She turned towards me, and the slanting sunlight aureoled her bare head. She had a startling kind of beauty: yellow hair, light hazel eyes, brown skin. She filled her tailored suit like sand in a sack.

  “Good morning.”

  She pretended not to hear me. Her right foot was tapping the pavement impatiently. I crossed the porch to the high bronze door and pushed. It didn’t give.

  “There’s nobody here yet,” she said. “The gallery doesn’t open until ten.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I happen to work here.”

  “Why don’t you open up?”

  “I have no key. In any case,” she added primly, “we don’t allow visitors before ten.”

  “I’m not a tourist, at least at the moment. I came to see Mr. Western.”

  “Hugh?” She looked at me directly for the first time. “Hugh’s not here. He lives around the corner on Rubio Street.”

  “I just came from there.”

  “Well, he isn’t here.” She gave the words a curious emphasis. “There’s nobody here but me. And I won’t be here much longer if Dr. Silliman doesn’t come.”

  “Silliman?”

  “Dr. Silliman is our curator.” She made it sound as if she owned the gallery. After a while she said in a softer voice: “Why are you looking for Hugh? Do you have some business with him?”

  “Western’s an old friend of mine.”

  “Really?”

  She lost interest in the conversation. We stood together in silence for several minutes. She was tapping her foot again. I watched the Saturday-morning crowd on the street: women in slacks, women in shorts and dirndls, a few men in ten-gallon hats, a few in berets. A large minority of the people had Spanish or Indian faces. Nearly half the cars in the road carried out-of-state licenses. San Marcos was a unique blend of western border town, ocean resort, and artists’ colony.

  A small man in a purple corduroy jacket detached himself from the crowd and bounded up the steps. His movements were quick as a monkey’s. His lined face had a simian look, too. A brush of frizzled gray hair added about three inches to his height.

  “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, Alice.”

  She made a nada gesture. “It’s perfectly all right. This gentleman is a friend of Hugh’s.”

  He turned to me. His smile went on and off. “Good morning, sir. What was the name?”

  I told him. He shook my hand. His fingers were like thin steel hooks.

  “Western ought to be here at any minute. Have you tried his flat?”

  “Yes. His sister thought he might have spent the night in the gallery.”

  “Oh, but that’s impossible. You mean he didn’t come home last night?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” the blond girl said.

  “I didn’t know you were interested.”

  “Alice has every right to be interested.” Silliman’s eyes glowed with a gossip’s second-hand pleasure. “She and Hugh are going to be married. Next month, isn’t it, Alice? Do you know Miss Turner, by the way, Mr. Archer?”

  “Hello, Mr. Archer.” Her voice was shallow and hostile. I gathered that Silliman had embarrassed her.

  “I’m sure he’ll be along shortly,” he said reassuringly. “We still have some work to do on the program for the private showing tonight. Will you come in and wait?”

  I said I would.

  He took a heavy key ring out of his jacket pocket and unlocked the bronze door, relocking it behind us. Alice Turner touched a switch which lit up the high-ceilinged lobby and the Greek statues standing like frozen sentinels along the walls. There were several nymphs and Venuses in marble, but I was more interested in Alice. She had everything the Venuses had, and the added advantage of being alive. She also had Hugh Western, it seemed, and that surprised me. He was a little old for her, and a little used. She didn’t look like one of those girls who’d have to settle for an aging bachelor. But then Hugh Western had talent.

  She removed a bundle of letters from the mail box and took them into the office which opened off the lobby. Silliman turned to me with a monkey grin.

  “She’s quite a girl, is she not? Trust Hugh to draw a circle around the prettiest girl in town. And she comes from a very good family, an excellent family. Her father, the Admiral, is one of our trustees, you know, and Alice has inherited his interest in the arts. Of course she has a more personal interest now. Had you known of their engagement?”

  “I haven’t seen Hugh for years, not since the war.”

  “Then I should have held my tongue and let him tell you himself.”

