The Zebra-Striped Hearse

22

THE DEPUTY on duty at the Citrus Junction courthouse was a tired-looking man with his blouse open at the neck and a toothpick in his mouth. A deep nirvanic calm lay over his office. Even the motes at the window moved languidly. The ultimate slowdown of the universe would probably begin in Citrus Junction. Perhaps it already had.

I asked the tired man where Sergeant Leonard was. He regarded me morosely, as if I’d interrupted an important meditation.

“Gone to town on business.”

“Which town?”

“L. A.”

“What business?”

He looked me over some more. Perhaps he was estimating my Bertillon measurements. He belonged to the Bertillon era.

“Anything to do with the Simpson case?” I said.

He removed his toothpick from between his teeth and examined it for clues, such as toothmarks. “We don’t discuss official business with the public. You a newspaper fellow?”

“I’m a private detective working with Leonard on the Simpson case.”

He was unimpressed. “I’ll tell the Sergeant when he comes in. What’s your name?”

“S. Holmes.”

He reinserted his toothpick in his mouth and wrote haltingly on a scratch pad. I said: “The ‘S.’ stands for Sherlock.”

He looked up from his laborious pencil work. The old crystal set he was using for a brain received a faint and far-off signal: he was being ribbed.

“What did you say the first name was?”

“Sherlock.”

“That supposed to be funny? Ha ha,” he said.

I started over: “My name is Archer, and Leonard will want to see me. When are you expecting him back?”

“When he gets here.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He tore up the paper he had been writing on and let the pieces flutter down onto the counter between us.

“Can you give me Leonard’s home address?”

“Sure I can. But you’re the great detective. Find it for yourself.”

Archer the wit. Archer the public relations wizard. I took my keen sense of humor and social expertise for a walk down the corridor. There was nobody at the information desk inside the front door, but a thin telephone directory was chained to the side of the desk. Wesley Leonard lived on Walnut Street. An old man watering the courthouse chrysanthemums told me where Walnut Street was, a few blocks from here. Archer the bloodhound.

It was a middle-middle-class street of stucco cottages dating from the twenties. The lawn in front of Leonard’s cottage was as well kept as a putting green. A stout woman who was not so well kept answered the door.

Pink plastic curlers on her head gave her a grim and defiant expression. She said before I asked: “Wesley’s not here. And I’m busy cooking supper.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“He’s generally home for supper. Wesley likes a good hot supper.”

“What time would that be?”

“Six. We eat an early supper.” Supper was a key word in her vocabulary. “Who shall I tell him?”

“Lew Archer. I’m the detective who brought Vicky Simpson here last Monday night. Is Mrs. Simpson still with you?”

“No. She only stayed the one night.” The woman said in a sudden gush of confidence: “Wesley’s such a good Samaritan, he doesn’t realize. Are you a real good friend of Mrs. Simpson’s?”

“No.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to insult her. She has her troubles. But it’s hard on an older woman having a younger woman in the house. A younger woman with all those troubles, it puts a strain on the marriage.” She ran her fingers over her curlers, as if they were holding the marriage precariously together. “You know how men are.”

“Not Wesley.”

“Yes, Wesley. He’s not immune. No man is. ” She looked ready to be disappointed in me at any moment. “Wesley was up half the night letting her cry on his shoulder. Heating milk. Making a grilled cheese sandwich at four A.M. He hasn’t made me a sandwich in ten years. So after she woke up at noon and I gave her her lunch I tactfully suggested that she should try the hotel. Wesley says I acted hardhearted. I say I was only heading off trouble in the marriage.”

“What’s she using for money?”

“Her boss wired her an advance on her wages, and I guess the boys in the courthouse chipped in some. Mrs. Vicky Simpson is comfortably ensconced.”

“Where?”

“The Valencia Hotel, on Main Street.”

It had stood there for forty or fifty years, a three-story cube of bricks that had once been white. Old men in old hats were watching the street through the front window. Their heads turned in unison to follow my progress across the dim lobby. It was so quiet I could hear their necks, or their chairs, creak.

There was nobody on duty at the desk. I punched the handbell. It didn’t work. One of the old men rose from his chair near the window and shuffled past me through a door at the back. He reappeared behind the desk, adjusting a glossy brown toupee which he had substituted for his hat. It settled low on his forehead.

“Yessir?”

“Is Mrs. Simpson in?”

He turned to inspect the bank of pigeonholes behind him. The back of his neck was naked as a plucked chicken’s.

“Yessir. She’s in.”

“Tell her there’s someone who wants to speak to her.”

“No telephone in her room. I guess I could go up and tell her,” he said doubtfully.

