The Zebra-Striped Hearse (10 page)

“How fascinating. And what has dear old Mark been up to
now? Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” She held a forefinger upright in front of her nose. “He’s worried about Harriet.”

“You’re a good guesser, Mrs. Hatchen.”

She smiled thinly. “It’s the same old story. He’s always brooded over her like a father hen.”

“Mother hen,” Hatchen said.

“
Father
hen.”

“At any rate, she’s run off and married that Damis chap,” he said.

“I’m not surprised. I’m glad she had it in her. All Harriet ever needed was a little of her mother’s spirit and fortitude. Speaking of spirits, Mr. Archer”—she waved her finger—“Keith and I were just about to have a nightcap. Won’t you join us?”

Hatchen looked at her brightly. He was still on his feet in the middle of the room. “You’ve had your ration, dear one. You know what the doctor said.”

“The doctor’s in Guad and I’m here.”

“I’m here, too.”

“So be a sport and get us all a drink. You know what I like.”

He shrugged and turned to me. “What will you have?”

“Whisky?”

“I can’t recommend the whisky. The gin’s okay.”

“Gin and tonic will be fine.”

He left the room with a nervous glance at his wife, as if she might be contemplating elopement. She turned the full panoply of her charm on me.

“I know you must think I’m a strange sort of mother, totally unconcerned with my daughter’s welfare and so on. The fact is I’m a kind of refugee. I escaped from Mark and his ménage long long ago. I haven’t even seen him for thirteen years, and for once that’s a lucky number, I turned over a fresh page and started a new chapter—a chapter dedicated to love and freedom.”
Romanticism soughed in her voice like a loosely strung Aeolian harp.

“It isn’t entirely clear to me why you left him.”

She took the implied question as a matter of course. “The marriage was a mistake. We had really very little in common. I love movement and excitement, interesting people, people with a sense of life.” She looked at me sideways. “You seem to be a man with a sense of life. I’m surprised that you should be a friend of Mark’s. He used to spend his spare time doing research on the Blackwell genealogy.”

“I didn’t say I was a friend of Mark’s.”

“But I understood he sent you here.”

“I’m a private detective, Mrs. Hatchen. He hired me to look into Damis’s background. I was hoping you could give me some assistance.”

“I barely knew the fellow. Though I sensed from the beginning that Harriet was smitten with him.”

“When was the beginning?”

“A few days after she got here. She came a little over a month ago. I was really glad to see her.” She sounded surprised. “A little disappointed, perhaps, but glad.”

“Why disappointed?”

“I had various reasons. I’d always sort of hoped that she’d outgrow her ugly-duckling phase, and she did to some extent, of course. After all she is my daughter.” Her active forefinger went to her brow and moved down her nose to her mouth and chin, which she tilted up. “And I was disappointed that we didn’t really have anything in common. She didn’t take to our friends or our way of life. We did our best to make her comfortable, but she moved out before the end of the first week.”

“And moved in with Damis?”

“Harriet wouldn’t do that. She’s quite a conventional girl. She rented a studio down near the lake. I think he had one somewhere in the neighborhood. I have no doubt they spent a lot of time together. More power to them, I thought.”

“Did you know Burke Damis before she met him?”

“No, and she didn’t meet him in our
casa
. We’d seen him around, of course, but we’d never met him till Harriet introduced him. That was a few days after she got here, as I said.”

“Where did you see him around?”

“At the
Cantina
mostly. I think that’s where Harriet picked—where Harriet met him. A lot of arty young people hang out there, or used to.”

“You saw him there before she met him?”

“Oh, yes, several times. He’s rather conspicuously good-looking, don’t you think?”

“Was he using the name Burke Damis?”

“I suppose so. You could always ask the
Cantina
people. It’s just down the street.”

“I’ll do that. Before Harriet arrived, did Damis ever try to contact you?”

“Never. We didn’t know him from Adam.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is Mark trying to pin the blame on me for something?”

“No, but it occurred to me that Damis might have had her spotted before she got here.”

“Spotted?”

“As a girl with money behind her.”

