Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) (14 page)

 
          
“I’ll
bring her home safely,” I said. I should have held my tongue.

 
          
He
moved toward me with his head down like a bull’s, a big man and still hard. His
arms were stiff at his sides. The fists were clenched at the end of them.

 
          
“Listen
to me, Archer,” he said in a monotone. “Wipe the lipstick off your cheek or
I’ll wipe it off for you.”

 
          
I
tried to cover my embarrassment with a smile. “I’d take you, Bert. I’ve had a
lot of practice handling jealous males.”

 
          
“That
may be. But keep your hands off Miranda, or I’ll spoil your good looks.”

 
          
I
rubbed my left cheek where Miranda had left her mark. “Don’t get her wrong -.”

 
          
“I
suppose it was Mrs. Sampson you were playing kissing games with?” He uttered a
small heartbroken laugh. “No soap!”

 
          
“It
was Miranda, and it wasn’t a game. She was feeling low and I talked to her and
she kissed me once. It didn’t mean a thing.
Purely a filial
kiss.”

 
          
“I’d
like to believe you,” he said uncertainly. “You know how I feel about Miranda.”

 
          
“She
told me.”

 
          
“What
did she say?”

 
          
“That
you were in love with her.”

 
          
“I’m
glad she knows that, anyway. I wish she’d talk to me when she’s feeling low.”
He smiled bitterly. “How do you do it, Lew?”

 
          
“Don’t
come to me with your heart problems. I’ll foul you up for sure. I have one
little piece of advice, though.”

 
          
“Shoot.”

 
          
“Take
it easy,” I said. “Just take it easy. We’ve got a big job on our hands and
we’ve got to pull together. I’m no threat to your love life and I wouldn’t be
if I could. And while I’m being blunt, I don’t think Taggert is, either. He
simply isn’t interested.”

 
          
“Thanks,”
he said in a harsh, forced voice. He wasn’t the kind of man who went in for
intimate confessions. But he added miserably: “She’s so much younger than I am.
Taggert has youth and looks.”

 
          
There
was a soft plopping of feet in the hall outside the door, and Taggert appeared
in the doorway as if on cue. “Did somebody take my name in vain?”

 
          
He
was naked except for wet bathing trunks, wide-shouldered, narrow-
waisted
and long-legged. With the wet dark hair curling on
his small skull, the lazy smile on his face, he could have posed for the Greeks
as a youthful god. Bert Graves looked him over with dislike and said slowly: “I
was just telling Archer how handsome I thought you were.”

 
          
The
smile contracted slightly but stayed on his face. “That sounds like a
left-handed compliment, but what the hell! Hello, Archer, anything new?”

 
          
“No,”
I said. “And I was telling Graves that you’re not interested in Miranda.”

 
          
“Right
you are,” he answered airily. “She’s a nice girl but not for me. Now if you’ll
excuse me I’ll put on some clothes.”

 
          
“Gladly,”
Graves said.

 
          
But
I called him back: “Wait a minute. Do you have a gun?”

 
          
“A
pair of target pistols
..32’s.”

 
          
“Load
one and keep it on you, eh? Stick around the house and keep your eyes open. Try
not to be trigger happy.”

 
          
“I
learned my lesson,” he said cheerfully. “Do you expect something to break?”

 
          
“No,
but if something does, you’ll want to be ready. Will you do what I said?”

 
          
“I
sure will.”

 
          
“He’s
not a bad kid,” Graves said, when he was gone, “but I can’t stand the sight of
him. It’s funny; I’ve never been jealous before.”

 
          
“Ever
been in love before?”

 
          
“Not
until now.” He stood with his shoulders bowed, burdened by fatality and
exaltation and despair. He was in love for the first time and for keeps. I was
sorry for him.

 
          
“Tell
me,” he said, “what was Miranda feeling low about?
This
business of her father?”

 
          
“Partly that.
She feels the family’s been going to pieces.
She needs some sort of steady backing.”

 
          
“I
know she does. It’s one reason I want to marry her. There are other reasons, of
course; I don’t have to tell you that.”

 
          
“No,”
I said. I risked a candid question. “Is money one of them?”

 
          
He
glanced at me sharply. “Miranda has no money of her own.”

 
          
“She
will have, though?”

 
          
“She
will have, naturally, when her father dies, I wrote his will for him, and she
gets half. I don’t object to the money -” he smiled wryly “- but I’m not a
fortune-hunter, if that’s what you mean.”

