The Zebra-Striped Hearse Part 31

"Who are you waiting for?"

"A fare. Any objections?" His broken sleep had made him a little surly. He had a seamed dark face, and the eyes of a loner.

"I have no objections."

He said with aggressive politeness: "If I'm in your way I can move. Just say the word."

"You're not in my way. What happened, brother-did a bear bite you?"

"I don't like these long waits. These dames have no consideration. She must of been in there nearly an hour." He looked at his watch. "Over an hour."

"Who is she?"

"I dunno. Some big blonde dame in a leopard coat. I picked her up in Santa Monica."

"Is she old or young?"

"She isn't young. You ask a lot of questions."

"I'll bet you two dollars you didn't pick her up at the Santa Monica Inn."

"You lose. Are you her husband?"

"A friend." I gave him two dollars and went back to my car. We sat and had a waiting compet.i.tion which lasted another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then the front door opened.

Pauline Hatchen backed out saying good night to Isobel Blackwell. I had a good look at Isobel before she closed the door. She was fully and formally dressed in a dark suit. Her heavy make-up didn't entirely hide her pallor or the patches of funeral crepe under her eyes. She didn't notice me.

I was waiting beside the cab when Pauline Hatchen reached it. "How are you, Mrs. Hatchen? I'm not as surprised to see you here as you might think. I got your call, and tried to return it."

"It's Mr. Archer. How nice." But she didn't sound too happy. "I've been wanting to talk to you again. It was one of my main reasons for coming back. The other night, in Ajijic, I didn't truly realize the situation. I suppose I'm what they call slow on the uptake."

"Did you fly in?"

"Yes. Today." She looked around at the large and quiet night. The lights in the Blackwell house were going out progressively. "Is there somewhere we can go and talk?"

"Will my car do? I prefer not to leave here right now. I want to see Isobel before she goes back to bed."

"I suppose it will have to do." She turned to the driver. "Do you mind waiting a few more minutes?"

"It's your time, ma'am. You're paying for it."

We walked back to my car. She seemed very tired, so tired that she had forgotten her self-consciousness. She leaned on my arm, and let me help her into the lighted front seat. Her leopard coat was genuine but shabby. She pulled it around her not inelegant legs, and I shut the door.

I sat behind the wheel. "You want to talk about Harriet."

"Yes. Is there any word from her? Anything at all?"

"Nothing that will give you any comfort."

"So Isobel said. I thought perhaps she was holding back on me. She's always been a great one for deciding what other people ought to know. And I had the very devil of a time getting in touch with her. She'd gone to bed and refused to answer the phone. How any woman can sleep sleep through a thing like this! But of course she's not Harriet's mother. That makes the difference. Blood is thicker than water." through a thing like this! But of course she's not Harriet's mother. That makes the difference. Blood is thicker than water."

She sounded like an algebra student quoting a formula which she was just learning how to apply.

"Do you know Isobel well?"

"I've known her for a long time. That isn't quite the same thing, is it? Her first husband, Ronald Jaimet, was Mark's cousin, and incidentally one of his best friends. Mark is a very family-minded man, and naturally we saw a good deal of the Jaimets. But Isobel and I were never close. I always felt she envied me my position as Mark's wife. Ronald was a decent-enough fellow, but he was nothing but a high-school teacher. He was one of those dedicated souls. Perhaps his diabetes had something to do with it."

"Do you know anything about his death?"

"Not much. He had an accident in the mountains. Mark was with him at the time. Why don't you ask Mark?"

"Mark isn't available. Or is he?"

"No, he's not here. According to Isobel, he's gone up to Tahoe." She leaned toward me, and her clothes emitted a gust of perfume. "Just what is the situation up there, Mr. Archer?"

"I haven't been in touch with it today. They're searching for Harriet, of course. She was last seen there, and a bloodstained hat belonging to her was found in the water. I found it myself."

"Does that mean she's been killed?"

"I keep hoping it doesn't. All we can do is hope."

"You think Harriet's dead." Her voice was low and dull. "Did Burke Damis kill her?"

"He says he didn't."

"But what would he have to gain?"

"Not all murders are for profit."

We sat in close silence, listening to each other breathe. I was keenly aware of her, not so much as a woman, but as a fellow creature who had begun to feel pain. She had lost her way to the happy ending and begun to realize the consequences of the sealed-off past.

"You came a long way to ask me a few questions, Mrs. Hatchen. I'm sorry I can't give you better answers."

"It isn't your fault. And it wasn't just to ask questions that I came back. I heard from Harriet, you see. It brought home to me-"

"You heard from Harriet? When?"

"Yesterday, but please don't get your hopes up. She wrote the letter last Sunday, before this thing erupted. It was a very touching little letter. It made me see myself, and Harriet, in quite a new light."

"What did she have to say?"

"I can't repeat it verbatim, though I must have read it a dozen times on the plane. You can read it yourself if you like."

