The Moving Target Read online

  When I reached stage three the red light was burning and the soundproof doors were shut. I set the golf bag down against the wall and waited. After a while the light went out. The door opened, and a herd of chorus girls in bunny costumes came out and wandered up the street. I held the door for the last pair and stepped inside.

  The interior of the sound stage was a reproduction of a theater, with red plush orchestra seats and boxes, and gilt rococo decorations. The orchestra pit was empty and the stage was bare, but there was a small audience grouped in the first few rows. A young man in shirt sleeves was adjusting an overhead baby spot. He called for lights, and the baby spot illuminated the head of a woman sitting in the center of the first row facing a camera. I moved down the side aisle and recognized Fay before the light went out.

  The light came on again, a buzzer sounded, and there was a heavy silence in the room. It was broken by the woman’s deep voice:

  “Isn’t he marvelous?”

  She turned to a gray-mustached man beside her and gently shook his arm. He smiled and nodded.

  “Cut!” A tired-looking little man with a bald head, beautifully clothed in pale-blue gabardines, got up from behind the camera and leaned toward Fay Estabrook. “Look, Fay, you’re his mother. He’s up there on the stage singing his heart out for you. This is his first big chance; it’s what you’ve hoped and prayed for all these years.”

  His emotional central European voice was so compelling that I glanced at the stage involuntarily. It was still empty.

  “Isn’t he marvelous?” the woman said strenuously.

  “Better. Better. But remember the question is not a real question. It is a rhetorical question. The accent is on the ‘marvelous.’ ”

  “Isn’t he marvelous!” the woman cried.

  “More accent. More heart, my dear Fay. Pour out your mother love to your son singing so gloriously up there behind the footlights. Try again.”

  “Isn’t he marvelous!” the woman yelped viciously.

  “No! Sophistication is not the line. You must keep your intelligence out of this. Simplicity. Warm, loving simplicity. Do you get it, my dear Fay?”

  She looked angry and distraught. Everyone in the room, from assistant director to prop man, was watching her expectantly. “Isn’t he marvelous?” she said throatily.

  “Much, much better,” said the little man. He called for lights and camera.

  “Isn’t he marvelous?” she said again. The gray-mustached man smiled and nodded some more. He put his hand over hers, and they smiled into each others’ eyes.

  “Cut!”

  The smiles faded into weary boredom. The lights went out. The little director called for number seventy-seven. “You may go, Fay. Tomorrow at eight. And try to get a good night’s sleep, darling.” The way he said it sounded very unpleasant.

  She didn’t answer. While a new group of actors was forming in the wings of the theater stage and a camera rolled toward them, she rose and walked up the central aisle. I followed her out of the gloomy warehouse-like building into the sun.

  I stood in the doorway as she walked away, not quickly, with movements a little random and purposeless. In her dowdy costume—black hat with a widow’s veil and plain black coat—her big, handsome body looked awkward and ungainly. It may have been the sun in my eyes or simple romanticism, but I had the feeling that the evil which hung in studio air like an odorless gas was concentrated in that heavy black figure wandering up the empty factitious street.

  When she was out of sight around the Continental Hotel corner, I picked up the golf bag and followed her. I started to sweat again, and I felt like an aging caddy, the kind that never quite became a pro.

  She had joined a group of half a dozen women of all ages and shapes which was headed for the main entrance. Before they got there, they turned off into an alley. I trotted after them and saw them disappearing under a stucco arch labeled “Dressing Rooms.”

  I pushed open the swinging gate beside the guard and started out. He remembered me and the golf clubs:

  “Didn’t he want them?”

  “He’s going to play badminton instead.”

  chapter 6 I was waiting when she came out, parked with my motor idling at a yellow curb near the entrance. She turned up the sidewalk in the other direction. She had changed to a well-cut dark suit, a small slanted hat. Will or foundation garments had drawn her body erect. From the rear she looked ten years younger.

  Half a block from me she stopped by a black sedan, unlocked it and got in. I eased out into the traffic and let her slide into the lane ahead of me. The sedan was a new Buick. I wasn’t concerned about her noticing my car. Los Angeles County was crawling with blue convertibles, and the traffic on the boulevard was a kaleidoscope being shaken.

  She added her personal touch to the pattern, cutting in and out of lanes, driving furiously and well. In the overpass I had to touch seventy to keep her in sight. I didn’t think she was aware of me; she was doing it for fun. She went down Sunset at a steady fifty, headed for the sea. Fifty-five and sixty on the curves in Beverly Hills. Her heavy car was burning rubber. In my lighter car I was gambling at even odds with centrifugal force. My tires screeched and shuddered.

  On the long, looping final grade sloping down to Pacific Palisades I let her go away from me and almost lost her. I caught her again in the straightaway a minute before she turned off the boulevard to the right.

  I followed her up a road marked “Woodlawn Lane,” which wound along the hillside. A hundred yards ahead of me as I came out of a curve she swung wide and turned into a driveway. I stopped my car where I was and parked under a eucalyptus tree.

  Through the japonica hedge that lined the sidewalk I saw her climb the steps to the door of a white house. She unlocked it and went in. The house was two-storied, set far back from the street among trees, with an attached garage built into the side of the hill. It was a handsome house for a woman on her way out.

