The Moving Target Read online

  “I’d give you my autograph, only I sign it with an ‘X.’ ”

  “Seriously, though, I’m interested in detectives. I thought I’d like to be one at one time—before I went up in a plane. I guess most kids dream about it.”

  “Most kids don’t get stuck with the dream.”

  “Why? Don’t you like your work?”

  “It keeps me out of mischief. Let’s see, you were with Mr. Sampson when he dropped out of sight?”

  “Right.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Sports clothes. Harris tweed jacket, brown wool shirt, tan slacks, brogues. No hat.”

  “And when was this exactly?”

  “About three thirty—when we landed at Burbank yesterday afternoon. They had to move another crate before I could park the plane. I always put it away myself; it’s got some special gadgets we wouldn’t want stolen. Mr. Sampson went to call the hotel to send out a limousine.”

  “What hotel?”

  “The Valerio.”

  “The pueblo off Wilshire?”

  “Ralph keeps a bungalow there,” Miranda said. “He likes it because it’s quiet.”

  “When I got out to the main entrance,” Taggert continued, “Mr. Sampson was gone. I didn’t think much about it. He’d been drinking pretty hard, but that was nothing unusual, and he could still look after himself. It made me a little sore, though. There I was stranded in Burbank, simply because he couldn’t wait five minutes. It’s a three-dollar taxi ride to the Valerio, and I couldn’t afford that.”

  He glanced at Miranda to see if he was saying too much. She looked amused.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I took a bus to the hotel. Three buses, about half an hour on each. And then he wasn’t there. I waited around until nearly dark, and then I flew the plane home.”

  “Did he ever get to the Valerio?”

  “No. He hadn’t been there at all.”

  “What about his luggage?”

  “He didn’t carry luggage.”

  “Then he wasn’t planning to stay overnight?”

  “It doesn’t follow,” Miranda put in. “He kept whatever he needed in the bungalow at the Valerio.”

  “Maybe he’s there now.”

  “No. Elaine’s been phoning every hour on the hour.”

  I turned to Taggert. “Didn’t he say anything about his plans?”

  “He was going to spend the night at the Valerio.”

  “How long was he by himself when you were parking the plane?”

  “Fifteen minutes or so. Not more than twenty.”

  “The limousine from the Valerio would’ve had to get there pretty fast. He may never have called the hotel at all.”

  “Somebody might have met him at the airport,” Miranda said.

  “Did he have many friends in Los Angeles?”

  “Business acquaintances mostly. Ralph’s never been much of a mixer.”

  “Can you give me their names?”

  She moved her hand in front of her face as if the names were insects. “You’d better ask Albert Graves. I’ll call his office and tell him you’re coming. Felix will drive you in. And then I suppose you’ll be going back to Los Angeles.”

  “It looks like the logical place to start.”

  “Alan can fly you.” She stood up and looked down at him with a flash of half-learned imperiousness. “You’re not doing anything special this afternoon, are you, Alan?”

  “Glad to,” he said. “It’ll keep me from getting bored.”

  She switch-tailed into the house, a pretty piece in a rage.

  “Give her a break,” I said.

  He stood up and overshadowed me. “What do you mean?”

  He had a trace of smugness, of high-school arrogance, and I needled it. “She needs a tall man. You’d make a handsome pair.”

  “Sure, sure.” He wagged his head negatively from side to side. “More people jump to conclusions about me and Miranda.”

  “Including Miranda?”

  “I happen to be interested in somebody else. Not that it’s any of your business. Or that God damn eight ball’s either.”

  He meant Felix, who was standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen. He suddenly disappeared.

  “The bastard gets on my nerves,” Taggert said. “He’s always hanging around and listening in.”

  “Maybe he’s just interested.”

  He snorted. “He’s just one of the things that gripes me about this place. I eat with the family, yeah, but don’t think I’m not a servant when the chips are down. A bloody flying chauffeur.”

  Not to Miranda, I thought but didn’t say it. “It’s an easy enough job, isn’t it? Sampson can’t be flying much of the time.”

  “The flying doesn’t bother me. I like it. What I don’t like is being the old guy’s keeper.”

  “He needs a keeper?”

