Free The Blue Hammer by Ross MacDonald

but I had slipped away under the fence.
    Looking into Paola’s opaque black eyes, I thought that the grief you shared with women was most always partly desire. At least sometimes you could take them to bed, I thought, and exchange a temporary kindness, which priests were denied.But not Paola. Both she and the woman at Sycamore Point belonged to dead men tonight. Chapel thoughts.
    “What happened to Paul?” I asked her.
    She looked at me with her chin on her shoulder, her lower lip protruding, her eyes defensive. “You haven’t told me who you are. Are you a policeman?”
    “No. I run a small business.” I winced at the half-lie; the chapel was getting to me. “I heard that Paul was in the market for pictures.”
    “Not any more. He’s dead.”
    “Aren’t you going to carry on the business?”
    She raised her shoulders and shook her head fiercely, as if she were being violently threatened. “Not me. You think I want to be killed like my father was?”
    “Was Paul really your father?”
    “Yes, he was.”
    “Who killed him?”
    “I’m not saying. You’re not saying much, either.” She leaned toward me. “Didn’t you come into the shop today?”
    “Yes.”
    “It was something about the Biemeyers’ picture, wasn’t it? What kind of business are you in? Are you a dealer?”
    “I’m interested in pictures.”
    “I can see that. But whose side are you on?”
    “The good guys.”
    “There are no good guys. If you don’t know that, you’re no use to me.” She rose on her knees and swept her arm between us in a gesture of angry dismissal. “So why don’t you get lost?”
    “I want to help you.” It wasn’t entirely a lie.
    “Sure you do. You want to help me. Then you want me to help you. Then you want to take the profits and run. That’s the story, isn’t it?”
    “What profits? All you’ve got is a double handful of grief.”
    She was silent for a while. Her eyes stayed on my face. Through them I could sense the movements of her mind almost as tangibly as if she were playing chess or checkers on a board, asking herself what she had to lose to me in order to take a greater amount away.
    “I admit I’m in trouble.” She turned her hands palms upward on her knees, as if to offer me a share of her grief. “Only I think you’re worse trouble. Who are you, anyway?”
    I told her my name and what I did for a living. Her eyes changed but she didn’t speak. I told her that the Biemeyers had hired me to find their stolen painting.
    “I don’t know anything about it. I told you that this afternoon at the shop.”
    “I believe you,” I said with a mental reservation. “The point is that the theft of the painting and the killing of your father may be connected.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I don’t know it, but it seems likely. Where did that painting come from, Miss Grimes?”
    She winced. “Just call me Paola. I never use my father’s name. And I can’t tell you where he got the picture. He just used me for front; he never told me his business.”
    “You can’t tell me, or you won’t?”
    “Both.”
    “Was the picture genuine?”
    “I don’t know.” She was silent for an interval, during which she hardly seemed to breathe. “You say you want to help me, but all you do is ask questions. I’m supposed to supply the answers. How does it help me if I talk myself into jail?”
    “Your father might have been better off in jail.”
    “Maybe you’re right. But I don’t want to end up there. Or in a hole in the ground, either.” Her gaze was restless and inward, lost in the convolutions of her mind. “You think whoever painted that picture killed my father, too.”
    “That may be true. I have a feeling it is.”
    She said in a thin voice, “Is Richard Chantry still alive?”
    “He may be. What makes you think he is?”
    “That picture. I’m no expert like my father was, but it looked like a Chantry to me, the real McCoy.”
    “What did your father say about