The Zebra-Striped Hearse

8

I HAD A DREAM which I’d been dreaming in variant forms for as long as I could remember. I was back in high school, in my senior year. The girl at the next desk smiled at me snootily.

“Poor Lew. You’ll fail the exams.”

I had to admit to myself that this was likely. The finals loomed up ahead like the impossible slopes of purgatory, guarded by men with books I hadn’t read.

“I’m going to college,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

I had no idea. I knew with a part of my dreaming mind that I was a grown man in my forties. There wasn’t anything more that high school could do to me. Yet here I was, back in Mr. Merritt’s classroom, dreading the finals and wondering what I would do when I had failed them.

“You’ll have to learn a trade,” the snooty one said.

So far it was more or less the dream I had always had. Then something different happened. I said to the girl, rather snootily. “I have a trade, kiddo. I’m a detective. You’ll be reading about me in the papers.”

I woke up with a warm feeling in my chest and the small birds peeping outside the pale grey rectangle of the window. The dream had never ended this way before. Did it mean that I had made it? That didn’t seem likely. You went on making it, or trying to, all your life – working your way up the same old terraced slopes with different street names on them.

The Blackwell case came back on my mind, muffling the bird sounds and draining the last of the warm feeling from my chest. There were two cases, really. One belonged to me and one belonged to the authorities, but they were connected. The link between them was small but definite: the airline envelope with Q. R. Simpson’s name on it which Burke Damis, or possibly someone else, had left in the beach house. I wanted to explore the connection further, without too much interference from the police. The possibility existed that Damis had come by the envelope, or even used the name, quite innocently.

It was broad daylight and the birds had finished their matins when I went back to sleep. I slept late into the morning. Perhaps I was hoping for another good dream. More likely I was fixing my schedule so that I wouldn’t have time to report in to Peter Colton.

I had become a great frequenter of airports. Before I set out this time, I dug my birth certificate out of the strongbox in the bedroom closet. I had no definite plan to use it. I just thought it would be nice to have along.

The polite young man at the Mexicana desk greeted me like a long-lost brother. The crew I was interested in had already checked in for their flight, and the steward and stewardess had gone up to the restaurant for coffee. He was tall and dark; she was short and plump and pretty, with red hair. They both had on Mexicana uniforms, and I surely couldn’t miss them.

I picked them out in the murmurous cavern of the restaurant, hunched over coffee cups at one of the long counters. The girl had an empty stool beside her, and I slid onto it. She was certainly pretty, though the red hair that curled from under her overseas-type cap had been dyed. She had melting dark eyes and a stung-cherry mouth. Like American airline hostesses, she had on enough make-up to go on the stage.

She was talking in Spanish with the steward, and I waited for a pause in their conversation.

“Miss Gomez?”

“Yessir, what can I do for you?” she said in a pleasantly accented voice.

“I’m looking for a little information. A week ago yesterday, a man and woman I know took your flight from Guadalajara to Los Angeles. That was Monday, July the tenth. You may remember them, or one of them. The woman is quite tall, about your age, blonde. She often wears dark glasses, and she probably had on expensive clothes. Her name is Harriet Blackwell.”

She nodded her head emphatically. “I remember Miss Blackwell, yes – a very nice lady. The lady across from her was sick – we had some rough air out of Mazatlan – and she took care of the sick lady’s baby for her.” She said to the steward beside her: “You remember the tall lady who was so nice with the baby?”

“Si.”

“Is Miss Blackwell all right?” she asked me solicitously.

“I think so. Why do you ask?”

“I thought of her afterward, after we landed. And now you are inquiring about her.”

“What did you think about her after you landed?”

“I thought – do you speak Spanish? I express myself better in Spanish.”

“Your English is ten times better than my Spanish will ever be.”

“Gracias, señor.” She gave me a full dazzling smile. “Well, I saw her after we landed, going through Customs. She looked very – excited. I thought she was going to faint. I approached her and inquired if she was all right. The man with her said that she was all right. He didn’t like – he didn’t want me asking questions, so I went away.”

“Can you describe the man?”

“Yes.” She described Burke Damis. “A very beautiful young man,” she added with a trace of satire in her voice.

