The Zebra-Striped Hearse (16 page)

“I’d have to be asked. Which isn’t very likely.”

“I know how difficult he can be,” she said in a rush of feeling. “Tell me exactly what the trouble was.”

“He listened in on a telephone conversation I had with a police officer. I made some critical remarks about his treatment of Harriet. He didn’t like them.”

“And that’s all?”

“All there is on the surface. Of course he was thrown by the information I gave him on Damis-Campion. He couldn’t handle it, so he threw it back. He thinks that I’m what hurts him.”

She nodded. “That’s his standard pattern. It’s been getting worse since this began. I’m worried about him, Mr. Archer. I don’t know how he’s going to survive.”

“It’s Harriet’s survival I’m worried about. She and Campion were seen at State Line last night, and I have some Reno detectives on their trail. We have a chance to take him and rescue her, if we can stay with it.”

Her whole body reacted to my words. She clutched her handbag to her breast as if it was a child she could protect. “The man is a murderer, you say?”

“It’s a matter of police record.”

She moved closer to me. Her hand lit on my wrist, and she said in a voice as low as a mourning dove’s: “You said you’d have to be asked. I’m asking you. Will you take me for a client?”

“Nothing would suit me better.”

“Then it’s a contract.” Her hand slid from my wrist to my fingers, and squeezed them. “It would be a good idea to let me tell Mark about this. In my own time, in my own way.”

“I agree.”

She went into the house and came out and gave me money and went in again. Blackwell’s Cadillac rolled into the drive. He climbed out and gave me money. His color was better, and I could smell fresh whisky on him. He must have had a quick one or two at the hotel.

He looked at me as though he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say a word.

A
RNIE
W
ALTERS
met me at the Reno airport. He was a short broad man in his early fifties who looked like somebody you’d see selling tips at a race track. But he had the qualities of a first-rate detective: honesty, imagination, curiosity, and a love of people. Ten or twelve years in Reno had left him poor and uncorrupted.

On the way to State Line he filled me in on the situation there. A handyman named Sholto, who kept an eye on several lakeside houses for their absentee owners, had talked to Harriet
the night before. She had come to Sholto’s house to get the key to her father’s lodge, and specifically asked him not to tell her father she was there. Campion had been with her, but stayed in the car, her car.

“Apparently,” Arnie went on, “they spent the night, or part of the night, in the lodge. There’s some dirty dishes on the sinkboard, recently used. Also there’s some indication they’re coming back, or planned to. He left his suitcase in the entrance hall. I have the place staked out.”

“What about her suitcase?”

“Gone. So is her car.”

“I don’t like that.”

Arnie shifted his eyes from the road to my face. “You seriously think he brought her up here to do her in?”

“It’s a possibility that can’t be ruled out.”

“What were the circumstances of the other killing? The wife.”

“He strangled her. I don’t have the details yet.”

“Did he stand to gain by her death?”

“The San Mateo police think not. The only motive they’ve come up with is incompatibility, or words to that effect. Evidently it was a forced marriage: the girl was about three months pregnant at the time. He married her in Reno last September, by the way, which means that this isn’t new territory to Campion.”

“You think he’s repeating a pattern?”

“Something like that.”

“What kind of a character is he?”

“He has me baffled.”

“I never heard you say that before, Lew. Not out loud.”

“Maybe I’m slipping. I don’t pretend to be attuned to the artistic mind. Campion is a good painter, according to a critic who knows what he’s talking about.”

“You think he could be psycho? A lot of psychos magnetize the broads.”

“The psycho broads,” I said. “It’s hard to tell about Campion. He had himself in control both times I saw him. The second time was under severe provocation. Harriet’s father threatened him with a shotgun, and he stood up to it like a little man. But then psychos can be actors.”

“Bad actors. Is he as good-looking as the description says?”

“Unfortunately yes. I brought along a picture of him. It’s a self-sketch, not a photograph, but it’s a good-enough likeness to circularize. I want it back after you have it photographed.”

“Sure. Leave it in the car. I’ll get it around to our informers and have it posted in the lookout galleries in the clubs. Sooner or later he’ll show, if he’s hiding out in this area. You realize he could be long gone by now, and so could the girl.”