 
          
“It
isn’t. She might come into that money sooner than you think, though. The old
man’s been running in some fast and funny circles in L. A. Did he ever mention
a Mrs. Estabrook? Fay Estabrook? Or a man called Troy?”

 
          
“You
know Troy? What sort of a character is he, anyway?”

 
          
“A
gunman,” I said. “I’ve heard that he’s done murders.”

 
          
“I’m
not surprised. I tried to tell Sampson to keep away from Troy, but Sampson
thinks he’s fine.”

 
          
“Have
you met Troy?”

 
          
“Sampson
introduced me to him in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. The three of us went
the rounds, and a lot of people seemed to know him. All the croupiers knew him,
if that’s a recommendation.”

 
          
“It
isn’t. But he had his own place in Las Vegas at one time. He’s done a lot of
things. And I don’t think kidnapping would be beneath his dignity. How did Troy
happen to be with Sampson?”

 
          
“I
got the impression that he worked for Sampson, but I couldn’t be sure. He’s a
queer fish. He watched me and Sampson gamble, but he wouldn’t himself. I
dropped an even thousand that night. Sampson won four thousand. To him that hath
shall be given.” He smiled ruefully.

 
          
“Maybe
Troy was making a good impression,” I said.

 
          
“Maybe.
The bastard gave me the creeps. Do you think he’s
mixed up in this?”

 
          
“I’m
trying to find out,” I said. “Does Sampson need money, Bert?”

 
          
“Hell, no!
He’s a millionaire.”

 
          
“Why
would he go into business with a jerk like Troy?”

 
          
“The
time hangs heavy on his hands. The royalties roll in from Texas and Oklahoma,
and he gets bored. Sampson’s a natural money-maker the way I’m a natural
money-loser. He’s not happy unless he’s making it; I’m not happy unless I’m
losing it.” He broke off short when Miranda entered the room.

 
          
“Ready?”
she said. “Don’t worry about me, Bert.”

 
          
She
pressed his shoulder with her hand. Her light-brown coat fell open in front,
and her small
sweatered
breasts, pointed like
weapons, were half impatient promise, half gradual threat. She had let down her
hair and brushed it behind her ears. Her bright face slanted toward him like a
challenge.

 
          
He
kissed her cheek lightly and tenderly. I still felt sorry for him. He was a
strong, intelligent man, but he looked a little stuffy beside her in his blue
pin-stripe business suit. A little weary and old to tame
a
filly like
Miranda.

 
          
THE
PASS ROAD climbed through sloping fields of dust-colored chaparral and raw red
cutbacks. By holding the accelerator to the floor I kept our speed at fifty.
The road narrowed and twisted more abruptly as we went up. I caught quick
glimpses of boulder-strewn slopes, mile-wide canyons lined with mountain oak and
spanned by telephone cables. Once through a gap in the hills I saw the sea like
a low blue cloud slanting away behind. Then the road looped round into
landlocked mountain wilderness, grayed and chilled suddenly by the clouds in
the pass.

 
          
The
clouds looked heavy and dense from the outside. When we entered them they
seemed to thin out, blowing across the road in whitish filaments. Barren and
dim through the clouds, the mountainside shouldered us. In a 1946 car, with a
late-model girl beside me, I could still imagine we were crossing the watershed
between Colton’s atomic age and the age of stone when men stood up on their
hind legs and began to count time by the sun.

 
          
The
fog grew denser, limiting my vision to twenty-five or thirty feet. I took the
last hairpin curves in second. Then the road straightened out. At a definite
point the laboring motor accelerated of its own accord, and we came out of the
cloud. From the summit of the pass we could see the valley filled with sunlight
like a bowl brimming with yellow butter, and the mountains clear and sharp on
the other side.

 
          
“Isn’t
it glorious?” Miranda said. “No matter how cloudy it is on the Santa Teresa
side, it’s nearly always sunny in the valley. In the rainy season I often drive
over by myself just to feel the sun.”

 
          
“I
like the sun.”

 
          
“Do
you really? I didn’t think you’d go in for simple things like sun. You’re the
neon type, aren’t you?”

 
          
“If you say so.”

 
          
She
was silent for a while, watching the leaping road, the blue sky streaming
backward. The road cut straight and flat through the green-and-yellow
checkerboard valley.
With no one in sight but the Mexican
braceros
in the fields, I
floorboarded
.
The speedometer needle stuck halfway between eighty-five and ninety.

 
          
“What
are you running away from, Archer?” she said, in a mocking tone.

 
          
“Not
a thing. Do you want a serious answer?”

 
          
“It
would be nice for a change.”

