The Moving Target

by Ross Macdonald

  “You could take good care of her. She’s ripe for marriage.”

  He looked at me in silence for a moment. His lips continued to smile, but his eyes flashed a hands-off signal. “She said you had quite a talk on your drive this afternoon.”

  “I gave her some fatherly advice,” I said. “About driving too fast.”

  “As long as you keep it on the paternal level.” Abruptly he changed the subject. “What about this character Claude? Could he be in on the kidnapping?”

  “He could be in on anything. I wouldn’t trust him with a burnt-out match. But I didn’t get anything definite. He claimed he hadn’t seen Sampson for months.”

  Straw-yellow fog lamps brushed the side of the house, and a moment later a car door slammed. “That must be the sheriff,” Graves said. “It took him a hell of a long time.”

  The sheriff came in with a great show of haste, like a sprinter breasting the tape. He was a big man in a business suit, carrying a wide-brimmed rancher’s hat. Like his clothes, his face was hybrid, half cop and half politician. The sternness of his jaw was denied by the softness of his mouth, a loosely folded mouth that liked women and drink and words.

  He thrust out his hand to Graves. “I would have been here sooner, but you asked me to pick up Humphreys.”

  The other man, who had followed him quietly into the room, was wearing a tuxedo. “I was at a party,” he said. “How are you, Bert?”

  Graves introduced me. The sheriff’s name was Spanner. Humphreys was the District Attorney. He was tall and balding, with the lean face and haunted eyes of an intellectual sharpshooter. He and Graves didn’t shake hands. They were too close for that. Humphreys had been Deputy Prosecutor when Graves was District Attorney. I stood back and let Graves do the talking. He told them what they needed to know and left out what they didn’t need to know.

  When he had finished, the sheriff said: “The letter orders you to drive away in a northern direction. That means he’ll be making his getaway in the other direction, toward Los Angeles.”

  “That’s what it means,” Graves said.

  “Now if we set up a road block down the highway a piece, we should be able to catch him.”

  “We can’t do that,” I said in words of one syllable. “If we do, we can kiss good-bye to Sampson.”

  “But if we catch the kidnapper, we can make him talk—”

  “Hold it, Joe,” Humphreys put in. “We’ve got to assume that there are more than one. If we knock off one of them, the other or others will knock off Sampson. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.”

  “And it’s in the letter,” I said. “Have you seen the letter?”

  “Andrews has it,” Humphreys said. “He’s my fingerprint man.”

  “If he finds anything, you should check with the F.B.I. files.” I sensed that I was making myself unpopular, but I had no time to be tactful and I didn’t trust small-time cops to know their business. I turned to the sheriff: “Are you in touch with the L. A. County authorities?”

  “Not yet. I felt I should assess the situation first.”

  “All right, this is the situation. Even if we obey instructions to the letter, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that Sampson won’t come out alive. He must be able to identify at least one of the gang—the one that picked him up in Burbank. That’s bad for him. You’ll make it worse if you try to trip the money pickup. You’ll have a kidnapper in the county jail, and Sampson lying somewhere with his throat cut. The best thing you can do is get on the wires. Let Graves handle the business at this end.”

  Spanner’s face was mottled with anger, his mouth half open to speak.

  Humphreys cut him off. “That makes sense, Joe. It’s not good law enforcement, but we’ve got to compromise. The thing is to save Sampson’s life. What say we get back to town now?”

  He stood up. The sheriff followed him out.

  “Can we trust Spanner not to make his own arrangements?”

  “I think so,” Graves said slowly. “Humphreys will keep an eye on him.”

  “Humphreys sounds like a good head.”

  “The best. I worked with him for seven-odd years, and I never caught him in a bad mistake. I got him the appointment when I resigned.” There was some regret in his voice.

  “You should have stuck with the work,” I said. “You got a lot of satisfaction out of it.”

  “And damned little money! I stuck with it for ten years, and I ended up in debt.” He gave me a sly look. “Why did you quit the Long Beach force, Lew?”

