Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) (19 page)

 
          
“Going
to leave the money with the boss?”

 
          
“I’m
thinking about it. I want to be sure he gets it.”

 
          
“You
must be eaten up with honesty, eh?”

 
          
“You
know what happens to bookies that don’t pay off.”

 
          
“I
sort of thought you was a bookie.” She leaned toward me with sudden urgency.
“Listen, mister, I got a girl friend, she goes out with an exercise boy, she
says he says Jinx is a cert in the third tomorrow. Would you bet it on the nose
or across the board?”

 
          
“Save
your money,” I said. “You can’t beat them.”

 
          
“I
only bet tip money. This boy, my girl friend’s boy friend, he says Jinx is a
cert.”

 
          
“Save
it.”

 
          
Her
mouth pursed skeptically. “You’re a funny kind of bookie.”

 
          
“All right.”
I handed her two ones.
“Play
Jinx to show.”

 
          
She
looked at me with a scowl of surprise. “Gee, thanks, mister - only I wasn’t
asking for money.”

 
          
“It’s
better than losing your own money,” I said.

 
          
I
hadn’t eaten for nearly twelve hours, and the sandwich tasted good. While I was
eating it several cars arrived. A party of young people came in laughing and
talking, and business picked up at the bar. Then a black sedan rolled into the
parking lot, a black Ford sedan with a red police searchlight sticking out like
a sore thumb beside the windshield.

 
          
The
man who got out wore plain clothes as obvious as a baseball umpire’s suit, with
gun wrinkles over the right hip. I saw his face when he came into the circle of
light from the entrance. It was the deputy sheriff from Santa Teresa. I got up
quickly and went through the door at the end of the bar into the men’s
lavatory, locking the door behind me. I lowered the top of the toilet seat and
sat down to brood over my lack of foresight. I shouldn’t have left the book
matches in Eddie something’s pocket.

 
          
I
put in eight or ten minutes reading the inscriptions on the whitewashed walls.
“John ‘Rags’ Latino, Winner 120 Hurdles, Dearborn High School,
Dearborn, Mich., 1946.”

 
          
“Franklin P. Schneider, Osage County, Oklahoma, Deaf Mute, Thank
you.”
The rest of them were the usual washroom graffiti interspersed
with primitive line drawings.

 
          
The
naked bulb in the ceiling shone in my eyes. My brain skipped a beat, and I went
to sleep sitting up. The room was a whitewashed corridor slanting down into the
bowels of the earth. I followed it down to the underground river of filth that
ran under the city. There was no turning back. I had to
wade
the excremental river. Fortunately I had my stilts with me. They carried me
untainted, wrapped in cellophane, to the landing on the other side. I tossed my
stilts away - they were also crutches - and mounted a chrome-plated escalator
that gleamed like the jaws of death. Smoothly and surely it lifted me through
all the zones of evil to a rose-embowered gate, which a maid in gingham opened
for me, singing Home, Sweet Home.

 
          
I
stepped out into a stone-paved square, and the gate clanged shut behind me. It
was the central square of the city, but I was alone in it. It was very late.
Not a streetcar was in sight. A single yellow light shone down on the foot-smoothed
pavement. When I moved, my footsteps echoed
lonesomely
,
and on all four sides the hunchbacked tenements muttered like a forest before a
storm. The gate clanged shut again, and I opened my eyes.

 
          
Something
metallic was pounding on the door.

 
          
“Open
up,” the deputy sheriff said. “I know you’re in there.”

 
          
I
slipped the bolt and pulled the door wide open.
“You in a
hurry, officer?”

 
          
“So
it’s you. I thought maybe it was you.” His black eyes and heavy lips were
bulging with satisfaction. He had a gun in his hand.

 
          
“I
knew damn well it was you,” I said. “I didn’t think it was necessary to tell
everybody in the place.”

 
          
“Maybe
you had a reason for keeping it quiet, eh? Maybe you had a reason for hiding in
here when I come in? The sheriff thinks it’s an inside job, and he’ll want to
know what you’re doing here.”

 
          
“This
is the guy,” the bartender said, at his shoulder. “He said Eddie phoned him in
Las Vegas.”

 
          
“What
you got to say to that?” the deputy demanded. He waggled the gun in my face.

 
          
“Come
in and close the door.”

 
          
“Yeah?
Then put your hands on your head.”

 
          
“I
don’t think so.”

 
          
“Put
your hands on your head.” The gun poked into my solar plexus. “
You carrying
a gun?” He started to frisk me with his other
hand.

 
          
I
stepped back out of his reach. “I’m carrying a gun. You can’t have it.”

 
          
He
moved toward me again. The door swung closed behind him. “You know what you’re
doing, eh?
Resisting an officer in performance his duty.
I got a good mind to put you under arrest.”

 
          
“You
got a good mind, period.”

 
          
“No
cracks from
you,
jerk. All I want to know is what
you’re doing here.”

 
          
“Enjoying myself.”

 
          
“So
you won’t talk, eh?” he said, like a comic-book cop. He raised his free hand to
slap me.

