Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) (6 page)

 
          
“Isn’t
he marvelous!” the woman yelped viciously.

 
          
“No!
Sophistication is not the line. You must keep your intelligence out of this.
Simplicity.
Warm, loving simplicity.
Do you get it, my dear Fay?”

 
          
She
looked angry and distraught. Everyone in the room, from assistant director to
prop man, was watching her expectantly. “Isn’t he marvelous?” she said
throatily.

 
          
“Much,
much better,” said the little man. He called for lights and camera.

 
          
“Isn’t
he marvelous?” she said again. The gray-mustached man smiled and nodded some
more. He put his hand over hers, and they smiled into each other’s eyes.

 
          
“Cut!”

 
          
The
smiles faded into weary boredom. The lights went out. The little director
called for number seventy-seven. “You may go, Fay.
Tomorrow
at eight.
And try to get a good night’s sleep, darling.” The way he said
it sounded very unpleasant.

 
          
She
didn’t answer. While a new group of actors was forming in the wings of the
theater stage and a camera rolled toward them, she rose and walked up the
central aisle. I followed her out of the gloomy warehouse-like building into
the sun.

 
          
I
stood in the doorway as she walked away, not quickly, with movements a little
random and purposeless. In her dowdy costume - black hat with a widow’s veil
and plain black coat - her big, handsome body looked awkward and ungainly. It
may have been the sun in my eyes or simple romanticism, but I had the feeling
that the evil which hung in studio air like an odorless gas was concentrated in
that heavy black figure wandering up the empty factitious street.

 
          
When
she was out of sight around the Continental Hotel corner, I picked up the golf
bag and followed her. I started to sweat again, and I felt like an aging caddy,
the kind that never quite became a pro.

 
          
She
had joined a group of half a dozen women of all ages and shapes which was
headed for the main entrance. Before they got there, they turned off into an
alley. I trotted after them and saw them disappearing under a stucco arch
labeled “Dressing Rooms.”

 
          
I
pushed open the swinging gate beside the guard and started out. He remembered
me and the golf clubs: “Didn’t he want them?”

 
          
“He’s
going to play badminton instead.”

 
          
I
was waiting when she came out, parked with my motor idling at a yellow curb
near the entrance. She turned up the sidewalk in the other direction. She had changed
to a well-cut dark suit, a small slanted hat. Will or foundation garments had
drawn her body erect. From the rear she looked ten years younger.

 
          
Half
a block from me she stopped by a black sedan, unlocked it and got in. I eased
out into the traffic and let her slide into the lane ahead of me. The sedan was
a new Buick. I wasn’t concerned about her noticing my car. Los Angeles County
was crawling with blue convertibles, and the traffic on the boulevard was a
kaleidoscope being shaken.

 
          
She
added her personal touch to the pattern, cutting in and out of lanes, driving
furiously and well. In the overpass I had to touch seventy to keep her in
sight. I didn’t think she was aware of me; she was doing it for fun. She went
down Sunset at a steady fifty, headed for the sea.
Fifty-five
and sixty on the curves in Beverly Hills.
Her heavy car was burning
rubber. In my lighter car I was gambling at even odds with centrifugal force.
My tires screeched and shuddered.

 
          
On
the long, looping final grade sloping down to Pacific Palisades I let her go
away from me and almost lost her. I caught her again in the straightaway a
minute before she turned off the boulevard to the right.

 
          
I
followed her up a road marked “Woodlawn Lane,” which wound along the hillside.
A hundred yards ahead of me as I came out of a curve she swung wide and turned
into a driveway. I stopped my car where I was and parked under a eucalyptus
tree.

 
          
Through
the japonica hedge that lined the sidewalk I saw her climb the steps to the
door of a white house. She unlocked it and went in. The house was two-storied,
set far back from the street among trees, with an attached garage built into
the side of the hill. It was a handsome house for a woman on her way out.

 
          
After
a while I got tired of watching the
unopening
door. I
took off my coat and tie, folded them over the back of the seat, and rolled up
my sleeves. There was a long-spouted oilcan in the trunk, and I took it with
me. I walked straight up the driveway past the Buick and into the open door of
the garage.

 
          
The
garage was enormous, big enough to hold a two-ton truck with space for the
Buick to spare. The queer thing was that it looked as if a heavy truck had
recently been there. There were wide tire marks on the concrete floor, and
thick oil drippings.

 
          
A
small window high in the rear wall of the garage looked out on the back yard
just above the level of the ground. A heavy-shouldered man in a scarlet silk
sport shirt was sitting in a canvas deck chair with his back to me. His short
hair looked thicker and blacker than Ralph Sampson’s should have. I raised
myself on my toes and pressed my face against the glass. Even through its dingy
surface the scene was as vivid as paint: the broad, unconscious back of the man
in the scarlet shirt, the brown bottle of beer and the bowl of salted peanuts
in the grass beside him, the orange tree over his head hung with unripe oranges
like dark-green golf balls.

