The Zebra-Striped Hearse

1

SHE WAS WAITING at the office door when I got back from my morning coffee break. The women I usually ran into in the rather dingy upstairs corridor were the aspiring hopeless girls who depended on the modeling agency next door. This one was different.

She had the kind of style that didn’t go on with her make-up, and she was about my age. As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

“I’m Mrs. Blackwell,” she said. “You must be Mr. Archer.”

I acknowledged that I was.

“My husband has an appointment with you in half an hour or so.” She consulted a wrist watch on which diamonds sparkled. “Thirty-five minutes, to be precise. I’ve been waiting for some time.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t anticipate the pleasure. Colonel Blackwell is the only appointment I have scheduled this morning.”

“Good. Then we can talk.”

She wasn’t using her charm on me, exactly. The charm was merely there. I unlocked the outer door and led her across the waiting room, through the door marked Private, into my inner office, where I placed a chair for her.

She sat upright with her black leather bag under her elbow, touching as little of the chair as possible. Her gaze went to the mug shots on the wall, the faces you see in bad dreams and too often on waking. They seemed to trouble her. Perhaps they brought home to her where she was and who I was and what I did for a living.

I was thinking I liked her face. Her dark eyes were intelligent, and capable of warmth. There was a touch of sadness on her mouth. It was a face that had known suffering, and seemed to be renewing the acquaintance.

I said in an exploratory way: “ ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ ”

She colored slightly. “You’re quick at catching moods. Or is that a stock line?”

“I’ve used it before.”

“So has Dante.” She paused, and her voice changed in tone and rhythm: “I suppose I’ve placed myself in a rather anomalous position, coming here. You mustn’t imagine my husband and I are at odds. We’re not, basically. But it’s such a destructive thing he proposes to do.”

“He wasn’t very specific on the telephone. Is it divorce he has on his mind?”

“Heavens, no. There’s no trouble of that sort in our marriage.” Perhaps she was protesting a little too vehemently. “It’s my husband’s daughter I’m concerned – that we’re both concerned about.”

“Your stepdaughter?”

“Yes, though I dislike that word. I have tried to be something better than the proverbial stepmother. But I got to Harriet very late in the day. She was deprived of her own mother when she was only a child.”

“Her mother died?”

“Pauline is still very much alive. But she divorced Mark years ago, when Harriet was eleven or twelve. Divorce can be terribly hard on a little girl, especially when she’s approaching puberty. There hasn’t been much I could do to make Harriet feel easier in the world. She’s a grown woman, after all, and she’s naturally suspicious of me.”

“Why?”

“It’s in the nature of things, when a man marries for the second time. Harriet and her father have always been close. I used to be able to communicate with her better before I married him.” She stirred uneasily, and shifted her attention from herself to me. “Do you have any children, Mr. Archer?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“I have, but I don’t quite see the relevance. You didn’t come here to discuss my private life. You haven’t made it clear why you did come, and your husband will be turning up shortly.”

She looked at her watch and rose, I think without intending to. The tension in her simply levitated her out of the chair.

I offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and lit one for myself. “Am I wrong in thinking you’re a little afraid of him?”

“You’re completely wrong,” she said in a definite voice, but she seemed to have some difficulty in continuing. “The thing I’m afraid of is letting him down. Mark needs to be able to trust me. I don’t want to do anything behind his back.”

“But here you are.”

“Here I am.” She relapsed into the chair.

“Which brings us back to the question of why.”

“I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Archer. I don’t like Mark’s battle plan–” she made the phrase sound ironic “–and I’ve told him so. I’ve done some social work, and I have some conception of what it means to be a young woman in the contemporary world. I believe it’s best to let nature take its course. Let Harriet marry the man, if her heart is set on him. But Mark can’t see it my way at all. He’s fiercely opposed to the marriage, and determined to do something drastic.”

“And I’m the something drastic.”

“You’re one version of it. Guns and horsewhips have also been mentioned. Not,” she added quickly, “that I take everything he says seriously.”

“I always take gun talk seriously. What do you want me to do?”

Her gaze had returned to the pin-ups on the wall. Killers, embezzlers, bigamists, and con men looked at her with unabashed eyes. She shifted her bag to her lap.

“Well, I can hardly ask you to turn him down. It would do no good, anyway. He’d simply find another detective and set him loose on Harriet and – her friend. All I really hoped to do was prepare you for the situation. You’ll get a very one-sided view of it from Mark.”

“I’ve gotten a very vague one from you, so far.”

“I’ll try to do better,” she said with a small tight smile. “About five weeks ago Harriet went to Mexico. Her announced intentions were to visit her mother – Pauline lives on Lake Chapala – and to do some painting. But the fact is that she’s not on very good terms with her mother, and her talent as a painter will never set the world on fire. I think she went to Lake Chapala deliberately to find a man.

“Any man. If that sounds cynical, let me add that I might have done the same thing myself, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“I mean her father’s second marriage, to me. It’s been quite apparent that Harriet hasn’t been happy living with us. Fortunately for her, for all of us, her little Mexican expedition was successful. She found a friend, and brought him back alive.”

“Does this live one have a name?”

