The Zebra-Striped Hearse

by Ross Macdonald

  “Did she say anything about taking him there?”

  “I believe she did. Yes, I remember she suggested that it would be an ideally secluded place for a honeymoon.”

  “This may be the most helpful thing you’ve told me yet,” I said. “How did you happen to overhear it, by the way?”

  She tugged at one of her earrings in embarrassment “I didn’t mean to let that slip. I might as well confess, though, while I’m confessing all. I eavesdropped on them. I didn’t intend to do it, but he brought her to the studio several nights in a row, and my good intentions broke down. I had to know what they were saying to each other.” Her voice took on a satiric lilt: “So she was saying that her father had oodles of money and three houses, and Burke was drinking it in. Maybe he had an underprivileged childhood, who knows?”

  “It’s a funny thing about con men, they often come from respectable well-heeled families.”

  “He isn’t a confidence man. He’s a good painter.”

  “I have to reserve my judgment, on both counts. It might be a good idea for you to reserve yours.”

  “I’ve been trying, these last weeks. But it’s fearfully hard, when you’ve made a commitment—” She moved her hands helplessly.

  “I’d like to have a look at the studio you rented him. Would that be possible?”

  “If you think it will help in any way.”

  On the far side of the courtyard, where a Volkswagen was parked for the night, a detached brick building with a huge window stood against the property wall. She unlocked the door and turned on a lamp inside. The big bare-walled room smelled of insecticide. Several unsittable-looking pigskin-covered chairs were distributed around the tile floor. A cot with its thin mattress uncovered stood in one corner. The only sign of comfort was the hand-woven drapes at the big window.

  “He lived frugally enough here,” I said.

  “Just like a monk in his cell.” Her inflection was sardonic. “Of course I’ve stripped the place since he moved out. That was a week ago Sunday.”

  “He didn’t fly to Los Angeles until the following day.”

  “I presume he spent the last night with her.”

  “They were spending nights together, were they?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what went on in the course of the nights. You mustn’t think I spied on them persistently. I only broke down the once.” She folded her arms across her breasts and stood like a small monument, determined never to break down again. “You see me in my nakedness, Mr. Archer. I’m the classic case of the landlady who fell in love with her star boarder and got jilted.”

  “I don’t see you in that light at all.”

  “What other light could you possibly see me in?”

  “You’d be surprised. Have you ever been married, Miss Castle?”

  “Once. I left Vassar to get married, to a poet, of all things. It didn’t work out.”

  “So you exiled yourself to Mexico?”

  “It’s not that simple, and neither am I,” she said with a complicated smile. “You couldn’t possibly understand how I feel about this place. It’s as ancient as the hills and as new as the Garden of Eden—the real New World—and I love to be a part of it.” She added sadly, her mind revolving around a single pole: “I thought that Burke was beginning to feel the same.”

  I moved around the room and in and out of the bathroom at the rear. It was all bare and clean and unrevealing. I came back to her.

  “Did Damis leave much behind him, in the way of things?”

  “He left no personal things, if that’s what you’re interested in. He had nothing when he came here and not much more when he left, except for his brushes.”

  “He came here with nothing at all?”

  “Just the clothes he had on, and they were quite used up. I persuaded him to have a suit made in Guad. Yes, I paid for it.”

  “You did a lot for him.”

  “Nada.”

  “Did he give you anything in return?”

  “I didn’t want anything from him.”

  “No keepsakes or mementos?”‘

  She hesitated. “Burke gave me a little self-portrait. It’s only a sketch he tossed off. I asked him for it.”

  “May I see it?”

  “If you like.”

  She locked up the studio and took me back across the courtyard to her bedroom. Framed in bamboo, the small black and white picture hung on the wall above her smooth bed. The sketch was too stylized to be a perfect likeness, and one eye was for some reason larger than the other, but Burke Damis was easily recognizable in it. He glared out somberly from a nest of crosshatched lines.

  Anne Castle stood and answered his look with defensive arms folded across her breasts.

  “I have a favor to ask you. A big one.”

  “You want the sketch,” she said.

  “I promise you’ll get it back.”

  “But you must know what he looks like. You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve seen him, but I don’t know who I’ve seen.”

  “You think he’s using a false name?”

  “I believe he’s using at least two aliases. Burke Damis is one. Quincy Ralph Simpson is another. Did he ever use the Simpson name when he was with you?”

  She shook her head. The movement left her face loose and expectant.

  “He came to Mexico under the Simpson name. He used it again when he left. There’s a strange thing about the name Quincy Ralph Simpson. The man who originally owned it is dead.”

  Her head moved forward on her neck. “How did he die?”

  “Of an icepick in the heart, two months ago, in a town near Los Angeles called Citrus Junction. Did Burke ever mention Citrus Junction to you?”

  “Never.” Her arms had fallen to her sides. She looked at the bed, and then sat down on it. “Are you trying to tell me that Burke killed him?”

  “Burke, or whatever his name is, is the leading suspect in my book, so far the only one. He left the United States shortly after Simpson disappeared. It’s virtually certain he was using Simpson’s papers.”

