The Zebra-Striped Hearse (2 page)

“I’m afraid not. Shall I get rid of him?”

“No. It would only lead to further trouble.”

Her husband was fumbling at the door, his featureless shadow moving on the glass. “I wondered what you were up to when I saw your car in the parking lot. Isobel?”

She didn’t answer him. She moved to the window and looked out through the slatted blind over Sunset Boulevard, She was very slim and tense against the striated light. I suppose
my protective instinct was aroused. I opened the door a foot or so and slid out into the waiting room and closed the door behind me.

It was my first meeting with Colonel Blackwell. His phone call the day before had been our only contact. I’d looked him up afterward and learned that he was a Regular Army officer who had retired soon after the war from an undistinguished career.

He was a fairly big man who had begun to lose his battle with age. His brown outdoorsman’s face made his white hair seem premature. He held himself with ramrod dignity. But his body had started to dwindle. His Shetland jacket hung loose around the shoulders; the collar of his shirt was noticeably large for his corded neck.

His eyebrows were his most conspicuous feature, and they gave him the air of an early Roman emperor. Black in contrast with his hair, they merged in a single eyebrow which edged his forehead like an iron rim. Under it, his eyes were unexpectedly confused.

He tried to shout down his own confusion: “I want to know what’s going on in there. My wife is in there, isn’t she?”

I gave him a vacant stare. “Your wife? Do I know you?”

“I’m Colonel Blackwell. We spoke on the telephone yesterday.”

“I see. Do you have any identification?”

“I don’t need identification! I vouch for myself!”

He sounded as though a yelling demon, perhaps the tormented ghost of a master sergeant, had taken possession of him. His tanned face turned red, then lavender.

I said at the purple end of the yell: “Are you really Colonel Blackwell? The way you came bulling in here, I thought you were a crank. We get a lot of cranks.”

A woman with very tall pink hair looked in from the corridor, knotting her imitation pearls in her fist. It was Miss Ditmar, who ran the modeling agency:

“Is it all right?”

“Everything’s under control,” I said. “We were just having a yelling contest. This gentleman won.”

Colonel Blackwell couldn’t bear to be talked about in this fashion. He turned his back on me and stood with his face to the wall, like a plebe being braced. Miss Ditmar waved her hand benevolently and departed under her hive of hair, trailing a smog of perfume.

The door to the inner office was open now. Mrs. Blackwell had recovered her composure, which was mainly what I’d had in mind.

“Was that a mirage?” she said.

“That was Miss Ditmar in the next office. She was alarmed by the noise. She’s very nervous about me all the time.”

“I really must apologize,” Mrs. Blackwell said with a glance at her husband, “for both of us. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s put you very much in the middle.”

“I’ve been in the middle before. I rather enjoy it.”

“You’re very nice.”

Like a man being rotated by invisible torque, Blackwell turned and let us see his face. The anger had drained out of it and left it open. His eyes had a hurt expression, as though his young wife had rejected him by complimenting me. He tried to cover this with a wide painful smile.

“Shall we start over, in a lower key?”

“A lower key would suit me, Colonel.”

“Fine.”

It did something for him to be called by his rank. He made an abrupt horizontal gesture which implied that he was in charge of himself and the situation. He cast an appraising glance around my waiting room as if he was thinking of having it redecorated. With a similar glance at me, he said: “I’ll join you shortly in your office. First I’ll put Mrs. Blackwell in her car ”

“It isn’t necessary, Mark. I can find my way—”

“I insist.”

He offered her his elbow. She trudged out holding onto it. Though he was the big one and the loud one, I had the impression that she was supporting him.

Through the Venetian blind I watched them emerge from the street entrance onto the sidewalk. They walked very formally together, like people on their way to a funeral.

I liked Isobel Blackwell, but I was sort of hoping her husband wouldn’t come back.

H
E CAME BACK
, though, wearing a purged expression which failed to tell me what had been purged, or who. I took the hand he offered me across my desk, but I went on disliking him.