“He didn’t learn it from us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“And there was nothing to show that he deliberately planned to meet her?”

“I doubt it. He picked her up in the
Cantina
and she was dazzled with gratitude, poor girl.”

“Why do you say ‘poor girl’?”

“I’ve always felt that way about Harriet. She had a rough deal, from both of us. I realize I appear to be a selfish woman, leaving her and Mark when she was just a child. But I had no choice if I wanted to save my soul.”

I sat there wondering if she had saved it and waiting for
her to elaborate. Her eyes had the hardness that comes from seeing too many changes and not being changed by them.

“To make a long story short, and a sordid one, I moved into the Tahoe house and got a Reno divorce. I didn’t want to do it. It broke my heart to turn my back on Harriet. But she was very much her father’s daughter. There was nothing I could do to break that up, short of murder. And don’t think I haven’t contemplated murder. But a Nevada divorce seemed more civilized. Keith”—she gestured toward the kitchen, where ice was being picked—“Keith was in Nevada on the same errand. What’s keeping him out there so long?”

“He may be giving us a chance to talk.”

“Yes, he’s a very thoughtful man. I’ve been very happy with Keith, don’t think I haven’t.” There was a hint of defiance in her voice. “On the other hand, don’t think I haven’t felt guilty about my daughter. When she visited us last month the old guilt feelings came back. It was so obvious that she wanted—that she needed something from me. Something I couldn’t give, and if I could, she couldn’t have taken it. She still blamed me for deserting her, as she put it. I tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen to any criticism of her father. He’s always dominated her every thought. She went into hysterics, and so did I, I suppose. We quarreled, and she moved out on
me.”

“It looks as though that made her ripe for Damis. I’ve known other men like him. They prey on girls and women who step outside the protection of their families.”

“You make him sound like a very devious type.”

“He’s devious. Does the name Q. R. Simpson mean anything to you? Quincy Ralph Simpson?”

She shook her head and her hairdo slipped. It made her entire personality seem held in place by pins. “Should I know the name?”

“I didn’t really expect you to.”

“What name?” her husband said from the doorway. He came in carrying a hammered brass tray with three pale drinks placed geometrically on it.

“The name that Burke Damis used to cross the border, coming and going. Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“You will if you take the California papers.”

“But we don’t.” He passed the drinks around with a flourish. “We are happy fugitives from the California papers, and from nuclear bombs and income taxes—”

“And the high cost of liquor,” his wife chimed in like the other half of a vaudeville team.

“This gin costs me forty American cents a liter,” he said, “and I don’t believe you can top it at any price. Well,
salud.”
He lifted his glass.

I drank from mine. The gin was all right, but it failed to warm me. There was something cold and lost about the room and the people in it. They had roosted like migrant birds that had lost their homing instincts, caught in a dream of perpetual static flight. Or so it seemed through the bottom of my glass.

I set it down and got up. Hatchen rose, too.

“What was that about this man Simpson and the newspapers?”

“Simpson was stabbed with an icepick a couple of months ago. His body was found last week.”

“And you say Damis was using his name?”

“Yes.”

“Is he suspected of Simpson’s murder?”

“Yes. By me.”

“Poor Harriet,” Mrs. Hatchen said over her drink.

T
HE
Cantina
had several interconnected public rooms, and looked as though it had once been a private house. At eleven-thirty on this Tuesday night it had just about reverted to privacy. A single drinker, a big man with streaked yellow hair that hung down to his collar, sat in a corner behind the deserted bandstand. There was no one else in the place.

A number of small oil paintings hung on the walls. Their blobs and blocks and whorls and scatterations reminded me of the shapes that dissolve on the retina between sleeping and waking. I felt that I was getting closer to Burke Damis, and I moved from picture to picture looking for his style or his signature.

“Las pinturas
, they are for sale, señor,” a mild voice said behind me.

It belonged to a Mexican youth in a waiters apron. He had a broken nose and a mouth that had been hurt both physically and morally. Intelligence burned like fever in his black eyes.

“Sorry, I don’t buy pictures.”

“Nobody buys them. No more. ‘Quoth the Raven, “Never-more.” ’ ”

“You read Poe?”

