The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

probably accounted for the burned paper in the upstairs fireplace. Damishad gone to a lot of trouble to cover his traces.
    But he had overlooked one piece of paper. It was jammed between the sliding glass door and its frame, evidently to keep the door from rattling. It was thick and yellowish paper, folded small. When I unfolded it, I recognized it as one of those envelopes that airlines give their passengers to keep their tickets in.
    This was a Mexicana Airlines envelope, with flight instructions typed inside the flap. Mr. Q. R. Simpson, the instructions said, was to leave the Guadalajara airport at 8:40 A.M . on July 10 and arrive at Los Angeles International at 1:30 P.M . the same day.
    I messed around in the bedroom some more, discovered only some dust mice under the bed, and went upstairs. The painting drew me back to it. It affected me differently each time. This time I saw, or thought I saw, that it was powerful and ugly—an assault of dark forces on the vision. Perhaps I was reading my fantasy into it, but it seemed to me that its darkness was the ultimate darkness of death.
    I had an impulse to take it along and find an expert to show it to. If Damis was a known artist, his style should be recognizable. But I couldn’t move the thing. The oils were still wet and would smear.
    I went out to the car to get my camera. The zebra-striped hearse was standing empty beside it. The sky had cleared, and a few sun-bathers were lying around in the sand like bodies after a catastrophe. Beyond the surf line the six surfers waited in prayerful attitudes on their boards.
    A big wave rose toward them. Five of the surfers rode it in, like statues on a traveling blue hillside. The sixth was less skillful. The wave collapsed on her. She lost her board and swam in after it.
    Instead of taking it out to sea again, she carried it up the beach on her head. She left it on the sand above the tide line and climbed the rocky bank to the parking space. She had thebust and shoulders of a young Amazon, but she was shivering and close to tears.
    It was the girl who had made the face at me, which gave us something in common. I said: “You took quite a spill.”
    She looked at me as if she had never seen me before, almost as if she wasn’t seeing me now. I was a member of another tribe or species. Her eyes were wet and wild, like the eyes of sea lions.
    She got a man’s topcoat out of the back of the hearse and put it on. It was good brown tweed which looked expensive, but there were wavy white salt marks on it, as if it had been immersed in the sea. Her fingers trembled on the brown leather buttons. One of the buttons, the top one, was missing. She turned up the collar around the back of her head where the wet hair clung like a golden helmet.
    “If you’re cold I have a heater in my car.”
    “Blah,” she said, and turned her tweed back on me.
    I loaded the camera with color film and took some careful shots of Damis’s painting. On my way to the airport I dropped the film off with a photographer friend in Santa Monica. He promised to get it developed in a hurry.
    The very polite young man at the Mexicana desk did a few minutes’ research and came up with the information that Q. R. Simpson had indeed been on the July 10 flight from Guadalajara. So had Harriet Blackwell. Burke Damis hadn’t.
    My tentative conclusion, which I kept to myself, was that Damis had entered the United States under the name of Simpson. Since he couldn’t leave Mexico without a nontransferable tourist card or enter this country without proof of citizenship, the chances were that Q. R. Simpson was Damis’s real name.
    The polite young Mexican told me further that the crew of the July 10 flight had flown in from Mexico again early this afternoon. The pilot and copilot were in the office now, but they wouldn’t know anything about the passengers. The stewardand stewardess, who would, had already gone for the day. They were due to fly out again tomorrow morning. If