The Moving Target

8

In the Hollywood Roosevelt bar she complained of the air and said she felt wretched and old. Nonsense, I told her, but we moved to the Zebra Room. She had shifted to Irish whisky, which she drank straight. In the Zebra Room she accused a man at the next table of looking at her contemptuously. I suggested more air. She drove down Wilshire as if she was trying to break through into another dimension. I had to park the Buick for her at the Ambassador. I’d left my car at Swift’s.

She quarreled with the Ambassador barman on the grounds that he laughed at her when he turned his back. I took her to the downstairs bar at the Huntoon Park, which wasn’t often crowded. Wherever we went, there were people who recognized her, but nobody joined us or stood up. Not even the waiters made a fuss over her. She was on her way out.

Except for a couple leaning together at the other end of the bar, the Huntoon Park was deserted. The thickly carpeted, softly lighted basement was a funeral parlor where the evening we had killed was laid out. Mrs. Estabrook was pale as a corpse, but she was vertical, able to see, talk, drink, and possibly even think.

I was steering her in the direction of the Valerio, hoping that she’d name it. A few more drinks, and I could take the risk of suggesting it myself. I was drinking with her, but not enough to affect me. I made inane conversation, and she didn’t notice the difference. I was waiting. I wanted her far enough gone to say whatever came into her head. Archer the heavenly twin and midwife to oblivion.

I looked at my face in the mirror behind the bar and didn’t like it too well. It was getting thin and predatory-looking. My nose was too narrow, my ears were too close to my head. My eyelids were the kind that overlapped at the outside corners and made my eyes look triangular in a way that I usually liked. Tonight my eyes were like tiny stone wedges hammered between the lids.

She leaned forward over the bar with her chin in her hands, looking straight down into her half-empty liqueur glass. The pride that had kept her body erect and organized her face had seeped away. She was hunched there tasting the bitterness at the bottom of her life, droning out elegies: “He never took care of himself, but he had the body of a wrestler and the head of an Indian chief. He was part Indian. Nothing mean about him, though. One sweet guy. Quiet and easy, never talked much. But passionate, and a real one-woman man, the last I ever seen. He got T. B. and went off in one summer. It broke me up. I never got over it since. He was the only man I ever loved.”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Bill.” She looked at me slyly. “I didn’t say. He was my foreman. I had one of the first big places in the valley. We were together for a year, and then he died. That was twenty-five years ago, and I been feeling ever since I might as well be dead myself.”

She raised her large tearless eyes and met my glance in the mirror. I wanted to respond to her melancholy look, but I didn’t know what to do with my face.

I tried smiling to encourage myself. I was a good Joe after all. Consorter with roughnecks, tarts, hard cases and easy marks; private eye at the keyhole of illicit bedrooms; informer to jealousy, rat behind the walls, hired gun to anybody with fifty dollars a day; but a good Joe after all. The wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a coyote’s sneer. The face had seen too many bars, too many rundown hotels and crummy love nests, too many courtrooms and prisons, post-mortems and police lineups, too many nerve ends showing like tortured worms. If I found the face on a stranger, I wouldn’t trust it. I caught myself wondering how it looked to Miranda Sampson.

“To hell with the three-day parties,” Mrs. Estabrook said. “To hell with the horses and the emeralds and the boats. One good friend is better than any of them, and I haven’t got one good friend. Sim Kuntz said he was my friend, and he tells me I’m making my last picture. I lived my life twenty-five years ago, and I’m all washed up. You don’t want to get mixed up with me, Archer.”

She was right. Still, I was interested, apart from my job. She’d had a long journey down from a high place, and she knew what suffering was. Her voice had dropped its phony correctness and the other things she had learned from studio coaches. It was coarse and pleasantly harsh. It placed her childhood in Detroit or Chicago or Indianapolis, at the beginning of the century, on the wrong side of town.

She drained her glass and stood up. “Take me home, Archer.”

I slid off my stool with gigolo alacrity and took her by the arm. “You can’t go home like this. You need another drink to snap you back.”

“You’re nice.” My skin was thin enough to feel the irony. “Only I can’t take this place. It’s a morgue. For Christ’s sake,” she yelled at the bartender, “where are all the merrymakers?”

“Aren’t you a merrymaker, madam?”

