The Zebra-Striped Hearse

30

CAMPION HAD BEEN MOVED to the San Mateo County jail. He still wasn’t talking. After some palaver with Captain Royal and his chief, and telephone calls to their opposite numbers in Los Angeles, I got permission to interview him alone. Royal brought him into the interrogation room and left us together, locking the steel-sheathed door behind him.

Campion stood with his back to the door. He didn’t say hello or nod his head. Bad nights had left their nightmare tracks on his face, but he still had a kind of frayed intensity. He looked at me as though I might lunge at him with a rubber hose.

“How are you, Bruce? Sit down.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s an invitation,” I said in a mollifying tone. “Mark Blackwell has confessed your wife’s murder. Did Royal tell you?”

“He told me. It came a little late. I’m going to sue you all for false arrest.”

“That doesn’t sound like such a wise idea. You’re pretty vulnerable.”

“Then when are they going to let me out? I’ve got work to go on with.”

“You’ve got some talking to do first. If you’d leveled with the cops, you wouldn’t be here–”

“Don’t snow me. I know cops. They make patsies out of the little ones and let the big ones go.”

“You made a patsy out of yourself. Think about it.”

I left him standing and moved around the bright barred room. Campion’s eyes followed me warily. After a while he sat down at a metal table, resting his bandaged head on one hand.

I approached him and touched his shoulder. “Listen, Bruce–”

He raised both arms to protect his head.

“Relax. I’m not your enemy.”

He twisted under my hand. “Then don’t stand over me. I’ve always hated people standing over me.”

I sat down across the table from him. “I assume you’re a serious man in spite of the cop-hater nonsense. You’ve been through some rough experiences, and I respect that. You could have spared yourself some of the roughness by trusting other people.”

“Who was there to trust?”

“Me, for one. Royal can be trusted, too. He’s not a bad cop. Why didn’t you tell us the truth the night before last? You let us believe that Harriet was dead and you had drowned her.”

“You would have gone on believing it no matter what I said.”

“But you didn’t give us a chance. You didn’t give her a chance, either. You might have saved her life.”

His right fist clenched on the table. “I tried. I tried to stop her. But I can’t swim too well. She got away from me in the dark.”

“We seem to be talking past each other. When did she get away from you?”

“That night at the lake, Tuesday night I think it was. She went berserk when I told her I suspected her father of killing Dolly. She came at me clawing – I had to hit her to get her off me. It was a bad scene, and it got worse. Before I knew what she was doing, she ran out of the lodge and down to the lake. I plunged in after her, but she was already gone. I’m afraid I panicked then.”

“Is this the truth?”

His eyes came up to mine. “I swear it is. I didn’t tell you and Royal because you would have taken any such admission as a confession of guilt.” He looked at his fist; slowly it came unclenched. “I still can’t prove I didn’t knock her out and drown her.”

“You don’t have to. She didn’t drown in Tahoe. If suicide was in her mind that night, she changed her mind. Evidently she came out of the water after you’d gone.”

“Then she’s still alive!”

“She’s dead, but you didn’t kill her. Her father did. He confessed it along with his other murders before he shot himself.”

“Why in the name of God did he do that?”

“God only knows. She probably accused him to his face of murdering Dolly.”

Emotions warred across Campion’s face: incredulity and relief and self-reproach. He tried to wipe them away with his hand.

“I should never have told Harriet about her father,” he said. “I see now why I should have been honest with you. But I thought you were working for Blackwell, covering up for him.”

“We were both mistaken about each other. Do you want to straighten me out about a few other matters?”

“I suppose so. I seem to be on the truth kick.”

“You were in serious trouble during the Korean War,” I said by way of testing him. “What was it?”

“It was after the war. We were sitting around in Japan waiting for transport.” He made an impatient outward gesture with his arm. “To make a long story short, I hit the officer in charge of the staging point. I broke his nose. He was a Colonel.”

“Did you have a reason, apart from the fact that you don’t like Colonels?”

“My reason may sound foolish to you. He caught me sketching one day and thought it would be dandy if I painted his portrait. I told him I didn’t take orders about my work. We got into a battle of wills. He threatened to keep me over there till I painted him. I hit him. If he’d had a little less rank, or a little more, or if he’d belonged to our unit, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But face had to be saved and I got a year in a detention camp and a D. D. I didn’t paint him, though,” he added with bitter satisfaction.

“You’re a pretty good hater. What do you like?”

