Росс Макдональд - The Zebra-Striped Hearse

“I’m sober as a judge, soberer than some. You ought to be getting official confirmation in the course of the day.”

I hung up before he could ask me questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Isobel Blackwell was looking at me strangely, as if I had created the situation and somehow made it real by telling Arnie about it. The light from the windows was cruel on her face.

“Has my husband’s car been found?”

“Harriet’s. I’m going out to Malibu to look at it.”

“Does it mean she’s alive?”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“You suspect Mark of killing Harriet, too.”

“We’d better not discuss what I suspect. I’ll be back. If your husband should come home, don’t tell him what’s been said here tonight.”

“He has a right to know–”

“Not from you, Mrs. Blackwell. We can’t predict how he’d react.”

“Mark would never injure me.”

But there was a questioning note in her voice, and her hand went to her throat. Her head moved from side to side in the collar of her fingers.

I DROVE OUT to Malibu through the chilly dawn. The zebra-striped hearse was still parked by the roadside at Zuma. The sight of it did nothing for me at all.

The HP dispatcher working the graveyard shift had an open paperback on the desk in front of him, and seemed to begrudge his answers to my questions. Harriet’s Buick Special was impounded in a local garage; it wouldn’t be available for inspection until the garage opened at eight.

“When was it picked up?”

“Last night, before I came on duty.”

“You came on at midnight?”

“That’s correct.”

His eyes kept straying downward to his book. He was a fat man with a frowzy unwed aura.

“Can you tell me where it was found?”

He consulted his records. “Side road off the highway about six miles north of here. According to the officer, the woman in the lunchroom said it was there all day. She got around to reporting it when she closed up for the night.”

“What lunchroom is that?”

“It’s one of those jumbo shrimp traps. You’ll see the sign on the right as you go north.”

He picked up his book. It had a picture on the cover of a man riding a horse into a kind of nuclear sunset.

I drove out of the straggling beachfront town and north on the highway to the jumbo shrimp place. It was the same establishment in which I had sat and drunk coffee long ago at the beginning of the case. Harriet’s car had been abandoned within a few hundred yards of her father’s beach house.

I turned left down the hill, nosed my car into the parking area, and parked at the railing beside a black Cadillac. The tide was high, and the sea brimmed up like blue mercury. Some pelicans were sailing far out over it, tiny within the amplitude of the sky.

The Cadillac had Blackwell’s name on the steering post. I walked along the gangway to his beach house. I was keenly aware of every sound and movement, my own, the thumping and shushing of the waves, the distant cry of a scavenger gull following the pelicans. Then my knocking on Blackwell’s door was the only sound.

Finally I let myself in with his key. Nothing had been changed in the high raftered room, except for what had been done to Campion’s painting. Someone had slashed it so that the morning sun came jaggedly through it like lightning in a cloud.

I went to the head of the stairs and called down: “Blackwell! Are you there?”

No answer.

I called Harriet. My voice rang through the house. I felt like a self-deluded medium trying to summon up the spirits of the dead. I moved reluctantly down the steps and more reluctantly through the big front bedroom into the bathroom. I think I smelled the spillage before I saw it.

I turned on the bathroom light. A towel in the sink was soaked and heavy with coagulating blood. I lifted it by one corner, dropped it back into the sink. Splatters of blood were congealed on the linoleum floor. I stepped across them and opened the door into the back bedroom. It had a broken lock.

Blackwell was there, sitting in his shirtsleeves on the edge of a bare mattress. His face was white, except where it was shadowed by black beard. He looked at me like a thief.

“Good morning,” he said. “It would have to be you.”

“Bad morning. Who have you been killing this morning?”

He screwed up his face, as if a glare had fallen across it. “No one.”

“The bathroom is a shambles. Whose blood is it?”

“Mine. I cut myself shaving.”

“You haven’t shaved for at least twenty-four hours.”

He touched his chin absently. I sensed that he was out of contact, trying to fill the gap between himself and reality with any words he could think of from moment to moment.

“I cut myself shaving yesterday. That’s old blood. Nobody died today.”

“Who died yesterday?”

“I did.” He grimaced in the invisible glare.

“You’re not that lucky. Stand up.”

He rose obediently. I shook him down, though I hated to touch his body. He had no weapon on him. I told him to sit again, and he sat.

The angry will had gone out of him. A sort of fretfulness had taken its place. I had seen that fretfulness before, in far-gone men. It was like a rat gnawing their hearts and it made them dangerous, to others and themselves.

A slow leakage of water glazed his eyes. “I’ve had a lonely night.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing in particular. Waiting. I hoped that daylight would give me the strength to get up and move. But the daylight is worse than the darkness.” He sniffed a little. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you. You don’t like me.”

I didn’t try to pretend anything. “It’s good you’re able and willing to talk. We have the business of the confession to get over.”

“Confession? I have nothing to confess. The blood in the bathroom is old blood. I didn’t spill it.”

“Who did?”

“Vandals, possibly. Vandals must have broken in. We’ve had a lot of vandalism over the years.”

“We’ve had a lot of murders over the years. Let’s start with the first one. Why did you kill Ronald Jaimet?”

He looked up like a white-haired child horribly ravaged by age. “I didn’t kill him. His death was the result of an accident. He fell and broke his ankle, and his needle. It took me a day and a night to get him out of the mountains. Without his insulin he became very sick. He died of his illness. It was all completely accidental.”

“Just how did the accident happen?”

“Ronald and I had a scuffle, a friendly scuffle. His foot slipped on a stone and went over the edge of the trail. His weight came down on his ankle. I actually heard it snap.”

“What was the friendly scuffle about?”

“Nothing, really. He was joshing me a bit, about my affection for a young protégée of his. It’s true I was fond of the girl, but that was as far as it went. I never – I never did her any physical harm. My feelings were pure, and I told Ronald this. I think I pushed him, in a playful way, to emphasize what I was saying. I had no idea of making him fall.”

“And no intention of killing him?”

He puzzled over the question. “I don’t see how I could have wanted to kill him. Wouldn’t I have left him there if I had?” He added, as if this would clinch it: “Ronald was my favorite cousin. He greatly resembled my mother.”

He gave me a peculiar wet look. I was afraid he was going to talk about his mother. They often did.

I said: “When did you start having sexual relations with Dolly Stone?”

His eyes shifted away. They were almost lost in the puffiness around them, as if he had been beaten by intangible fists. “Oh. That.”