The Moving Target

4

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-mache I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

The plane leaned gradually and turned out over the sea. It was a four-seater equipped for night flying. I was in the back seat. Miranda was in front on Taggert’s right. She watched his right hand, careful on the stick. He seemed to take pride in holding the plane quiet and steady.

We hit a downdraft and fell a hundred feet. Her left hand grasped his knee. He let it stay there.

What was obvious to me must have been obvious to Albert Graves. Miranda was Taggert’s if he wanted her, brain and body. Graves was wasting his time, building himself up to a very nasty letdown. I knew enough about him to understand it. Miranda was everything he’d dreamed about – money, youth, bud-sharp breasts, beauty on the way. He’d set his mind on her and had to have her. All his life he’d been setting his mind on things – and getting them.

He was a farmer’s son from Ohio. When he was fourteen or fifteen his father lost his farm and died soon after. Bert supported his mother by building tires in a rubber factory for six years. When she died he put himself through college and came out a Phi Beta Kappa. Before he was thirty he had taken his law degree at the University of Michigan. He spent one year in corporation law in Detroit and decided to come west. He settled in Santa Teresa because he had never seen mountains or swum in the sea. His father had always intended to retire in California, and Bert inherited the Midwestern dream – which included the daughter of a Texas oil millionaire.

The dream was intact. He’d worked too hard to have any time for women. Deputy D. A., City Attorney, D. A. He prepared his cases as if he were laying the foundations of society. I knew, because I’d helped him. His courtroom work had been cited by a state-supreme-court judge as a model of forensic jurisprudence. And now at forty Graves had decided to beat his head against a wall.

But perhaps he could scale the wall, or the wall would fall down by itself. Taggert shook his leg like a horse frightening flies. The plane veered and returned to its course. Miranda removed her hand.

With a little angry flush spreading to his ears, Taggert pulled the stick and climbed – climbed as if he could leave her behind and be all alone in the heart of the sky. The thermometer in the roof sank below forty. At eight thousand feet I could see Catalina far down ahead to the right. After a few minutes we turned left toward the white smudge of Los Angeles.

I shouted over the roar: “Can you set her down at Burbank? I want to ask some questions.”

“I’m going to.”

The summer heat of the valley came up to meet us as we circled in. Heat lay like a fine ash on the rubbish lots and fields and half-built suburbs, slowing the tiny cars on the roads and boulevards, clogging the air. The impalpable white dust invaded my nostrils and dried my throat. Dryness of the throat went with the feeling I always had, even after half a day, when I came back to the city.

The taxi starter at the airport wore steel-wire armbands on the sleeves of his red-striped shirt. A yellow cap hung almost vertically from the back of his gray head. Seasons of sun and personal abuse had given him an angry red face and an air of great calm.

He remembered Sampson when I showed him the photograph.

“Yeah, he was here yesterday. I noticed him because he was a little under the weather. Not blotto, or I would of called a guard. Just a couple of drinks too many.”

“Sure,” I said. “Was anybody with him?”

“Not that I saw.”

A woman wearing two foxes that looked as if they had died from the heat broke out of the line at the curb. “I have to get downtown right away.”

“Sorry, madam. You got to wait your turn.”

“I tell you this is urgent.”

“You got to wait your turn,” he said monotonously. “We got a cab shortage, see?”

He turned to me again. “Anything else, bud? This guy in trouble or something?”

“I wouldn’t know. How did he leave?”

“By car – a black limousine. I noticed it because it didn’t carry no sign. Maybe from one of the hotels.”

“Was there anybody in it?”

“Just the driver.”

“You know him?”

“Naw. I know some of the hotel drivers, but they’re always changing. This was a little guy, I think, kind of pale.”

“You don’t remember the make or the license number?”

“I keep my eyes open, bud, but I ain’t a genius.”

“Thanks.” I gave him a dollar. “Neither am I.”

I went upstairs to the cocktail bar, where Miranda and Taggert were sitting like strangers thrown together by accident.

“I called the Valerio,” Taggert said, “The limousine should be here any minute.”

The limousine, when it came, was driven by a pale little man in a shiny blue-serge suit like an umpire’s and a cloth cap. The taxi starter said he wasn’t the man who had picked up Sampson the day before.

I got into the front seat with him. He turned with nervous quickness, gray-faced, concave-chested, convex-eyed. “Yes, sir?” The question trailed off gently and obsequiously.

“We’re going to the Valerio. Were you on duty yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes, sir.” He shifted gears.

“Was anybody else?”

“No, sir. There’s another fellow on the night shift, but he doesn’t come on till six.”

“Did you have any calls to the Burbank airport yesterday afternoon?”

“No, sir.” A worried expression was creeping into his eyes and seemed to suit them. “I don’t believe I did.”

“But you’re not certain.”

“Yes, sir. I’m certain. I didn’t come out this way.”

“You know Ralph Sampson?”

“At the Valerio? Yes, sir. Indeed I do, sir.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“No, sir. Not for several weeks.”

“I see. Tell me, who takes the calls for you?”

“The switchboard operator. I do hope there’s nothing wrong, sir. Is Mr. Sampson a friend of yours?”

“No,” I said. “I’m one of his employees.”

All the rest of the way he drove in tight-mouthed silence, regretting the wasted sirs. When I got out I gave him a dollar tip to confuse him. Miranda paid the fare.

“I’d like to look at the bungalow,” I told her in the lobby. “But first I want to talk to the switchboard operator.”

“I’ll get the key and wait for you.”

The operator was a frozen virgin who dreamed about men at night and hated them in the daytime. “Yes?”

