The Zebra-Striped Hearse (22 page)

“Apparently the baby slept in the same room.”

“There’s only the one room. They lived like shanty Irish,” he said in the disapproving tone of a lace-curtain Irishman.

“What happened to the child on the night of the murder?”

“I was going to bring that up. It’s one of the queer things about the case, and one reason we suspected Campion from the start. Somebody, presumably the killer, took the baby out of his crib and stashed him in a car that was parked by the next house down the road. The woman who lives there, a Negro woman name of Johnson, woke up before dawn and heard the baby crying in her car. She knew whose baby it was—her and Dolly were good neighbors—so naturally she took it over to the Campions’, That’s how Dolly’s body was discovered.”

“Where was Campion that night, do you know?”

“He said he was gone all night, drinking until the bars closed, and then driving, all over hell and gone. It’s the kind of story you can’t prove or disprove. He couldn’t or wouldn’t name the bars, or the places he drove afterward. He said along toward dawn he went to sleep in his car in a cul-de-sac off Skyline. That wouldn’t be inconsistent with him doing the murder. Anyway, we picked him up around nine o’clock in the morning, when he drove back to his place. There’s no doubt he had been drinking. I could smell it on him.”

“What time was his wife killed?”

“Between three and four
A.M
. The deputy Coroner was out
there by eight, and he said she couldn’t have been dead longer than four or five hours. He went by body temp. and stomach contents, and the two factors checked each other out.”

“How did he know when she’d eaten last?”

“Campion said they ate together at six the previous night. He brought in a couple of hamburgers—some diet for a nursing mother—and the carhop at the drive-in confirmed the time. Apparently he and Dolly had an argument over the food, so he took what money there was in the house and went and got himself plastered.”

“What was the argument about?”

“Things in general, he said. They hadn’t been getting along too well for months.”

“He told you this?”

“Yeah. You’d think he was trying to make himself look bad.”

“Did he say anything about another woman?”

“No. What’s on your mind, Lew?”

“I think we can prove he was lying about what he did on the night of May the fifth. Have you talked to Royal this morning?”

“He phoned to tell me he had Campion. He wants me to go over to Redwood City and take a hand in the questioning.”

“Has Campion admitted anything yet?”

“He’s not talking at all. Royal’s getting kind of frustrated.”

“Did he say anything to you about the Travelers Motel in Saline City?”

“Not a word.” Mungan gave me a questioning look.

“According to their night clerk, Nelson Karp, Campion spent the night of May fifth there with a woman. Or part of the night. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Burke Damis, which is one of the aliases Campion has been using. The Saline City police lifted the registration card last night after Campion was seen there. He seems to have been trying to set up an alibi.”

“A good one or a phony?”

“You can find that out quicker than I can.”

Mungan stood up and looked down the rocky slopes of his
face at me. “Whyn’t you give me the word on it in the first place?”

“I gave the word to Royal last night. He wasn’t interested. I thought I’d wait and see if you were.”

“Well, I am. But if this is no phony, why did Campion hold it out until now?”

“Ask him.”

“I think I will.”

He dropped the leather button he had been playing with on his desk. It rolled onto the floor, and I picked it up.

“Is this part of the evidence, Pat?”

“I honestly don’t know. The baby had it in his fist when Mrs. Johnson found him in her car. She didn’t know where it came from. Neither did anybody else.”

I was still trying to remember where I had seen a button or buttons like it. I dredged deep in my memory, but all that came up was the smell of the sea and the sound of it.

“May I have this button?”

“Nope. I read a story once about a button solving a murder, and I have a special feeling about this button.”

“So have I.”

“But I’m holding onto it.” His smiling eyes narrowed on my face. “You sure you don’t want to borrow the use of my razor before you go?”

“I guess I’d better.”

He got the electric razor out of the bottom drawer of his desk. I took it into the washroom and shaved myself. All I uncovered was the same old trouble-prone face.

M
UNGAN WAS GONE
when I came out. I used his telephone to call Vicky Simpson’s house. No answer. The young deputy in the back room told me that so far as he knew Vicky was still in Citrus Junction waiting for the authorities to release her husband’s body, I turned in the U-drive car at the San Francisco airport, caught a jet to Los Angeles, picked up my own car at the airport there, and drove out through the wedding-smelling orange groves to Citrus Junction.

I went first to see the baby. His grandmother lived on the west side of town in the waste that the highway builders had created. It was mid-afternoon when I got there. Earth movers were working in the dust like tanks in a no man’s land.

An overgrown pittasporum hedge shielded the house from the road. The universal dust had made its leaves as grey as aspen. The house was a two-story frame building which needed paint. Holes in the screen door had been repaired with string. I rattled it with my fist.

The woman who appeared behind the screen looked young to be a grandmother. The flouncy dress she wore, and her spike heels, were meant to emphasize her slender figure. She had a blue-eyed baby face to which the marks of time clung like an intricate spider web. She was blonder than the picture I’d seen of her daughter.

“Mrs. Stone?”

“I’m Mrs. Stone.”

I told her my name and occupation. “May I come in and talk to you for a bit?”

“What about?”

“Your daughter Dolly and what happened to her. I know it must be a painful subject—”

“Painful subject is right. I don’t see any sense in going over and over the same old ground. You people know who killed her as well as me. Instead of coming around torturing me, why don’t you go and catch that man? He has to be some place.”

“I took Campion last night, Mrs. Stone. He’s being held in Redwood City.”

A hungry eagerness deepened the lines in her face and aged her suddenly. “Has he confessed?”

“Not yet. We need more information. I’m comparatively new on the case, and I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

“Sure. Come in.”

