'Then what happened to the picture Fred brought home?'
Johnson lowered his head and swung it from side to side like a sick old bull. 'I never saw the picture. You don't understand how it is with me. I spent six, seven years after the war in a veterans' hospital. Most of the time I was in a daze, most of the time I still am. The days go by, and half the time I don't know what day it is and I don't want to. I'm a sick man. Now why don't you leave me alone?'
I left him alone and made a cursory search of the upstairs rooms. Only one other was occupied, a room containing a double bed that Johnson evidently shared with his wife. There was no painting under the mattress, nothing incriminating in the closet or chest of drawers, no evidence of any crime but that of poverty.
One narrow door at the end of the upstairs hallway was closed and padlocked. I stopped in front of it.
Johnson came up behind me. 'That goes up to the attic. I don't have a key for it. Sarah's always afraid I'll fall down the stairs. Anyway, there isn't anything up there. Like me,' he added foolishly, tapping the side of his head. 'Nobody home upstairs.'
He gave me a broad idiot smile. I gave him the other half-pint. It was an ugly transaction, and I was glad to leave him. He closed the front door behind me like a trusty shutting himself into his own prison. I locked the door.
VIII
I left my car where it was and walked toward the hospital. I hoped to get some further information about Fred from Mrs. Johnson. The night was almost fully dark, the streetlights scattered sparsely among the trees. On the sidewalk ahead of me I noticed a spillage of oil drops that became more frequent as I moved along.
I dipped my finger in one of the spilled drops and held it up to the light. It had a reddish tinge. It didn't smell like oil.
On the grass beside the sidewalk ahead of me someone was snoring. It was a man lying face down. I ran to him and got down on my knees beside him. The back of his head was dark and lustrous with blood. I moved him just enough to look at his face. It was bloody, too.
He groaned and tried to raise himself in a sad and helpless parody of a push-up, then fell on his face again. I turned his head to one side so that he could breathe more freely.
He opened one eye and said, 'Chantry? Leave me alone.'
Then he relapsed into his broken-faced snuffling. I could see that he was very badly hurt. I left him and ran to the emergency entrance of the hospital.
Seven or eight adults and children were waiting inside on collapsible chairs. A harassed young nurse behind a counter was manning it like a barricade.
I said, 'There's an injured man just up the street.'
'So bring him in.'
'I can't. He needs an ambulance.'
'How far up the street?'
'Next block.'
'There's no ambulance here. If you want to call one, that's a public phone in the corner there. Do you have a dime?'
She gave me a number to call. In less than five minutes an ambulance pulled up outside. I got in with the driver and directed him to the bleeding man in the grass.
His snoring was less regular now, and less loud. The ambulance attendant turned a flashlight on him. I took a closer look. He was a man of sixty or so, with a pointed gray beard and a lot of bloody gray hair. He looked like a dying sea lion, and his snoring sounded like a sea lion's distant barking.
'Do you know him, sir?'
I was thinking that he fitted the liquor-store proprietor's description of the art dealer Paul Grimes.
I said, 'No. I've never seen him before.'
The ambulance men lifted him gently onto a stretcher and drove him to the emergency entrance. I rode along and was there when they carried him out. He raised himself on his arms, almost overturning the stretcher, and looked at me from his blind broken glistening face.
He said, 'I know you, Chantry, you bastard.'
He fell back and lay still. The ambulance men rushed him into the hospital. I waited outside for the inevitable police.
They came in an unmarked car, a pair of youngish detective-sergeants wearing light summery clothes and dark wintry faces. One went into the hospital, and the other, a Sergeant Leverett, stayed with me.
'You know the injured man?'
'I never saw him before. I found him on the street.'
'How did you happen to call an ambulance for him?'
'It seemed like the logical thing to do.'
'Why didn't you call us?'
'I knew somebody would.'
Leverett reddened slightly. 'You sound like a smart bastard. Who in hell are you, anyway?'
I swallowed my anger and told him that I was a private detective doing a job for the Biemeyers. Leverett knew the name and it altered his voice and manner.
'May I see your identification?'
I showed it to him. He asked me to stick around, if I would be so good. I promised that I would.
Interpreting my promise loosely, I wandered back into the next block and found the place on the sidewalk where the drippings of blood had started. They were already drying in the warm air.
