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 and painter’s tools and 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 wall, 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 hike. 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 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 mesa. It wasn’t the middle of the afternoon yet, but my nerves felt stretched and scratchy, as though it was late at night. 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. I mixed a whiskey and water and tried to relax in an easy chair. 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, and led him and his deputies back up the mountain to the body. Photographs were taken, the cabin and its surroundings searched, many questions asked. Mary didn’t mention the lost Chardin. Neither did I.
Some of the questions were answered after the county coroner arrived. Hugh Western had been dead since some time between eight and 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 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.
I stood up when Mary came back into the room. She had brushed her black hair gleaming, and changed to a dress of soft black jersey which fitted her like skin. A thought raced through my mind like a nasty little rodent. I wondered what she would look like with a beard.
“Can I have another look at the studio? I’m interested in that sketch.”
She looked at me for a moment, frowning a little dazedly. “Sketch?”
“The one of the lady with the beard.”
She crossed the hall ahead of me, walking slowly and carefully as if the floor were unsafe and a rapid movement might plunge her into black chaos. The door of the studio was still unlocked. She held it open for me and pressed the light switch.
When the fluorescent lights blinked on, I saw that the bearded nude was gone. There was nothing left of her but the four torn corners of the drawing paper thumbtacked to the empty easel. I turned to Mary.
“Did you take it down?”
“No. I haven’t been in the studio since this morning.”
“Somebody’s stolen it then. Is there anything else missing?”
“I can’t be sure, it’s such a mess in here.” She moved around the room looking at the pictures on the walls and pausing finally by a table in the corner. “There was a bronze cast on this table. It isn’t here now.”
“What sort of a cast?”
“The cast of a fist. Hugh made it from the fist of that man – that dreadful man I told you about.”
“What dreadful man?”
“I think his name is Devlin. He’s Hendryx’ bodyguard. Hugh’s always been interested in hands, and the man has enormous hands.”
Her eyes unfocused suddenly. I guessed she was thinking of the same thing I was: the marks on the side of Hugh’s head, which might have been made by a giant fist.
“Look.” I pointed to the scars on the doorframe. “Could the cast of Devlin’s fist have made these marks?”
She felt the indentations with trembling fingers. “I think so – I don’t know.” She turned to me with a dark question in her eyes.
“If that’s what they are,” I said, “it probably means that he was killed in this studio. You should tell the police about it. And I think it’s time they knew about the Chardin.”
She gave me a look of passive resistance. Then she gave in. “Yes, I’ll have to tell them. They’ll find out soon enough, anyway. But I’m surer now than ever that Hugh didn’t take it.”
“What does the picture look like? If we could find it, we might find the killer attached to it.”
“You think so? Well, it’s a picture of a little boy looking at an apple. Wait a minute: Hilary has a copy. It was painted by one of the students at the college, and it isn’t very expert. It’ll give you an idea, though, if you want to go down to his shop and look at it.”
“The shop is closed.”
“He may be there anyway. He has a little apartment at the back.”