The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald Page A

whipcord uniform came back. He had two more victims with him, a young couple who were explaining that they had been assured that these formalities could be taken care of when they got to Mexico City. The nurse smiled at them maternally.

chapter
9
    I T WAS RAINING HARD when we put down at Guadalajara, as if our descent had ruptured a membrane in the lower sky. In spite of the newspaper tent I held over my head, the short walk from the plane to the terminal pasted my clothes to my back.
    I exchanged some damp dollars for some dry pesos and asked the cashier to get me an English-speaking taxi driver, if possible. The porter he dispatched reappeared with a man in a plastic raincoat who grinned at me from under his dripping mustache.
    “Yessir, where you want to go?”
    “Ajijic, if they have a hotel there.”
    “Yessir, they have a very nice
posada.”
    He led me across the many-puddled parking lot to a fairly new Simca sedan. I climbed squishing into the front seat.
    “Wet night.”
    “Yessir.”
    He drove me through it for half an hour, entertaining me with fragments of autobiography. Like the nurse who had vaccinated me in Mazatlán, he had learned his English in the Central Valley.
    “I was a wetback,” he said with some pride. “Three times I walked across the border. Two times they picked me up on the other side and hauled me back on a bus. The third time, I made it, all the way to Merced. I worked around Merced for four years, in the fields. You know Merced?”
    “I know it. How were working conditions?”
    “Not so good. But the pay, it was very good. I made enough to come back home and go into business.” He slapped the wheel of his Simca.
    We emerged from between steep black hills onto a lake-shore road. I caught pale glimpses of ruffled water. A herd of burros crossed the headlights and galloped away into darkness. Through the streaming windshield they looked like the grey and shrunken ghosts of horses.
    Church towers, buttressed by other buildings, rose from the darkness ahead. The rain was letting up, and had stopped by the time we reached the village. Though it was past ten o’clock, children swarmed in the doorways. Their elders were promenading in the steep cobbled streets, which had drained already.
    At the corner of the central square an old woman in a shawl had set up a wooden table on the sidewalk. She was serving some kind of stew out of a pot, and I caught a whiff of it as we went by. It had a heady pungency, an indescribable smell which aroused no memories; expectation, maybe, and a smattering of doubt. The smell of Mexico.
    I felt closer to home when we reached the
posada
. The night clerk was a big middle-aged American named Stacy, and he was glad to see me. The pillared lobby of the place had a deserted air. Stacy and I and my driver, who was waiting for me just inside the entrance, were the only human beings within sight or sound.
    Stacy fussed over me like somebody trying to give the impression that he was more than one person. “I can certainly fix you up, Mr. Archer. I can give you your choice of several nice private cottages.”
    “Any one of them will do. I think I’ll only be staying one night.”
    He looked disappointed. “I’ll send out the
mozo
for your luggage.”
    “I have no luggage.”
    “But you’re all
wet
, man.”
    “I know. Luckily this is a drip-dry suit.”
    “You can’t let it dry right on you.” He clucked sympathetically. “Listen, you’re about my size. I’ll lend you some slacks and a sweater if you like. Unless you’re thinking of going right to bed.”
    “I wasn’t intending to. You’re very kind.”
    “Anything for a fellow American,” he said in a mocking tone which was half serious after all.
    He took me through a wet garden to my cottage. It was clean and roomy; a fire was laid in the fireplace. He left me with instructions to use the bottled water, even for cleaning my teeth. I lit the fire and hung up my wet suit on a wall bracket above