I dropped Taggert at the Valerio and went home. A quart of milk was waiting on my doorstep. I took it in for company. The electric clock in the kitchen said twenty after four. I found a box of frozen oysters in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator and made an oyster stew. My wife had never liked oysters. Now I could sit at my kitchen table at any hour of the day or night and eat oysters to my heart’s content, building up my virility.
I undressed and got into bed without looking at the empty twin bed on the other side of the room. In a way it was a relief not to have to explain to anyone what I had been doing all day.
chapter 12 It was ten in the morning before I got downtown. Peter Colton was at the flat-topped desk in his office. He had been my colonel in Intelligence. When I opened the ground-glass door he glanced up sharply from a pile of police reports, then lowered his eyes immediately to show that I wasn’t welcome. He was a senior investigator in the D.A.’s office, a heavy middle-aged man with cropped fair hair and a violent nose like the prow of a speedboat inverted. His office was a plaster cubicle with a single steel-framed window. I made myself uncomfortable on a hard-backed chair against the wall.
After a while he pointed his nose at me. “What happened to that which, for want of a better term, I choose to call your face?”
“I got into an argument.”
“And you want me to arrest the neighborhood bully.” His smile dragged down the corners of his mouth. “You’ll have to fight your own battles, my little man, unless of course there’s something in it for me.”
“A popsicle,” I said sourly, “and three sticks of bubble gum.”
“You attempt to bribe the forces of the law with three sticks of bubble gum? Don’t you realize that this is the atomic age, my friend? Three sticks of bubble gum contain enough primal energy to blow us all to bits.”
“Forget it. The argument was with a wild piano.”
“And you think I have nothing better to do with my time than to go about putting the arm on berserk pianos? Or putting on a vaudeville act with a rundown divorce detective? All right, spill it. You want something for nothing again.”
“I’m giving you something. It could grow up to be the biggest thing in your life.”
“And of course you want something in return.”
“A little something,” I admitted.
“Let’s see the color of your story. In twentyfive words.”
“Your time isn’t that valuable.”
“Five,” he said, leaning his nose on the ball of his thumb.
“My client’s husband left Burbank Airport day before yesterday in a black limousine, ownership unknown. He hasn’t been seen since.”
“Twentyfive.”
“Shut up. Yesterday she got a letter in his handwriting asking for a hundred grand in bills.”
“There isn’t that much money. Not in bills.”
“There is. They have it. What does it suggest to you?”
He had taken a sheaf of mimeographed sheets from the upper left-hand drawer of his desk and was scanning them in quick succession. “Kidnapping?” he said absently.
“It smells like a snatch to me. Could be my nostrils are insensate. What does the hot sheet say?”
“No black limousines in the last seventy-two hours. People with limousines look after them. Day before yesterday, you say. What time?”
I gave him the details.
“Isn’t your client a little slow on the uptake?”
“She has a passion for discretion.”
“But not for her husband, I take it. It would help if you gave me her name.”
“Wait a minute. I told you I want something. Two things. One, this isn’t for publication. My client doesn’t know I’m here. Besides, I want the guy back alive. Not dead.”
“It’s too big to sit on, Lew.” He was up and walking, back and forth like a caged bear between the window and the door.
“You’ll be getting it through official channels. Then it’s out of my hands. In the meantime you can be doing something.”
“For you?”
“For yourself. Start checking the car-rental agencies. That’s number two. Number three is the Wild Piano—”
“That’s enough.” He flapped his hands in front of his face. “I’ll wait for the official report, if there is any.”
“Did I ever give you a bum lead?”
“Plenty, but we won’t go into that. You could be doing a little exaggerating, you know.”
“Why should I be pitching curves?”
“It’s a cheap and easy way to get your leg work done.” His eyes were narrowed to intelligent blue slits. “There’s an awful lot of car rentals in the county.”
“I’d do it myself but I have to go out of town. These people live in Santa Teresa.”
“And their name?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Some. Further than you can see me.”
“Sampson,” I said. “Ralph Sampson.”
“I’ve heard of him. And I see what you mean about the hundred grand.”
“The trouble is we can’t be sure what happened to him. We’ve got to wait.”
“That’s what you said.” He swung on his heel to the window and spoke with his back to the room. “You also said something about the Wild Piano.”
“That was before you said I was looking for cheap leg work.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got feelings I can hurt.”
“You merely disappoint me,” I said. “I bring you a setup involving a hundred grand in cash and five million in capital assets. So you haggle over a day of your precious time.”
“I don’t work for myself, Lew.” He turned on me suddenly. “Is Dwight Troy in this?”
“Who,” I said, “is Dwight Troy?”
“Poison in a small package. He runs the Wild Piano.”
“I thought there were laws against places like that. And people like him. Excuse my ignorance.”
“You know who he is, then?”
“If he’s a white-haired Englishman, yes.” Colton nodded his head. “I met him once. He waved a gun at me for some reason. I left. It wasn’t my job to take his gun away.”
