Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“A mountain?”

“Complete with hunting-lodge.”

“Did he give it to a woman?”

“I almost wish he had. He gave it to a man, but it’s not what you’re thinking. A Los Angeles holy man with a long gray beard.”

“He sounds like a soft touch.”

“Ralph? He’d go stark staring mad if you called him that to his face. He started out as a wildcat oil operator. You know the type, half man, half alligator, half bear trap, with a piggy bank where his heart should be. That’s when he’s sober. But alcohol softens him up, at least it has the last few years. A few drinks, and he wants to be a little boy again. He goes looking for a mother type or a father type to blow his nose and dry away his tears and spank him when he’s naughty. Do I sound cruel? I’m simply being objective.”

“Yes,” I said. “You want me to find him before he gives away another mountain.” Dead or alive, I thought; but I wasn’t her analyst.

“And if he’s with a woman, naturally I’ll be interested. I’ll want to know all about her, because I couldn’t afford to give away an advantage like that.”

I wondered who her analyst was.

“Have you any particular woman in mind?”

“Ralph doesn’t confide in me – he’s much closer to Miranda than he is to me – and I’m not equipped to spy on him. That’s why I’m hiring you.”

“To put it bluntly,” I said.

“I always put things bluntly.”

A Filipino houseboy in a white jacket appeared at the open French window. “Your coffee, Mrs. Sampson.”

He set down the silver coffee service on a low table by the chaise. He was little and quick. The hair on his small round head was slick and black like a coating of grease.

“Thank you, Felix.” She was gracious to her servants or making an impression on me. “Will you have some, Mr. Archer?”

“No, thanks.”

“Perhaps you’d like a drink.”

“Not before lunch. I’m the new-type detective.”

She smiled and sipped her coffee. I got up and walked to the seaward end of the sun deck. Below it the terraces descended in long green steps to the edge of the bluff, which fell sharply down to the shore.

I heard a splash around the corner of the house and leaned out over the railing. The pool was on the upper terrace, an oval of green water set in blue tile. A girl and a boy were playing tag, cutting the water like seals. The girl was chasing the boy. He let her catch him.

Then they were a man and a woman, and the moving scene froze in the sun. Only the water moved, and the girl’s hands. She was standing behind him with her arms around his waist. Her fingers moved over his ribs gently as a harpist’s, clenched in the tuft of hair in the center of his chest. Her face was hidden against his back. His face held pride and anger like a blind bronze.

He pushed her hands down and stepped away. Her face was naked then and terribly vulnerable. Her arms hung down as if they had lost their purpose. She sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled her feet in the water.

The dark young man did a flip and a half from the springboard. She didn’t look. The drops fell off the tips of her hair like tears and ran down into her bosom.

Mrs. Sampson called me by name. “You haven’t had lunch?”

“No.”

“Lunch for three in the patio, then, Felix. I’ll eat up here as usual.”

Felix bowed slightly and started away. She called him back. “Bring the photo of Mr. Sampson from my dressing-room. You’ll have to know what he looks like, won’t you, Mr. Archer?”

The face in the leather folder was fat, with thin gray hair and a troubled mouth. The thick nose tried to be bold and succeeded in being obstinate. The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I’d seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.

“A poor thing, but mine own,” said Mrs. Sampson.

Felix let out a little sound that could have been a snicker, grunt, or sigh. I couldn’t think of anything to add to his comment.

He served lunch in the patio, a red-tiled triangle between the house and the hillside. Above the masonry retaining wall the slope was planted with ground cover, ageratum, and trailing lobelia in an unbreaking blue-green wave.

The dark young man was there when Felix led me out. He had laid away his anger and his pride, changed to a fresh light suit, and looked at ease. He was tall enough when he stood up to make me feel slightly undersized – six foot three or four. His grip was hard.

“Alan Taggert’s my name. I pilot Sampson’s plane.”

“Lew Archer.”

He rotated a small drink in his left hand. “What are you drinking?”

“Milk.”

“No kidding? I thought you were a detective.”

“Fermented mare’s milk, that is.”

He had a pleasant white smile. “Mine’s gin and bitters. I picked up the habit at Port Moresby.”

“Done a good deal of flying?”

“Fifty-five missions. And a couple of thousand hours.”

“Where?”

“Mostly in the Carolines. I had a P-38.”

He said it with loving nostalgia, like a girl’s name.

The girl came out then, wearing a black-striped dress, narrow in the right places, full in the others. Her dark-red hair, brushed and dried, bubbled around her head. Her wide green eyes were dazzling and strange in her brown face, like light eyes in an Indian.

Taggert introduced her. She was Sampson’s daughter Miranda. She seated us at a metal table under a canvas umbrella that grew out of the table’s center on an iron stem. I watched her over my salmon mayonnaise; a tall girl whose movements had a certain awkward charm, the kind who developed slowly and was worth waiting for. Puberty around fifteen, first marriage or affair at twenty or twenty-one. A few hard years outgrowing romance and changing from girl to woman; then the complete fine woman at twenty-eight or thirty. She was about twenty-one, a little too old to be Mrs. Sampson’s daughter.

“My stepmother” – she said, as if I’d been thinking aloud – “my stepmother is always going to extremes.”

“Do you mean me, Miss Sampson? I’m a very moderate type.”

“Not you, especially. Everything she does is extreme. Other people fall off horses without being paralyzed from the waist down. But not Elaine. I think it’s psychological. She isn’t the raving beauty she used to be, so she retired from competition. Falling off the horse gave her a chance to do it. For all I know, she deliberately fell off.”

Taggert laughed shortly. “Come off it, Miranda. You’ve been reading a book.”

She looked at him haughtily. “You’ll never be accused of that.”

“Is there a psychological explanation for my being here?” I said.

“I’m not exactly sure why you’re here. Is it to track Ralph down, or something like that?”

“Something like that.”

“I suppose she wants to get something on him. You have to admit it’s pretty extreme to call in a detective because a man stays away overnight.”

“I’m discreet, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Nothing’s worrying me,” she said sweetly. “I merely made a psychological observation.”

The Filipino servant moved unobtrusively across the patio. Felix’s steady smile was a mask behind which his personality waited in isolation, peeping furtively from the depths of his bruised-looking black eyes. I had the feeling that his pointed ears heard everything I said, counted my breathing, and could pick up the beat of my heart on a clear day.

Taggert had been looking uncomfortable, and changed the subject abruptly. “I don’t think I ever met a real-life detective before.”