Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

Russell got up laboriously, as if the top of his red head supported the ceiling.

“Good night,” I said to Timothy. “Have fun with the hired help before they throw you out on your fat neck.”

I picked up my drink and steered Russell across the room. “Don’t tell her my business,” I said in his ear.

“Who am I to wash your dirty linen in public? In private it’s another matter. I’d love to wash your dirty linen in private. It’s a fetish with me.”

“I throw it away when it’s dirty.”

“But what a waste. Please save it for me in future. Just send it to me care of Krafft-Ebing at the clinic.”

Mrs. Estabrook looked up at us with eyes like dark searchlights.

“This is Lew Archer, Fay. The agent. Of the Communist International, that is. He’s an old admirer of yours in his secret heart.”

“How nice!” she said, in a voice that was wasted on mother roles. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.” I sat down in the leather seat opposite her.

“Excuse me,” Russell said. “I have to look after Timothy. He’s waging a class war with the waiter. Tomorrow night it’s his turn to look after me. Oh goody!” He went away, lost in his private maze of words.

“It’s nice to be remembered occasionally,” the woman said. “Most of my friends are gone, and all of them are forgotten. Helene and Florence and Mae – all of them gone and forgotten.”

Her winy sentimentality, half phony and half real, was a pleasant change in a way from Russell’s desperate double-talk. I took my cue.

“ Sic transit gloria mundi . Helene Chadwick was a great player in her day. But you’re still carrying on.”

“I try to keep my hand in, Archer. The life has gone out of the town, though. We used to care about picture-making – really care. I made three grand a week at my peak, but it wasn’t the money we worked for.”

“The play’s the thing.” It was less embarrassing to quote.

“The play was the thing. It isn’t like that any more. The town has lost its sincerity. No life left in it. No life left in either it or me.”

She poured the final ounce from her half bottle of sherry and drank it down in one long mournful swallow. I nursed my drink.

“You’re doing all right.”

I let my glance slide down the heavy body half revealed by the open fur coat. It was good for her age, tight-waisted, high-bosomed, with amphora hips. And it was alive, with a subtly persistent female power, an animal pride like a cat’s.

“I like you, Archer. You’re sympathetic. Tell me, when were you born?”

“What year, you mean?”

“The date.”

“The second of June.”

“Really? I didn’t expect you to be Geminian. Geminis have no heart. They’re double-souled like the Twins, and they lead a double life. Are you coldhearted, Archer?”

She leaned toward me with wide, unfocused eyes. I couldn’t tell whether she was kidding me or herself.

“I’m everybody’s friend,” I said, to break the spell. “Children and dogs adore me. I raise flowers and have green thumbs.”

“You’re a cynic,” she answered sulkily. “I thought you were going to be sympathetic, but you’re in the Air triplicity and I’m in the Water.”

“We’d make a wonderful air-sea rescue team.”

She smiled and said chidingly: “Don’t you believe in the stars?”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do – in a purely scientific way. When you look at the evidence, you simply can’t deny it. I’m Cancer, for example, and anybody can see that I’m the Cancer type. I’m sensitive and imaginative; I can’t do without love. The people I love can twist me around their little finger, but I can be stubborn when I have to be. I’ve been unlucky in marriage, like so many other Cancerians. Are you married, Archer?”

“Not now.”

“That means you were. You’ll marry again. Gemini always does. And he often marries a woman older than himself, did you know that?”

“No.” Her insistent voice was pushing me slightly off balance, threatening to dominate the conversation and me. “You’re very convincing,” I said.

“What I’m telling you is the truth.”

“You should do it professionally. There’s money in it for a smooth operator with a convincing spiel.”

Her candid eyes narrowed to two dark slits like peepholes in a fort. She studied me through them, made a tactical decision, and opened them wide again. They were dark pools of innocence, like poisoned wells.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I never do this professionally. It’s a talent I have, a gift – Cancer is frequently psychic – and I feel it’s my duty to use it. But not for money – only for my friends.”

“You’re lucky to have an independent income.”

Her thin-stemmed glass twirled out of her fingers and broke in two pieces on the table. “That’s Gemini for you,” she said. “Always looking for facts.”

I felt a slight twinge of doubt and shrugged it off. She’d fired at random and hit the target by accident. “I didn’t mean to be curious,” I said.

“Oh, I know that.” She rose suddenly, and I felt the weight of her body standing over me. “Let’s get out of here, Archer. I’m starting to drop things again. Let’s go some place we can talk.”

“Why not?”

She left an unbroken bill on the table and walked out with heavy dignity. I followed her, pleased with my startling success but feeling a little like a male spider about to be eaten by a female spider.

Russell was at his table with his head in his arms. Timothy was yelping at the captain of waiters like a terrier who has cornered some small defenseless animal. The captain of waiters was explaining that the au gratin potatoes would be ready in fifteen minutes.

In the Hollywood Roosevelt bar she complained of the air and said she felt wretched and old. Nonsense, I told her, but we moved to the Zebra Room. She had shifted to Irish whisky, which she drank straight. In the Zebra Room she accused a man at the next table of looking at her contemptuously. I suggested more air. She drove down Wilshire as if she was trying to break through into another dimension. I had to park the Buick for her at the Ambassador. I’d left my car at Swift’s.

She quarreled with the Ambassador barman on the grounds that he laughed at her when he turned his back. I took her to the downstairs bar at the Huntoon Park, which wasn’t often crowded. Wherever we went, there were people who recognized her, but nobody joined us or stood up. Not even the waiters made a fuss over her. She was on her way out.

Except for a couple leaning together at the other end of the bar, the Huntoon Park was deserted. The thickly carpeted, softly lighted basement was a funeral parlor where the evening we had killed was laid out. Mrs. Estabrook was pale as a corpse, but she was vertical, able to see, talk, drink, and possibly even think.

I was steering her in the direction of the Valerio, hoping that she’d name it. A few more drinks, and I could take the risk of suggesting it myself. I was drinking with her, but not enough to affect me. I made inane conversation, and she didn’t notice the difference. I was waiting. I wanted her far enough gone to say whatever came into her head. Archer the heavenly twin and midwife to oblivion.

I looked at my face in the mirror behind the bar and didn’t like it too well. It was getting thin and predatory-looking. My nose was too narrow, my ears were too close to my head. My eyelids were the kind that overlapped at the outside corners and made my eyes look triangular in a way that I usually liked. Tonight my eyes were like tiny stone wedges hammered between the lids.

She leaned forward over the bar with her chin in her hands, looking straight down into her half-empty liqueur glass. The pride that had kept her body erect and organized her face had seeped away. She was hunched there tasting the bitterness at the bottom of her life, droning out elegies: “He never took care of himself, but he had the body of a wrestler and the head of an Indian chief. He was part Indian. Nothing mean about him, though. One sweet guy. Quiet and easy, never talked much. But passionate, and a real one-woman man, the last I ever seen. He got T. B. and went off in one summer. It broke me up. I never got over it since. He was the only man I ever loved.”