“The best people in town.”
“Mr. Archer?” the maid said. “Mr. Hendryx is having his bath. I’ll show you the way.”
I told the driver to wait, and followed her through the house. I saw when I stepped outside that the man on the diving board wasn’t short at all. He only seemed to be short because he was so wide. Muscle bulged out his neck, clustered on his shoulders and chest, encased his arms and legs. He looked like a graduate of Muscle Beach, a subman trying hard to be a superman.
There was another man floating in the water, the blotched brown swell of his stomach breaking the surface like the shellback of a Galapagos tortoise. Thinker stood up, accompanied by his parasitic muscles, and called to him:
“Mr. Hendryx!”
The man in the water rolled over lazily and paddled to the side of the pool. Even his head was tortoise-like, seamed and bald and impervious-looking. He stood up in the waist-deep water and raised his thin brown arms. The other man bent over him. He drew him out of the water and steadied him on his feet, rubbing him with a towel.
“Thank you, Devlin.”
“Yessir.”
Leaning far forward with his arms dangling like those of a withered, hairless ape, Hendryx shuffled towards me. The joints of his knees and ankles were knobbed and stiffened by what looked like arthritis. He peered up at me from his permanent crouch:
“You want to see me?” The voice that came out of his crippled body was surprisingly rich and deep. He wasn’t as old as he looked. “What is it?”
“A painting was stolen last night from the San Marcos gallery: Chardin’s ‘Apple on a Table’. I’ve heard that you were interested in it.”
“You’ve been misinformed. Good afternoon.” His face closed like a fist.
“You haven’t heard the rest of it.”
Disregarding me, he called to the maid who was waiting at a distance: “Show this man out.”
Devlin came up beside me, strutting like a wrestler, his great curved hands conspicuous.
“The rest of it,” I said, “is that Hugh Western was murdered at the same time. I think you knew him?”
“I knew him, yes. His death is unfortunate. Regrettable. But so far as I know, it has nothing to do with the Chardin and nothing to do with me. Will you go now, or do I have to have you removed?”
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.”