“I liked him, too,” she was saying. “Very much. And I’ve been thinking – I’ve remembered something. Something that Hilary mentioned a couple of weeks ago, about Walter Hendryx wanting to buy the Chardin. It seems Hugh and Walter Hendryx were talking in the shop–”
She broke off suddenly. She had looked up and seen Todd leaning though the doorway, his face alive with anger. His shoulders moved slightly in her direction. She recoiled, clutching her glass. If I hadn’t been there, I guessed he would have hit her. As it was, he said in a monotone:
“How cozy. Haven’t you had quite a bit to drink, Sarah darling?”
She was afraid of him, but unwilling to admit it. “I have to do something to make present company bearable.”
“You should be thoroughly anesthetized by now.”
“If you say so, darling.”
She hurled her half-empty glass at the wall beside the door. It shattered, denting the wallboard and splashing a photograph of Nijinsky as the Faun. Some of the liquid splattered on Todd’s blue suede shoes.
“Very nice,” he said. “I love your girlish antics, Sarah. I also love the way you run at the mouth.” He turned to me: “This is the copy, Mr. Archer. Don’t mind her, she’s just a weensy bit drunky.”
He held it up for me to see, an oil painting about a yard square showing a small boy in a blue waistcoat sitting at a table. In the center of the linen tablecloth there was a blue dish containing a red apple. The boy was looking at the apple as if he intended to eat it. The copyist had included the signature and date: Chardin, 1744.
“It’s not very satisfactory,” Todd said, “if you’ve ever seen the original. But of course you haven’t?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. You probably never will now, and it’s really perfect. Perfect. It’s the finest Chardin west of Chicago.”
“I haven’t given up hope of seeing it.”
“You might as well, old boy. It’ll be well on its way by now, to Europe, or South America. Picture thieves move fast, before the news of the theft catches up with them and spoils the market. They’ll sell the Chardin to a private buyer in Paris or Buenos Aires, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Why ‘they’?”
“Oh, they operate in gangs. One man can’t handle the theft and the disposal of a picture by himself. Division of labor is necessary, and specialization.”
“You sound like a specialist yourself.”
“I am, in a way.” He smiled obliquely. “Not in the way you mean. I was in museum work before the war.”
He stooped and propped the picture against the wall. I glanced at Sarah Turner. She was hunched forward in her chair, still and silent, her hands spread over her face.
“And now,” he said to me, “I suppose you’d better go. I’ve done what I can for you. And I’ll give you a tip if you like. Picture thieves don’t do murder, they’re simply not the type. So I’m afraid your precious hypothesis is based on bad information.”
“Thanks very much,” I said. “I certainly appreciate that. Also your hospitality.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He raised an ironic brow, and turned to the door. I followed him out through the deserted shop. Most of the stock seemed to be in the window. Its atmosphere was sad and broken-down, the atmosphere of an empty-hearted, unprosperous, secondhand Bohemia. Todd didn’t look around like a proprietor. He had already abandoned the place in his mind, it seemed.
He unlocked the front door. The last thing he said before he shut it behind me was:
“I wouldn’t go bothering Walter Hendryx about that story of Sarah’s. She’s not a very trustworthy reporter, and Hendryx isn’t as tolerant of intruders as I am.”
So it was true.
I left my car where it was and crossed to a taxi stand on the opposite corner. There was a yellow cab at the stand, with a brown-faced driver reading a comic book behind the wheel. The comic book had dead women on the cover. The driver detached his hot eyes from its interior, leaned wearily over the back of the seat and opened the door for me. “Where to?”
“A man called Walter Hendryx – know where he lives?”
“Off of Foothill Drive. I been up there before. It’s a two-fifty run, outside the city limits.” His Jersey accent didn’t quite go with his Sicilian features.
“Newark?”
“Trenton.” He showed bad teeth in a good smile. “You want to make something out of it?”
“Nope. Let’s go.”
He spoke to me over his shoulder when we were out of the heavy downtown traffic. “You got your passport?”
“What kind of a place are you taking me to?”
“They don’t like visitors. You got to have a visa to get in, and a writ of habeas corpus to get out. The old man’s scared of burglars or something.”
“Why?”
“He’s got about ten million reasons, the way I hear it. Ten millions bucks.” He smacked his lips.
“Where did he get it?”
“You tell me. I’ll drop everything and take off for the same place.”
“You and me both.”
“I heard he’s a big contractor in L.A.,” the driver said. “I drove a reporter up here a couple of months ago, from one of the L.A. papers. He was after an interview with the old guy, something about a tax case.”
“What about a tax case?”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s way over my head, friend, all that tax business. I have enough trouble with my own forms.”
“What happened to the reporter?”
“I drove him right back down. The old man wouldn’t see him. He likes his privacy.”
“I’m beginning to get the idea.”
“You a reporter, too, by any chance?”
“No.”
He was too polite to ask me any more questions.
We left the city limits. The mountains rose ahead, violet and unshadowed in the sun’s lengthening rays. Foothill Drive wound through a canyon, across a high-level bridge, up the side of a hill from which the sea was visible like a low blue cloud on the horizon. We turned off the road through an open gate on which a sign was posted: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
A second gate closed the road at the top of the hill. It was a double gate of wrought iron hung between a stone gatepost and a stone gatehouse. A heavy wire fence stretched out from it on both sides, following the contours of the hills as far as I could see. Hendryx’ estate was about the size of a small European country.
The driver honked his horn. A thick-waisted man in a Panama hat came out of the stone cottage. He squeezed through a narrow postern and waddled up to the cab. “Well?”
“I came to see Mr. Hendryx about a picture.”
He opened the cab door and looked me over, from eyes that were heavily shuttered with old scar tissue. “You ain’t the one that was here this morning.”
I had my first good idea of the day. “You mean the tall fellow with the sideburns?”
“Yeah.”
“I just came from him.”
He rubbed his heavy chin with his knuckles, making a rasping noise. The knuckles were jammed.
“I guess it’s all right,” he said finally. “Give me your name and I’ll phone it down to the house. You can drive down.”
He opened the gate and let us through into a shallow valley. Below, in a maze of shrubbery, a long, low house was flanked by tennis courts and stables. Sunk in the terraced lawn behind the house was an oval pool like a wide green eye staring at the sky. A short man in bathing trunks was sitting in a Thinker pose on the diving board at one end.
He and the pool dropped out of sight as the cab slid down the eucalyptus-lined road. It stopped under a portico at the side of the house. A uniformed maid was waiting at the door.
“This is further than that reporter got,” the driver said in an undertone. “Maybe you got connections?”