He raised his cold eyes to mine. I stared him down, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.
“You take murder pretty lightly, Hendryx.”
“Mr. Hendryx to you,” Devlin said in my ear. “Come on now, bud. You heard what Mr. Hendryx said.”
“I don’t take orders from him.”
“I do,” he said with a lopsided grin like a heat-split in a melon. “I take orders from him.” His light small eyes shifted to Hendryx. “You want for me to throw him out?”
Hendryx nodded, backing away. His eyes were heating up, as if the prospect of violence excited him. Devlin’s hand took my wrist. His fingers closed around it and overlapped.
“What is this, Devlin?” I said. “I thought Hugh Western was a pal of yours.”
“Sure thing.”
“I’m trying to find out who killed him. Aren’t you interested? Or did you slap him down yourself?”
“The hell.” Devlin blinked stupidly, trying to hold two questions in his mind at the same time.
Hendryx said from a safe distance: “Don’t talk. Just give him a going-over and toss him out.”
Devlin looked at Hendryx. His grip was like a thick handcuff on my wrist. I jerked his arm up and ducked under it, breaking the hold, and chopped at his nape. The bulging back of his neck was hard as a redwood bole.
He wheeled, and reached for me again. The muscles in his arm moved like drugged serpents. He was slow. My right fist found his chin and snapped it back on his neck. He recovered, and swung at me. I stepped inside of the roundhouse and hammered his ridged stomach, twice, four times. It was like knocking my fists against the side of a corrugated iron building. His great arms closed on me. I slipped down and away.
When he came after me, I shifted my attack to his head, jabbing with the left until he was off balance on his heels. Then I pivoted and threw a long right hook which changed to an uppercut. An electric shock surged up my arm. Devlin lay down on the green tiles, chilled like a side of beef.
I looked across him at Hendryx. There was no fear in his eyes, only calculation. He backed into a canvas chair and sat down clumsily.
“You’re fairly tough, it seems. Perhaps you used to be a fighter? I’ve owned a few fighters in my time. You might have a future at it, if you were younger.”
“It’s a sucker’s game. So is larceny.”
“Larceny-farceny,” he said surprisingly. “What did you say you do?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Private, eh?” His mouth curved in a lipless tortoise grin. “You interest me, Mr. Archer. I could find a use for you – a place in my organization.”
“What kind of an organization?”
“I’m a builder, a mass-producer of houses. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I make enemies: cranks and bleeding hearts and psychopathic veterans who think the world owes them something. Devlin here isn’t quite the man I thought he was. But you–”
“Forget it. I’m pretty choosy about the people I work for.”
“An idealist, eh? A clean-cut young American idealist.” The smile was still on his mouth; it was saturnine. “Well, Mr. Idealist, you’re wasting your time. I know nothing about this picture or anything connected with it. You’re also wasting my time.”
“It seems to be expendable. I think you’re lying, incidentally.”
Hendryx didn’t answer me directly. He called to the maid: “Telephone the gate. Tell Shaw we’re having a little trouble with a guest. Then you can come back and look after this.” He jerked a thumb at Muscle-Boy, who was showing signs of life.
I said to the maid: “Don’t bother telephoning. I wouldn’t stick around here if I was paid to.”
She shrugged and looked at Hendryx. He nodded. I followed her out.
“You didn’t stay long,” the cab driver said.
“No. Do you know where Admiral Turner lives?”
“Curiously enough, I do. I should charge extra for the directory service.”
I didn’t encourage him to continue the conversation. “Take me there.”
He let me out in a street of big old houses set far back from the sidewalk behind sandstone walls and high eugenia hedges. I paid him off and climbed the sloping walk to the Turner house. It was a weathered frame building, gabled and turreted in the style of the nineties. A gray-haired housekeeper who had survived from the same period answered my knock.
“The Admiral’s in the garden,” she said. “Will you come out?”
The garden was massed with many-colored begonias, and surrounded by a vine-covered wall. The Admiral, in stained and faded suntans, was chopping weeds in a flowerbed with furious concentration. When he saw me he leaned on his hoe and wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand.
“You should come in out of the sun,” the housekeeper said in a nagging way. “A man of your age–”
“Nonsense! Go away, Mrs. Harris.” She went. “What can I do for you, Mr.–?”
“Archer. I guess you’ve heard that we found Hugh Western’s body.”
“Sarah came home and told me half an hour ago. It’s a foul thing, and completely mystifying. He was to have married–”
His voice broke off. He glanced towards the stone cottage, at the rear of the garden. Alice Turner was there at an open window. She wasn’t looking in our direction. She had a tiny paintbrush in her hand, and she was working at an easel.
“It’s not as mystifying as it was. I’m starting to put the pieces together, Admiral.”
He turned back to me quickly. His eyes became hard and empty again, like gun muzzles.
“Just who are you? What’s your interest in this case?”
“I’m a friend of Hugh Western’s, from Los Angeles. I stopped off here to see him, and found him dead. I hardly think my interest is out of place.”
“No, of course not,” he grumbled. “On the other hand, I don’t believe in amateur detectives running around like chickens with their heads cut off, fouling up the authorities.”
“I’m not exactly an amateur. I used to be a cop. And any fouling up there’s been has been done by other people.”
“Are you accusing me?”
“If the shoe fits.”
He met my eyes for a time, trying to master me and the situation. But he was old and bewildered. Slowly the aggressive ego faded from his gaze. He became almost querulous.
“You’ll excuse me. I don’t know what it’s all about. I’ve been rather upset by everything that’s happened.”
“What about your daughter?” Alice was still at the window, working at her picture and paying no attention to our voices. “Doesn’t she know that Hugh is dead?”
“Yes. She knows. You mustn’t misunderstand what Alice is doing. There are many ways of enduring grief, and we have a custom in the Turner family of working it out of our system. Hard work is the cure for a great many evils.” He changed the subject, and his tone, abruptly. “And what is your idea of what’s happened?”
“It’s no more than a suspicion, a pretty foggy one. I’m not sure who stole your picture, but I think I know where it is.”
“Well?”
“There’s a man named Walter Hendryx who lives in the foothills outside the city. You know him?”
“Slightly.”
“He probably has the Chardin. I’m morally certain he has it, as a matter of fact, though I don’t know how he got it.”
The Admiral tried to smile, and made a dismal failure of it. “You’re not suggesting that Hendryx took it? He’s not exactly mobile, you know.”
“Hilary Todd is very mobile,” I said. “Todd visited Hendryx this morning. I’d be willing to bet even money he had the Chardin with him.”