The Zebra-Striped Hearse

23

I DROVE BACK to the coast and hit the surfing beaches southward from the fork of 101 and 101 Alternate. Some of the surfers recalled the black-and-white hearse, but they didn’t know the names of any of the occupants. Anyway they claimed they didn’t – they’re a closemouthed tribe.

I had better luck with the Highway Patrol in Malibu. The owner of the hearse had been cited the previous weekend for driving with only one headlight. His name was Ray Buzzell, and he lived in one of the canyons above the town.

“Mrs. Sloan Buzzell” was stenciled on the side of the rustic mailbox. An asphalt driveway zigzagged down the canyon side to her house. It was a redwood and glass structure with a white gravel roof, cantilevered over a steep drop. A small Fiat stood in the double carport, but there was no hearse beside it.

A violently redheaded woman opened the front door before I got to it, and stepped outside. Her hard, handsome face was carefully made up, as though she’d been expecting a visitor. I wondered what kind of visitor. Her black Capri pants adhered like oil to her thighs and hips. The plunging neckline of her shirt exhibited large areas of chest and stomach. She was carrying a half-full martini glass in her hand and, to judge by her speech, a number of previous martinis inside of her.

“Hello-hello,” she said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“I’m just a type. How are you, Mrs. Buzzell?”

“Fine. Feen. Fane.” She flexed her free arm to prove it, and inflated her chest, which almost broke from its moorings. “You look sort of beat. Come in and I’ll pour you a drink. I hope you drink.”

“Quantities, but not at the moment, thanks. I’m looking for Ray.”

She frowned muzzily. “People are always looking for Ray. Has he done something?”

“I hope not. Where can I find him?”

She flung out her arm in a gesture which included the whole coast. From the height we stood on, we could see a good many miles of it. The sun was low in the west, and it glared like a searchlight through barred clouds.

“I can’t keep track of my son any more,” she said in a soberer voice. “I haven’t seen him since breakfast. He’s off with his crowd somewhere. All they care about is surfing. Some weeks I don’t set eyes on him for days at a time.” She consoled herself with the rest of her martini. “Sure you won’t come in for a drink? I just made a fresh shaker, and if I have to drink it all by myself I’ll be smasherooed.”

“Pour it out.”

“The man is mad.” She studied my face with exaggerated interest. “You must be a wandering evangelist or something.”

“I’m a wandering detective investigating a murder. Your son may be able to help me.”

She moved closer to me and whispered through her teeth: “Is Ray involved in a murder?”

“That I doubt. He may have some information that will help me. Are you expecting him home for dinner?”

“I never know. Sometimes he’s out all night with his crowd. They have bedrolls in the hearse.” She burst out angrily: “I could kill myself for letting him buy that thing. He practically lives in it.” Her mind veered back to the point. “Who do you mean, he has information?”

“I said he may have.”

“Who was murdered?”

“A man named Simpson, Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

“I never heard of any such man. Neither did Ray, I’m sure.”

I said: “When Simpson was last seen alive by his wife, he was carrying a brown Harris tweed topcoat with brown leather buttons; the top button was missing. That was two months ago. The other day I saw one of the girls in Ray’s crowd wearing that topcoat, or one exactly like it.”

“Mona?”

“She was a big chesty blonde.”

“That’s Ray’s girl, Mona Sutherland. And the coat is his, too. I know it well. His father gave it to him the last time Ray visited him, so you see you’ve made a mistake. It’s a different coat entirely.”

“Now tell me where Ray really got it, Mrs. Buzzell.”

The manifestations of mother love are unpredictable. She threw her empty glass at my head. It missed me and smashed on the flagstones. Then she retreated into the house, slamming the door behind her.

I got into my car and sat. The sun was almost down, a narrowing red lozenge on the cloud-streaked horizon. It slipped out of sight. The whole western sky became smoky red, as if the sun had touched off fires on the far side of the world.

After a while the front door opened. The lady appeared with a fresh glass in her hand.

“I’ve just been talking to my ex on the long-distance telephone. He’ll back me up about the coat.”

“Bully for him.”

She looked at the glass in her hand as if she was considering throwing it, too. But it had liquor in it.

“What right have you got sitting on my property? Get off my property!”

I turned the car and drove up past her mailbox and parked at the roadside and watched the horizontal fires die out and the dark come on. The sky was crowded with stars when the woman came out again. She plodded up the slope and balanced her teetering weight against the mailbox.

“I’m smasherooed.”

I got out and approached her. “I told you to pour it out.”

“I couldn’t do that to good gin. It’s been my dearest friend and beloved companion for lo these many yea-hears.” She reached for me like a blind woman. “I’m frightened.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, and I don’t believe your son is involved in this murder. But I have to know where he got the tweed topcoat. His father had nothing to do with it, did he?”

“No. Ray told me he found it.”

“Where?”

“On the beach, he said.”

“How long ago was this?”

“About two months. He brought it home and brushed the sand out of it. That’s why I got so frightened, on account of the timing. You said two months. That’s why I lied to you.”

She was leaning on me heavily, one hand on my shoulder, the other clutching my upper arm. I let her lean.

“Ray couldn’t murder anyone,” she said. “He’s a little hard to regiment but he’s not a bad boy really. And he’s so young.”

“He’s not a murder suspect, Mrs. Buzzell. He’s a witness, and the coat is evidence. How he got it may be significant. But I can’t establish that without talking to him. You must have some idea where I can find him.”

