The Zebra-Striped Hearse

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’ve 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.”

“You mentioned a crime that occurred up north. Do you want to let down your back hair about it? I’ve been letting down my back hair.”

I told her what had happened to Quincy Ralph Simpson. She looked somehow disappointed, as if she’d been expecting something more lurid.

“This is all new to me,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you about Simpson.”

“Let’s get back to the picture then. Damis called it a portrait. Did he ever say who the subject of it was?”

“He never did,” she said shortly.

“Do you have any ideas?”

She shrugged her shoulders and made a stupid face, with her mouth turned down at the corners.

“You must have had a reason for buying the painting and wanting to keep it. Your husband cared enough about it to burn it.”

“I don’t know who the woman was,” she said, too forcefully.

“I think you do.”

“Think away. You’re getting rather boring. It’s late, and I have a headache.” She drew her fingers across her forehead. “Why don’t you drink up and go?”

I left my drink where it was on the bar between us. “I’m sorry if I pressed too hard. I didn’t mean to–”

“Didn’t you?” She finished her drink and came around the end of the bar, licking her lips. “Come on, I’ll let you out.”

It had been a very quick party. Reluctantly I followed her to the door.

“I was hoping to ask you some questions about Harriet Blackwell. I understand Damis met her here at your house.”

“So what?” she said, and pulled the door open. “Out.”

She slammed it behind me. In the dooryard I bumped my head on the same low-hanging fruit. I picked it – it was a mango – and took it along with me as a souvenir.

It was a long walk back, but I rather enjoyed it. It gave me a chance to think, among other things about Helen Holmes Wilkinson. Our rather tenuous relationship, based on Claude Stacy’s sweater and my remembering her movie name, had broken down over the identity of the woman in the burned portrait. I would give odds that she knew who the woman was and what her connection with Damis had been.

I wondered about Helen’s own connection with Damis.

Headlights approached me, coming very fast from the direction of the village. They belonged to a beetle-shaped Porsche which swerved in long arcs from one side of the road to the other. I had to slide into the ditch to avoid being run over. As the Porsche went by I caught a glimpse of the driver’s face, pale under flying dark hair. I threw my mango at him.

The clock chimed two quarters – half-past two – as I struggled through the village to the posada. In the room behind the desk, Claude Stacy was sleeping in his clothes on a mohair couch. It was a couch with one high end, the kind psychiatrists use, and he was curled up on it in fetal position.

I shook him. He grimaced and snorted like a huge old baby being born into a world he never made.

“What is it?”

“I met a friend of yours tonight. Helen Wilkinson. She mentioned you.”

“Did she now?” He took a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his thinning hair. “I hope it was complimentary.”

“Very,” I lied.

He basked in the imaginary compliment. “Oh, Helen and I get along. If Bill Wilkinson hadn’t got to her first I might have thought of marrying her myself.” He thought about it now. “She used to be in pictures, you know, and she saved her money. I did some acting at one time myself. But I didn’t hang on to any money.”

“What does Bill Wilkinson do for a living?”

“Nothing. He must be twenty years younger than Helen is,” he said by way of explanation. “You’d never know it, she’s so beautifully preserved. And Bill has let himself go frightfully. He used to be a Greek god, I mean it.”

“Have you known him long?”

“Years and years. It’s through him I got to know Helen. He married her a couple of years ago, after his folks stopped sending him money. I wouldn’t say he married her for her money, but he married where money is. Tennyson.” Stacy giggled. “It drives him out of his mind when Helen even looks at another man.”

“She looks at other men?”

“I’m afraid she does. She was interested in me at one time.” He flushed with vanity. “Of course I wouldn’t steal another fellow’s wife. Bill knows he can trust me. Bill and I have been buddy-buddy for years.”

“Have you seen him tonight?”

“No, I haven’t. I think he went to a party in Guadalajara. He has some very good connections. His family are very well-known people in Texas.”

“Does he drive a Porsche?”

“If you can call it driving. His driving is one reason he had to leave Texas.”

“I can believe it. He almost ran me down on the road just now.”

“Poor old Bill. Some night he’s going to end up in the ditch with a broken neck. And maybe I’ll marry Helen after all, who knows?” The prospect failed to cheer him. “I need a drink, old chap. Will you have one with me?”

“All right. Drinking seems to be the favorite indoor sport around here.”

He looked at me to see if I was accusing him of being a drunk. I smiled. He gave me a Mexican-type shrug and got a bottle of Bacardi out from under the high end of the couch. He poured some into paper cups from a dispenser that hung on the wall beside the bottled water. I added water to mine.

“Salud,” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you happen to run into Helen Wilkinson?”

“I went to see her.”

“Just like that?”

“I happen to be a private investigator.”

He sat bolt upright. His drink slopped over the rim of the cup. I wondered what old scandal had the power to galvanize him.

“I thought you were a tourist,” he said resentfully.

“I’m a detective, and I came here to investigate a man who calls himself Burke Damis. I think he stayed with you for a night or two.”

“One night,” Stacy said. “So it’s really true about him, after all? I hated to believe it – he’s such a fine-looking chap.”

“You hated to believe what?”

“That he murdered his wife. Isn’t that why you’re after him?”

With the aid of a little rum and water I made a quick adjustment. “These rumors get around. Where did you happen to pick that one up?”

“It was going the rounds, as you say. I think it started when Bill Wilkinson told somebody at The Place that he was going to report Damis as an undesirable alien.” Stacy sounded like a connoisseur of rumors, who collected them as other men collected notable sayings or pictures of women. “The government has been bearing down on undesirables, rounding them up and sending them back across the border. Like wetbacks in reverse.”

