The Zebra-Striped Hearse (4 page)

H
E SAID WHEN
she released him: “Is there anything else, Mr. Archer?”

“No. Thanks. I’ll check back with you later.”

“If you insist.”

Harriet Blackwell gave me a peculiar look. “Your name is Archer?”

I acknowledged that it was. She turned her back on me, in a movement that reminded me of her father, and stood looking out over the grey sea. Like a man stepping under a bell jar which muffled sound and feeling, Damis had already returned to his painting.

I let myself out, wondering if it had been a good idea to put in a personal appearance at the beach house. I found out in a moment that it hadn’t been. Before I reached my car, Harriet came running after me, her heels rat-tat-tatting on the wooden gangway.

“You came here to spy on us, didn’t you?”

She took hold of my arm and shook it. Her snakeskin bag fell to the ground between us. I picked it up and handed it to her as a peace offering. She snatched it out of my hand.

“What are you trying to do to me? What did I ever do to you?”

“Not a thing, Miss Blackwell. And I’m not trying to do anything to you.”

“That’s a lie. Father hired you to break it up between me and Burke. I heard him talk to you yesterday, on the telephone.”

“You don’t have very good security at your house.”

“I have a right to protect myself, when people connive against me.”

“Your father thinks he’s protecting you.”

“Oh, certainly. By trying to destroy the only happiness I’ll ever know or want.” There was a lilt of hysteria in her voice. “Father pretends to love me, but I believe in his secret heart of hearts he wishes me ill. He
wants
me to be lonely and miserable.”

“That’s not very sensible talk.”

She shifted her mood abruptly, “But what you’re doing is very sensible, I suppose. Sneaking around other people’s houses pretending to be something different from what you are.”

“It wasn’t a good idea.”

“So you admit it.”

“I should have gone about it in a different way.”

“You’re
cynical.”
She curled her lips at me youngly. “I don’t know how you can bear to live with yourself.”

“I was trying to do a job. I bungled it. Let’s start over.”

“I have nothing to say to you whatever.”

“I have something to say to you, Miss Blackwell. Are you willing to sit in the car and listen to me?”

“You can say it right out here.”

“I don’t want interruptions,” I said, looking back toward the beach house.

“You don’t have to be afraid of Burke. I didn’t tell him who you are. I don’t like to upset him when he’s working.”

She sounded very much like a young wife, or almost-wife. I made a comment on this. It seemed to please her.

“I love him. It’s no secret. You can write it down in your little black book and make a full report of it to Father. I love Burke, and I’m going to marry him.”

“When?”

“Very soon now.” She hid her secret behind a hushed mysterious look. Perhaps she wasn’t sure she had a secret to hide. “I wouldn’t dream of telling you when or where. Father would call out the National Guard, at least.”

“Are you getting married to please yourself or spite your father?”

She looked at me uncomprehendingly. I had no doubt it was a relevant question, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to it.

“Let’s forget about Father,” I said.

“How can I? There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to stop us. He said so himself.”

“I’m not here to stop your marriage, Miss Blackwell.”

“Then what are you trying to do?”

“Find out what I can about your friend’s background.”

“So Father can use it against him.”

“That’s assuming there’s something that can be used.”

“Isn’t that your assumption?”

“No. I made it clear to Colonel Blackwell that I wouldn’t go along with a smear attempt, or provide the material for any kind of moral blackmail. I want to make it clear to you.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you?”

“Why not? I have nothing against your friend, or against you. If you’d co-operate—”

“Oh, very likely.” She looked at me as though I’d made an obscene suggestion. “You’re a brash man, aren’t you?”

“I’m trying to make the best of a bad job. If you’d co-operate we might be able to get it over with in a hurry. It’s not the kind of a job I like.”

“You didn’t have to take it. I suppose you took it because you needed the money.” There was a note of patronage in her voice, the moral superiority of the rich who never have to do anything for money. “How much money is Father paying you?”

“A hundred a day.”

