The Moving Target

9

When I went back to the bar, a young Mexican in a tuxedo was leaning against the piano with a guitar. His small tenor, plaintive and remote, was singing a Spanish bullfighting song. His fingers marched thunderously in the strings. Mrs. Estabrook was watching him and barely noticed me when I sat down.

She clapped loudly when the song was finished, and beckoned him to our booth. “Babalu. Pretty please.” She handed him a dollar.

He bowed and smiled, and returned to his singing.

“It’s Ralph’s favorite song,” she said. “Domingo sings it so well. He’s got real Spanish blood in his veins.”

“About this friend of yours, Ralph.”

“What about him?”

“He wouldn’t object to your being here with me?”

“Don’t be silly. I want you to meet him some time. I know you’ll like him.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s more or less retired. He’s got money.”

“Why don’t you marry him?”

She laughed harshly. “Didn’t I tell you I had a husband? But you don’t have to worry about him. It’s purely a business proposition.”

“I didn’t know you were in business.”

“Did I say I was in business?” She laughed again, much too alertly, and changed the subject: “It’s funny you suggesting I should marry Ralph. We’re both married to other people. Anyway, our friendship is on a different level. You know, more spiritual.”

She was sobering up on me. I raised my glass. “To friendship. On a different level.”

While she was still drinking, I held up two fingers to the waitress. The second drink fixed her. Her face went to pieces as if by its own weight. Her eyes went dull and unblinking. Her mouth hung open in a fixed yawn, the scarlet lips contrasting with the pink-and-white interior. She brought it together numbly and whispered: “I don’t feel so good.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“You’re nice.”

I helped her to her feet. The waitress held the door open, with a condoling smile for Mrs. Estabrook and a sharp glance at me. Mrs. Estabrook stumbled across the sidewalk like an old woman leaning on a cane that wasn’t there. I held her up on her anesthetized legs, and we made it to the car. Getting her in was like loading a sack of coal. Her head rolled into the corner between the door and the back of the seat. I started the car and headed for Pacific Palisades.

The motion of the car revived her after a while. “Got to get home,” she said dully. “You know where I live?”

“You told me.”

“Got to climb on the treadmill in the morning. Crap! I should weep if he throws me out of pictures. I got independent means.”

“You look like a businesswoman,” I said encouragingly.

“You’re nice, Archer.” The line was beginning to get me down. “Taking care of an old hag like me. You wouldn’t like me if I told you where I got my money.”

“Try me.”

“But I’m not telling you.” Her laugh was ugly and loose, in a low register. I thought I caught overtones of mockery in it, but they may have been in my head. “You’re too nice a boy.”

Yeah, I said to myself, a clean-cut American type. Always willing to lend a hand to help a lady fall flat on her face in the gutter.

The lady passed out again. At least she said nothing more. It was a lonely drive down the midnight boulevard with her half-conscious body. In the spotted coat it was like a sleeping animal beside me in the seat, a leopard or a wildcat heavy with age. It wasn’t really old – fifty at most – but it was full of the years, full and fermenting with bad memories. She’d told me a number of things about herself, but not what I wanted to know, and I was too sick of her to probe deeper. The one sure thing I knew about her she hadn’t had to tell me: she was bad company for Sampson or any incautious man. Her playmates were dangerous – one rough, one smooth. And if anything had happened to Sampson she’d know it or find out.

She was awake when I parked in front of her house. “Put the car in the drive. Would you, honey?”

I backed across the road and took the car up the driveway. She needed help to climb the steps to the door, and handed me the key to open it. “You come in. I been trying to think of something I want to drink.”

“You’re sure it’s all right? Your husband?”

Laughter growled in her throat. “We haven’t lived together for years.”

I followed her into the hallway. It was thick with darkness and her two odors, musk and alcohol, half animal and half human. I felt slippery waxed floor under my feet and wondered if she’d fall. She moved in her own house with the blind accuracy of a sleepwalker. I felt my way after her into a room to the left, where she switched on a lamp.

