Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“Yes,” I said. “Kidnapping is a federal offense.”

When I went back to the bar, a young Mexican in a tuxedo was leaning against the piano with a guitar. His small tenor, plaintive and remote, was singing a Spanish bullfighting song. His fingers marched thunderously in the strings. Mrs. Estabrook was watching him and barely noticed me when I sat down.

She clapped loudly when the song was finished, and beckoned him to our booth. “ Babalu . Pretty please.” She handed him a dollar.

He bowed and smiled, and returned to his singing.

“It’s Ralph’s favorite song,” she said. “Domingo sings it so well. He’s got real Spanish blood in his veins.”

“About this friend of yours, Ralph.”

“What about him?”

“He wouldn’t object to your being here with me?”

“Don’t be silly. I want you to meet him some time. I know you’ll like him.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s more or less retired. He’s got money.”

“Why don’t you marry him?”

She laughed harshly. “Didn’t I tell you I had a husband? But you don’t have to worry about him . It’s purely a business proposition.”

“I didn’t know you were in business.”

“Did I say I was in business?” She laughed again, much too alertly, and changed the subject: “It’s funny you suggesting I should marry Ralph. We’re both married to other people. Anyway, our friendship is on a different level. You know, more spiritual.”

She was sobering up on me. I raised my glass. “To friendship. On a different level.”

While she was still drinking, I held up two fingers to the waitress. The second drink fixed her. Her face went to pieces as if by its own weight. Her eyes went dull and unblinking. Her mouth hung open in a fixed yawn, the scarlet lips contrasting with the pink-and-white interior. She brought it together numbly and whispered: “I don’t feel so good.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“You’re nice.”

I helped her to her feet. The waitress held the door open, with a condoling smile for Mrs. Estabrook and a sharp glance at me. Mrs. Estabrook stumbled across the sidewalk like an old woman leaning on a cane that wasn’t there. I held her up on her anesthetized legs, and we made it to the car. Getting her in was like loading a sack of coal. Her head rolled into the corner between the door and the back of the seat. I started the car and headed for Pacific Palisades.

The motion of the car revived her after a while. “Got to get home,” she said dully. “You know where I live?”

“You told me.”

“Got to climb on the treadmill in the morning. Crap! I should weep if he throws me out of pictures. I got independent means.”

“You look like a businesswoman,” I said encouragingly.

“You’re nice, Archer.” The line was beginning to get me down. “Taking care of an old hag like me. You wouldn’t like me if I told you where I got my money.”

“Try me.”

“But I’m not telling you.” Her laugh was ugly and loose, in a low register. I thought I caught overtones of mockery in it, but they may have been in my head. “You’re too nice a boy.”

Yeah, I said to myself, a clean-cut American type. Always willing to lend a hand to help a lady fall flat on her face in the gutter.

The lady passed out again. At least she said nothing more. It was a lonely drive down the midnight boulevard with her half-conscious body. In the spotted coat it was like a sleeping animal beside me in the seat, a leopard or a wildcat heavy with age. It wasn’t really old – fifty at most – but it was full of the years, full and fermenting with bad memories. She’d told me a number of things about herself, but not what I wanted to know, and I was too sick of her to probe deeper. The one sure thing I knew about her she hadn’t had to tell me: she was bad company for Sampson or any incautious man. Her playmates were dangerous – one rough, one smooth. And if anything had happened to Sampson she’d know it or find out.

She was awake when I parked in front of her house. “Put the car in the drive. Would you, honey?”

I backed across the road and took the car up the driveway. She needed help to climb the steps to the door, and handed me the key to open it. “You come in. I been trying to think of something I want to drink.”

“You’re sure it’s all right? Your husband?”

Laughter growled in her throat. “We haven’t lived together for years.”

I followed her into the hallway. It was thick with darkness and her two odors, musk and alcohol, half animal and half human. I felt slippery waxed floor under my feet and wondered if she’d fall. She moved in her own house with the blind accuracy of a sleepwalker. I felt my way after her into a room to the left, where she switched on a lamp.

The room it brought out of darkness was nothing like the insane red room she had made for Ralph Sampson. It was big and cheerful, even at night behind closed Venetian blinds. A solid middle-class room with post-Impressionist reproductions on the walls, built-in bookshelves, books on them, a radio-phonograph and a record cabinet, a glazed brick fireplace with a heavy sectional chesterfield curved in front of it. The only strangeness was in the pattern of the cloth that covered the chesterfield and the armchair under the lamp: brilliant green tropical plants against a white desert sky, with single eyes staring between the fronds. The pattern changed as I looked at it. The eyes disappeared and reappeared again. I sat down on a batch of them.

She was at the portable bar in the corner beside the fireplace. “What are you drinking?”

“Whisky and water.”

She brought me my glass. Half of its contents slopped out en route, leaving a trail of dark splotches across the light-green carpet. She sat down beside me, depressing the cushioned seat. Her dark head swayed toward my shoulder and lodged there. I could see the few iron-gray strands the hairdresser had left in her hair so it wouldn’t look dyed.

“I can’t think of anything I want to drink,” she whined. “Don’t let me fall.”

I put one arm around her shoulders, which were almost as wide as mine. She leaned hard against me. I felt the stir and swell of her breathing, gradually slowing down.

“Don’t try to do anything to me, honey, I’m dead tonight. Some other night....” Her voice was soft and somehow girlish, but blurred. Blurred like the submarine glints of youth in her eyes.

Her eyes closed. I could see the faint tremor of her heartbeat in the veins of her withering eyelids. Their fringe of curved dark lashes was a vestige of youth and beauty which made her ruin seem final and hard. It was easier to feel sorry for her when she was sleeping.

To make certain that she was, I gently raised one of her eyelids. The marbled eyeball stared whitely at nothing. I took away my arm and let her body subside on the cushions. Her breasts hung askew. Her stockings were twisted. She began to snore.

I went into the next room, closed the door behind me, and turned on the light. It shone down from the ceiling on a bleached mahogany refectory table with artificial flowers in the center, a china cabinet at one side, a built-in buffet at the other, six heavy chairs ranged around the wall on their haunches. I turned the light off and went into the kitchen, which was neat and well equipped.

I wondered for an instant if I had misjudged the woman. There were honest astrologists – and plenty of harmless drunks. Her house was like a hundred thousand others in Los Angeles County, almost too typical to be true. Except for the huge garage and the bulldog that guarded it.

The bathroom had walls of pastel-blue tile and a square blue tub. The cabinet over the sink was stuffed and heaped with tonics and patent medicines, creams and paints and powders, luminol, nembutal, veronal. The hypochondriac bottles and boxes overflowed on the back of the sink, the laundry hamper, and the toilet top. The clothes in the hamper were female. There was only one toothbrush in the holder. A razor but no shaving cream, nor any other trace of a man.