 
          
“Hold
it,” I said. “Don’t lay a finger on me.”

 
          
“And why not?”

 
          
“Because I’ve never killed a cop.
It would be a blot on my
record.”

 
          
Our
glances met and deadlocked. His raised hand hung stiff in the air and gradually
subsided.

 
          
“Now
put your gun away,” I said. “I don’t like being threatened.”

 
          
“Nobody
asked you what you liked,” he said, but his fire had gone out. His swarthy face
was caught between conflicting emotions: anger and doubt, suspicion and
bewilderment.

 
          
“I
came here for the same reason you did - officer.” The word came hard, but I
managed to get it out. “I found the book matches in Eddie’s pocket -.”

 
          
“How
come you know his name?” he said alertly.

 
          
“The
waitress told me.”

 
          
“Yeah?
The bartender said he phoned you in Las Vegas.”

 
          
“I
was trying to pump the bartender. Get it? It was a gag. I was trying to be
subtle.”

 
          
“Well,
what did you find out?”

 
          
“The
dead man’s name is Eddie, and he drove a truck. He came in here for drinks
sometimes. Three nights ago he phoned Las Vegas from here. Sampson was in Las
Vegas three nights ago.”

 
          
“No
kidding?”

 
          
“I
wouldn’t kid you, officer, even if I could.”

 
          
“Jesus,”
he said, “
it
all fits in, don’t it?”

 
          
“I
never thought of that,” I said. “Thank you very much for pointing it out to
me.”

 
          
He
gave me a queer look, but he put away his gun.

 
          
I
drove a half mile down the highway, turned, drove back again, and parked at the
intersection diagonally across from The Corner. The deputy’s car was still in
the parking lot.

 
          
The
fog was lifting, dissolving into the sky like milk in water, and blowing out to
sea. The expanding horizon only reminded me that Ralph Sampson could be a long
way from there - anywhere at all. Starving to death in a mountain cabin,
drowned at the bottom of the sea, or wearing a hole in the head like Eddie. The
cars went by the roadhouse in both directions, headed for home or headed for
brighter lights. In the rear-vision mirror my face was ghostly pale, as if I
had caught a little death from Eddie. There were circles under my eyes, and I
needed a shave.

 
          
A
truck came up from the south and passed me slowly. It wheeled into the parking
lot of The Corner. The truck was blue and had a closed van. A man jumped down
from the cab and shuffled across the asphalt. I knew his rubber-kneed walk, and
in the light from the entrance I knew his face. A savage sculptor had hacked it
out of stone and smashed it with another stone.

 
          
He
stopped with a jerk when he saw the black police car. Stopped and turned and
ran back to the blue truck. It backed out with a grinding of gears, and turned
down the road towards White Beach. When its tail light had dwindled to a red
spark, I followed it. The road changed from black-top to gravel, and finally to
sand. For two miles I ate his dust.

 
          
Where
the road came down to the beach between two bluffs, another road crossed it.
The lights of the truck turned left and climbed the slope. When they were over
the rise and out of sight, I followed them. The road was a single track cut
into the side of the hill. From the crest I could see the ocean below to my
right. There was a traveling moon in the clouds, which were drifting out to
sea. Its light on the black water made a dull lead-foil shine.

 
          
The
hill flattened out ahead, and the road straightened. I drove on slowly with my
lights out. Before I knew it I was abreast of the truck. It was standing in a
lane with no lights showing, fifty yards off the road. I kept going.

 
          
The
road ended abruptly at the bottom of the hill a quarter mile farther on. A lane
meandered off toward the ocean on the right, but its entrance was blocked by a wooden
gate. I turned my car in the dead end and climbed the hill on foot.

 
          
A
row of eucalyptus trees, ragged against the sky, edged the lane where the truck
was standing. I left the road and kept them between me and the truck. The
ground was uneven, dotted with clumps of coarse grass. I stumbled more than
once. Then space fell open in front of me, and I nearly walked off the edge of
the bluff. Far down below, the white surf stroked the beach. The sea looked
close enough for a dive, but hard as metal.

 
          
Below
me to the right there was a white square of light I climbed and slid down the
side of the hill, holding onto the grass to keep from falling. A small building
took shape around the light a white cottage held in a groin of the bluff.

 
          
The
unblinded
window gave me a full view of the single
room. I felt for the gun in my holster and approached the window on my hands
and knees. There were two people in the room. Neither of them was Sampson.

 
          
Puddler
was wedged in a chair cut out of a barrel, his
broken profile toward me, a bottle of beer in his fist. He was facing a woman
on an unmade studio bed against the wall. The gasoline lamp that hung from a
rafter in the un-plastered ceiling threw a hard white light on her streaked
blond hair and her face. It was a thin and harried face, with wide resentful
nostrils and a parched mouth. Only the cold brown eyes were lively in it,
darting and peering from the puckered skin of their sockets. I moved my head
sideways, out of their range.