  “Who was Simpson?”

  “A little man of no importance who wanted to be a detective.”

  “Was he after Burke for—some crime?”

  Her voice had overtones and undertones. The dead man was walking in the attic again. The skeleton hung behind her half-shuttered eyes.

  “You brought up the subject of murder before,” I said. “Is that the crime you have in mind?”

  She looked from me to the picture on the wall and back at me. She said miserably: “Did Burke kill a woman?”

  “It’s not unlikely,” I said in a neutral tone.

  “Do you know who she was?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “He didn’t tell me her name, or anything else about her. All he said—” She straightened up, trying to discipline her thoughts. “I’ll see if I can reconstruct exactly what he did say. It was our first night together. He’d been drinking, and he was in a low mood. Post-coital tristesse, I believe they call it.”

  She was being cruel to herself. Her fingers worked in the coverlet of her bed. One of her hands, still working, went to her breast. She was no longer looking at me.

  “You were going to tell me what he said, Miss Castle.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You already have, in a sense.”

  “I shouldn’t have spoken. Jilted landlady betrays demon lover. I didn’t think that was my style. I’m a hopeless creature,” she said, and flung herself sideways with her face in the pillow, her legs dragging on the floor.

  They were good legs, and I was aware of it, in the center of my body as well as in my head. A wave of feeling went through me; I wanted to comfort her. But I kept my hands off. She had more memories than she could use, and so had I.

  The memory I was interested in came out brokenly, half smothered by the pillow. “He said he was bad luck to his women. I should have nothing to do with him if I liked my neck in one piec
e. He said that that had happened to his last one.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was choked to death. It was why he had to leave the States.”

  “That implies he was responsible for her death. Did he make a confession to you?”

  “He didn’t say it outright. It was more of a threat to me, or a warning. I suppose he was bullying me. But he never actually hurt me. He’s very strong, too. He could have hurt me.”

  “Did he ever repeat the confession, or the threat?”

  “No, but I often thought of it afterward. I never brought it up, though. I was always a little afraid of him after that. It didn’t stop my loving him. I’d love him no matter what he’d done.”

  “Two murders take a lot of doing, and a very special kind of person to do them.”

  She detached her face from the comfort of the pillow and sat up, smoothing her skirt and then her hair. She was pale and shaken, as if she’d been through a bout of moral nausea.

  “I can’t believe that Burke is that kind of person.”

  “Women never can about the men they love.”

  “Just what evidence is there against him?”

  “What I’ve told you, and what you’ve told me.”

  “But it doesn’t amount to anything. He might have been simply talking, with me.”

  “You didn’t think so at the time, or later. You asked me right off if murder was involved. And I have to tell you that it certainly is. I saw Ralph Simpson’s body just twenty-four hours ago.”

  “But you don’t know who the woman was?”

  “Not yet, I have no information on Damis’s past life. It’s why I came here, and why I want to borrow your picture of him.”

  “What use will you make of it?”

  “An acquaintance of mine is art critic on one of the L.A. papers. He knows the work of a lot of young painters, and quite a few of them personally. I want to show the sketch to him and see if he can put a name to your friend.”

  “Why do you think Burke Damis isn’t his name?”

  “If he’s on the run, as he seems to be, he wouldn’t be using his own name. He entered Mexico under the Simpson alias, as I told you. There’s one other little piece of evidence. Did you ever notice a shaving kit he had, in a leather case?”

  “Yes. It was just about his only possession.”

  “Do you recall the initials on it?”

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  “ ‘B.C.,’ ” I said. “They don’t go with the name Burke Damis. I’m very eager to know what name they do go with. That picture may do it.”

  “You can have it,” she said, “and you don’t have to send it back. I shouldn’t have hung it here anyway. It’s too much like self-flagellation.”

  She took it off its hook and gave it to me, talking me out of the room and herself out of her embarrassed pain. “I’m a very self-flagellant type. But I suppose it’s better than having other people do it to you. And so very much more economical—it saves paying the middlemen.”

  “You talk a great deal, Anne.”

  “Too much, don’t I? Much too much too much.”

  But she was a serviceable woman. She gave me a bag of woven straw to carry the picture in, backed her Volkswagen out over my protests, and drove me out to the Wilkinsons’ lakefront house. It was past one but the chances were, she said, that Bill and his wife would still be up. They were late risers and late drinkers.

  She turned in at the top of their lane and kept her headlights on the barbed-wire gate while I unfastened it and closed it behind me. Then she gave a little toot on her horn and started back toward the village.

  I didn’t expect to see her again, and I regretted it.

  chapter 12

  MUSIC DRIFTED from the house. It was old romantic music of the twenties, poignant and sweet as the jasmine on the air. The dooryard was thickly planted with shrubbery and trees. Wide terraces descended from it to the lake, which glimmered faintly in the middle distance.

  I bumped my head on a low-hanging fruit which was probably a mango. Above the trees the stars hung in the freshly cleared sky like clusters of some smaller, brighter fruit too high to reach.

