The Zebra-Striped Hearse (21 page)

“Don’t call me Bruce.”

“Bruce is your name, isn’t it?”

“Not to you. To my friends.”

“What friends?” Royal said in bitter contempt.

“I have friends.”

“Where are they? Under the ground?”

Campion turned his face away,

“Did Ralph Simpson call you Bruce?” I said.

“What?” he said to the wall.

“Did Ralph Simpson call you Bruce?”

“Yes, he did.”

“You were friends?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you knock him off and steal his papers?”

His eyes rolled in my direction. “I didn’t steal his papers.”

“We found his birth certificate in your pocket,” Royal said.

“Ralph lent it to me.”

“The same night you stuck the icepick in him?”

Campion’s mouth became rectangular. I could see the red tongue curled behind his teeth. He raised his voice and cried out. His eyes turned up, and their veined whites glared at us as he went on yelling inarticulately.

Royal and I exchanged shameful looks. For some reason we were feeling guilty, at least I was. When Campion stopped his noise and fell back onto the pillow, other noises could be heard in the corridor. A woman seemed to be arguing with more than one man.

Royal started for the door. It was flung open before he reached it. The woman who burst in resembled Campion, though she was older and softer and better cared for.

“What are you doing to my brother?”

“Nothing, ma’am,” Royal said. “That is, we had some questions—”

“Have you been torturing him?”

“It’s been more like the other way around.”

She moved past him to the bed. “They’ve hurt you, Bruce.”

Campion looked at her bleakly. “If I can stand it, you can. Go away.”

“He’s right, Mrs. Jurgensen,” Royal said. “You shouldn’t be in here, you know.”

The guard spoke up from the doorway. “That’s what I was trying to tell her, Captain. I didn’t know if I should use physical force.”

Royal shook his head curtly. A tall man came in past the guard. He had greying blond crewcut hair and a long face. His mouth was pinched as though he’d been sucking a lemon. He took the woman by the arm and tried to drag her away from the bed.

She resisted his efforts without looking at him. She was staring hungrily at her brother’s face.

“Don’t you want me to help you?”

“You were among the missing when I needed it. You know what you can do with it now. Get lost.”

“You heard him, Evelyn,” the tall man said. He had a faint Scandinavian accent, more a lack of timbre than an accent. “He wants no part of us. We want no part of him.”

“But he’s my brother.”

“I
know
that, Evelyn. Do you want everyone in the Bay area to know it? Do you want young Thor to lose his fraternity connection? Do you want people pointing me out on Montgomery Street?”

“You hear your husband,” Campion said. “Why don’t you amscray, sister? Fold your tensions like the Arabs and silently steal away.”

The resident doctor appeared with a nurse in tow. He cast a withering glance around the room.

“May I remind you this is a hospital, Captain. This man is your prisoner but also my patient. I gave you permission to question him on the understanding that it would be quiet and brief.”

Royal started to say: “I’m not responsible—”

“I am. I want this room cleared immediately. That includes you, Captain.”

“I’m not finished with my interrogation.”

“It can wait till morning.”

Royal dropped the issue. He had the trial to think of, and the use that Campion’s defense could make of the doctor’s testimony. He walked out. The rest of us went along.

Not entirely by accident, I met the Jurgensen couple in the parking lot. They pretended not to see me, but I planted myself between them and their Mercedes sedan and made a fast pitch to her.

“I’m a private detective working on this case and it’s come to my attention that there are some holes in the case against your brother. I’d like very much to talk to you about it.”

“Don’t say a word, Evelyn,” her husband said.

“If we could sit down and have an exchange of views, Mrs. Jurgensen—”

“Pay no attention, Evelyn. He’s simply trying to pump you.”

“Why don’t you stay out of this?” I said. “He isn’t your brother.”

She turned to him. “I’m worried about him, Thor, and I’m ashamed. All these months we’ve pretended he didn’t exist, that we had no connection—”

“We
have
no connection. We decided that between us and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“Why don’t you let the lady do her own talking?” I said.

“There isn’t going to be any talking. You get out of the way.”

