The Moving Target

1

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak.

“This is Cabrillo Canyon,” the driver said.

There weren’t any houses in sight. “The people live in caves?”

“Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.”

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: “Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.”

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal.

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

We turned up a drive between sentinel yews, cruised round in a private highway network for a while, and came out above the sea stretching deep and wide to Hawaii. The house stood part way down the shoulder of the bluff, with its back to the canyon. It was long and low. Its wings met at an obtuse angle pointed at the sea like a massive white arrowhead. Through screens of shrubbery I caught the white glare of tennis courts, the blue-green shimmer of a pool.

The driver turned on the fan-shaped drive and stopped beside the garages. “This is where the cavemen live. You want the service entrance?”

“I’m not proud.”

“You want me to wait?”

“I guess so.”

A heavy woman in a blue linen smock came out on the service porch and watched me climb out of the cab. “Mr. Archer?”

“Yes. Mrs. Sampson?”

“Mrs. Kromberg. I’m the housekeeper.” A smile passed over her lined face like sunlight on a plowed field. “You can let your taxi go. Felix can drive you back to town when you’re ready.”

I paid off the driver and got my bag out of the back. I felt a little embarrassed with it in my hand. I didn’t know whether the job would last an hour or a month.

“I’ll put your bag in the storeroom,” the housekeeper said. “I don’t think you’ll be needing it.”

She led me through a chromium-and-porcelain kitchen, down a hall that was cool and vaulted like a cloister, into a cubicle that rose to the second floor when she pressed a button.

“All the modern conveniences,” I said to her back.

“They had to put it in when Mrs. Sampson hurt her legs. It cost seven thousand five hundred dollars.”

If that was supposed to silence me, it did. She knocked on a door across the hall from the elevator. Nobody answered. After knocking again, she opened the door on a high white room too big and bare to be feminine. Above the massive bed there was a painting of a clock, a map, and a woman’s hat arranged on a dressing-table. Time, space, and sex. It looked like a Kuniyoshi.

The bed was rumpled but empty. “Mrs. Sampson!” the housekeeper called.

A cool voice answered her: “I’m on the sun deck. What do you want?”

“Mr. Archer’s here – the man you sent the wire to.”

“Tell him to come out. And bring me some more coffee.”

“You go out through the French windows,” the housekeeper said, and went away.

Mrs. Sampson looked up from her book when I stepped out. She was half lying on a chaise longue with her back to the late morning sun, a towel draped over her body. There was a wheelchair standing beside her, but she didn’t look like an invalid. She was very lean and brown, tanned so dark that her flesh seemed hard. Her hair was bleached, curled tightly on her narrow head like blobs of whipped cream. Her age was as hard to tell as the age of a figure carved from mahogany.

She dropped the book on her stomach and offered me her hand. “I’ve heard about you. When Millicent Drew broke with Clyde, she said you were helpful. She didn’t exactly say how.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “And a sordid one.”

“Millicent and Clyde are dreadfully sordid, don’t you think? These aesthetic men! I’ve always suspected his mistress wasn’t a woman.”

“I never think about my clients.” With that I offered her my boyish grin, a little the worse for wear.

“Or talk about them?”

“Or talk about them. Even with my clients.”

Her voice was clear and fresh, but the sickness was there in her laugh, a little clatter of bitterness under the trill. I looked down into her eyes, the eyes of something frightened and sick hiding in the fine brown body. She lowered the lids.

“Sit down, Mr. Archer. You must be wondering why I sent for you. Or don’t you wonder either?”

I sat on a deck chair beside the chaise. “I wonder. I even conjecture. Most of my work is divorce. I’m a jackal, you see.”

“You slander yourself, Mr. Archer. And you don’t talk like a detective, do you? I’m glad you mentioned divorce. I want to make it clear at the start that divorce is not what I want. I want my marriage to last. You see, I intend to outlive my husband.”

I said nothing, waiting for more. When I looked more closely, her brown skin was slightly roughened, slightly withered. The sun was hammering her copper legs, hammering down on my head. Her toenails and her fingernails were painted the same blood color.

“It mayn’t be survival of the fittest. You probably know I can’t use my legs any more. But I’m twenty years younger than he is, and I’m going to survive him.” The bitterness had come through into her voice, buzzing like a wasp.

She heard it and swallowed it at a gulp. “It’s like a furnace out here, isn’t it? It’s not fair that men should have to wear coats. Please take yours off.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re very gentlemanly.”

“I’m wearing a shoulder holster. And still wondering. You mentioned Albert Graves in your telegram.”

“He recommended you. He’s one of Ralph’s lawyers. You can talk to him after lunch about your pay.”

“He isn’t D. A. any more?”

“Not since the war.”

“I did some work for him in ’40 and ’41. I haven’t seen him since.”

“He told me. He told me you were good at finding people.” She smiled a white smile, carnivorous and startling in her dark face. “Are you good at finding people, Mr. Archer?”

“ ‘Missing Persons’ is better. Your husband’s missing?”

“Not missing, exactly. Just gone off by himself, or in company. He’d be frantically angry if I went to the Missing Persons Bureau.”

“I see. You want me to find him if possible and identify the company. And what then?”

“Just tell me where he is, and with whom. I’ll do the rest myself.” Sick as I am, said the little whining undertone, legless though I be.

“When did he go away?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Where?”

“Los Angeles. He was in Las Vegas – we have a desert place near there – but he flew to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon with Alan. Alan’s his pilot. Ralph gave him the slip at the airport and went off by himself.”

“Why?”

“I suppose because he was drunk.” Her red mouth curved contemptuously. “Alan said he’d been drinking.”

“You think he’s gone off on a binge. Does he often?”

“Not often, but totally. He loses his inhibitions when he drinks.”

“About sex?”

“All men do, don’t they? But that isn’t what concerns me. He loses his inhibitions about money. He tied one on a few months ago and gave away a mountain.”

“A mountain?”

“Complete with hunting-lodge.”

“Did he give it to a woman?”

“I almost wish he had. He gave it to a man, but it’s not what you’re thinking. A Los Angeles holy man with a long gray beard.”

“He sounds like a soft touch.”

“Ralph? He’d go stark staring mad if you called him that to his face. He started out as a wildcat oil operator. You know the type, half man, half alligator, half bear trap, with a piggy bank where his heart should be. That’s when he’s sober. But alcohol softens him up, at least it has the last few years. A few drinks, and he wants to be a little boy again. He goes looking for a mother type or a father type to blow his nose and dry away his tears and spank him when he’s naughty. Do I sound cruel? I’m simply being objective.”

“Yes,” I said. “You want me to find him before he gives away another mountain.” Dead or alive, I thought; but I wasn’t her analyst.

“And if he’s with a woman, naturally I’ll be interested. I’ll want to know all about her, because I couldn’t afford to give away an advantage like that.”

I wondered who her analyst was.

“Have you any particular woman in mind?”

“Ralph doesn’t confide in me – he’s much closer to Miranda than he is to me – and I’m not equipped to spy on him. That’s why I’m hiring you.”

“To put it bluntly,” I said.

“I always put things bluntly.”