The Zebra-Striped Hearse (9 page)

“I thought so.”

“You thought so?” Her look was accusing. “Why didn’t you tell me, then, that Señor Simpson is dead?”

“I wasn’t aware of it.” It was a half truth, or a half lie, according to which version of Simpson we were talking about. “How do you know he is, Miss Gomez?”

She held the morning
Times
under my nose, jabbing the late bulletins at the bottom of the front page with a chipped carmine fingernail.

“Slain Man Identified,” one of the items said.

“You see,” Miss Gomez insisted, “he is dead. Murdered.”

“I see.”

“You said you are an investigator. Are you investigating his murder?”

“It’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”

“And you suspect someone from Mexico?” she said in a nationalistic way.

“Someone from the United States.”

This relieved her, but not for long. “Poor Miss Blackwell, she was so crazy about him. All the time, even when she was holding the lady’s baby, she kept looking at him like”—she searched for a phrase—“like he was a saint.”

“He was no saint.”

“Was he a
rufian
—a gangster?”

“I doubt it.”

“It says in the paper that it was a gang killing.”

“Gangsters kill citizens, too.”

She wrinkled her dark brows over this idea. The doubleness of the conversation was getting on my nerves; or perhaps it was the doubleness of my attitude toward Damis. In spite of the evidence tightening around him, I was trying to keep an open mind.

I was glad when the girl went to attend to her duties. She stayed away. When she passed me in the aisle, she carefully avoided meeting my eyes. I think she was afraid of the contagion I carried from Simpson’s death.

We were flying over the sea within sight of land. The air was perfectly transparent. Baja California passed under the wing like the endless harsh shores of hell, its desolation unbroken by tree or house or human being.

As the sun declined, the shadows of the yellow hills lengthened
into the dry valleys. The first green and brown checkerboard of cultivated fields came as a relief to the eye and the mind. The desolation didn’t go on forever.

Miss Gomez unbent a little when she brought me my dinner. “Are you enjoying the flight, sir?”

I said yes.

We circled in over Mazatlán in a red sunset. The three rocky islands offshore jutted up angrily out of a streaked purple sea. A single freighter lay in the harbor with the fishing boats. At the other end of the town, beyond the airport where we landed, new apartment buildings stood along the sea like a miniature Copacabana.

We were herded into the terminal building, to have our tourist cards checked, it was explained. A boy was selling, or trying to sell, costumed puppets which he manipulated on a string. His bare arms were almost as thin as the wooden arms of his dolls.

The line of passengers moved forward slowly in steamy heat. I got my turn at the battered rostrumlike desk where a man in an open-necked white shirt presided. He had pockmarks on his face, and they gave special emphasis to his question:
“Certificado de vacunacion, señor?”

I had none. No one had told me. That was a silly thing to say, but I said it. He leaned toward me not so much in anger as in sorrow.

“You must have the
vacunacion
. I cannot permit you to enter—”

“How do I get one?”

“They will vacunate you
ahora
, now, here.”

He summoned an attendant in olive whipcord who escorted me to an office at the far end of the building. A dark and dumpy woman in white was waiting at the desk with a maternal smile. The white masonry wall behind her had jagged cracks in it.

“Vaccination?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She took my name and home address on a filing card. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, I never hurt ‘em. Jacket off and roll up your left sleeve, please.”

She struck my arm smartly as the needle went in.

“You took it well,” she said. “Some of them keel over.”

“You speak good English.”

“Why not? I was a nurse’s aide in Fresno six years before I went into training. I got a married daughter in Los Angeles. You can roll down your sleeve now. You’ll probably have a reaction by tomorrow.”

I buttoned the cuff of my shirt and put on my jacket. “Do you give many of these impromptu vaccinations?”

“Two or three a day, at least, since the government clamped down. People are always forgetting their certificates, or else they didn’t get the word in the first place. They process so many at the L.A. airport that they get careless.”

