Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“The smuggling rap?”

“Right. Troy disappointed me. Trucking in Mexicans is a pretty low-grade racket for a gentleman crook. He should be selling the Hollywood Bowl to visiting firemen.”

“It paid him well. He made it pay off double. He took the poor creeps’ money for the ride, then turned them over to the ranches at so much a head. The Mexicans didn’t know it, but they were being used as strikebreakers. That way Troy got protection from some of the local cops. Luis greased the Mexican federals at the other end.”

“Was Sampson buying strikebreakers from Troy?”

“He was, but you’d never prove it. Sampson was very careful to keep himself in the clear.”

“He wasn’t careful enough,” I said. She was silent after that.

As I turned north on the highway I noticed that her face was ugly with pain. “There’s a pint of whisky in the glove compartment. You can use it to clean your burns and the scratches on your face. Or you can drink it.”

She followed both suggestions and offered me the open bottle.

“Not for me.”

“Because I drank from it first? All my diseases are mental.”

“Put it away.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“Poison isn’t my drink. Not that you don’t have your points. You seem to have some brains, on a low level.”

“Thanks for nothing, my intellectual friend.”

“And you’ve been around.”

“I’m not a virgin, if you’re talking about that. I haven’t been since I was eleven. Eddie saw a chance to turn a dollar. But I never did my living below the belt. The music saved me from that.”

“It’s too bad it didn’t save you from this.”

“I took my chance. It didn’t work out. What makes you think I care one way or the other?”

“You care about this other person. You want him to have the money, no matter what happens to you.”

“I told you to forget that.” After a pause she said: “You could let me go and keep the money yourself. You’ll never have another crack at a hundred grand.”

“Neither will you, Betty. Neither will Alan Taggert.”

She uttered a groan of surprise and shock. When she recovered her voice she said in a hostile tone: “You’ve been kidding me. What do you know about Taggert?”

“What he told me.”

“I don’t believe you. He never told you a thing.”

She corrected herself. “He doesn’t know anything to tell.”

“He did.”

“Did something happen to him?”

“Death happened to him. He’s got a hole in the head like Eddie.”

She started to say something, but the words were broken up by a rush of crying, a high drawn-out whimper giving place to steady dry sobs. After a long time she whispered: “Why didn’t you tell me he was dead?”

“You didn’t ask me. Were you crazy about him?”

“Yes,” she said. “We were crazy about each other.”

“If you were so crazy about him, why did you drag him into a thing like this?”

“I didn’t drag him in. He wanted to do it. We were going to go away together.”

“And live happily ever after.”

“Keep your cheap cracks to yourself.”

“I won’t buy love’s young dream from you, Betty. He was a boy, and you’re an old woman, as experience goes. I think you sucked him in. You needed a finger man, and he looked easy.”

“That’s not the way it was.” Her voice was surprisingly gentle. “We’ve been together for half a year. He came into the Piano with Sampson the week after I opened. I fell, and it was the same with him. But neither of us had anything. We had to have money to make a clean break.”

“And Sampson was the obvious source. Kidnapping was the obvious method.”

“You don’t have to waste your sympathy on Sampson. But we had other ideas at first. Alan was going to marry the girl, Sampson’s daughter, and get Sampson to buy him off. Sampson spoilt that himself. He lent Alan his bungalow at the Valerio one night. In the middle of the night we caught Sampson behind the curtains in the bedroom peeping at us. After that Sampson told the girl that if she married Alan he’d cut her off. He was going to fire Alan too, only we knew too much about him.”

“Why didn’t you blackmail him? That would be more your line.”

“We thought of that, but he was too big for us to handle and he has the best lawyers in the state. We knew plenty about him, but he would be hard to pin down. This Temple in the Clouds, for example. How could we prove that Sampson knew what Troy and Claude and Fay were using it for?”

“If you know so much about Sampson,” I said, “what makes him tick?”

“That’s a hard one. I used to think maybe he had some faggot blood, but I don’t know. He’s getting old, and I guess he felt washed up. He was looking for anything that would make him feel like a man again: astrology or funny kinds of sex, anything at all. The only thing he cares about is his daughter. I mink he caught on that she was stuck on Alan, and never forgave Alan.”

“Taggert should have stuck to her,” I said.

“You think so?” Her voice cracked. It was humble and small when she spoke again. “I didn’t do him any good. I know that, you don’t have to tell me. I couldn’t help myself, and neither could he. How did he die, Archer?”

“He got into a tight corner and tried to push out with a gun. Somebody else shot first. A man called Graves.”

“I’d like to meet that man. You said before that Alan talked. He didn’t do that?”

“Not about you.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said. “Where is he now?”

“In the morgue in Santa Teresa.”

“I wish I could see him – once more.”

The words came softly out of a dark dream. In the silence that followed, the dream spread beyond her mind and cast a shadow as long as the shadows thrown by the setting sun.

When I slowed down for Buenavista, twilight was softening the ugliness of the buildings and the lights were going on along the main street. I noticed the neon greyhound at the bus station but didn’t stop. A few miles beyond the town the highway converged with the shoreline again, winding along the bluffs above the uninhabited beaches. The last gray shreds of daylight clung to the surface of the sea and were slowly absorbed.

“This is it,” Betty Fraley said. She had been so still I’d almost forgotten she was in the seat beside me.

I stopped on the asphalt shoulder of the highway, just short of a crossroads. On the ocean side the road slanted down to the beach. A weather-faded sign at the corner advertised a desirable beach development, but there were no houses in sight. I could see the old beach club, though, a mass of buildings two hundred yards below the highway, long and low and neutral-colored against the glimmering whiteness of the surf.

“You can’t drive down,” she said. “The road’s washed out at the bottom.”

“I thought you hadn’t been down there.”

“Not since last week. I looked it over with Eddie when he found it. Sampson’s in one of the little rooms on the men’s side of the dressing-rooms.”

“He better be.”

I took the ignition key and left her in the car. As I went down, the road narrowed to a humped clay pathway with deeply eroded ditches on both sides. The wooden platform in front of the first building was warped, and I could feel the clumps of grass growing up through the cracks under my feet. The windows were high under the eaves, and dark.

I turned my flashlight on the twin doors in the middle, and saw the stencilled signs: “Gentlemen” on one, “Ladies” on the other. The one on the right, for “Gentlemen,” was hanging partly open. I pulled it wide, but not very hopefully. The place seemed empty and dead. Except for the restless water, there was no sign of life in it or around it.