Free The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald

Ralph’s name to cross the border from Mexico last week. You’re sure the name Burke Damis rings no bell?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “And you don’t recognize the description?”
    “No. At this point I wouldn’t recognize my own brother if he walked in the door. Aren’t you ever going to leave me alone?”
    Leonard came into the room. I suspected that he had been listening outside the door, and chose this moment to break up the interview. He was a kind man, and he said that he and his wife would look after Vicky for the balance of the night.
    I drove home to Los Angeles, home to a hot shower and a cold drink and a dark bed.

chapter
8
    I HAD A DREAM which I’d been dreaming in variant forms for as long as I could remember. I was back in high school, in my senior year. The girl at the next desk smiled at me snootily.
    “Poor Lew. You’ll fail the exams.”
    I had to admit to myself that this was likely. The finals loomed up ahead like the impossible slopes of purgatory, guarded by men with books I hadn’t read.
    “
I’m
going to college,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
    I had no idea. I knew with a part of my dreaming mind that I was a grown man in my forties. There wasn’t anything more that high school could do to me. Yet here I was, back in Mr. Merritt’s classroom, dreading the finals and wondering what I would do when I had failed them.
    “You’ll have to learn a trade,” the snooty one said.
    So far it was more or less the dream I had always had.Then something different happened. I said to the girl, rather snootily: “I have a trade, kiddo. I’m a detective, You’ll be reading about me in the papers.”
    I woke up with a warm feeling in my chest and the small birds peeping outside the pale grey rectangle of the window. The dream had never ended this way before. Did it mean that I had made it? That didn’t seem likely. You went on making it, or trying to, all your life—working your way up the same old terraced slopes with different street names on them.
    The Blackwell case came back on my mind, muffling the bird sounds and draining the last of the warm feeling from my chest There were two cases, really. One belonged to me and one belonged to the authorities, but they were connected. The link between them was small but definite: the airline envelope with Q. R. Simpson’s name on it which Burke Damis, or possibly someone else, had left in the beach house. I wanted to explore the connection further, without too much interference from the police. The possibility existed that Damis had come by the envelope, or even used the name, quite innocently.
    It was broad daylight and the birds had finished their matins when I went back to sleep. I slept late into the morning. Perhaps I was hoping for another good dream. More likely I was fixing my schedule so that I wouldn’t have time to report in to Peter Colton.
    I had become a great frequenter of airports. Before I set out this time, I dug my birth certificate out of the strongbox in the bedroom closet. I had no definite plan to use it. I just thought it would be nice to have along.
    The polite young man at the Mexicana desk greeted me like a long-lost brother. The crew I was interested in had already checked in for their flight, and the steward and stewardess had gone up to the restaurant for coffee. He was tall and dark; she was short and plump and pretty, with red hair. They both had on Mexicana uniforms, and I surely couldn’t miss them.
    I picked them out in the murmurous cavern of the restaurant, hunched over coffee cups at one of the long counters. The girl had an empty stool beside her, and I slid onto it. She was certainly pretty, though the red hair that curled from under her overseas-type cap had been dyed. She had melting dark eyes and a stung-cherry mouth. Like American airline hostesses, she had on enough make-up to go on the stage.
    She was talking in Spanish with the steward, and I waited for a pause in their conversation.
    “Miss