“Who’s Hendryx?”
“A man.”
“I gathered that. What’s the matter with his money?”
“I really don’t know. I have no idea where it comes from. But he has it — plenty of it.”
“You don’t like him?”
“No. I don’t like him and I don’t like the men who work for him. They look like a gang of thugs to me. But Hugh wouldn’t notice that. He’s horribly dense where people are concerned. I don’t mean that Hugh’s done anything wrong,” she added quickly. “He’s bought a few paintings for Hendryx on commission.”
“I see.” But I didn’t like what I saw. “The Admiral said something about Hugh trying to buy the Chardin for an unnamed purchaser. Would that be Hendryx?”
“It could be,” she said.
“Tell me more about Hendryx.”
“I don’t know any more. I only met him once. That was enough. I know that he’s an evil old man, and he has a bodyguard who carries him upstairs.”
“Carries him upstairs?”
“Yes. He’s crippled. As a matter of fact, he offered me a job.”
“Carrying him upstairs?”
“He didn’t specify my duties. He didn’t get that far.” Her voice was so chilly it quick-froze the conversation. “Now could we drop the subject, Mr. Archer?”
The road had begun to rise toward the mountains. Yellow and black Slide Area signs sprung up along the shoulders. By holding the gas pedal nearly to the floor, I kept our speed around fifty.
“You’ve had quite a busy morning,” Mary said after a while, “meeting the Turners and all.”
“Social mobility is my stock in trade.”
“Did you meet Alice, too?”
I nodded.
“And what did you think of her?”
“I shouldn’t say it to another girl, but she’s a lovely one.”
“Vanity isn’t one of my vices,” Mary said. “She’s beautiful. And she’s really devoted to Hugh.”
“I gathered that.”
“I don’t think Alice has ever been in love before. And painting means almost as much to her as it does to him.”
“He’s a lucky man.” I remembered the disillusioned eyes in Hugh’s self-portrait, and hoped his luck was holding.
The road twisted and climbed through red clay cut banks and fields of dry chaparral.
“How long does this go on?” I asked.
“Another two miles.”
We zigzagged up the mountainside for ten or twelve minutes more. Finally the road began to level out. I was watching its edge so closely that I didn’t see the cabin until we were almost on top of it. It was a one-story frame building standing in a little hollow at the edge of the high mesa. Attached to one side was an open tarpaulin shelter from which the rear end of a gray coupe protruded. I looked at Mary.
She nodded. “It’s our car.” Her voice was bright with relief.
I stopped the convertible in the lane in front of the cabin. As soon as the engine died, the silence began. A single hawk high over our heads swung round and round on his invisible wire. Apart from that, the entire world seemed empty. As we walked down the ill-kept gravel drive, I was startled by the sound of my own footsteps.
The door was unlocked. The cabin had only one room. It was a bachelor hodgepodge, untouched by the human hand for months at a time. Cooking utensils, paint-stained dungarees, painter’s tools, and soiled bedding were scattered on the floor and furniture. There was an open bottle of whiskey, half — empty, on the kitchen table in the center of the room. It would have been just another mountain shack if it hadn’t been for the watercolors on the walls, like brilliant little windows, and the one big window which opened on the sky.
Mary had crossed to the window and was looking out. I moved up to her shoulder. Blue space fell away in front of us all the way down to the sea, and beyond to the curved horizon. San Marcos and its suburbs were spread out like an air-map between the sea and the mountains.
“I wonder where he can be,” she said. “Perhaps he’s gone for a walk. After all, he doesn’t know we’re looking for him.”
I looked down the mountainside, which fell almost sheer from the window.
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”
The red clay slope was sown with boulders. Nothing grew there except a few dust-colored mountain bushes... and a foot, wearing a man’s shoe, which projected from a cleft between two rocks.
I went out without a word. A path led round the cabin to the edge of the slope. Hugh Western was there, attached to the solitary foot. He was lying, or hanging, head down, with his face in the clay, about twenty feet below the edge. One of his legs was doubled under him. The other was caught between the boulders. I climbed around the rocks and bent down to look at his head.
The right temple was smashed. The face was smashed — I raised the rigid body to look at it. He had been dead for hours, but the sharp strong odor of whiskey still hung around him.
A tiny gravel avalanche rattled past me. Mary was at the top of the slope.
“Don’t come down here.”
She paid no attention to the warning. I stayed where I was, crouched over the body, trying to hide the ruined head from her. She leaned over the boulder and looked down, her eyes bright-black in her drained face. I moved to one side. She took her brother’s head in her hands.
“If you pass out,” I said, “I don’t know whether I can carry you up.”
“I won’t pass out.”
She lifted the body by the shoulders to look at the face. It was a little unsettling to see how strong she was. Her fingers moved gently over the wounded temple. “This is what killed him. It looks like a blow from a fist.”
I kneeled down beside her and saw the row of rounded indentations in the skull.
“He must have fallen,” she said, “and struck his head on the rocks. Nobody could have hit him that hard.”
“I’m afraid somebody did, though.” Somebody whose fist was hard enough to leave its mark in wood.
Two long hours later I parked my car in front of the art shop on Rubio Street. Its windows were jammed with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist reproductions, and one very bad original oil of surf as stiff and static as whipped cream. The sign above the windows was lettered in flowing script: Chez Hilary. The cardboard sign on the door was simpler and to the point. It said: Closed.
The stairs and hallway seemed dark, but it was good to get out of the sun. The sun reminded me of what I had found at high noon on the high mesa. It wasn’t the middle of the afternoon yet, but my nerves felt stretched and scratchy, as though it were late at night. And my eyes were aching.
Mary unlocked the door of her apartment, stepped aside to let me pass. She paused at the door of her room to tell me there was whiskey on the sideboard. I offered to make her a drink. No, thanks, she never drank. The door shut behind her. mixed a whiskey and water and tried to relax in an easy chair. But I couldn’t relax. My mind kept playing back the questions and the answers — and the questions that had no answers.
We had called the sheriff from the nearest fire warden’s post, led him and his deputies back up the mountain to the body. Photographs were taken, the cabin and its surroundings searched, and many questions were asked. Mary didn’t mention the Chardin. Neither did I.
Some of the questions were answered after the county coroner arrived. Hugh Western had been dead since eight or ten o’clock the previous night; the coroner couldn’t place the time more definitely before analyzing the stomach contents. The blow on the temple had killed him. The injuries to his face, which had failed to bleed, had probably been inflicted after death. Which meant that he was dead when his body fell — or was thrown — down the mountainside.
His clothes had been soaked with whiskey to make it look like a drunken accident. But the murderer had gone too far in covering, and had outwitted himself. The whiskey bottle in the cabin showed no fingerprints, not even Western’s. And there were no fingerprints on the steering wheel of his coupe. Bottle and wheel had been wiped clean.