The room it brought out of darkness was nothing like the insane red room she had made for Ralph Sampson. It was big and cheerful, even at night behind closed Venetian blinds. A solid middle-class room with post-Impressionist reproductions on the walls, built-in bookshelves, books on them, a radio-phonograph and a record cabinet, a glazed brick fireplace with a heavy sectional chesterfield curved in front of it. The only strangeness was in the pattern of the cloth that covered the chesterfield and the armchair under the lamp: brilliant green tropical plants against a white desert sky, with single eyes staring between the fronds. The pattern changed as I looked at it. The eyes disappeared and reappeared again. I sat down on a batch of them.

She was at the portable bar in the corner beside the fireplace. “What are you drinking?”

“Whisky and water.”

She brought me my glass. Half of its contents slopped out en route, leaving a trail of dark splotches across the light-green carpet. She sat down beside me, depressing the cushioned seat. Her dark head swayed toward my shoulder and lodged there. I could see the few iron-gray strands the hairdresser had left in her hair so it wouldn’t look dyed.

“I can’t think of anything I want to drink,” she whined. “Don’t let me fall.”

I put one arm around her shoulders, which were almost as wide as mine. She leaned hard against me. I felt the stir and swell of her breathing, gradually slowing down.

“Don’t try to do anything to me, honey, I’m dead tonight. Some other night....” Her voice was soft and somehow girlish, but blurred. Blurred like the submarine glints of youth in her eyes.

Her eyes closed. I could see the faint tremor of her heartbeat in the veins of her withering eyelids. Their fringe of curved dark lashes was a vestige of youth and beauty which made her ruin seem final and hard. It was easier to feel sorry for her when she was sleeping.

To make certain that she was, I gently raised one of her eyelids. The marbled eyeball stared whitely at nothing. I took away my arm and let her body subside on the cushions. Her breasts hung askew. Her stockings were twisted. She began to snore.

I went into the next room, closed the door behind me, and turned on the light. It shone down from the ceiling on a bleached mahogany refectory table with artificial flowers in the center, a china cabinet at one side, a built-in buffet at the other, six heavy chairs ranged around the wall on their haunches. I turned the light off and went into the kitchen, which was neat and well equipped.

I wondered for an instant if I had misjudged the woman. There were honest astrologists – and plenty of harmless drunks. Her house was like a hundred thousand others in Los Angeles County, almost too typical to be true. Except for the huge garage and the bulldog that guarded it.

The bathroom had walls of pastel-blue tile and a square blue tub. The cabinet over the sink was stuffed and heaped with tonics and patent medicines, creams and paints and powders, luminol, nembutal, veronal. The hypochondriac bottles and boxes overflowed on the back of the sink, the laundry hamper, and the toilet top. The clothes in the hamper were female. There was only one toothbrush in the holder. A razor but no shaving cream, nor any other trace of a man.

The bedroom next to the bathroom was flowered and prettied in pink like a prewar sentimental hope. There was a book on the stars on the bedside table. The clothes in the closet were women’s, and there were a great many of them, with Saks and Magnin labels. The undergarments and night-clothes in the chest of drawers were peach and baby blue and black lace.

I looked under the twisted mass of stockings in the second drawer and found the core of strangeness in the house. It was a row of narrow packages held together with elastic bands. The packages contained money, all in bills, ones and fives and tens. Most of the bills were old and greasy. If all the packages assayed like the one I examined, the bottom of the drawer was lined with eight or ten thousand dollars.

I sat on my heels and looked at all that money. A bedroom drawer was hardly a good place to keep it. But it was safer than a bank for people who couldn’t declare their income.

The burring ring of a telephone cut the silence like a dentist’s drill. It struck a nerve, and I jumped. But I shut the drawer before I went into the hall where the telephone was. There was no sound from the woman in the living-room.

I muffled my voice with my tie. “Hello.”

“Mr. Troy?” It was a woman.

“Yes.”

“Is Fay there?” Her speech was rapid and clipped. “This is Betty.”

“No.”

“Listen, Mr. Troy. Fay was fried in the Valerio about an hour ago. The man she was with could be plain-clothes. He said he was taking her home. You wouldn’t want him around when the truck goes through. And you know Fay when she’s oiled.”

“Yes,” I said, and risked: “Where are you now?”

“The Piano, of course.”

“Is Ralph Sampson there?”

Her answer was a hiccup of surprise. She was silent for a moment. At the other end of the line I could hear the murmur of people, the clatter of dishes. Probably a restaurant.

