The Moving Target

by Ross Macdonald

  None of the people in the room showed the tension I was looking for. They were waiting for ordinary things: supper, a bus, Saturday night, a pension check, or a natural death in bed.

  I pushed the glass door open and crossed the butt-strewn floor to the lockers. The number I wanted was stamped on the key: twenty-eight. As I pushed the key into the lock I glanced around the room. The doughnut woman’s boiled blue eyes were watching me incuriously. Nobody else seemed interested.

  There was a red canvas beach bag in the locker. When I pulled it out I could hear the rattling paper inside. I sat down on the nearest empty bench and opened the bag. The brown paper package it contained was torn open at one end. I felt the edges of the stiff new bills with my fingers.

  I tucked the bag under my arm, went to the doughnut counter, and ordered coffee.

  “Did you know you got blood on your shirt?” the blond woman said.

  “I know it. I wear it that way.”

  She looked me over as if she doubted my ability to pay. I restrained the impulse I had to give her a hundred-dollar bill, and slapped a dime on the counter. She gave me coffee in a thick white cup.

  I watched the door as I drank it, holding the cup in my left hand, with my right hand ready to take out my gun. The electric clock above the ticket booth took little bites of time. A bus arrived and departed, shuffling the occupants of the room. The clock chewed very slowly, masticating each minute sixty times. By ten to eight it was too late to hope for them. They had by-passed the money or gone the other way.

  Graves appeared in the doorway gesticulating violently. I set down my cup and followed him out. His car was double-parked across the street.

  “They just wrecked your car,” he told me, on the sidewalk. “About fifteen miles north of here.”

  “Did they get away?”

  “Apparently one of them did. The Fraley woman’s dead.”

  “What happened to the other?”

  “The H.P. don’t know yet. All they had was the first radio report.”

  We covered the fifteen miles in less than fifteen minutes. The place was marked by a line of standing cars, a crowd of human figures like animated black cut-outs in the headlights. Graves pulled up short of a policeman who was trying to wave us on with a red-beamed flashlight.

  Standing on the running board, I could see beyond the line of cars to the edge of the swathe of light. My car was there, its nose crumpled into the bank. I took off at a run and elbowed my way through the crowd around the wreck.

  A highway patrolman with a seamed brown face put his hand on my arm. I shook it off. “This is my car.”

  His eyes narrowed, and the sun wrinkles fanned back to his ears. “You sure? What’s your name?”

  “Archer.”

  “It’s yours all right. That’s who she’s registered to.” He called out to a young patrolman who was standing uneasily by his motorcycle: “Come here, Ollie! It’s this guy’s car.”

  The crowd began to re-form, focusing on me. When they broke their tight circle around the smashed car, I could see the blanket-covered figure on the ground beside it. I pushed between a pair of women whose eyes were drinking it in, and lifted one end of the blanket. The object underneath wasn’t recognizably human, but I knew it by its clothes.

  Two of them in an hour were too much for me, and my stomach revolted. Empty of everything but the coffee I had drunk, it brought up bitterness. The two patrolmen waited until I was able to talk.

  “This woman steal your car?” the older one said.

  “Yes. Her name is Betty Fraley.”

  “The office said they had a bulletin on her—”

  “That’s right. But what happened to the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “There was a man with her.”

  “Not when she wrecked the car,” the young patrolman said.

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “I am sure, though. I saw it happen. I was responsible in a way.”

  “Naw, naw, Ollie.” The older man put his hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “You did exactly the right thing. Nobody’s going to blame you.”

  “Anyway,” Ollie blurted, “I’m glad the car was hot.”

  That irritated me. The convertible was insured, but it would be hard to replace. Besides, I had a feeling for it, the kind of feeling a rider has for his horse.

  “What did happen?” I asked him sharply.

  “I was tooling along about fifty a few miles south of here, heading north. This dame in the convertible passed me as if I was standing still, and I gave chase. I was traveling around ninety before I started to pull up on her. Even when I was abreast of her, she went right on gunning down the road. She didn’t pay any attention when I signaled to pull over, so I cut in ahead. She swerved and tried to pass me on the right and lost control of the car. It skidded a couple of hundred feet and piled up in the bank. When I pulled her out of it she was dead.”

  His face was wet when he finished. The older man shook him gently by the shoulder. “Don’t let it worry you, kid. You got to enforce the law.”

  “You’re absolutely sure,” I asked, “there was nobody else in the car?”

  “Unless they went up in smoke—It’s a funny thing,” he added in a high, nervous voice, “there was no fire, but the soles of her feet were blistered. And I couldn’t find her shoes. She was in her bare feet.”

  “That is funny,” I said. “Extremely funny.”

  Albert Graves had forced his way through the crowd. “They must have had another car.”

  “Then why would she bother with mine?” I reached inside the wreck, under the warped and bloody dashboard, and felt the ignition wires. The terminals had been reconnected with the copper wire I had left there in the morning. “She had to rewire my ignition to start the engine.”