  I knocked on the heavy door. A woman spoke over the music: “Is that you, Bill?”

  I didn’t answer. After a minute’s waiting she opened the door. She was blonde and slim in something diaphanous. She also wore in her right hand a clean-looking .38 revolver pointed at my stomach.

  “What do you want?”

  “A little talk. My name is Archer and I’m only here overnight and I realize this is a poor time to come bothering you—”

  “You haven’t told me what you want.”

  “I’m a private detective investigating a crime.”

  “We don’t have crime here,” she said sharply.

  “This crime occurred up north.”

  “What makes you think that I know anything about it?”

  “I’m here to ask you, is all.”

  She moved back, and waved the revolver commandingly. “Come in under the light and let me see you.”

  I stepped into a room so huge that its far corners were in darkness. Gershwin spilled in a nostalgic cascade from a massive hi-fi layout against one wall. The blonde woman was heavily made up in an old-fashioned way, as if she had been entertaining ghosts. Her triangular face had the taut immobility that plastic surgery often leaves behind.

  She looked at my feet and swept her eyes up my body like searchlights, half occulted by eye shadow. I recognized the way she used her eyes. I’d seen it a dozen times before through the fallout of old late movies, and earlier still, when I was a juvenile patron of the Long Beach movie houses and she was a western leading lady smirking and ogling her way out of triangular relationships with horses.

  I reached deep for her movie name, but I couldn’t quite dredge it up.

  “You’re fairly pretty,” she said. “Isn’t that Claude Stacy’s sweater you’re wearing?”

  “He lent it to me. My clothes got rained on.”

  “I gave him that sweater. Are you a friend of Claude’s?”

  “Not an intimate one.”

  “That’s good. You don’t look his type. Do you like women?”

  “Put the gun away and I’ll give you a truthful answer,” I said with the necessary smile.

  She responded with a smile of her own, a 1929 smile that rested on her mouth like a footnote to history. “Don’t let the gun bother you. I learned to handle a gun when I was playing in westerns. My husband insists I keep it handy when I’m alone at night. Which I usually am.”

  She laid the revolver down on a table near the door and turned back to me. “You haven’t told me if you like women or not.”

  “I like individual women. I’ve liked you, for example, for a longer time than either of us would care to admit.” The name she had used as an actress had come back to me. “You’re Helen Holmes, aren’t you?”

  She lit up coldly and brightly, like a marquee. “You remember me. I thought everyone had forgotten.”

  “I was a fan,” I said, spreading it not too thick.

  “How nice!” She clenched her hands at her shoulders and jumped a few inches off the floor, with both feet, her smile immobile. “For that you may sit you down and I’ll pour you a drink and tell you anything you want to know. Except about me. Name your poison.”

  “Gin and tonic, since you’re so kind.”

  “One gin and tonic coming up.”

  She turned on a gilt chandelier which hung like a barbaric treasure among the ceiling beams. The room was like an auctioneer’s warehouse, crowded with furniture of various periods and countries. Against a distant wall stood an ornately carved bar, backed by shelves of bottles, with half a dozen leather-covered stools in front of it.

  “Come sit at the bar. It’s cozier.”

  I sat and watched her mix my drink. For herself she compounded something out of tequila and grenadine, with coarse salt sprinkled around the rim of the
glass. She stayed behind the bar to drink it, leaning on her forearms and exposing her bosom like a barmaid favoring a customer.

  “I won’t waste time beating around the bush. I’m interested in Burke Damis. You know him, Mrs. Wilkinson?”

  “Slightly. He is, or was, a friend of my husband’s.”

  “Why do you put it in the past tense?”

  “They had a quarrel, some time before Mr. Damis left here.”

  “What about?”

  “You ask very direct questions.”

  “I don’t have time for my usual subtlety.”

  “That must be something to experience.”

  “Oh, it is. What did they quarrel about?”

  “Me, if you have to know. Poor little old me.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “I was afraid they were going to kill each other, honestly. But Bill contented himself with burning the picture. That way he got back at both of us.” She raised one hand like a witness. “Now don’t ask me for doing what. There wasn’t any what It’s just that Bill is very insecure in our relationship.”

  “He burned the ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman’?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t forgiven him for it,” she said, as though this were proof of character. “He broke up the frame and tore the canvas and put the whole thing in the fireplace and set fire to it. Bill can be quite violent sometimes.”

  She sipped her drink and licked the salt from her lips with a pale pointed tongue. She reminded me of a cat, not a domestic cat, but one of the larger breeds that could stalk men. Her bright lips seemed to be savoring the memory of violence.

  “Did Damis know the picture was destroyed?”

  “I told him. It broke him up. He wept actual tears, can you imagine?”

  “I wonder why.”

  “It was his best picture, he said. I liked it, too.”

  “I heard he’d tried to buy it back.”

  “He did, but I wouldn’t part with it.” Between the shadowed lids her eyes were watchful. “Who else have you been talking to?”

  “Various people around the village.”

  “Claude Stacy?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Why are you so interested in that particular picture?”

  “I’m interested in everything Damis does.”