Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

“The police will probably make arrangements for you. Let’s wait and see how it falls.”

The metal cupola of the courthouse swelled like a tarnished bubble under the stars. The building’s dark interior smelled mustily of human lives, like the inside of an old trunk. I found the duty deputy in an office on the first floor. He told me that Sergeant Leonard was at the mortuary, just around the corner.

It was a three-storied white colonial building with a sign on the lawn in front of it: “Norton’s Funeral Parlors.” Vicky hung back when we got out of the car. I took her arm and walked her down a hall through the odor of carnations to a lighted doorway at the end of the hall and through it into the odor of formaldehyde.

She dragged on my arm. “I can’t go through with it.”

“You have to. It may not be Ralph.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“It may be Ralph.”

She looked wildly around the room. It was bare except for a grey coffin standing on trestles against the wall.

“Is he in that?”

“No. Get yourself under control, Vicky. It will only take a minute and then it will be over.”

“But what am I going to do afterward?”

It was a question I couldn’t attempt to answer. A further door opened, and a deputy with sergeant’s stripes on his arm came through toward us. He was a middle-aged man with a belly overlapping his gunbelt, and slow friendly eyes that went with his voice on the telephone.

“I’m Leonard.”

“Archer. This is Mrs. Simpson.”

He bowed with exaggerated courtliness. “I’m pleased to know you, ma’am. It was good of you to make the journey.”

“I had to, I guess. Where is he?”

“The doctor’s working on him.”

“You mean he’s still alive?”

“He’s long dead, ma’am. I’m sorry. Dr. White is working on his internal organs, trying to find out what killed him.”

She started to sit down on the floor. I caught her under the arms. Leonard and I helped her into an adjoining room where a night light burned and the smell of carnations was strong. She half lay on an upholstered settee, with her spike heels tucked under her.

“If you don’t mind waiting a little, ma’am, Doc White will get him ready for your inspection.” Leonard’s voice had taken on unctuous intonations from the surroundings. He hovered over her. “Maybe I could get you a drink. What would you like to drink?”

“Embalming fluid.”

He made a shocked noise at the back of his palate.

“Just go away and leave me alone. I’m all right.”

I followed Leonard into the autopsy room. The dead man lay on an enameled table. I won’t describe him. His time in the earth, and on the table, had altered him for the worse. He bore no great resemblance to Burke Damis, and never had.

Dr. White was closing a butterfly incision in the body. His rubber-gloved hands looked like artificial hands. He was a bald-headed man with hound jowls drooping from under a tobacco-stained mustache. He had a burning cigarette in his mouth, and wagged his head slowly from side to side to keep the smoke out of his eyes. The smoke coiled and drifted in the brilliant overhead light.

I waited until he had finished what he was doing and had drawn a rubberized sheet up to the dead man’s chin.

“What did you find out, Doctor?”

“Heart puncture, in the left ventricle. Looks like an icepick wound.” He stripped off his rubber gloves and moved to the sink, saying above the noise of running water: “Those contusions on the head were inflicted after death, in my opinion – a long time after death.”

“By the bulldozer?”

“I assume so.”

“Just when was he dug up?”

“Friday, wasn’t it, Wesley?”

The Sergeant nodded. “Friday afternoon.”

“Did you make a preliminary examination then?”

Dr. White turned from the sink, drying his hands and arms. “None was ordered. The D. A. and the Sheriff, who’s also Coroner, are both in Sacramento at a convention.”

“Besides,” Leonard put in, eager to save face, “the icepick wound didn’t show from the outside hardly at all. It was just a little nick under the left breast.”

It wasn’t for me to tell them their business. I wanted co-operation. “Did you find the icepick?”

Leonard spread his hands loosely. “You couldn’t find anything out there after the ’dozers went through. Maybe you saw the mess on your way into town?”

“I saw it. Are you ready for Mrs. Simpson now?”

I was talking to the doctor and the Sergeant, but the question hung in the air as though it belonged to the dead man on the table. I even had a feeling that he might answer me. The room was getting me down.

I brought Vicky Simpson into it. The time by herself had calmed her. She had strength enough to walk across the room and stand by the table and look down at the ruined head for a minute, for minutes on end.

“It’s him. It’s Ralph.”

She proved it by stroking his dusty hair.

She looked up at Leonard. “What happened to him?”

“He was icepicked, ma’am, a couple of months ago.”

“You mean he’s been dead all this time?”

“A couple of months.”

The two months of waiting seemed to rush across her eyes like dizzy film. She turned blindly. I took her back to the room where the night light burned.

“Do you know who killed him, Vicky?”

“How would I know? I’ve never even been in Citrus Junction – is that what they call this hole?”

“You mentioned that Ralph was paid by the police to gather information.”

“That’s what he said. I don’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

“Did Ralph have criminal connections?”

“No. He wasn’t that kind of a man.”

“You said he had a record.”

She shook her head.

“You might as well tell me, Vicky. It can’t hurt him now.”

“It didn’t amount to anything,” she said. “He was just a kid. He got in with a bad crowd in high school and they got caught smoking reefers one time and they all got sent to Juvie. That was all the record Ralph had.”

“You’re certain?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Did he ever speak of a man named Burke Damis?”

“Burke Damis?”

“Damis is the man I met in Malibu, the one I described to you. He’s an artist, a painter, who apparently has been using your husband’s name.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Perhaps because he’s ashamed of his own name. I believe he used Ralph’s name to cross the border from Mexico last week. You’re sure the name Burke Damis rings no bell?”

“I’m sure.”

“And you don’t recognize the description?”

“No. At this point I wouldn’t recognize my own brother if he walked in the door. Aren’t you ever going to leave me alone?”

Leonard came into the room. I suspected that he had been listening outside the door, and chose this moment to break up the interview. He was a kind man, and he said that he and his wife would look after Vicky for the balance of the night.

I drove home to Los Angeles, home to a hot shower and a cold drink and a dark bed.

I HAD A DREAM which I’d been dreaming in variant forms for as long as I could remember. I was back in high school, in my senior year. The girl at the next desk smiled at me snootily.

“Poor Lew. You’ll fail the exams.”

I had to admit to myself that this was likely. The finals loomed up ahead like the impossible slopes of purgatory, guarded by men with books I hadn’t read.

“I’m going to college,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

I had no idea. I knew with a part of my dreaming mind that I was a grown man in my forties. There wasn’t anything more that high school could do to me. Yet here I was, back in Mr. Merritt’s classroom, dreading the finals and wondering what I would do when I had failed them.