Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

“It’s an ironic thing,” he said. “This is our wedding night, the night that I’ve been waiting for for years. And now I don’t want to see her.”

“Do you expect me to leave you out here by yourself?”

“Why not?”

“I can’t trust you. You were the one man I thought I could trust–” I couldn’t find the words to end the sentence.

“You can trust me, Lew.”

“Well make it Mr. Archer from now on.”

“Mr. Archer, then. I’ve got a gun in my pocket. But I’m not going to use it. I’ve had enough of violence. Do you understand that? I’m sick of it.”

“You should be sick,” I said, “with two murders on your stomach. You’ve had your fill of violence for a while.”

“Why did you say two murders, Lew?”

“Mr. Archer,” I said.

“You don’t have to take a high moral tone. I didn’t plan it this way.”

“Not many do. You shot Taggert on the spur of the moment, and you’ve improvised ever since. Toward the end you’ve been getting pretty careless. You might have known I’d find out you didn’t call the sheriff tonight.”

“You can’t prove you told me to.”

“I don’t have to. But it was enough to let me know what you were up to. You wanted to be alone with Sampson in that shack for a little while. You had to finish the job that Taggert’s partners had failed to do for you.”

“Do you seriously think I had anything to do with the kidnapping?”

“I know damn well you didn’t. But the kidnapping has something to do with you. It made a murderer out of you by giving you a reason to kill Taggert.”

“I shot Taggert in good faith,” he said. “I admit I wasn’t sorry to have him out of the way. Miranda liked him too well. But the reason I shot him was to save you.”

“I don’t believe you.” I sat there in cold anger. The stars clung like snow crystals in the black sky, pouring cold down on my head.

“I didn’t plan it,” he said. “I had no time to plan it. Taggert was going to shoot you, and I shot him instead. It was as simple as that.”

“Killing is never simple, not when it’s done by a man with your brains. You’re a dead shot, Graves. You didn’t have to kill him.”

He answered me harshly. “Taggert deserved to die. He got what was coming to him.”

“But not at the right time. I’ve been wondering how much you heard of what he said to me. You must have heard enough to know he was one of the kidnappers. Probably enough to be pretty sure that if Taggert died, his partners would kill Sampson.”

“I heard very little. I saw he was going to shoot you, and I shot him instead.” The iron return to his voice. “Evidently I made a mistake.”

“You made several mistakes. The first was killing Taggert – that’s what started it all, isn’t it? It wasn’t really Taggert you wanted dead. It was Sampson himself. You never wanted Sampson to come home alive, and you thought that by killing Taggert you’d arranged that. But Taggert had only one surviving partner, and she was hiding out. She didn’t even know Taggert was dead until I told her, and she had no chance to kill Sampson, though she probably would have if she’d had the chance. So you had to murder Sampson for yourself.”

Shame, and what looked like uncertainty, pulled at his face again. He shook them off. “I’m a realist. Archer. So are you. Sampson’s no loss to anybody.”

His voice had changed, become suddenly shallow and flat. The whole man was shifting and fencing, trying out attitudes, looking for one that would sustain him.

“You’re taking murder more lightly than you used to,” I said. “You’ve sent men to the gas chamber for murder. Has it occurred to you that that’s where you’re probably headed?”

He managed to smile. The smile made deep and ugly lines around his mouth and between his eyes. “You have no proof against me. Not a scrap.”

“I have moral certainty and your own implicit confession–”

“But no record of it. You haven’t even enough to bring me to trial.”

“It isn’t my job to do that. You know where you stand, better than I do. I don’t know why you had to murder Sampson.”

He was silent for some time. When he spoke, his voice had changed again. It was candid and somehow young, the voice of the man I had known in bull sessions years ago. “It’s strange that you should say that I had to, Lew. That was how I felt. I had to do it. I hadn’t made up my mind until I found Sampson there by himself in the dressing-room. I didn’t even speak to him. I saw what could be done, and once I’d seen it, I had to do it whether I liked it or not.”

“I think you liked it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I liked killing him. Now I can’t bear to think of it.”

“Aren’t you being a little easy on yourself? I’m no analyst, but I know you had other motives. More obvious and not so interesting. You got married this afternoon to a girl who was potentially very rich. If her father was dead she was actually very rich. Don’t tell me you’re not aware that you and your bride have been worth five million dollars for the last couple of hours.”

“I know it well enough,” he said. “But it’s not five million. Mrs. Sampson gets half.”

“I forgot about her. Why didn’t you kill her too?”

“You’re bearing down pretty hard.”

“You bore down harder on Sampson, for a paltry million and a quarter. Half of one half of his money. Weren’t you being a piker, Graves? Or were you planning to murder Mrs. Sampson and Miranda later on?”

“You know that isn’t true,” he said tonelessly. “What do you think I am?”

“I haven’t made up my mind. You’re a man who married a girl and killed her father the same day to convert her into an heiress. What was the matter, Graves? Didn’t you want her without a million-dollar dowry? I thought you were in love with her.”

“Lay off.” His voice was tormented. “Leave Miranda out of it.”

“I can’t. If it wasn’t for Miranda, we might have something more to talk about.”

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing more to talk about.”

I left him sitting in the car, smiling his stony gambler’s smile. My back was to him as I crossed the gravel drive to the house, and he had a gun in his pocket, but I didn’t look back. I believed him when he said he was sick of violence.

The lights were on in the kitchen, but nobody answered my knock. I went through the house to the elevator. Mrs. Kromberg was in the upstairs hall when I stepped out.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to see Mrs. Sampson.”

“You can’t. She’s been awful nervous today. She took three grains of nembutal about an hour ago.”

“This is important.”

“How important?”

“The thing she’s been waiting to hear.”

Comprehension flickered in her eyes, but she was too good a servant to question me. “I’ll see if she’s asleep.” She went to the closed door of Mrs. Sampson’s room and opened it quietly.

A frightened whisper came from inside the room. “Who’s that?”

“Kromberg. Mr. Archer says he has to see you. He says it’s very important.”

“Very well,” the whisper said. A light switched on. Mrs. Kromberg stood back to let me enter.

Mrs. Sampson leaned on her elbows, blinking in the light. Her brown face was drugged and sodden with sleep or the hope of sleep. The round dark tips of her breasts stared through the silk pajamas like dull eyes.

I shut the door behind me. “Your husband is dead.”

“Dead,” she repeated after me.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Should I be surprised? You don’t know the dreams I’ve been having. It’s terrible when you can’t quiet your mind, when you’re far enough gone to see the faces but you can’t quite go to sleep. The faces have been so vivid tonight. I saw his face all bloated by the sea, threatening to devour me.”