Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

I checked in at a Camino Real motel and went to sleep trying to think of some one thing I could do that would be absolutely right and final. I dreamed that Campion was innocent and I had to prove it by re-enacting the crimes with paper dolls that stuck to my fingers. Then I found Harriet’s body in the lake. She had talon marks on her head.

I awoke in a cold sweat. The late night traffic whirred with a sound like wings along the highway.

I GOT UP into the sharp-edged uncertainties of morning and drove across the county to Luna Bay. Patrick Mungan, the deputy in charge there, was a man I knew and trusted. I hoped the trust was reciprocal.

When I entered the bare stucco substation, his broad face generated a smile which resembled sunlight on a cliff.

“I hear you’ve been doing our work for us, Lew.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Uh-huh. You look kind of bedraggled. I keep an electric razor here, in case you want to borrow it.”

I rubbed my chin. It rasped. “Thanks, it can wait. Captain Royal tells me you handled the evidence in the Dolly Campion murder.”

“What evidence there was. We didn’t pick up too much. It wasn’t there to be picked up.”

Mungan had risen from his desk. He was a huge man who towered over me. It gave me the not unpleasant illusion of being small and fast, like a trained-down welterweight. He opened the swinging door at the end of the counter that divided the front office.

“Come on in and sit down. I’ll send out for coffee.”

“That can wait, too.”

“Sure, but we might as well be comfortable while we talk.” He summoned a young deputy from the back room and dispatched him for coffee. “What got you so involved in the Campion business?”

“Some Los Angeles people named Blackwell hired me to look into Campion’s background. He’d picked up their daughter Harriet in Mexico and was romancing her, under an alias. Three days ago they ran away together to Nevada, where she disappeared. The indications are that she’s his second victim, or his third.”

I told Mungan about the hat in the water, and about the dusty fate of Quincy Ralph Simpson. He listened earnestly, with the corners of his mouth drawn down like a bulldog’s, and said when I’d done: “The Blackwell girl I don’t know about. But I don’t see any reason why Campion would stab Ralph Simpson. It may be true what he said about Simpson lending him his papers to use. They were friends. When the Campions moved here last fall, it was Simpson who found them a house. Call it a house, but I guess it was all they could afford. They had a tough winter.”

“In what way?”

“Every way. They ran out of money. The wife was pregnant and he wasn’t working, unless you call painting pictures work. They had to draw welfare money for a while. The county cut ’em off when they found out Campion was using some of it to buy paints. Ralph Simpson helped them out as much as he could. I heard when the baby was born in March, he was the one paid the doctor.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah. It crossed my mind at the time that maybe Simpson was the baby’s father. I asked him if he was, after Dolly got killed. He denied it.”

“It’s still a possibility. Simpson was a friend of Dolly’s before she knew Campion. I found out last night that Simpson was responsible for bringing them together in the first place. If Simpson got her pregnant and let Campion hold the bag, it would give Campion a motive for both killings. I realize that’s very iffy reasoning.”

“It is that.”

“Have you had any clear indication that Campion wasn’t the father?”

Mungan shook his ponderous head. “All the indications point the other way. Remember she was well along when he married her in September. A man doesn’t do that for a woman unless he’s the one.”

“I admit it isn’t usual. But Campion isn’t a usual man.”

“Thank the good Lord for that. If everybody was like him, the whole country would be headed for Hades in a handbasket. A hand-painted handbasket.” He laid his palm on the desk as if he was covering a hole card. “Personally I have my doubts that those two killings, Dolly and Simpson, are connected. I’m not saying they aren’t connected. I’m only saying I have my doubts.”

“They have to be connected, Pat. Simpson was killed within a couple of weeks of Dolly – a couple of weeks which he apparently spent investigating her death. Add to that the fact that he was found buried in her home town.”

“Citrus Junction?”

I nodded.

“Maybe he went to see the baby,” Mungan said thoughtfully. “The baby’s in Citrus Junction, you know. Dolly’s mother came and got him.”

“You seem to like my idea after all.”

“It’s worth bearing in mind, I guess. If you’re going down that way, you might drop in on Mrs. Stone and take a look at the little tyke. He’s only about four months old, though, so I wouldn’t count on his resembling anybody.”

The young deputy came back with a hot carton in a paper bag. Mungan poured black coffee for the three of us. In response to unspoken signals, the young deputy carried his into the back room and closed the door. Mungan said over his paper cup: “What I meant a minute ago, I meant the two killings weren’t connected the way you thought, by way of Campion. This isn’t official thinking, so I’m asking you to keep it confidential, but there’s some doubt in certain quarters that Campion killed Dolly.”

“What quarters are you talking about?”

“These quarters,” he said with a glance at the closed door. “Me personally. So did Ralph Simpson have his doubts. We talked about it. He knew that he was a suspect himself, but he insisted that Campion didn’t do it. Simpson was the kind of fellow who sometimes talked without knowing what he was talking about. But now that he’s dead, I give his opinion more weight.”

I sipped my coffee and kept still while Mungan went on in his deliberate way: “Understand me, Lew, I’m not saying Bruce Campion didn’t kill his wife. When a woman gets herself murdered, nine times out of ten it’s the man in her life, her boy friend or her husband or her ex. We all know that. All I’m saying, and I probably shouldn’t be saying it, we don’t have firm evidence that Campion did it.”

“Then why was he indicted?”

“He has his own stupidity to thank for that. He panicked and ran, and naturally it looked like consciousness of guilt to the powers that be. But we didn’t have the evidence to convict him, or maybe even arraign him. After we held him twenty-four hours, I recommended his release without charges. The crazy son-of-a-gun took off that same night. The Grand Jury was sitting, and the D. A. rushed the case in to them and got an indictment. They never would have indicted if Campion hadn’t run.” Mungan added with careful honesty: “This is just my opinion, my unofficial opinion.”

“What’s Royal’s unofficial opinion?”

“The Captain keeps his opinion to himself. He’s bucking for Sheriff, and you don’t get to be Sheriff by fighting the powers that be.”

“And I suppose the D. A. is bucking for Governor or something.”

“Something. Watch him make a circus out of this.”

“You don’t like circuses?”

“I like the kind with elephants.”

He finished his coffee, crumpled the cup in his fist, and tossed it into the wastebasket. I did the same. It was a trivial action, but it seemed to me to mark a turning point in the case.

“Exactly what evidence do you have against Campion?”

Mungan made a face, as if he had swallowed and regurgitated a bitter pill. “It boils down to suspicion, and his lack of an alibi, and his runout. In addition to which, there’s the purely negative evidence: there was no sign that the place had been broken into, or that Dolly had tried to get away from the killer. She was lying there on the floor in her nightgown, real peaceful like, with one of her own silk stockings knotted around her neck.”