  After a while I got tired of watching the unopening door. I took off my coat and tie, folded them over the back of the seat, and rolled up my sleeves. There was a long-spouted oilcan in the trunk, and I took it with me. I walked straight up the driveway past the Buick and into the open door of the garage.

  The garage was enormous, big enough to hold a two-ton truck with space for the Buick to spare. The queer thing was that it looked as if a heavy truck had recently been there. There were wide tire marks on the concrete floor, and thick oil drippings.

  A small window high in the rear wall of the garage looked out on the back yard just above the level of the ground. A heavy-shouldered man in a scarlet silk sport shirt was sitting in a canvas deck chair with his back to me. His short hair looked thicker and blacker than Ralph Sampson’s should have. I raised myself on my toes and pressed my face against the glass. Even through its dingy surface the scene was as vivid as paint: the broad, unconscious back of the man in the scarlet shirt, the brown bottle of beer and the bowl of salted peanuts in the grass beside him, the orange tree over his head hung with unripe oranges like dark-green golf balls.

  He leaned sideways, the crooked fingers of his large hand groping for the bowl of peanuts. The hand missed the bowl and scrabbled in the grass like a crippled lobster. Then he turned his head, and I saw the side of his face. It wasn’t Ralph Sampson’s, and it wasn’t the face the man in the scarlet shirt had started out with. It was a stone face hacked out by a primitive sculptor. It told a very common twentieth-century story: too many fights, too many animal guts, not enough brains.

  I returned to the tire marks and went down on my knees to examine them. Too late to do anything but stay where I was, I heard the shuffling footsteps on the driveway.

  The man in the scarlet shirt said from the door: “What business you got messing around in here? You got no business messing around in here.”

  I inverted the oilcan and squirted a stream of oil at the wall. “Get out of my light, please.”

  “What’s that?” he said laboriously. His uppe
r lip was puffed thick as a mouth guard.

  He was no taller than I was, and he wasn’t as wide as the door, but he gave that impression. He made me nervous, the way you feel talking to a strange bulldog on his master’s property. I stood up.

  “Yes,” I said. “You certainly got them, brother.”

  I didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute rounds.

  “What do you mean, we got them? We ain’t got nothing, but you get yourself some trouble you come selling your woof around here.”

  “Termites,” I said rapidly. He was close enough to let me smell his breath. Beer and salted peanuts and bad teeth. “You tell Mrs. Goldsmith she’s got them for sure.”

  “Termites?” He was flat on his heels. I could have knocked him down, but he wouldn’t have stayed down.

  “The tiny animals that eat wood.” I squirted more oil at the wall. “The little muckers.”

  “What you got in that there can? That there can.”

  “This here can?”

  “Yeah.” I’d established rapport.

  “It’s termite-killer,” I said. “They eat it and they die. You tell Mrs. Goldsmith she’s got them all right.”

  “I don’t know no Mrs. Goldsmith.”

  “The lady of the house. She called up headquarters for an inspection.”

  “Headquarters?” he said suspiciously. His scar-tissue-padded brows descended over his little empty eyes like shutters.

  “Termite-control headquarters. Killabug is termite-control headquarters for the Southern California area.”

  “Oh!” He was puzzling over the words. “Yeah. But we got no Mrs. Goldsmith here.”

  “Isn’t this Eucalyptus Lane?”

  “Naw, this is Woodlawn Lane. You got the wrong address, bud.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” I said. “I thought this was Eucalyptus Lane.”

  “Naw, Woodlawn.” He smiled widely at my ridiculous mistake.

  “I better be going then. Mrs. Goldsmith will be looking for me.”

  “Yeah. Only wait a minute.”

  His left hand came out fast and took me by the collar. He cocked his right. “Don’t come messing around in here any more. You got no business messing around in here.”

  His face filled out with angry blood. His eyes were hot and wild. There was a bright seepage of saliva at the cracked and folded corners of his mouth. A punchy fighter was less predictable than a bulldog, and twice as dangerous.

  “Look.” I raised the can. “This stuff will blind you.”

  I squirted oil in his eyes. He let out a howl of imaginary agony. I jerked sideways. His right went by my ear and left it burning. My shirt collar ripped loose and dangled from his clenched hand. He spread his right hand over his oil-doused eyes and moaned like a baby. Blindness was the one thing he feared.

  A door opened behind me when I was halfway down the drive, but I didn’t show my face by looking back. I ducked around the corner of the hedge and kept running, away from my car. I circled the block on foot.

  When I came back to the convertible the road was deserted. The garage doors were closed, but the Buick was still standing in the drive. The white house among its trees looked very peaceful and innocent in the early evening light.

  It was nearly dark when the lady of the house came out in a spotted ocelot coat. I passed the entrance to the drive before the Buick backed out, and waited for it on Sunset Boulevard. She drove with greater fury and less accuracy all the way back to Hollywood, through Westwood, Bel-Air, Beverley Hills. I kept her in sight.

  Near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where everything ends and a great many things begin, she turned into a private parking lot and left her car. I double-parked in the street till I saw her enter Swift’s, a gaudy figure walking like a slightly elated lady. Then I went home and changed my shirt.

  The gun in my closet tempted me, but I didn’t put it on. I compromised by taking it out of the holster and putting it in the glove compartment of my car.

  chapter 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 th
at 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 retroussé nostrils glaring.

  “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.”