“What was he planning to do in Los Angeles?”
“I don’t know. He told me this story, when he was trying to talk me out of the car, but I didn’t believe it. He said he was doing undercover work. I heard the same story from him before, when he was working in a drive-in on Camino Real. He claimed the cops were paying him to give them tips.”
“Tips about what?”
“Kids smoking reefers, stuff like that. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I thought maybe he was just talking to make himself feel important. He always wanted to be a cop himself.”
“But his record wouldn’t let him.”
“He has no record.”
“You said he had.”
“You must have been hearing things. Anyway, I’m getting tired. I’ve had enough of this.”
She rose in a sudden thrust of energy and stood by the door, inviting me to leave. I stayed where I was on the plastic chesterfield.
“You might as well leave,” she said. “It isn’t Ralph you saw in Malibu.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“You can take my word.”
“All right, I take your word.” It doesn’t pay to argue with a source of information. “But I’m still interested in Ralph. Aren’t you?”
“Naturally I am. I’m married to him. At least I’m supposed to be married to him. But I got a funny feeling, here.” Her left hand moved up her body to her breast. “I got a feeling he traded me in on a new model, and that’s the undercover work.”
“Do you know who the other woman might be?”
“No. I just got a feeling. Why would a man go away and not come back?”
I could think of various answers to that, but I didn’t see much point in spelling them out. “When Ralph took the bus south, did he say anything about going to Mexico?”
“Not to me he didn’t.”
“Has he ever been there?”
“I don’t think so. He would of told me if he had.”
“Did he ever talk about leaving the country?”
“Not lately. He used to talk about going back to Japan someday. He spent some time there in the Korean War. Wait a minute, though. He took his birth certificate with him, I think. That could mean he was planning to leave the States, couldn’t it?”
“It could. He took his birth certificate to Los Angeles?”
“I guess he did, but it was a couple of weeks before that he had me looking for it. It took me hours to find it He wanted to take it along to Nevada with him. He said he needed it to apply for a job.”
“What kind of a job?”
“He didn’t say. He was probably stringing me, anyway.” She moved restlessly and stood over me. “You think he left the country?”
Before I could answer her, a telephone rang in another part of the house. She stiffened, and walked quickly out of the room. I heard her voice: “This is Vicky Simpson speaking.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
Another pause.
“It can’t be him,” she said. “He can’t be dead.”
I followed the fading sound of her voice into the kitchen. She was leaning on the yellow formica breakfast bar, holding the receiver away from her head as if it was a dangerous yellow bird. The pupils of her eyes had expanded and made her look blind.
“Who is it, Mrs. Simpson?”
Her lips moved, groping for words. “A caw—a policeman down south. He says Ralph is dead. He can’t be.”
“Let me talk to the man.”
She handed me the receiver. I said into the mouthpiece: “This is Lew Archer. I’m a licensed private detective working in co-operation with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office.”
“We had a query from them this evening.” The man’s voice was slow and uncertain. “We had this body on our hands, unidentified. Their chief investigator called—fellow named Colton, maybe you know him.”
“I know him. Who am I talking to?”
“Leonard, Sergeant Wesley Leonard. I do the identification work for the sheriff’s department here in Citrus County. We use the L.A. facilities all the time, and we had already asked for their help on this body. Mr. Colton wanted to know if maybe it was this certain Ralph Simpson who is missing. We must have mislaid the original missing report,” he added apologetically, “or maybe we never got it in the first place.”
“It happens all the time.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we’re trying to get a positive identification. What’s the chances of Mrs. Simpson coming down here?”
“Pretty good, I think. Does the body fit the description?”
“It fits all right. Height and weight and coloring and estimated age, all the same.”
“How did he die?”
“That’s a little hard to say. He got pretty banged up when the bulldozer rooted him out.”
“A bulldozer rooted him out?”
“I’ll explain. They’re putting in this new freeway at the west end of town. Quite a few houses got condemned to the state, they were standing vacant you know, and this poor guy was buried in back of one of them. He wasn’t buried very deep. A ’dozer snagged him and brought him up when they razed the houses last week.”
“How long dead?”
“A couple of months, the doc thinks. It’s been dry, and he’s in pretty fair condition. The important thing is who he is. How soon can Mrs. Simpson get down here?”
“Tonight, if I can get her on a plane.”
“Swell. Ask for me at the courthouse in Citrus Junction. Sergeant Wesley Leonard.”
She said when I hung up: “Oh no you don’t, I’m staying here.”
She retreated across the kitchen, shocked and stumbling, and stood in a corner beside the refrigerator.
“Ralph may be dead, Vicky.”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t want to see him if he is.”
“Somebody has to identify him.”
“You identify him.”
“I don’t know him. You do.”
Her mascara had started to dissolve. She dashed murky tears from her eyes. “I don’t want to see him dead. I never saw anybody dead before.”