  “That’s more like a man’s work, isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. She could have picked it up from her brother. Every car thief knows the trick.”

  “Maybe they decided to split up for the getaway.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t see it. She was smart enough to know my car would identify her.”

  “I got to fill out a report,” the older patrolman said. “Can you spare a few minutes?”

  While I was answering the last of the questions, Sheriff Spanner arrived in a radio car driven by a deputy. The two of them got out and trotted toward us. Spanner’s heavy chest bounced almost like a woman’s as he ran.

  “What’s been happening?” He looked from me to Graves with moist, suspicious eyes.

  I let Graves tell him. When he had heard what had happened to Sampson and Betty Fraley, Spanner turned back to me.

  “You see what’s come of your meddling, Archer. I warned you to work under my supervision.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to take it quietly. “Supervision, hell! If you’d got to Sampson soon enough, he might be alive now.”

  “You knew where he was, and you didn’t tell me about it,” he yammered. “You’re going to suffer for that, Archer.”

  “Yeah, I know. When my license comes up for renewal. You said that before. But what are you going to tell Sacramento about your own incompetence? You’re out at the county hospital committing a loony when the case is breaking wide open.”

  “I haven’t been out at the hospital since yesterday,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you get my message about Sampson? A couple of hours ago?”

  “There was no message. You can’t cover yourself that way.”

  I looked at Graves. His eyes avoided mine. I held my tongue.

  An ambulance with its siren whooping came down the highway from the direction of Santa Teresa.

  “They take their time,” I said to the patrolman.

  “They knew she was dead. No hurry.”

  “Where will they take her?”

  “The morgue in Santa Teresa, unless she’s claimed.”

  “She won’t be. It’s a good place for her.�
�

  Alan Taggert and Eddie, her lover and her brother, were there already.

  chapter 31 Graves drove very slowly, as if the sight of the wreck had had an effect on him. It took us nearly an hour to get back to Santa Teresa. I spent it thinking—about Albert Graves and then about Miranda. My thoughts were poor company.

  He looked at me curiously as we entered the city. “I wouldn’t give up hope, Lew. The police have a good chance to catch him.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The murderer, of course. The other man.”

  “I’m not sure there was another man.”

  His hands tightened on the wheel. I could see the knuckles stand out. “But somebody killed Sampson.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Somebody did.”

  I watched his eyes as they turned slowly to meet mine. He looked at me coldly for a long moment.

  “Watch your driving, Graves. Watch everything.”

  He turned his face to the road again, but not before I had caught its look of shame.

  Where the highway crossed the main street of Santa Teresa, he stopped for a red light. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “We’ll go to the Sampson place,” I said. “I want to talk to Mrs. Sampson.”

  “Do you have to do it now?”

  “I’m working for her. I owe her a report.”

  The light changed. Nothing more was said until we turned up the drive to the Sampson house. Its dark mass was pierced by a few lights.

  “I don’t want to see Miranda if it can be helped,” he said. “We were married this afternoon.”

  “Didn’t you jump the gun a little?”

  “What do you mean by that? I’ve been carrying the license for months.”

  “You might have waited until her father was home. Or decently laid away.”

  “She wanted it done today,” he said. “We were married in the courthouse.”

  “You’ll probably be spending your wedding night there. The jail’s in the same building, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer. When he stopped the car by the garages, I leaned forward to look into his face. He had swallowed the shame. Nothing was left but a gambler’s resignation.

  “It’s an ironic thing,” he said. “This is our wedding night, the night that I’ve been waiting for for years. And now I don’t want to see her.”

  “Do you expect me to leave you out here by yourself?”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t trust you. You were the one man I thought I could trust—” I couldn’t find the words to end the sentence.

  “You can trust me, Lew.”

  “We’ll make it Mr. Archer from now on.”

  “Mr. Archer, then. I’ve got a gun in my pocket. But I’m not going to use it. I’ve had enough of violence. Do you understand that? I’m sick of it.”

  “You should be sick,” I said, “with two murders on your stomach. You’ve had your fill of violence for a while.”

  “Why did you say two murders, Lew?”

  “Mr. Archer,” I said.

  “You don’t have to take a high moral tone. I didn’t plan it this way.”

  “Not many do. You shot Taggert on the spur of the moment, and you’ve improvised ever since. Toward the end you’ve been getting pretty careless. You might have known I’d find out you didn’t call the sheriff tonight.”

  “You can’t prove you told me to.”

  “I don’t have to. But it was enough to let me know what you were up to. You wanted to be alone with Sampson in that shack for a little while. You had to finish the job that Taggert’s partners had failed to do for you.”

  “Do you seriously think I had anything to do with the kidnapping?”

  “I know damn well you didn’t. But the kidnapping has something to do with you. It made a murderer out of you by giving you a reason to kill Taggert.”

  “I shot Taggert in good faith,” he said. “I admit I wasn’t sorry to have him out of the way. Miranda liked him too well. But the reason I shot him was to save you.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I sat there in cold anger. The stars clung like snow crystals in the black sky, pouring cold down on my head.

