Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“Perhaps you’d better not.” He lowered his voice. “The sheriff’s peeved at you for running out last night. I’ll come there.” He hung up, and I opened the door to the kitchen.

Bacon was making cheerful noises in a pan. Felix transferred it to a warming-dish, inserted bread in the toaster beside the stove, broke the eggs in the hot grease, poured me a cup of coffee from a steaming Silex maker.

I sat down at the kitchen table and gulped the scalding coffee. “Are all the phones in the house on the same line?”

“No, sir. The phones in the front of the house are on a different line from the servants’ phones. Do you wish your eggs turned over, Mr. Archer?”

“I’ll take them the way they are. Which ones are connected with the phone in the pantry?”

“The one in the linen closet and the one in the guest cottage above the house. Mr. Taggert’s cottage.”

Between mouthfuls I asked him: “Is Mr. Taggert there now?”

“I do not know, sir. I think I heard him drive in during the night.”

“Go and make sure, will you?”

“Yes, sir.” He left the kitchen by the back door.

A car drove up a minute later, and Graves came in. He had lost some of his momentum, but he still moved quickly. His eyes were red-rimmed.

“You look like hell, Lew.”

“I just came from there. Did you bring the dope on Lassiter?”

“Yeah.”

He took a teletype flimsy out of his inside pocket and handed it to me. My eye skipped down the closely printed sheet.

Brought before Children’s Court, New York, March 29, 1923, father’s complaint, truancy. Committed to New York Catholic Protectory, April 4, 1923. Released August 5, 1925....

Brooklyn Special Sessions Court, January 9, 1928, charged with bicycle theft. Received suspended sentence and placed on probation. Discharged from probation November 12, 1929....

Arrested May 17, 1932, and charged with possession of a stolen money order. Case dismissed for lack of evidence on recommendation U. S. Attorney....

Arrested for car theft October 5, 1936, sentenced to 3 years in Sing Sing....

Arrested with sister Betty Lassiter by agents of the U. S. Narcotics Bureau, April 23, 1943. Convicted of selling one ounce of cocaine, May 2, 1943, sentenced to year and a day in Leavenworth....

Arrested August 3, 1944, for participating in holdup of General Electric payroll truck. Pleaded guilty, sentenced to 5 to 10 years in Sing Sing. Released on parole September 18, 1947. Broke parole and disappeared, December 1947.

Those were the high points in Eddie’s record, the dots in the dotted line that marked his course from a delinquent childhood to a violent death. Now it was just as if he had never been born.

Felix said at my shoulder: “Mr. Taggert is in his cottage, sir.”

“Is he up?”

“Yes, he is dressing.”

“How about some breakfast?” Graves said.

“Yes, sir.”

Graves turned to me. “Is there anything useful in it?”

“Just one thing, and it isn’t nailed down. Lassiter had a sister named Betty who was arrested with him on a narcotics charge. There’s a woman named Betty in Los Angeles with narcotics in her record, a pianist in Troy’s clipjoint. She calls herself Betty Fraley.”

“Betty Fraley!” Felix said from the stove.

“This doesn’t concern you,” Graves told him unpleasantly.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about Betty Fraley, Felix? Do you know her?”

“I do not know her, no, but I have seen her records, in Mr. Taggert’s cottage. I have noticed the name when I dusted there.”

“Are you telling the truth?” Graves said.

“Why should I lie, sir?”

“Well see what Taggert has to say about that.” Graves got to his feet.

“Wait a minute, Bert.” I put my hand on his arm, which was hard with tension. “Bulldozing won’t get us anywhere. Even if Taggert has the woman’s records, it doesn’t have to mean anything. We’re not even certain she’s Lassiter’s sister. And maybe he’s a collector.”

“He has quite a large collection,” Felix said.

Graves was stubborn. “I think we should take a look at ft.”

“Not now. Taggert may be as guilty as hell, but we won’t get Sampson back by being blunt about it. Wait until Taggert isn’t there. Then I’ll look over his records.”

Graves let me pull him back into his seat. He stroked his closed eyelids with his fingertips. “This case is the wildest mess I’ve ever seen or heard of,” he said.

“It is.” Graves only knew the half of it. “Is the general alarm out for Sampson?”

He opened his eyes. “Since ten o’clock last night. We’ve alerted the highway patrol and the F. B. I., and every police department and county sheriff between here and San Diego.”

“You’d better get on the phone,” I said, “and put out another state-wide alarm. This time for Betty Fraley. Take in the whole Southwest.”

He smiled ironically, with his heavy jaw thrust out. “Doesn’t that fall under the category of bluntness?”

“In this case I think it’s necessary. If we don’t get to Betty fast there’ll be somebody there ahead of us. Dwight Troy is gunning for her.”

He gave me a curious look. “Where do you get your information, Lew?”

“I got that the hard way. I talked to Troy himself last night.”

“He is mixed up in this, then?”

“He is now. I think he wants the hundred grand for himself, and I think he knows who has it.”

“Betty Fraley?” He took a notebook out of his pocket.

“That’s my guess. Black hair, green eyes, regular features, five foot two or three, between twenty-five and thirty, probable cocaine addict, thin but well stacked, and pretty if you like to play with reptiles. Wanted on suspicion of the murder of Eddie Lassiter.”

He glanced up sharply from his writing. “Is that another guess, Lew?”

“Call it that. Will you put it on the wires?”

“Right away.” He started across the room to the butler’s pantry.

“Not that phone, Bert. It’s connected with the one in Taggert’s cottage.”

He stopped and turned to me with a shadow of grief on his face. “You seem pretty sure that Taggert’s our man.”

“Would it break your heart if he was?”

“Not mine,” he said, and turned away. “I’ll use the phone in the study.”

I waited in the hall at the front of the house until Felix came to tell me that Taggert was eating breakfast in the kitchen. He led me around the back of the garages, up a path that became a series of low stone steps climbing the side of the hill. When we came within sight of the guest cottage, he left me.

It was a one-story white frame house perched among trees with its back to the hillside. I opened the unlocked door and went in. The living-room was paneled in yellow pine and furnished with easy chairs, a radio-phonograph, a large refectory table covered with magazines and piles of records. The view through the big western window took in the whole estate and the sea to the horizon.

The magazines on the table were Jazz Record and Downbeat . I went through the records and albums one by one, Decca and Bluebird and Asch, twelve-inch Commodores and Blue Notes. There were many names I had heard of: Fats Waller, Red Nichols, Lux Lewis, Mary Lou Williams – and titles I never had heard of: Numb Fumblin’ and Viper’s Drag, Night Life, Denapas Parade . But no Betty Fraley.

I was at the door on my way to talk to Felix when I remembered the black disks skipping out to sea the day before. A few minutes after I saw them, Taggert had come through the house in bathing trunks.

Avoiding the house, I headed for the shore. From the glassed-in pergola on the edge of the bluff a long flight of concrete steps descended the cliff diagonally to the beach. There was a bathhouse with a screened veranda at the foot of the steps, and I went in. I found a rubber-and-plate-glass diving mask hanging on a nail in one of the bathhouse cubicles. I stripped to my shorts and adjusted the mask to my head.