The Moving Target

7

The back room of Swift’s was paneled in black oak that glowed dimly under the polished brass chandeliers. It was lined on two sides with leather-cushioned booths. The rest of the floor space was covered with tables. All of the booths and most of the tables were crowded with highly dressed people eating or waiting to be fed. Most of the women were tight-skinned, starved too thin for their bones. Most of the men had the masculine Hollywood look, which was harder to describe. An insistent self-consciousness in their loud words and wide gestures, as if God had a million-dollar contract to keep an eye on them.

Fay Estabrook was in a back booth, with a blue flannel elbow on the table opposite her. The rest of her companion was hidden by the partition.

I went to the bar against the third wall and ordered a beer.

“Bass ale, Black Horse, Carta Blanca, or Guinness stout? We don’t serve domestic beer after six o’clock.”

I ordered Bass, gave the bartender a dollar and told him to keep the change. There wasn’t any change. He went away.

I leaned forward to look in the mirror behind the bar and caught a three-quarters view of Fay Estabrook’s face. It was earnest and intense. The mouth was moving rapidly. Just then the man stood up.

He was the kind who was usually in the company of younger women, the neat and ageless kind who turned a dollar year after year at nobody knew what. He was the aging chorus boy Cramm had described. His blue jacket fitted him too well. A white silk scarf at his throat set off his silver hair.

He was shaking hands with a red-haired man who was standing by the booth. I recognized the red-haired man when he turned and wandered back to his own table in the center of the room. He was a contract writer for Metro named Russell Hunt.

The silver-haired man waved good-bye to Fay Estabrook and set his course for the door. I watched him in the mirror. He walked efficiently and neatly, looking straight ahead as if the place was deserted. As far as he was concerned it was deserted. Nobody lifted a hand or raised a lip over teeth. When he went out a few heads turned, a couple of eyebrows were elevated. Fay Estabrook was left in her booth by herself as if she had caught his infection and could communicate it.

I carried my glass to Russell Hunt’s table. He was sitting with a fat man who had a round ugly nose turned up at the tip and bright little agent’s eyes.

“How’s the word business, Russell?”

“Hello, Lew.”

He wasn’t glad to see me. I earned three hundred a week when I was working, and that made me one of the peasantry. He made fifteen hundred. An ex-reporter from Chicago who had sold his first novel to Metro and never written another, Hunt was turning from a hopeful kid to a nasty old man with the migraine and a swimming pool he couldn’t use because he was afraid of the water. I had helped him lose his second wife to make way for his third, who was no improvement.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, when I didn’t go away. “Have a drink. It dissipates the megrims. I do not drink to dissipate myself. I dissipate the megrims.”

“Hold it,” said agent eyes. “If you’re a creative artist you may sit down. Otherwise I can hardly be expected to waste my time with you.”

“Timothy is my agent,” Russell said. “I am the goose that lays his golden eggs. Observe his nervous fingers toying with the steak knife, his eyes fastened wistfully upon my rounded throat. Boding me no good, I ween.”

“He weens,” said Timothy. “Do you create?”

I slid into the patois and a chair. “I am a man of action. A sleuth hound, to wit.”

“Lew’s a detective,” Russell said. “He unearths people’s guilty secrets and exposes them to the eyes of a scandalized world.”

“Now, how low can you get?” asked Timothy cheerfully.

I didn’t like the crack, but I’d come for information, not exercise. He saw the look on my face and turned to the waiter who was standing by his chair.

“Who was that you were shaking hands with?” I asked Russell.

“The elegant lad in the scarf? Fay said his name was Troy. They were married at one time, so she ought to know.”

“What does he do?”

“I wouldn’t know for sure. I’ve seen him around: Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Tia Juana.”

“Las Vegas?”

“I think so. Fay says he’s an importer, but if he’s an importer I’m a monkey’s uncle.” He remembered his role. “Curiously enough, I am a monkey’s uncle, though I must confess that no one was more surprised than I when my younger sister, the one with the three breasts, gave birth last Whitsuntide to the cutest little chimpanzee you ever did see. She was Lady Greystoke by her first marriage, you know.”

His patter ceased abruptly. His face became grim and miserable again. “Another drink,” he said to the waiter. “A double Scotch. Make it the same all round.”

“Just a minute, sir.” The waiter was a wizened old man with black thumbtack eyes. “I’m taking this gentleman’s order.”

“He won’t serve me.” Russell flung out his arms in a burlesque gesture of despair. “I’m eighty-six again.”

The waiter pretended to be absorbed in what Timothy was saying.

“But I don’t want French fried potatoes. I want au gratin potatoes.”

“We don’t have au gratin, sir.”

“You can make them, can’t you?” Timothy said, his retroussed nostrils flaring.

“Thirty-five or forty minutes, sir.”

“O God!” Timothy said. “What kind of a beanery is this? Let’s go to Chasen’s, Russell. I got to have au gratin potatoes.”

The waiter stood watching him as if from a great distance. I glanced around him and saw that Fay Estabrook was still at her table, working on a bottle of wine.

“They don’t let me into Chasen’s any more,” Russell said. “On account of I am an agent of the Cominform. I wrote a movie with a Nazi for a villain, so I am an agent of the Cominform. That’s where my money comes from, friends. It’s tainted Moscow gold.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “Do you know Fay Estabrook?”

