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

I came out to the airport before flight time, perhaps they would have a few minutes to talk to me about my friend Señor Simpson.
    Exhilarated by his Latin courtesy, I walked back to the Immigration and Customs shed. The officers on duty took turns looking at my license as if it was something I’d found in a box of breakfast cereal.
    Feeling the need to check in with some friendly authority, I drove downtown. Peter Colton was in his cubicle in the District Attorney’s office, behind a door that said Chief Criminal Investigator.
    Peter had grown old in law enforcement. The grooves of discipline and thought ware like saber scars in his cheeks. His triangular eyes glinted at me over half-glasses which had slid down his large aggressive nose.
    He finished reading a multigraphed sheet, initialed it, and scaled it into his out-basket.
    “Sit down, Lew. How’s it going?”
    “All right. I dropped by to thank you for recommending me to Colonel Blackwell.”
    He regarded me quizzically. “You don’t sound very grateful. Is Blackie giving you a bad time?”
    “Something is. He handed me a peculiar case. I don’t know whether it’s a case or not. It may be only Blackwell’s imagination.”
    “He never struck me as the imaginative type.”
    “Known him long?”
    “I served under him, for my sins, in Bavaria just after the war. He was in Military Government, and I was in charge of a plain-clothes section of Military Police.”
    “What was he like to work for?”
    “Tough,” Colton said, and added reflectively: “Blackie liked command, too much. He didn’t get enough of it during the fighting. Some friend in Washington, or some enemy, kept himin the rear echelons. I don’t know whether it was for Blackie’s own protection or the protection of the troops. He was bitter about it, and it made him hard on his men. But he’s a bit of an ass, and we didn’t take him too seriously.”
    “In what way was he hard on his men?”
    “All the ways he could think of. He went in for enforcement of petty rules. He was very keen on the anti-fraternization policy. My men had murder and rape and black-marketeering to contend with. But Blackie expected us to spend our nights patrolling the cabarets suppressing fraternization. It drove him crazy to think of all the fraternization that was going on between innocent American youths and man-eating
Fräuleins.”
    “Is he some kind of a sex nut?”
    “I wouldn’t put it that strongly.” But Colton’s grin was wolfish. “He’s a Puritan, from a long line of Puritans. What made it worse, he was having fraternization problems in his own family. His wife was interested in various other men. I heard later she divorced him.”
    “What sort of a woman is she?”
    “Quite a dish, in those days, but I never knew her up close. Does it matter?”
    “It could. Her daugher Harriet went to Mexico to visit her a few weeks ago and made a bad connection. At least it doesn’t look too promising. He’s a painter named Burke Damis, or possibly Q. R. Simpson. She brought him back here with her, intends to marry him. Blackwell thinks the man is trying to take her for her money. He hired me to investigate that angle, or anything else that I can find on Damis.”
    “Or possibly Q. R. Simpson, you said. Is Damis using an alias?”
    “I haven’t confirmed it. I’m fairly sure he entered the country a week ago under the Q. R. Simpson name. It may be his real name, since it isn’t a likely alias.”
    “And you want me to check it out”
    “That would be nice.”
    Colton picked up his ball-point pen and jabbed with it in my direction. “You know I can’t spend public time and money on a private deal like this.”
    “Even for an old friend?”
    “Blackwell’s no friend of mine. I recommended you to get him out of my hair in one quick easy motion.”
    “I was referring to myself,” I said, “no doubt presumptuously. A simple query to the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation wouldn’t take