  “He can be hell on wheels. I couldn’t tell you about him in front of Miranda, but the last week in the desert you’d think he was trying to drink himself to death. A quart and a pint a day. When he drinks like that he gets delusions of grandeur, and I get sick of taking chicken from a lush. Then he goes sentimental. He wants to adopt me and buy an airline for me.” His voice went harsh and loose, in satiric mimicry of a drunk old man’s: “ ‘I’ll look after you, Alan boy. You’ll get your airline.’ ”

  “Or a mountain?”

  “I’m not kidding about the airline. He could do it, too. But he doesn’t give anything away when he’s sober. Not a thin dime.”

  “Strictly schizo,” I said. “What makes him like that?”

  “I wouldn’t know for sure. The bitch upstairs would drive anybody crazy. Then he lost a son in the war. That’s where I come in, I guess. He doesn’t really need a full-time pilot. Bob Sampson was a flier, too. Shot down over Sakashima. Miranda thinks that that’s what broke the old man up.”

  “How does Miranda get along with him?”

  “Pretty well, but they’ve been feuding lately. Sampson’s been trying to make her get married.”

  “To anybody in particular?”

  “Albert Graves.” He said it deadpan, neither pro nor con.

  chapter 3 The highway entered Santa Teresa at the bottom of the town near the sea. We drove through a mile of slums: collapsing shacks and store-front tabernacles, dirt paths where sidewalks should have been, black and brown children playing in the dust. Nearer the main street there were a few tourist hotels with neon signs like icing on a cardboard cake, red-painted chili houses, a series of shabby taverns where the rumdums were congregating. Half the men in the street had short Indian bodies and morocco faces. After Cabrillo Canyon I felt like a man from another planet. The Cadillac was a space ship skimming just above the ground.

  Felix turned left at the main street, away from the sea. The street changed as we went higher. Men in colored shirts and seersucker suits, women in slacks and midriff dresses displaying various grades of abdomen, moved in and out of California Spanish shops and office buildings. Nobody looked at the mountains standing above the town, but the mountains were there, making them all look silly.

  Taggert had been sitting in silence, his handsome face a blank. “How do you like it?” he asked me.

  “I don’t have to like it. How about you?”

  “It’s pretty dead for my money. People come here to die like elephants. But then they go on living—call it living.”

  “You should have seen it before the war. It’s a hive of activity compared with what it was. There was nothing but rich old ladies clipping coupons and pinching pennies and cutting the assistant gardener’s wages.”

  “I didn’t know you knew the town.”

  “I worked on a couple of cases with Bert Graves—when he was District Attorney.”

  Felix parked in front of a yellow stucco archway that led into the courtyard of an office building. He opened the glass partition. “Mr. Graves’s office is on the second floor. You can take the elevator.”

  “I’ll wait
out here,” Taggert said.

  Graves’s office was a contrast to the grimy cubicle in the courthouse where he used to prepare his cases. The waiting-room was finished in cool green cloth and bleached wood. A blonde receptionist with cool green eyes completed the color scheme and said:

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  “Just tell Mr. Graves it’s Lew Archer.”

  “Mr. Graves is busy at the moment.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  I sat down in an overstuffed chair and thought about Sampson. The blonde’s white fingers danced on her typewriter keys. I was restless and still feeling unreal, hired to look for a man I couldn’t quite imagine. An oil tycoon who consorted with holy men and was drinking himself to death. I pulled his photograph out of my pocket and looked at it again. It looked back at me.

  The inner door was opened, and an old lady backed out bobbing and chortling. Her hat was something she’d found washed up on the beach. There were diamonds in the watch that was pinned to her purple silk bosom.

  Graves followed her out. She was telling him how clever he was, very clever and helpful. He was pretending to listen. I stood up. When he saw me he winked at me over the hat.

  The hat went away, and he came back from the door. “It’s good to see you, Lew.”

  He didn’t slap backs, but his grip was as hard as ever. The years had changed him, though. His hairline was creeping back at the temples, his small gray eyes peered out from a network of little wrinkles. The heavy blue-shadowed jaw was drooping at the sides in the beginning of jowls. It was unpleasant to remember that he wasn’t five years older than I was. But Graves had come up the hard way, and that was an aging process.

  I told him I was glad to see him. I was.

  “It must be six or seven years,” he said.

  “All of that. You’re not prosecuting any more.”

  “I couldn’t afford to.”

  “Married?”

  “Not yet. Inflation.” He grinned. “How’s Sue?”

  “Ask her lawyer. She didn’t like the company I kept.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, Lew.”

