The Moving Target

12

It was ten in the morning before I got downtown. Peter Colton was at the flat-topped desk in his office. He had been my colonel in Intelligence. When I opened the ground-glass door he glanced up sharply from a pile of police reports, then lowered his eyes immediately to show that I wasn’t welcome. He was a senior investigator in the D. A.’s office, a heavy middle-aged man with cropped fair hair and a violent nose like the prow of a speedboat inverted. His office was a plaster cubicle with a single steel-framed window. I made myself uncomfortable on a hard-backed chair against the wall.

After a while he pointed his nose at me. “What happened to that which, for want of a better term, I choose to call your face?”

“I got into an argument.”

“And you want me to arrest the neighborhood bully.” His smile dragged down the corners of his mouth. “You’ll have to fight your own battles, my little man, unless of course there’s something in it for me.”

“A popsicle,” I said sourly, “and three sticks of bubble gum.”

“You attempt to bribe the forces of the law with three sticks of bubble gum? Don’t you realize that this is the atomic age, my friend? Three sticks of bubble gum contain enough primal energy to blow us all to bits.”

“Forget it. The argument was with a wild piano.”

“And you think I have nothing better to do with my time than to go about putting the arm on berserk pianos? Or putting on a vaudeville act with a run-down divorce detective? All right, spill it. You want something for nothing again.”

“I’m giving you something. It could grow up to be the biggest thing in your life.”

“And of course you want something in return.”

“A little something,” I admitted.

“Let’s see the color of your story. In twenty-five words.”

“Your time isn’t that valuable.”

“Five,” he said, leaning his nose on the ball of his thumb.

“My client’s husband left Burbank Airport day before yesterday in a black limousine, ownership unknown. He hasn’t been seen since.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Shut up. Yesterday she got a letter in his handwriting asking for a hundred grand in bills.”

“There isn’t that much money. Not in bills.”

“There is. They have it. What does it suggest to you?” He had taken a sheaf of mimeographed sheets from the upper left-hand drawer of his desk and was scanning them in quick succession. “Kidnapping?” he said absently.

“It smells like a snatch to me. Could be my nostrils are insensate. What does the hot sheet say?”

“No black limousines in the last seventy-two hours. People with limousines look after them. Day before yesterday, you say. What time?” I gave him the details.

“Isn’t your client a little slow on the uptake?”

“She has a passion for discretion.”

“But not for her husband, I take it. It would help if you gave me her name.”

“Wait a minute. I told you I want something. Two things. One, this isn’t for publication. My client doesn’t know I’m here. Besides, I want the guy back alive. Not dead.”

“It’s too big to sit on, Lew.” He was up and walking, back and forth like a caged bear between the window and the door.

“You’ll be getting it through official channels. Then it’s out of my hands. In the meantime you can be doing something.”

“For you?”

“For yourself. Start checking the car-rental agencies. That’s number two. Number three is the Wild Piano–”

“That’s enough.” He flapped his hands in front of his face. “I’ll wait for the official report, if there is any.”

“Did I ever give you a bum lead?”

“Plenty, but we won’t go into that. You could be doing a little exaggerating, you know.”

“Why should I be pitching curves?”

“It’s a cheap and easy way to get your leg work done.”

His eyes were narrowed to intelligent blue slits. “There’s an awful lot of car rentals in the county.”

“I’d do it myself but I have to go out of town. These people live in Santa Teresa.”

“And their name?”

“Can I trust you?”

“Some. Further than you can see me.”

“Sampson,” I said. “Ralph Sampson.”

“I’ve heard of him. And I see what you mean about the hundred grand.”

“The trouble is we can’t be sure what happened to him. We’ve got to wait.”

“That’s what you said.” He swung on his heel to the window and spoke with his back to the room. “You also said something about the Wild Piano.”

“That was before you said I was looking for cheap leg work.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got feelings I can hurt.”

“You merely disappoint me,” I said. “I bring you a setup involving a hundred grand in cash and five million in capital assets. So you haggle over a day of your precious time.”

“I don’t work for myself, Lew.” He turned on me suddenly. “Is Dwight Troy in this?”

“Who,” I said, “is Dwight Troy?”

“Poison in a small package. He runs the Wild Piano.”

“I thought there were laws against places like that. And people like him. Excuse my ignorance.”

“You know who he is, then?”

“If he’s a white-haired Englishman, yes.” Colton nodded his head. “I met him once. He waved a gun at me for some reason. I left. It wasn’t my job to take his gun away.”

Colton moved his thick shoulders uncomfortably. “We’ve been trying to get him for years. He’s smooth and versatile. He goes just so far in a racket, until his protection wears thin, then he shifts to something else. He rode high in the early thirties, running liquor from Baja California until that petered out. Since then he’s had his ups and downs. He had a gambling pitch in Nevada for a while, but the syndicate forced him out. His pickings have been slender lately, I hear, but we’re still waiting to take him.”

“While you’re waiting,” I said, with heavy irony, “you could close the Wild Piano.”

“We close it every six months,” he snapped. “You should have seen it before the last raid, when it was the Rhinestone. They had a one-way window upstairs for voyeurs and masochists, a regular act of a woman whipping a man, and such stuff. We put an end to that.”

“Who ran it then?”

“A woman by the name of Estabrook. And what happened to her? She wasn’t even prosecuted.” He snorted angrily. “I can’t do anything about conditions like that. I’m not a politician.”

“Neither is Troy,” I said. “Do you know where he lives?”

“No. I asked you a question about him, Lew.”

“So you did. The answer is I don’t know. But he and Sampson have been moving in some of the same circles. You’d be smart to put a man on the Wild Piano.”

“If we can spare one.” He moved toward me unexpectedly and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “If you meet Troy again, don’t try to take his gun. It’s been tried.”

“Not by me.”

“No,” he said. “The men that tried it are dead.”