"I can't. She went away and locked me in." His voice was a hoarse whine.
"Where did she go?"
"Probably the La Paloma-that's the nursing home. She's supposed to be on night duty."
"I just came from there. Mrs. Johnson walked off the job again."
"She shouldn't do that. She'll lose that job, too. We'll have to go on welfare. I don't know what will happen to us."
"Where's Fred?"
"I don't know."
There were other questions I wanted to ask him, about his wife and the missing picture, but I despaired of getting useful answers. I gave Johnson a curt good night through the door and drove to the police station.
Mackendrick was in his office, looking not much different from the way he had looked seven or eight hours before. There were tender-looking blue patches under his eyes, but the eyes themselves were stern and steady, and he was freshly shaven.
"You look as if you didn't get much sleep," he said.
"I didn't get any. I've been trying to catch up with Betty Siddon."
Mackendrick drew in a long breath that made the chair creak under him. He let it out with a sigh.
"Why is it so important? We can't keep twenty-four-hour tabs on every reporter in town."
"I know that. This is a special case. I think the Johnson house ought to be searched."
"Do you have any reason to think Miss Siddon's in there?"
"Nothing definite, no. But there's a possibility, more than a possibility, that the missing picture is hidden in that house. It passed through Mrs. Johnson's hands once before, and then through her son Fred's."
I reminded Mackendrick of the facts of the case: Fred Johnson's theft or borrowing of the picture from the Biemeyer house; its subsequent theft from the art museum or, according to Fred's original story, from the Johnson house. I added what Jessie Gable had told me, that Whitmore had bought the picture from Mrs. Johnson in the first place.
"All this is very interesting," Mackendrick said in a flat voice. "But I haven't got time to look for Miss Siddon right now. And I haven't got time to look for a lost or stolen or mislaid picture which probably isn't worth very much anyway."
"The girl is. And the picture is the key to the whole bloody case."
Mackendrick leaned heavily forward across his desk. "She's your girl, right?"
"I don't know yet."
"But you're interested in her?"
"Very interested," I said.
"And the picture is the one you were hired to reclaim?"
"I guess so."
"And that makes it the key to the case, right?"
"I didn't say that, Captain. My personal connection with the girl and the picture aren't the reasons they're important."
"You may not think so. I want you to go into my washroom and take a good look at your face in the mirror. Incidentally, while you're in there, you can use my electric razor. It's in the cabinet behind the mirror. The light switch is to the left inside the door."
I went into the little room and looked at my face. It was drawn and pale. I grimaced to bring it to life but my eyes didn't change. They were at the same time dull and glaring.
I shaved and washed. It made some improvement in my looks. But it didn't touch the anxiety and fatigue that I was carrying inside my head and body.
When I came back into Mackendrick's office, he gave me a hard stare.
"Are you feeling any better?"
"Some."
"How long is it since you've eaten?" I looked at my watch. It was ten to seven. "About nine or ten hours."
"No sleep?"
"No."
"Okay, let's get some breakfast. Joe's opens at seven."
Joe's was a workingman's restaurant whose booths and bar were already filling up with customers. There was a low-key half-kidding kind of hopefulness in the smoky atmosphere, as if the day might turn out to be not so bad after all.
Mackendrick and I sat across from each other in one of the booths. We discussed the case over coffee while we waited for our breakfasts to arrive. I was becoming painfully aware that I hadn't told Mackendrick about my interview with Mrs. Chantry. I was going to have to tell him before he found out for himself, if he hadn't already. I was going to have to tell him very soon. But I put it off until I had fortified myself with some solid food.
Both Mackendrick and I had ham and eggs and fried potatoes and toast. On top of that, he ordered a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream on the side.
When he had eaten it and ordered a fresh cup of coffee, I said, "I went to see Mrs. Chantry last night."
His face hardened, cracking at the corners of the mouth and eyes. "I asked you not to."
"It seemed necessary. We work under different rules, Captain."
"You can say that again."
I had meant that he had to work under special political constraints. He was the iron fist of the city, embodying all its crushing force, but he had to listen to what the city told him to do with it. He seemed to be listening now to the city's multitudinous voices, some of which were speaking in the big smoky room where we sat.
Gradually his face smoothed out and lost its cracked-cement look. His eyes remained impassive.
"What did you find out from Mrs. Chantry?"
I told him in some detail, with special emphasis on the man in the brown suit whose bones Mrs. Chantry and Rico had dug up. By this time, Mackendrick's face was flushed with interest.
"Did she tell you where the man came from?"
"Apparently he'd been in a veterans' hospital."
Mackendrick hit the table once with his hand. The dishes jumped and rattled. Everyone at our end of the restaurant was probably aware of this, but nobody turned to look.
"I wish to hell," he said, "that you'd told me about this earlier. If the man was ever in a veterans' hospital, we should be able to trace him through his bones."
Mackendrick laid three dollar bills on the table and got up and walked out.
I put down my own money and went outside. It was past eight, and the city was coming to life. I walked down the main street, hoping that I would come to life along with it, and ended up at the newspaper building.
She hadn't been seen or heard from.
I walked back to the parking lot and reclaimed my car and drove it down to the waterfront. I was guided by a half-admitted half-unconscious fantasy: if I went back to the room where Betty and I had started, she would be there.
She wasn't. I threw myself down on the bed and tried to turn my mind off. But it was invaded by dreams of the angry dead.
I woke up clear-minded in strong daylight. It was nearly twelve by my watch. I looked out the window at the harbor, sliced into long bright sizzling strips by the partly closed Venetian blinds. A few sailors were taking their boats out in the light noon wind. And my mind released the memory I needed.
When I was in Arizona, Sheriff Brotherton had told me about a soldier whose name was "something like Wilson or Jackson," and who had been a friend of Mildred Mead's murdered son, William. The sheriff had had a postcard from the soldier after the war, sent from a veterans' hospital in California.
I picked up the room phone and placed a call to Sheriff Brotherton's office in Copper City. After a period of waiting, Brotherton himself came on the line.
"I'm glad you caught me, Archer. I was just going out to lunch. How's everything with the little Biemeyer girl? I take it she's home safe with her family."
"She's home. I don't know how safe she is."
"Isn't she safe with her own family?" Brotherton seemed to resent the implication that his rescue of Doris had not been permanent, like an ascent into heaven.
"She's a troubled girl, and she isn't too happy with her father. Speaking of whom, and forgive me if I've asked you this before, did Biemeyer have anything to do with shutting off the investigation of William Mead's death?"
"You have asked me that before. I said I didn't know."
"What are the probabilities?"
"It wouldn't make sense for Biemeyer to do that. He was very close to William Mead's mother at that time. I'm not telling you anything that isn't generally known."