“I’ll give you five hundred, five days’ pay, if you’ll simply go away and forget about us.”

She took out her red wallet and brandished it.

“I couldn’t do that, Miss Blackwell. Besides, it wouldn’t do
you any good. He’d go and hire himself another detective. And if you think I’m trouble, you should take a look at some of my colleagues.”

She leaned on the white guard rail and studied me in silence. Behind her the summer tide had begun to turn. The rising surge slid up the beach, and sanderlings skimmed along its wavering edges. She said to an invisible confidant located somewhere between me and the birds: “Can the man be honest?”

“I can and am. I can, therefore I am.”

No smile. She never smiled. “I still don’t know what I’m going to do about you. You realize this situation is impossible.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Don’t you have any interest in your fiancé’s background?”

“I know all I need to know.”

“And what is that?”

“He’s a sweet man, and a brilliant one, and he’s had a very rough time. Now that he’s painting again, there’s no limit to what he can accomplish. I want to help him develop his potential.”

“Where did he study painting?”

“I’ve never asked him.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Long enough.”

“How long?”

“Three or four weeks.”

“And that’s long enough to make up your mind to marry him?”

“I have a right to marry whom I please. I’m not a child, and neither is Burke.”

“I realize
he
isn’t.”

“I’m twenty-four,” she said defensively. “I’m going to be twenty-five in December.”

“At which time you come into money.”

“Father’s briefed you very thoroughly, hasn’t he? But there
are probably a few things he left out. Burke doesn’t care about money, he despises it. We’re going to Europe or South America and live very simply, and he will do his work and I will help him and that will be our life.” There were stars in her eyes, dim and a long way off. “If I thought the money would prevent me from marrying the man I love, I’d
give
it away.”

“Would Burke like that?”

“He’d love it.”

“Have you discussed it with him?”

“We’ve discussed everything. We’re very frank with each other.”

“Then you can tell me where he comes from and so on.”

There was another silence. She moved restlessly against the guard rail as though I had backed her into a corner. The chancy stars in her eyes had dimmed out In spite of her protestations, she was a worried girl. I guessed that she was mainlining on euphoria, which can be as destructive as any drug.

“Burke doesn’t like to talk about the past. It makes him unhappy.”

“Because he’s an orphan?”

“That’s part of it, I think.”

“He must be thirty. A man stops being an orphan at twenty-one. What’s he been doing since he gave up being a full-time orphan?”

“All he’s ever done is paint”

“In Mexico?”

“Part of the time.”

“How long had he been in Mexico when you met him?”

“I don’t know. A long time.”

“Why did he go to Mexico?”

“To paint.”

We were going around in circles, concentric circles which contained nothing but a blank. I said: “We’ve been talking for some time now, and you haven’t told me anything that would help to check your friend out.”

“What do you expect? I haven’t pried into his affairs. I’m not a detective.”

“I’m supposed to be,” I said ruefully, “but you’re making me look like a slob.”

“That could be because you are a slob. You could always give up and go away. Go back to Father and tell him you’re a failure.”

Her needle failed to strike a central nerve, but I reacted to it. “Look here, Miss Blackwell. I sympathize with your natural desire to break away from your family ties and make a life of your own. But you don’t want to jump blindly in the opposite direction—”

“You sound exactly like Father. I’m sick of people breathing in my face, telling me what to do and what not to do. You can go back and tell him that.”

She was getting terribly restless. I knew I couldn’t hold her very much longer. Her body mimed impatience in its awkward gangling attitude, half sitting on the rail, with one foot kicking out spasmodically. It was a fine big body, I thought, not meant for spinsterhood. I had serious doubts that Harriet and her fine big body and her fine big wad of money were meant for Burke Damis, either. The little love scene I’d witnessed between them had been completely one-sided.

Her face had darkened. She turned it away from me. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m trying to understand you.”

“Don’t bother. There’s nothing to understand. I’m a very simple person.”

“I was thinking that, too.”

“You make it sound like an insult.”

