The Zebra-Striped Hearse

28

I DROVE OUT to Malibu through the chilly dawn. The zebra-striped hearse was still parked by the roadside at Zuma. The sight of it did nothing for me at all.

The HP dispatcher working the graveyard shift had an open paperback on the desk in front of him, and seemed to begrudge his answers to my questions. Harriet’s Buick Special was impounded in a local garage; it wouldn’t be available for inspection until the garage opened at eight.

“When was it picked up?”

“Last night, before I came on duty.”

“You came on at midnight?”

“That’s correct.”

His eyes kept straying downward to his book. He was a fat man with a frowzy unwed aura.

“Can you tell me where it was found?”

He consulted his records. “Side road off the highway about six miles north of here. According to the officer, the woman in the lunchroom said it was there all day. She got around to reporting it when she closed up for the night.”

“What lunchroom is that?”

“It’s one of those jumbo shrimp traps. You’ll see the sign on the right as you go north.”

He picked up his book. It had a picture on the cover of a man riding a horse into a kind of nuclear sunset.

I drove out of the straggling beachfront town and north on the highway to the jumbo shrimp place. It was the same establishment in which I had sat and drunk coffee long ago at the beginning of the case. Harriet’s car had been abandoned within a few hundred yards of her father’s beach house.

I turned left down the hill, nosed my car into the parking area, and parked at the railing beside a black Cadillac. The tide was high, and the sea brimmed up like blue mercury. Some pelicans were sailing far out over it, tiny within the amplitude of the sky.

The Cadillac had Blackwell’s name on the steering post. I walked along the gangway to his beach house. I was keenly aware of every sound and movement, my own, the thumping and shushing of the waves, the distant cry of a scavenger gull following the pelicans. Then my knocking on Blackwell’s door was the only sound.

Finally I let myself in with his key. Nothing had been changed in the high raftered room, except for what had been done to Campion’s painting. Someone had slashed it so that the morning sun came jaggedly through it like lightning in a cloud.

I went to the head of the stairs and called down: “Blackwell! Are you there?”

No answer.

I called Harriet. My voice rang through the house. I felt like a self-deluded medium trying to summon up the spirits of the dead. I moved reluctantly down the steps and more reluctantly through the big front bedroom into the bathroom. I think I smelled the spillage before I saw it.

I turned on the bathroom light. A towel in the sink was soaked and heavy with coagulating blood. I lifted it by one corner, dropped it back into the sink. Splatters of blood were congealed on the linoleum floor. I stepped across them and opened the door into the back bedroom. It had a broken lock.

Blackwell was there, sitting in his shirtsleeves on the edge of a bare mattress. His face was white, except where it was shadowed by black beard. He looked at me like a thief.

“Good morning,” he said. “It would have to be you.”

“Bad morning. Who have you been killing this morning?”

He screwed up his face, as if a glare had fallen across it. “No one.”

“The bathroom is a shambles. Whose blood is it?”

“Mine. I cut myself shaving.”

“You haven’t shaved for at least twenty-four hours.”

He touched his chin absently. I sensed that he was out of contact, trying to fill the gap between himself and reality with any words he could think of from moment to moment.

“I cut myself shaving yesterday. That’s old blood. Nobody died today.”

“Who died yesterday?”

“I did.” He grimaced in the invisible glare.

“You’re not that lucky. Stand up.”

He rose obediently. I shook him down, though I hated to touch his body. He had no weapon on him. I told him to sit again, and he sat.

The angry will had gone out of him. A sort of fretfulness had taken its place. I had seen that fretfulness before, in far-gone men. It was like a rat gnawing their hearts and it made them dangerous, to others and themselves.

A slow leakage of water glazed his eyes. “I’ve had a lonely night.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing in particular. Waiting. I hoped that daylight would give me the strength to get up and move. But the daylight is worse than the darkness.” He sniffed a little. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you. You don’t like me.”

I didn’t try to pretend anything. “It’s good you’re able and willing to talk. We have the business of the confession to get over.”

“Confession? I have nothing to confess. The blood in the bathroom is old blood. I didn’t spill it.”

“Who did?”

“Vandals, possibly. Vandals must have broken in. We’ve had a lot of vandalism over the years.”

“We’ve had a lot of murders over the years. Let’s start with the first one. Why did you kill Ronald Jaimet?”

He looked up like a white-haired child horribly ravaged by age. “I didn’t kill him. His death was the result of an accident. He fell and broke his ankle, and his needle. It took me a day and a night to get him out of the mountains. Without his insulin he became very sick. He died of his illness. It was all completely accidental.”

“Just how did the accident happen?”

“Ronald and I had a scuffle, a friendly scuffle. His foot slipped on a stone and went over the edge of the trail. His weight came down on his ankle. I actually heard it snap.”

“What was the friendly scuffle about?”

“Nothing, really. He was joshing me a bit, about my affection for a young protégée of his. It’s true I was fond of the girl, but that was as far as it went. I never – I never did her any physical harm. My feelings were pure, and I told Ronald this. I think I pushed him, in a playful way, to emphasize what I was saying. I had no idea of making him fall.”

“And no intention of killing him?”

He puzzled over the question. “I don’t see how I could have wanted to kill him. Wouldn’t I have left him there if I had?” He added, as if this would clinch it: “Ronald was my favorite cousin. He greatly resembled my mother.”

He gave me a peculiar wet look. I was afraid he was going to talk about his mother. They often did.

I said: “When did you start having sexual relations with Dolly Stone?”

His eyes shifted away. They were almost lost in the puffiness around them, as if he had been beaten by intangible fists. “Oh. That.”

“That.”

