The Moving Target

19

He was still wearing his leather cap sharply tilted on the left side of his head. There was a round hole in the cap above his left ear. The left side of his face was peppered with black powder burns. His head had been knocked askew by the force of the bullet, and rolled on his shoulder when I pushed him upright. His black-nailed hands slipped off the steering wheel and dangled at his sides.

Holding him up in the seat with one hand, I went through his pockets with the other. The side pockets of his leather windbreaker contained a windproof lighter smelling of gasoline, a cheap wooden case half full of cigarettes rolled in brown wheat-straw paper, and a four-inch spring-knife. There was a worn sharkskin wallet in the hip pocket of his levis, containing eighteen or twenty dollars in small bills and a California driver’s license recently issued to one Lawrence Becker. The address on the license was a cheap Los Angeles hotel teetering on the edge of Skid Row. It wouldn’t be his address, and Lawrence Becker wouldn’t be his name.

The left side pocket of the levis held a dirty comb in a leatherette case. The other pocket held a heavy bunch of car keys on a chain – keys for every make of car from Chevrolet to Cadillac – and a half-used book of matches labeled: “Souvenir of The Corner, Cocktails and Steaks, Highway 101 South of Buenavista.” He had nothing on under his wind-breaker but a T-shirt.

There were a few short marijuana butts in the dashboard ash tray, but the rest of the car was as clean as a whistle. Not even a registration card in the glove compartment, nor a hundred thousand dollars in moderate-sized bills.

I put the things back in his pockets and propped him up in the seat, slamming the door to hold him. I looked back once before I got into my car. The lights of the Lincoln were still burning, the idling motor still sending out a steady trickle of vapor from the exhaust. The dead man hunched at the wheel looked ready to start on a long, fast trip to another part of the country.

Graves’s Studebaker was parked by the pumps at the filling station. Graves and Taggert were standing beside it and came running when I drove up. Their faces were pale and slick with excitement.

“It was a black limousine,” Graves said. “We drove away slow and saw him stop at the corner. I couldn’t see his face, but he was wearing a cap and a leather windbreaker.”

“He still is.”

“Did you see him pass you?” Taggert’s voice was so tense he whispered.

“He turned off before he got to me. He’s sitting in his car on the next side road with a bullet in his head.”

“Good Christ!” Graves cried. “You didn’t shoot him, Lew?”

“Somebody else did. A cream convertible came out of the side road a minute after the shot. I think a woman was driving. She headed for L. A. Now, are you sure he got the money?”

“I saw him pick it up.”

“He hasn’t got it any more; so one of two things happened. It was a heist, or his partners double-crossed him. If he was highjacked, his partners don’t get the hundred grand. If they double-crossed him, they’ll double-cross us. Either way it’s bad for Sampson.”

“What do we do now?” Taggert said.

Graves answered him. “We take the wraps off the case. Give the police the go-ahead. Post a reward. I’ll see Mrs. Sampson about it.”

“One thing, Bert,” I said. “We’ve got to keep this shooting quiet – out of the papers anyway. If highjackers did it, his partners will blame us, and that’s the end of Sampson.”

“The dirty bastards!” Graves’s voice was heavy and grim. “We kept our side of the bargain. If I could get my hands on them–”

“You wouldn’t know it. All we have is a dead man in a rented car. You better start with the sheriff; he won’t do much, but it’s a nice gesture. Then the highway patrol and the F. B. I. Get as many men on it as you can.”

I released my emergency brake and let the car roll a few inches. Graves backed away from the window. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“On a wild-goose chase. Things look so bad for Sampson I might as well.”

It took me down the highway fifty miles to Buenavista. The highway doubled as the town’s main street. It was lit by motel and tavern signs and three theater fronts. Two of the three theaters advertised Mexican films. The Mexicans lived off the land when the canneries were closed. The rest of the townspeople lived off the Mexicans and the fishing fleet.

I stopped in the middle of the town, in front of an overgrown cigar store that sold guns, magazines, fishing tackle, draft beer, stationery, baseball gloves, contraceptives, and cigars. Two dozen Mexican boys with grease-slicked ducktail haircuts were swarming in and out of the store, drawn two ways by the pinball machines in the back and the girls on the street. The girls went by in ribbons and paints, cutting the air with their bosoms. The boys whistled and postured or pretended to be uninterested.

I called one to the curb and asked him where The Corner was. He conferred with another pachuco. Then they both pointed south.

“Straight ahead, about five miles, where the road goes down to White Beach.”

“There’s a big red sign,” the other boy said, stretching out his arms enthusiastically. “You can’t miss it. The Corner.”

I thanked them. They bowed and smiled and nodded as if I had done them a favor.