  “I didn’t plan it,” he said. “I had no time to plan it. Taggert was going to shoot you, and I shot him instead. It was as simple as that.”

  “Killing is never simple, not when it’s done by a man with your brains. You’re a dead shot, Graves. You didn’t have to kill him.”

  He answered me harshly. “Taggert deserved to die. He got what was coming to him.”

  “But not at the right time. I’ve been wondering how much you heard of what he said to me. You must have heard enough to know he was one of the kidnappers. Probably enough to be pretty sure that if Taggert died, his partners would kill Sampson.”

  “I heard very little. I saw he was going to shoot you, and I shot him instead.” The iron returned to his voice. “Evidently I made a mistake.”

  “You made several mistakes. The first was killing Taggert—that’s what started it all, isn’t it? It wasn’t really Taggert you wanted dead. It was Sampson himself. You never wanted Sampson to come home alive, and you thought that by killing Taggert you’d arranged that. But Taggert had only one surviving partner, and she was hiding out. She didn’t even know Taggert was dead until I told her, and she had no chance to kill Sampson, though she probably would have if she’d had the chance. So you had to murder Sampson for yourself.”

  Shame, and what looked like uncertainty, pulled at his face again. He shook them off. “I’m a realist, Archer. So are you. Sampson’s no loss to anybody.”

  His voice had changed, become suddenly shallow and flat. The whole man was shifting and fencing, trying out attitudes, looking for one that would sustain him.

  “You’re taking murder more lightly than you used to,” I said. “You’ve sent men to the gas chamber for murder. Has it occurred to you that that’s where you’re probably headed?”

  He managed to smile. The smile made deep and ugly lines around his mouth and between his eyes. “You have no proof against me. Not a scrap.”

  “I have moral certainty and your own implicit confession—”

  “But no record of it. You haven’t even enough to bring me to trial.”

  “It isn’t my job to do that. You know where you stand, better than I do. I don’t know why you had to murder Sampson.”

  He was silent for some time. When he spoke, his voice had changed again. It was candid and somehow young, the voice of the man I had known in bull sessions years ago. “It’s strange that you should say that I had to, Lew. That was how I felt. I had to do it. I hadn’t made up my mind until I found Sampson there by himself in the dressing-room. I didn’t even speak to him. I saw what could be done, and once I’d seen it, I had to do it whether I liked it or not.”

  “I think you liked it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I liked killing him. Now I can’t bear to think of it.”

  “Aren’t you being a little easy on yourself? I’m no analyst, but I know you had other motives. More obvious and not so interesting. You got married this afternoon to a girl who was potentially very rich. If her father was dead she was actually very rich. Don’t tell me you’re not aware that you and your bride have been worth five million dollars for the last couple of hours.”

  “I know it well enough,” he said. “But it’s not five million. Mrs. Sampson gets half.”

  “I forgot about her. Why didn’t you kill her too?”

  “You’re bearing down pretty hard.”

  “You bore down harder on Sampson, for a paltry million and a quarter. Half of one half of his money. Weren’t you being a piker, Graves? Or were you planning to murder Mrs. Sampson and Miranda later on?”

  “You know that isn’t true,” he said tonelessly. “What do you think I am?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind. You’re a man who ma
rried a girl and killed her father the same day to convert her into an heiress. What was the matter, Graves? Didn’t you want her without a million-dollar dowry? I thought you were in love with her.”

  “Lay off.” His voice was tormented. “Leave Miranda out of it.”

  “I can’t. If it wasn’t for Miranda, we might have something more to talk about.”

  “No,” he said. “There’s nothing more to talk about.”

  I left him sitting in the car, smiling his stony gambler’s smile. My back was to him as I crossed the gravel drive to the house, and he had a gun in his pocket, but I didn’t look back. I believed him when he said he was sick of violence.

  The lights were on in the kitchen, but nobody answered my knock. I went through the house to the elevator. Mrs. Kromberg was in the upstairs hall when I stepped out.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to see Mrs. Sampson.”

  “You can’t. She’s been awful nervous today. She took three grains of nembutal about an hour ago.”

  “This is important.”

  “How important?”

  “The thing she’s been waiting to hear.”

  Comprehension flickered in her eyes, but she was too good a servant to question me. “I’ll see if she’s asleep.” She went to the closed door of Mrs. Sampson’s room and opened it quietly.

  A frightened whisper came from inside the room. “Who’s that?”

  “Kromberg. Mr. Archer says he has to see you. He says it’s very important.”

  “Very well,” the whisper said. A light was switched on. Mrs. Kromberg stood back to let me enter.

  Mrs. Sampson leaned on her elbows, blinking in the light. Her brown face was drugged and sodden with sleep or the hope of sleep. The round dark tips of her breasts stared through the silk pajamas like dull eyes.

  I shut the door behind me. “Your husband is dead.”