The Moving Target Page 3

  The taxi starter at the airport wore steel-wire armbands on the sleeves of his red-striped shirt. A yellow cap hung almost vertically from the back of his gray head. Seasons of sun and personal abuse had given him an angry red face and an air of great calm.

  He remembered Sampson when I showed him the photograph.

  “Yeah, he was here yesterday. I noticed him because he was a little under the weather. Not blotto, or I would of called a guard. Just a couple of drinks too many.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Was anybody with him?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  A woman wearing two foxes that looked as if they had died from the heat broke out of the line at the curb. “I have to get downtown right away.”

  “Sorry, madam. You got to wait your turn.”

  “I tell you this is urgent.”

  “You got to wait your turn,” he said monotonously. “We got a cab shortage, see?”

  He turned to me again. “Anything else, bud? This guy in trouble or something?”

  “I wouldn’t know. How did he leave?”

  “By car—a black limousine. I noticed it because it didn’t carry no sign. Maybe from one of the hotels.”

  “Was there anybody in it?”

  “Just the driver.”

  “You know him?”

  “Naw. I know some of the hotel drivers, but they’re always changing. This was a little guy, I think, kind of pale.”

  “You don’t remember the make or the license number?”

  “I keep my eyes open, bud, but I ain’t a genius.”

  “Thanks.” I gave him a dollar. “Neither am I.”

  I went upstairs to the cocktail bar, where Miranda and Taggert were sitting like strangers thrown together by accident.

  “I called the Valerio,” Taggert said. “The limousine should be here any minute.”

  The limousine, when it came, was driven by a pale little man in a shiny blue-serge suit like an umpire’s and a cloth cap. The taxi starter said he wasn’t the man who had picked up Sampson the day before.

  I got into the front seat with him. He turned with nervous quickness, gray-faced, concave-chested, convex-eyed. “Yes, sir?” The question trailed off gently and obsequiously.

  “We’re going to the Valerio. Were you on duty yesterday afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir.” He shifted gears.

  “Was anybody else?”

  “No, sir. There’s another fellow on the night shift, but he doesn’t come on till six.”

  “Did you have any calls to the Burbank airport yesterday afternoon?”

  “No, sir.” A worried expression was creeping into his eyes and seemed to suit them. “I don’t believe I did.”

  “But you’re not certain.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m certain. I didn’t come out this way.”

  “You know Ralph Sampson?”

  “At the Valerio? Yes, sir. Indeed I do, sir.”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “No, sir. Not for several weeks.”

  “I see. Tell me, who takes the calls for you?”

  “The switchboard operator. I do hope there’s nothing wrong, sir. Is Mr. Sampson a friend of yours?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m one of his employees.”

  All the rest of the way he drove in tight-mouthed silence, regretting the wasted sirs. When I got out I gave him a dollar tip to confuse him. Miranda paid the fare.

  “I’d like to look at the bungalow,” I told her in the lobby. “But first I want to talk to the switchboard operator.”

  “I’ll get the key and wait for you.”

  The operator was a frozen virgin who dreamed about men at night and hated them in the daytime. “Yes?”

  “Yesterday afternoon you had a call for a limousine from the Burbank airport.”

  “We do not answer questions of that nature.”

  “That wasn’t a question. It was a statement.”

  “I’m very busy,” she said. Her tone clicked like pennies; her eyes were small and hard and shiny like dimes.

  I put a dollar bill on the desk by her elbow. She looked at it as if it was unclean. “I’ll have to call the manager.”

  “All right. I work for Mr. Sampson.”

  “Mr. Ralph Sampson?” She lilted, she trilled.

  “That’s correct.”

  “But he was the one that made the call!”

  “I know. What happened to it?”

  “He canceled it almost immediately, before I had an opportunity to tell the driver. Did he have a change of plan?”

  “Apparently. You’re sure it was him both times?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I know Mr. Sampson well. He’s been coming here for years.”