Colton moved his thick shoulders uncomfortably. “We’ve been trying to get him for years. He’s smooth and versatile. He goes just so far in a racket, until his protection wears thin, then he shifts to something else. He rode high in the early thirties, running liquor from Baja California until that petered out. Since then he’s had his ups and downs. He had a gambling pitch in Nevada for a while, but the syndicate forced him out. His pickings have been slender lately, I hear, but we’re still waiting to take him.”
“While you’re waiting,” I said, with heavy irony, “you could close the Wild Piano.”
“We close it every six months,” he snapped. “You should have seen it before the last raid, when it was the Rhinestone. They had a one-way window upstairs for voyeurs and masochists, a regular act of a woman whipping a man, and such stuff. We put an end to that.”
“Who ran it then?”
“A woman by the name of Estabrook. And what happened to her? She wasn’t even prosecuted.” He snorted angrily. “I can’t do anything about conditions like that. I’m not a politician.”
“Neither is Troy,” I said. “Do you know where he lives?”
“No. I asked you a question about him, Lew.”
“So you did. The answer is I don’t know. But he and Sampson have been moving in some of the same circles. You’d be smart to put a man on the Wild Piano.”
“If we can spare one.” He moved toward me unexpectedly and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “If you meet Troy again, don’t try to take his gun. It’s been tried.”
“Not by me.”
“No,” he said. “The men that tried it are dead.”
chapter 13 It was a two-hour drive at sixty from Los Angeles to Santa Teresa. The sun was past its zenith when I reached the Sampson house, declining toward the sea through scattered clouds t
hat made moving shadows on the terraces. Felix admitted me and led me through the house to the living-room.
It was so big the heavy furniture seemed sparse. The wall that faced the sea was a single sheet of glass, with spun-glass curtains at each end like gathered lengths of light. Mrs. Sampson was a life-size doll propped in a padded chair beside the giant window. She was fully dressed, in lime-colored silk jersey. Her gold-shod feet rested on a footstool. Not a hair of her bleached head was out of place. The metal wheelchair was beside the door.
She was motionless and silent, making a deliberate tableau that verged on the ridiculous as the seconds passed. When the silence had twisted my arm for a quarter of a minute, “Very nice,” I said. “You were trying to get in touch with me?”
“You’ve taken your time about coming.” The voice of the still mahogany face was petulant.
“I can’t apologize. I’ve been working hard on your case, and I relayed my advice to you. Have you taken it?”
“In part. Come closer, Mr. Archer, and sit down. I’m perfectly harmless, really.” She indicated an armchair facing her own. I moved across the room to it.
“Which part?”
“All of me,” she said, with the carnivore smile. “My sting has been removed. But of course you mean the advice. Bert Graves is attending to the money now.”
“Has he seen the police?”
“Not yet. I want to discuss that with you. But first you’d better read the letter.”
She picked up an envelope from the coffee table beside her and tossed it to me. I took out the empty envelope I’d found in Mrs. Estabrook’s drawer and compared the two. They differed in size and quality and the handwriting of the address. The only similarity was in the Santa Maria postmark. Sampson’s letter was addressed to Mrs. Sampson and had been collected at four thirty the previous afternoon.
“What time did you get it?”
“About nine o’clock last night. It’s special delivery, as you can see. Read it.”
The letter was a single sheet of plain white typewriter paper covered on one side with a blue-ink scrawl:
Dear Elaine:
I am involved in a deal which came up suddenly, and I need some cash in a hurry. There are a number of bonds in our joint safety deposit box at the Bank of America. Albert Graves can identify those that are negotiable and arrange to have them cashed. I want you to cash bonds for me to the value of one hundred thousand dollars. I want no bills larger than fifties and hundreds. Do not permit the bank to mark them or record the numbers, since the deal I mentioned is confidential and highly important. Keep the money in my safe at home until you hear from me again, as you shortly will, or until I send a messenger bearing a letter of identification from me.
You will have to take Bert Graves into your confidence, of course, but it is of the outmost importance that you should not tell anyone else about this business. If you do, I stand to lose a very large profit and might even find myself on the wrong side of the law. It must be kept completely secret from everyone. That is why I am asking you to obtain the money for me, instead of going directly to my bank. I will be finished with this business within the week, and will see you soon.
My best love, and don’t worry.
Ralph Sampson.
“It’s carefully done,” I said, “but not convincing. The reason he gives for not going to the bank himself sounds pretty weak. What does Graves think of it?”
“He pointed that out, too. He thinks it’s a put-up job. But, as he says, it’s my decision.”
“Are you absolutely certain this is your husband’s writing?”
“There’s no doubt about that. And did you notice the spelling of ‘utmost’? It’s one of his favorite words, and he always misspells it. He even pronounces it ‘outmost.’ Ralph isn’t a cultivated man.”
“The question is, is he a living one?”
Her level blue eyes turned to me with dislike. “Do you really think it’s as serious as that, Mr. Archer?”
“He doesn’t normally do business like this, does he?”
“I know nothing about his ways of doing business. Actually he retired from business when we were married. He bought and sold some ranches during the war, but he didn’t confide the details of the transactions to me.”
“Have any of his transactions been illegal?”
“I simply don’t know. He’s perfectly capable of it. It’s one of the things that ties my hands.”