  “The money wasn’t the main thing. I couldn’t stand podex osculation. And I didn’t like dirty politics. Anyway, I didn’t quit, I was fired.”

  “All right, you win.” He glanced at his watch again. It was nearly eight thirty. “Time to get on our horse.”

  Alan Taggert was in the study, in a tan trench coat that bunched at the waist and made his shoulders look huge. He brought his hands out of his pockets with a gun in each fist. Graves took one, and Taggert kept the other. They were .32 target pistols with slender blue-steel snouts and prominent sights.

  “Remember,” I said, for Taggert’s benefit, “no shooting unless you’re shot at.”

  “Aren’t you coming along?”

  “No.” I said to Graves: “You know the corner at Fryers Road?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no cover around?”

  “Not a thing. The open beach on one side, and the cutbank on the other.”

  “There wouldn’t be. You go ahead in your car. I’ll tag along behind and park a mile or so down the highway.”

  “You’re not going to try a fast one?”

  “Not me. I just want to see him go by. I’ll meet you at the filling station at the city limits afterward. The Last Chance.”

  “Right.” Graves twirled the knobs of the wall safe.

  From the city limits to Fryers Road the highway was fourlane, a mile-long shelf cut into the bluffs that stood along the shore. It was divided in the middle by a strip of turf between concrete curbs. At the intersection with Fryers Road the turf ended and the highway narrowed to three lanes. Graves’s Studebaker made a quick U turn at the intersection and parked with its lights burning on the shoulder of the highway.

  It was a good place for the purpose, a bare corner rimmed on the right by a line of white posts. The entrance to Fryers Road was a gray-black hole in the side of the bluff. There wasn’t a house in sight, or a tree. The cars on the highway were few and far between.

  It was ten minutes to nine by my dashboard clock. I waved to Taggert and Graves and drove on past them. It was seven tenths of a mile to the next side road. I checked it on my mileage. Two hundred yards beyond this side road a parking space for sightseers had been built up over the beach on the right side of the highway. I turned off and parked with the lights out and the nose of the car pointed south. It was seven minutes to nine. If everything went on schedule, the pay-off car should pass me in ten minutes.

  The fog closed around the car when it stopped, rising from the shore like an impossible gray tide. A few pairs of headlights went north through the fog like the eyes of deep-sea fish. Below the guardrail the sea breathed and gargled in the darkness. At two minutes after nine the rushing headlights came around the curve from the direction of Fryers Road.

  The plunging car wheeled sharply before it reached me and turned up the side road to the left. I couldn’t see its color or shape but I heard it losing rubber. The driver’s technique seemed familiar.

  Leaving my lights out, I drove across the highway and along its shoulder to the side road. Before I reached it I heard three sounds, remote and muffled by the fog. The banshee wail of brakes, the sound of a shot, the ascending roar of a motor picking up speed.

  The trough of the side road was filled with diffused white light. I stopped my car a few feet short of the intersection. Another car came out of the side road and turned left in front of me toward Los Angeles. It was a long-nosed convertible painted light cream.
I couldn’t see the driver through the blurred side window, but I thought I saw a dark mass of woman’s hair. I wasn’t in position to give chase, and I couldn’t have anyway.

  I switched on my fog lamps and turned up the road. A few hundred yards from the highway a car was standing with two of its wheels in the ditch. I parked behind it and got out with the gun in my hand. It was a black limousine, a prewar Lincoin custom job. The engine was idling and the lights were on. The license number was 62 S 895. I opened the front door with my left hand, my gun cocked in my right.

  A little man leaned toward me, peering into the fog with intent dead eyes. I caught him before he fell out. I’d been feeling death in my bones for twenty-four hours.

  chapter 19 He was still wearing his leather cap sharply tilted on the left side of his head. There was a round hole in the cap above his left ear. The left side of his face was peppered with black powder burns. His head had been knocked askew by the force of the bullet, and rolled on his shoulder when I pushed him upright. His black-nailed hands slipped off the steering wheel and dangled at his sides.