He was sensitive to this—a surprising thing in a man of his temper and background—and made an oblique attempt to get around it: “You don’t know the pressures I live under. The combined forces of the females in my life—” He paused, and decided not to finish the sentence.

“Mrs. Blackwell was telling me about some of the pressures.”

“So she said. I suppose she meant no harm in coming here. But dammit, if a man’s wife won’t go through channels,” he said obscurely, “who will?”

“I understand the two of you disagree about your prospective son-in-law.”

“Burke Damis is not my prospective son-in-law. I have no intention of letting the marriage go through.”

“Why not?”

He glared down at me, moving his tongue around under his lips as if he had foreign objects between his teeth. “My wife has the standard female illusion that all marriages are made
in heaven. Apparently she’s infected you with it.”

“I asked a simple question, about this particular marriage. Won’t you sit down, Colonel?”

He sat stiffly in the chair his wife had occupied. “The man’s a fortune-hunter, or worse. I suspect he’s one of those confidence men who make a career of marrying silly women.”

“Do you have any evidence along those lines?”

“The evidence is on his face, in his manner, in the nature of his relationship with my daughter. He’s the kind of man who would make her miserable, and that’s putting it gently.”

Concern for her had broken through into his voice and changed its self-conscious tone. He wasn’t the stuffed shirt I had taken him for, or at least the stuffing had its human elements.

“What about their relationship?”

He hitched his chair forward. “It’s completely unilateral. Harriet is offering him everything—her money, her love, her not inconsiderable attractions. Damis offers nothing. He
is
nothing—a man from nowhere, a man from Mars. He pretends to be a serious painter, but I know something about painting and I wouldn’t hire him to paint the side of a barn. Nobody’s ever heard of him, and I’ve made inquiries.”

“How extensive?”

“I asked a fellow at the art museum. He’s an authority on contemporary American painters. The name Burke Damis meant nothing to him.”

“The woods are full of contemporary American painters, and there are always new ones coming up.”

“Yes, and a lot of them are fakes and impostors. We’re dealing with one here, with this Burke Damis. I believe the name’s an alias, one he picked out of a hat.”

“What makes you think so?”

“The point is, he’s given me no reason to think otherwise. I tried to question him about his background. His answers were evasive. When I asked him where he came from, he said
Guadalajara, Mexico. He’s obviously not Mexican and he admitted having been born in the States, but he wouldn’t say where. He wouldn’t tell me who his father was or what he’d done for a living or if he had any relatives extant. When I pressed him on it, he claimed to be an orphan.”

“Maybe he is. Poor boys can be sensitive, especially under cross-examination.”

“He’s no boy, and I didn’t cross-examine him, and he’s got the sensitivity of a wild pig.”

“I seem to have struck out, Colonel.”

He sat back in his chair, unsmiling, and ran his hand over his head. He was careful not to dislodge the wave in his meticulously brushed white hair.

“You make it very clear that you think I’m taking the wrong approach to this problem. I assure you I am not. I don’t know how much my wife told you, or how much of what she told you was true—objectively true. The fact remains that my daughter, whom I love dearly, is a fool about men.”

“Mrs. Blackwell did mention,” I said carefully, “that a similar situation had come up before.”

“Several times. Harriet has a great desire to get married. Unfortunately she combines it with a genius for picking the wrong man. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not opposed to marriage. I want my daughter to get married—to the right man, at the proper time. But this idea of rushing into it with a fellow she barely knows—”

“Exactly how long has she known Damis?”

“No more than a month. She picked up with him in Ajijic, on Lake Chapala. I’ve visited Mexico myself, and I know what kind of floaters you can get involved with if you’re not careful. It’s no place for an unattached young woman. I realize now I shouldn’t have let her go down there.”

“Could you have stopped her?”

A shadow stained his eyes. “The fact is I didn’t try. She’d had an unhappy winter, and I could see she needed a change.
I was under the impression she would stay with her mother, my former wife, who lives in Ajijic. I should have known better than to depend on Pauline. I naturally supposed she’d surround her with the appropriate social safeguards. Instead she simply turned her loose on the town.”