“No. I doubt that your friend Burke is quite so simple. That isn’t an insult, either.”

“What is it?”

“Call it a warning. If you were my daughter, and you’re young enough to be, I’d hate to see you fling yourself into this
thing in a frantic hurry—merely because your father is against it.”

“That isn’t my reason. It’s a positive thing.”

“Whatever your reasons are, you could find yourself in water over your head.”

She looked out past the kelp beds where the ocean went dark and deep and the sharks lived out of sight.

“ ‘Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘but don’t go near the water.’ I’ve heard that before.”

“You could even keep your clothes on.”

She gave me another of her looks, her black Blackwell looks. “How dare you speak to me in that way?”

“The words came out. I let them.”

“You’re an insufferable man.”

“While I’m being insufferable, you may be able to clear up a small discrepancy for me. I noticed that the shaving kit in the bathroom has the initials B.C. on it. Those initials don’t go with the name Burke Damis.”

“I never noticed it.”

“Don’t you find it interesting?”

“No.” But the blood had drained out of her face and left it sallow. “I imagine it belonged to some previous guest. A lot of different people have used the beach house.”

“Name one with the initials B.C.”

“Bill Campbell,” she said quickly.

“Bill Campbell’s initials would be W.C. Who is Bill Campbell, by the way?”

“A friend of Father’s. I don’t know if he ever used the beach house or not.”

“Or if he ever existed?”

I’d pressed too hard, and lost her. She dismounted from the rail, smoothing down her skirt, and started away from me toward the beach house. I watched her go. No doubt she was a simple person, as she said, but I couldn’t fathom her.

I
DROVE BACK
up to the highway. Diagonally across the intersection, a large fading sign painted on the side of a roadside diner advertised Jumbo Shrimp. I could smell grease before I got out of the car.

The stout woman behind the counter looked as though she had spent her life waiting, but not for me. I sat in a booth by the front window, partly obscured by an unlit neon beer sign. She brought me a knife and fork, a glass of water, and a paper napkin. I was the only customer in the place.

“You want the shrimp special?”

“I’ll just have coffee, thanks.”

“That will cost you twenty cents,” she said severely, “without the food to go with it.”

She picked up the knife and fork and the paper napkin. I sat and nursed the coffee, keeping an eye on the blacktop road that led up from the beach.

The overcast was burning off. A sun like a small watery moon appeared behind it. The muffled horizon gradually cleared, and the sea changed from grey to greyish blue. The surf had begun to thump so hard I could hear it.

Two or three cars had come up from the cluster of beach houses, but there had been no sign of Harriet’s green Buick. I started in on my second cup of coffee. Refills were only ten cents.

A zebra-striped hearse with a broken headlight came in off the highway. It disgorged, from front and rear, four boys and two girls who all looked like siblings. Their hair, bleached by sun and peroxide, was long on the boys and short on the girls so that it was almost uniform. They wore blue sweatshirts over
bathing suits. Their faces were brown and closed.

They came in and sat in a row at the counter, ordered six beers, drank them with hero sandwiches which the girls made out of French loaves and other provisions brought in in paper bags. They ate quietly and voraciously. From time to time, between bites, the largest boy, who carried himself like their leader, made a remark about big surf. He might have been talking about a tribal deity.

They rose in unison like a platoon, and marched out to their hearse. Two of the boys got into the front seat. The rest of them sat in the back beside the surfboards. One of the girls, the pretty one, made a face at me through the side window. For no good reason, I made a face back at her. The hearse turned down the blacktop toward the beach.

“Beach bums,” the woman behind the counter said.

She wasn’t talking to me. Having nursed two coffees for an hour, I may have been included in her epithet. The coffee, or the waiting, was beginning to make me nervous. I ordered a therapeutic beer and turned back to the window.

The woman went on talking to herself. “You’d think they’d have more respect, painting a hearse in stripes like that. They got no respect for the living or the dead. How they expect me to make a living, bringing in their own food?
I
don’t know what the world is coming to.”