  Holding him up in the seat with one hand, I went through his pockets with the other. The side pockets of his leather windbreaker contained a windproof lighter smelling of gasoline, a cheap wooden case half full of cigarettes rolled in brown wheat-straw paper, and a four-inch spring-knife. There was a worn sharkskin wallet in the hip pocket of his levis, containing eighteen or twenty dollars in small bills and a California driver’s license recently issued to one Lawrence Becker. The address on the license was a cheap Los Angeles hotel teetering on the edge of Skid Row. It wouldn’t be his address, and Lawrence Becker wouldn’t be his name.

  The left side pocket of the levis held a dirty comb in a leatherette case. The other pocket held a heavy bunch of car keys on a chain—keys for every make of car from Chevrolet to Cadillac—and a half-used book of matches labeled: “Souvenir of The Corner, Cocktails and Steaks, Highway 101 South of Buenavista.” He had nothing on under his windbreaker but a T-shirt.

  There were a few short marijuana butts in the dashboard ash tray, but the rest of the car was as clean as a whistle. Not even a registration card in the glove compartment, nor a hundred thousand dollars in moderate-sized bills.

  I put the things back in his pockets and propped him up in the seat, slamming the door to hold him. I looked back once before I got into my car. The lights of the Lincoln were still burning, the idling motor still sending out a steady trickle of vapor from the exhaust. The dead man hunched at the wheel looked ready to start on a long, fast trip to another part of the country.

  Graves’s Studebaker was parked by the pumps at the filling station. Graves and Taggert were standing beside it and came running when I drove up. Their faces were pale and slick with excitement.

  “It was a black limousine,” Graves said. “We drove away slow and saw him stop at the corner. I couldn’t see his face, but he was wearing a cap and a leather windbreaker.”

  “He still is.”

  “Did you see him pass you?” Taggert’s voice was so tense he whispered.

  “He turned off before he got to me. He’s sitting in his car on the next side road with a bullet in his head.”

  “Good Christ!” Graves cried. “You didn’t shoot him, Lew?”

  “Somebody else did. A cream convertible came out of the side road a minute after the shot. I think a woman was driving. She headed for L. A. Now, are you sure he got the money?”

  “I saw him pick it up.”

  “He hasn’t got it any more; so one of two things happened. It was a heist, or his partners double-crossed him. If he was highjacked, his partners don’t get the hundred grand. If they double-crossed him, they’ll double-cross us. Either way it’s bad for Sampson.”

  “What do we do now?” Taggert said.

  Graves answered him. “We take the wraps off the case. Give the police the go-ahead. Post a reward. I’ll see Mrs. Sampson about it.”

  “One thing, Bert,” I said. “We’ve got to keep this shooting quiet—out of the papers anyway. If highjackers did it, his partners will blame us, and that’s the end of Sampson.”

  “The dirty bastards!” Graves’s voice was heavy and grim. “We kept our side of the bargain. If I could get my hands on them—”

  “You wouldn’t know it. All we have is a dead man in a rented car. You better start with the sheriff; he won’t do much, but it’s a nice gesture. Then the highway patrol and the F.B.I. Get as many men on it as you can.”

  I released my emergency brake and let the car roll a few inches. Graves backed away from the window. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “On a wild-goose chase. Things look so bad for Sampson I might as well.”

  It took me down the highway fifty miles to Buenavista. The highway doubled as the town’s main street. It was lit by motel and tavern signs and three theater fronts. Two of the three theaters advertised Mexican films. The Mexicans lived off the land when the canneries were closed. The rest of the townspeople lived off the Mexicans and the fishing fleet.

  I stopped in the middle of the town, in front of an overgrown cigar store that sold guns, magazines, fishing tackle, draft beer, stationery, baseball gloves, contraceptives, and cigars. Two dozen Mexican boys with grease-slicked duck-tail haircuts were swarming in and out of the store, drawn two ways by the pinball machines in the back and the girls on the street. The girls went by in ribbons and paints, cutting the air with their bosoms. The boys whistled and postured or pretended to be uninterested.