  She picked up the unclean dollar lest it contaminate her desk, and tucked it into a cheap plastic handbag. Then she turned to the switchboard, which had three red lights on it.

  Miranda stood up when I came back to the lobby. It was hushed and rich, deep-carpeted, deep-chaired, with mauve-coated bellboys at attention. She moved like a live young nymph in a museum. “Ralph hasn’t been here for nearly a month. I asked the assistant manager.”

  “Did he give you the key?”

  “Of course. Alan’s gone to open the bungalow.”

  I followed her down a corridor that ended in a wroughtiron door. The grounds back of the main building were laid out in little avenues, with bungalows on either side, set among terraced lawns and flower beds. They covered a city block, enclosed by high stone walls like a prison. But the prisoners of those walls could lead a very full life. There were tennis courts, a swimming pool, a restaurant, a bar, a night club. All they needed was a full wallet or a blank checkbook.

  Sampson’s bungalow was larger than most of the others and had more terrace. The door at the side was standing open. We passed through a hall cluttered with uncomfortable-looking Spanish chairs into a big room with a high oak-beamed ceiling.

  On the chesterfield in front of the dead fireplace Taggert was hunched over a telephone directory. “I thought I’d call a buddy of mine.” He looked up at Miranda with a half smile. “Since I have to hang around anyway.”

  “I thought you were going to stay with me.” Her voice was high and uncertain.

  “Did you?”

  I looked around the room, which was mass-produced and impersonal like most hotel rooms. “Where does your father keep his private stuff?”

  “In his room, I suppose. He doesn’t keep much here. A few changes of clothes.”

  She showed me the door of the bedroom across the hall and switched on the light.

  “What on earth has he done to it?” she said.

  The room was twelve-sided and windowless. The indirect lights were red. The walls were covered with thick red stuff that hung in folds from the ceiling to the floor. A heavy armchair and the bed in the room’s center were covered with the same dark red. The crowning touch was a circular mirror in the ceiling which repeated the room upside down. My memory struggled in the red gloom and found the comparison it wanted: a Neapolitan-type bordello I’d visited in Mexico City—on a case.

  “No wonder he took to drink, if he had to sleep in here.”

  “It didn’t used to be like this,” she said. “He must have had it redone.”

  I moved around the room. Each of the twelve panels was embroidered in gold with one of the twelve signs of the zodiac—the archer, the bull, the twins, and the nine others.

  “Is your father interested in astrology?”

  “Yes, he is.” She said it shamefacedly. “I’ve tried to argue with him, but it doesn’t do any good. He went off the deep end when Bob died. I had no idea he’d gone so far in it, though.”

  “Does he go to a particular astrologist? The woods are full of them.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  I found the entrance to the closet behind a movable curtain. It was stuffed with suits and shirts and shoes, from golf clothes to evening dress. I went through the pockets systematically.
In the breast pocket of a jacket I found a wallet. The wallet contained a mass of twenties and a single photograph.

  I held it up to the bulb that lit the closet. It was a sibylline face, with dark and mournful eyes and a full drooping mouth. On either side the black hair fell straight to the high neckline of a black dress that merged into artistic shadows at the bottom of the picture. A feminine hand had written in white ink across the shadows: “To Ralph from Fay with Blessings.”

  It was a face I should know. I remembered the melancholy eyes but nothing else. I replaced the wallet in Sampson’s jacket and added the picture to my photographic collection of one.

  “Look,” Miranda said, when I stepped back into the room. She was lying on the bed with her skirt above her knees. Her body in the rosy light seemed to be burning. She closed her eyes. “What does this mad room make you think of?”

  Her hair was burning all around the edges. Her upturned face was closed and dead. And her slender body was burning up, like a sacrifice on an altar.

  I crossed the room and put my hand on her shoulder. The ruddy light shone through my hand and reminded me that I contained a skeleton. “Open your eyes.”

  She opened them smiling. “You saw it, didn’t you? The sacrifice on the heathen altar—like Salammbô.”

