The Zebra-Striped Hearse

11

THE PLACE was closed for the night. Steering a course by dead reckoning and the sound of the town clock chiming the quarter, I made my way back to the central square. It was abandoned except for one lone man locked behind the grille of the unicellular jail.

Followed by his Indian gaze, I took myself for a walk around the perimeter of the square. Seven eighths of the way around, I was stopped by a sign in English hand-lettered on wood: “Anne’s Native Crafts.” The shutters were up but there was light behind them, and the thump and clack of some rhythmic movement.

The noise stopped when I knocked on the door beside the shutters. Heels clicked on stone, and the heavy door creaked open. A smallish woman peered out at me.

“What do you want? It’s very late.”

“I realize that, Miss Castle. But I’m hoping to fly out of here in the morning, and I thought since you were up–”

“I know who you are,” she said accusingly.

“News travels fast in Ajijic.”

“Does it not? I can also tell you that you’re here to no purpose. Burke Damis left Ajijic some time ago. It’s true I sublet a studio to him for a brief period. But I can tell you nothing whatever about him.”

“That’s funny. You know all about me, and you never even saw me before.”

“There’s nothing funny about it. The waiter at the Cantina is a friend of mine. I taught his sister to weave.”

“That was nice of you.”

“It was part of the normal course of my life and work. You are distinctly not. Now if you’ll take your big foot out of my doorway, I can get back to my weaving.”

I didn’t move. “You work very late.”

“I work all the time.”

“So do I when I’m on a case. That gives us something in common. I think we have something else in common.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be.”

“You’re concerned about Burke Damis, and so am I.”

“Concerned?” Her voice went tinny on the word. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t either, Miss Castle. You would have to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you nothing.”

“Are you in love with Burke Damis?”

“I certainly am not!” she said passionately, telling me a great deal. “That’s the most absurd statement – question, that anyone ever asked me.”

“I’m full of absurd questions. Will you let me come in and ask you some of them?”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re a serious woman, and serious things are happening. I didn’t fly down from Los Angeles for fun.”

“What is happening then?”

“Among other things,” I said, “Burke has eloped with a young woman who doesn’t know which end is up.”

She was silent for a long moment. “I know Harriet Blackwell, and I quite agree with your description of her. She’s an emotionally ignorant girl who threw – well, she practically threw herself at his head. There’s nothing I can do about it, or want to.”

“Even if she’s in danger?”

“Danger from Burke? That’s impossible.”

“It’s more than possible, in my opinion, and I’ve been giving it a good deal of thought.”

She moved closer to me. I caught the glint of her eyes, and her odor, light and clean, devoid of perfume. “Did you really come all the way from the States to ask me about Burke?”

“Yes.”

“Has he – done something to Harriet Blackwell?”

“I don’t know. They’ve dropped out of sight.”

“What makes you suspect he’s done something?”

“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me. We both seem to have the same idea.”

“No. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“I wouldn’t have to, if you’d talk to me.”

“Perhaps I had better,” she said to me and her conscience. “Come in, Mr. Archer.” She even knew my name.

I followed her into the room behind her shop. A wooden hand loom stood in one corner, with a piece of colored fabric growing intricately on it. The walls and furniture were covered with similar materials in brilliant designs.

Anne Castle was quite brilliant in her own way. She wore a multicolored Mexican skirt, an embroidered blouse, in her ears gold hoops that were big enough to swing on. Black hair cut short emphasized her petiteness and the individuality of her looks. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, and warmer than her voice had let me hope.

She said when we were seated on the divan: “You were going to tell me what Burke has done.”

“I’d rather have your account of him first, for psychological reasons.”

“You mean,” she said carefully, “that I may not want to talk after you’ve done your talking?”

“Something like that.”

“Is it so terrible?”

“It may be quite terrible. I don’t know.”

“As terrible as murder?” She sounded like a child who names the thing he fears, the dead man walking in the attic, the skeleton just behind the closet door, in order to be assured that it doesn’t exist.

“Possibly. I’m interested in your reasons for suggesting it.”