  I called one to the curb and asked him where the Corner was. He conferred with another pachuco. Then they both pointed south.

  “Straight ahead, about five miles, where the road goes down to White Beach.”

  “There’s a big red sign,” the other boy said, stretching out his arms enthusiastically. “You can’t miss it. The Corner.”

  I thanked them. They bowed and smiled and nodded as if I had done them a favor.

  The sign spelled out “The Corner” in red-neon script on the roof of a long, low building to the right of the highway. A black-and-white sign at the intersection beyond it pointed to White Beach. I parked in the asphalt parking-space beside the building. There were eight or ten other cars in the lot, and a trailer truck on the shoulder of the highway. Through the half-curtained windows I could see a few couples at tables, a few others dancing.

  To the left as I went in was a long bar, totally empty. The dining-room and dance floor was to the right. I stood at the entrance as if I was looking for somebody. There weren’t enough dancers to bring the big room to life. Their music came from a jukebox. There was an empty orchestra stand at the back of the room. All that was left of the big war nights were the foot-grained floor, rows of unset rickety tables, odors like drunken memories in the walls, tattered decorations like drunken hopes.

  The customers felt the depression in the room. Their faces groped for laughter and enjoyment and couldn’t quite get hold of them. None of the faces meant anything to me.

  The solitary waitress came up to me. She had dark eyes and a soft mouth, a good body going to seed at twenty. You could read her history in her face and body. She walked carefully as if she had sore feet.

  “You want a table, sir?”

  “Thanks, I’ll sit in the bar. You may be able to help me, though. I’m looking for a man I met at a baseball game. I don’t see him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “That’s the trouble—I don’t know his name. I owe him money on a bet, and he said he’d meet me here. He’s a little fellow, about thirty-five, wears a leather windbreaker and a leather cap. Blue eyes, sharp nose.” And a hole in his head, sister, a hole in his head.

  “I think I know who you mean. His name’s Eddie something, or something. He comes in for a drink sometimes, but he hasn’t been in tonight.”

  “He said he’d meet me here. What time does he usually come in?”

  “Later than this—around midnight. He drives a truck,
don’t he?”

  “Yeah, a blue truck.”

  “That’s the one,” she said. “I seen it in the parking lot. He was in a couple of nights ago, used our phone for a longdistance telephone call. Three nights ago, it was. The boss didn’t like it—you never know how much to collect when it runs over three minutes—but Eddie said he’d reverse the charges, so the boss let him go ahead. How much do you owe him, anyway?”

  “Plenty. You don’t know where he was calling?”

  “No. It’s none of my business, anyway. Is it any of yours?”

  “It’s just that I want to get in touch with him. Then I could send him his money.”

  “You can leave it with the boss if you want to.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Chico, behind the bar.”

  A man at one of the tables rapped with his glass, and she walked carefully away. I went into the bar.

  The bartender’s face, from receding hairline to slack jaw, was terribly long and thin. His night of presiding at an empty bar made it seem even longer. “What’ll it be?”

  “A beer.”

  His jaw dropped another notch. “Eastern or Western?”

  “Eastern.”

  “That’s thirty-five, with the music.” His jaw recovered the lost ground. “We provide the music.”

  “Can I get a sandwich?”

  “Sure thing,” he said, almost cheerfully. “What kind?”

  “Bacon and egg.”

  “O.K.” He signaled the waitress through the open door.

  “I’m looking for a guy called Eddie,” I said. “The one that phoned me longdistance the other night.”

  “You from Las Vegas?”

  “Just came from there.”

  “How’s business in L.V.?”

  “Pretty slow.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said happily. “What were you looking for him for?”

  “I owe him some money. Does he live around here?”

  “Yeah, I think he does. I don’t know where, though. He come in once or twice with a blond dame. Probably his wife. He might come in tonight for all I know. Stick around.”

  “Thanks, I will.”