Ross Macdonald - The Moving Target

Blue City
The Dark Tunnel
Trouble Follows Me
The Three Roads
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The Way Some People Die
The Ivory Grin
Meet Me at the Morgue
Find a Victim
The Name is Archer
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
The Ferguson Affair
The Wycherly Woman
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill Black Money
The Far Side of the Dollar
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
Sleeping Beauty
The Blue Hammer

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, MARCH 1998

Copyright 1949, copyright renewed 1977 by Ross Macdonald

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1949.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Macdonald, Ross, 1915
The moving target / by Ross Macdonald.
p. cm.(Vintage crime/Black Lizard)
eISBN: 978-0-307-77318-0
1. Archer, Lew (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Private
investigatorsCaliforniaFiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3525.I486M67 1998
813.52dc21 97-47422

Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

chapter The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak.

This is Cabrillo Canyon, the driver said.

There werent any houses in sight. The people live in caves?

Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal.

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyons mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

We turned up a drive between sentinel yews, cruised round in a private highway network for a while, and came out above the sea stretching deep and wide to Hawaii. The house stood part way down the shoulder of the bluff, with its back to the canyon. It was long and low. Its wings met at an obtuse angle pointed at the sea like a massive white arrowhead. Through screens of shrubbery I caught the white glare of tennis courts, the blue-green shimmer of a pool.

The driver turned on the fan-shaped drive and stopped beside the garages. This is where the cavemen live. You want the service entrance?

Im not proud.

You want me to wait?

I guess so.

A heavy woman in a blue linen smock came out on the service porch and watched me climb out of the cab. Mr. Archer?

Yes. Mrs. Sampson?

Mrs. Kromberg: Im the housekeeper. A smile passed over her lined face like sunlight on a plowed field. You can let your taxi go. Felix can drive you back to town when youre ready.

I paid off the driver and got my bag out of the back. I felt a little embarrassed with it in my hand. I didnt know whether the job would last an hour or a month.

Ill put your bag in the storeroom, the housekeeper said. I dont think youll be needing it.

She led me through a chromium-and-porcelain kitchen, down a hall that was cool and vaulted like a cloister, into a cubicle that rose to the second floor when she pressed a button.

All the modern conveniences, I said to her back.

They had to put it in when Mrs. Sampson hurt her legs. It cost seven thousand, five hundred dollars.

If that was supposed to silence me, it did. She knocked on a door across the hall from the elevator. Nobody answered. After knocking again, she opened the door on a high white room too big and bare to be feminine. Above the massive bed there was a painting of a clock, a map, and a womans hat arranged on a dressing-table. Time, space, and sex. It looked like a Kuniyoshi.

The bed was rumpled but empty. Mrs. Sampson! the housekeeper called.

A cool voice answered her: Im on the sun deck. What do you want?

Mr. Archers herethe man you sent the wire to.

Tell him to come out. And bring me some more coffee.

You go out through the French windows, the housekeeper said, and went away.

Mrs. Sampson looked up from her book when I stepped out. She was half lying on a chaise longue with her back to the late morning sun, a towel draped over her body. There was a wheelchair standing beside her, but she didnt look like an invalid. She was very lean and brown, tanned so dark that her flesh seemed hard. Her hair was bleached, curled tightly on her narrow head like blobs of whipped cream. Her age was as hard to tell as the age of a figure carved from mahogany.

She dropped the book on her stomach and offered me her hand. Ive heard about you. When Millicent Drew broke with Clyde, she said you were helpful. She didnt exactly say how.

Its a long story, I said. And a sordid one.

Millicent and Clyde are dreadfully sordid, dont you think? These sthetic men! Ive always suspected his mistress wasnt a woman.

I never think about my clients. With that I offered her my boyish grin, a little the worse for wear.

Or talk about them?

Or talk about them. Even with my clients.

Her voice was clear and fresh, but the sickness was there in her laugh, a little clatter of bitterness under the trill. I looked down into her eyes, the eyes of something frightened and sick hiding in the fine brown body. She lowered the lids.

Sit down, Mr. Archer. You must be wondering why I sent for you. Or dont you wonder either?

I sat on a deck chair beside the chaise. I wonder. I even conjecture. Most of my work is divorce. Im a jackal, you see.

You slander yourself, Mr. Archer. And you dont talk like a detective, do you? Im glad you mentioned divorce. I want to make it clear at the start that divorce is not what I want. I want my marriage to last. You see, I intend to outlive my husband.

I said nothing, waiting for more. When I looked more closely, her brown skin was slightly roughened, slightly withered. The sun was hammering her copper legs, hammering down on my head. Her toenails and her fingernails were painted the same blood color.

It maynt be survival of the fittest. You probably know I cant use my legs any more. But Im twenty years younger than he is, and Im going to survive him. The bitterness had come through into her voice, buzzing like a wasp.