“Dead people won’t hurt you. It’s the live ones that hurt you.”
I touched her goosefleshed arm. She jerked it away from me.
“You’ll feel better if you have a drink,” I said. “Do you have anything to drink in the house?”
“I don’t drink.”
I opened a cupboard and found a glass and filled it at the tap. Some of it spilled down her chin. She scrubbed at it angrily with a dish towel.
“I don’t want to go. It’ll only make me sick.”
But after a while she agreed to get ready while I phoned the coastal airlines. There was room for us on a ten-thirty flight to Los Angeles. By midnight we were approaching Citrus Junction in the car I had left at International Airport.
The road was walled on each side by thick orange groves. It emerged into a desolate area rimmed with houses, where highway construction had been under way. Earth movers hulked in the darkness like sleeping saurians.
The road became the main street of the town. It was a back-country town, in spite of its proximity to Los Angeles. Everything was closed for the night, except for a couple of bars. A few men in working clothes wandered along the empty pavements, staggering under the twin burdens of alcohol and loneliness.
“I don’t like it here,” Vicky said. “It looks like hicksville.”
“You won’t have to stay long.”
“How long? I’m stony until payday.”
“The police will probably make arrangements for you. Let’s wait and see how it falls.”
The metal cupola of the courthouse swelled like a tarnished bubble under the stars. The building’s dark interior smelled mustily of human lives, like the inside of an old trunk. I found the duty deputy in an office on the first floor. He told me that Sergeant Leonard was at the mortuary, just around the corner.
She dragged on my arm. “I can’t go through with it.”
“You have to. It may not be Ralph.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
“It may be Ralph.”
She looked wildly around the room. It was bare except for a grey coffin standing on trestles against the wall.
“Is he in that?”
“No. Get yourself under control, Vicky. It will only take a minute and then it will be over.”
“But what am I going to do afterward?”
It was a question I couldn’t attempt to answer. A further door opened, and a deputy with sergeant’s stripes on his arm came through toward us. He was a middle-aged man with a belly overlapping his gunbelt, and slow friendly eyes that went with his voice on the telephone.
“I’m Leonard.”
“Archer. This is Mrs. Simpson.”
He bowed with exaggerated courtliness. “I’m pleased to know you, ma’am. It was good of you to make the journey.”
“I had to, I guess. Where is he?”
“The doctor’s working on him.”
“You mean he’s still alive?”
“He’s long dead, ma’am. I’m sorry. Dr. White is working on his internal organs, trying to find out what killed him.”
She started to sit down on the floor. I caught her under the arms. Leonard and I helped her into an adjoining room where a night light burned and the smell of carnations was strong. She half lay on an upholstered settee, with her spike heels tucked under her.
“If you don’t mind waiting a little, ma’am, Doc White will get him ready for your inspection.” Leonard’s voice had taken on unctuous intonations from the surroundings. He hovered over her. “Maybe I could get you a drink. What would you like to drink?”
“Embalming fluid.”
He made a shocked noise at the back of his palate.
“Just go away and leave me alone. I’m all right.”
I followed Leonard into the autopsy room. The dead man lay on an enameled table. I won’t describe him. His time in the earth, and on the table, had altered him for the worse. He bore no great resemblance to Burke Damis, and never had.
Dr. White was closing a butterfly incision in the body. His rubber-gloved hands looked like artificial hands. He was a bald-headed man with hound jowls drooping from under a tobacco-stained mustache. He had a burning cigarette in his mouth, and wagged his head slowly from side to side to keep the smoke out of his eyes. The smoke coiled and drifted in the brilliant overhead light.
I waited until he had finished what he was doing and had drawn a rubberized sheet up to the dead man’s chin.
“What did you find out, Doctor?”
“Heart puncture, in the left ventricle. Looks like an icepick wound.” He stripped off his rubber gloves and moved to the sink, saying above the noise of running water: “Those contusions on the head were inflicted after death, in my opinion—a long time after death.”
“By the bulldozer?”
“I assume so.”
“Just when was he dug up?”
“Friday, wasn’t it, Wesley?”
The Sergeant nodded. “Friday afternoon.”
“Did you make a preliminary examination then?”
Dr. White turned from the sink, drying his hands and arms. “None was ordered. The D.A. and the Sheriff, who’s also Coroner, are both in Sacramento at a convention.”
“Besides,” Leonard put in, eager to save face, “the icepick wound didn’t show from the outside hardly at all, It was just a little nick under the left breast.”
It wasn’t for me to tell them their business. I wanted cooperation. “Did you find the icepick?”
Leonard spread his hands loosely. “You couldn’t find anything out there after the ’dozers went through. Maybe you saw the mess on your way into town?”
“I saw it. Are you ready for Mrs. Simpson now?”