“What are the others?”
“I don’t trust him,” she said thinly. “I have no way of knowing what he intends to do. With all that money he may be planning a trip around the world. Perhaps he intends to leave me. I don’t know.”
“I don’t either, but this is my guess. Your husband is being held for ransom. He wrote this letter from dictation with a gun at his head. If it was really a business deal, he’d have no reason to write to you. Graves has his power of attorney. But kidnappers prefer to deal with the victim’s wife. It makes things easier for them.”
“What am I going to do?” she said, in a strained voice.
“Follow instructions to the letter, except that you should bring in the police. Not in an obvious or public way, but so they’ll be standing by. You see, Mrs. Sampson, the easy way for kidnappers to dispose of a victim, after the money’s been collected, is to blow his brains out and leave him. He’s got to be found before that happens, and I can’t do it alone.”
“You seem very sure he’s been kidnapped. Have you found out anything you haven’t told me?”
“Quite a few things. They add up to the fact that your husband’s been keeping bad company.”
“I knew it.” Her face slipped out of control for an instant, sprang into curves of triumph. “He loves to pose as a family man and a good father, but he’s never fooled me.”
“Very bad company,” I said heavily. “As bad as there is in Los Angeles, and that’s as bad as there is.”
“He’s always had a taste for low companions—” She broke off suddenly, raising her eyes to the door behind me.
Miranda was standing there. Wearing a gray gabardine suit that emphasized her height, her copper hair swept up on top of her head, she looked like an older sister of the girl I’d met the day before. But her eyes were wide with fury, and her words came out in a rush.
“You dare to say that about my father! He may be dying, and all you care about is proving something against him.”
“Is that all I care about, dear?” The brown face was impassive again. Only the pale eyes moved, and the carefully painted mouth.
“Don’t ‘dear’ me.” Miranda strode toward us. Even in anger her body had the grace of a young cat. She showed her claws. “All you really care about is yourself. If I ever saw a narcissist, you’re one, Elaine. With your precious vanity, your primping, and your curling, and your special hairdresser, and your diet—it’s all for your own benefit, isn’t it?—so you can go on loving yourself. You surely don’t expect anyone else to love you.”
“Not you, certainly,” the older woman said coolly. “The thought repels me. But what do you care about, my dear? Alan Taggert, perhaps? I believe you spent last night with him, Miranda.”
“I didn’t. You lie.”
She was standing over her stepmother with her back to me. I was embarrassed, but I stayed where I was, balanced on the edge of my chair. I’d seen verbal cat fights end in violence more than once.
“Did Alan stand you up again? When is he going to marry you?”
“Never! I wouldn’t have him.” Miranda’s voice was breaking. She was too young and vulnerable to stand the quarrel for long. “It’s easy for you to make fun of me; you’ve never cared for anyone. You’re frigid, that’s what you are. My father wouldn’t be God knows where if you’d given him any love. You made him come out here to California, away from all his friends, and now you’ve driven him away from his own house.”
“Nonsense!” But Mrs. Sampson too was showing the strain. “I want you to think that over
, Miranda. You’ve hated me from the beginning and sided against me whether I was right or wrong. Your brother was fairer to me—”
“You leave Bob out of this. I know you had him under your thumb, but it’s no credit to you. It pleased your vanity, didn’t it, to have your stepson dancing attendance?”
“That’s enough,” Mrs. Sampson said hoarsely. “Go away, you wretched girl.”
Miranda didn’t move, but she fell silent. I turned in my seat and looked out the window. Below the terraced lawn a stone walk led out to a pergola that stood on the edge of the bluff overlooking the sea. It was a small octagonal building with a conical roof, completely walled with glass. Through it and beyond it I could see the shifting colors of the ocean: green and white where the surf began, sage-honey-colored in the kelp zone further out, then deep-water blue to the deep-sky-blue horizon.
My eye was caught by an unexpected movement beyond the belt of white water where the waves began to break. A little black disk skimmed out along the surface, skipped from wave to wave, and sank out of sight. Another followed it a moment later. The source of the skimming objects was too near shore to be seen, hidden by the steep fall of the cliff. When six or seven had skipped along the water and disappeared, there were no more. Unwillingly I turned to the silent room.
Miranda was still standing above the other woman’s chair, but her posture had altered. Her body had come unstarched. One of her hands was lifted from her side toward her stepmother, not in anger. “I’m sorry, Elaine.” I couldn’t see her face.
Mrs. Sampson’s was visible. It was hard and clever. “You hurt me,” she said. “You can’t expect me to forgive you.”
“You hurt me too,” with a sobbing rhythm. “You mustn’t throw Alan in my face.”
“Then don’t throw yourself at his head. No, I don’t really mean that, and you know it. I think you ought to marry him. You want to, don’t you?”
“Yes. But you know how father feels about it. Not to mention Alan.”
“You take care of Alan,” Mrs. Sampson said, almost gaily, “and I’ll take care of your father.”
“Will you really?”
“I give you my word. Now please go away, Miranda. I’m dreadfully tired.” She glanced at me. “All this must have been very instructive to Mr. Archer.”
The Moving Target Page 8