I pulled her away from the start of another quarrel, up the steps and out. There was a light fog in the air, blurring the neons. Above the tops of the buildings the starless sky was dull and low. She shivered, and I felt the tremor in her arm. “There’s a good bar next street up,” I said. “The Valerio?”

“I think that’s it.”

“All right. One more drink, then I got to go home.” I opened the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder heavily. I moved back. I preferred a less complicated kind of pillow, stuffed with feathers, not memories and frustrations.

The waitress in the Valerio cantina called her by name, escorted us to a booth, emptied the empty ash tray. The bartender, a smooth-faced young Greek, came all the way around from behind the bar to say hello to her and to ask after Mr. Sampson.

“He’s still in Nevada,” she said. I was watching her face, and she caught my look. “A very good friend of mine. He stops here when he’s in town.”

The two-block ride, or her welcome, had done her good. She was almost sprightly. Maybe I’d made a mistake.

“A great old guy,” the bartender said. “We miss him around here.”

“Ralph’s a wonderful, wonderful man,” said Mrs. Estabrook. “One sweet guy.”

The bartender took our order and went away.

“Have you cast his horoscope?” I said. “This friend of yours?”

“Now, how did you know? He’s Capricorn. One sweet guy, but a very dominant type. He’s had tragedy in his life, though. His only boy was killed in the war. Ralph’s sun was squared by Uranus, you see. You wouldn’t know what that can mean to a Capricornian.”

“No. Does it mean much to him?”

“Yes, it does. Ralph has been developing his spiritual side. Uranus is against him, but the other planets are with him. It’s given him courage to know that.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “I wish I could show you the room I redecorated for him. It’s in one of the bungalows here, but they wouldn’t let us in.”

“Is he staying here now?”

“No, he’s in Nevada. He has a very lovely home on the desert.”

“Ever been there?”

“You ask so many questions.” She smiled side-eyed in ghastly coquetry. “You wouldn’t be getting jealous?”

“You told me you had no friends.”

“Did I say that? I was forgetting Ralph.”

The bartender brought our drinks, and I sipped mine. I was facing the back of the room. A door in the wall beside the silent grand piano opened into the Valerio lobby. Alan Taggert and Miranda came through the door together.

“Excuse me,” I said to Mrs. Estabrook.

Miranda saw me when I stood up, and started forward. I put a finger to my mouth and waved her back with the other hand. She moved away with a wide-mouthed, bewildered look.

Alan was quicker. He took her arm and hustled her out the door. I followed them. The bartender was mixing a drink. The waitress was serving a customer. Mrs. Estabrook hadn’t looked up. The door closed behind me.

Miranda turned on me. “I don’t understand this. You’re supposed to be looking for Ralph.”

“I’m working on a contact. Go away, please.”

“But I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.” She was strained to the point of tears.

I said to Taggert: “Take her away before she spoils my night’s work. Out of the city, if possible.” Three hours of Fay had sharpened my temper.

“But Mrs. Sampson’s been phoning for you,” he said.

A Filipino bellboy was standing against the wall hearing everything we said. I took them around the corner into the half-lit lobby. “What about?”

“She’s heard from Ralph.” Miranda’s eyes glowed amber like a deer’s. “A special-delivery letter. He wants her to send him money. Not send it exactly, but have it ready for him.”

“How much money?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

“Say that again.”

“He wants her to cash a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds.”

“Does she have that much?”

“She hasn’t, but she can get it. Bert Graves has Ralph’s power of attorney.”

“What’s she supposed to do with the money?”

“He said we’ll hear from him again or he’ll send a messenger for it.”

“You’re sure the letter’s from him?”

“Elaine says it’s in his writing.”

“Does he say where he is?”

“No, but the letter’s postmarked Santa Maria. He must have been there today.”

“Not necessarily. What does Mrs. Sampson want me to do?”

“She didn’t say. I suppose she wants your advice.”

“All right, this is it. Tell her to have the money ready, but not to hand it over to anybody without proof that your father’s alive.”

“You think he’s dead?” Her hand plucked at the neckline of her dress.

“I can’t afford to guess.” I turned to Taggert. “Can you fly Miranda up tonight?”

“I just phoned Santa Teresa. The airport’s fogged in. First thing in the morning, though.”

“Then tell her over the phone. I have a possible lead and I’m following it up. Graves had better contact the police, quietly. The local police and the Los Angeles police. And the F. B. I.”

“The F. B. I.?” Miranda whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “Kidnapping is a federal offense.”