Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

“In her bedroom?”

“The place has no bedroom. I’ll show you a picture of the layout.”

He went to his files in the back room and returned with several photographs in his hands. One was a close-up of a full-breasted young blonde woman whose face had been savagely caricatured by the internal pressure of her own blood. The stocking around her neck was almost hidden in her flesh.

In the other pictures, her place on the floor had been taken by a chalk outline of her figure. They showed from various angles a roughly finished interior containing an unmade bed, a battered-looking child’s crib, a kitchen table and some chairs, a gas plate and a heater, a palette and some paints on a bench by the single large window. This window, actually the glazed door opening of the converted garage, had a triangular hole in a lower corner. Unframed canvases hung on the plasterboard walls, like other broken windows revealing a weirdly devastated outside world.

“How did the window get broken, Pat?”

“Ralph Simpson said that it had been broken for weeks. Campion just never got around to fixing it. He was too high and mighty, too busy throwing paint at the wall to see that the wife and child got proper care.”

“You don’t like him much.”

“I think he’s a bum. I also think he’s got a fair shake coming to him.”

Mungan tossed the pictures onto his desk. He took a button out of the pocket of his blouse and rolled it meditatively between his thumb and forefinger. It was a large brown button covered with woven leather, and it had a few brown threads attached to it. I’d seen a button like it in the last few days, I couldn’t remember where.

“Apparently the baby slept in the same room.”

“There’s only the one room. They lived like shanty Irish,” he said in the disapproving tone of a lace-curtain Irishman.

“What happened to the child on the night of the murder?”

“I was going to bring that up. It’s one of the queer things about the case, and one reason we suspected Campion from the start. Somebody, presumably the killer, took the baby out of his crib and stashed him in a car that was parked by the next house down the road. The woman who lives there, a Negro woman name of Johnson, woke up before dawn and heard the baby crying in her car. She knew whose baby it was – her and Dolly were good neighbors – so naturally she took it over to the Campions’. That’s how Dolly’s body was discovered.”

“Where was Campion that night, do you know?”

“He said he was gone all night, drinking until the bars closed, and then driving, all over hell and gone. It’s the kind of story you can’t prove or disprove. He couldn’t or wouldn’t name the bars, or the places he drove afterward. He said along toward dawn he went to sleep in his car in a cul-de-sac off Skyline. That wouldn’t be inconsistent with him doing the murder. Anyway, we picked him up around nine o’clock in the morning, when he drove back to his place. There’s no doubt he had been drinking. I could smell it on him.”

“What time was his wife killed?”

“Between three and four A.M. The Deputy Coroner was out there by eight, and he said she couldn’t have been dead longer than four or five hours. He went by body temp, and stomach contents, and the two factors checked each other out.”

“How did he know when she’d eaten last?”

“Campion said they ate together at six the previous night. He brought in a couple of hamburgers – some diet for a nursing mother – and the carhop at the drive-in confirmed the time. Apparently he and Dolly had an argument over the food, so he took what money there was in the house and went and got himself plastered.”

“What was the argument about?”

“Things in general, he said. They hadn’t been getting along too well for months.”

“He told you this?”

“Yeah. You’d think he was trying to make himself look bad.”

“Did he say anything about another woman?”

“No. What’s on your mind, Lew?”

“I think we can prove he was lying about what he did on the night of May the fifth. Have you talked to Royal this morning?”

“He phoned to tell me he had Campion. He wants me to go over to Redwood City and take a hand in the questioning.”

“Has Campion admitted anything yet?”

“He’s not talking at all. Royal’s getting kind of frustrated.”

“Did he say anything to you about the Travelers Motel in Saline City?”

“Not a word.” Mungan gave me a questioning look.

“According to their night clerk, Nelson Karp, Campion spent the night of May fifth there with a woman. Or part of the night. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Burke Damis, which is one of the aliases Campion has been using. The Saline City police lifted the registration card last night after Campion was seen there. He seems to have been trying to set up an alibi.”

“A good one or a phony?”

“You can find that out quicker than I can.”

Mungan stood up and looked down the rocky slopes of his face at me. “Whyn’t you give me the word on it in the first place?”

“I gave the word to Royal last night. He wasn’t interested. I thought I’d wait and see if you were.”

“Well, I am. But if this is no phony, why did Campion hold it out until now?”

“Ask him.”

“I think I will.”

He dropped the leather button he had been playing with on his desk. It rolled onto the floor, and I picked it up.

“Is this part of the evidence, Pat?”

“I honestly don’t know. The baby had it in his fist when Mrs. Johnson found him in her car. She didn’t know where it came from. Neither did anybody else.”

I was still trying to remember where I had seen a button or buttons like it. I dredged deep in my memory, but all that came up was the smell of the sea and the sound of it.

“May I have this button?”

“Nope. I read a story once about a button solving a murder, and I have a special feeling about this button.”

“So have I.”

“But I’m holding onto it.” His smiling eyes narrowed on my face. “You sure you don’t want to borrow the use of my razor before you go?”

“I guess I’d better.”

He got the electric razor out of the bottom drawer of his desk. I took it into the washroom and shaved myself. All I uncovered was the same old trouble-prone face.

MUNGAN WAS GONE when I came out. I used his telephone to call Vicky Simpson’s house. No answer. The young deputy in the back room told me that so far as he knew Vicky was still in Citrus Junction waiting for the authorities to release her husband’s body. I turned in the U-drive car at the San Francisco airport, caught a jet to Los Angeles, picked up my own car at the airport there, and drove out through the wedding-smelling orange groves to Citrus Junction.

I went first to see the baby. His grandmother lived on the west side of town in the waste that the highway builders had created. It was mid-afternoon when I got there. Earth movers were working in the dust like tanks in a no man’s land.

An overgrown pittasporum hedge shielded the house from the road. The universal dust had made its leaves as grey as aspen. The house was a two-story frame building which needed paint. Holes in the screen door had been repaired with string. I rattled it with my fist.

The woman who appeared behind the screen looked young to be a grandmother. The flouncy dress she wore, and her spike heels, were meant to emphasize her slender figure. She had a blue-eyed baby face to which the marks of time clung like an intricate spider web. She was blonder than the picture I’d seen of her daughter.

“Mrs. Stone?”

“I’m Mrs. Stone.”

I told her my name and occupation. “May I come in and talk to you for a bit?”