Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

She got a man’s topcoat out of the back of the hearse and put it on. It was good brown tweed which looked expensive, but there were wavy white salt marks on it, as if it had been immersed in the sea. Her fingers trembled on the brown leather buttons. One of the buttons, the top one, was missing. She turned up the collar around the back of her head where the wet hair clung like a golden helmet.

“If you’re cold I have a heater in my car.”

“Blah,” she said, and turned her tweed back on me.

I loaded the camera with color film and took some careful shots of Damis’s painting. On my way to the airport I dropped the film off with a photographer friend in Santa Monica. He promised to get it developed in a hurry.

The very polite young man at the Mexicana desk did a few minutes’ research and came up with the information that Q. R. Simpson had indeed been on the July 10 flight from Guadalajara. So had Harriet Blackwell. Burke Damis hadn’t.

My tentative conclusion, which I kept to myself, was that Damis had entered the United States under the name of Simpson. Since he couldn’t leave Mexico without a nontransferable tourist card or enter this country without proof of citizenship, the chances were that Q. R. Simpson was Damis’s real name.

The polite young Mexican told me further that the crew of the July 10 flight had flown in from Mexico again early this afternoon. The pilot and copilot were in the office now, but they wouldn’t know anything about the passengers. The steward and stewardess, who would, had already gone for the day. They were due to fly out again tomorrow morning. If I came out to the airport before flight time, perhaps they would have a few minutes to talk to me about my friend Señor Simpson.

Exhilarated by his Latin courtesy, I walked back to the Immigration and Customs shed. The officers on duty took turns looking at my license as if it was something I’d found in a box of breakfast cereal.

Feeling the need to check in with some friendly authority, I drove downtown. Peter Colton was in his cubicle in the District Attorney’s office, behind a door that said Chief Criminal Investigator.

Peter had grown old in law enforcement. The grooves of discipline and thought were like saber scars in his cheeks. His triangular eyes glinted at me over half-glasses which had slid down his large aggressive nose.

He finished reading a multigraphed sheet, initialed it, and scaled it into his out-basket.

“Sit down, Lew. How’s it going?”

“All right. I dropped by to thank you for recommending me to Colonel Blackwell.”

He regarded me quizzically. “You don’t sound very grateful. Is Blackie giving you a bad time?”

“Something is. He handed me a peculiar case. I don’t know whether it’s a case or not. It may be only Blackwell’s imagination.”

“He never struck me as the imaginative type.”

“Known him long?”

“I served under him, for my sins, in Bavaria just after the war. He was in Military Government, and I was in charge of a plain-clothes section of Military Police.”

“What was he like to work for?”

“Tough,” Colton said, and added reflectively: “Blackie liked command, too much. He didn’t get enough of it during the fighting. Some friend in Washington, or some enemy, kept him in the rear echelons. I don’t know whether it was for Blackie’s own protection or the protection of the troops. He was bitter about it, and it made him hard on his men. But he’s a bit of an ass, and we didn’t take him too seriously.”

“In what way was he hard on his men?”

“All the ways he could think of. He went in for enforcement of petty rules. He was very keen on the anti-fraternization policy. My men had murder and rape and black-marketeering to contend with. But Blackie expected us to spend our nights patrolling the cabarets suppressing fraternization. It drove him crazy to think of all the fraternization that was going on between innocent American youths and man-eating Fräuleins.”

“Is he some kind of a sex nut?”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly.” But Colton’s grin was wolfish. “He’s a Puritan, from a long line of Puritans. What made it worse, he was having fraternization problems in his own family. His wife was interested in various other men. I heard later she divorced him.”

“What sort of a woman is she?”

“Quite a dish, in those days, but I never knew her up close. Does it matter?”

“It could. Her daughter Harriet went to Mexico to visit her a few weeks ago and made a bad connection. At least it doesn’t look too promising. He’s a painter named Burke Damis, or possibly Q. R. Simpson. She brought him back here with her, intends to marry him. Blackwell thinks the man is trying to take her for her money. He hired me to investigate that angle, or anything else that I can find on Damis.”

“Or possibly Q. R. Simpson, you said. Is Damis using an alias?”

“I haven’t confirmed it. I’m fairly sure he entered the country a week ago under the Q. R. Simpson name. It may be his real name, since it isn’t a likely alias.”

“And you want me to check it out.”

“That would be nice.”

Colton picked up his ball-point pen and jabbed with it in my direction. “You know I can’t spend public time and money on a private deal like this.”

“Even for an old friend?”

“Blackwell’s no friend of mine. I recommended you to get him out of my hair in one quick easy motion.”

“I was referring to myself,” I said, “no doubt presumptuously. A simple query to the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation wouldn’t take much time, and it might save trouble in the long run. You always say you’re more interested in preventing crime than punishing it.”

“What crime do you have in mind?”

“Murder for profit is a possibility. I don’t say it’s probable. I’m mainly concerned with saving a naive young woman from a lot of potential grief.”

“And saving yourself a lot of potential legwork.”

“I’m doing my own legwork as usual. But I could knock on every door from here to San Luis Obispo and it wouldn’t tell me what I need to know.”

“What, exactly, is that?”

“Whether Q. R. Simpson, or Burke Damis, has a record.”

Colton wrote the names on a memo pad. I’d succeeded in arousing his curiosity.

“I suppose I could check with Sacramento.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearly four. “If the circuits aren’t too loaded, we might get an answer before we close up for the night. You want to wait outside?”

I read a law-enforcement trade journal in the anteroom, all the way through to the advertisements. Police recruits were being offered as much as four hundred and fifty dollars a month in certain localities.

Peter Colton opened his door at five o’clock on the nose and beckoned me into his office. A teletype flimsy rustled in his hand.

“Nothing on Burke Damis,” he said. “Quincy Ralph Simpson is another story: he’s on the Missing Persons list, has been for a couple of weeks. According to his wife, he’s been gone much longer than that.”

“His wife?”

“She’s the one who reported him missing. She lives up north, in San Mateo County.”

IT WAS CLEAR late twilight when the jet dropped down over the Peninsula. The lights of its cities were scattered like a broken necklace along the dark rim of the Bay. At its tip stood San Francisco, remote and brilliant as a city of the mind, hawsered to reality by her two great bridges – if Marin and Berkeley were reality.

I took a cab to Redwood City. The deputy on duty on the ground floor of the Hall of Justice was a young man with red chipmunk cheeks and eyes that were neither bright nor stupid. He looked me over noncommittally, waiting to see if I was a citizen or one of the others.