  As we were talking, he led me through the central gallery, which ran the length of the building like the nave of a church. To the left and right, in what would have been the aisles, the walls of smaller exhibition rooms rose halfway to the ceiling. Above them was a mezzanine reached by an open iron staircase.

  He started up it, still talking: “If you haven’t seen Hugh since the war, you’ll be interested in the work he’s been doing lately.”

  I was interested, though not for artistic reasons. The wall of the mezzanine was hung with twenty-odd paintings: landscapes, portraits, groups of semi-abstract figures, and more abstract still lifes. I recognized some of the scenes he had sketched in the Philippine jungle, transposed into the permanence of oil. In the central position there was a portrait of a bearded man whom I’d hardly have known without the label, “Self-Portrait.”

  Hugh had changed. He had put on weight and lost his youth entirely. There were vertical lines in the forehead, gray flecks in the hair and beard. The light eyes seemed to be smiling sardonically. But when I looked at them from another angle, they were bleak and somber. It was a face a man might see in his bathroom mirror on a cold gray hangover morning.

  I turned to the curator hovering at my elbow. “When did he raise the beard?”

  “A couple of years ago, I believe, shortly after he joined us as resident painter.”

  “Is he obsessed with beards?”

  “I don’t quite know what you mean.”

  “Neither do I. But I came across a funny thing in his studio this morning. A sketch of a woman, a nude, with a heavy black beard. Does that make sense to you?”

  The old man smiled. “I’ve long since given up trying to make sense of Hugh. He has his own esthetic logic, I suppose. But I’d have to see this sketch before I could form an opinion. He may have simply been doodling.”

  “I doubt it. It was big, and carefully done.” I brought out the question that had been nagging at the back of my mind. “Is there something the matter with him, emotionally? He hasn’t gone off the deep end?”

  His answer was sharp. “Certainly not. He’s simply wrapped up in his works and he lives by impulse. He’s never on time for appointments.” He looked at his watch. “He promised last night to meet me here this morning at nine, and it’s almost nine-thirty.”

  “When did you see him last night?”

  “I left the key of the gallery with him when I went home for dinner. He wanted to rehang some of these paintings. About eight or a little after he walked over to my house to return the key. We have only the one key, since we can’t afford a watchman.”

  “Did he say where he was going after that?”

  “He had an appointment, he didn’t say with whom. It seemed to be urgent, since he wouldn’t stop for a drink. Well.” He glanced at his watch again. “I suppose I’d better be getting down to work. Western or no Western.”

  Alice was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. Both of her hands gripped the wrought-iron bannister. Her voice was no more than a whisper, but it seemed to fill the great room with leaden echoes:

  “Dr. Silliman, the Chardin’s gone.”

  He stopped so suddenly I nearly ran into him. “That’s impossible.”

  “I know. But it’s gone, frame and all.” He bounded down the remaining steps and disappeared into one of the smaller rooms under the mezzanine. Alice followed him more slowly. I caught up with her: “There’s a picture missing?”

  “Father’s best picture, one of the best Chardins in the country. He loaned it to the gallery for a month.”

  “Is it worth a lot of money?”

  “Yes, it’s very valuable. But it means a lot more to Father than the money—” She turned in the doorway and gave me a closed look, as if she’d realized she was telling her family secrets to a stranger.

  Silliman was standing with his back to us, staring at a blank space on the opposite wall. He looked badly shaken when he turned around.

  “I told the board that we should install a burglar alarm—the insurance people recommended it. But Admiral Turner was the only one who supported me. Now of course they’ll be blaming me.” His nervous eyes roved around and paused on Alice. “And what is your father going to say?”

  “He’ll be sick.” She looked sick herself.

  They were getting nowhere, and I cut in: “When did you see it last?”

  Silliman answered me. “Yesterday afternoon, about five-thirty. I showed it to a visitor just before we closed. We check the visitors very closely from the office, since we have no guards.”

