The Zebra-Striped Hearse

14

I DROVE ACROSS to Sunset, and up the winding road to Blackwell’s house in Bel Air. He opened the front door himself, brushing aside a little maid in uniform. His eyes moved on my face like a blind man’s eyes trying to glean a ray of light.

“You’ve found out something?”

“The news is not good.”

His hands came out and clutched both of my arms above the elbows. With the mindless automatism of St. Vitus’s dance, he started to shake me. I pushed him away.

“Calm down and I’ll tell you about it.”

“How can you expect me to be calm? My daughter has been gone for forty-eight hours. I should have used force to stop them. I should have shot him dead at my feet–”

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “We need to talk. Can we go in and sit down?”

He blinked like a man waking up from troubled sleep. “Yes. Of course.”

The drawing room he took me into was furnished with Empire pieces which gave it a museum-like atmosphere. Family portraits looked down their Blackwell noses from the walls. One of them, of an officer in the uniform of the War of 1812, had the weight and finish of a Gilbert Stuart.

Blackwell sat in an armchair under it, as if to call attention to the family resemblance. I parked myself uninvited on a red divan with a curved back, and gave him a brief rundown on my Mexican trip.

“I’ve put together certain facts I uncovered there with others that cropped up here and come to a definite conclusion about Damis. He’s a wanted man traveling under more than one alias. His real name is Bruce Campion, and he’s wanted for murder.”

Blackwell’s jaw moved slackly. I could see the pale insides of his mouth. “What did you say?”

“Damis’s real name is Campion. He’s wanted in San Mateo County for strangling his wife last spring.”

Blackwell’s face looked like cracked plaster. Consciousness withdrew from his eyes, leaving them blank as glass. He slipped from the armchair onto his knees, then fell heavily sideways. His white hair spilled like a sheaf on the old rose carpet.

I went to the door and called the maid. She came trotting and skidding on the parquetry, her excited little breasts bobbing under her uniform. She let out a muffled scream when she saw the fallen man.

“Is he dead?”

“He fainted, honey. Bring some water, and a washcloth.”

She was back in thirty seconds, half spilling a pan of water on the carpet. I sprinkled some of it on Blackwell’s face and swabbed his long forehead. His eyes came open, recognized me, remembered what I had told him. He groaned, and tried to faint again.

I slapped him with the wet cloth. The little maid stood and watched me with wide blue eyes, as if I was committing lèse-majesté.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Letty.”

“Where’s Mrs. Blackwell, Letty?”

“She does hospital work one day a week. This is the day.”

“You’d better try and get in touch with her.”

“All right. Should I call the doctor, do you think?”

“He doesn’t need a doctor unless he has a heart history.”

“Heart history?” she repeated like a lip reader.

“Has he ever had a heart attack, or a stroke?”

Blackwell answered me himself, in a shamed voice: “I’ve never even fainted before.” He sat up laboriously, resting his back against the chair. “I’m not as young as I am – as I was. What you told me came as a fearful shock.”

“It doesn’t mean that Harriet is dead, you know.”

“Doesn’t it? I must have jumped to that conclusion.” He noticed the young maid standing over him. He smoothed his hair and tried to compose his face. “You may go now, Miss Flavin. Be good enough to take that pot of water with you. It’s out of place in here.”

“Yessir.” She picked it up and marched out.

Blackwell levered himself into the chair. “We have to do something,” he said unsteadily.

“I’m glad you feel that way. I’ve already alerted detectives in the Reno area. I think we should extend the search to the whole Southwest, if not the entire country. That will cost a good deal of money.”

He extended his limp fingers. “It doesn’t matter. Anything.”

“It’s time to bring in the police, too, give them all we know and build a fire under them. I suggest you start off by talking to Peter Colton.”

“Yes. I’ll do that.” He rose shakily as if the weight of his years had fallen on him all at once. “Give me a minute. My mind isn’t quite clear yet.”

“Better get yourself a drink. In the meantime, I have an important call to make. May I use one of your phones?”

“There’s one in Isobel’s sitting room. You can be private there.”

It was a small pleasant room whose French doors opened onto a private terrace. The furniture was well used, shabby rather than antique. It didn’t match the nineteenth-century grandeur of the drawing room, and I guessed that Isobel Blackwell had saved it from some less opulent period of her life – a period on which she hadn’t turned her back.

I sat at the plain oak desk, called the Hall of Justice in Redwood City, and asked the switchboard operator for Captain Royal. He was San Mateo County’s homicide chief, and I had met him on an earlier case.

“What can I do for you?” he said, after a few preliminaries.

“I have some information about Bruce Campion, who is alleged to have strangled his wife last May in your bailiwick. Is that correct?”

“Correct. It happened the night of May fifth. What’s your information?”

I heard the small click as Royal switched on his recording machine. There was a second click, that sounded like a receiver being lifted.

“I’ve been tracing Campion’s movements,” I said. “He flew from Los Angeles to Guadalajara on May twentieth.”

“The airport police were supposed to be watching for him,” Royal said impatiently.

