The Zebra-Striped Hearse

6

I USED BLACKWELL’S KEY to let myself into the beach house. Nothing had changed in the big upstairs room, except that there were black paper ashes in the fireplace. They crumbled when I tried to pick them up on the fire shovel. The painting hung on its easel, still gleaming wet in places. In the light that slanted through the glass doors, the spot of cobalt blue which Damis had added last glared at me like any eye.

I backed away from the picture, trying to understand it, and went down the stairs to the master bedroom. The louvered doors of the closet were swinging open. It had been cleared out. There was nothing in the chest of drawers, nothing in the bathroom but some clean towels. The back bedroom was empty.

I moved back into the front bedroom and went through it carefully. The wastebasket had been emptied, which probably accounted for the burned paper in the upstairs fireplace. Damis had gone to a lot of trouble to cover his traces.

But he had overlooked one piece of paper. It was jammed between the sliding glass door and its frame, evidently to keep the door from rattling. It was thick and yellowish paper, folded small. When I unfolded it, I recognized it as one of those envelopes that airlines give their passengers to keep their tickets in.

This was a Mexicana Airlines envelope, with flight instructions typed inside the flap. Mr. Q. R. Simpson, the instructions said, was to leave the Guadalajara airport at 8:40 A.M. on July 10 and arrive at Los Angeles International at 1:30 P.M. the same day.

I messed around in the bedroom some more, discovered only some dust mice under the bed, and went upstairs. The painting drew me back to it. It affected me differently each time. This time I saw, or thought I saw, that it was powerful and ugly – an assault of dark forces on the vision. Perhaps I was reading my fantasy into it, but it seemed to me that its darkness was the ultimate darkness of death.

I had an impulse to take it along and find an expert to show it to. If Damis was a known artist, his style should be recognizable. But I couldn’t move the thing. The oils were still wet and would smear.

I went out to the car to get my camera. The zebra-striped hearse was standing empty beside it. The sky had cleared, and a few sunbathers were lying around in the sand like bodies after a catastrophe. Beyond the surf line the six surfers waited in prayerful attitudes on their boards.

A big wave rose toward them. Five of the surfers rode it in, like statues on a traveling blue hillside. The sixth was less skillful. The wave collapsed on her. She lost her board and swam in after it.

Instead of taking it out to sea again, she carried it up the beach on her head. She left it on the sand above the tide line and climbed the rocky bank to the parking space. She had the bust and shoulders of a young Amazon, but she was shivering and close to tears.

It was the girl who had made the face at me, which gave us something in common. I said: “You took quite a spill.”

She looked at me as if she had never seen me before, almost as if she wasn’t seeing me now. I was a member of another tribe or species. Her eyes were wet and wild, like the eyes of sea lions.

She got a man’s topcoat out of the back of the hearse and put it on. It was good brown tweed which looked expensive, but there were wavy white salt marks on it, as if it had been immersed in the sea. Her fingers trembled on the brown leather buttons. One of the buttons, the top one, was missing. She turned up the collar around the back of her head where the wet hair clung like a golden helmet.

“If you’re cold I have a heater in my car.”

“Blah,” she said, and turned her tweed back on me.

I loaded the camera with color film and took some careful shots of Damis’s painting. On my way to the airport I dropped the film off with a photographer friend in Santa Monica. He promised to get it developed in a hurry.

The very polite young man at the Mexicana desk did a few minutes’ research and came up with the information that Q. R. Simpson had indeed been on the July 10 flight from Guadalajara. So had Harriet Blackwell. Burke Damis hadn’t.

My tentative conclusion, which I kept to myself, was that Damis had entered the United States under the name of Simpson. Since he couldn’t leave Mexico without a nontransferable tourist card or enter this country without proof of citizenship, the chances were that Q. R. Simpson was Damis’s real name.

The polite young Mexican told me further that the crew of the July 10 flight had flown in from Mexico again early this afternoon. The pilot and copilot were in the office now, but they wouldn’t know anything about the passengers. The steward and stewardess, who would, had already gone for the day. They were due to fly out again tomorrow morning. If I came out to the airport before flight time, perhaps they would have a few minutes to talk to me about my friend Señor Simpson.

Exhilarated by his Latin courtesy, I walked back to the Immigration and Customs shed. The officers on duty took turns looking at my license as if it was something I’d found in a box of breakfast cereal.

