The Zebra-Striped Hearse

9

IT WAS RAINING HARD when we put down at Guadalajara, as if our descent had ruptured a membrane in the lower sky. In spite of the newspaper tent I held over my head, the short walk from the plane to the terminal pasted my clothes to my back.

I exchanged some damp dollars for some dry pesos and asked the cashier to get me an English-speaking taxi driver, if possible. The porter he dispatched reappeared with a man in a plastic raincoat who grinned at me from under his dripping mustache.

“Yessir, where you want to go?”

“Ajijic, if they have a hotel there.”

“Yessir, they have a very nice posada.”

He led me across the many-puddled parking lot to a fairly new Simca sedan. I climbed squishing into the front seat.

“Wet night.”

“Yessir.”

He drove me through it for half an hour, entertaining me with fragments of autobiography. Like the nurse who had vaccinated me in Mazatlan, he had learned his English in the Central Valley.

“I was a wetback,” he said with some pride. “Three times I walked across the border. Two times they picked me up on the other side and hauled me back on a bus. The third time, I made it, all the way to Merced. I worked around Merced for four years, in the fields. You know Merced?”

“I know it. How were working conditions?”

“Not so good. But the pay, it was very good. I made enough to come back home and go into business.” He slapped the wheel of his Simca.

We emerged from between steep black hills onto a lakeshore road. I caught pale glimpses of ruffled water. A herd of burros crossed the headlights and galloped away into darkness. Through the streaming windshield they looked like the grey and shrunken ghosts of horses.

Church towers, buttressed by other buildings, rose from the darkness ahead. The rain was letting up, and had stopped by the time we reached the village. Though it was past ten o’clock, children swarmed in the doorways. Their elders were promenading in the steep cobbled streets, which had drained already.

At the corner of the central square an old woman in a shawl had set up a wooden table on the sidewalk. She was serving some kind of stew out of a pot, and I caught a whiff of it as we went by. It had a heady pungency, an indescribable smell which aroused no memories; expectation, maybe, and a smattering of doubt. The smell of Mexico.

I felt closer to home when we reached the posada. The night clerk was a big middle-aged American named Stacy, and he was glad to see me. The pillared lobby of the place had a deserted air. Stacy and I and my driver, who was waiting for me just inside the entrance, were the only human beings within sight or sound.

Stacy fussed over me like somebody trying to give the impression that he was more than one person. “I can certainly fix you up, Mr. Archer. I can give you your choice of several nice private cottages.”

“Any one of them will do. I think I’ll only be staying one night.”

He looked disappointed. “I’ll send out the mozo for your luggage.”

“I have no luggage.”

“But you’re all wet, man.”

“I know. Luckily this is a drip-dry suit.”

“You can’t let it dry right on you.” He clucked sympathetically. “Listen, you’re about my size. I’ll lend you some slacks and a sweater if you like. Unless you’re thinking of going right to bed.”

“I wasn’t intending to. You’re very kind.”

“Anything for a fellow American,” he said in a mocking tone which was half serious after all.

He took me through a wet garden to my cottage. It was clean and roomy; a fire was laid in the fireplace. He left me with instructions to use the bottled water, even for cleaning my teeth. I lit the fire and hung up my wet suit on a wall bracket above the mantel.

Stacy came back after a while with an armful of dry clothes. His large rubbery face was flushed with generosity and a meantime drink. The flannel slacks he gave me were big in the waist. I cinched them in with my belt and pulled on his blue turtleneck sweater. It had a big monogrammed “S” like a target over the heart, and it smelled of the kind of piny scent they foist off on men who want to smell masculine.

“You look very nice,” Stacy declared.

He stood and watched me in wistful empathy. Perhaps he saw himself with ten pounds shifted from his waistline to his shoulders, and ten lost years regained. He got a bit flustered when I told him I was going out. He may have been looking forward to an intimate conversation by the fire: And what is your philosophy of life?

Keep moving, amigo.

Stacy knew where the Hatchens lived, and passed the word in rapid Spanish to my driver. We drove to a nameless street. The only sign at the corner had been painted on a wall by an amateur hand: “Cristianismo si, Comunismo no.” A church tower rose on the far side of the wall.

The Hatchens’ gate was closed for the night. I knocked for some time before I got a response. My knocking wasn’t the only sound in the neighborhood. Up the street a radio was going full blast; hoofs clip-clopped; a burro laughed grotesquely in the darkness; the bell in the church tower rang the three-quarter hour and then repeated it for those who were hard of hearing; a pig squealed.