“He used false papers and an alias – Quincy Ralph Simpson. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“It does. I found out yesterday that Simpson was icepicked in Citrus Junction two months ago. You telling me Campion did it?”

“The possibility suggests itself,” I said. “He must have been carrying Simpson’s identification when he crossed the border. Simpson was almost certainly dead by then.”

“Is Campion still in Mexico?”

“No. He spent two months there under the name Burke Damis, in Ajijic on Lake Chapala, where he was eventually recognized as a wanted man. In the meantime he’d got a visiting American girl named Harriet Blackwell to fall for him. Nine days ago the two of them flew back to Los Angeles. Campion used the Simpson alias again. Then he switched back to Damis, and spent a week as a guest in the Blackwell’s beach house near Malibu. It’s possible the Blackwell girl knows something about his past and is protecting him. Campion has her hypnotized, but she could hardly miss the change of names.”

“Is she with him now?”

“I hope not. But she probably is. The two of them left her father’s house forty-eight hours ago after a serious altercation which involved threats of shooting. They took off in her car, a new green Buick Special.” I gave him the license number.

“Who did the threatening?”

“Her father, Mark Blackwell. He’s only a retired Colonel but he has money, and I imagine he pulls weight in some circles. I’m calling from his house in Bel Air now.”

“Is Blackwell your client?”

“Yes. My immediate job is to find the girl and get her out of danger. She should be easy to spot. She’s a big blonde, short-haired, aged twenty-four, about six feet in her shoes, with a tall girl’s stoop. Expensively dressed, good figure, but face a little disfigured by a bony protuberance over the eyes. It’s a genetic defect–”

“What?”

“The bony eyebrows are a family trait. The old man has ’em, and all the ancestors. Harriet wears dark glasses part of the time. I assume you know what Campion looks like.”

“I have him memorized,” Royal said.

“Picture?”

“No picture. That’s how he got across the border.”

“I have one. I’ll try to get a copy of it into your hands today. Now there’s a possibility that Campion and the girl have doubled back toward Mexico. Nevada is another possibility. They were talking about getting married, and it’s an easy state to get married in. They may be married now, or representing themselves as married.”

“The girl must be crazy,” Royal said, “if she knows what he did to his wife and still wants to marry him.”

“I’m not suggesting she knows about the wife. He probably faked a story to explain the aliases, and she would be easily taken in. She’s crazy in the sense that she’s crazy about him. Also, she’s in active revolt against her father. She’s twenty-four, as I said, and he treats her as if she was four.”

“Isn’t twenty-four a little late for the big rebellion?”

“Harriet has been living under military occupation. She’s a fugitive from injustice.”

“So she takes up with a fugitive from justice. I’ve seen it happen before.” Royal paused. “How much danger do you think she’s in?”

“You’d know more about that than I do, Captain. It depends on Campion’s motivation. Harriet’s due to come into money on her twenty-fifth birthday, so if it’s money he’s after, she’s safe for the next six months. Did Campion kill his wife for money?”

“There wasn’t any money, so far as we know. We haven’t been able to uncover any motive at all. Which means he could be off his rocker. A lot of these creeps who call themselves artists are nuts. He lived like a bum in a remodeled garage near Luna Bay, everything in one room.” Royal’s voice was scornful.

“Did he have a record of irrational behavior?”

“I wouldn’t know. He has a record, period. A year’s hard labor and a dishonorable discharge for assaulting an officer during the Korean War. That’s all we’ve been able to dig up on him, but it shows a history of violence. Also he wasn’t getting along with his wife. Put the two together, it’s all you need in the way of motive.”

“Tell me about the wife.”

“That can wait, can’t it, Archer? I want to get your info out on the wires.”

“You could give me a quick rundown.”

Royal said in a clipped, toneless voice: “Her name was Dolly Stone Campion, age about twenty, pretty little blonde, not so pretty when we found her. According to our info, Campion picked her up on the South Shore of Tahoe last summer, and married her in Reno in September. It must have been a marriage of inconvenience – Dolly was three months pregnant at the time. At least their child was born in March, six months after the wedding. Two months after that he knocked her off.”

“Tahoe keeps cropping up,” I said. “The Blackwells have a lodge there, and Q. R. Simpson spent some time at the lake in May, shortly before he was murdered.”

“What was he doing there?”

“I have a hunch he was working on the Dolly Campion case. What happened to her baby, by the way?”

“Her mother took him. Look, Archer, this could go on all day, and I have work to do. A lot more work than I had before,” he added wryly. “Will you be coming up this way?”

“As soon as I can make it.”

Which wasn’t soon. I made a second call to Arnie Walters’s office in Reno. I wanted to pass the word on Campion and ask Arnie to add more men to the search. He already had, Phyllis told me, because Campion and Harriet Blackwell had been seen in State Line the previous night. That was all so far.

I dropped the receiver into its cradle. When I picked it up, it felt appreciably heavier. I called the airport and made a reservation on the next flight to Reno. They were going to have to give me flying pay.

As I was getting up from the desk, I noticed a folded newspaper which lay on the back of it. “San Mateo Man,” I spelled out upside down. I unfolded the paper.

