The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald

fields came as a relief to the eye and the mind. The desolation didn’t go on forever.
    Miss Gomez unbent a little when she brought me my dinner. “Are you enjoying the flight, sir?”
    I said yes.
    We circled in over Mazatlán in a red sunset. The three rocky islands offshore jutted up angrily out of a streaked purple sea. A single freighter lay in the harbor with the fishing boats. At the other end of the town, beyond the airport where we landed, new apartment buildings stood along the sea like a miniature Copacabana.
    We were herded into the terminal building, to have our tourist cards checked, it was explained. A boy was selling, or trying to sell, costumed puppets which he manipulated on a string. His bare arms were almost as thin as the wooden arms of his dolls.
    The line of passengers moved forward slowly in steamy heat. I got my turn at the battered rostrumlike desk where a man in an open-necked white shirt presided. He had pockmarks on his face, and they gave special emphasis to his question:
“Certificado de vacunacion, señor?”
    I had none. No one had told me. That was a silly thing to say, but I said it. He leaned toward me not so much in anger as in sorrow.
    “You must have the
vacunacion
. I cannot permit you to enter—”
    “How do I get one?”
    “They will vacunate you
ahora
, now, here.”
    He summoned an attendant in olive whipcord who escorted me to an office at the far end of the building. A dark and dumpy woman in white was waiting at the desk with a maternal smile. The white masonry wall behind her had jagged cracks in it.
    “Vaccination?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    She took my name and home address on a filing card. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, I never hurt ‘em. Jacket off and roll up your left sleeve, please.”
    She struck my arm smartly as the needle went in.
    “You took it well,” she said. “Some of them keel over.”
    “You speak good English.”
    “Why not? I was a nurse’s aide in Fresno six years before I went into training. I got a married daughter in Los Angeles. You can roll down your sleeve now. You’ll probably have a reaction by tomorrow.”
    I buttoned the cuff of my shirt and put on my jacket. “Do you give many of these impromptu vaccinations?”
    “Two or three a day, at least, since the government clamped down. People are always forgetting their certificates, or else they didn’t get the word in the first place. They process so many at the L.A. airport that they get careless.”
    I said, on the off-chance of learning something: “A man I know passed through here from L.A. some time in the last two months. I’m wondering if you had to vaccinate him.”
    “What does he look like?”
    I described Burke Damis.
    She twisted her mouth to one side. “I think I do remember him. He had big fat biceps, like yours. But he didn’t like the needle. He tried to talk himself out of it.”
    “When was this?”
    “I couldn’t say exactly. A couple of months ago, like you said. I could look it up if you’ll give me his name.”
    “Quincy Ralph Simpson.”
    She opened one of the desk drawers, went through a filing box of cards, and picked out one of them.
    “
Here
it is, Simpson. I gave him his shot on May twenty.”
    It meant that Burke Damis had entered Mexico two days after the original Simpson left home for the last time. It probably meant that Simpson had been murdered between May18 and May 20, more likely than not by the man who had stolen his name.
    “A very nice-appearing young man,” the woman was saying. “We had a nice chat after we got the vaccination out of the way.”
    “Chat about what?”
    “My daughter in Los Angeles. And he wanted to know if that was earthquake damage.” She waved her hand toward the cracks in the masonry.
    “I was asking myself the same thing.”
    “It was no earthquake. The hurricane did it. It practically tore out the whole end of the building. You’d never know it was built in the last ten years.”
    The man in the