Parked at the adjacent curb was an old black convertible with a ragged top. Its key was in the ignition. A square white envelope was stuck between the black plastic seat and the back cushion. On the shelf behind the seat were a pile of smallish oil paintings and a white sombrero.
I turned on the dashboard light and examined the square envelope. It was an invitation to cocktails addressed to Mr. Paul Grimes, on Mrs. Richard Chantry's stationery, and signed 'Francine Chantry.' The party was tonight at eight o'clock.
I looked at my watch: just past eight. Then I examined the stack of paintings behind the seat. Two of them were framed in old-fashioned gilt, the rest unframed. They didn't resemble any of the Chantrys I had seen.
They didn't look like much of anything. There were a few seascapes and beach scenes, which looked like minor accidents, and a small portrait of a woman, which looked like a major one. But I didn't entirely trust my eye or my judgment.
I took one of the seascapes and put it in the trunk of my own car. Then I started back toward the hospital.
Leverett and the other detective-sergeant met me on the way. They were accompanied by a captain of detectives named Mackendrick, a heavy powerful-looking middle-aged man in a crumpled blue suit that went with his crumpled face. He told me that the man I had found was dead. I told him who the man probably was.
Mackendrick absorbed my information quickly and made a few scrawlings in a black notebook. He was particularly interested in the fact that Grimes had mentioned Richard Chantry before he died.
I remember Chantry,' he said. 'I was a rookie when he pulled his big disappearance.'
'You think he disappeared deliberately?'
'Sure. There was plenty of evidence of that.'
He didn't tell me what the evidence was. I didn't tell him where I was going.
IX
I drove through the lower town, past Grimes's lightless and uninhabited little building. I could taste the salty tang of the sea long before I got to it, and feel its cool breath. A seaside park stretched along the shore for more than a mile. Below it waves foamed on the beach, preternaturally white against the darkness. There were pairs of lovers here and there in the grass instead of dead men, and that was good.
Channel Road ascended a cliff that overlooked and partly enclosed the harbor. Suddenly I was looking down at its masts. The road climbed away over the shoulder of the cliff, wound past a Coast Guard colony, and skirted a deep barranca that opened out onto the sea. Beyond the barranca was the hill on which the Biemeyers' house stood.
Mrs. Chantry's house was perched between the barranca and the water. It was built of stone and stucco, with many arches and several turrets. There was a glass-roofed greenhouse on one side, and between me and the house was a walled flagstone parking area holding about twenty cars. A white-coated attendant came up to the side of my car and offered to park it for me.
A uniformed black maid greeted me pleasantly at the open front door. She didn't ask me for my invitation or any identification. She didn't even allow herself to notice that I wasn't wearing party clothes or a party look on my face.
Piano music drew me past her into a central room of the house, a wide high room that rose two 'stories to the roof. A woman with short black hair was playing 'Someone to Watch Over Me' on a grand piano that was dwarfed by the room. A couple of dozen men and women stood around in party clothes with drinks. It looked like a scene recovered from the past, somehow less real than the oil paintings hanging on the walls.
Mrs. Chantry came toward me from the far end of the room. She was wearing a blue evening dress with a lot of skirt and not much top, which displayed her arms and shoulders. She didn't seem to recognize me at first, but then she lifted both her hands in a gesture of happy surprise.
'How good of you to come. I was hoping I'd mentioned my little party to you, and I'm so glad I did. It's Mr. Marsh, isn't it?' Her eyes were watching me carefully. I couldn't tell if she liked me or was afraid of me.
'Archer,' I said. 'Lew Archer.'
'Of course. I never could remember names. If you don't mind, I'll let Betty Jo Siddon introduce you to my other guests.'
Betty Jo Siddon was a level-eyed brunette of about thirty. She was well-shaped but rather awkward in her movements, as if she weren't quite at home in the world. She said she was covering the party for the local paper, and clearly wondered what I was doing there. I didn't tell her. She didn't ask.
She introduced me to Colonel Aspinwall, an elderly man with an English accent, an English suit, and a young English wife who looked me over and found me socially undesirable. To Dr. Ian Innes, a cigar-chomping thick-jowled man, whose surgical eyes seemed to be examining me for symptoms. To Mrs. Innes, who was pale and tense and fluttering, like a patient. To Jeremy Rader, the artist, tall and hairy and jovial in the last late flush of his youth. To Molly Rader, a statuesque brunette of about thirty-nine, who was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in weeks. To Jackie Pratt, a spare little