I turned on the overhead light. She rummaged in her leopard bag and produced a crumpled airmail envelope. It was addressed to Mrs. Keith Hatchen, Apartado Postal 89, Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico, and had been postmarked in Pacific Palisades the previous Monday morning at 9:42. The envelope contained a single sheet crowded with writing. The first few lines slanted up to the right; the rest slanted down increasingly, so that the concluding lines were at a thirty-degree angle from the bottom of the page.

Dear Mother,This is a difficult letter to write because we've never talked to one another as woman to woman (all my fault) and it was stupid and childish of me to leave without saying good-by. I was afraid (it seems I'm always afraid of something, doesn't it?) you would disapprove of me and Burke, and that I couldn't bear. He's my moon and stars, my great brilliant moon and my cruel bright stars. You didn't know I had such feelings, did you? Well, I do. I love him and I'm going to marry him, I don't care what Mark says. When I'm with Him I feel quite different from my ordinary sad shy self (alliteration's artful aid!)-he's a Prince, a dark Prince, who fits crystal slippers on my Cinderella feet and teaches me to dance to music I never heard before-the music of the spheres. When he touches me the dead cold world comes alive, dead cold Harriet comes alive.That sounds like gibberish, doesn't it, but believe me I mean every word of it, but I will try to write more calmly. I need your help, Mother. I know I can count on you, in spite of all the wasted years between us. You have known pa.s.sion and suffered for it-but here I am going on again like a nineteenth-century romance. The point is, we need money and we need it right away if we are to get married. Burke is in some sort of trouble (nothing serious) and I should never have brought him back to this country. We plan to fly to South America-keep this under your hat!-if we can get the money, and you are the only one we can turn to. Mark is no help at all. He hates Burke, I even think he hates me, too. He says he'll hire detectives to stop the wedding! Since he is one of the controllers of Aunt Ada's trust, I can't do anything in that direction until I'm twenty-five. So I am asking you to lend me five thousand dollars till January. If you will do this please have it ready for me and I will get in touch with you when we reach Mexico. We have enough money to reach Mexico.Dear Mother, please do this. It's the only tiling I've ever asked of you. It's the only thing I ask of life, that Burke and I have a chance to be happy together. If I can't have him, I'll die.Your loving daughter, Harriet.

I folded the letter along its creases and tucked it into the envelope. Mrs. Hatchen watched me as if it was a live thing which I might injure.

"It's a strangely beautiful letter, isn't it?"

"It didn't strike me in quite that way. I'm not too crazy about some of the implications. Harriet wasn't thinking too well when she wrote it."

"What do you expect?" she said defensively. "The poor girl was under great strain. She'd just had a fearful battle with her father-Isobel told me something about it. Harriet was fighting for everything she holds dear."

"So was Campion. Everything that he holds dear seems to be five thousand dollars."

"Campion?"

"Campion is Burke Damis's real name. He's in jail in Redwood City at the moment. What about the five thousand dollars, Mrs. Hatchen? Would you have been willing to lend it to her?"

"Yes. I still am, if she is alive to use it. I brought it with me. Keith and I went into Guadalajara yesterday afternoon and took it out of the bank. It's part of my settlement from Mark, and Keith had no real objection."

"I hope you're not carrying it around."

"It's in the safe at the hotel."

"Leave it there. Harriet certainly won't be needing it. I don't believe it was her idea, anyway." I turned to look at her under the light. "You're a generous woman, Mrs. Hatchen. I took you for something different."

"I am something different." She narrowed her eyes and drew down the corners of her mouth. "Please turn off the light and don't look at me. I'm an ugly old woman, trying to buy back the past. But I came back here about fifteen years too late. I had no right to leave Harriet. Her life would have turned out better if I'd stayed."

"You can't be sure of that." I switched off the light, and noticed that all the lights in the Blackwell house had gone out. "Do you mind telling me just why you left Mark Blackwell? Did it have anything to do with Isobel?"

"No, he wasn't interested in her. He wasn't interested in any woman, and that includes me." Her voice had become harsher and deeper. "Mark was a mother's boy. I know that sounds like a peculiar statement to make about a professional military man. Unfortunately it's true. His mother was the widow of the late Colonel, who was killed in the First War, and Mark was her only son, and she really lavished herself on him, if 'lavish' is the word. 'Ravish' may be closer.

"She spent the first years of our marriage with us, and I had to sit in the background and watch him dance to her tune, playing skip-rope with the silver cord. It's a common story-I've heard it from other women, in and out of the service. You marry them because they're idealistic and make no pa.s.ses. The trouble is, they stay that way. Mark was like a little boy in bed. You'll never know the contortions I had to go through to get a child. But we won't go into that.