Feeling the need to check in with some friendly authority, I drove downtown. Peter Colton was in his cubicle in the District Attorney’s office, behind a door that said Chief Criminal Investigator.

Peter had grown old in law enforcement. The grooves of discipline and thought were like saber scars in his cheeks. His triangular eyes glinted at me over half-glasses which had slid down his large aggressive nose.

He finished reading a multigraphed sheet, initialed it, and scaled it into his out-basket.

“Sit down, Lew. How’s it going?”

“All right. I dropped by to thank you for recommending me to Colonel Blackwell.”

He regarded me quizzically. “You don’t sound very grateful. Is Blackie giving you a bad time?”

“Something is. He handed me a peculiar case. I don’t know whether it’s a case or not. It may be only Blackwell’s imagination.”

“He never struck me as the imaginative type.”

“Known him long?”

“I served under him, for my sins, in Bavaria just after the war. He was in Military Government, and I was in charge of a plain-clothes section of Military Police.”

“What was he like to work for?”

“Tough,” Colton said, and added reflectively: “Blackie liked command, too much. He didn’t get enough of it during the fighting. Some friend in Washington, or some enemy, kept him in the rear echelons. I don’t know whether it was for Blackie’s own protection or the protection of the troops. He was bitter about it, and it made him hard on his men. But he’s a bit of an ass, and we didn’t take him too seriously.”

“In what way was he hard on his men?”

“All the ways he could think of. He went in for enforcement of petty rules. He was very keen on the anti-fraternization policy. My men had murder and rape and black-marketeering to contend with. But Blackie expected us to spend our nights patrolling the cabarets suppressing fraternization. It drove him crazy to think of all the fraternization that was going on between innocent American youths and man-eating Fräuleins.”

“Is he some kind of a sex nut?”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly.” But Colton’s grin was wolfish. “He’s a Puritan, from a long line of Puritans. What made it worse, he was having fraternization problems in his own family. His wife was interested in various other men. I heard later she divorced him.”

“What sort of a woman is she?”

“Quite a dish, in those days, but I never knew her up close. Does it matter?”

“It could. Her daughter Harriet went to Mexico to visit her a few weeks ago and made a bad connection. At least it doesn’t look too promising. He’s a painter named Burke Damis, or possibly Q. R. Simpson. She brought him back here with her, intends to marry him. Blackwell thinks the man is trying to take her for her money. He hired me to investigate that angle, or anything else that I can find on Damis.”

“Or possibly Q. R. Simpson, you said. Is Damis using an alias?”

“I haven’t confirmed it. I’m fairly sure he entered the country a week ago under the Q. R. Simpson name. It may be his real name, since it isn’t a likely alias.”

“And you want me to check it out.”

“That would be nice.”

Colton picked up his ball-point pen and jabbed with it in my direction. “You know I can’t spend public time and money on a private deal like this.”

“Even for an old friend?”

“Blackwell’s no friend of mine. I recommended you to get him out of my hair in one quick easy motion.”

“I was referring to myself,” I said, “no doubt presumptuously. A simple query to the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation wouldn’t take much time, and it might save trouble in the long run. You always say you’re more interested in preventing crime than punishing it.”

“What crime do you have in mind?”

“Murder for profit is a possibility. I don’t say it’s probable. I’m mainly concerned with saving a naive young woman from a lot of potential grief.”

“And saving yourself a lot of potential legwork.”

“I’m doing my own legwork as usual. But I could knock on every door from here to San Luis Obispo and it wouldn’t tell me what I need to know.”

“What, exactly, is that?”

“Whether Q. R. Simpson, or Burke Damis, has a record.”

Colton wrote the names on a memo pad. I’d succeeded in arousing his curiosity.

“I suppose I could check with Sacramento.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearly four. “If the circuits aren’t too loaded, we might get an answer before we close up for the night. You want to wait outside?”

I read a law-enforcement trade journal in the anteroom, all the way through to the advertisements. Police recruits were being offered as much as four hundred and fifty dollars a month in certain localities.

Peter Colton opened his door at five o’clock on the nose and beckoned me into his office. A teletype flimsy rustled in his hand.

“Nothing on Burke Damis,” he said. “Quincy Ralph Simpson is another story: he’s on the Missing Persons list, has been for a couple of weeks. According to his wife, he’s been gone much longer than that.”

“His wife?”

“She’s the one who reported him missing. She lives up north, in San Mateo County.”