Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

He made a sideways slicing gesture. The edge of his hand struck the doorframe. He put the edge of his hand in his mouth.

“I heard a rumor that he killed his own wife.”

“That was no rumor. We were in San Francisco in the spring, and I saw it in the paper with these eyes – the dead woman’s picture and all. It said that he shtrangled her. But we didn’t know who he was when he came here worming his way. We didn’t know till we saw the picture he painted.”

“Was it a portrait of his wife?”

“Thass right. Helen reckonized her face, poor little woman. That snake-in-the-grass shtrangled her with his own hands.”

Wilkinson made clutching motions, as though he was having a waking dream of strangling or being strangled. His wife called from somewhere out of sight: “Who is it, Bill? Who are you talking to?”

“Man from L. A. He says that he’s a detective.”

She ran the length of the living room to his side. “Don’t talk to him.”

“I’ll talk to him if I like,” he said with the look of a spoiled and sullen child. “I’ll put the kibosh on Damis once and for all.”

“You stay out of it.”

“You were the one that got me into it. If you hadn’t tried to blackmail him into–”

“Be quiet. You’re a fool.”

They faced each other in a rage that created a vacuum around them. He was twice as big as she was, and almost twice as young, but she held her anger better. Her taut and shining face was expressionless.

“Listen to me, Bill. This man was here an hour or so ago. I had to ask him to leave.”

“Whaffor?”

“He made a pass at me.” Her hooked fingers swept across her bosom.

His attention slopped heavily in my direction. “Izzat true?”

“Don’t believe her.”

“Now he’s calling me a liar.” Her white triangular face was at his shoulder. “Are you going to let him get away with it?”

He threw a wild fist at my head. I let it go by and hit him in the body. He sat down holding his belly with both hands. I shouldn’t have hit him. He retched.

“Why you dirty lousy son,” the woman said.

She picked her revolver off the table and fired it at me. The bullet tugged at a loose fold of Stacy’s sweater, close to my side. I turned and ran.

IN THE MORNING, the sudden morning, Stacy drove me to the airport. He wouldn’t let me pay him for the service, or for the double hole in his sweater. He said it would make a conversation piece.

But he did ask me when I had the time to call a friend of his who managed a small hotel in Laguna Beach. I was to tell the man that Claude was doing all right, and there were no hard feelings.

I tottered on board the plane and slept most of the way to Los Angeles. We landed shortly after one o’clock. It was hot, hotter than it had been in Mexico. Smog lay over the city like the lid of a pressure cooker.

I immured myself in an outside phone booth and made several calls. Colonel Blackwell had had no word from Harriet since she drove off with Damis the day before yesterday. It was possible, he agreed, that they had gone to Tahoe. His lodge there was situated on the lake, on the Nevada side of State Line.

I cut his anxious questions short with a promise to come and see him at his house. Then I called Arnie Walters in Reno. He ran a detective agency which covered that end of Nevada.

Arnie’s wife and partner answered the phone. Phyllis Walters had the official-sounding voice of an ex-policewoman, but it didn’t quite hide her exuberant femininity.

“How are you, Lew? Where have you been keeping yourself?”

“All over the map. Last night, for instance, I spent a week in Mexico.”

“You do get around. Arnie’s out. Is it business or just social?”

“Urgent business. You’d better record this.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

I gave her a description of Harriet and Damis and asked to have them looked for in the Tahoe and Reno area, with special attention to the Blackwell lodge and the wedding chapels. “If Arnie or one of his men runs into Damis, with or without the girl, I want Damis held.”

“We can’t detain him, you know that.”

“You can make a citizen’s arrest and turn him over to the nearest cop. He’s a fugitive from a murder rap.”

“Who did he murder?”

“His wife, apparently. I expect to get the details this afternoon. In the meantime Arnie should be warned that the man is dangerous.”

“Will do.”

“Good girl. I’ll get back to you later, Phyllis.”

I called the photographer with whom I’d left my film of Damis’s painting. The slides were ready. Finally, I called the art critic Manny Meyer. He said he’d be home for the next hour, and he was willing to look at my exhibits. I picked up the slides in Santa Monica and drove up Wilshire to Westwood.

Manny lived in one of the big new apartment buildings on the hill. The windows of his front room overlooked the UCLA campus. It was the room of a man who loved art and not much besides. Dozens of books had overflowed from the bookshelves onto the furniture, including the closed top of the baby grand piano. The walls were literally paneled with nineteenth-century reproductions and contemporary originals. Entering the room was like stepping into the interior of Manny’s head.

He was a small man in a rumpled seersucker suit. His eyes looked deceptively sleepy behind his glasses. They regarded me with quiet waiting patience, as if I was the raw material of art.

“Sit down, Lew.”

He waved his hand at the encumbered chairs. I remained standing.

“You would like me to identify a style, is that the problem? It isn’t always so easy. You know how many painters there are? I bet you I could find five hundred within a radius of a mile. A thousand, maybe.” He smiled slightly. “All of them geniuses of the first water.”

“This particular genius did a self-portrait, which ought to make it easier for you.”

“If I have ever seen him.”

I got the bamboo-framed sketch out of my straw bag and showed it to Manny. He held it in his hands, studying it with concentration, like a man peering into a mirror for traces of illness.

“I believe I have seen him. Let me look at the transparencies.”

I slid them out of their envelope. He held them up to the window one at a time.

“Yes. I know him. He has his own style, though there has been some change in it, perhaps some deterioration. That wouldn’t be surprising.” When he turned from the window his eyes were sorrowful.

“His name is Bruce Campion. I saw some of his work at a showing of young artists in San Francisco last year. I also met him briefly. I hear since then that he has come to grief, that he is wanted by the police, for murdering his wife. It was in the San Francisco papers. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

“I don’t take the San Francisco papers.”

“Perhaps you should. You could have saved yourself time and trouble.” He gathered together the sketch and the slides and handed them back to me. “I suppose you’re hot on his heels?

“On the contrary, the trail is cold.”

“I’m glad. Campion is a good painter.”

“How good?”

“So good that I don’t greatly care what he did to his wife,” he said softly. “You live in a world of stark whites and blacks. My world is one of shadings, and the mechanism of punishment is anathema to me. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is the law of a primitive tribe. If we practiced it to the letter we would all be eyeless and toothless. I hope he eludes you, and goes on painting.”

“The danger is that he’ll go on killing.”

“I doubt it. According to my reading, murderers are the criminals least likely to repeat their offense. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a show to cover.”