  “You do read too many books,” I said.

  My hand was still on her shoulder, conscious of sunned flesh. She turned toward me and pulled me down. Her lips were hot on my face.

  “What goes on?” Taggert asked, from the doorway. The red light on his face made him look choleric, but he was smiling his same half smile. The incident amused him.

  I stood up and straightened my coat. I was not amused. Miranda was the freshest thing I’d touched in many a day. She made the blood run round in my veins like horses on a track.

  “What’s so hard in your coat pocket?” Miranda said distinctly.

  “I’m wearing a gun.”

  I pulled out the dark woman’s picture and showed it to both of them. “Did you ever see her before? She signs herself ‘Fay.’ ”

  “I never did,” said Taggert.

  “No,” said Miranda. She was smiling at him side-eyed and secretly, as if she had won a point.

  She’d been using me to stir him up, and it made me angry. The red room made me angry. It was like the inside of a sick brain, with no eyes to see out of, nothing to look at but the upside-down reflection of itself. I got out.

  chapter 5 I pressed the bell, and in a minute a rich female voice gurgled in the speaking-tube. “Who is it, please?”

  “Lew Archer. Is Morris home?”

  “Sure. Come on up.” She sounded the buzzer that opened the inner door of the apartment lobby.

  She was waiting when I reached the head of the stairs, a fat and fading blonde, happily married. “Long time no see.” I winced, but she didn’t notice. “Morris slept in this morning. He’s still eating breakfast.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was three thirty. Morris Cramm was night legman for a columnist and worked from seven in the evening to five in the morning.

  His wife led me through a living-room-bedroom combination crowded with papers and books and an unmade studio bed. Morris was at the kitchen table, in a bathrobe, staring down two fried eggs that were looking up at him. He was a dark little man with sharp black eyes behind thick spectacles. And behind the eyes was a card-index brain that contained the vital statistics of Los Angeles.

  “Morning, Lew,” he said, without getting up.

  I sat down opposite him. “It’s late afternoon.”

  “It’s morning to me. Time is a relative concept. In summer when I go to bed the yellow sun shines overhead—Robert Louis Stevenson. Which lobe of my brain do you want to pick this morning?”

  He italicized the last word, and Mrs. Cramm punctuated it by pouring me a cup of coffee. They half convinced me I had just got up after having a dream about the Sampsons. I wouldn’t have minded being convinced that the Sampsons were a dream.

  I showed him the picture signed “Fay.” “Do you know the face? I have a hunch I’ve seen it before, and that could mean she’s in pictures. She’s a histrionic type.”

  He studied the piece of cardboard. “Superannuated vampire. Fortyish, but the picture’s prewar, maybe ten years old. Fay Estabrook.”

  “You know her?”

  He stabbed an egg and watched it bleed yellow on his plate. “I’ve seen her around. She was a star in the Pearl White era.”

  “What does she do for a living?”

  “Nothing much. Lives quietly. She’s been married once or twice.” He overcame his reluctance and began to eat his eggs.

  “Is she married now?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think her last one took. She makes a little money doing bit parts. Sim Kuntz makes a place for her in his pictures. He was her director in the old days.”

  “She wouldn’t be an astrologist on the side?”

  “Could be.” He jabbed viciously at his second egg. It humiliated him not to know the answer to a question. “I got no file on her, Lew. She isn’t that important any more. But she must have some income. She makes a moderate splash. I’ve seen her at Chasen’s.”

  “All by herself, no doubt.”

  He screwed up his small serious face, chewing sideways like a camel. “You’re picking both lobes, you son of a gun. Do I get paid for wearying my lobes?”

  “A fin,” I said. “I’m on an expense account.” Mrs. Cramm hovered breastily over me and poured me another cup of coffee.

  “I’ve seen her more than once with an English-remittance-man type.”

  “Description?”

  “White hair, premature, eyes blue or gray. Middle-sized and wiry. Well-dressed. Handsome if you like an aging chorus boy.”