“Forgive my bluntness, but you talk about your daughter as though she wasn’t responsible. She isn’t mentally retarded?”

“Far from it. Harriet is a normal young woman with more than her share of intelligence. To a great extent,” he said, as if this settled the matter, “I educated her myself. After Pauline saw fit to abandon us, I was both father and mother to my girl. It grieves me to say no to her on this marriage. She’s pinned her hopes of heaven to it. But it wouldn’t last six months.

“Or rather it would last six months—just long enough for him to get his hands on her money.” He propped his head on his fist and peered at me sideways, one of his eyes half closed by the pressure of his hand. “My wife doubtless told you that there is money involved?”

“She didn’t say how much.”

“My late sister Ada set up a half-million-dollar trust fund for Harriet. She’ll come into active control of the money on her next birthday. And she’ll have at least as much again when I—pass away.”

The thought of his own death saddened him. His sadness changed perceptibly to anger. He leaned forward and struck the top of my desk so hard that the pen-set hopped. “No thief is going to get his paws on it!”

“You’re very certain in your mind that Burke Damis is one.”

“I know men, Mr. Archer.”

“Tell me about the other men Harriet wanted to marry. It may help me to understand the pattern of her behavior.” And the pattern of her father’s.

“They’re rather painful to contemplate. However. One was a man in his forties with two wrecked marriages behind him,
and several children. Then there was a person who called himself a folk singer. He was a bearded nonentity. Another was an interior decorator in Beverly Hills—a nancy-boy if I ever saw one. All of them were after her money. When I confronted them with the fact, they bowed out more or less gracefully.”

“What did Harriet do?”

“She came around. She sees them now as I saw them from the beginning. If we can keep her from doing something rash, she’ll see through Damis eventually, just as I do.”

“It must be nice to have X-ray eyes.”

He gave me a long black look from under his formidable eyebrow. “I resent that remark. You’re not only personally insulting but you seem decidedly lukewarm about my problem. Apparently my wife really got to you.”

“Your wife is a very charming woman, and possibly a wise one.”

“Possibly, in some situations. But Damis has her hoodwinked—she’s only a woman after all. I’m surprised that you should be taken in, however. I was told that you run one of the best one-man operations in Los Angeles County.”

“Who told you that?”

“Peter Colton, of the D.A.’s office. He assured me I couldn’t find a better man. But I must say you don’t exhibit much of the bloodhound spirit.”

“You may have enough of it for both of us.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve got the case all wrapped up and tied with a noose before I’ve started on it. But you haven’t given me any concrete evidence.”

“Getting the evidence is your job.”

“If it’s there. I’m not going to cook up evidence, or select it to confirm you in your prejudices. I’m willing to investigate Damis on the understanding that the chips fall where they fall.”

He threw his Roman-emperor look around my office. It
bounced off the drab green filing cabinet with the dents in it, riffled the flaking slats of the Venetian blind, and found the ugly pin-ups on the wall all guilty as charged.

“You feel you can afford to lay down terms to your prospective clients?”

“Certain terms are always implied. Sometimes I have to spell them out. I have a license to lose, and a reputation.”

His face had entered the color cycle again, starting with pink. “If you consider me a threat to your reputation—”

“I didn’t say that. I said I had one. I intend to keep it.”

He tried to stare me down. He used his face like an actor, making his brow horrendous, converting his eyes into flinty arrowheads pointed at me between slitted lids. But he grew tired of the game. He wanted my help.

“Of course,” he said in a reasonable tone, “I had nothing in mind but a fair, unprejudiced investigation. If you got any other impression, you misread me. You realize my daughter is very dear to me.”

“I can use a few more facts about her. How long has she been back from Mexico?”

“Just a week.”

“This is the seventeenth of July. Does that mean she returned on the tenth?”

“Let me see. It was a Monday. Yes, she flew back on Monday, July tenth. I met them at the airport around lunchtime.”

“Damis was with her?”

“He was very much with her. It’s what all the trouble is about.”

“Just what kind of trouble has there been?”