The Zebra-Striped Hearse Part 14

She lit up coldly and brightly, like a marquee. "You remember me. I thought everyone had forgotten."

"I was a fan," I said, spreading it not too thick.

"How nice!" She clenched her hands at her shoulders and jumped a few inches off the floor, with both feet, her smile immobile. "For that you may sit you down and I'll pour you a drink and tell you anything you want to know. Except about me. Name your poison."

"Gin and tonic, since you're so kind."

"One gin and tonic coming up."

She turned on a gilt chandelier which hung like a barbaric treasure among the ceiling beams. The room was like an auctioneer's warehouse, crowded with furniture of various periods and countries. Against a distant wall stood an ornately carved bar, backed by shelves of bottles, with half a dozen leather-covered stools in front of it.

"Come sit at the bar. It's cozier."

I sat and watched her mix my drink. For herself she compounded something out of tequila and grenadine, with coa.r.s.e salt sprinkled around the rim of the gla.s.s. She stayed behind the bar to drink it, leaning on her forearms and exposing her bosom like a barmaid favoring a customer.

"I won't waste time beating around the bush. I'm interested in Burke Damis. You know him, Mrs. Wilkinson?"

"Slightly. He is, or was, a friend of my husband's."

"Why do you put it in the past tense?"

"They had a quarrel, some time before Mr. Damis left here."

"What about?"

"You ask very direct questions."

"I don't have time for my usual subtlety."

"That must be something to experience." must be something to experience."

"Oh, it is. What did they quarrel about?"

"Me, if you have to know. Poor little old me." She fluttered her eyelashes. "I was afraid they were going to kill each other, honestly. But Bill contented himself with burning the picture. That way he got back at both of us." She raised one hand like a witness. "Now don't ask me for doing what. There wasn't any what what It's just that Bill is very insecure in our relationship." It's just that Bill is very insecure in our relationship."

"He burned the 'Portrait of an Unknown Woman'?"

"Yes, and I haven't forgiven him for it," she said, as though this were proof of character. "He broke up the frame and tore the canvas and put the whole thing in the fireplace and set fire to it. Bill can be quite violent sometimes."

She sipped her drink and licked the salt from her lips with a pale pointed tongue. She reminded me of a cat, not a domestic cat, but one of the larger breeds that could stalk men. Her bright lips seemed to be savoring the memory of violence.

"Did Damis know the picture was destroyed?"

"I told him. It broke him up. He wept actual tears, can you imagine?"

"I wonder why."

"It was his best picture, he said. I liked it, too."

"I heard he'd tried to buy it back."

"He did, but I wouldn't part with it." Between the shadowed lids her eyes were watchful. "Who else have you been talking to?"

"Various people around the village."

"Claude Stacy?"

"No. Not yet."

"Why are you so interested in that particular picture?"

"I'm interested in everything Damis does."

"You mentioned a crime that occurred up north. Do you want to let down your back hair about it? I've been letting down my back hair."

I told her what had happened to Quincy Ralph Simpson. She looked somehow disappointed, as if she'd been expecting something more lurid.

"This is all new to me," she said. "There's nothing I can tell you about Simpson."

"Let's get back to the picture then. Damis called it a portrait. Did he ever say who the subject of it was?"

"He never did," she said shortly.

"Do you have any ideas?"

She shrugged her shoulders and made a stupid face, with her mouth turned down at the corners.

"You must have had a reason for buying the painting and wanting to keep it. Your husband cared enough about it to burn it."

"I don't know who the woman was," she said, too forcefully.

"I think you do."

"Think away. You're getting rather boring. It's late, and I have a headache." She drew her fingers across her forehead. "Why don't you drink up and go?"

I left my drink where it was on the bar between us. "I'm sorry if I pressed too hard. I didn't mean to-"

"Didn't you?" She finished her drink and came around the end of the bar, licking her lips. "Come on, I'll let you out."

It had been a very quick party. Reluctantly I followed her to the door.

"I was hoping to ask you some questions about Harriet Blackwell. I understand Damis met her here at your house."

"So what?" she said, and pulled the door open. "Out."

She slammed it behind me. In the dooryard I b.u.mped my head on the same low-hanging fruit. I picked it-it was a mango-and took it along with me as a souvenir.

It was a long walk back, but I rather enjoyed it. It gave me a chance to think, among other things about Helen Holmes Wilkinson. Our rather tenuous relationship, based on Claude Stacy's sweater and my remembering her movie name, had broken down over the ident.i.ty of the woman in the burned portrait. I would give odds that she knew who the woman was and what her connection with Damis had been.

I wondered about Helen's own connection with Damis.