“A little. I passed her on the way up a few years ago. A few more years, and I’ll pass her on the way down.”

“Introduce me to her.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always wanted to meet her.”

“I don’t get it, Lew. She’s old enough to be your wife.”

I said in language he could understand: “I have a sentimental regard for her, stemming from the dear dead days beyond recall.”

“Introduce him if he wants,” said Timothy. “Sleuth hounds make me nervous. Then I can eat my au gratin potatoes in peace.”

Russell got up laboriously, as if the top of his red head supported the ceiling.

“Good night,” I said to Timothy. “Have fun with the hired help before they throw you out on your fat neck.”

I picked up my drink and steered Russell across the room. “Don’t tell her my business,” I said in his ear.

“Who am I to wash your dirty linen in public? In private it’s another matter. I’d love to wash your dirty linen in private. It’s a fetish with me.”

“I throw it away when it’s dirty.”

“But what a waste. Please save it for me in future. Just send it to me care of Krafft-Ebing at the clinic.”

Mrs. Estabrook looked up at us with eyes like dark searchlights.

“This is Lew Archer, Fay. The agent. Of the Communist International, that is. He’s an old admirer of yours in his secret heart.”

“How nice!” she said, in a voice that was wasted on mother roles. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.” I sat down in the leather seat opposite her.

“Excuse me,” Russell said. “I have to look after Timothy. He’s waging a class war with the waiter. Tomorrow night it’s his turn to look after me. Oh goody!” He went away, lost in his private maze of words.

“It’s nice to be remembered occasionally,” the woman said. “Most of my friends are gone, and all of them are forgotten. Helene and Florence and Mae – all of them gone and forgotten.”

Her winy sentimentality, half phony and half real, was a pleasant change in a way from Russell’s desperate double-talk. I took my cue.

“Sic transit gloria mundi. Helene Chadwick was a great player in her day. But you’re still carrying on.”

“I try to keep my hand in, Archer. The life has gone out of the town, though. We used to care about picture-making – really care. I made three grand a week at my peak, but it wasn’t the money we worked for.”

“The play’s the thing.” It was less embarrassing to quote.

“The play was the thing. It isn’t like that any more. The town has lost its sincerity. No life left in it. No life left in either it or me.”

She poured the final ounce from her half bottle of sherry and drank it down in one long mournful swallow. I nursed my drink.

“You’re doing all right.”

I let my glance slide down the heavy body half revealed by the open fur coat. It was good for her age, tight-waisted, high-bosomed, with amphora hips. And it was alive, with a subtly persistent female power, an animal pride like a cat’s.

“I like you, Archer. You’re sympathetic. Tell me, when were you born?”

“What year, you mean?”

“The date.”

“The second of June.”

“Really? I didn’t expect you to be Geminian. Geminis have no heart. They’re double-souled like the Twins, and they lead a double life. Are you coldhearted, Archer?”

She leaned toward me with wide, unfocused eyes. I couldn’t tell whether she was kidding me or herself.

“I’m everybody’s friend,” I said, to break the spell. “Children and dogs adore me. I raise flowers and have green thumbs.”

“You’re a cynic,” she answered sulkily. “I thought you were going to be sympathetic, but you’re in the Air triplicity and I’m in the Water.”

“We’d make a wonderful air-sea rescue team.”

She smiled and said chidingly: “Don’t you believe in the stars?”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do – in a purely scientific way. When you look at the evidence, you simply can’t deny it. I’m Cancer, for example, and anybody can see that I’m the Cancer type. I’m sensitive and imaginative; I can’t do without love. The people I love can twist me around their little finger, but I can be stubborn when I have to be. I’ve been unlucky in marriage, like so many other Cancerians. Are you married, Archer?”

“Not now.”

“That means you were. You’ll marry again. Gemini always does. And he often marries a woman older than himself, did you know that?”

“No.” Her insistent voice was pushing me slightly off balance, threatening to dominate the conversation and me. “You’re very convincing,” I said.

“What I’m telling you is the truth.”

“You should do it professionally. There’s money in it for a smooth operator with a convincing spiel.”

Her candid eyes narrowed to two dark slits like peepholes in a fort. She studied me through them, made a tactical decision, and opened them wide again. They were dark pools of innocence, like poisoned wells.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I never do this professionally. It’s a talent I have, a gift – Cancer is frequently psychic – and I feel it’s my duty to use it. But not for money – only for my friends.”

“You’re lucky to have an independent income.”

Her thin-stemmed glass twirled out of her fingers and broke in two pieces on the table. “That’s Gemini for you,” she said. “Always looking for facts.”

I felt a slight twinge of doubt and shrugged it off. She’d fired at random and hit the target by accident. “I didn’t mean to be curious,” I said.

“Oh, I know that.” She rose suddenly, and I felt the weight of her body standing over me. “Let’s get out of here, Archer. I’m starting to drop things again. Let’s go some place we can talk.”

“Why not?”

She left an unbroken bill on the table and walked out with heavy dignity. I followed her, pleased with my startling success but feeling a little like a male spider about to be eaten by a female spider.

Russell was at his table with his head in his arms. Timothy was yelping at the captain of waiters like a terrier who has cornered some small defenseless animal. The captain of waiters was explaining that the au gratin potatoes would be ready in fifteen minutes.