“His name is Burke Damis. He’s a young painter. While he’s no great social prize – my husband tends to overrate the social – he is quite personable. He has no money, which is another of Mark’s objections to him, but he does have artistic talent – a great deal more talent than Harriet possesses, as she knows. And, after all, she’ll have money enough for both of them. With his talent and – virility, and her money and devotion, I’d say they had the makings of a marriage.”

“She’ll have money?”

“Quite a lot of money, and quite soon. One of her aunts left her a substantial trust fund. Harriet comes into it when she’s twenty-five.”

“How old is she now?”

“Twenty-four. Old enough to know her own mind and live her own life and get out from under Mark’s domination–” She paused, as if the strength of her feeling had carried her too far.

I prompted her: “Domination is a strong word.”

“It slipped out. I don’t mean to malign my husband behind his back. He’s a good man, according to his lights, but like other men he’s capable of emotional foolishness. This isn’t the first affair of Harriet’s he’s tried to break up. He’s always succeeded before. If he succeeds this time, we could end up with a very sad girl on our hands.” Her face was alive with passionate identification.

“You really care about Harriet, Mrs. Blackwell.”

“I care about all three of us. It isn’t good for her to live in her father’s shadow. It isn’t good for me to sit and watch it – I’m not the sitting and watching type – and it will become less good if it goes on. Harriet is so vulnerable, really, and Mark is such a powerful personality.”

As if to illustrate this remark, a large masculine voice was raised in the outer room. I recognized it from Blackwell’s telephone call. He said through the translucent glass door: “Isobel, are you in there?”

She jumped as if lightning had struck her, not for the first time. Then she tried to make herself small.

“Is there a back way out?” she whispered.

“I’m afraid not. Shall I get rid of him?”

“No. It would only lead to further trouble.”

Her husband was fumbling at the door, his featureless shadow moving on the glass. “I wondered what you were up to when I saw your car in the parking lot. Isobel?”

She didn’t answer him. She moved to the window and looked out through the slatted blind over Sunset Boulevard. She was very slim and tense against the striated light. I suppose my protective instinct was aroused. I opened the door a foot or so and slid out into the waiting room and closed the door behind me.

It was my first meeting with Colonel Blackwell. His phone call the day before had been our only contact. I’d looked him up afterward and learned that he was a Regular Army officer who had retired soon after the war from an undistinguished career.

He was a fairly big man who had begun to lose his battle with age. His brown outdoorsman’s face made his white hair seem premature. He held himself with ramrod dignity. But his body had started to dwindle. His Shetland jacket hung loose around the shoulders; the collar of his shirt was noticeably large for his corded neck.

His eyebrows were his most conspicuous feature, and they gave him the air of an early Roman emperor. Black in contrast with his hair, they merged in a single eyebrow which edged his forehead like an iron rim. Under it, his eyes were unexpectedly confused.

He tried to shout down his own confusion: “I want to know what’s going on in there. My wife is in there, isn’t she?”

I gave him a vacant stare. “Your wife? Do I know you?”

“I’m Colonel Blackwell. We spoke on the telephone yesterday.”

“I see. Do you have any identification?”

“I don’t need identification! I vouch for myself!”

He sounded as though a yelling demon, perhaps the tormented ghost of a master sergeant, had taken possession of him. His tanned face turned red, then lavender.

I said at the purple end of the yell: “Are you really Colonel Blackwell? The way you came bulling in here, I thought you were a crank. We get a lot of cranks.”

A woman with very tall pink hair looked in from the corridor, knotting her imitation pearls in her fist. It was Miss Ditmar, who ran the modeling agency: “Is it all right?”

“Everything’s under control,” I said. “We were just having a yelling contest. This gentleman won.”

Colonel Blackwell couldn’t bear to be talked about in this fashion. He turned his back on me and stood with his face to the wall, like a plebe being braced. Miss Ditmar waved her hand benevolently and departed under her hive of hair, trailing a smog of perfume.

The door to the inner office was open now. Mrs. Blackwell had recovered her composure, which was mainly what I’d had in mind.

“Was that a mirage?” she said.

“That was Miss Ditmar in the next office. She was alarmed by the noise. She’s very nervous about me all the time.”

“I really must apologize,” Mrs. Blackwell said with a glance at her husband, “for both of us. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s put you very much in the middle.”

“I’ve been in the middle before. I rather enjoy it.”

“You’re very nice.”

Like a man being rotated by invisible torque, Blackwell turned and let us see his face. The anger had drained out of it and left it open. His eyes had a hurt expression, as though his young wife had rejected him by complimenting me. He tried to cover this with a wide painful smile.

“Shall we start over, in a lower key?”

“A lower key would suit me, Colonel.”

“Fine.”

It did something for him to be called by his rank. He made an abrupt horizontal gesture which implied that he was in charge of himself and the situation. He cast an appraising glance around my waiting room as if he was thinking of having it redecorated. With a similar glance at me, he said: “I’ll join you shortly in your office. First I’ll put Mrs. Blackwell in her car.”

“It isn’t necessary, Mark. I can find my way–”

“I insist.”

He offered her his elbow. She trudged out holding onto it. Though he was the big one and the loud one, I had the impression that she was supporting him.

Through the Venetian blind I watched them emerge from the street entrance onto the sidewalk. They walked very formally together, like people on their way to a funeral.

I liked Isobel Blackwell, but I was sort of hoping her husband wouldn’t come back.