She unhooked the screen door and led me across a hallway into her living room. It was closely blinded, almost dark. Instead of raising a blind, she turned on a standing lamp.

“Excuse the dust on everything. It’s hard to keep a decent house with that road work going on. Stone thought we should sell, but we found out we couldn’t get our money out of it. The lucky ones were the people across the way that got condemned by the State. But they’re not widening on this side.”

An undersong of protest ran through everything she said, and she had reason. Grey dust rimed the furniture; even without it the furniture would have been shabby. I sat on a prolapsed chair and watched her arrange herself on the chesterfield. She had the faintly anachronistic airs of a woman who had been good-looking but had found no place to use her looks except the mirror.

At the moment I was the mirror, and she smiled into me intensively. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Well start with your son-in-law. Did you ever meet him?”

“Once. Once was enough. Jack and me invited the two of them down for Christmas. We had a hen turkey and all the trimmings. But that Bruce Campion acted like he was on a slumming expedition. He hauled poor Dolly out of here so fast
you’d think there was a quarantine sign on the house. Little did he know that some of the best people in town are our good friends.”

“Did you quarrel with him?”

“You bet I did. What did he have to act so snooty about? Dolly told me they were living in a garage, and we’ve owned our own house here for twenty-odd years. So I asked him what he planned to do for her. When was he going to get a job and so on? He said he married her, didn’t he, and that was all he planned to do for her, said he already had a job doing his own work. So I asked him how much money he made and he said not very much, but they were getting along with the help of friends. I told him my daughter wasn’t a charity case, and he said that’s what
I
thought. Imagine him talking like that to her own mother, and her six months pregnant at the time. I tried to talk her into cutting her losses and staying here with us, but Dolly wouldn’t. She was too loyal.”

Mrs. Stone had the total recall of a woman with a grievance. I interrupted her flow of words: “Were they getting along with each other?”

“She
was getting along with him. It took a saint to do it and that’s what she was, a saint.” She rummaged in a sewing basket beside her. “I want to show you a letter she wrote me after Christmas. If you ever saw a devoted young wife it was her.”

She produced a crumpled letter addressed to her and postmarked “Luna Bay, Dec. 27.” It was written in pencil on a sheet of sketching paper by an immature hand:

“Doesn’t it tear your heart out?” Mrs. Stone said, plucking at the neighborhood of hers. “I mean the way she idolized him and all?”

I assumed a suitably grim expression. It came naturally enough. I was thinking of the cultural gap between Dolly and Harriet, and the flexibility of the man who had straddled it.

“How did she happen to marry him, Mrs. Stone?”

“It’s the old old story. You probably know what happened. She was an innocent girl. She’d never even been away from home before. He corrupted her, and he had to take the consequences.” She was a little alarmed by what she had said. She dropped her eyes, and added: “It was partly my own fault, I admit it. I never should have let her go off to Nevada by herself, a young girl like her.”

“How old?”

“Dolly was just twenty when she left home. That was a year ago last May. She was working in the laundry and she wasn’t happy there, under her father’s thumb. She wanted to have more of a life of her own. I couldn’t blame her for that. A girl with her looks could go far.”

She paused, and her eyes went into long focus. Perhaps she was remembering that a girl with her own looks hadn’t. Perhaps
she was remembering how far Dolly had gone, all the way out of life.

“Anyway,” she said, “I let her go up to Tahoe and get herself a job. It was just to be for the summer. She was supposed to save her money, so she could prepare herself for something permanent. I wanted her to go to beauty school. She was very good at grooming herself—it was the one real talent she had. She took after me in that. But then she ran into
him
, and that was the end of beauty school and everything else.”

“Did she make any other friends up at the lake?”

“Yeah, there was one little girl who helped her out, name of Fawn. She was a beauty operator, and Dolly thought very highly of her. She even wrote me about her. I was glad she had a girl friend like that. I thought it would give her some ambition. Beauty operators command good money, and you can get a job practically anywhere. I always regretted I didn’t take it up myself. Jack makes a fair salary at the laundry, but it’s been hard these last years, with inflation and all. Now we have the baby to contend with.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

“I’d like to see the baby.”

“He’s upstairs sleeping. What do you want to see him for?”

“I like babies.”

“You don’t look the type. I’m not the type myself, not any more. You get out of the habit of attending to their needs. Still,” she added in a softer voice, “the little man’s a comfort to me. He’s all I have left of Dolores. You can come and take a look—long as you don’t wake him.”

I followed her up the rubber-treaded staircase. The baby’s room was dim and hot. She turned on a shaded wall light. He was lying uncovered in the battered crib which I had seen in Mungan’s glaring photographs. As Mungan had predicted, he didn’t resemble anyone in particular. Small and vulnerable and profoundly sleeping, he was simply a baby. His breath was sweet.

His grandmother pulled a sheet up over the round Buddha eye of his umbilicus. I stood above him, trying to guess what he would look like when he grew up. It was hard to imagine him as a man, with a man’s passions.

“This was Dolly’s own crib,” Mrs. Stone was saying. “We sent it up with them at Christmas. Now we have it back here.” I heard her breath being drawn in. “Thank God his crazy father spared him, anyway.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dolly called him Jack, after her father. Dolly and her father were always close. What do you think of him?”

“He’s a fine healthy baby.”

“Oh, I do for him the best I can. It isn’t easy to go back to it, though, after twenty years. My only hope is that I can bring him up properly. I guess I didn’t do such a good job of bringing Dolly up.”

I murmured something encouraging as we started downstairs. Like other women I had known, she had the strength to accept the worst that could happen and go on from there. Moving like a dreamer into the living room, she went to the mantel and took down a framed photograph.