“The life of the imagination,” he said. “It’s all I’m good for. Every time I try to do something in the actual world I make a mess of it. I never should have married Dolly, for instance.”

“Why did you?”

“It’s a hard question. I’ve been thinking about the answers to it ever since I got into this jam. The main thing was the money, of course – I’d be a hypocrite if I denied that. She had a little money, call it a dowry. I was trying to prepare a series of pictures for a show, and I needed money to do it. You always need money, at least I do, and so we struck a bargain.”

“You knew about her pregnancy?”

“It was one of the attractions, in a way.”

“Most men would feel the opposite way.”

“I’m not most men. I liked the idea of having a child but I didn’t want to be anybody’s father. I didn’t care who the father was, so long as it wasn’t me. Does that sound foolish? It may have something to do with the fact that my old man did the disappearing-father act when I was four years old.” There was a growl of resentment in his voice.

“Did your father have trouble with the law?”

He said with a sour mocking grin: “My father was the law. He was a lousy Chicago cop, with both front feet in the trough. A bad act. I remember the last time I saw him. I was eighteen at the time, hacking my way through art school. He was helping a blonde into a Cadillac in front of an apartment hotel on the Gold Coast.” He cleared his throat. “Next question.”

“Getting back to Dolly – I’m not quite clear how you felt about her.”

“Neither am I. I started out feeling sorry for her. I thought it might develop into something real – that’s an old boyish dream of mine.” His mouth curled in self-irony. “It didn’t. You know the pity that chills the heart? Oddly enough I never went to bed with her. I loved to paint her, though. That’s my way of loving people. I’m not much good at the other ways.”

“I thought you were a devil with the ladies.”

He flushed. “I’ve done my share of rutting. A lot of them think it’s artistic to bed with an artist. But there was only one in my life I cared about – and that one didn’t last. I was too fouled up.”

“What was her name?”

“Does it matter? Her first name was Anne.”

“Anne Castle.”

He gave me a bright astonished look. “Who told you about her?”

“She did. I was in Ajijic two or three nights ago. She spoke of you with great affection.”

“Well,” he said. “That’s a fresh note for a change. Is Anne all right?”

“She probably would be if she didn’t have you to worry about. It broke her heart when you decamped with Harriet. The least you can do is write her a letter.”

He sat quiet for a time. I think he was composing the letter in his head. To judge by his frowning concentration, he was having a hard time with it.

“If Anne was important to you,” I said, “why did you take up with Harriet?”

“I’d already made a commitment.” His eyes were still turned inward on himself.

“I don’t follow you, Campion.”

“I didn’t meet Harriet in Mexico, as you seem to think. I met her in my own house in Luna Bay several weeks before I went to Mexico. She came to see Dolly and the baby. She and Dolly were old friends. But Dolly wasn’t there that afternoon – she’d taken the baby in for his monthly checkup. Harriet stood around watching me paint. She was an amateur painter herself, and she got very excited over what I was doing. She was quite an excitable girl.”

“So?”

Campion looked at me uneasily. “I couldn’t help thinking what she could do for me, with a little encouragement. I was broke, as usual, and she obviously wasn’t. I thought it would be pleasant to have a patroness. I could stop worrying about the light bill and simply do my work. I made a date with her before Dolly got back with the baby. I saw her that night, and before long we were spending nights together.

“I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. Harriet acted as though she’d never been with a man. She fell so hard it scared me. She drove over from Tahoe a couple of times a week, and we were in and out of the motels. I should have had the sense to pull out of the situation. I had a feeling that it would lead to trouble.” He drew in a deep breath.

“What kind of trouble?”

“I didn’t know. But she was a serious girl, too serious, and terribly passionate. I shouldn’t have led her on.”

“Did you suspect that Blackwell was the baby’s father?”

He hesitated. “I may have, more or less subconsciously. Harriet said something once, when she was holding the baby in her arms. She called him little brother. It stuck in my mind, though I didn’t realize she was speaking literally.”

“And Dolly never told you?”

“No. I didn’t press the point, while she was alive. I didn’t really want to know who the father was. I thought I could love the baby better if he was anonymous. But it turned out I couldn’t love him too well. Him or anybody. Then I messed the whole thing up when I tried to go into orbit with Harriet. I should have stayed home and looked after Dolly and the baby.”

His voice was low, and I thought I heard the growl of manhood in it. He rose and struck his open left palm with his closed right fist. Shaking hands with himself in an embarrassed way, he went to the window.

“I was with Harriet the night Dolly was killed,” he said with his back turned.

“Harriet was the woman you slept with in the Travelers Motel?”

