Read The Blue Hammer for Free Online Page B

1961. I couldn’t find Fred in the picture.
    “This is him,” Johnson said at my shoulder. He pointed out a teen-age boy’s face that from this distance in time looked touchingly hopeful.
    I looked over the books in the bookcase. Most of them were paperbacks on art and culture and technology. There were a few books about psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The only ones I had read myself were The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Gandhi’s Truth —unusual background reading for a thief, if that’s what Fred was.
    I turned to Johnson. “Could someone have gotten into the house and taken the picture from this room?”
    He lifted his heavy shoulders and dropped them. “I guess anything is possible. I didn’t hear anybody. But then I generally sleep the sleep of the dead.”
    “You didn’t take the picture yourself, Jerry?”
    “No, sir.” He shook his head violently. “I know enough not to mess with Fred’s stuff. I may be an old nothing man but I wouldn’t steal from my own boy. He’s the only one of us with any future, in this house.”
    “Just the three of you live here—you and Fred and Mrs. Johnson?”
    “That’s correct. We had roomers at one time, but that was long ago.”
    “Then what happened to the picture Fred brought home?”
    Johnson lowered his head and swung it from side to side like a sick old bull. “I never saw the picture. You don’t understand how it is with me. I spent six, seven years after the war in a veterans’ hospital. Most of the time I was in a daze, most of the time I still am. The days go by, and half the time I don’t know what day it is and I don’t want to. I’m a sick man. Now why don’t you leave me alone?”
    I left him alone and made a cursory search of the upstairs rooms. Only one other was occupied, a room containing a double bed that Johnson evidently shared with his wife. There was no painting under the mattress, nothing incriminating in the closet or chest of drawers, no evidence of any crime but that of poverty.
    One narrow door at the end of the upstairs hallway was closed and padlocked. I stopped in front of it.
    Johnson came up behind me. “That goes up to the attic. I don’t have a key for it. Sarah’s always afraid I’ll fall down the stairs. Anyway, there isn’t anything up there. Like me,” he added foolishly, tapping the side of his head. “Nobody home upstairs.”
    He gave me a broad idiot smile. I gave him the other half-pint. It was an ugly transaction, and I was glad to leave him. He closed the front door behind me like a trusty shutting himself into his own prison. I locked the door.

chapter 8
    I left my car where it was and walked toward the hospital. I hoped to get some further information about Fred from Mrs. Johnson. The night was almost fully dark, the streetlights scattered sparsely among the trees. On the sidewalk ahead of me I noticed a spillage of oil drops that became more frequent as I moved along.
    I dipped my finger in one of the spilled drops and held it up to the light. It had a reddish tinge. It didn’t smell like oil.
    On the grass beside the sidewalk ahead of me someone was snoring. It was a man lying face down. I ran to him and got down on my knees beside him. The back of his head was dark and lustrous with blood. I moved him just enough to look at his face. It was bloody, too
    He groaned and tried to raise himself in a sad and helpless parody of a push-up, then fell on his face again. I turned his head to one side so that he could breathe more freely.
    He opened one eye and said, “Chantry? Leave me alone.”
    Then he relapsed into his broken-faced snuffling. I could see that he was very badly hurt. I left him and ran to the emergency entrance of the hospital.
    Seven or eight adults and children were waiting inside on collapsible chairs. A harassed young nurse behind a counter was manning it like a barricade.
    I said, “There’s an injured man just up the street.”
    “So bring him in.”
    “I can’t. He needs