The sign spelled out “The Corner” in red-neon script on the roof of a long, low building to the right of the highway. A black-and-white sign at the intersection beyond it pointed to White Beach. I parked in the asphalt parking-space beside the building. There were eight or ten other cars in the lot, and a trailer truck on the shoulder of the highway. Through the half-curtained windows I could see a few couples at tables, a few others dancing.

To the left as I went in was a long bar, totally empty. The dining-room and dance floor was to the right. I stood at the entrance as if I was looking for somebody. There weren’t enough dancers to bring the big room to life. Their music came from a jukebox. There was an empty orchestra stand at the back of the room. All that was left of the big war nights were the foot-grained floor, rows of unset rickety tables, odors like drunken memories in the walls, tattered decorations like drunken hopes.

The customers felt the depression in the room. Their faces groped for laughter and enjoyment and couldn’t quite get hold of them. None of the faces meant anything to me.

The solitary waitress came up to me. She had dark eyes and a soft mouth, a good body going to seed at twenty. You could read her history in her face and body. She walked carefully as if she had sore feet.

“You want a table, sir?”

“Thanks, I’ll sit in the bar. You may be able to help me, though. I’m looking for a man I met at a baseball game. I don’t see him.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s the trouble – I don’t know his name. I owe him money on a bet, and he said he’d meet me here. He’s a little fellow, about thirty-five, wears a leather windbreaker and a leather cap. Blue eyes, sharp nose.” And a hole in his head, sister, a hole in his head.

“I think I know who you mean. His name’s Eddie something, or something. He comes in for a drink sometimes, but he hasn’t been in tonight.”

“He said he’d meet me here. What time does he usually come in?”

“Later than this – around midnight. He drives a truck, don’t he?”

“Yeah, a blue truck.”

“That’s the one,” she said. “I seen it in the parking lot. He was in a couple of nights ago, used our phone for a long-distance telephone call. Three nights ago, it was. The boss didn’t like it – you never know how much to collect when it runs over three minutes – but Eddie said he’d reverse the charges, so the boss let him go ahead. How much do you owe him, anyway?”

“Plenty. You don’t know where he was calling?”

“No. It’s none of my business, anyway. Is it any of yours?”

“It’s just that I want to get in touch with him. Then I could send him his money.”

“You can leave it with the boss if you want to.”

“Where’s he?”

“Chico, behind the bar.”

A man at one of the tables rapped with his glass, and she walked carefully away. I went into the bar.

The bartender’s face, from receding hairline to slack jaw, was terribly long and thin. His night of presiding at an empty bar made it seem even longer. “What’ll it be?”

“A beer.”

His jaw dropped another notch. “Eastern or Western?”

“Eastern.”

“That’s thirty-five, with the music.” His jaw recovered the lost ground. “We provide the music.”

“Can I get a sandwich?”

“Sure thing,” he said, almost cheerfully. “What kind?”

“Bacon and egg.”

“O. K.” He signaled the waitress through the open door.

“I’m looking for a guy called Eddie,” I said. “The one that phoned me long-distance the other night.”

“You from Las Vegas?”

“Just came from there.”

“How’s business in L. V.?”

“Pretty slow.”

“That’s too bad,” he said happily. “What were you looking for him for?”

“I owe him some money. Does he live around here?”

“Yeah, I think he does. I don’t know where, though. He come in once or twice with a blond dame. Probably his wife. He might come in tonight for all I know. Stick around.”

“Thanks, I will.”

I took my beer to a table beside the window, from which I could watch the parking lot and the main entrance. After a while the waitress brought my sandwich. She lingered even after I paid and tipped her.

“Going to leave the money with the boss?”

“I’m thinking about it. I want to be sure he gets it.”

“You must be eaten up with honesty, eh?”

“You know what happens to bookies that don’t pay off.”

“I sort of thought you was a bookie.” She leaned toward me with sudden urgency. “Listen, mister, I got a girl friend, she goes out with an exercise boy, she says he says Jinx is a cert in the third tomorrow. Would you bet it on the nose or across the board?”

“Save your money,” I said. “You can’t beat them.”

“I only bet tip money. This boy, my girl friend’s boy friend, he says Jinx is a cert.”

“Save it.”

Her mouth pursed skeptically. “You’re a funny kind of bookie.”

“All right.” I handed her two ones. “Play Jinx to show.”

She looked at me with a scowl of surprise. “Gee, thanks, mister – only I wasn’t asking for money.”

“It’s better than losing your own money,” I said.