“That’s right. Slept isn’t quite accurate. We had an argument, and she started back to Tahoe in the middle of the night. I stayed in the room and got drunk. She’d brought me a bottle of her father’s Scotch.” He seemed to take a painful pride in spelling out the details of his humiliation.

“What was the argument about?”

“Marriage. She wanted to buy me a Reno divorce. I won’t deny I was tempted, but when it came to a showdown I found I couldn’t do it. I didn’t love Harriet. I didn’t love Dolly, either, but I had made a bargain with her to give the boy my name. I kept hoping if I stuck with it I’d learn to love the boy. But it was already too late. When I sobered up enough to drive myself home, Dolly was dead and the boy was gone and the cops were there.”

“Why didn’t you tell them where you’d spent the night? You had an alibi of sorts.”

“It didn’t look as if I’d have to use it. They questioned me and let me go. As soon as I was free, I got in touch with Harriet at Tahoe. She said I mustn’t on any account drag her or her family into it. She was protecting her father, obviously, though she didn’t say so. She sold me the idea of hiding out after they indicted me, and I spent a bad couple of weeks shut up in their beach house. I wanted to go on to Mexico – Ralph lent me his birth certificate with that in mind – but I had no money.

“Harriet finally gave me the money for the flight. She said that she would join me in Mexico later, and we could pretend to be strangers, and pick up where we’d left off. We could stay in Mexico or go further down into South America.” He turned from the window – his face had been opened by the light. “I suppose she saw her chance to sew me up for life. And I was tempted, again. I’m a very ambivalent guy.”

“I’m wondering about Harriet’s motive. You suggested she was protecting her father. Did she know, at that time, that he had murdered Dolly?”

“I don’t see how she could have.” He fingered the scratches on his face. “Look how she reacted when I told her about my suspicions the other night.”

“Just when did you develop those suspicions?”

“It happened over a period of time. Ralph Simpson brought up the name before I left Luna Bay. He’d seen Dolly with Blackwell last summer. Ralph fancied himself as a detective, and he was very interested in a leather button that was found at the scene of the crime. The police mentioned it, too. Do you know anything about that button?”

“Too much.” I summarized the history of the wandering topcoat.

“So Blackwell killed Ralph.”

“He confessed the murder this morning, along with the others.”

“Poor old Ralph.” Campion lowered himself into a chair and sat for a while in blank-eyed silence. “Ralph should never have got mixed up with me. I’m a moral typhoid carrier.”

“It’s a thought,” I said. “But you were telling me about your suspicions of Blackwell and how they grew.”

After another silence he went on: “Ralph started me thinking about Blackwell. Bits and pieces, associations, began to gather, and eventually I had a sort of Gestalt. Some of the things that went into it were Harriet’s interest in the baby, and the slip she made, if it was a slip, about her little brother. Then Dolly started getting money from somewhere, about the time that Harriet turned up at our house. I didn’t understand the relationship between Dolly and Harriet. It was pleasant enough on the surface, but there was a good deal of hostility under it.”

“That would be natural enough, if Dolly knew you were making love to Harriet.”

“She didn’t. Anyway, the relationship didn’t change from the first afternoon Harriet came to the house. They greeted each other like two sisters who hated each other but refused to admit it. I can see now why that would be: Harriet knew about Dolly’s fling with her father, and Dolly knew she knew.”

“You still haven’t told me when you found out.”

“I got my Gestalt one night in Mexico, after Harriet came. We were talking in my studio, and the subject of her father’s lodge at Tahoe came up, I don’t know how.” He turned his head to one side, as though he had overheard a distant voice. “Yes, I do know. She was hot on the marriage trail again, in spite of the fact that I was wanted for murder. She was fantasying about going back to the States where we could settle down in the lodge and live happily ever after. She got quite lyrical in her descriptions of the place. Oddly enough, I’d heard it all before.”

“From Harriet?”

“From Dolly. Dolly used to tell me stories about the sweet old lady who befriended her when she was on her uppers in State Line last summer. She gave me detailed descriptions of the sweet old lady’s house – the beamed ceilings, the lake view, the layout of the rooms. It suddenly hit me that it was Blackwell’s house and that Blackwell was the sweet old lady and probably the father of my–” he swallowed the word “–the father of Dolly’s child. I didn’t say a word to Harriet at the time, but I decided to go back to the States with her. I wanted to find out more about the sweet old lady. Well, I have.”

A complex grief controlled the lines of his face like a magnetic field.