"When his mother died, I thought he'd turn to me. I was a dreamer. He transferred his fixation-yes, I've talked to the doctors-he transferred his fixation to poor little Harriet. It's a terrible thing to see a person converting another person into a puppet, a kind of zombie. He supervised her reading, her games, her friends, even her thoughts. He made her keep a diary, which he read, and when he was away on duty she had to send it to him. He got her so confused that she didn't know whether she was a girl or a boy, or if he was her father or her lover.

"He was worse than ever after the war, when he got back from Germany. The war was a disappointment to Mark; it didn't do what he'd hoped for his career. Actually he only chose that career because it was a family tradition and his mother insisted on it. I think he would have been happier doing almost anything else. But by the time they retired him, he thought it was too late to start something new. And he had money, so he didn't have to. There's always been scads of money in the family, and he could afford to spend all his time on Harriet. He conceived the grand idea of turning her into a sort of boy-girl who would make everything come right in the end for him. He taught her to shoot and climb mountains and play polo. He even took to calling her Harry.

"It sickened me. I'm not the aggressive type, and I'd always been afraid of him-you get that way living with a man you don't love. But I finally forced a showdown. I told him I would divorce him if he didn't get some help, psychiatric help. Naturally he thought I was the one who was crazy-he couldn't afford to think otherwise. Maybe I was, to stay with him for twelve years. He told me to go ahead and divorce him, that he and Harriet were enough for each other. She was only eleven years old at the time. I wanted to take her with me, but Mark said he would fight me to the limit. I couldn't afford a court battle. Don't ask why. Everything catches up with you in the end. So I lost my daughter, and now she's really lost."

We sat and let the darkness soak into our bones. I tried to relieve it.

"There's a small chance that Harriet's all right," I said. "She and Campion may have decided to travel separately. It would account for his refusal to say what happened to her. She may turn up in Mexico after all."

"But you don't really think she will?"

"No. It's just one of several possibilities. The others aren't so pleasant to contemplate."

There was a stir of life in the cab ahead. The driver got out and slouched toward us.

"You said a few minutes, ma'am. I don't mind waiting if I know how long I got to wait. It's this uncertainty that makes me nervous."

"Things are rough all over," I said.

"I was speaking to the lady." But he went back to his cab.

Mrs. Hatchen opened the door on her side. "I've kept you longer than I meant to. You said you wanted to talk to Isobel."

"Yes."

"Do you think she knows something she hasn't told?"

"People nearly always do," I said. "It's why I have a hard life, and an interesting one."

She reached for the letter, which was still in my hand. "I'd like that back if you don't mind. It's very important to me."

"I'm sorry. The police will have to see it. I'll try to get it back to you eventually. Will you be staying at the Santa Monica Inn?"

"I don't know. Isobel asked me to stay with her, but that's impossible."

"Why?"

"We don't get along. We never have. She thinks I'm a silly flibbertigibbet. Maybe I am. I I think think she she is a hypocrite." is a hypocrite."

"I'd be interested in your reasons."

"They're simple enough. Isobel has always pretended to despise money and the things it can buy. Plain living and high thinking was her motto. But I notice she grabbed Mark and his money the first good chance she got. Please don't quote me to Isobel. In fact, you better not tell her that you saw me."

I said I wouldn't. "One more question, Mrs. Hatchen. What happens to Ada's trust fund if Harriet doesn't live to enjoy it?"

"I suppose it reverts to Mark. Nearly everything does."

chapter 26

THE MAID reluctantly let me in. I waited in the hallway, counting the pieces in the parquetry and wishing that I had never seen Isobel Blackwell, or taken her money, or liked her. She finally appeared, wearing the same dark suit and the same dark patches under her eyes. Her movements were carefully controlled, as if she was walking a line. reluctantly let me in. I waited in the hallway, counting the pieces in the parquetry and wishing that I had never seen Isobel Blackwell, or taken her money, or liked her. She finally appeared, wearing the same dark suit and the same dark patches under her eyes. Her movements were carefully controlled, as if she was walking a line.

She said with unsmiling formality: "I hope the importance of your news justifies this late-night visit."

"It does. Can we sit down?"

She took me into the drawing room, under the eyes of the ancestors. I said to them as well as to her: "I'm doing you a favor coming here. If you weren't my client, there'd be policemen instead, and reporters trampling the roses."

"Am I supposed to understand that?" Her speech was slurred; and her eyes had a drugged look. "If I am, you'll have to explain it to me. And please bear in mind that I may not be thinking too clearly-I'm full of chloral hydrate. Now what were you saying about policemen and newspapermen?"

"They'll be here tomorrow. They'll be wanting to know, among other things, if you have an icepick with a square-cut silver handle."

"We do have, yes. I haven't seen it lately, but I a.s.sume it's somewhere in the kitchen, or one of the portable bars."

"I can tell you now it isn't. It's in the hands of Sergeant Wesley Leonard of the Citrus County Sheriffs Department."