“In school, señor,” he said smiling. “ ‘My beautiful Annabel Lee,… in this kingdom by the sea.’ I studied to be a professor but my father lost his nets, I had to give it up. There is very little money, and work is not easy to find. Tourism is slow this summer.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Who understands the migration of the birds? I only know it is hard to make an honest living. I tried boxing, but it is not for me.” He touched his nose.

His story had come fast and slick, and I was expecting a touch. I liked him anyway. His battered face had an incandescence, as if the scattered lights of the dark town had gathered and were burning in him. “Something to drink, señor?”

“I guess a beer.”

“Dark or light?”

“Light”

“Bueno
, we have no dark. We have three bottles of light beer, one
litro
of tequila, and no ice. The beer is cold, however. I borrowed it.”

Smiling intensely, he went into a side room and came back with a bottle and a glass. He poured the contents of the one into the other.

“You pour beer well.”

“Yessir. Also I can make martinis, margueritas, any kind of drink. I work at parties sometimes, which is how I speak English so good. Please to tell your friends, when they need a first-class
cantinero
, José Perez of the
Cantina
is at your service.”

“I’m afraid I have no friends in these parts.”

“You are a tourist?”

“Sort of. I’m just passing through.”

“An artist,
por ventura?”
he said with an eye on Stacy’s sweater. “We used to have many artists here. My boss himself is an artist.” He glanced across the room to the solitary drinker in the corner.

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I will tell him, señor.”

José darted across the room and said something in Spanish to the long-haired man. He picked up his drink and plodded toward me as if the room was hip-deep in water, or eye-deep in tequila. A woven belt with an amethyst-studded silver buckle divided his globular stomach into two hemispheres.

“Aha,” he said. “I spy with my little eye a customer and a fellow American.”

“Your eye is sound, My name is Archer, by the way.”

He stood over me tall and leaning, a Pisan tower of flesh.

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.” He subsided into a chair. “I am Chauncey Reynolds, no kin to Sir Joshua Reynolds, though I do dabble in paint. I’ve always considered Sir Joshua a better critic than he was a painter. Or don’t you share my opinion?” He hunched forward with a touch of belligerence.

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Reynolds. I’m not too hep artistically.”

“I thought you were, since you were looking at the paintings. No matter. It’s a pleasure to have a customer.”

“What happened to all the other customers?”

“
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
This place was jumping, honestly, when I took over the lease. I thought I had a gold mine on my hands.” He looked down into his pudgy hands as if he was surprised by their emptiness. “Then people stopped coming. If the drought of customers persists, I’ll close up and go back to work.” He seemed to be delivering an ultimatum to himself.

“You paint for a living?”

“I paint. Fortunately I have a small private income. Nobody paints for a
living
. You have to die before you make a living out of painting. Van Gogh, Modigliani, all the great ones had to die.”

“What about Picasso?”

“Picasso is the exception that proves the rule. I drink to Pablo Picasso.” He raised his glass and drank from it. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Archer?”

“I’m a detective.”

He set down his glass with a rap. His bloodshot eyes watched me distrustfully, like a wounded bull from his
querencia
. “Did Gladys send you to ferret me out? She isn’t supposed to know where I am.”

“I don’t know any Gladys.”

“Honestly?”

“And I never heard of you until now. Who’s Gladys?”

“My ex-wife. I divorced her in Juarez but the New York courts don’t recognize it. Which is why, my friend, I am here. Forever.” He made it sound like a long time.

“The one I’m interested in,” I said, “is a young man named Burke Damis.”

“What’s he wanted for?”

“He isn’t wanted.”

“Kid me not. I read a great deal of mystery fiction in the long night watches, and I recognize that look you have on your face. You have the look of a shamus who is about to put the arm on a grifter.”

“How well you express yourself. I take it you know Damis.”

“In a casual way. He used to pass the time here, mainly before I took over the leash—the lease.” He leaned forward over the table, and his long hair flopped like broken wings. “Why do you suppose they all stopped coming? Tell me—you’re a trained objective observer—do I have an offensive personality?”