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

She turned to her companion and spoke in rapid Spanish. He shrugged. He didn’t remember either.

“Who would know?”

“You, perhaps,” she said pertly. “You said they were your friends.”

“I said I knew them.”

“I see. Are they in trouble?”

“That’s an interesting question. What brings it up?”

“You,” she said. “You look like trouble for them.”

“For him, not for her. Did they sit together on the plane?”

“Yes. They embarked together at Guadalajara. I noticed them, I thought they were recién casados – honeymooners. But they had different names.”

“What was his name?”

“I said I don’t remember. If I can find the passenger list–”

“Try and do that, will you?”

“You are a policeman?”

“An investigator.”

“I see. Where will I see you?”

“On the plane, if they have a seat for me.” I looked at my watch. I had half an hour till flight time.

“We are never crowded in the middle of the week.”

She turned out to be right. I bought a return ticket to Guadalajara from my courteous friend, leaving the date of my return open. At another desk in the same building I applied for a Mexican tourist card. The hurried clerk who took my application barely glanced at my birth certificate.

“I’ll type up your card pronto. Your plane will take off soon.”

In the time I had left, I made the necessary call to Colonel Blackwell. He picked up the phone on the first ring, as if he had been waiting there beside it.

“Mark Blackwell speaking.”

“This is Archer. Have you heard anything from Harriet?”

“No. I don’t expect to.” His voice rose shakily from the depths of depression. “You haven’t either, I take it.”

“No. I have been busy on the case. It took me to the Bay area last night.”

“Is that where they’ve gone?”

“It’s possible, but it’s not why I went up there. To make a long story short, I stumbled on a murder which Damis may be involved in.”

“A murder?” His voice sank almost out of hearing. He said in a rustling whisper: “You’re not trying to tell me that Harriet has been murdered?”

“No. It’s a man named Simpson, icepicked in Citrus Junction two months ago. I’m trying to trace his connection with Damis, and get a line on Damis’s identity and background. The next logical step, as I see it, is to go back to the point where Harriet met him and work forward from there. If it’s all right with you, I intend to fly down to Mexico.”

There was a long silence on the line. Outside the telephone booth, I could hear my flight being announced over the loudspeakers.

“Are you there, Colonel?”

“I’m here. You’re planning to go to Mexico, you say. When?”

“In about five minutes. It’s going to cost you a couple of hundred dollars–”

“Money is no object. By all means go if you think it will help.”

“I can’t guarantee any results, but it’s worth trying. Can you give me your ex-wife’s address in Ajijic?”

“She doesn’t have an address. But any member of the American community should be able to tell you where she lives. Pauline was never one to hide her light under a bushel.”

“Her last name is Hatchen?”

“That is correct. Good luck.” He sounded as though his own had run out.

The plane was barely half full. I had a window seat over the left wing. As the redheaded stewardess placed me in it, I noticed that she looked at me in a peculiar way.

The broken jigsaw of Los Angeles tilted and drifted backward into brownish smog. When the plane had leveled out at cruising altitude, the stewardess slipped into the empty seat beside me. She held a folded newspaper in the hand away from me. Under the make-up, her color wasn’t good.

“I found the seating chart for July – July ten. The man with Miss Blackwell, his name was Simpson, Q. R. Simpson.”

“I thought so.”

“You thought so?” Her look was accusing. “Why didn’t you tell me, then, that Señor Simpson is dead?”

“I wasn’t aware of it.” It was a half truth, or a half lie, according to which version of Simpson we were talking about. “How do you know he is, Miss Gomez?”

She held the morning Times under my nose, jabbing the late bulletins at the bottom of the front page with a chipped carmine fingernail.

“Slain Man Identified,” one of the items said.

“You see,” Miss Gomez insisted, “he is dead. Murdered.”

“I see.”

“You said you are an investigator. Are you investigating his murder?”

“It’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”

“And you suspect someone from Mexico?” she said in a nationalistic way.

“Someone from the United States.”

This relieved her, but not for long. “Poor Miss Blackwell, she was so crazy about him. All the time, even when she was holding the lady’s baby, she kept looking at him like–” she searched for a phrase “–like he was a saint.”

“He was no saint.”

“Was he a ruffian – a gangster?”

“I doubt it.”