She recovered her voice: “Why ask me? I haven’t seen him lately?”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Who is this talking? Mr. Troy?”

“Yes. I’ll attend to Fay.” I hung up.

The knob of the front door rattled slightly behind me. I froze with my hand on the telephone and watched the cut-glass knob as it slowly rotated, sparking in the light from the living-room. The door swung open suddenly, and a man in a light topcoat stood in the opening. His silver head was hatless. He stepped inside like an actor coming on stage, shutting the door neatly with his left hand. His right hand was in the pocket of the topcoat. The pocket was pointed at me.

I faced him. “Who are you?”

“I know it isn’t polite to answer one question with another.” His voice was softened by a trace of south-of-England accent a long way from home. “But who are you?”

“If this is a stickup...”

The weight in his pocket nodded at me dumbly. He became more peremptory. “I asked you a simple question, old chap. Give me a simple answer.”

“The name is Archer,” I said. “Do you use bluing when you wash your hair? I had an aunt who said it was very effective.”

His face didn’t change. He showed his anger by speaking more precisely. “I dislike superfluous violence. Please don’t make it necessary.”

I could look down on the top of his head, see the scalp shining through the carefully parted hair. “You terrify me,” I said. “An Italianate Englishman is a devil incarnate.”

But the gun in his pocket was a small, intense refrigerating unit cooling off the hallway. His eyes had already turned to ice.

“And what do you do for a living, Mr. Archer?”

“I sell insurance. My hobby is stooging for gunmen.” I reached for my wallet to show him my “insurance of all descriptions” card.

“No, keep your hands where I can see them. And guard your tongue, won’t you?”

“Gladly. Don’t expect me to sell you insurance. You’re not a good risk, toting a gun in L. A.”

The words went over his head and left it unruffled. “What are you doing here, Mr. Archer?”

“I brought Fay home.”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Apparently. Are you?”

“I’ll ask the questions. What do you plan to do next?”

“I was just going to call a taxi and go home.”

“Perhaps you had better do that now,” he said.

I picked up the receiver and called a Yellow Cab. He moved toward me lightly. His left hand palpated my chest and armpits, moved down my flanks and hips. I was glad I’d left my gun in the car, but I hated to be touched by him. His hands were epicene.

He stepped back and showed me his gun, a nickel-plated revolver, .32 or .38 caliber. I was calculating my chances of kicking him off balance and taking it.

His body stiffened slightly, and the gun came into focus like an eye. “No,” he said. “I’m a quick shot, Mr. Archer. You’d stand no chance at all. Now turn around.”

I turned. He jammed the gun into my back above the kidneys. “Into the bedroom.”

He marched me into the lighted bedroom and turned me to face the door. I heard his quick feet cross the room, a drawer open and shut. The gun came back to my kidneys.

“What were you doing in here?”

“I wasn’t in here. Fay turned on the light.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the front room.”

He walked me into the room where Mrs. Estabrook was lying, bidden by the back of the chesterfield. She had sunk into a stuporous sleep that resembled death. Her mouth was open, but she was no longer snoring. One of her arms hung down to the floor like an overfed white snake.

He looked at her with contempt, the contempt that silver might feel for sodden flesh.

“She never could hold her liquor.”

“We were pub-crawling,” I said. “We had a wizard do.”

He looked at me sharply. “Evidently. Now why should you be interested in a bag of worms like this?”

“You’re talking about the woman I love.”

“My wife.” A slight twitch of his nostrils proved that his face could move.

“Really?”

“I’m not a jealous man, Mr. Archer, but I must warn you to keep away from her. She has her own small circle of associates, and you simply wouldn’t fit in. Fay’s very tolerant, of course. I am less tolerant. Some of her associates aren’t tolerant in the least.”

“Are they all as wordy as you?”

He showed his small, regular teeth and subtly changed his posture. His torso leaned, and his head leaned sideways with it, glinting in the light. He was an obscene shape, a vicious boy alert and eager behind an old man’s mask. The gun twirled on his finger like a silver wheel and came to rest pointed at my heart. “They have other ways of expressing themselves. Do I make myself clear?”

“The idea is a simple one to grasp.” The sweat was cold on my back.

A car honked in the street. He went to the door and held it open for me. It was warmer outside.