Росс Макдональд: The Zebra-Striped Hearse

“So?”

Campion looked at me uneasily. “I couldn’t help thinking what she could do for me, with a little encouragement. I was broke, as usual, and she obviously wasn’t. I thought it would be pleasant to have a patroness. I could stop worrying about the light bill and simply do my work. I made a date with her before Dolly got back with the baby. I saw her that night, and before long we were spending nights together.

“I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. Harriet acted as though she’d never been with a man. She fell so hard it scared me. She drove over from Tahoe a couple of times a week, and we were in and out of the motels. I should have had the sense to pull out of the situation. I had a feeling that it would lead to trouble.” He drew in a deep breath.

“What kind of trouble?”

“I didn’t know. But she was a serious girl, too serious, and terribly passionate. I shouldn’t have led her on.”

“Did you suspect that Blackwell was the baby’s father?”

He hesitated. “I may have, more or less subconsciously. Harriet said something once, when she was holding the baby in her arms. She called him little brother. It stuck in my mind, though I didn’t realize she was speaking literally.”

“And Dolly never told you?”

“No. I didn’t press the point, while she was alive. I didn’t really want to know who the father was. I thought I could love the baby better if he was anonymous. But it turned out I couldn’t love him too well. Him or anybody. Then I messed the whole thing up when I tried to go into orbit with Harriet. I should have stayed home and looked after Dolly and the baby.”

His voice was low, and I thought I heard the growl of manhood in it. He rose and struck his open left palm with his closed right fist. Shaking hands with himself in an embarrassed way, he went to the window.

“I was with Harriet the night Dolly was killed,” he said with his back turned.

“Harriet was the woman you slept with in the Travelers Motel?”

“That’s right. Slept isn’t quite accurate. We had an argument, and she started back to Tahoe in the middle of the night. I stayed in the room and got drunk. She’d brought me a bottle of her father’s Scotch.” He seemed to take a painful pride in spelling out the details of his humiliation.

“What was the argument about?”

“Marriage. She wanted to buy me a Reno divorce. I won’t deny I was tempted, but when it came to a showdown I found I couldn’t do it. I didn’t love Harriet. I didn’t love Dolly, either, but I had made a bargain with her to give the boy my name. I kept hoping if I stuck with it I’d learn to love the boy. But it was already too late. When I sobered up enough to drive myself home, Dolly was dead and the boy was gone and the cops were there.”

“Why didn’t you tell them where you’d spent the night? You had an alibi of sorts.”

“It didn’t look as if I’d have to use it. They questioned me and let me go. As soon as I was free, I got in touch with Harriet at Tahoe. She said I mustn’t on any account drag her or her family into it. She was protecting her father, obviously, though she didn’t say so. She sold me the idea of hiding out after they indicted me, and I spent a bad couple of weeks shut up in their beach house. I wanted to go on to Mexico – Ralph lent me his birth certificate with that in mind – but I had no money.

“Harriet finally gave me the money for the flight. She said that she would join me in Mexico later, and we could pretend to be strangers, and pick up where we’d left off. We could stay in Mexico or go further down into South America.” He turned from the window – his face had been opened by the light. “I suppose she saw her chance to sew me up for life. And I was tempted, again. I’m a very ambivalent guy.”

“I’m wondering about Harriet’s motive. You suggested she was protecting her father. Did she know, at that time, that he had murdered Dolly?”

“I don’t see how she could have.” He fingered the scratches on his face. “Look how she reacted when I told her about my suspicions the other night.”

“Just when did you develop those suspicions?”

“It happened over a period of time. Ralph Simpson brought up the name before I left Luna Bay. He’d seen Dolly with Blackwell last summer. Ralph fancied himself as a detective, and he was very interested in a leather button that was found at the scene of the crime. The police mentioned it, too. Do you know anything about that button?”

“Too much.” I summarized the history of the wandering topcoat.

“So Blackwell killed Ralph.”

“He confessed the murder this morning, along with the others.”

“Poor old Ralph.” Campion lowered himself into a chair and sat for a while in blank-eyed silence. “Ralph should never have got mixed up with me. I’m a moral typhoid carrier.”

“It’s a thought,” I said. “But you were telling me about your suspicions of Blackwell and how they grew.”

After another silence he went on: “Ralph started me thinking about Blackwell. Bits and pieces, associations, began to gather, and eventually I had a sort of Gestalt. Some of the things that went into it were Harriet’s interest in the baby, and the slip she made, if it was a slip, about her little brother. Then Dolly started getting money from somewhere, about the time that Harriet turned up at our house. I didn’t understand the relationship between Dolly and Harriet. It was pleasant enough on the surface, but there was a good deal of hostility under it.”

“That would be natural enough, if Dolly knew you were making love to Harriet.”

“She didn’t. Anyway, the relationship didn’t change from the first afternoon Harriet came to the house. They greeted each other like two sisters who hated each other but refused to admit it. I can see now why that would be: Harriet knew about Dolly’s fling with her father, and Dolly knew she knew.”

“You still haven’t told me when you found out.”

“I got my Gestalt one night in Mexico, after Harriet came. We were talking in my studio, and the subject of her father’s lodge at Tahoe came up, I don’t know how.” He turned his head to one side, as though he had overheard a distant voice. “Yes, I do know. She was hot on the marriage trail again, in spite of the fact that I was wanted for murder. She was fantasying about going back to the States where we could settle down in the lodge and live happily ever after. She got quite lyrical in her descriptions of the place. Oddly enough, I’d heard it all before.”

“From Harriet?”

“From Dolly. Dolly used to tell me stories about the sweet old lady who befriended her when she was on her uppers in State Line last summer. She gave me detailed descriptions of the sweet old lady’s house – the beamed ceilings, the lake view, the layout of the rooms. It suddenly hit me that it was Blackwell’s house and that Blackwell was the sweet old lady and probably the father of my–” he swallowed the word “–the father of Dolly’s child. I didn’t say a word to Harriet at the time, but I decided to go back to the States with her. I wanted to find out more about the sweet old lady. Well, I have.”

A complex grief controlled the lines of his face like a magnetic field.

GETTING OUT OF my cab at the San Francisco airport, I saw a woman I vaguely recognized standing with a suitcase in front of the main terminal building. She was wearing a tailored suit whose skirt was a little too long for the current fashion. It was Anne Castle, minus her earrings and with the addition of a rakish hat.

I took the suitcase out of her hand. “May I carry this, Miss Castle?”

She looked up at my face. Her own was so deeply shadowed by trouble that her vision seemed clouded. Slowly her brow cleared.