“Yesterday afternoon you had a call for a limousine from the Burbank airport.”

“We do not answer questions of that nature.”

“That wasn’t a question. It was a statement.”

“I’m very busy,” she said. Her tone clicked like pennies; her eyes were small and hard and shiny like dimes.

I put a dollar bill on the desk by her elbow. She looked at it as if it was unclean. “I’ll have to call the manager.”

“All right. I work for Mr. Sampson.”

“Mr. Ralph Sampson?” She lilted, she trilled.

“That’s correct.”

“But he was the one that made the call!”

“I know. What happened to it?”

“He canceled it almost immediately, before I had an opportunity to tell the driver. Did he have a change of plan?”

“Apparently. You’re sure it was him both times?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I know Mr. Sampson well. He’s been coming here for years.”

She picked up the unclean dollar lest it contaminate her desk, and tucked it into a cheap plastic handbag. Then she turned to the switchboard, which had three red lights on it.

Miranda stood up when I came back to the lobby. It was hushed and rich, deep-carpeted, deep-chaired, with mauve-coated bellboys at attention. She moved like a live young nymph in a museum. “Ralph hasn’t been here for nearly a month. I asked the assistant manager.”

“Did he give you the key?”

“Of course. Alan’s gone to open the bungalow.”

I followed her down a corridor that ended in a wrought-iron door. The grounds back of the main building were laid out in little avenues, with bungalows on either side, set among terraced lawns and flower beds. They covered a city block, enclosed by high stone walls like a prison. But the prisoners of those walls could lead a very full life. There were tennis courts, a swimming pool, a restaurant, a bar, a night club. All they needed was a full wallet or a blank checkbook.

Sampson’s bungalow was larger than most of the others and had more terrace. The door at the side was standing open. We passed through a hall cluttered with uncomfortable-looking Spanish chairs into a big room with a high oak-beamed ceiling.

On the chesterfield in front of the dead fireplace Taggert was hunched over a telephone directory. “I thought I’d call a buddy of mine.” He looked up at Miranda with a half smile. “Since I have to hang around anyway.”

“I thought you were going to stay with me.” Her voice was high and uncertain.

“Did you?”

I looked around the room, which was mass-produced and impersonal like most hotel rooms. “Where does your father keep his private stuff?”

“In his room, I suppose. He doesn’t keep much here. A few changes of clothes.”

She showed me the door of the bedroom across the hall and switched on the light.

“What on earth has he done to it?” she said.

The room was twelve-sided and windowless. The indirect lights were red. The walls were covered with thick red stuff that hung in folds from the ceiling to the floor. A heavy armchair and the bed in the room’s center were covered with the same dark red. The crowning touch was a circular mirror in the ceiling which repeated the room upside down. My memory struggled in the red gloom and found the comparison it wanted: a Neapolitan-type bordello I’d visited in Mexico City – on a case.

“No wonder he took to drink, if he had to sleep in here.”

“It didn’t used to be like this,” she said. “He must have had it redone.”

I moved around the room. Each of the twelve panels was embroidered in gold with one of the twelve signs of the zodiac – the archer, the bull, the twins, and the nine others.

“Is your father interested in astrology?”

“Yes, he is.” She said it shamefacedly. “I’ve tried to argue with him, but it doesn’t do any good. He went off the deep end when Bob died. I had no idea he’d gone so far in it, though.”

“Does he go to a particular astrologist? The woods are full of them.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

I found the entrance to the closet behind a movable curtain. It was stuffed with suits and shirts and shoes, from golf clothes to evening dress. I went through the pockets systematically. In the breast pocket of a jacket I found a wallet. The wallet contained a mass of twenties and a single photograph.

I held it up to the bulb that lit the closet. It was a sibylline face, with dark and mournful eyes and a full drooping mouth. On either side the black hair fell straight to the high neckline of a black dress that merged into artistic shadows at the bottom of the picture. A feminine hand had written in white ink across the shadows: “To Ralph from Fay with Blessings.”

It was a face I should know. I remembered the melancholy eyes but nothing else. I replaced the wallet in Sampson’s jacket and added the picture to my photographic collection of one.

“Look,” Miranda said, when I stepped back into the room. She was lying on the bed with her skirt above her knees. Her body in the rosy light seemed to be burning. She closed her eyes. “What does this mad room make you think of?”

Her hair was burning all around the edges. Her upturned face was closed and dead. And her slender body was burning up, like a sacrifice on an altar.

I crossed the room and put my hand on her shoulder. The ruddy light shone through my hand and reminded me that I contained a skeleton. “Open your eyes.”

She opened them, smiling. “You saw it, didn’t you? The sacrifice on the heathen altar – like Salammbo.”

“You do read too many books,” I said.

My hand was still on her shoulder, conscious of sunned flesh. She turned toward me and pulled me down. Her lips were hot on my face.

“What goes on?” Taggert asked, from the doorway. The red light on his face made him look choleric, but he was smiling his same half smile. The incident amused him.

I stood up and straightened my coat. I was not amused. Miranda was the freshest thing I’d touched in many a day. She made the blood run round in my veins like horses on a track.

“What’s so hard in your coat pocket?” Miranda said distinctly.

“I’m wearing a gun.”

I pulled out the dark woman’s picture and showed it to both of them. “Did you ever see her before? She signs herself ‘Fay.’”

“I never did,” said Taggert.

“No,” said Miranda. She was smiling at him side-eyed and secretly, as if she had won a point.

She’d been using me to stir him up, and it made me angry. The red room made me angry. It was like the inside of a sick brain, with no eyes to see out of, nothing to look at but the upside-down reflection of itself. I got out.