  “Who was the visitor?”

  “A lady—an elderly lady from Pasadena. She’s above suspicion, of course. I escorted her out myself, and she was the last one in, I know for a fact.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting Hugh?”

  “By George, I was. He was here until eight last night. But you surely don’t suggest that Western took it? He’s our resident painter, he’s devoted to the gallery.”

  “He might have been careless. If he was working on the mezzanine and left the door unlocked—”

  “He always kept it locked,” Alice said coldly. “Hugh isn’t careless about the things that matter.”

  “Is there another entrance?”

  “No,” Silliman said. “The building was planned for security. There’s only the one window in my office, and it’s heavily barred. We do have an air-conditioning system, but the inlets are much too small for anyone to get through.”

  “Let’s have a look at the window.”

  The old man was too upset to question my authority. He led me through a storeroom stacked with old gilt-framed pictures whose painters deserved to be hung, if the pictures didn’t. The single casement in the office was shut and bolted behind a Venetian blind. I pulled the cord and peered out through the dusty glass. The vertical bars outside the window were no more than three inches apart. None of them looked as if it had been tampered with. Across the alley, I could see a few tourists obliviously eating breakfast behind the restaurant hedge.

  Silliman was leaning on the desk, one hand on the cradle phone. Indecision was twisting his face out of shape. “I do hate to call the police in a matter like this. I suppose I must, though, mustn’t I?”

  Alice covered his hand with hers, the line of her back a taut curve across the desk. “Hadn’t you better talk to Father first? He was here with Hugh last night—I should have remembered before. It’s barely possible he took the Chardin home with him.”

  “Really? You really think so?” Silliman let go of the telephone and clasped his hands hopefully under his chin.

  “It wouldn’t be like Father to do that without letting you know. But the month is nearly up, isn’t it?”

  “Three more days.” His hand returned to the phone. “Is the Admiral at home?”

  “He’ll be down at the club by now. Do you have your car?”

  “Not this morning.”

  I made one of my famous quick decisions, the kind you wake up in the middle of the night reconsidering five years later. San Francisco could wait. My curiosity was touched, and something deeper than curiosity. Something of the responsibility I’d felt for Hugh in the Philippines, when I was the practical one and he was the evergreen adolescent who thought the jungle was as safe as a scene by Le Douanier Rousseau. Though we were nearly the same age, I’d felt like his elder brother. I still did.

  “My car’s around the corner,” I said. “I’ll be glad to drive you.”

  The San Marcos Beach Club was a long low building painted an unobtrusive green and standing well back from the road. Everything about it was unobtrusive, including the private policeman who stood inside the plate-glass doors and watched us come up the walk.

  “Looking for the Admiral, Miss Turner? I think he’s up on the north deck.”

  We crossed a tiled lanai shaded with potted palms, and climbed a flight of stairs to a sun deck lined with cabanas. I could see the mountains that walled the city off from the desert in the northeast, and the sea below with its waves glinting like blue fish scales. The swimming pool on the lee side of the deck was still and clear.

  Admiral Turner was taking the sun in a canvas chair. He stood up when he saw us, a big old man in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. Sun and wind had reddened his face and crinkled the flesh around his eyes. Age had slackened his body, but there was nothing aged or infirm about his voice. It still held the brazen echo of command.

  “What’s this, Alice? I thought you were at work.”

  “We came to ask you a question, Admiral.” Silliman hesitated, coughing behind his hand. He looked at Alice.

  “Speak out, man. Why is everybody looking so green around the gills?”

  Silliman forced the words out: “Did you take the Chardin home with you last night?”

  “I did not. Is it gone?”

  “It’s missing from the gallery,” Alice said. She held herself uncertainly, as though the old man frightened her a little. “We thought you might have taken it.”

  “Me take it? That’s absurd! Absolutely absurd and preposterous!” The short white hair bristled on his head. “When was it taken?”

  “We don’t know. It was gone when we opened the gallery. We discovered it just now.”