I said, on the off-chance of learning something: “A man I know passed through here from L.A. some time in the last two months. I’m wondering if you had to vaccinate him.”

“What does he look like?”

I described Burke Damis.

She twisted her mouth to one side. “I think I do remember him. He had big fat biceps, like yours. But he didn’t like the needle. He tried to talk himself out of it.”

“When was this?”

“I couldn’t say exactly. A couple of months ago, like you said. I could look it up if you’ll give me his name.”

“Quincy Ralph Simpson.”

She opened one of the desk drawers, went through a filing box of cards, and picked out one of them.

“
Here
it is, Simpson. I gave him his shot on May twenty.”

It meant that Burke Damis had entered Mexico two days after the original Simpson left home for the last time. It probably meant that Simpson had been murdered between May
18 and May 20, more likely than not by the man who had stolen his name.

“A very nice-appearing young man,” the woman was saying. “We had a nice chat after we got the vaccination out of the way.”

“Chat about what?”

“My daughter in Los Angeles. And he wanted to know if that was earthquake damage.” She waved her hand toward the cracks in the masonry.

“I was asking myself the same thing.”

“It was no earthquake. The hurricane did it. It practically tore out the whole end of the building. You’d never know it was built in the last ten years.”

The man in the whipcord uniform came back. He had two more victims with him, a young couple who were explaining that they had been assured that these formalities could be taken care of when they got to Mexico City. The nurse smiled at them maternally.

I
T WAS RAINING HARD
when we put down at Guadalajara, as if our descent had ruptured a membrane in the lower sky. In spite of the newspaper tent I held over my head, the short walk from the plane to the terminal pasted my clothes to my back.

I exchanged some damp dollars for some dry pesos and asked the cashier to get me an English-speaking taxi driver, if possible. The porter he dispatched reappeared with a man in a plastic raincoat who grinned at me from under his dripping mustache.

“Yessir, where you want to go?”

“Ajijic, if they have a hotel there.”

“Yessir, they have a very nice
posada.”

He led me across the many-puddled parking lot to a fairly new Simca sedan. I climbed squishing into the front seat.

“Wet night.”

“Yessir.”

He drove me through it for half an hour, entertaining me with fragments of autobiography. Like the nurse who had vaccinated me in Mazatlán, he had learned his English in the Central Valley.

“I was a wetback,” he said with some pride. “Three times I walked across the border. Two times they picked me up on the other side and hauled me back on a bus. The third time, I made it, all the way to Merced. I worked around Merced for four years, in the fields. You know Merced?”

“I know it. How were working conditions?”

“Not so good. But the pay, it was very good. I made enough to come back home and go into business.” He slapped the wheel of his Simca.

We emerged from between steep black hills onto a lake-shore road. I caught pale glimpses of ruffled water. A herd of burros crossed the headlights and galloped away into darkness. Through the streaming windshield they looked like the grey and shrunken ghosts of horses.

Church towers, buttressed by other buildings, rose from the darkness ahead. The rain was letting up, and had stopped by the time we reached the village. Though it was past ten o’clock, children swarmed in the doorways. Their elders were promenading in the steep cobbled streets, which had drained already.

At the corner of the central square an old woman in a shawl had set up a wooden table on the sidewalk. She was serving some kind of stew out of a pot, and I caught a whiff of it as we went by. It had a heady pungency, an indescribable smell which aroused no memories; expectation, maybe, and a smattering of doubt. The smell of Mexico.

I felt closer to home when we reached the
posada
. The night clerk was a big middle-aged American named Stacy, and he was glad to see me. The pillared lobby of the place had a deserted air. Stacy and I and my driver, who was waiting for me just inside the entrance, were the only human beings within sight or sound.

Stacy fussed over me like somebody trying to give the impression that he was more than one person. “I can certainly fix you up, Mr. Archer. I can give you your choice of several nice private cottages.”

“Any one of them will do. I think I’ll only be staying one night.”