A man opened the upper half of the wicket gate and flashed a bright light in my face. “Quién es? Are you American?”

“Yes. My name is Archer. You’re Mr. Hatchen?”

“Dr. Hatchen. I don’t know you, do I? Is there some trouble?”

“Nothing immediate. Back in the States, your wife’s daughter, Harriet, has run off with a young man named Burke Damis whom you may know. I came here to investigate him for Colonel Blackwell. Are you and Mrs. Hatchen willing to talk to me?”

“I suppose we can’t refuse. Come back in the morning, eh?”

“I may not be here in the morning. If you’ll give me a little time tonight, I’ll try to make it short.”

“All right.”

I paid off my driver as Hatchen was opening the lower gate. He led me up a brick walk through an enclosed garden. The flashlight beam jumped along in front of us across the uneven bricks. He was a thin aging man who walked with great strenuosity.

He paused under an outside light before we entered the house. “Just what do you mean when you say Harriet’s run off with Damis?”

“She intends to marry him.”

“Is that bad?”

“It depends on what I find out about him. I’ve already come across some dubious things.”

“For instance?” He had a sharp wizened face in which the eyes were bright and quick.

“Apparently he came here under an alias.”

“That’s not unusual. The Chapala woods are full of people living incognito. But come in. My wife will be interested.”

He turned on a light in a screened portico and directed me through it to a further room. A woman was sitting there on a couch in an attitude of conscious elegance. Masses of blondish hair were arranged precariously on her head. Her black formal gown accentuated the white puffiness of her shoulders. The classic lines of her chin and throat were a little blurred by time.

“This is Mr. Archer, Pauline. My wife,” Hatchen said proudly.

She took my hand with the air of a displaced queen and held onto it in a subtle kind of Indian wrestling until I was sitting beside her on the couch.

“Sit down,” she said unnecessarily. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Mr. Archer is an emissary from dear old Mark.”

“How fascinating. And what has dear old Mark been up to now? Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” She held a forefinger upright in front of her nose. “He’s worried about Harriet.”

“You’re a good guesser, Mrs. Hatchen.”

She smiled thinly. “It’s the same old story. He’s always brooded over her like a father hen.”

“Mother hen,” Hatchen said.

“Father hen.”

“At any rate, she’s run off and married that Damis chap,” he said.

“I’m not surprised. I’m glad she had it in her. All Harriet ever needed was a little of her mother’s spirit and fortitude. Speaking of spirits, Mr. Archer–” she waved her finger “–Keith and I were just about to have a nightcap. Won’t you join us?”

Hatchen looked at her brightly. He was still on his feet in the middle of the room. “You’ve had your ration, dear one. You know what the doctor said.”

“The doctor’s in Guad and I’m here.”

“I’m here, too.”

“So be a sport and get us all a drink. You know what I like.”

He shrugged and turned to me. “What will you have?”

“Whisky?”

“I can’t recommend the whisky. The gin’s okay.”

“Gin and tonic will be fine.”

He left the room with a nervous glance at his wife, as if she might be contemplating elopement. She turned the full panoply of her charm on me.

“I know you must think I’m a strange sort of mother, totally unconcerned with my daughter’s welfare and so on. The fact is I’m a kind of refugee. I escaped from Mark and his ménage long long ago. I haven’t even seen him for thirteen years, and for once that’s a lucky number. I turned over a fresh page and started a new chapter – a chapter dedicated to love and freedom.” Romanticism soughed in her voice like a loosely strung Aeolian harp.

“It isn’t entirely clear to me why you left him.”

She took the implied question as a matter of course. “The marriage was a mistake. We had really very little in common. I love movement and excitement, interesting people, people with a sense of life.” She looked at me sideways. “You seem to be a man with a sense of life. I’m surprised that you should be a friend of Mark’s. He used to spend his spare time doing research on the Blackwell genealogy.”

“I didn’t say I was friend of Mark’s.”

“But I understood he sent you here.”

“I’m a private detective, Mrs. Hatchen. He hired me to look into Damis’s background. I was hoping you could give me some assistance.”

“I barely knew the fellow. Though I sensed from the beginning that Harriet was smitten with him.”

“When was the beginning?”

“A few days after she got here. She came a little over a month ago. I was really glad to see her.” She sounded surprised. “A little disappointed, perhaps, but glad.”

“Why disappointed?”

