Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) (5 page)

 
          
“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
Salammbo
.”

 
          
“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.

 
          
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 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 plaster 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 ask 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 more lax,
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.

 
          
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.”