  “You know I do. Anybody else?” I couldn’t show him Sampson’s picture or mention Sampson’s name. He was paid for collecting names in groups of two. Very badly paid.

  “Once at least. She had late supper with a fat tourist-type dressed in ten-dollar bills. He was so squiffed he had to be helped to the door. That was several months ago. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “And you don’t know where she lives?”

  “Somewhere out of town. It’s off my beat. Anyway, I’ve given you a fin’s worth.”

  “I won’t deny it, but there’s one more thing. Is Simeon Kuntz working now?”

  “He’s doing an independent on the Telepictures lot. She might be out there. I heard they’re shooting.”

  I handed him his bill. He kissed it and pretended to use it to light a cigarette. His wife snatched it out of his hand. When I left they were chasing each other around the kitchen, laughing like a couple of amiable maniacs.

  My taxi was waiting in front of the apartment house. I took it home and went to work on the telephone directories for Los Angeles and environs. There was no Fay Estabrook listed.

  I called Telepictures in Universal City and asked for Fay Estabrook. The operator didn’t know if she was on the lot; she’d have to make inquiries. On a small lot it meant that Fay was definitely a has-been where pictures were concerned.

  The operator came back to the telephone: “Miss Estabrook is here, but she’s working just now. Is there a message?”

  “I’ll come out. What stage is she on?”

  “Number three.”

  “Is Simeon Kuntz directing?”

  “Yes. You have to have a pass, you know.”

  “I have,” I lied.

  Before I left I made the mistake of taking off my gun and hanging it away in the hall closet. Its harness was uncomfortable on a hot day, and I didn’t expect to be using it. There was a bag of battered golf clubs in the closet. I took them out to the garage and slung them into the back of my car.

  Universal City wore its stucco facades like yellowing paper collars. The Telepictures buildings were newer than the rest, but they didn’t seem out of place among the rundown bars and seedy restaurants that lined the boulevard. Their pla
ster walls had a jerry-built look, as if they didn’t expect to last.

  I parked around the corner in a residential block and lugged my bag of clubs to the main entrance of the studio. There were ten or twelve people sitting on straight-backed chairs outside the casting-office, trying to look sought-after and complacent. A girl in a neat black suit brushed threadbare was taking off her gloves and putting them on. A grim-faced woman sat with a grim-faced little girl on her knee, dressed in pink silk and whining. The usual assortment of displaced actors—fat, thin, bearded, shaven, tuxedoed, sombreroed, sick, alcoholic, and senile—sat there with great dignity, waiting for nothing.

  I tore myself away from all that glamour, and went down the dingy hall to the swinging gate. A middle-aged man with a chin like the butt end of a ham was sitting beside the gate in a blue guard’s uniform, with a black visored cap on his head and a black holster on his hip. I stopped at the gate, hugging the golf bag as if it meant a great deal to me. The guard half opened his eyes and tried to place me.

  Before he could say anything that might arouse his suspicions, I said: “Mr. Kuntz wants these right away.”

  The guards at the majors asked for passports and visas and did everything but probe the body cavities for concealed hand grenades. The independents were laxer, and I was taking a chance on that.

  He pushed open the gate and waved me through. I emerged in a white-hot concrete alley like the entrance to a maze and lost myself among the anonymous buildings. I turned down a dirt road with a sign that said “Western Main Street,” and went up to a couple of painters who were painting the weather-warped front of a saloon with a swinging door and no insides.

  “Stage three?” I asked them.

  “Turn right, then left at the first turn. You’ll see the sign across the street from New York Tenement.”

  I turned right and passed London Street and Pioneer Log Cabin, then left in front of Continental Hotel. The false fronts looked so real from a distance, so ugly and thin close up, that they made me feel suspicious of my own reality. I felt like throwing away the golf bag and going into Continental Hotel for an imitation drink with the other ghosts. But ghosts had no glands, and I was sweating freely. I should have brought something lighter, like a badminton racquet.