I was talking to the doctor and the Sergeant, but the question hung in the air as though it belonged to the dead man on the table. I even had a feeling that he might answer me. The room was getting me down.
I brought Vicky Simpson into it. The time by herself had calmed her. She had strength enough to walk across the room and stand by the table and look down at the ruined head for a minute, for minutes on end.
“It’s him. It’s Ralph.”
She proved it by stroking his dusty hair.
She looked up at Leonard. “What happened to him?”
“He was icepicked, ma’am, a couple of months ago.”
“You mean he’s been dead all this time?”
“A couple of months.”
The two months of waiting seemed to rush across her eyes like dizzy film. She turned blindly. I took her back to the room where the night light burned.
“Do you know who killed him, Vicky?”
“How would I know? I’ve never even been in Citrus Junction—is that what they call this hole?”
“You mentioned that Ralph was paid by the police to gather information.”
“That’s what he said. I don’t know if it was true or not. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
“Did Ralph have criminal connections?”
“No. He wasn’t that kind of a man.”
“You said he had a record.”
She shook her head.
“You might as well tell me, Vicky. It can’t hurt him now.”
“It didn’t amount to anything,” she said. “He was just a kid. He got in with a bad crowd in high school and they got caught smoking reefers one time and they all got sent to Juvie. That was all the record Ralph had.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m not lying.”
“Did he ever speak of a man named Burke Damis?”
“Burke Damis?”
“Damis is the man I met in Malibu, the one I described to you. He’s an artist, a painter, who apparently has been using your husband’s name.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Perhaps because he’s ashamed of his own name. I believe he used Ralph’s name to cross the border from Mexico last week. You’re sure the name Burke Damis rings no bell?”
“I’m sure.”
“And you don’t recognize the description?”
“No. At this point I wouldn’t recognize my own brother if he walked in the door. Aren’t you ever going to leave me alone?”
Leonard came into the room. I suspected that he had been listening outside the door, and chose this moment to break up the interview. He was a kind man, and he said that he and his wife would look after Vicky for the balance of the night.
I drove home to Los Angeles, home to a hot shower and a cold drink and a dark bed.
chapter 8
I HAD A DREAM which I’d been dreaming in variant forms for as long as I could remember. I was back in high school, in my senior year. The girl at the next desk smiled at me snootily.
“Poor Lew. You’ll fail the exams.”
I had to admit to myself that this was likely. The finals loomed up ahead like the impossible slopes of purgatory, guarded by men with books I hadn’t read.
“I’m going to college,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
I had no idea. I knew with a part of my dreaming mind that I was a grown man in my forties. There wasn’t anything more that high school could do to me. Yet here I was, back in Mr. Merritt’s classroom, dreading the finals and wondering what I would do when I had failed them.
“You’ll have to learn a trade,” the snooty one said.
So far it was more or less the dream I had always had. Then something different happened. I said to the girl, rather snootily: “I have a trade, kiddo. I’m a detec
tive, You’ll be reading about me in the papers.”
I woke up with a warm feeling in my chest and the small birds peeping outside the pale grey rectangle of the window. The dream had never ended this way before. Did it mean that I had made it? That didn’t seem likely. You went on making it, or trying to, all your life—working your way up the same old terraced slopes with different street names on them.
The Blackwell case came back on my mind, muffling the bird sounds and draining the last of the warm feeling from my chest There were two cases, really. One belonged to me and one belonged to the authorities, but they were connected. The link between them was small but definite: the airline envelope with Q. R. Simpson’s name on it which Burke Damis, or possibly someone else, had left in the beach house. I wanted to explore the connection further, without too much interference from the police. The possibility existed that Damis had come by the envelope, or even used the name, quite innocently.
It was broad daylight and the birds had finished their matins when I went back to sleep. I slept late into the morning. Perhaps I was hoping for another good dream. More likely I was fixing my schedule so that I wouldn’t have time to report in to Peter Colton.
I had become a great frequenter of airports. Before I set out this time, I dug my birth certificate out of the strongbox in the bedroom closet. I had no definite plan to use it. I just thought it would be nice to have along.
The polite young man at the Mexicana desk greeted me like a long-lost brother. The crew I was interested in had already checked in for their flight, and the steward and stewardess had gone up to the restaurant for coffee. He was tall and dark; she was short and plump and pretty, with red hair. They both had on Mexicana uniforms, and I surely couldn’t miss them.
I picked them out in the murmurous cavern of the restaurant, hunched over coffee cups at one of the long counters. The girl had an empty stool beside her, and I slid onto it. She was certainly pretty, though the red hair that curled from under her overseas-type cap had been dyed. She had melting dark eyes and a stung-cherry mouth. Like American airline hostesses, she had on enough make-up to go on the stage.
The Zebra-Striped Hearse Page 6