“And Wilkinson turned Damis in?”

“I don’t believe he actually did, but he threatened to. Which is probably why Damis got out in a hurry. So he really is one jump ahead of the law?”

“A long jump,” I said. “This rumor interests me. What exactly was said?”

“Simply that Damis – which wasn’t his real name – was wanted for the murder of his wife.”

“How do you know it isn’t his real name?”

“I don’t know anything. It was all part of the rumor. I pestered Bill and Helen for more details, but they refused to talk–”

“They know more details, do they?”

“I would say so.”

“Where did they get them?”

“I’ve asked myself that question many times. I know they made their border trip last May and spent a week or so in California. That’s when the murder occurred, isn’t it? Maybe they read about it in the newspapers. But if they knew all about it, I can’t understand why they would get chummy with the man. The three of them were very buddy-buddy for a while, before Bill turned against him. Helen got too interested in Damis.”

“But Damis had a girl of his own.” Or two. Or three.

He smiled indulgently. “That wouldn’t stop Helen.”

“Do you know the girl he left here with – Harriet Blackwell?”

“I met her once, at a party.”

“Where did Damis meet her?”

“Same party, at Helen Wilkinson’s. Helen told me he asked her to invite her.”

“Damis asked Helen to invite Harriet to the party?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So that he could meet Harriet?”

“Apparently. I only know what I hear.”

The interview was beginning to depress me. Stacy’s eyes had a feeding look, as if he lived on these morsels and scraps of other people’s lives. Perhaps I feared a similar fate for myself.

He poured himself more Bacardi and offered me some. I turned it down, politely. If I wanted to get back to California tomorrow – and now I was determined to – I had some further legwork to do tonight.

“Tell me, Mr. Stacy, is there a taxi in the village?”

“There’s a man who drives people. You’d have a frightful time routing him out at three in the morning. Why?”

“I have to get out to the Wilkinsons, and I don’t feel like walking it again.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“You’re very hospitable.”

“Think nothing of it. This is exciting for me. I’ll take you on one condition, that you don’t tell Bill or Helen I had any part in this. The connection is important to me, you know.”

“Sure.”

He brought his battered Ford around to the entrance and drove me out the lake road. Roosters were crowing in the dark countryside. Stacy parked at the head of the Wilkinsons’ lane and let me go in by myself.

The Wilkinsons were having an argument which was loud enough to penetrate the walls. I stood outside the front door and listened to it.

She called him an alcoholic. He said she couldn’t talk to a Charro like that. She said it took more than a Charro hat to make a Charro, that he was a Charro like she was a member of the DAR.

He called her a sexoholic. She told him if he didn’t watch his lip she’d divorce him and turn him loose to beg in the streets. He announced that she’d be doing him a favor, since marriage to her was uphill work at best.

The argument simmered down after a while, so that I could hear the roosters in the distance, yelling with insane glee in the dead dark middle of the night. I balled up the rest of my energy in my fist and knocked on the door.

Wilkinson answered it this time. He was a big man in his thirties who looked older. His Mexican clothes and haircut made him seem to be metamorphosing under my eyes, changing into something that was strange even to himself. He had alcohol in him, red in the eye, sour on the breath, thick on the tongue.

“I don’t know you. Go ’way.”

“Just give me a minute. I’m a private detective, and I flew down from L. A. to do some checking on Burke Damis. I heard you were a friend of his.”

“You heard wrong. He came sucking around for free drinks. Once I caught onto him, I cut him dead. But dead.”

Wilkinson had a nasty whining drawl. His red eyes glared with something stronger than drink, perhaps a touch of madness.

“What did you catch on to about Damis?”

“He wormed himself into my good graces so he could get next to my wife. I don’t stand for that.”

He made a sideways slicing gesture. The edge of his hand struck the doorframe. He put the edge of his hand in his mouth.

“I heard a rumor that he killed his own wife.”

“That was no rumor. We were in San Francisco in the spring, and I saw it in the paper with these eyes – the dead woman’s picture and all. It said that he shtrangled her. But we didn’t know who he was when he came here worming his way. We didn’t know till we saw the picture he painted.”

“Was it a portrait of his wife?”

“Thass right. Helen reckonized her face, poor little woman. That snake-in-the-grass shtrangled her with his own hands.”

Wilkinson made clutching motions, as though he was having a waking dream of strangling or being strangled. His wife called from somewhere out of sight: “Who is it, Bill? Who are you talking to?”

“Man from L. A. He says that he’s a detective.”

She ran the length of the living room to his side. “Don’t talk to him.”

“I’ll talk to him if I like,” he said with the look of a spoiled and sullen child. “I’ll put the kibosh on Damis once and for all.”

“You stay out of it.”

“You were the one that got me into it. If you hadn’t tried to blackmail him into–”

“Be quiet. You’re a fool.”

They faced each other in a rage that created a vacuum around them. He was twice as big as she was, and almost twice as young, but she held her anger better. Her taut and shining face was expressionless.

“Listen to me, Bill. This man was here an hour or so ago. I had to ask him to leave.”

“Whaffor?”

“He made a pass at me.” Her hooked fingers swept across her bosom.

His attention slopped heavily in my direction. “Izzat true?”

“Don’t believe her.”

“Now he’s calling me a liar.” Her white triangular face was at his shoulder. “Are you going to let him get away with it?”

He threw a wild fist at my head. I let it go by and hit him in the body. He sat down holding his belly with both hands. I shouldn’t have hit him. He retched.

“Why you dirty lousy son,” the woman said.

She picked her revolver off the table and fired it at me. The bullet tugged at a loose fold of Stacy’s sweater, close to my side. I turned and ran.