Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

The solitary waitress came up to me. She had dark eyes and a soft mouth, a good body going to seed at twenty. You could read her history in her face and body. She walked carefully as if she had sore feet.

“You want a table, sir?”

“Thanks, I’ll sit in the bar. You may be able to help me, though. I’m looking for a man I met at a baseball game. I don’t see him.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s the trouble – I don’t know his name. I owe him money on a bet, and he said he’d meet me here. He’s a little fellow, about thirty-five, wears a leather windbreaker and a leather cap. Blue eyes, sharp nose.” And a hole in his head, sister, a hole in his head.

“I think I know who you mean. His name’s Eddie something, or something. He comes in for a drink sometimes, but he hasn’t been in tonight.”

“He said he’d meet me here. What time does he usually come in?”

“Later than this – around midnight. He drives a truck, don’t he?”

“Yeah, a blue truck.”

“That’s the one,” she said. “I seen it in the parking lot. He was in a couple of nights ago, used our phone for a long-distance telephone call. Three nights ago, it was. The boss didn’t like it – you never know how much to collect when it runs over three minutes – but Eddie said he’d reverse the charges, so the boss let him go ahead. How much do you owe him, anyway?”

“Plenty. You don’t know where he was calling?”

“No. It’s none of my business, anyway. Is it any of yours?”

“It’s just that I want to get in touch with him. Then I could send him his money.”

“You can leave it with the boss if you want to.”

“Where’s he?”

“Chico, behind the bar.”

A man at one of the tables rapped with his glass, and she walked carefully away. I went into the bar.

The bartender’s face, from receding hairline to slack jaw, was terribly long and thin. His night of presiding at an empty bar made it seem even longer. “What’ll it be?”

“A beer.”

His jaw dropped another notch. “Eastern or Western?”

“Eastern.”

“That’s thirty-five, with the music.” His jaw recovered the lost ground. “We provide the music.”

“Can I get a sandwich?”

“Sure thing,” he said, almost cheerfully. “What kind?”

“Bacon and egg.”

“O. K.” He signaled the waitress through the open door.

“I’m looking for a guy called Eddie,” I said. “The one that phoned me long-distance the other night.”

“You from Las Vegas?”

“Just came from there.”

“How’s business in L. V.?”

“Pretty slow.”

“That’s too bad,” he said happily. “What were you looking for him for?”

“I owe him some money. Does he live around here?”

“Yeah, I think he does. I don’t know where, though. He come in once or twice with a blond dame. Probably his wife. He might come in tonight for all I know. Stick around.”

“Thanks, I will.”

I took my beer to a table beside the window, from which I could watch the parking lot and the main entrance. After a while the waitress brought my sandwich. She lingered even after I paid and tipped her.

“Going to leave the money with the boss?”

“I’m thinking about it. I want to be sure he gets it.”

“You must be eaten up with honesty, eh?”

“You know what happens to bookies that don’t pay off.”

“I sort of thought you was a bookie.” She leaned toward me with sudden urgency. “Listen, mister, I got a girl friend, she goes out with an exercise boy, she says he says Jinx is a cert in the third tomorrow. Would you bet it on the nose or across the board?”

“Save your money,” I said. “You can’t beat them.”

“I only bet tip money. This boy, my girl friend’s boy friend, he says Jinx is a cert.”

“Save it.”

Her mouth pursed skeptically. “You’re a funny kind of bookie.”

“All right.” I handed her two ones. “Play Jinx to show.”

She looked at me with a scowl of surprise. “Gee, thanks, mister – only I wasn’t asking for money.”

“It’s better than losing your own money,” I said.

I hadn’t eaten for nearly twelve hours, and the sandwich tasted good. While I was eating it several cars arrived. A party of young people came in laughing and talking, and business picked up at the bar. Then a black sedan rolled into the parking lot, a black Ford sedan with a red police searchlight sticking out like a sore thumb beside the windshield.

The man who got out wore plain clothes as obvious as a baseball umpire’s suit, with gun wrinkles over the right hip. I saw his face when he came into the circle of light from the entrance. It was the deputy sheriff from Santa Teresa. I got up quickly and went through the door at the end of the bar into the men’s lavatory, locking the door behind me. I lowered the top of the toilet seat and sat down to brood over my lack of foresight. I shouldn’t have left the book matches in Eddie something’s pocket.

I put in eight or ten minutes reading the inscriptions on the whitewashed walls. “John ‘Rags’ Latino, Winner 120 Hurdles, Dearborn High School, Dearborn, Mich., 1946.”

“Franklin P. Schneider, Osage County, Oklahoma, Deaf Mute, Thank you.” The rest of them were the usual washroom graffiti interspersed with primitive line drawings.

The naked bulb in the ceiling shone in my eyes. My brain skipped a beat, and I went to sleep sitting up. The room was a whitewashed corridor slanting down into the bowels of the earth. I followed it down to the underground river of filth that ran under the city. There was no turning back. I had to wade the excremental river. Fortunately I had my stilts with me. They carried me untainted, wrapped in cellophane, to the landing on the other side. I tossed my stilts away – they were also crutches – and mounted a chrome-plated escalator that gleamed like the jaws of death. Smoothly and surely it lifted me through all the zones of evil to a rose-embowered gate, which a maid in gingham opened for me, singing Home, Sweet Home.

I stepped out into a stone-paved square, and the gate clanged shut behind me. It was the central square of the city, but I was alone in it. It was very late. Not a streetcar was in sight. A single yellow light shone down on the foot-smoothed pavement. When I moved, my footsteps echoed lonesomely, and on all four sides the hunchbacked tenements muttered like a forest before a storm. The gate clanged shut again, and I opened my eyes.

Something metallic was pounding on the door.

“Open up,” the deputy sheriff said. “I know you’re in there.”

I slipped the bolt and pulled the door wide open. “You in a hurry, officer?”

“So it’s you. I thought maybe it was you.” His black eyes and heavy lips were bulging with satisfaction. He had a gun in his hand.

“I knew damn well it was you,” I said. “I didn’t think it was necessary to tell everybody in the place.”

“Maybe you had a reason for keeping it quiet, eh? Maybe you had a reason for hiding in here when I come in? The sheriff thinks it’s an inside job, and he’ll want to know what you’re doing here.”

“This is the guy,” the bartender said, at his shoulder. “He said Eddie phoned him in Las Vegas.”

“What you got to say to that?” the deputy demanded. He waggled the gun in my face.

“Come in and close the door.”

“Yeah? Then put your hands on your head.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Put your hands on your head.” The gun poked into my solar plexus. “You carrying a gun?” He started to frisk me with his other hand.

I stepped back out of his reach. “I’m carrying a gun. You can’t have it.”