“I’ll go. What’s her number?”

“Three-oh-eight on the third floor. But we don’t like gentlemen visitors in a lady’s room.” Somehow his toupee made this remark sound lowbrow and obscene.

“I’m no gentleman. I’m a detective.”

“I see.”

He and his friends by the window watched me go up the stairs. I was the event of the day. A red bulb lit the third-floor corridor. I tapped on the door of 308.

“Who is it?” Vicky said in a dull voice.

“Lew Archer. Remember me?”

Bedsprings made a protesting noise. She opened the door and peered out. Her face had thinned.

“What do you want?”

“Some talk.”

“I’m all run out of talk.”

Her eyes were enormous and vulnerable. I could see myself mirrored in their pupils, a tiny red-lit man caught in amber, twice.

“Let me in, Vicky. I need your help.”

She shrugged and walked away from the open door, sprawling on the bed in a posture that seemed deliberately ugly. Her breasts and hips stood out under her black dress like protuberances carved from something hard and durable, wood or bone. A Gideon Bible lay open on the bed. I saw when I sat down in the chair beside it that Vicky had been reading the Book of Job.

“I didn’t know you were a Bible reader.”

“There’s lots of things you don’t know about me.”

“That’s true. Why didn’t you tell me Ralph was a friend of the Campions?”

“That should be easy to figure out. I didn’t want you to know.”

“But why?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“We have business in common, Vicky. We both want to get this mess straightened out.”

“It’ll never get straightened out. Ralph’s dead. You can’t change that.”

“Was he involved in Dolly’s murder? Is that why you covered for him?”

“I didn’t cover for him.”

“Of course you did. You must have recognized Campion from the description I gave you. You must have known that Dolly had been murdered. You knew that Ralph was close to her.”

“He wasn’t – not in the way you mean.”

“In what way was he close to her?”

“He was more like her financial adviser,” she said in a halting voice.

“Dolly had no use for a financial adviser. She was stony broke.”

“That’s what you think. I happen to know she was loaded at the time she was killed. Ralph told me she had at least a thousand dollars in cash. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she asked Ralph.”

“You must be mistaken, Vicky. The Campions had no money. I was told that Ralph had to pay the doctor when their child was born.”

“He didn’t have to. He had a good day at the race track and gave them the money. When Ralph won a little money he thought he was Santa Claus. Don’t think I didn’t put up a squawk. But she paid him back after all.”

“When?”

“Just before she was killed. Out of the money she had. That’s how he financed his trip to Tahoe.”

It was a peculiar story, peculiar enough to be true.

“Did Ralph actually see all the money Dolly claimed she had?”

“He saw it. He didn’t count it or anything, but he saw it. She asked him to take it and hold it for her, so she could make a down payment on a tract house. Ralph didn’t want the responsibility. He advised her to put it in the bank, but she was afraid Bruce would find out, and it would be gone with the wind. Like the other money – the money she had when he married her.”

“I didn’t know she had any.”

“What do you think he married her for? She had plenty, according to Ralph, another thousand anyway. Bruce took it and blew it. She was afraid he’d do the same with the new money.”

“Where did all the money come from?”

“Ralph said she got it out of a man. She wasn’t saying who.”

“Was the man the father of her child?”

She lowered her eyes demurely. “I always thought Bruce was the father.”

“Bruce denied it.”

“I never heard that.”

“I did, Vicky. Do you have any idea who the father was if it wasn’t Bruce?”

“No.”

“Could it have been Ralph?”

“No. There was nothing between him and Dolly. For one thing, he had too much respect for Bruce.”

“But the child was conceived long before she married Campion. Also you tell me she confided in Ralph about her money problems. Didn’t you say she wanted him to look after her thousand dollars?”

“Yes, and maybe he should have.” She glanced around the little room as if someone might be spying at the keyhole or the window. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “I think she was killed for that money.”

“By Bruce, you mean?”

“By him, or somebody else.”

“Did Ralph tell the police about it?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t either?”

“Why should I ask for trouble? You get enough trouble in this life without coming out and asking for it.”

I rose and stood over her. Late afternoon sunlight slanted in through the window. She sat rigid with her legs under her, as if the shafts of light had transfixed her neck and shoulders.

“You were afraid Ralph killed her.”

Her eyes shifted away from mine and stayed far over in the corners of her head. “Deputy Mungan made Ralph come down to the station and answer a lot of questions. Then Ralph went off to Nevada right after. Naturally I was scared.”

“Where was Ralph the night Dolly was killed?”

“I don’t know. He was out late, and I didn’t wake up when he came in.”

