
He nodded once. Tears had begun to form in his eyes and run down his cheeks, slowly, like the sparse blood from stiletto wounds.
Jack Biemeyer stepped forward and touched his son's wet face.
Ross Macdonald