He took me by the shoulder and pushed me to one side. There was no point in hitting him. The Mercedes whisked them away to their half-acre earthly paradise.

I checked in at a Camino Real motel and went to sleep trying to think of some one thing I could do that would be absolutely right and final. I dreamed that Campion was innocent and I had to prove it by re-enacting the crimes with paper dolls that stuck to my fingers. Then I found Harriet’s body in the lake. She had talon marks on her head.

I awoke in a cold sweat. The late night traffic whirred with a sound like wings along the highway.

I
GOT UP
into the sharp-edged uncertainties of morning and drove across the county to Luna Bay. Patrick Mungan, the deputy in charge there, was a man I knew and trusted. I hoped the trust was reciprocal.

When I entered the bare stucco substation, his broad face generated a smile which resembled sunlight on a cliff.

“I hear you’ve been doing our work for us, Lew.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Uh-huh. You look kind of bedraggled. I keep an electric razor here, in case you want to borrow it.”

I rubbed my chin. It rasped. “Thanks, it can wait. Captain Royal tells me you handled the evidence in the Dolly Campion murder.”

“What evidence there was. We didn’t pick up too much. It wasn’t there to be picked up.”

Mungan had risen from his desk. He was a huge man who towered over me. It gave me the not unpleasant illusion of being small and fast, like a trained-down welterweight. He opened the swinging door at the end of the counter that divided the front office.

“Come on in and sit down. I’ll send out for coffee.”

“That can wait, too.”

“Sure, but we might as well be comfortable while we talk.” He summoned a young deputy from the back room and dispatched him for coffee. “What got you so involved in the Campion business?”

“Some Los Angeles people named Blackwell hired me to look into Campion’s background. He’d picked up their daughter Harriet in Mexico and was romancing her, under an alias. Three days ago they ran away together to Nevada, where she
disappeared. The indications are that she’s his second victim, or his third.”

I told Mungan about the hat in the water, and about the dusty fate of Quincy Ralph Simpson. He listened earnestly, with the corners of his mouth drawn down like a bulldog’s, and said when I’d done: “The Blackwell girl I don’t know about. But I don’t see any reason why Campion would stab Ralph Simpson. It may be true what he said about Simpson lending him his papers to use. They were friends. When the Campions moved here last fall, it was Simpson who found them a house. Call it a house, but I guess it was all they could afford. They had a tough winter.”

“In what way?”

“Every way. They ran out of money. The wife was pregnant and he wasn’t working, unless you call painting pictures work. They had to draw welfare money for a while. The county cut ’em off when they found out Campion was using some of it to buy paints. Ralph Simpson helped them out as much as he could. I heard when the baby was born in March, he was the one paid the doctor.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah. It crossed my mind at the time that maybe Simpson was the baby’s father. I asked him if he was, after Dolly got killed. He denied it.”

“It’s still a possibility. Simpson was a friend of Dolly’s before she knew Campion. I found out last night that Simpson was responsible for bringing them together in the first place. If Simpson got her pregnant and let Campion hold the bag, it would give Campion a motive for both killings. I realize that’s very iffy reasoning.”

“It is that.”

“Have you had any clear indication that Campion wasn’t the father?”

Mungan shook his ponderous head. “All the indications point the other way. Remember she was well along when he
married her in September. A man doesn’t do that for a woman unless he’s the one.”

“I admit it isn’t usual. But Campion isn’t a usual man.”

“Thank the good Lord for that. If everybody was like him, the whole country would be headed for Hades in a handbasket. A hand-painted handbasket.” He laid his palm on the desk as if he was covering a hole card. “Personally I have my doubts that those two killings, Dolly and Simpson, are connected. I’m not saying they aren’t connected. I’m only saying I have my doubts.”

“They have to be connected, Pat. Simpson was killed within a couple of weeks of Dolly—a couple of weeks which he apparently spent investigating her death. Add to that the fact that he was found buried in her home town.”

“Citrus Junction?”

I nodded.

“Maybe he went to see the baby,” Mungan said thoughtfully. “The baby’s in Citrus Junction, you know. Dolly’s mother came and got him.”

“You seem to like my idea after all.”