He looked disappointed. “I’ll send out the
mozo
for your luggage.”

“I have no luggage.”

“But you’re all
wet
, man.”

“I know. Luckily this is a drip-dry suit.”

“You can’t let it dry right on you.” He clucked sympathetically. “Listen, you’re about my size. I’ll lend you some slacks and a sweater if you like. Unless you’re thinking of going right to bed.”

“I wasn’t intending to. You’re very kind.”

“Anything for a fellow American,” he said in a mocking tone which was half serious after all.

He took me through a wet garden to my cottage. It was clean and roomy; a fire was laid in the fireplace. He left me with instructions to use the bottled water, even for cleaning my teeth. I lit the fire and hung up my wet suit on a wall bracket above the mantel.

Stacy came back after a while with an armful of dry clothes. His large rubbery face was flushed with generosity and a meantime drink. The flannel slacks he gave me were big in the waist. I cinched them in with my belt and pulled on his blue turtleneck sweater. It had a big monogrammed “S” like a target over the heart, and it smelled of the kind of piny scent
they foist off on men who want to smell masculine.

“You look very nice,” Stacy declared.

He stood and watched me in wistful empathy. Perhaps he saw himself with ten pounds shifted from his waistline to his shoulders, and ten lost years regained. He got a bit flustered when I told him I was going out. He may have been looking forward to an intimate conversation by the fire:
And what is your philosophy of life?

Keep moving, amigo
.

Stacy knew where the Hatchens lived, and passed the word in rapid Spanish to my driver. We drove to a nameless street. The only sign at the corner had been painted on a wall by an amateur hand:
“Cristianismo sí, Comunismo no.”
A church tower rose on the far side of the wall.

The Hatchens’ gate was closed for the night. I knocked for some time before I got a response. My knocking wasn’t the only sound in the neighborhood. Up the street a radio was going full blast; hoofs clip-clopped; a burro laughed grotesquely in the darkness; the bell in the church tower rang the three-quarter hour and then repeated it for those who were hard of hearing; a pig squealed.

A man opened the upper half of the wicket gate and flashed a bright light in my face. “
Quien es?
Are you American?”

“Yes. My name is Archer. You’re Mr. Hatchen?”

“Dr. Hatchen. I don’t know you, do I? Is there some troubler?”

“Nothing immediate. Back in the States, your wife’s daughter, Harriet, has run off with a young man named Burke Damis whom you may know. I came here to investigate him for Colonel Blackwell. Are you and Mrs. Hatchen willing to talk to me?”

“I suppose we can’t refuse. Come back in the morning, eh?”

“I may not be here in the morning. If you’ll give me a little time tonight, I’ll try to make it short.”

“All right.”

I paid off my driver as Hatchen was opening the lower gate. He led me up a brick walk through an enclosed garden. The flashlight beam jumped along in front of us across the uneven bricks. He was a thin aging man who walked with great strenuosity.

He paused under an outside light before we entered the house. “Just what do you mean when you say Harriet’s run off with Damis?”

“She intends to marry him.”

“Is that bad?”

“It depends on what I find out about him. I’ve already come across some dubious things.”

“For instance?” He had a sharp wizened face in which the eyes were bright and quick.

“Apparently he came here under an alias.”

“That’s not unusual. The Chapala woods are full of people living incognito. But come in. My wife will be interested.”

He turned on a light in a screened portico and directed me through it to a further room. A woman was sitting there on a couch in an attitude of conscious elegance. Masses of blondish hair were arranged precariously on her head. Her black formal gown accentuated the white puffiness of her shoulders. The classic lines of her chin and throat were a little blurred by time.

“This is Mr. Archer, Pauline. My wife,” Hatchen said proudly.

She took my hand with the air of a displaced queen and held onto it in a subtle kind of Indian wrestling until I was sitting beside her on the couch.

“Sit down,” she said unnecessarily. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Mr. Archer is an emissary from dear old Mark.”