Read Online The Blue Hammer by Ross MacDonald - Free Book Online

painting you want me to look at, is it a Chantry?”
    “I wouldn’t know. Maybe you can tell me.”
    I led him out to my car and showed him in my headlights the small seascape I had taken from Paul Grimes’s convertible. He lifted it out of my hands with delicate care, as if he were showing me how to handle a painting.
    But what he said was, “I’m afraid it’s pretty bad. It’s certainly not a Chantry, if that’s your question.”
    “Do you have any idea who might have painted it?”
    He considered the question. “It could be the work of Jacob Whitmore. If so, it’s very early Whitmore—purely and clumsily representational. I’m afraid poor Jacob’s career recapitulated the history of modern art a generation or so late. He’d worked his way up to surrealism and was beginning to discover symbolism, when he died.”
    “When did he die?”
    “Yesterday.” Planter seemed to take pleasure in giving me this mild shock. “I understood he went for a dip in the sea off Sycamore Point and had a heart attack.” He looked down musingly at the picture in his hands. “I wonder what Paul Grimes thought he could do with this. A good painter’s prices will often go up at his death. But Jacob Whitmore was not a good painter.”
    “Does his work resemble Chantry’s?”
    “No. It does not.” Planter’s eyes probed at my face. “Why?”
    “I’ve heard that Paul Grimes may not have been above selling fake Chantrys.”
    “I see. Well, he’d have had a difficult time selling this as a Chantry. It isn’t even a passable Whitmore. As you can see for yourself, it’s no more than half finished.” Planter added with elaborate cruel wit, “He took his revenge on the sea in advance by painting it badly.”
    I looked at the blurred and swirling blues and greens in the unfinished seascape. However bad the painting was, it seemed to be given some depth and meaning by the fact that the painter had died in that sea.
    “Did you say he lived at Sycamore Point?”
    “Yes. That’s on the beach north of the campus.”
    “Did he have any family?”
    “He had a girl,” Planter said. “As a matter of fact, she called me up today. She wanted me to come and look at the paintings he left behind. She’s selling them off cheap, I understand. Frankly I wouldn’t buy them at any price.”
    He handed the picture back to me and told me how to find the place. I got into my car and drove northward past the university to Sycamore Point.
    The girl that Jacob Whitmore had left behind was a mournful blonde in a rather late stage of girlhood. She lived in one of half a dozen cottages and cabins that sprawled across the sandy base of the point. She held her door almost completely closed and peered at me through the crack as if I might be bringing a second disaster.
    “What do you want?”
    “I’m interested in pictures.”
    “A lot of them are gone. I’ve been selling them off. Jake drowned yesterday—I suppose you know that. He left me without a sou.”
    Her voice was dark with sorrow and resentment. The darkness appeared to have seeped up from her mind into the roots of her hair. She looked past me out to sea where the barely visible waves were rolling in like measured installments of eternity.
    “May I come in and look?”
    “I guess so. Sure.”
    She opened the door and swung it shut behind me against the wind. The room smelled of the sea, of wine and pot and mildew. The furniture was sparse and broken-down. It looked like a house that had barely survived a battle—an earlier stage of the same desultory battle against poverty and failure that had passed through the Johnson house on Olive Street.
    The woman went into an inner room and emerged with a stack of unframed paintings in her arms. She set them down on the warped rattan table.
    “These’ll cost you ten apiece, or forty-five for five of them. Jake used to get more for his paintings at the Saturday art show on Santa Teresa beach. A while ago, he sold one of them to a