It was yesterday’s issue of the Citrus Junction News-Beacon. The full headline ran across the top of the page: “San Mateo Man Killed Here: Police Suspect Gang Murder.” The story under it was poorly written and poorly printed, and it told me nothing I didn’t already know.

I still had the paper in my hands when Blackwell came into the room. He looked like the ghost of one of his ancestors.

“What are you doing with that newspaper?”

“I was wondering how it got into your house.”

“That’s no concern of yours, I should think.” He snatched it away from me and rolled it up small. “A number of things are no concern of yours. For example, I’m not paying out good money to have myself and my daughter slandered to policemen.”

“I thought I heard somebody on another extension. Does everyone in your household eavesdrop on everyone else?”

“That’s an insulting remark. I demand that you withdraw it.”

Blackwell was shaking with another bout of uncontrollable anger. The rolled newspaper vibrated in his hand. He slapped his thigh with it, as if it was a swagger stick or a riding crop. He looked ready to strike me with it, and challenge me to a duel.

“I can’t change facts, Colonel. If you don’t like what you heard, you could have stopped listening.”

“Are you telling me what to do in my own house?”

“It does sound like it, doesn’t it?”

“Then get out of my house. Get out, do you hear?”

“They hear you in Tarzana. Don’t you want your daughter found?”

“We’ll find her without your help. You’re fired.”

“You’ve already had my help,” I said. “You owe me three hundred and fifty dollars for time and expenses.”

“I’ll write you a check, now?”

“You can stop payment on a check. I need cash.”

I was playing for time in the faint hope that Blackwell would come to his senses, as he had once before. Though I couldn’t knuckle under to him, I was eager to hold on to the case. It was beginning to break, and a breaking case to a man in my trade is like a love affair you can’t stay away from, even if it tears your heart out daily.

“I don’t have that much in the house,” he was saying. “I’d have to cash a check at the hotel.”

“Do that. I’ll wait here.”

“Outside,” he said in a monitory tone. “I don’t want you prying around in here. You can wait in your car.”

I went down the hall and out, with Blackwell making shooing motions at my kidneys. He backed his black Cadillac out of the garage and drove away down the hill. I put in a bad ten minutes deciding where to go from here. It would have to be Tahoe, though I hated to make the trip on my own time.

The mourning dove had returned to the television antenna. He sat there still and perfect as a heraldic bird. I said hoo-hoo to him and got a response, hoo-hoo, and I felt better.

Isobel Blackwell, driving a small foreign car, came into the driveway from the road. I got out of my car to meet her. Her face looked wan in the sunlight, but she made herself smile at me.

“Mr. Archer! What a pleasant surprise.”

“Didn’t Letty get in touch with you?”

“I left the hospital early. I’ve been concerned about Mark.”

“You have some reason to be. He had a fainting spell a while ago. Then he had a yelling spell.”

“Mark fainted?”

“I gave him some information that hit him hard.”

She ducked out of her little car and thrust her face up toward mine. “Something has happened to Harriet.”

“We don’t know that. But something could happen to her any time. She’s wandering around Nevada with the man who calls himself Damis. His actual name is Bruce Campion, and he’s wanted in Redwood City for murdering his wife.”

It took her a minute to absorb this. Then she turned toward the house and noticed the empty garage. “Where is Mark?”

“He went down to the hotel to get some money to pay me off. He fired me.”

“What on earth for?”

“The Colonel and I have had it, I’m afraid. We’ve both had too much Army, in different ways – the worm’s-eye view and the god’s-eye view.”

“But I don’t understand. You mean you won’t go on with him?”

“I’d have to be asked. Which isn’t very likely.”

“I know how difficult he can be,” she said in a rush of feeling. “Tell me exactly what the trouble was.”

“He listened in on a telephone conversation I had with a police officer. I made some critical remarks about his treatment of Harriet. He didn’t like them.”

“And that’s all?”

“All there is on the surface. Of course he was thrown by the information I gave him on Damis-Campion. He couldn’t handle it, so he threw it back. He thinks that I’m what hurts him.”

She nodded. “That’s his standard pattern. It’s been getting worse since this began. I’m worried about him, Mr. Archer. I don’t know how he’s going to survive.”

“It’s Harriet’s survival I’m worried about. She and Campion were seen at State Line last night, and I have some Reno detectives on their trail. We have a chance to take him and rescue her, if we can stay with it.”

Her whole body reacted to my words. She clutched her handbag to her breast as if it was a child she could protect. “The man is a murderer, you say?”

“It’s a matter of police record.”

She moved closer to me. Her hand lit on my wrist, and she said in a voice as low as a mourning dove’s: “You said you’d have to be asked. I’m asking you. Will you take me for a client?”

“Nothing would suit me better.”

“Then it’s a contract.” Her hand slid from my wrist to my fingers, and squeezed them. “It would be a good idea to let me tell Mark about this. In my own time, in my own way.”

“I agree.”

She went into the house and came out and gave me money and went in again. Blackwell’s Cadillac rolled into the drive. He climbed out and gave me money. His color was better, and I could smell fresh whisky on him. He must have had a quick one or two at the hotel.

He looked at me as though he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say a word.