We drove in silence for a while, through country wooded with evergreens. The trees parted at one point, and I caught a first glimpse of the lake. It was the height of the season, and outboards were rioting in the afternoon sun. Skiers drove their plows of spray in eccentric furrows. I couldn’t help remembering that Tahoe was deep and cold. Harriet could be long gone, far down, sheathed in black bottom water.

Her father’s lodge stood among dense trees at the end of a frost-cracked asphalt lane. It was an imposing timbered building with half-walls of native stone. Concrete steps with iron railings zigzagged down from the terrace to the shore.

A man stepped out of the trees. He had the stubborn thick-bodied presence of an old cop. Arnie introduced him as Jim Hanna, one of his men. The three of us went inside.

Campion’s brown suitcase was standing in the hallway under a moose head. I reached for it, but Arnie stopped me.

“It’s a waste of time, Lew. Nothing in it but some painting equipment and shaving kit and some old clothes. He was hungry.”

The great front room was furnished with handsome rustic pieces, Navajo rugs, animal skins, animal heads staring down at us with sad glass eyes. The picture window that Harriet
had described to Campion framed blue sky and blue lake. Her pitch had been too successful, I was thinking.

We went through the other rooms, including the six upstairs bedrooms. Their mattresses lay bare. A closet in the hallway was full of sheets and pillow slips and towels, none of which had been used.

I left Arnie and Hanna in the house and went down the concrete steps to the shore. The lake had been pulling at me since my first sight of it. It was very low this year, and a swath of gravel sloped down from the foot of the steps.

I took a walk along the edge of the gravel. Speedboat waves lapped at the stones and brightened them. I was looking for some trace of Harriet; yet I was shocked when I found it. It was something that looked like a scrap of grey fishnet tangled with some floating sticks about fifty feet offshore.

I stripped to my shorts behind a tree and went in after it. The lake was icy after the summer air. The thing in the nest of sticks did nothing to warm me. It was her hat, with its little veil fluttering in the sun.

I disentangled it and held it out of the water in my left hand as I side-stroked back to shore. There I discovered that the hat had more than the veil attached to it. In the damp silk lining there was a smear of coagulated blood about the size of a thumbnail. Adhering to this was a thin lock of hair about six inches long. It was fair and straight, like Harriet’s, and it had been torn out by the roots.

I dressed and went up to the lodge on cold and heavy legs and showed the other men what I had found.

Arnie whistled softly, on a diminuendo. “Looks like we’re too late.”

“That remains to be proved. How good is the law around here?”

“Spotty. It’s been improving, but there’s six or seven different jurisdictions around the lake. It spreads the money thin, and also the responsibility.”

“Can you bring the Reno P.D. in on this? It needs lab work.”

“And a dragging operation. It’s not their territory, but I’ll see what I can do. You want to come back to town with me?”

“I should talk to Sholto. Does he live in this neighborhood?”

“A couple of miles from here, on the road to State Line. I’ll drop you.”

Sholto’s boxlike little house stood in a clearing far back from the road. Chickens scratched around it. The young woman who answered the door had a baby on her hip and a slightly larger child hanging onto her skirt. She pushed back her hair and gave Arnie a wide slack smile.

“Hank is out back, Mr. Walters. He’s building a hutch for the rabbits. Come through the house if you want.”

A third child, a girl of eight or nine, was reading a comic book at the kitchen table, simultaneously drinking chocolate milk through a straw. Her bare toes were curled with concentrated pleasure. She regarded us blankly, as though we were less vivid than the characters in her book. I paid particular attention to the child because her towhead was the same color as Harriet’s.

A boy of twelve or so was helping his father in the back yard. That is, he sat on a board laid across wooden horses while Sholto used a handsaw on the board. He was a wiry man of indeterminate age, hipless in faded blue levis. His sun wrinkles gave his jay-blue eyes a fiercely questioning look.

“Hi, Mr. Walters. You find her all right?”

“Not yet. This is my associate Lew Archer. He has some more questions to ask you.”