He lay back on the bed, curling his body sideways so that his head rested on the uncovered striped pillow. He said in a hushed voice: “I swear to heaven I didn’t touch her when she was a child. I merely adored her from a distance. She was like a fairy princess. And I didn’t go near her after Ronald died. I didn’t see her again till we met last spring at Tahoe. She was grown up, but I felt as though I’d found my fairy princess once again.

“I invited her to the lodge, simply with the idea of showing it to her. But I was too happy. And she was willing. She came back more than once on her own initiative. I lived in pure delight and pure misery – delight when I was with her, and misery the rest of my waking hours. Then she turned against me, and I was in utter misery all the time.” He sighed like an adolescent lover.

“What turned her against you?”

“We ran into difficulties.”

I was weary of his euphemisms. “You mean you got her pregnant.”

“That, and other things, other difficulties. She turned against me finally and completely.” He drew up his legs. “I went through hell last summer. She put me through hell.”

“How did she do that?”

“I was fearful of losing her, and just as fearful of what would happen if I tried to hold her. I was utterly at her mercy. It was a very tense period. I couldn’t stomach some of the things she said. She called me a dirty old man. Then my daughter Harriet joined me at the lodge, and the whole thing became impossible. Dolly wouldn’t come to me any more, but she kept threatening to tell Harriet about us.”

He squirmed and tossed like a restless sleeper. The bed creaked under him in harsh mimicry of the noises of passion.

“Was Dolly blackmailing you?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I gave her money, altogether a good deal of money. Then I stopped hearing from her entirely. But I was still on tenterhooks. The thing could erupt publicly at any time. I didn’t know she’d married until this spring.”

“In the meantime you married Isobel Jaimet as a buffer.”

“It was more than that,” he insisted. “Isobel was an old and trusted friend. I was – I am genuinely fond of Isobel.”

“Lucky Isobel.”

He looked up at me with hatred in his eyes. But he was too broken to sustain it. He turned his face into the pillow. I had the queer impression that under the tangled white hair at the back of his head was another face made of blind bone.

“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.

He lay so still that he didn’t appear to be breathing. It occurred to me that he was holding his breath as angry children did when the world turned unpermissive.

“Tell me the rest of it, Blackwell.”

He began to breathe visibly. His shoulders rose and fell. His body jerked in occasional little spasms. It was the only response I could get from him.

“Then I’ll tell you, and I’ll make it short, because the police will be eager to talk to you. Dolly renewed her demands for money this spring – she’d had a hard winter. You decided to put a final stop to the demands and the uncertainty. You went to her house in the middle of the night of May the fifth. Her husband wasn’t there – he was out with another woman. I suppose Dolly let you in because she thought you were bringing her money. You strangled her with one of her stockings.”

Blackwell groaned as though he felt the nylon around his withering neck.

“Then you noticed the baby, your own bastard son. For some reason you couldn’t bear to leave him in the room with the dead woman. Perhaps you had the child’s safety and welfare in mind. I’d like to think so. At any rate you picked him up and carried him down the road to a neighbor’s car. The child got hold of a button on your coat which may have been loosened during your struggle with Dolly. It was still in his fist when the neighbor woman found him. The button has brought this whole thing home to you.

“When Dolly’s husband was indicted for her murder, his friend Ralph Simpson set out to track down its source. He probably knew of your affair with Dolly, and had a pretty good idea where the button came from. He went up to Tahoe and got you to employ him and eventually found the coat where you had hidden it. Perhaps he confronted you with it. You fired him and came back here. Instead of taking the coat to the police, as he ought to have, he followed you south with it. He may have had a dream of solving the crime by himself – Simpson was a failure who needed a success – or maybe the dream went sour in him and turned into money-hunger. Did he attempt to blackmail you?”

He spoke inarticulately into the pillow.

“It doesn’t greatly matter now,” I said. “It will come out at the trial. It will come out that you took a silver icepick from your house when you went to meet Simpson. I think it was no accident that the icepick was a wedding present from Dolly’s parents. It was certainly no accident that you buried his body in what had been Ronald Jaimet’s back yard. I don’t know what was going on in your head. I don’t believe you could tell me if you tried. A psychiatrist would be interested in what went on in that back yard when Dolly was a child.”

Blackwell cried out. His voice was thin and muffled. It sounded like a ghost trapped in the haunted house of his mind. I remembered his saying that he was dead and I pitied him as you pity the dead, from a long way off.

He turned his head sideways. His visible eye was open, but featureless as a mollusk in the harsh shell of his brow.

“Is that how it was?” he said. There seemed to be no irony in his question.

“I don’t claim to know all the details. If you’re willing to talk now, correct me.”

“Why should I correct your errors for you?”

“You’re talking for the record, not for me. Is that Harriet’s blood in the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill her?”

“Yes. I cut her throat.” His voice was flat and unemotional.

“Why? Because she caught on to you and had to be silenced?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with her body?”

“You’ll never find it.” A kind of giggle rattled out of his throat and made his lips flutter. “I’m a dirty old man, as Dolly said. Why don’t you put me out of my misery? You have a gun, don’t you?”

“No. I wouldn’t use it on you if I had. You’re not that important to me. Where is your daughter’s body?”

The giggle erupted again, and amplified itself into a laugh. Whoops of laughter surged up into his throat and choked him. He sat up coughing.

“Get me some water, for pity’s sake.”

For pity’s sake I started into the bathroom. Then I heard the furtive rustle of his movement. One of his hands was groping under the pillow. It came out holding a revolver which wavered in my direction and then held steady.

“Get out of here or I’ll shoot you. You don’t want to be the fifth one.”

I backed through the doorway.

“Close the door. Stay in there.”

I obeyed his orders. The bathroom seemed hideously familiar. The towel lay like a maimed thing in the sink.

Blackwell’s gun went off on the other side of the door. It was still in his mouth when I reached him, like a pipe of queer design which he had fallen asleep smoking.