“Well,” she hedged, “you said Harriet Blackwell was in danger.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Of course.” The skeleton had frightened her away from the verge of candor. She covered her retreat with protestations: “I’m sure you must be mistaken. They seem fond of each other. And you couldn’t describe Burke as a violent man.”

“How well did you know him, Miss Castle?”

She hesitated. “You asked me, before, if I was in love with him.”

“I apologize for my bluntness.”

“I don’t care. Is it so obvious? Or has Chauncey Reynolds been telling tales out of school?”

“He said that you were seeing a lot of Burke, before Harriet Blackwell entered the picture.”

“Yes. I’ve been trying ever since to work him out of my system. With not very striking success.” She glanced at the loom in the corner. “At least I’ve gotten through a lot of work.”

“Do you want to tell me the story from the beginning?”

“If you insist. I don’t see how it can help you.”

“How did you meet him?”

“In a perfectly natural way. He came into the shop the day after he got here. His room at the posada didn’t suit him, because of the light. He was looking for a place to paint. He said he hadn’t been able to paint for some time, and he was burning to get at it. I happened to have a studio I’m not using, and I agreed to rent it to him for a month or so.”

“Is that how long he wanted it for? A month?”

“A month or two, it wasn’t definite.”

“And he came here two months ago?”

“Almost to the day. When I think of the changes there have been in just two months–!” Her eyes reflected them. “Anyway, the day he moved in, I had to make a speed trip to Guad. One of my girls has a rheumatic heart and she needed emergency treatment. Burke came along for the ride, and I was impressed by his kindness to the girl – she’s one of my best students. After we took her to the hospital we went to the Copa de Leche for lunch and really got to know each other.

“He talked to me about his plans as an artist. He’s still caught up in abstraction but he’s trying to use that method to penetrate more deeply into life. It’s his opinion that the American people are living through a tragedy unconsciously, suffering without knowing that we are suffering or what the source of the suffering may be. He thinks it’s in our sexual life.” She flushed suddenly. “Burke is very verbal for a painter.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “Who paid for the lunch?”

Her flush deepened. “You know quite a bit about him, don’t you? I paid. He was broke. I also took him to an artists’ supply house and let him charge four hundred pesos’ worth of paints on my account. It was my suggestion, not his, and I don’t regret it.”

“Did he pay you back?”

“Of course.”

“Before or after he attached himself to Harriet Blackwell?”

“Before. It was at least a week before she got here.”

“What did he use for money?”

“He sold a picture to Bill Wilkinson, or rather to his wife – she’s the one with the money. I tried to persuade him not to sell it or, if he insisted, to sell it to me. But he was determined to sell it to her, and she was determined to have it. She paid him thirty-five hundred pesos, which was more than I could afford. Later on he regretted the sale and tried to buy the picture back from the Wilkinsons. I heard that they had quite a ruction about it.”

“When was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago. I only heard about it at second hand. Burke and I were no longer speaking, and I have nothing to do with the Wilkinsons. Bill Wilkinson is a drunk married to a woman older than himself and living on her.” She paused over the words, perhaps because they had accidentally touched on her relations with Damis. “They’re dangerous people.”

“I understand that Wilkinson was Burke’s boon companion.”

“For a while. Bill Wilkinson is quite perceptive, in the sense that he understands people’s weaknesses, and Burke was taken in by him for a while.”

“Or vice versa?”

“That was not the case. What would a man like Burke have to gain from a man like Bill Wilkinson?”

“He sold his wife a picture for thirty-five hundred pesos.”

“It’s a very good picture,” she said defensively, “and cheap at the price. Burke isn’t ever high on his own work, but even he admitted that it was the kind of tragic painting he was aiming at. It wasn’t like his other things, apart from a few sketches. As a matter of fact, it’s representational.”

“Representational?”

“It’s a portrait,” she said, “of a lovely young girl. He called it ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman.’ I asked him if he’d ever known such a woman. He said perhaps he had, or perhaps he dreamed her.”

“What do you think?”

“I think he must have known her, and painted her from memory. I never saw a man work so ferociously hard. He painted twelve and fourteen hours a day. I had to make him stop to eat. I’d walk into the studio with his comida, and he’d be working with the tears and sweat running down his face. He’d paint himself blind, then he’d go off on the town and get roaring drunk. I’d put him to bed in the wee hours, and he’d be up in the morning painting again.”

