Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“Sit down,” I said again. “I didn’t find what I was looking for last night, but I found something else. It should make you and the inspectors very happy. I’m offering it to you as a free gift, no strings.”

He lowered his haunches into the canvas chair. His anger had passed off suddenly, and curiosity had taken its place. “What is it? It better be good.”

I told him about the closed blue truck, the brown men at the Temple, Troy and Eddie and Claude. “Troy is the head of the gang, I’m pretty sure. The others work for him. They’ve been running an underground railway on a regular schedule between the Mexican border and the Bakersfield area. The southern end is probably at Calexico.”

“Yeah,” Spanner said. “That’s an easy place to cross the border. I took a trip down there with the border guard a couple of months ago. All they got to do is crawl through a wire fence from one road to the other.”

“And Troy’s truck would be waiting to pick them up. They used the Temple in the Clouds as a receiving station for illegal immigrants. God knows how many have passed through there. There were twelve or more last night.”

“Are they still there?”

“They’re in Bakersfield by now, but they shouldn’t be hard to round up. If you get hold of Claude I’m pretty sure he’ll talk.”

“Jesus!” Spanner said. “If they brought over twelve a night, that’s three hundred and sixty a month. Do you know how much they pay to get smuggled in?”

“No.”

“A hundred bucks apiece. This Troy has been making big money.”

“Dirty money,” I said. “Trucking in a bunch of poor Indians, taking their savings away, and turning them loose to be migrant laborers.”

He looked at me a little queerly. “They’re breaking the law, too, don’t forget. We don’t prosecute, though, unless they got criminal records. We just ship them back to the border and let them go. But Troy and his gang are another matter. What they been doing is good for thirty years.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“You don’t know where he hangs out in Los Angeles?”

“He runs a place called the Wild Piano, but he won’t be showing there. I’ve told you what I know.” With two exceptions: the man I had killed, and the blond woman who would still be waiting for Eddie.

“You seem to be on the level,” the sheriff said slowly. “You can forget what I said about arrest. But if this turns out to be a song-and-dance you gave me, I’ll remember it again.”

I hadn’t expected to be thanked, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I parked in the lane under the eucalyptus trees. The marks of the truck tires were still visible in the dust. Further down the lane a green A-model sedan, acned with rust, was backed against a fence post. On the registration card strapped to the steering gear I read the name, “Mrs. Marcella Finch.”

The moonlight had been kind to the white cottage. It was ugly and mean and dilapidated in the noon sun, a dingy blot against the blue field of the sea. Nothing in sight lived or moved, except the sea itself and a few weak puffs of wind in the withered grass on the hillside. I felt for my gun butt. The dry dust muffled my footsteps.

The door creaked partly open when I knocked.

A woman’s voice said dully: “Who’s that?”

I stood aside and waited, in case she had a gun. She raised her voice. “Is somebody there?”

“Eddie,” I whispered. Eddie had no further use for his name, but it was a hard thing to say.

“Eddie?” A hushed and wondering word.

I waited. Her sibilant feet crossed the floor. Before I could see her face in the dim interior, her right hand grasped the edge of the door. Under the peeling scarlet polish, her fingernails were dirty. I took hold of her hand.

“Eddie!” The face that looked around the door was blind with the sun and a desperate hopefulness. Then she blinked and saw I wasn’t Eddie.

She had aged rapidly in twelve hours. She was puffed around the eyes, drawn at the mouth, drooping at the chin. Waiting for Eddie had drained away her life. A kind of galvanic fury took its place.

Her nails bit into my hand like parrot’s claws. She squawked like a parrot: “Dirty liar!”

The name hit me hard, but not as hard as a bullet. I caught her other wrist and forced her back into the house, slamming the door with my heel. She tried to knee me, then to bite my neck. I pushed her down on the bed.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Marcie.”

From a round open mouth she screamed up into my face. The scream broke down in dry hiccuping. She flung herself sideways, burrowing under the covers. Her body moved in a rhythmic orgasm of grief. I stood above her and listened to the dry hiccuping.

Filtered through dirty windows, reflected from rain-stained walls and shabby furniture, the light in the room was gray. On top of an old battery radio beside the bed there were a handful of matches and a pack of cigarettes. She sat up after a while and lit a brown cigarette, dragging deep. Her bathrobe gaped open as if her slack breasts didn’t matter any more.

The voice that came out with the smoke was contemptuous and flat. “I should stage a crying jag to give a copper his kicks.”

“I’m no copper.”

“You know my name. I been waiting all morning to hear from the law.” She looked at me with cold interest. “How low can you bastards get? You blow Eddie down when he ain’t even heeled. Then you come and tell me you’re Eddie at the door. For a minute you make me think the newscast was wrong or you bastards was bluffing again. Can you get any lower than that?”

“Not much,” I said. “I thought you might answer the door with a gun.”

“I got no gun. I never carried a gun, nor Eddie neither. You wouldn’t be walking around if Eddie was heeled last night. Jumping for joy on his grave.” The flat voice broke again. “Maybe I’ll waltz on yours, copper.”

“Be quiet for a minute. Listen to me.”

“Gladly, gladly.” The voice recaptured its tinny quality. “You’ll be doing all the talking from now on. You can lock me up and throw away the key. You won’t get nothing out of me.”

“Douse the muggles, Marcie. I want you to talk some sense.”

She laughed and blew smoke in my face. I took the half-burned cigarette from her fingers and ground it under my heel. The scarlet claws reached for my face. I stepped back, and she lapsed onto the bed.

“You must have been in on it, Marcie. You knew what Eddie was doing?”

“I deny everything. He had a job driving a truck. He trucked beans from the Imperial Valley.” She stood up suddenly and threw off her bathrobe. “Take me down to headquarters and get it over. I’ll deny everything formal.”

“I don’t belong to headquarters.”

When she raised her arms to pull a dress over her head, her body drew itself up, the breasts erect, the belly taut and white. The hair on her body was black.

“Like it?” she said. She pulled the dress down with a vicious gesture and fumbled with the buttons at the neck. Her streaked blond hair was down around her face.

“Sit down,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere. I came here to tell you a thing.”

“Aren’t you a copper?”

“You repeat yourself like Puddler. Listen to me. I want Sampson. I’m a private cop hired to find him. He’s all I want – do you understand? If you can give him to me, I’ll keep you in the clear.”

“You’re a dirty liar,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust a cop, private or any other kind. Anyway, I don’t know where Sampson is.”

I looked hard into her bird-brown eyes. They were shallow and meaningless. I couldn’t tell from them if she was lying.

“You don’t know where Sampson is–”