Ross MACDONALD - The Moving Target

A door opened behind me when I was halfway down the drive, but I didn’t show my face by looking back. I ducked around the corner of the hedge and kept running, away from my car. I circled the block on foot.

When I came back to the convertible the road was deserted. The garage doors were closed, but the Buick was still standing in the drive. The white house among its trees looked very peaceful and innocent in the early evening light.

It was nearly dark when the lady of the house came out in a spotted ocelot coat. I passed the entrance to the drive before the Buick backed out, and waited for it on Sunset Boulevard. She drove with greater fury and less accuracy all the way back to Hollywood, through Westwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills. I kept her in sight.

Near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where everything ends and a great many things begin, she turned into a private parking lot and left her car. I double-parked in the street till I saw her enter Swift’s, a gaudy figure walking like a slightly elated lady. Then I went home and changed my shirt.

The gun in my closet tempted me, but I didn’t put it on. I compromised by taking it out of the holster and putting it in the glove compartment of my car.

The back room of Swift’s was paneled in black oak that glowed dimly under the polished brass chandeliers. It was lined on two sides with leather-cushioned booths. The rest of the floor space was covered with tables. All of the booths and most of the tables were crowded with highly dressed people eating or waiting to be fed. Most of the women were tight-skinned, starved too thin for their bones. Most of the men had the masculine Hollywood look, which was harder to describe. An insistent self-consciousness in their loud words and wide gestures, as if God had a million-dollar contract to keep an eye on them.

Fay Estabrook was in a back booth, with a blue flannel elbow on the table opposite her. The rest of her companion was hidden by the partition.

I went to the bar against the third wall and ordered a beer.

“Bass ale, Black Horse, Carta Blanca, or Guinness stout? We don’t serve domestic beer after six o’clock.”

I ordered Bass, gave the bartender a dollar and told him to keep the change. There wasn’t any change. He went away.

I leaned forward to look in the mirror behind the bar and caught a three-quarters view of Fay Estabrook’s face. It was earnest and intense. The mouth was moving rapidly. Just then the man stood up.

He was the kind who was usually in the company of younger women, the neat and ageless kind who turned a dollar year after year at nobody knew what. He was the aging chorus boy Cramm had described. His blue jacket fitted him too well. A white silk scarf at his throat set off his silver hair.

He was shaking hands with a red-haired man who was standing by the booth. I recognized the red-haired man when he turned and wandered back to his own table in the center of the room. He was a contract writer for Metro named Russell Hunt.

The silver-haired man waved good-bye to Fay Estabrook and set his course for the door. I watched him in the mirror. He walked efficiently and neatly, looking straight ahead as if the place was deserted. As far as he was concerned it was deserted. Nobody lifted a hand or raised a lip over teeth. When he went out a few heads turned, a couple of eyebrows were elevated. Fay Estabrook was left in her booth by herself as if she had caught his infection and could communicate it.

I carried my glass to Russell Hunt’s table. He was sitting with a fat man who had a round ugly nose turned up at the tip and bright little agent’s eyes.

“How’s the word business, Russell?”

“Hello, Lew.”

He wasn’t glad to see me. I earned three hundred a week when I was working, and that made me one of the peasantry. He made fifteen hundred. An ex-reporter from Chicago who had sold his first novel to Metro and never written another, Hunt was turning from a hopeful kid to a nasty old man with the migraine and a swimming pool he couldn’t use because he was afraid of the water. I had helped him lose his second wife to make way for his third, who was no improvement.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, when I didn’t go away. “Have a drink. It dissipates the megrims. I do not drink to dissipate myself. I dissipate the megrims.”

“Hold it,” said agent eyes. “If you’re a creative artist you may sit down. Otherwise I can hardly be expected to waste my time with you.”

“Timothy is my agent,” Russell said. “I am the goose that lays his golden eggs. Observe his nervous fingers toying with the steak knife, his eyes fastened wistfully upon my rounded throat. Boding me no good, I ween.”

“He weens,” said Timothy. “Do you create?”

I slid into the patois and a chair. “I am a man of action. A sleuth hound, to wit.”

“Lew’s a detective,” Russell said. “He unearths people’s guilty secrets and exposes them to the eyes of a scandalized world.”

“Now, how low can you get?” asked Timothy cheerfully.

I didn’t like the crack, but I’d come for information, not exercise. He saw the look on my face and turned to the waiter who was standing by his chair.

“Who was that you were shaking hands with?” I asked Russell.

“The elegant lad in the scarf? Fay said his name was Troy. They were married at one time, so she ought to know.”

“What does he do?”

“I wouldn’t know for sure. I’ve seen him around: Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Tia Juana.”

“Las Vegas?”

“I think so. Fay says he’s an importer, but if he’s an importer I’m a monkey’s uncle.” He remembered his role. “Curiously enough, I am a monkey’s uncle, though I must confess that no one was more surprised than I when my younger sister, the one with the three breasts, gave birth last Whitsuntide to the cutest little chimpanzee you ever did see. She was Lady Greystoke by her first marriage, you know.”

His patter ceased abruptly. His face became grim and miserable again. “Another drink,” he said to the waiter. “A double Scotch. Make it the same all round.”

“Just a minute, sir.” The waiter was a wizened old man with black thumbtack eyes. “I’m taking this gentleman’s order.”

“He won’t serve me.” Russell flung out his arms in a burlesque gesture of despair. “I’m eighty-six again.”

The waiter pretended to be absorbed in what Timothy was saying.

“But I don’t want French fried potatoes. I want au gratin potatoes.”

“We don’t have au gratin, sir.”

“You can make them, can’t you?” Timothy said, his retroussed nostrils flaring.

“Thirty-five or forty minutes, sir.”

“O God!” Timothy said. “What kind of a beanery is this? Let’s go to Chasen’s, Russell. I got to have au gratin potatoes.”

The waiter stood watching him as if from a great distance. I glanced around him and saw that Fay Estabrook was still at her table, working on a bottle of wine.

“They don’t let me into Chasen’s any more,” Russell said. “On account of I am an agent of the Cominform. I wrote a movie with a Nazi for a villain, so I am an agent of the Cominform. That’s where my money comes from, friends. It’s tainted Moscow gold.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “Do you know Fay Estabrook?”

“A little. I passed her on the way up a few years ago. A few more years, and I’ll pass her on the way down.”

“Introduce me to her.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always wanted to meet her.”

“I don’t get it, Lew. She’s old enough to be your wife.”

I said in language he could understand: “I have a sentimental regard for her, stemming from the dear dead days beyond recall.”

“Introduce him if he wants,” said Timothy. “Sleuth hounds make me nervous. Then I can eat my au gratin potatoes in peace.”