“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 it?”

“I’m not telling you. And I don’t want to talk about that picture any more. You’re still asking all the questions, and I’m doing all the answering, and I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Let me take you.”

“No. You don’t know where I live, and I’m not telling you, either. That’s my secret.”

She got up from her knees, staggering a little. I supported her with my arm. Her breast touched my side. She leaned on me, breathing deeply for a moment, then pulled away. Some of her heat migrated through my body to my groin. I felt less tired than I had.

“I’ll take you home.”

“No, thanks. I have to wait here for the police. Anyway, all I need right now is a private cop in my life.”

“You could do worse, Paola. Your father was murdered, remember, possibly by the man who painted that picture.”

She took hold of my left arm above the elbow. “So you keep telling me, but do you know it?”

“No. I don’t know it.”

“Then stop trying to scare me. I’m scared enough already.”

“I think you should be. I got to your father before he died. It happened just a couple of hundred yards from here. It was dark, and he was badly hurt, and he thought I was Chantry. In fact, he called me Chantry. And what he said implied that Chantry killed him.”

Her eyes dilated. “Why would Richard Chantry kill my father? They were good friends in Arizona. My father often talked about him. He was Chantry’s first teacher.”

“That must have been a long time ago.”

“Yes. Over thirty years.”

“And people can change in thirty years.”

She nodded in assent, and her head stayed down. Her hair swung forward so that it poured like black water over her face.

“What happened to your father in those years?”

“I don’t know much about it. I didn’t see a lot of my father until recently—until he had a use for me.”

“Was he on heroin?”

She was silent for a time. Her hair was still over her face, and she didn’t push it back. She looked like a woman without a face.

Finally she said, “You know the answer to that question, or you wouldn’t ask it. He used to be an addict. They sent him to federal prison, and he licked it there, cold turkey.” She separated her hair with her hands and looked at me between it, probably to see if I believed her. “I wouldn’t have come here with him if he had been on drugs. I saw what it did to him when I was a kid in Tucson and Copper City.”

“What did it do to him?”

“He used to be a good man, an important man. He even taught a course at the university once. Then he turned into something else.”

“What did he turn into?”

“I don’t know. He started running after boys. Or maybe he was always like that. I don’t know.”

“Did he kick that habit, too, Paola?”

“I guess he did.” But her voice was uncertain, full of pain and doubt.

“Was the Biemeyers’ painting genuine?”

“I don’t know. He thought it was, and he was the expert.”

“How do you know that?”

“He talked to me about it the day he bought it on the beach. He said it had to be a Chantry, nobody else could have painted it. He said it was the greatest find he ever made in his life.”

“Did he say this to you?”

“Yes. Why would he lie to me? He had no reason.” But she was watching my face as if my reaction might resolve the question of her father’s honesty.

She was frightened, and I was tired. I sat down on one of the padded chairs and let my mind fray out for a couple of minutes. Paola went to the door but she didn’t go out. She leaned on the doorframe, watching me as if I might steal her purse, or already had.

“I’m not your enemy,” I said.

“Then don’t press me so hard. I’ve had a rough night.” She averted her face, as if she were ashamed of what she was about to say. “I liked my father. When I saw him dead, it was a terrible thing for me.”

“I’m sorry, Paola. I hope tomorrow will be better.”

“I hope so,” she said.

“I understand your father had a photograph of the painting.”

“That’s right. The coroner has it.”

“Henry Purvis?”

“Is that his name? Anyway, he has it.”

“How do you know?”

“He showed it to me. He said he found it in my father’s clothes, and he wanted to know if I recognized the woman. I told him I didn’t.”

“You recognized the painting?”

“Yes.”

“It was the painting your father sold to the Biemeyers?”

“Yes, it was.”

“How much did they pay him for it?”

“My father never told me. I think he needed the money to pay off a debt, and he didn’t want me to know. I can tell you something that he did say, though. He knew the woman in the painting, and that was how he authenticated it as a Chantry.”

“It is an authentic Chantry, then?”

“Yes. My father said it was.”

“Did he tell you the woman’s name?”

“It was Mildred. She was a model in Tucson when he was young—a beautiful woman. He said it must be a memory painting, because she’s an old woman now, if she’s alive at all.”

“Do you remember her last name?”

“No. I think she took the names of the men she lived with.”

I left Paola in the chapel and went back to the cold room. Purvis was in the anteroom, but he no longer had the photograph of the painting. He told me that he had given it to Betty Jo Siddon.

“What for?”

“She wanted to take it down to the newspaper building and have it photographed.”

“Mackendrick will like that, Henry.”

“Hell, it was Mackendrick who told me to let her have it. The chief of police is retiring this year, and it’s made Captain Mackendrick publicity-conscious.”

I started out of the hospital. A sense of unfinished business brought me to a full stop before I left the building. When Paul Grimes fell and died in my path, I had been on my way to talk to Fred’s mother, Mrs. Johnson.

^chapter

12

I went to the nurses’ station at the front and asked where I could find Mrs. Johnson. The nurse in charge was a middle-aged woman with a sallow bony face and an impatient manner.