 
          
“I
like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of
power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to
lose it.”

 
          
“Unless we have a blowout.”

 
          
“I’ve
never had one.”

 
          
“Tell
me,” she said, “is that why you do your kind of work?
Because
you like danger?”

 
          
“It’s
as good a reason as any. It wouldn’t be true, though.”

 
          
“Why, then?”

 
          
“I
inherited the job from another man.”

 
          
“Your father?”

 
          
“Myself when I was younger.
I used to think the world was
divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for
evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through
the motions.
And talking too much.”

 
          
“Don’t
stop.”

 
          
“I’m
fouled up. Why should I foul you up?”

 
          
“I
am already. And I don’t understand what you said.”

 
          
“I’ll
take it from the beginning. When I went into police work in 1935, I believed
that evil was a quality some people were born with, like a harelip. A cop’s job
was to find those people and put them away. But evil isn’t so simple. Everybody
has it in him, and whether it comes out in his actions depends on a number of
things.
Environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece
of bad luck, a wrong friend.
The trouble is a cop has to go on judging
people by rule of thumb, and acting on the judgment.”

 
          
“Do
you judge people?”

 
          
“Everybody
I meet. The graduates of the police schools make a big thing of scientific
detection, and that has its place. But most of my work is watching people, and
judging them.”

 
          
“And
you find evil in everybody?”

 
          
“Just about.
Either I’m getting sharper or people are
getting worse. And that could be. War and inflation always raise a crop of
stinkers, and a lot of them have settled in California.”

 
          
“You
wouldn’t be talking about our family?” she said.

 
          
“Not
especially.”

 
          
“Anyway,
you can’t blame Ralph on the war - not entirely. He’s always been a bit of a
stinker, at least since I’ve known him.”

 
          
“All your life?”

 
          
“All my life.”

 
          
“I
didn’t know you felt that way about him.”

 
          
“I’ve
tried to understand him,” she said. “Maybe he had his points when he was young.
He started out with nothing, you know. His father was a tenant farmer who never
had land of his own. I can understand why Ralph spent his life acquiring land.
But you’d think he’d be more sympathetic to poor people, because he was poor
himself.
The strikers on the ranch, for instance.
Their living conditions are awful and their wages aren’t decent, but Ralph
won’t admit it. He’s been doing everything he can to starve them out and break
the strike. He can’t seem to see that Mexican field-workers are people.”

 
          
“It’s
a common enough illusion, and a useful one. It makes it easier to gouge people
if you don’t admit they’re human - I’m developing into quite a moralist in
early middle age.”

 
          
“Are
you judging me?” she asked me, after a pause.

 
          
“Provisionally.
The evidence isn’t in. I’d say you have
nearly everything, and could develop into nearly anything.”

 
          
“Why
‘nearly’? What’s my big deficiency?”

 
          
“A tail on your kite.
You can’t speed up time. You have to
pick up its beat and let it support you.”

 
          
“You’re
a strange man,” she said softly. “I didn’t know you’d be able to say things
like that. And do you judge yourself?”

 
          
“Not
when I can help it, but I did last night. I was feeding alcohol to an
alcoholic, and I saw my face in the mirror.”

 
          
“What
was the verdict?”

 
          
“The
judge suspended sentence, but he gave me a tongue-lashing.”

 
          
“And
that’s why you drive so fast?”

 
          
“Maybe
it is.”

 
          
“I
do it for a different reason. I still think your reason is a kind of running
away.
Death wish.”

 
          
“No jargon, please.
Do you drive fast?”

 
          
“I’ve
done a hundred and five on this road in the Caddie.”

 
          
The
rules of the game we were playing weren’t clear yet, but I felt outplayed. “And
what’s your reason?”

 
          
“I
do it when I’m bored. I pretend to myself I’m going to meet something -
something utterly new.
Something naked and bright, a moving
target in the road.”

 
          
My
obscure resentment came out as fatherly advice, “You’ll meet something new if
you do it often.
A smashed head and oblivion.”

 
          
“Damn
you!” she cried. “You said you liked danger, but you’re as stuffy as Bert
Graves.”

 
          
“I’m
sorry if I frightened you.”

 
          
“Frightened
me?” Her short laugh was thin and cracked like a sea bird’s cry. “All you men
still have the Victorian hangover. I suppose you think woman’s place is in the
home, too?”

 
          
“Not
my home.”

 
          
The
road began to twist restlessly and rise toward the sky. I let the gradient
brake the car. At fifty we had nothing to say to each other.