 
          
The
room wasn’t large, but it seemed to be terribly bare. The pine floor was
carpetless
, slick with grime. A wooden table piled with
dirty dishes stood under the light
Beyond
it against
the far wall were a two-burner oil stove, a sagging icebox, a rust-mottled sink
with a tin pail under it to catch the drip.

 
          
The
room was so still, the clapboard walls so thin, that I could hear the steady
suspiration of the lamp. And
Puddler’s
voice when he
said: “I can’t wait here all night, can I? You can’t expect me to wait here all
night. I got a job to get back to. And I don’t like that police car setting up
there at The Corner.”

 
          
“That’s
what you said before.
That car don’t
mean anything.”

 
          
“I’m
saying it again. I should
of
been back at the Piano
already; you know that. Mr. Troy was mad when Eddie didn’t show.”

 
          
“Let
him get apoplexy.” The woman’s voice was sharp and thin like her face. “If he
don’t
like the way Eddie does the job, he can stick it.”

 
          
“You
ain’t in
no
position to talk like that.”
Puddler
looked from side to side of the room. “You didn’t
talk like that when Eddie come sucking around for a job when he got out of the
pen. When he got out of the pen and come sucking around for a job and Mr. Troy
give him one -.”

 
          
“For God’s sake!
Can’t you stop repeating yourself, dim
brain?”

 
          
His
scarred face gathered in folds of hurt surprise. He drew in his head, and his
thick neck wrinkled up like a turtle’s neck. “That’s no way to talk, Marcie.”

 
          
“You
shut your yap about Eddie and the pen.” Her voice bit like a thin knife blade.
“How many jails you seen the inside of, dim brain?”

 
          
His
answer was a tormented bellow. “Lay off me, hear.”

 
          
“All
right then, lay off Eddie.”

 
          
“Where
the hell is Eddie, anyway?”

 
          
“I
don’t know where he is or why, but I know he’s got a reason.”

 
          
“It
better be good when he talks to Mr. Troy.”

 
          
“Mister
Troy, Mister Troy. He’s got you hypnotized, hasn’t he? Maybe Eddie won’t be
talking to Mr. Troy.”

 
          
His
small eyes-peered at her, trying to read her meaning in her face, and gave up.
“Listen, Marcie,” he said after a pause. “You can drive the truck.”

 
          
“The
hell you say! I want no part of that racket.”

 
          
“It’s
good enough for me. It’s good enough for Eddie. You’re getting awful
fancy-pants since he took you off the street -.”

 
          
“Shut
up or you’ll be sorry!” she said. “The trouble with you is you’re yellow. You
see a patrol car and you
wet
your pants. So you try
to get a woman to take your rap, like any other pimp.”

 
          
He
stood up suddenly, brandishing the bottle. “Lay off me, hear. I don’t take
nothing
from nobody. You was a man, I spoil your face for
you, hear.” The beer foamed out on the floor and over her knees.

 
          
She
answered very coolly. “You wouldn’t say that in front of Eddie. He’d saw you to
pieces, and you know it.”

 
          
“That
little monkey!”

 
          
“Yeah,
that little monkey! Sit down,
Puddler
. Everybody
knows you’re a powerful battler. I’ll get you another beer.”

 
          
She
got up and moved across the room, stepping lightly and furiously like a starved
cat. Taking a towel from a nail beside the sink, she dabbed at her beer-stained
bathrobe.

 
          
“You
drive the truck?”
Puddler
said hopefully.

 
          
“Do
I have to say everything twice, the same as you? I’m not driving the truck. If
you’re afraid, let one of them drive.”

 
          
“
Naw
, I can’t do that. They don’t know the road; they get
knocked off.”

 
          
“You’re
wasting time, then, aren’t you?”

 
          
“Yeah,
I guess so.” He moved towards her uncertainly, casting a huge shadow on the
floor and wall.
“How’s about a little something before I go?
A little party.
Eddie’s probably in the sack with
somebody. I got plenty what it takes.”

 
          
She
picked up a bread knife from the table, the kind with a wavy cutting edge.
“Take it away with you,
Puddler
, or I’ll love you up
with this.”

 
          
“Come
on now, Marcie. We could get along.” He stood still, keeping his distance.

 
          
She
gulped to control her rising hysteria, but her voice came out as a scream.
“Beat it!” The bread knife moved in the glaring light, pointed at his throat.

 
          
“O.
K., Marcie. You don’t have to get mad.” He shrugged his shoulders and turned
away with the hurt and helpless look of any rejected lover.

 
          
I
left the window and started up the hill. Before I reached the top, a door swung
open, projecting an oblong of light on the hillside. I froze on my hands and
knees. I could see the shadow of my head on the dry grass in front of my face.

 
          
Then
the door closed, drawing darkness over me.
Puddler’s
shadow came out of the pool of shadows behind the house. He went up the steep
lane, scuffing the dust with his feet, and disappeared behind the eucalyptus
trees.

 
          
I
had to choose between him and the blond woman, Marcie. I chose
Puddler
. Marcie could wait. She’d wait forever before Eddie
something came back.