Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

“The doctor’s in Guad and I’m here.”

“I’m here, too.”

“So be a sport and get us all a drink. You know what I like.”

He shrugged and turned to me. “What will you have?”

“Whisky?”

“I can’t recommend the whisky. The gin’s okay.”

“Gin and tonic will be fine.”

He left the room with a nervous glance at his wife, as if she might be contemplating elopement. She turned the full panoply of her charm on me.

“I know you must think I’m a strange sort of mother, totally unconcerned with my daughter’s welfare and so on. The fact is I’m a kind of refugee. I escaped from Mark and his ménage long long ago. I haven’t even seen him for thirteen years, and for once that’s a lucky number. I turned over a fresh page and started a new chapter – a chapter dedicated to love and freedom.” Romanticism soughed in her voice like a loosely strung Aeolian harp.

“It isn’t entirely clear to me why you left him.”

She took the implied question as a matter of course. “The marriage was a mistake. We had really very little in common. I love movement and excitement, interesting people, people with a sense of life.” She looked at me sideways. “You seem to be a man with a sense of life. I’m surprised that you should be a friend of Mark’s. He used to spend his spare time doing research on the Blackwell genealogy.”

“I didn’t say I was friend of Mark’s.”

“But I understood he sent you here.”

“I’m a private detective, Mrs. Hatchen. He hired me to look into Damis’s background. I was hoping you could give me some assistance.”

“I barely knew the fellow. Though I sensed from the beginning that Harriet was smitten with him.”

“When was the beginning?”

“A few days after she got here. She came a little over a month ago. I was really glad to see her.” She sounded surprised. “A little disappointed, perhaps, but glad.”

“Why disappointed?”

“I had various reasons. I’d always sort of hoped that she’d outgrow her ugly-duckling phase, and she did to some extent, of course. After all she is my daughter.” Her active forefinger went to her brow and moved down her nose to her mouth and chin, which she tilted up. “And I was disappointed that we didn’t really have anything in common. She didn’t take to our friends or our way of life. We did our best to make her comfortable, but she moved out before the end of the first week.”

“And moved in with Damis?”

“Harriet wouldn’t do that. She’s quite a conventional girl. She rented a studio down near the lake. I think he had one somewhere in the neighborhood. I have no doubt they spent a lot of time together. More power to them, I thought.”

“Did you know Burke Damis before she met him?”

“No, and she didn’t meet him in our casa . We’d seen him around, of course, but we’d never met him till Harriet introduced him. That was a few days after she got here, as I said.”

“Where did you see him around?”

“At the Cantina mostly. I think that’s where Harriet picked – where Harriet met him. A lot of arty young people hang out there, or used to.”

“You saw him there before she met him?”

“Oh, yes, several times. He’s rather conspicuously good-looking, don’t you think?”

“Was he using the name Burke Damis?”

“I suppose so. You could always ask the Cantina people. It’s just down the street.”

“I’ll do that. Before Harriet arrived, did Damis ever try to contact you?”

“Never. We didn’t know him from Adam.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is Mark trying to pin the blame on me for something?”

“No, but it occurred to me that Damis might have had her spotted before she got here.”

“Spotted?”

“As a girl with money behind her.”

“He didn’t learn it from us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“And there was nothing to show that he deliberately planned to meet her?”

“I doubt it. He picked her up in the Cantina and she was dazzled with gratitude, poor girl.”

“Why do you say ‘poor girl’?”

“I’ve always felt that way about Harriet. She had a rough deal, from both of us. I realize I appear to be a selfish woman, leaving her and Mark when she was just a child. But I had no choice if I wanted to save my soul.”

I sat there wondering if she had saved it and waiting for her to elaborate. Her eyes had the hardness that comes from seeing too many changes and not being changed by them.

“To make a long story short, and a sordid one, I moved into the Tahoe house and got a Reno divorce. I didn’t want to do it. It broke my heart to turn my back on Harriet. But she was very much her father’s daughter. There was nothing I could do to break that up, short of murder. And don’t think I haven’t contemplated murder. But a Nevada divorce seemed more civilized. Keith–” she gestured toward the kitchen, where ice was being picked “–Keith was in Nevada on the same errand. What’s keeping him out there so long?”

“He may be giving us a chance to talk.”

“Yes, he’s a very thoughtful man. I’ve been very happy with Keith, don’t think I haven’t.” There was a hint of defiance in her voice. “On the other hand, don’t think I haven’t felt guilty about my daughter. When she visited us last month the old guilt feelings came back. It was so obvious that she wanted – that she needed something from me. Something I couldn’t give, and if I could, she couldn’t have taken it. She still blamed me for deserting her, as she put it. I tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen to any criticism of her father. He’s always dominated her every thought. She went into hysterics, and so did I, I suppose. We quarreled, and she moved out on me.”

“It looks as though that made her ripe for Damis. I’ve known other men like him. They prey on girls and women who step outside the protection of their families.”

“You make him sound like a very devious type.”

“He’s devious. Does the name Q. R. Simpson mean anything to you? Quincy Ralph Simpson?”

She shook her head and her hairdo slipped. It made her entire personality seem held in place by pins. “Should I know the name?”

“I didn’t really expect you to.”

“What name?” her husband said from the doorway. He came in carrying a hammered brass tray with three pale drinks placed geometrically on it.

“The name that Burke Damis used to cross the border, coming and going. Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“You will if you take the California papers.”

“But we don’t.” He passed the drinks around with a flourish. “We are happy fugitives from the California papers, and from nuclear bombs and income taxes–”

“And the high cost of liquor,” his wife chimed in like the other half of a vaudeville team.

“This gin costs me forty American cents a liter,” he said, “and I don’t believe you can top it at any price. Well, salud .” He lifted his glass.

I drank from mine. The gin was all right, but it failed to warm me. There was something cold and lost about the room and the people in it. They had roosted like migrant birds that had lost their homing instincts, caught in a dream of perpetual static flight. Or so it seemed through the bottom of my glass.

I set it down and got up. Hatchen rose, too.

“What was that about this man Simpson and the newspapers?”

“Simpson was stabbed with an icepick a couple of months ago. His body was found last week.”

“And you say Damis was using his name?”

“Yes.”

“Is he suspected of Simpson’s murder?”

“Yes. By me.”

“Poor Harriet,” Mrs. Hatchen said over her drink.