“You still think Ralph murdered her?”

“I didn’t say I thought it. I was scared.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Of course I didn’t ask him. But he kept talking about the murder. He was so upset and shaky he couldn’t handle a cup of coffee. This was the night after it happened. They had Bruce Campion in the clink, and Ralph kept saying that Bruce didn’t do it, he knew Bruce didn’t do it.”

“Did Ralph see Bruce before he left for Tahoe?”

“Yeah, Bruce came to the house in the morning when they let him out. I wouldn’t of let him in if I’d been there.”

“What happened between Bruce and Ralph that morning?”

“I wouldn’t know. I was at work. Ralph phoned me around noon and said he was going up to Tahoe. Maybe Bruce went with him. He dropped out of sight that same day, and I never saw him again. A couple of days after that, the papers were full of him running away, and the Grand Jury brought in a murder conviction.”

“The Grand Jury indicted him,” I said. “There’s a big difference between an indictment and a conviction.”

“That’s what Ralph said, the day he came back from the lake. I thought a week or so away from it all would get it off his mind. But he was worse than ever when he came back. He was obsessed with Bruce Campion.”

“Just how close were they?”

“They were like brothers,” she said, “ever since they were in Korea together. Bruce had more on the ball than Ralph had, I guess, but somehow it was Ralph who did the looking after. He thought it was wonderful to have Bruce for a friend. He’d give him the shirt off his back, and he practically did more than once.”

“Would Ralph give Bruce his birth certificate to get out of the country?”

She glanced up sharply. “Did he?”

“Bruce says he did. Either Ralph gave it to him voluntarily, or Bruce took it by force.”

“And killed him?”

“I have my doubts that Bruce killed either one of them. He had no apparent motive to kill Ralph, and the money Dolly had puts a new complexion on her case. It provides a motive for anyone who knew she had it.”

“But why would anybody want to kill Ralph?”

“There’s one obvious possibility. He may have known who murdered Dolly.”

“Why didn’t he say so, then?”

“Perhaps he wasn’t sure. I believe he was trying to investigate Dolly’s murder, up at the lake and probably here in Citrus Junction. When he came back from Tahoe, did he say anything to you about the Blackwells?”

“The Blackwells?” There was no recognition in her voice.

“Colonel Mark Blackwell and his wife. They brought me into this case, because their daughter Harriet had taken up with Campion. The Blackwells have a lodge at Tahoe, and Harriet was there with Campion the night before last. Then she disappeared. We found her hat in the lake with blood on it. Campion has no explanation.”

Vicky rose on her knees. Moving awkwardly, she backed away to the far side of the bed. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. The interesting thing is that Ralph spent some time in the Blackwells’ lodge last May. He worked as their houseboy for a week or so. They fired him, allegedly for stealing.”

“Ralph might of had his faults,” she said from her corner, “but I never knew him to steal anything in his life. Anyway, there’s no sense trying to pin something on a dead man.”

“I’m not, Vicky. I’m trying to pin murder on whoever killed him. You loved him, didn’t you?”

She looked as though she would have liked to deny it and the pain that went with it. “I couldn’t help it. I tried to help it, but I couldn’t stop myself. He was such a crazy guy,” she murmured, so softly that it sounded like an endearment. “Sometimes when he was asleep, when he was asleep and out of trouble, I used to think he was beautiful.”

“He’s asleep and out of trouble now,” I said. “What about the bundle of clothes he brought back from Tahoe?”

“There was no bundle of clothes, there was just the coat. He had this brown topcoat with him. But I know he didn’t steal it. He never stole in his life.”

“I don’t care whether he stole it or not. The question is where did he get it?”

“He said somebody gave it to him. But people don’t give away that kind of a coat for free. It was real good tweed, imported like. Harris tweed, I think they call it. It must of cost a hundred dollars new, and it was still in new condition. The only thing the matter with it, one of the buttons was missing.”

“Can you describe the buttons?”

“They were brown leather. I wanted to try and match the missing one so he could wear it. But he said leave it as it was, he wasn’t going to wear it.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “He said he wasn’t going to wear it and he was right.”

“Did he bring it with him when he came down south?”

“Yeah. He was carrying it over his arm when he got on the bus. I don’t know why he bothered dragging it along with him. It was warm weather, and anyway it had that button missing.”

“Which button on the coat was missing, Vicky?”

“The top one.” She pointed with her thumb between her breasts.

I wished I had Mungan’s button with me. I remembered now where I had seen other buttons like it, attached to a coat that answered Vicky’s description. One of the girls in the zebra-striped hearse had been wearing it.