The Moving Target

2

A Filipino houseboy in a white jacket appeared at the open French window. “Your coffee, Mrs. Sampson.”

He set down the silver coffee service on a low table by the chaise. He was little and quick. The hair on his small round head was slick and black like a coating of grease.

“Thank you, Felix.” She was gracious to her servants or making an impression on me. “Will you have some, Mr. Archer?”

“No, thanks.”

“Perhaps you’d like a drink.”

“Not before lunch. I’m the new-type detective.”

She smiled and sipped her coffee. I got up and walked to the seaward end of the sun deck. Below it the terraces descended in long green steps to the edge of the bluff, which fell sharply down to the shore.

I heard a splash around the corner of the house and leaned out over the railing. The pool was on the upper terrace, an oval of green water set in blue tile. A girl and a boy were playing tag, cutting the water like seals. The girl was chasing the boy. He let her catch him.

Then they were a man and a woman, and the moving scene froze in the sun. Only the water moved, and the girl’s hands. She was standing behind him with her arms around his waist. Her fingers moved over his ribs gently as a harpist’s, clenched in the tuft of hair in the center of his chest. Her face was hidden against his back. His face held pride and anger like a blind bronze.

He pushed her hands down and stepped away. Her face was naked then and terribly vulnerable. Her arms hung down as if they had lost their purpose. She sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled her feet in the water.

The dark young man did a flip and a half from the springboard. She didn’t look. The drops fell off the tips of her hair like tears and ran down into her bosom.

Mrs. Sampson called me by name. “You haven’t had lunch?”

“No.”

“Lunch for three in the patio, then, Felix. I’ll eat up here as usual.”

Felix bowed slightly and started away. She called him back. “Bring the photo of Mr. Sampson from my dressing-room. You’ll have to know what he looks like, won’t you, Mr. Archer?”

The face in the leather folder was fat, with thin gray hair and a troubled mouth. The thick nose tried to be bold and succeeded in being obstinate. The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I’d seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.

“A poor thing, but mine own,” said Mrs. Sampson.

Felix let out a little sound that could have been a snicker, grunt, or sigh. I couldn’t think of anything to add to his comment.

He served lunch in the patio, a red-tiled triangle between the house and the hillside. Above the masonry retaining wall the slope was planted with ground cover, ageratum, and trailing lobelia in an unbreaking blue-green wave.

The dark young man was there when Felix led me out. He had laid away his anger and his pride, changed to a fresh light suit, and looked at ease. He was tall enough when he stood up to make me feel slightly undersized – six foot three or four. His grip was hard.

“Alan Taggert’s my name. I pilot Sampson’s plane.”

“Lew Archer.”

He rotated a small drink in his left hand. “What are you drinking?”

“Milk.”

“No kidding? I thought you were a detective.”

“Fermented mare’s milk, that is.”

He had a pleasant white smile. “Mine’s gin and bitters. I picked up the habit at Port Moresby.”

“Done a good deal of flying?”

“Fifty-five missions. And a couple of thousand hours.”

“Where?”

“Mostly in the Carolines. I had a P-38.”

He said it with loving nostalgia, like a girl’s name.

The girl came out then, wearing a black-striped dress, narrow in the right places, full in the others. Her dark-red hair, brushed and dried, bubbled around her head. Her wide green eyes were dazzling and strange in her brown face, like light eyes in an Indian.

Taggert introduced her. She was Sampson’s daughter Miranda. She seated us at a metal table under a canvas umbrella that grew out of the table’s center on an iron stem. I watched her over my salmon mayonnaise; a tall girl whose movements had a certain awkward charm, the kind who developed slowly and was worth waiting for. Puberty around fifteen, first marriage or affair at twenty or twenty-one. A few hard years outgrowing romance and changing from girl to woman; then the complete fine woman at twenty-eight or thirty. She was about twenty-one, a little too old to be Mrs. Sampson’s daughter.

“My stepmother” – she said, as if I’d been thinking aloud – “my stepmother is always going to extremes.”

“Do you mean me, Miss Sampson? I’m a very moderate type.”

“Not you, especially. Everything she does is extreme. Other people fall off horses without being paralyzed from the waist down. But not Elaine. I think it’s psychological. She isn’t the raving beauty she used to be, so she retired from competition. Falling off the horse gave her a chance to do it. For all I know, she deliberately fell off.”

Taggert laughed shortly. “Come off it, Miranda. You’ve been reading a book.”

She looked at him haughtily. “You’ll never be accused of that.”

“Is there a psychological explanation for my being here?” I said.

“I’m not exactly sure why you’re here. Is it to track Ralph down, or something like that?”

“Something like that.”

“I suppose she wants to get something on him. You have to admit it’s pretty extreme to call in a detective because a man stays away overnight.”

“I’m discreet, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Nothing’s worrying me,” she said sweetly. “I merely made a psychological observation.”

The Filipino servant moved unobtrusively across the patio. Felix’s steady smile was a mask behind which his personality waited in isolation, peeping furtively from the depths of his bruised-looking black eyes. I had the feeling that his pointed ears heard everything I said, counted my breathing, and could pick up the beat of my heart on a clear day.

Taggert had been looking uncomfortable, and changed the subject abruptly. “I don’t think I ever met a real-life detective before.”