I hadn’t eaten for nearly twelve hours, and the sandwich tasted good. While I was eating it several cars arrived. A party of young people came in laughing and talking, and business picked up at the bar. Then a black sedan rolled into the parking lot, a black Ford sedan with a red police searchlight sticking out like a sore thumb beside the windshield.

The man who got out wore plain clothes as obvious as a baseball umpire’s suit, with gun wrinkles over the right hip. I saw his face when he came into the circle of light from the entrance. It was the deputy sheriff from Santa Teresa. I got up quickly and went through the door at the end of the bar into the men’s lavatory, locking the door behind me. I lowered the top of the toilet seat and sat down to brood over my lack of foresight. I shouldn’t have left the book matches in Eddie something’s pocket.

I put in eight or ten minutes reading the inscriptions on the whitewashed walls. “John ‘Rags’ Latino, Winner 120 Hurdles, Dearborn High School, Dearborn, Mich., 1946.”

“Franklin P. Schneider, Osage County, Oklahoma, Deaf Mute, Thank you.” The rest of them were the usual washroom graffiti interspersed with primitive line drawings.

The naked bulb in the ceiling shone in my eyes. My brain skipped a beat, and I went to sleep sitting up. The room was a whitewashed corridor slanting down into the bowels of the earth. I followed it down to the underground river of filth that ran under the city. There was no turning back. I had to wade the excremental river. Fortunately I had my stilts with me. They carried me untainted, wrapped in cellophane, to the landing on the other side. I tossed my stilts away – they were also crutches – and mounted a chrome-plated escalator that gleamed like the jaws of death. Smoothly and surely it lifted me through all the zones of evil to a rose-embowered gate, which a maid in gingham opened for me, singing Home, Sweet Home.

I stepped out into a stone-paved square, and the gate clanged shut behind me. It was the central square of the city, but I was alone in it. It was very late. Not a streetcar was in sight. A single yellow light shone down on the foot-smoothed pavement. When I moved, my footsteps echoed lonesomely, and on all four sides the hunchbacked tenements muttered like a forest before a storm. The gate clanged shut again, and I opened my eyes.

Something metallic was pounding on the door.

“Open up,” the deputy sheriff said. “I know you’re in there.”

I slipped the bolt and pulled the door wide open. “You in a hurry, officer?”

“So it’s you. I thought maybe it was you.” His black eyes and heavy lips were bulging with satisfaction. He had a gun in his hand.

“I knew damn well it was you,” I said. “I didn’t think it was necessary to tell everybody in the place.”

“Maybe you had a reason for keeping it quiet, eh? Maybe you had a reason for hiding in here when I come in? The sheriff thinks it’s an inside job, and he’ll want to know what you’re doing here.”

“This is the guy,” the bartender said, at his shoulder. “He said Eddie phoned him in Las Vegas.”

“What you got to say to that?” the deputy demanded. He waggled the gun in my face.

“Come in and close the door.”

“Yeah? Then put your hands on your head.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Put your hands on your head.” The gun poked into my solar plexus. “You carrying a gun?” He started to frisk me with his other hand.

I stepped back out of his reach. “I’m carrying a gun. You can’t have it.”

He moved toward me again. The door swung closed behind him. “You know what you’re doing, eh? Resisting an officer in performance his duty. I got a good mind to put you under arrest.”

“You got a good mind, period.”

“No cracks from you, jerk. All I want to know is what you’re doing here.”

“Enjoying myself.”

“So you won’t talk, eh?” he said, like a comic-book cop. He raised his free hand to slap me.

“Hold it,” I said. “Don’t lay a finger on me.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’ve never killed a cop. It would be a blot on my record.”

Our glances met and deadlocked. His raised hand hung stiff in the air and gradually subsided.

“Now put your gun away,” I said. “I don’t like being threatened.”

“Nobody asked you what you liked,” he said, but his fire had gone out. His swarthy face was caught between conflicting emotions: anger and doubt, suspicion and bewilderment.

“I came here for the same reason you did – officer.” The word came hard, but I managed to get it out. “I found the book matches in Eddie’s pocket–”

“How come you know his name?” he said alertly.

“The waitress told me.”

“Yeah? The bartender said he phoned you in Las Vegas.”

“I was trying to pump the bartender. Get it? It was a gag. I was trying to be subtle.”

“Well, what did you find out?”

“The dead man’s name is Eddie, and he drove a truck. He came in here for drinks sometimes. Three nights ago he phoned Las Vegas from here. Sampson was in Las Vegas three nights ago.”

“No kidding?”

“I wouldn’t kid you, officer, even if I could.”

“Jesus,” he said, “it all fits in, don’t it?”

“I never thought of that,” I said. “Thank you very much for pointing it out to me.”

He gave me a queer look, but he put away his gun.