“It says in the paper that it was a gang killing.”

“Gangsters kill citizens, too.”

She wrinkled her dark brows over this idea. The doubleness of the conversation was getting on my nerves; or perhaps it was the doubleness of my attitude toward Damis. In spite of the evidence tightening around him, I was trying to keep an open mind.

I was glad when the girl went to attend to her duties. She stayed away. When she passed me in the aisle, she carefully avoided meeting my eyes. I think she was afraid of the contagion I carried from Simpson’s death.

We were flying over the sea within sight of land. The air was perfectly transparent. Baja California passed under the wing like the endless harsh shores of hell, its desolation unbroken by tree or house or human being.

As the sun declined, the shadows of the yellow hills lengthened into the dry valleys. The first green and brown checkerboard of cultivated fields came as a relief to the eye and the mind. The desolation didn’t go on forever.

Miss Gomez unbent a little when she brought me my dinner. “Are you enjoying the flight, sir?”

I said yes.

We circled in over Mazatlan in a red sunset. The three rocky islands offshore jutted up angrily out of a streaked purple sea. A single freighter lay in the harbor with the fishing boats. At the other end of the town, beyond the airport where we landed, new apartment buildings stood along the sea like a miniature Copacabana.

We were herded into the terminal building, to have our tourist cards checked, it was explained. A boy was selling, or trying to sell, costumed puppets which he manipulated on a string. His bare arms were almost as thin as the wooden arms of his dolls.

The line of passengers moved forward slowly in steamy heat. I got my turn at the battered rostrum-like desk where a man in an open-necked white shirt presided. He had pockmarks on his face, and they gave special emphasis to his question: “Certificado de vacunación, señor?”

I had none. No one had told me. That was a silly thing to say, but I said it. He leaned toward me not so much in anger as in sorrow.

“You must have the vacunación. I cannot permit you to enter–”

“How do I get one?”

“They will vacunate you ahora, now, here.”

He summoned an attendant in olive whipcord who escorted me to an office at the far end of the building. A dark and dumpy woman in white was waiting at the desk with a maternal smile. The white masonry wall behind her had jagged cracks in it.

“Vaccination?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She took my name and home address on a filing card. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, I never hurt ’em. Jacket off and roll up your left sleeve, please.”

She struck my arm smartly as the needle went in.

“You took it well,” she said. “Some of them keel over.”

“You speak good English.”

“Why not? I was a nurse’s aide in Fresno six years before I went into training. I got a married daughter in Los Angeles. You can roll down your sleeve now. You’ll probably have a reaction by tomorrow.”

I buttoned the cuff of my shirt and put on my jacket. “Do you give many of these impromptu vaccinations?”

“Two or three a day, at least, since the government clamped down. People are always forgetting their certificates, or else they didn’t get the word in the first place. They process so many at the L. A. airport that they get careless.”

I said, on the off-chance of learning something: “A man I know passed through here from L. A. some time in the last two months. I’m wondering if you had to vaccinate him.”

“What does he look like?”

I described Burke Damis.

She twisted her mouth to one side. “I think I do remember him. He had big fat biceps, like yours. But he didn’t like the needle. He tried to talk himself out of it.”

“When was this?”

“I couldn’t say exactly. A couple of months ago, like you said. I could look it up if you’ll give me his name.”

“Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

She opened one of the desk drawers, went through a filing box of cards, and picked out one of them.

“Here it is, Simpson. I gave him his shot on May twenty.”

It meant that Burke Damis had entered Mexico two days after the original Simpson left home for the last time. It probably meant that Simpson had been murdered between May 18 and May 20, more likely than not by the man who had stolen his name.

“A very nice-appearing young man,” the woman was saying. “We had a nice chat after we got the vaccination out of the way.”

“Chat about what?”

“My daughter in Los Angeles. And he wanted to know if that was earthquake damage.” She waved her hand toward the cracks in the masonry.

“I was asking myself the same thing.”

“It was no earthquake. The hurricane did it. It practically tore out the whole end of the building. You’d never know it was built in the last ten years.”

The man in the whipcord uniform came back. He had two more victims with him, a young couple who were explaining that they had been assured that these formalities could be taken care of when they got to Mexico City. The nurse smiled at them maternally.