“He must have given you quite a month.”

“I loved it,” she said intensely. “I loved him. I still do.”

It was an avowal of passion. If there was some hysteria in it, she had it under control. Everything was under control, except that she worked all the time.

We sat there smiling dimly at each other. She was an attractive woman, with the kind of honesty that chisels the face in pure lines. I recalled what Chauncey Reynolds had said in drunken wisdom about Harriet, that she hadn’t made the breakthrough into womanhood. Anne Castle had.

I kept my eyes on her face too long. She rose and moved across the room with hummingbird vitality, and opened a portable bar which stood against the wall: “May I give you something to drink, Mr. Archer?”

“No, thanks, there’s a long night coming up. After you and I have finished, I’m going to try and see the Wilkinsons. I want a look at that portrait they bought, for one thing.”

She closed the door of the bar, sharply. “Haven’t we finished?”

“I’m afraid not, Miss Castle.”

She came back to the divan. “What more do you want from me?”

“I still don’t understand Damis and his background. Did he ever talk about his previous life?”

“Some. He came from somewhere in the Middle West. He studied at various art schools.”

“Did he name them?”

“If he did, I don’t remember. Possibly Chicago was one of them. He knew the Institute collection. But most painters do.”

“Where did he live before he came to Mexico?”

“All over the States, I gathered. Most of us have.”

“Most of the people here, you mean?”

She nodded. “This is our fifty-first state. We come here when we’ve run through the other fifty.”

“Burke came here from California, we know that. Did he ever mention San Mateo County, or the Bay area in general?”

“He’d spent some time in San Francisco. He was deeply familiar with the El Grecos in the museum there.”

“Painting is all he ever talked about, apparently.”

“He talked about everything under the sun,” she said, “except his past life. He was reticent about that. He did tell me he’d been unhappy for years, that I’d made him happy for the first time since he was a boy.”

“Then why did he turn his back on you so abruptly?”

“That’s a very painful question, Mr. Archer.”

“I know it, and I’m sorry. I’m trying to understand how the Blackwell girl got into the picture.”

“I can’t explain it,” she said with a little sigh. “Suddenly there she was, spang in the middle of it.”

“Had he ever mentioned her before she arrived?”

“No. They met here, you see.”

“And he had no previous knowledge of her?”

“No. Are you implying that he was lying in wait for her or something equally melodramatic?”

“My questions don’t imply anything. They’re simply questions. Do you happen to know where they first met?”

“At a party at Helen Wilkinson’s. I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you who introduced whom to whom, or who was the aggressor, shall we say. I do know it was love at first sight.” She added dryly: “On her part.”

“What about his part?”

Her clear brow knotted, and she looked almost ugly for a moment. “It’s hard to say. He dropped me like the proverbial hotcake when she hove into sight. He dropped his painting, too. He spent all his time with her for weeks, and finally went off with her. Yet the few times I saw them together – he was still living here, but I arranged to see as little of him as possible – I got the impression that he wasn’t terribly attracted to her.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Base is too definite a word for what I have to go on – the way he looked at her and the way he didn’t look. He struck me as a man doing a job, doing it with rather cold efficiency. That may be wishful thinking on my part.”

I doubted that it was. I’d seen the lack of interest in his face the day before, in the Malibu house, when Harriet ran to him across the room.

“I don’t believe you do much wishful thinking, Miss Castle.”

“Do I not? But they didn’t seem to talk about each other, as people in love are supposed to. As Burke and I did when we were – together.” The ugly darkness caught in her brow again. “They talked about how much money her father had, and what a beautiful place he maintained at Lake Tahoe. Things like that,” she said contemptuously.

“Just what was said about the place at Tahoe?”

“She described it to him in some detail, as if she was trying to sell a piece of real estate. I know I’m being hard on her, but it was hard to listen to. She went on for some time about the great oaken beams, and the stone fireplace where you could roast an ox if you had an ox, and the picture window overlooking the lake. The disheartening thing was, Burke was intensely interested in her very materialistic little recital.”

“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 piece. 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’ lake-front 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.