“I had various reasons. I’d always sort of hoped that she’d outgrow her ugly-duckling phase, and she did to some extent, of course. After all she is my daughter.” Her active forefinger went to her brow and moved down her nose to her mouth and chin, which she tilted up. “And I was disappointed that we didn’t really have anything in common. She didn’t take to our friends or our way of life. We did our best to make her comfortable, but she moved out before the end of the first week.”

“And moved in with Damis?”

“Harriet wouldn’t do that. She’s quite a conventional girl. She rented a studio down near the lake. I think he had one somewhere in the neighborhood. I have no doubt they spent a lot of time together. More power to them, I thought.”

“Did you know Burke Damis before she met him?”

“No, and she didn’t meet him in our casa. We’d seen him around, of course, but we’d never met him till Harriet introduced him. That was a few days after she got here, as I said.”

“Where did you see him around?”

“At the Cantina mostly. I think that’s where Harriet picked – where Harriet met him. A lot of arty young people hang out there, or used to.”

“You saw him there before she met him?”

“Oh, yes, several times. He’s rather conspicuously good-looking, don’t you think?”

“Was he using the name Burke Damis?”

“I suppose so. You could always ask the Cantina people. It’s just down the street.”

“I’ll do that. Before Harriet arrived, did Damis ever try to contact you?”

“Never. We didn’t know him from Adam.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is Mark trying to pin the blame on me for something?”

“No, but it occurred to me that Damis might have had her spotted before she got here.”

“Spotted?”

“As a girl with money behind her.”

“He didn’t learn it from us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“And there was nothing to show that he deliberately planned to meet her?”

“I doubt it. He picked her up in the Cantina and she was dazzled with gratitude, poor girl.”

“Why do you say ‘poor girl’?”

“I’ve always felt that way about Harriet. She had a rough deal, from both of us. I realize I appear to be a selfish woman, leaving her and Mark when she was just a child. But I had no choice if I wanted to save my soul.”

I sat there wondering if she had saved it and waiting for her to elaborate. Her eyes had the hardness that comes from seeing too many changes and not being changed by them.

“To make a long story short, and a sordid one, I moved into the Tahoe house and got a Reno divorce. I didn’t want to do it. It broke my heart to turn my back on Harriet. But she was very much her father’s daughter. There was nothing I could do to break that up, short of murder. And don’t think I haven’t contemplated murder. But a Nevada divorce seemed more civilized. Keith–” she gestured toward the kitchen, where ice was being picked “–Keith was in Nevada on the same errand. What’s keeping him out there so long?”

“He may be giving us a chance to talk.”

“Yes, he’s a very thoughtful man. I’ve been very happy with Keith, don’t think I haven’t.” There was a hint of defiance in her voice. “On the other hand, don’t think I haven’t felt guilty about my daughter. When she visited us last month the old guilt feelings came back. It was so obvious that she wanted – that she needed something from me. Something I couldn’t give, and if I could, she couldn’t have taken it. She still blamed me for deserting her, as she put it. I tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen to any criticism of her father. He’s always dominated her every thought. She went into hysterics, and so did I, I suppose. We quarreled, and she moved out on me.”

“It looks as though that made her ripe for Damis. I’ve known other men like him. They prey on girls and women who step outside the protection of their families.”

“You make him sound like a very devious type.”

“He’s devious. Does the name Q. R. Simpson mean anything to you? Quincy Ralph Simpson?”

She shook her head and her hairdo slipped. It made her entire personality seem held in place by pins. “Should I know the name?”

“I didn’t really expect you to.”

“What name?” her husband said from the doorway. He came in carrying a hammered brass tray with three pale drinks placed geometrically on it.

“The name that Burke Damis used to cross the border, coming and going. Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“You will if you take the California papers.”

“But we don’t.” He passed the drinks around with a flourish. “We are happy fugitives from the California papers, and from nuclear bombs and income taxes–”

“And the high cost of liquor,” his wife chimed in like the other half of a vaudeville team.

“This gin costs me forty American cents a liter,” he said, “and I don’t believe you can top it at any price. Well, salud.” He lifted his glass.

I drank from mine. The gin was all right, but it failed to warm me. There was something cold and lost about the room and the people in it. They had roosted like migrant birds that had lost their homing instincts, caught in a dream of perpetual static flight. Or so it seemed through the bottom of my glass.

I set it down and got up. Hatchen rose, too.

“What was that about this man Simpson and the newspapers?”

“Simpson was stabbed with an icepick a couple of months ago. His body was found last week.”

“And you say Damis was using his name?”

“Yes.”

“Is he suspected of Simpson’s murder?”

“Yes. By me.”

“Poor Harriet,” Mrs. Hatchen said over her drink.