Sholto laid down his saw and gave me a wide hard hand. “Shoot away.”

“Before you men talk,” Arnie said, “I want to show you a picture, Henry.”

He produced the self-sketch of Campion which he had
brought from the car. “Is this the man you saw with Harriet?”

“Sure looks like him. Something funny about the eyes, though. How come one of ’em is bigger than the other?”

“He drew it that way,” I said.

“He drew this himself?” “That’s right.”

“Why did he do that to the eyes? It makes him look cockeyed. He’s a real nice-lookin’ fellow in real life.”

Arnie lifted the picture from his hands. “Thanks, Henry. I needed a positive identification.”

“Is the guy some kind of a crook?”

“He has a record,” I said. “Maybe you’d better send the boy inside.”

“I don’t wanna go inside.”

“Inside,” Sholto said.

The boy climbed off his board and went. Arnie followed him into the house, with a curt flick of the hand to us. Sholto said to me: “I hope Miss Blackwell isn’t in trouble. She’s a nervous young lady, jumpy as a filly. She wouldn’t take trouble too well.”

“Was she nervous last night when you talked to her?”

He propped one foot up on a sawhorse and rested his arm on his knee. “I’d say she was. Mostly I think she was nervous on account of her father—you know, the young fellow, and them using the lodge. But she had a perfect right—I told Mr. Walters that. And I told her I wouldn’t breathe a word to the old man. After all, she’s used it before when he wasn’t here.”

“With men?”

“I dunno about that. This is the first man she ever brought up here, leastways that I saw. What did the two of them have in mind?”

“They talked about getting married.”

“Is that a fact?”

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s just that I never thought of her as the marrying type. I got a sister teaches school in Porterville, she’s the same way. She’s still living at home.”

“Miss Blackwell isn’t. How were the two of them getting along when you saw them?”

“I didn’t see them together. She came up to the door by herself, wanting the key to the lodge. He stayed in the car.” Sholto pushed back his cap and scratched his freckled hairline, as though to promote the growth of an idea. “They did sit out in the car for quite a while after. The wife thought they were having an argument.”

“Did you hear any of it?”

“I didn’t like to listen,” he said delicately. “Besides, I had the radio on.”

“Did your wife hear any of it?”

“She must of, or how would she know it was an argument?” He raised his voice: “Molly!”

The woman appeared at the back door with the baby on her hip. From the cover of her other hip, the twelve-year-old peered out resentfully.

“What is it, Hank?”

“Last night, when Miss Blackwell came for the key, and they were sitting out in the car after—did you hear anything they said?”

“Yeah. I told you they were having a battle.”

I moved to the foot of the back steps. “Did he hit her?”

“Not that I saw. It was just talk. She didn’t want to go to the lodge. He did.”

“She
didn’t want to go?”

“That’s what she said. She said he was trying to use her or something, said he was taking advantage of her love. He said he wasn’t. He said that he was working out his des—destry?”

“Destiny?”

“Yeah, destiny. He said he was working out his destiny or
something. I dunno what he meant when he said that. They were talkin’ pretty high-falutin’.”

“How did his voice sound? Was he excited?”

“Naw, he was real cool and cold. She was more hysterical like.”

“Did he threaten her, Mrs. Sholto?”

“I wouldn’t say he threatened her. More like he soothed her down. She was okay when they drove off.”

“Who was driving?”

“He was. She was at the wheel when they were sitting there, but he changed places with her. He did the driving.”

“What time did they leave?”

“I dunno. The clock broke. When are you going to get me a new clock, Hank?”

“Saturday.”

“I bet,” she said serenely, and retreated into the house.

Sholto turned to me. “It was twilight when they left here, nearly night, I’d say around eight o’clock. I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong or I’d of phoned her father. You think the guy did something to her, eh?”

“We have some evidence that points that way. Was Miss Blackwell wearing a hat when you saw her last night?”

“Yeah, a little hat with a veil. I noticed it because the girls don’t go in for hats around here much.”

“I found her hat in the lake just now,” I said. “With blood and hair on it.”

His eyes went almost out of sight in their twin nests of wrinkles.