“I’d give you my autograph, only I sign it with an ‘X.’”

“Seriously, though, I’m interested in detectives. I thought I’d like to be one at one time – before I went up in a plane. I guess most kids dream about it.”

“Most kids don’t get stuck with the dream.”

“Why? Don’t you like your work?”

“It keeps me out of mischief. Let’s see, you were with Mr. Sampson when he dropped out of sight?”

“Right.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Sports clothes. Harris tweed jacket, brown wool shirt, tan slacks, brogues. No hat.”

“And when was this exactly?”

“About three-thirty – when we landed at Burbank yesterday afternoon. They had to move another crate before I could park the plane. I always put it away myself; it’s got some special gadgets we wouldn’t want stolen. Mr. Sampson went to call the hotel to send out a limousine.”

“What hotel?”

“The Valerio.”

“The pueblo off Wilshire?”

“Ralph keeps a bungalow there,” Miranda said. “He likes it because it’s quiet.”

“When I got out to the main entrance,” Taggert continued, “Mr. Sampson was gone. I didn’t think much about it. He’d been drinking pretty hard, but that was nothing unusual, and he could still look after himself. It made me a little sore, though. There I was stranded in Burbank, simply because he couldn’t wait five minutes. It’s a three-dollar taxi ride to the Valerio, and I couldn’t afford that.”

He glanced at Miranda to see if he was saying too much. She looked amused.

“Anyway,” he said, “I took a bus to the hotel. Three buses, about half an hour on each. And then he wasn’t there. I waited around until nearly dark, and then I flew the plane home.”

“Did he ever get to the Valerio?”

“No. He hadn’t been there at all.”

“What about his luggage?”

“He didn’t carry luggage.”

“Then he wasn’t planning to stay overnight?”

“It doesn’t follow,” Miranda put in. “He kept whatever he needed in the bungalow at the Valerio.”

“Maybe he’s there now.”

“No. Elaine’s been phoning every hour on the hour.”

I turned to Taggert. “Didn’t he say anything about his plans?”

“He was going to spend the night at the Valerio.”

“How long was he by himself when you were parking the plane?”

“Fifteen minutes or so. Not more than twenty.”

“The limousine from the Valerio would’ve had to get there pretty fast. He may never have called the hotel at all.”

“Somebody might have met him at the airport,” Miranda said.

“Did he have many friends in Los Angeles?”

“Business acquaintances mostly. Ralph’s never been much of a mixer.”

“Can you give me their names?”

She moved her hand in front of her face as if the names were insects. “You’d better ask Albert Graves. I’ll call his office and tell him, you’re coming. Felix will drive you in. And then I suppose you’ll be going back to Los Angeles.”

“It looks like the logical place to start.”

“Alan can fly you.” She stood up and looked down at him with a flash of half-learned imperiousness. “You’re not doing anything special this afternoon, are you, Alan?”

“Glad to,” he said. “It’ll keep me from getting bored.”

She switch-tailed into the house, a pretty piece in a rage.

“Give her a break,” I said.

He stood up and overshadowed me. “What do you mean?”

He had a trace of smugness, of high-school arrogance, and I needled it. “She needs a tall man. You’d make a handsome pair.”

“Sure, sure.” He wagged his head negatively from side to side. “More people jump to conclusions about me and Miranda.”

“Including Miranda?”

“I happen to be interested in somebody else. Not that it’s any of your business. Or that Goddamn eight ball’s either.”

He meant Felix, who was standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen. He suddenly disappeared.

“The bastard gets on my nerves,” Taggert said. “He’s always hanging around and listening in.”

“Maybe he’s just interested.”

He snorted. “He’s just one of the things that gripes me about this place. I eat with the family, yeah, but don’t think I’m not a servant when the chips are down. A bloody flying chauffeur.”

Not to Miranda, I thought, but didn’t say it “It’s an easy enough job, isn’t it? Sampson can’t be flying much of the time.”

“The flying doesn’t bother me. I like it. What I don’t like is being the old guy’s keeper.”

“He needs a keeper?”

“He can be hell on wheels. I couldn’t tell you about him in front of Miranda, but the last week in the desert you’d think he was trying to drink himself to death. A quart and a pint a day. When he drinks like that he gets delusions of grandeur, and I get sick of taking chicken from a lush. Then he goes sentimental. He wants to adopt me and buy an airline for me.” His voice went harsh and loose, in satiric mimicry of a drunk old man’s: “ ‘I’ll look after you, Alan boy. You’ll get your airline.’”

“Or a mountain?”

“I’m not kidding about the airline. He could do it, too. But he doesn’t give anything away when he’s sober. Not a thin dime.”

“Strictly schizo,” I said. “What makes him like that?”

“I wouldn’t know for sure. The bitch upstairs would drive anybody crazy. Then he lost a son in the war. That’s where I come in, I guess. He doesn’t really need a full-time pilot. Bob Sampson was a flier, too. Shot down over Sakashima. Miranda thinks that that’s what broke the old man up.”

“How does Miranda get along with him?”

“Pretty well, but they’ve been feuding lately. Sampson’s been trying to make her get married.”

“To anybody in particular?”

“Albert Graves.” He said it deadpan, neither pro nor con.