Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) (31 page)

 
          
I
left her in the car and climbed the stone steps to the terrace. Humphreys
opened the door before I could reach the knocker. His face was more than ever
like a skull’s.

 
          
He
stepped out on the terrace and closed the door behind him. “Graves is here,” he
said. “He came a few minutes ago. He told me he murdered Sampson.”

 
          
“What
are you going to do?”

 
          
“I’ve
called the sheriff. He’s on his way over.” He ran his fingers through his
thinning hair. His gestures, like his voice, were light and distant, as if
reality had moved back out of his reach. “This is a tragic thing. I believed
that Albert Graves was a good man.”

 
          
“Crime
often spreads out like that,” I said. “
It’s
epidemic
You’ve seen k happen before.”

 
          
“Not
to one of my friends.” He was silent for a moment. “Bert was talking about
Kierkegaard just a minute ago. He quoted something about
innocence,
that
it’s like standing on the edge of a deep gulf. You can’t look down
into the gulf without losing your innocence. Once you’ve looked, you’re guilty.
Bert said that he looked down, that he was guilty before he murdered Sampson.”

 
          
“He’s
still being easy on himself,” I said. “He wasn’t looking down; he was looking
up. Up to the houses in the hills where the big money lives. He was going to be
big himself for a change, with a quarter of Sampson’s millions.”

 
          
Humphreys
answered slowly: “I don’t know. He never cared for money very much. He still
doesn’t, I don’t think. But something happened to him. He hated Sampson, but so
did lots of others. Sampson made anyone who worked for him feel like a valet.
But it was something deeper than that in Graves. He’d worked hard all his life,
and the whole thing suddenly went sour. It lost its meaning for him. There was
no more virtue or justice, in him or in the world. That’s why he gave up
prosecuting, you know.”

 
          
“I
didn’t know.”

 
          
“Finally
he struck out blindly at the world and killed a man.”

 
          
“Not
blindly.
Very shrewdly.”

 
          
“Very
blindly,” Humphreys said. “I’ve never seen a man
so
miserable as Bert Graves is now.”

 
          
I
went back to Miranda. “Graves is here. You weren’t entirely wrong about him. He
decided to do the right thing.”

 
          
“Confessed?”

 
          
“He
was too honest to bluff it through. If nobody had suspected him, he might have.
Anyone’s honesty has its conditions. But he knew that I knew. He went to
Humphreys and told his story.”

 
          
“I’m
glad he did.” She denied this a moment later by the sounds she made. Deep
shaking sobs bowed her over the wheel.

 
          
I
lifted her over, and drove myself. As we rolled down the hill, I could see all
the lights of the city. They didn’t seem quite real. The stars and the house
lights were firefly gleams, sparks of cold fire suspended in the black void.
The real thing in my world was the girl beside me, warm and shuddering and
lost.

 
          
I
could have put my arms around her and taken her over. She was that lost, that
vulnerable. But if I had, she’d have hated me in a week. In six months I might
have hated Miranda. I kept my hands to myself and let her lick her wounds. She
used my shoulder to cry on as she would have used anyone’s.

 
          
Her
crying was settling down to a steady rhythm, rocking itself to sleep. The
sheriff’s radio car passed us at the foot of the hill and turned up toward the
house where Graves was waiting.

 
          
The
End

 
          
About the Author

 
          
Ross
Macdonald was born near San Francisco in 1915. He was educated in Canadian
schools, traveled widely in Europe, and acquired advanced degrees and a Phi
Beta Kappa key at the University of Michigan. In 1938 lie married a Canadian
girl who is now well known as the novelist Margaret Millar. Mr. Macdonald
(Kenneth Millar in private life) taught school and later college, and served as
Communications Officer aboard an escort carrier in the Pacific. For over twenty
years he has lived in Santa Barbara and written mystery novels about the
fascinating and changing society of his native state. Among his leading
interests are conservation and politics. He is a past president of the Mystery
Writers of America. In 1964, his novel The Chill was given a Silver Dagger
award by the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. Mr. Macdonald’s The
Far Side of the Dollar was named the best crime novel of 1965 by the same
organization. And The Moving Target was made into the highly successful movie
Harper (1966).