  “God damn it, what goes on?” He glared at her and then he glared at me, from eyes like round blue gun muzzles. “And who the hell are you?”

  He was only a retired admiral, and I’d been out of uniform for years, but he gave me a qualm. Alice put in: “A friend of Hugh’s, Father. Mr. Archer.” He didn’t offer his hand. I looked away. A woman in a white bathing suit was poised on the ten-foot board at the end of the pool. She took three quick steps and a bounce. Her body hung jack-knifed in the air, straightened and dropped, cut the water with hardly a splash.

  “Where is Hugh?” the Admiral said petulantly. “If this is some of his carelessness, I’ll ream the bastard.”

  “Father!”

  “Don’t father me. Where is he, Allie? You ought to know if anyone does.”

  “But I don’t.” She added in a small voice: “He’s been gone all night.”

  “He has?” The old man sat down suddenly, as if his legs were too weak to bear the weight of his feelings. “He didn’t say anything to me about going away.”

  The woman in the white bathing suit came up the steps behind him. “Who’s gone away?” she said.

  The Admiral craned his wattled neck to look at her. She was worth the effort from anyone, though she wouldn’t see thirty again. Her dripping body was tanned and disciplined, full in the right places and narrow in the others. I didn’t remember her face, but her shape seemed familiar. Silliman introduced her as Admiral Turner’s wife. When she pulled off her rubber cap, her red hair flared like a minor conflagration.

  “You won’t believe what they’ve been telling me, Sarah. My Chardin’s been stolen.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’ve only the one. The ‘Apple on a Table’.”

  She turned on Silliman like a pouncing cat. “Is it insured?”

  “For twenty-five thousand dollars. But I’m afraid it’s irreplaceable.”

  “And who’s gone away?”

  “Hugh has,” Alice said. “Of course it’s nothing to do with the picture.”

  “You’re sure?” She turned to her husband with an intensity that made her almost ungainly. “Hugh was at the gallery when you dropped in there last night. You told me so yourself. And hasn’t he been trying to buy the Chardin?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alice said flatly. “He didn’t have the money.”

  “I know that perfectly well. He was acting as agent for someone. Wasn’t he, Johnston?”

  “Yes,” the old man admitted. “He wouldn’t tell me who his principal was, which is one of the reasons I wouldn’t listen to the offer. Still, it’s foolish to jump to conclusions about Hugh. I was with him when he left the gallery, and I know for a fact he didn’t have the Chardin. It was the last thing I looked at.”

  “What time did he leave you?”

  “Some time around eight—I don’t remember exactly.” He seemed to be growing older and smaller under her questioning. “He walked with me as far as my car.”

  “There was nothing to prevent him from walking right back.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,” Alice said.

  The older woman smiled poisonously. “I’m simply trying to bring out the facts, so we’ll know what to do. I notice that no one has suggested calling in the police.” She looked at each of the others in turn. “Well? Do we call them? Or do we assume as a working hypothesis that dear Hugh took the picture?”

  Nobody answered her for a while. The Admiral finally broke the ugly silence. “We can’t bring in the authorities if Hugh’s involved. He’s virtually a member of the family.”

  Alice put a grateful hand on his shoulder, but Silliman said uneasily, “We’ll have to take some steps. If we don’t make an effort to recover it, we may not be able to collect the insurance.”

  “I realize that,” the Admiral said. “We’ll have to take that chance.”

  Sarah Turner smiled with tight-lipped complacency. She’d won her point, though I still wasn’t sure what her point was. During the family argument I’d moved a few feet away, leaning on the railing at the head of the stairs and pretending not to listen.

  She moved towards me now, her narrow eyes appraising me as if maleness was a commodity she prized.

  “And who are you?” she said, her sharp smile widening.

  I identified myself. I didn’t smile back. But she came up very close to me. I could smell the chlorine on her, and under it the not so very subtle odor of sex.

 

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