 
          
He
leaned sideways, the crooked fingers of his large hand groping for the bowl of
peanuts. The hand missed the bowl and scrabbled in the grass like a crippled
lobster. Then he turned his head, and I saw the side of his face. It wasn’t
Ralph Sampson’s, and it wasn’t the face the man in the scarlet shirt had
started out with. It was a stone face hacked out by a primitive sculptor. It
told a very common twentieth-century story: too many fights, too many animal
guts, not enough brains.

 
          
I
returned to the tire marks and went down on my knees to examine them. Too late
to do anything but stay where I was
,
I heard the
shuffling footsteps on the driveway.

 
          
The
man in the scarlet shirt said from the door: “What business you got messing
around in here? You got no business messing around in here.”

 
          
I
inverted the oilcan and squirted a stream of oil at the wall. “Get out of my
light, please.”

 
          
“What’s
that?” he said laboriously. His upper lip was puffed thick as a mouth guard.

 
          
He
was no taller than I was, and he wasn’t as wide as the door, but he gave that
impression. He made me nervous, the way you feel talking to a strange bulldog
on his master’s property. I stood up.

 
          
“Yes,”
I said. “You certainly got them, brother.”

 
          
I
didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his
chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute
rounds.

 
          
“What
do you mean, we got them? We ain’t got
nothing
, but
you get yourself some trouble you come selling your woof around here.”

 
          
“Termites,”
I said rapidly. He was close enough to let me smell his breath.
Beer and salted peanuts and bad teeth.
“You tell Mrs.
Goldsmith she’s got them for sure.”

 
          
“Termites?”
He was flat on his heels. I could have knocked
him down, but he wouldn’t have stayed down.

 
          
‘The tiny animals that eat wood.”
I squirted more oil at the
wall.
“The little
muckers
.”

 
          
“What
you got in that there can?
That there can.”

 
          
“This
here can?”

 
          
“Yeah.”
I’d established rapport.

 
          
“It’s
termite-killer,” I said. “They eat it and they die. You tell Mrs. Goldsmith
she’s got them all right.”

 
          
“I
don’t know
no
Mrs. Goldsmith.”

 
          
“The lady of the house.
She called up headquarters for an
inspection.”

 
          
“Headquarters?”
he said suspiciously. His scar-tissue-padded brows descended over his little
empty eyes like shutters.

 
          
“Termite-control headquarters.
Killabug
is termite-control headquarters for the Southern California area.”

 
          
“Oh!”
He was puzzling over the words.
“Yeah.
But we got no
Mrs. Goldsmith here.”

 
          
“Isn’t
this Eucalyptus Lane?”

 
          
“
Naw
, this is Woodlawn Lane. You got the wrong address,
bud.”

 
          
“I’m
awfully sorry,” I said. “I thought this was Eucalyptus Lane.”

 
          
“
Naw
, Woodlawn.” He smiled widely at my ridiculous mistake.

 
          
“I
better
be
going then. Mrs. Goldsmith will be looking
for me.”

 
          
“Yeah.
Only wait a minute.”

 
          
His
left hand came out fast and took me by the collar. He cocked his right. “Don’t
come messing around in here
any more
. You got no
business messing around in here.”

 
          
His
face filled out with angry blood. His eyes were hot and wild. There was a
bright seepage of saliva at the cracked and folded corners of his mouth. A
punchy fighter was less predictable than a bulldog, and twice as dangerous.

 
          
“Look.”
I raised the can. “This stuff will blind you.”

 
          
I
squirted oil in his eyes. He let out a howl of imaginary agony. I jerked
sideways. His right went by my ear and left it burning. My shirt collar ripped
loose and dangled from his clenched hand. He spread his right hand over his
oil-doused eyes and moaned like a baby. Blindness was the one thing he feared.

 
          
A
door opened behind me when I was halfway down the drive, but I didn’t show my
face by looking back. I ducked around the corner of the hedge and kept running,
away from my car. I circled the block on foot.

 
          
When
I came back to the convertible the road was deserted. The garage doors were
closed, but the Buick was still standing in the drive. The white house among
its trees looked very peaceful and innocent in the early evening light.

 
          
It
was nearly dark when the lady of the house came out in a spotted ocelot coat. I
passed the entrance to the drive before the Buick backed out, and waited for it
on Sunset Boulevard. She drove with greater fury and less accuracy all the way
back to Hollywood, through Westwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills. I kept her in
sight.

 
          
Near
the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where everything ends and a great many things
begin, she turned into a private parking lot and left her car. I double-parked
in the street till I saw her enter Swift’s, a gaudy figure walking like a
slightly elated lady. Then I went home and changed my shirt.

 
          
The
gun in my closet tempted me, but I didn’t put it on. I compromised by taking it
out of the holster and putting it in the glove compartment of my car.