Headlights approached me, coming very fast from the direction of the village. They belonged to a beetle-shaped Porsche which swerved in long arcs from one side of the road to the other. I had to slide into the ditch to avoid being run over. As the Porsche went by I caught a glimpse of the driver's face, pale under flying dark hair. I threw my mango at him.

The clock chimed two quarters-half-past two-as I struggled through the village to the posada posada. In the room behind the desk, Claude Stacy was sleeping in his clothes on a mohair couch. It was a couch with one high end, the kind psychiatrists use, and he was curled up on it in foetal position.

I shook him. He grimaced and snorted like a huge old baby being born into a world he never made.

"What is it?"

"I met a friend of yours tonight. Helen Wilkinson. She mentioned you."

"Did she now?" He took a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his thinning hair. "I hope it was complimentary."

"Very," I lied.

He basked in the imaginary compliment. "Oh, Helen and I get along. If Bill Wilkinson hadn't got to her first I might have thought of marrying her myself." He thought about it now. "She used to be in pictures, you know, and she saved her money. I did some acting at one time myself. But I didn't hang on to any money."

"What does Bill Wilkinson do for a living?"

"Nothing. He must be twenty years younger than Helen is," he said by way of explanation. "You'd never know it, she's so beautifully preserved. And Bill has let himself go frightfully. He used to be a Greek G.o.d, I mean it."

"Have you known him long?"

"Years and years. It's through him I got to know Helen. He married her a couple of years ago, after his folks stopped sending him money. I wouldn't say he married her for her money, but he married where money is. Tennyson." Stacy giggled. "It drives him out of his mind when Helen even looks looks at another man." at another man."

"She looks at other men?"

"I'm afraid she does. She was interested in me at one time." He flushed with vanity. "Of course I wouldn't steal another fellow's wife. Bill knows he can trust me. Bill and I have been buddy-buddy for years."

"Have you seen him tonight?"

"No, I haven't. I think he went to a party in Guadalajara. He has some very good connections. His family are very well-known people in Texas."

"Does he drive a Porsche?"

"If you can call it driving. His driving is one reason he had to leave Texas."

"I can believe it. He almost ran me down on the road just now."

"Poor old Bill. Some night he's going to end up in the ditch with a broken neck. And maybe I'll marry Helen after all, who knows?" The prospect failed to cheer him. "I need a drink, old chap. Will you have one with me?"

"All right. Drinking seems to be the favorite indoor sport around here."

He looked at me to see if I was accusing him of being a drunk. I smiled. He gave me a Mexican-type shrug and got a bottle of Bacardi out from under the high end of the couch. He poured some into paper cups from a dispenser that hung on the wall beside the bottled water. I added water to mine.

"Salud," he said. "If you don't mind my asking, how did you happen to run into Helen Wilkinson?"

"I went to see her."

"Just like that?"

"I happen to be a private investigator."

He sat bolt upright. His drink slopped over the rim of the cup. I wondered what old scandal had the power to galvanize him.

"I thought you were a tourist," he said resentfully.

"I'm a detective, and I came here to investigate a man who calls himself Burke Damis. I think he stayed with you for a night or two."

"One night," Stacy said. "So it's really true about him, after all? I hated to believe it-he's such a fine-looking chap."

"You hated to believe what?"

"That he murdered his wife. Isn't that why you're after him?"

With the aid of a little rum and water I made a quick adjustment. "These rumors get around. Where did you happen to pick that one up?"

"It was going the rounds, as you say. I think it started when Bill Wilkinson told somebody at The Place that he was going to report Damis as an undesirable alien." Stacy sounded like a connoisseur of rumors, who collected them as other men collected notable sayings or pictures or women. "The government has been bearing down on undesirables, rounding them up and sending them back across the border. Like wetbacks in reverse."

"And Wilkinson turned Damis in?"

"I don't believe he actually did, but he threatened to. Which is probably why Damis got out in a hurry. So he really is one jump ahead of the law?"

"A long jump," I said. "This rumor interests me. What exactly was said?"

"Simply that Damis-which wasn't his real name-was wanted for the murder of his wife."

"How do you know it isn't his real name?"

"I don't know don't know any anything. It was all part of the rumor. I pestered Bill and Helen for more details, but they refused to talk-"

"They know more details, do they?"

"I would say so."

"Where did they get them?"

"I've asked myself that question many times. I know they made their border trip last May and spent a week or so in California. That's when the murder occurred, isn't it? Maybe they read about it in the newspapers. But if they knew all about it, I can't understand why they would get chummy with the man. The three of them were very buddy-buddy for a while, before Bill turned against him. Helen got too interested in Damis."

"But Damis had a girl of his own." Or two. Or three.

He smiled indulgently. "That wouldn't stop Helen."

"Do you know the girl he left here with-Harriet Blackwell?"

"I met her once, at a party."

"Where did Damis meet her?"