  “Don’t be.” I changed the subject. “Doing much trial work?”

  “Not since the war. It doesn’t pay off in a town like this.”

  “Something must.” I looked around the room. The cool blond girl permitted herself to smile.

  “This is just my front. I’m still a struggling attorney. But I’m learning to talk to the old ladies.” His smile was wry. “Come inside, Lew.”

  The inner office was bigger, cooler, more heavily furnished. There were hunting prints on the two bare walls. The others were lined with books. He looked smaller behind his massive desk.

  “What about politics?” I said. “You were going to be Governor, remember?”

  “The party’s gone to pieces in California. Anyway, I’ve had my fill of politics. I ran a town in Bavaria for two years. Military Government.”

  “Carpetbagger, eh? I was Intelligence. Now what about Ralph Sampson?”

  “You talked to Mrs. Sampson?”

  “I did. It was quite an experience. But I don’t quite get the point of this job. Do you?”

  “I should. I talked her into it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sampson might need protection. A man with five million dollars shouldn’t take the chances he does. He’s an alcoholic, Lew. He’s been getting worse since his boy was killed, and sometimes I’m afraid he’s losing his mind. Did she tell you about Claude, the character he gave the hunting-lodge to?”

  “Yeah. The holy man.”

  “Claude seems to be harmless, but the next one might not be. I don’t have to tell you about Los Angeles. It isn’t safe for an elderly lush by himself.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me. But Mrs. Sampson seemed to think he’s off on a round of pleasures.”

  “I encouraged her to think that. She wouldn’t spend money to protect him.”

  “But you would.”

  “Her money. I’m just his lawyer. Of course, I rather like the old guy.”

  And hope to be his son-in-law, I thought.

  “How much is she good for?”

  “Whatever you say. Fifty a day and expenses?”

  “Make it seventy-five. I don’t like the imponderables in this case.”

  “Sixty-five.” He laughed. “I’ve got to protect my client.”

  “I won’t argue. There may not even be a case. Sampson could be with friends.”

  “I’ve tried them. He didn’t have many friends here. I’ll give you a list of contacts, but I wouldn’t waste time on it except as a last resort. His real friends are in Texas. That’s where he made his money.”

  “You’re taking this pretty seriously,” I said. “Why don’t you go one step further and take it to the police?”

  “Trying to talk yourself out of a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “It can’t be done, Lew. If the police found him for me, he’d fire me in a minute. And I can’t be sure he isn’t with a woman. Last year I found him in a fifty-dollar house in San Francisco.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Looking for him.”

  “This smells more and more like divorce,” I said. “But Mrs. Sampson insisted that isn’t it. I still don’t get it—or her.”

  “You can’t expect to. I’ve known her for years and I don’t understand her. But I can handle her, up to a point. If anything ticklish comes up, bring it to me. She has a few dominant motives, like greed and vanity. You can count on them when you’re dealing with her. And she doesn’t want a divorce. She’d rather wait and inherit all his money—or half of it. Miranda gets the other half.”

  “Were those always her dominant motives?”

  “Ever since I’ve known her, since she married Sampson. She tried to have a career before that: dancing, painting, dress-designing. No talent. She was Sampson’s mistress for a while, and finally she fell back on him, married him as a last resort. That was six years ago.”

  “And what happened to her legs?”

  “She fell off a horse she was trying to train, and hit her head on a stone. She hasn’t walked since.”

  “Miranda thinks she doesn’t want to walk.”

  “Were you talking to Miranda?” His face lit up. “Isn’t she a marvelous kid?”

  “She certainly is.” I stood up. “Congratulations.”

  He blushed and said nothing. I had never seen Graves blush before. I felt slightly embarrassed.

  On the way down in the automatic elevator he asked me: “Did she say anything about me?”

  “Not a word. I plucked it out of the air.”

  “She’s a marvelous kid,” he repeated. At forty he was drunk on love.

  He sobered up in a hurry when we reached the car. Miranda was in the back seat with Alan Taggert. “I followed you in. I decided to fly down to Los Angeles with you. Hello, Bert.”

  “Hello, Miranda.”

  He gave her a hurt look. She was looking at Taggert. Taggert was looking nowhere in particular. It was a triangle, but not an equilateral one.

  chapter 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-mâché 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 ob
vious 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 with 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 was 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.