“It’s worth bearing in mind, I guess. If you’re going down that way, you might drop in on Mrs. Stone and take a look at the little tyke. He’s only about four months old, though, so I wouldn’t count on his resembling anybody.”

The young deputy came back with a hot carton in a paper bag. Mungan poured black coffee for the three of us. In response to unspoken signals, the young deputy carried his into the back room and closed the door. Mungan said over his paper cup: “What I meant a minute ago, I meant the two killings weren’t connected the way you thought, by way of Campion. This isn’t official thinking, so I’m asking you to keep it confidential, but there’s some doubt in certain quarters that Campion killed Dolly.”

“What quarters are you talking about?”

“These quarters,” he said with a glance at the closed door.
“Me personally. So did Ralph Simpson have his doubts. We talked about it. He knew that he was a suspect himself, but he insisted that Campion didn’t do it. Simpson was the kind of fellow who sometimes talked without knowing what he was talking about. But now that he’s dead, I give his opinion more weight.”

I sipped my coffee and kept still while Mungan went on in his deliberate way: “Understand me, Lew, I’m not saying Bruce Campion didn’t kill his wife. When a woman gets herself murdered, nine times out of ten it’s the man in her life, her boy friend or her husband or her ex. We all know that. All I’m saying, and I probably shouldn’t be saying it, we don’t have firm evidence that Campion did it.”

“Then why was he indicted?”

“He has his own stupidity to thank for that. He panicked and ran, and naturally it looked like consciousness of guilt to the powers that be. But we didn’t have the evidence to convict him, or maybe even arraign him. After we held him twenty-four hours, I recommended his release without charges. The crazy son-of-a-gun took off that same night. The Grand Jury was sitting, and the D.A. rushed the case in to them and got an indictment. They never would have indicted if Campion hadn’t run.” Mungan added with careful honesty: “This is just my opinion, my unofficial opinion.”

“What’s Royal’s unofficial opinion?”

“The Captain keeps his opinion to himself. He’s bucking for Sheriff, and you don’t get to be Sheriff by fighting the powers that be.”

“And I suppose the D.A. is bucking for Governor or something.”

“Something. Watch him make a circus out of this.”

“You don’t like circuses?”

“I like the kind with elephants.”

He finished his coffee, crumpled the cup in his fist, and
tossed it into the wastebasket. I did the same. It was a trivial action, but it seemed to me to mark a turning point in the case.

“Exactly what evidence do you have against Campion?”

Mungan made a face, as if he had swallowed and regurgitated a bitter pill. “It boils down to suspicion, and his lack of an alibi, and his runout. In addition to which, there’s the purely negative evidence: there was no sign that the place had been broken into, or that Dolly had tried to get away from the killer. She was lying there on the floor in her nightgown, real peaceful like, with one of her own silk stockings knotted around her neck.”

“In her bedroom?”

“The place has no bedroom. I’ll show you a picture of the layout.”

He went to his files in the back room and returned with several photographs in his hands. One was a close-up of a full-breasted young blonde woman whose face had been savagely caricatured by the internal pressure of her own blood. The stocking around her neck was almost hidden in her flesh.

In the other pictures, her place on the floor had been taken by a chalk outline of her figure. They showed from various angles a roughly finished interior containing an unmade bed, a battered-looking child’s crib, a kitchen table and some chairs, a gas plate and a heater, a palette and some paints on a bench by the single large window. This window, actually the glazed door opening of the converted garage, had a triangular hole in a lower corner. Unframed canvases hung on the plasterboard walls, like other broken windows revealing a weirdly devastated outside world.

“How did the window get broken, Pat?”

“Ralph Simpson said that it had been broken for weeks. Campion just never got around to fixing it. He was too high and mighty, too busy throwing paint at the wall to see that the wife and child got proper care.”

“You don’t like him much.”

“I think he’s a bum. I also think he’s got a fair shake coming to him.”

Mungan tossed the pictures onto his desk. He took a button out of the pocket of his blouse and rolled it meditatively between his thumb and forefinger. It was a large brown button covered with woven leather, and it had a few brown threads attached to it. I’d seen a button like it in the last few days, I couldn’t remember where.