The Moving Target

6

I was waiting when she came out, parked with my motor idling at a yellow curb near the entrance. She turned up the sidewalk in the other direction. She had changed to a well-cut dark suit, a small slanted hat. Will or foundation garments had drawn her body erect. From the rear she looked ten years younger.

Half a block from me she stopped by a black sedan, unlocked it and got in. I eased out into the traffic and let her slide into the lane ahead of me. The sedan was a new Buick. I wasn’t concerned about her noticing my car. Los Angeles County was crawling with blue convertibles, and the traffic on the boulevard was a kaleidoscope being shaken.

She added her personal touch to the pattern, cutting in and out of lanes, driving furiously and well. In the overpass I had to touch seventy to keep her in sight. I didn’t think she was aware of me; she was doing it for fun. She went down Sunset at a steady fifty, headed for the sea. Fifty-five and sixty on the curves in Beverly Hills. Her heavy car was burning rubber. In my lighter car I was gambling at even odds with centrifugal force. My tires screeched and shuddered.

On the long, looping final grade sloping down to Pacific Palisades I let her go away from me and almost lost her. I caught her again in the straightaway a minute before she turned off the boulevard to the right.

I followed her up a road marked “Woodlawn Lane,” which wound along the hillside. A hundred yards ahead of me as I came out of a curve she swung wide and turned into a driveway. I stopped my car where I was and parked under a eucalyptus tree.

Through the japonica hedge that lined the sidewalk I saw her climb the steps to the door of a white house. She unlocked it and went in. The house was two-storied, set far back from the street among trees, with an attached garage built into the side of the hill. It was a handsome house for a woman on her way out.

After a while I got tired of watching the unopening door. I took off my coat and tie, folded them over the back of the seat, and rolled up my sleeves. There was a long-spouted oilcan in the trunk, and I took it with me. I walked straight up the driveway past the Buick and into the open door of the garage.

The garage was enormous, big enough to hold a two-ton truck with space for the Buick to spare. The queer thing was that it looked as if a heavy truck had recently been there. There were wide tire marks on the concrete floor, and thick oil drippings.

A small window high in the rear wall of the garage looked out on the back yard just above the level of the ground. A heavy-shouldered man in a scarlet silk sport shirt was sitting in a canvas deck chair with his back to me. His short hair looked thicker and blacker than Ralph Sampson’s should have. I raised myself on my toes and pressed my face against the glass. Even through its dingy surface the scene was as vivid as paint: the broad, unconscious back of the man in the scarlet shirt, the brown bottle of beer and the bowl of salted peanuts in the grass beside him, the orange tree over his head hung with unripe oranges like dark-green golf balls.

He leaned sideways, the crooked fingers of his large hand groping for the bowl of peanuts. The hand missed the bowl and scrabbled in the grass like a crippled lobster. Then he turned his head, and I saw the side of his face. It wasn’t Ralph Sampson’s, and it wasn’t the face the man in the scarlet shirt had started out with. It was a stone face hacked out by a primitive sculptor. It told a very common twentieth-century story: too many fights, too many animal guts, not enough brains.

I returned to the tire marks and went down on my knees to examine them. Too late to do anything but stay where I was, I heard the shuffling footsteps on the driveway.

The man in the scarlet shirt said from the door: “What business you got messing around in here? You got no business messing around in here.”

I inverted the oilcan and squirted a stream of oil at the wall. “Get out of my light, please.”

“What’s that?” he said laboriously. His upper lip was puffed thick as a mouth guard.

He was no taller than I was, and he wasn’t as wide as the door, but he gave that impression. He made me nervous, the way you feel talking to a strange bulldog on his master’s property. I stood up.

“Yes,” I said. “You certainly got them, brother.”

I didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute rounds.

“What do you mean, we got them? We ain’t got nothing, but you get yourself some trouble you come selling your woof around here.”

“Termites,” I said rapidly. He was close enough to let me smell his breath. Beer and salted peanuts and bad teeth. “You tell Mrs. Goldsmith she’s got them for sure.”

“Termites?” He was flat on his heels. I could have knocked him down, but he wouldn’t have stayed down.

“The tiny animals that eat wood.” I squirted more oil at the wall. “The little muckers.”

“What you got in that there can? That there can.”

“This here can?”

“Yeah.” I’d established rapport.

“It’s termite-killer,” I said. “They eat it and they die. You tell Mrs. Goldsmith she’s got them all right.”

“I don’t know no Mrs. Goldsmith.”

“The lady of the house. She called up headquarters for an inspection.”

“Headquarters?” he said suspiciously. His scar-tissue-padded brows descended over his little empty eyes like shutters.

“Termite-control headquarters. Killabug is termite-control headquarters for the Southern California area.”

“Oh!” He was puzzling over the words. “Yeah. But we got no Mrs. Goldsmith here.”

“Isn’t this Eucalyptus Lane?”

“Naw, this is Woodlawn Lane. You got the wrong address, bud.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” I said. “I thought this was Eucalyptus Lane.”

“Naw, Woodlawn.” He smiled widely at my ridiculous mistake.

“I better be going then. Mrs. Goldsmith will be looking for me.”

“Yeah. Only wait a minute.”

His left hand came out fast and took me by the collar. He cocked his right. “Don’t come messing around in here any more. You got no business messing around in here.”

His face filled out with angry blood. His eyes were hot and wild. There was a bright seepage of saliva at the cracked and folded corners of his mouth. A punchy fighter was less predictable than a bulldog, and twice as dangerous.

“Look.” I raised the can. “This stuff will blind you.”

I squirted oil in his eyes. He let out a howl of imaginary agony. I jerked sideways. His right went by my ear and left it burning. My shirt collar ripped loose and dangled from his clenched hand. He spread his right hand over his oil-doused eyes and moaned like a baby. Blindness was the one thing he feared.

A door opened behind me when I was halfway down the drive, but I didn’t show my face by looking back. I ducked around the corner of the hedge and kept running, away from my car. I circled the block on foot.

When I came back to the convertible the road was deserted. The garage doors were closed, but the Buick was still standing in the drive. The white house among its trees looked very peaceful and innocent in the early evening light.

It was nearly dark when the lady of the house came out in a spotted ocelot coat. I passed the entrance to the drive before the Buick backed out, and waited for it on Sunset Boulevard. She drove with greater fury and less accuracy all the way back to Hollywood, through Westwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills. I kept her in sight.

Near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where everything ends and a great many things begin, she turned into a private parking lot and left her car. I double-parked in the street till I saw her enter Swift’s, a gaudy figure walking like a slightly elated lady. Then I went home and changed my shirt.

The gun in my closet tempted me, but I didn’t put it on. I compromised by taking it out of the holster and putting it in the glove compartment of my car.