The Zebra-Striped Hearse

31

GETTING OUT OF my cab at the San Francisco airport, I saw a woman I vaguely recognized standing with a suitcase in front of the main terminal building. She was wearing a tailored suit whose skirt was a little too long for the current fashion. It was Anne Castle, minus her earrings and with the addition of a rakish hat.

I took the suitcase out of her hand. “May I carry this, Miss Castle?”

She looked up at my face. Her own was so deeply shadowed by trouble that her vision seemed clouded. Slowly her brow cleared.

“Mr. Archer! I intended to look you up, and here you are. Surely you didn’t follow me from Los Angeles?”

“You seem to have followed me. I imagine we both came here for the same reason. Bruce Campion, alias Burke Damis.”

She nodded gravely. “I heard a report yesterday on the Guadalajara radio. I decided to drop everything and come here. I want to help him even if he did kill his wife. There must be mitigating circumstances.”

Her upward look was steady and pure. I caught myself on the point of envying Campion, wondering how the careless ones got women like her to care for them so deeply. I said: “Your friend is innocent. His wife was murdered by another man.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

Tears started in her eyes. She stood blind and smiling.

“We need to talk, Anne. Let’s go some place we can sit down.”

“But I’m on my way to see him.”

“It can wait. He’ll be busy with the police for some time. They have a lot of questions to ask him, and this is the first day he’s been willing to answer.”

“Why do they have to question him if he’s innocent?”

“He’s a material witness. He also has a good deal of explaining to do.”

“Because he used a false name to cross the border?”

“That doesn’t concern the local police. It’s the business of the Justice Department. I’m hoping they won’t press charges. A man who’s been wrongly indicted for murder has certain arguments on his side – what you called mitigating circumstances.”

“Yes,” she said. “We’ll fight it. Has he done anything else?”

“I can’t think of anything that’s actionable. But there are some things you should know before you see him. Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t think I’d better. I haven’t been sleeping too well, and I have to keep my wits about me. Could we have coffee?”

We went upstairs to the restaurant, and over several cups of coffee I told her the whole story of the case. It made more sense in the telling than it had in the acting out. Reflected in her deep eyes, her subtle face, it seemed to be transformed from a raffish melodrama into a tragedy of errors in which Campion and the others had been caught. But I didn’t whitewash him. I thought she deserved to know the worst about him, including his sporadic designs on Harriet’s money and his partial responsibility for her death.

She reached across the table and stopped me with her hand on my sleeve. “I saw Harriet last night.”

I looked at her closely. Her eyes were definite, alive with candor.

“Harriet isn’t dead. Her father must have been lying, or hallucinating. I know I wasn’t.”

“Where did you see her?”

“In the Guadalajara airport, when I went in to make my reservation. It was about nine-thirty last night. She was waiting for her bag at the end of the ticket counter. I heard her call out that it was azul – blue – and I knew her voice. She’d evidently just come in on the Los Angeles plane.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“I tried to. She didn’t recognize me, or pretended not to. She turned away very brusquely and ran out to the taxi stands. I didn’t follow her.”

“Why not?”

She answered carefully: “I felt I had no right to interfere with her. I was a little frightened of her, too. She had that terribly bright-faced look. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, but I’ve seen that look on other people who were far out.”