The Moving Target

27

I parked in the lane under the eucalyptus trees. The marks of the truck tires were still visible in the dust. Further down the lane a green A-model sedan, acned with rust, was backed against a fence post. On the registration card strapped to the steering gear I read the name, “Mrs. Marcella Finch.”

The moonlight had been kind to the white cottage. It was ugly and mean and dilapidated in the noon sun, a dingy blot against the blue field of the sea. Nothing in sight lived or moved, except the sea itself and a few weak puffs of wind in the withered grass on the hillside. I felt for my gun butt. The dry dust muffled my footsteps.

The door creaked partly open when I knocked.

A woman’s voice said dully: “Who’s that?”

I stood aside and waited, in case she had a gun. She raised her voice. “Is somebody there?”

“Eddie,” I whispered. Eddie had no further use for his name, but it was a hard thing to say.

“Eddie?” A hushed and wondering word.

I waited. Her sibilant feet crossed the floor. Before I could see her face in the dim interior, her right hand grasped the edge of the door. Under the peeling scarlet polish, her fingernails were dirty. I took hold of her hand.

“Eddie!” The face that looked around the door was blind with the sun and a desperate hopefulness. Then she blinked and saw I wasn’t Eddie.

She had aged rapidly in twelve hours. She was puffed around the eyes, drawn at the mouth, drooping at the chin. Waiting for Eddie had drained away her life. A kind of galvanic fury took its place.

Her nails bit into my hand like parrot’s claws. She squawked like a parrot: “Dirty liar!”

The name hit me hard, but not as hard as a bullet. I caught her other wrist and forced her back into the house, slamming the door with my heel. She tried to knee me, then to bite my neck. I pushed her down on the bed.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Marcie.”

From a round open mouth she screamed up into my face. The scream broke down in dry hiccuping. She flung herself sideways, burrowing under the covers. Her body moved in a rhythmic orgasm of grief. I stood above her and listened to the dry hiccuping.

Filtered through dirty windows, reflected from rain-stained walls and shabby furniture, the light in the room was gray. On top of an old battery radio beside the bed there were a handful of matches and a pack of cigarettes. She sat up after a while and lit a brown cigarette, dragging deep. Her bathrobe gaped open as if her slack breasts didn’t matter any more.

The voice that came out with the smoke was contemptuous and flat. “I should stage a crying jag to give a copper his kicks.”

“I’m no copper.”

“You know my name. I been waiting all morning to hear from the law.” She looked at me with cold interest. “How low can you bastards get? You blow Eddie down when he ain’t even heeled. Then you come and tell me you’re Eddie at the door. For a minute you make me think the newscast was wrong or you bastards was bluffing again. Can you get any lower than that?”

“Not much,” I said. “I thought you might answer the door with a gun.”

“I got no gun. I never carried a gun, nor Eddie neither. You wouldn’t be walking around if Eddie was heeled last night. Jumping for joy on his grave.” The flat voice broke again. “Maybe I’ll waltz on yours, copper.”

“Be quiet for a minute. Listen to me.”

“Gladly, gladly.” The voice recaptured its tinny quality. “You’ll be doing all the talking from now on. You can lock me up and throw away the key. You won’t get nothing out of me.”

“Douse the muggles, Marcie. I want you to talk some sense.”

She laughed and blew smoke in my face. I took the half-burned cigarette from her fingers and ground it under my heel. The scarlet claws reached for my face. I stepped back, and she lapsed onto the bed.

“You must have been in on it, Marcie. You knew what Eddie was doing?”

“I deny everything. He had a job driving a truck. He trucked beans from the Imperial Valley.” She stood up suddenly and threw off her bathrobe. “Take me down to headquarters and get it over. I’ll deny everything formal.”

“I don’t belong to headquarters.”

When she raised her arms to pull a dress over her head, her body drew itself up, the breasts erect, the belly taut and white. The hair on her body was black.

“Like it?” she said. She pulled the dress down with a vicious gesture and fumbled with the buttons at the neck. Her streaked blond hair was down around her face.

“Sit down,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere. I came here to tell you a thing.”

“Aren’t you a copper?”

“You repeat yourself like Puddler. Listen to me. I want Sampson. I’m a private cop hired to find him. He’s all I want – do you understand? If you can give him to me, I’ll keep you in the clear.”

“You’re a dirty liar,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust a cop, private or any other kind. Anyway, I don’t know where Sampson is.”

I looked hard into her bird-brown eyes. They were shallow and meaningless. I couldn’t tell from them if she was lying.

“You don’t know where Sampson is–”

“I said I didn’t.”

“But you know who does.”

She sat down on the bed. “I don’t know a damn thing. I told you that.”

“Eddie didn’t do it by himself. He must have had a partner.”

“He did it by himself. If he didn’t – would you take me for a squealer? Do I go to work for the cops after what they done to Eddie?”

I sat down in the barrel chair and lit a cigarette. “I’ll tell you a funny thing. I was there when Eddie was shot. There wasn’t a cop within two miles, unless you count me.”

“You killed him?” she said thinly.

“I did not. He stopped on a side road to pass the money to another car. It was a cream-colored convertible. It had a woman in it. She shot him. Where would that woman be now?”

Her eyes were glistening like wet brown pebbles. The red tip of her tongue moved across her upper lip and shifted to her lower lip. “Ever since she was on the white stuff,” she said to herself. “They allus hate us vipers.”

“Are you going to sit and take it, Marcie? Where is she?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Betty Fraley,” I said.

After a long silence she repeated: “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

I left her sitting on the bed and drove back to The Corner. I parked in the parking lot and lowered the sun screen over the windshield. She knew my face but not my car.

For half an hour the road from White Beach was empty. Then a cloud of dust appeared in the distance, towed by a green A-model sedan. Before the car turned south toward Los Angeles I caught a glimpse of a highly painted face, a swirl of gray fur, an aggressively tilted hat with a bright-blue feather. Clothes and cosmetics and half an hour alone had done a lot for Marcie.

Two or three other cars went by before I turned into the highway. The A-model’s top speed was under fifty, and it was easy to keep in sight. Driving slow on a hot day, down a highway I knew too well, the only trouble I had was staying awake. I narrowed the distance between us as we approached Los Angeles and the traffic increased.

The A-model left the highway at Sunset Boulevard and went through Pacific Palisades without a pause. It labored and trailed dark-blue oil smoke on the hills below the Santa Monica Mountains. On the edge of Beverly Hills it left the boulevard suddenly and disappeared.

I followed it up a winding road lined on both sides with hedges. The A-model was parked behind a laurel hedge in the entrance to a gravel drive. In the instant of passing I saw Marcie crossing the lawn toward a deep brick porch screened with oleanders. She seemed to be thrust forward and hustled along by a deadly energy.