“He did say something this morning – something about spending the night at Zuma. I know he took along some things to cook. But what he says and what he actually does are often two different things. I can’t keep track of him any more. He needs a father.”

She was talking into the front of my coat, and her grip had tightened on me. I held her for a bit, because she needed holding, until a car came up the road and flashed its headlights on her wet startled face.

The striped hearse was standing empty among other cars off the highway above Zuma. I parked behind it and went down to the beach to search for its owner. Bonfires were scattered along the shore, like the bivouacs of nomad tribes or nuclear war survivors. The tide was high and the breakers loomed up marbled black and fell white out of oceanic darkness.

Six young people were huddled under blankets around one of the fires. I recognized them: one of the girls was wearing the brown tweed coat. They paid no attention when I approached. I was an apparition from the adult world. If they pretended I wasn’t there, I would probably go away like all the other adults.

“I’m looking for Ray Buzzell.”

One of the boys cupped his hand behind his ear and said: “Hey?”

He was an overgrown seventeen- or eighteen-year-old with heavy masculine features unfocused by any meaning in his eyes. In spite of his peroxided hair, he looked like an Indian in the red firelight.

“Ray Buzzell,” I repeated.

“Never heard of him.” He glanced around at the others. “Anybody ever hear of a Ray Buzzell?”

“I never heard of a Ray Buzzell,” the girl in the coat said. “I knew a man named Heliogabalus Rexford Buzzell. He had a long grey beard and he died some years ago of bubonic plague.”

Everybody laughed except me and the girl. I said to the boy: “You’re Ray, aren’t you?”

“Depends who you are.” He rose in a sudden single movement, shedding his blanket. The three other boys rose, too. “You fuzz?”

“You’re getting warm, kid.”

“Don’t call me kid.”

“What do you want me to call you?”

“Anything but kid.”

“All right, Mr. Buzzell. I have some questions to ask you, about the coat Miss Sutherland is wearing.”

“Who you been talking to? How come you know our names?”

He took a step toward me, his bare feet noiseless in the sand. His little comitatus grouped themselves behind him. They crossed their arms on their chests to emphasize their muscles, and the red firelight flickered on their biceps.

With a little judo I thought I could handle all eight of their biceps, but I didn’t want to hurt them. I was an emissary from the adult camp. I flashed the special-deputy’s badge which I carried as a souvenir of an old trouble on the San Pedro docks.

“I’ve been talking to your mother, among other people. She said you found the coat on the beach.”

“Never believe her,” he said with one eye on the girls. “Never believe a mother.”

“Where did you get it then?”

“I wove it underwater out of sea lettuce. I’m very clever with my hands.” He wiggled his fingers at me.

“I wouldn’t go on playing this for laughs, Buzzell. It’s a serious matter. Have you ever been in Citrus Junction?”

“I guess I passed through.”

“Did you stop over long enough to kill and bury a man?”

“Bury a man?” He was appalled.

“His name was Quincy Ralph Simpson. He was found buried in Citrus Junction last week, with an icepick wound in his heart. Did you know him?”

“I never heard of him, honest. Besides, we’ve had the coat for a couple of months.” His voice had regressed five years, and sounded as though it was changing all over again. He turned to the girl. “Isn’t that right, Mona?”

She nodded. Her sea-lion eyes were wide and scared. With scrabbling fingers she unbuttoned the coat and flung it off. I held out my hands for it. Ray Buzzell picked it up and gave it to me. His movements had lost their certainty.

The coat was heavy, with matted fibers that smelled of the sea. I folded it over my arm.

“Where did you get it, Ray?”

“On the beach, like Moth– like the old lady said. It was salvage, like. I’m always living off the beach, picking up salvage and jetsam. Isn’t that right, Mona?”

She nodded, still without breaking silence.

His voice rushed on in an adolescent spate: “It was soaked through, and there were stones in the pockets, like somebody chunked it in the drink to get rid of it. But there was a strong tide running, and the waves washed it up on the beach. It was still in pretty good condition, this Harris tweed is indestructible, so I decided to dry it out and keep it. It was like salvage. Mona wears it mostly – she’s the one that gets cold.”

She was shivering in her bathing suit now, close by the fire. The other girl draped a plaid shirt over her shoulders. The boys were standing around desultorily, like figures relaxing out of a battle frieze.

“Can you name the beach?”

“I don’t remember. We go to a lot of beaches.”

“I know which one it was,” Mona said. “It was the day we had the six-point-five and I was scared to go out in them and you all said I was chicken. You know,” she said to the others, “that little private beach above Malibu where they have the shrimp joint across the highway.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “We ate there the other day. Crummy joint.”

“I saw you there the other day,” I said. “Now let’s see if we can pin down the date you found the coat.”

“I don’t see how. That was a long time ago, a couple months.”

The girl rose and touched his arm. “What about the tide tables, Raybuzz?”

“What about them?”

“We had a six-point-five tide that day. We haven’t had many this year. You’ve got the tide tables in the car, haven’t you?”

“I guess so.”

The three of us went up the beach to the zebra-striped hearse. Ray found the dog-eared booklet, and Mona scanned it under the dashboard lights.

“It was May the nineteenth,” she said positively. “It couldn’t have been any other day.”

I thanked her. I thanked them both, but she was the one with the brains. As I drove back toward Los Angeles, I wondered what Mona was doing on the beach. Perhaps if I met her father or her mother I could stop wondering.