Free The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald Page B

get a line on Damis’s identity and background. The next logical step, as I see it, is to go back to the point where Harriet met him and work forward from there. If it’s all right with you, I intend to fly down to Mexico.”
    There was a long silence on the line. Outside the telephone booth, I could hear my flight being announced over the loudspeakers.
    “Are you there, Colonel?”
    “I’m here. You’re planning to go to Mexico, you say. When?”
    “In about five minutes. It’s going to cost you a couple of hundred dollars—”
    “Money is no object. By all means go if you think it will help.”
    “I can’t guarantee any results, but it’s worth trying. Can you give me your ex-wife’s address in Ajijic?”
    “She doesn’t have an address. But any member of the American community should be able to tell you where she lives. Pauline was never one to hide her light under a bushel.”
    “Her last name is Hatchen?”
    “That is correct. Good luck.” He sounded as though his own had run out.
    The plane was barely half full. I had a window seat over the left wing. As the redheaded stewardess placed me in it, I noticed that she looked at me in a peculiar way.
    The broken jigsaw of Los Angeles tilted and drifted backward into brownish smog. When the plane had leveled out at cruising altitude, the stewardess slipped into the empty seat beside me. She held a folded newspaper in the hand away from me. Under the make-up, her color wasn’t good.
    “I found the seating chart for July—July ten. The man with Miss Blackwell, his name was Simpson, Q. R. Simpson.”
    “I thought so.”
    “You thought so?” Her look was accusing. “Why didn’t you tell me, then, that Señor Simpson is dead?”
    “I wasn’t aware of it.” It was a half truth, or a half lie, according to which version of Simpson we were talking about. “How do you know he is, Miss Gomez?”
    She held the morning
Times
under my nose, jabbing the late bulletins at the bottom of the front page with a chipped carmine fingernail.
    “Slain Man Identified,” one of the items said.
    The body of Quincy R. Simpson, found icepicked in a shallow grave in Citrus Junction last Friday, was positively identified late last night by his widow. The victim, missing for the past two months, was a resident of San Mateo County. Police suspect a gangkilling, according to Sergeant Wesley Leonard of the Citrus County Sheriff’s office.
    “You see,” Miss Gomez insisted, “he is dead. Murdered.”
    “I see.”
    “You said you are an investigator. Are you investigating his murder?”
    “It’s beginning to look like it, isn’t it?”
    “And you suspect someone from Mexico?” she said in a nationalistic way.
    “Someone from the United States.”
    This relieved her, but not for long. “Poor Miss Blackwell, she was so crazy about him. All the time, even when she was holding the lady’s baby, she kept looking at him like”—she searched for a phrase—“like he was a saint.”
    “He was no saint.”
    “Was he a
rufian
—a gangster?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “It says in the paper that it was a gang killing.”
    “Gangsters kill citizens, too.”
    She wrinkled her dark brows over this idea. The doubleness of the conversation was getting on my nerves; or perhaps it was the doubleness of my attitude toward Damis. In spite of the evidence tightening around him, I was trying to keep an open mind.
    I was glad when the girl went to attend to her duties. She stayed away. When she passed me in the aisle, she carefully avoided meeting my eyes. I think she was afraid of the contagion I carried from Simpson’s death.
    We were flying over the sea within sight of land. The air was perfectly transparent. Baja California passed under the wing like the endless harsh shores of hell, its desolation unbroken by tree or house or human being.
    As the sun declined, the shadows of the yellow hills lengthenedinto the dry valleys. The first green and brown checkerboard of cultivated