Free Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) by Ross MacDonald Page A

in a fixed yawn, the scarlet lips
contrasting with the pink-and-white interior. She brought it together numbly
and whispered: “I don’t feel so good.”
                 “I’ll
take you home.”
                 “You’re
nice.”
                 I
helped her to her feet. The waitress held the door open, with a condoling smile
for Mrs. Estabrook and a sharp glance at me. Mrs. Estabrook stumbled across the
sidewalk like an old woman leaning on a cane that wasn’t there. I held her up
on her anesthetized legs, and we made it to the car. Getting her in was like
loading a sack of coal. Her head rolled into the corner between the door and
the back of the seat. I started the car and headed for Pacific Palisades.
                 The
motion of the car revived her after a while. “Got to get home,” she said dully.
“You know where I live?”
                 “You
told me.”
                 “Got to climb on the treadmill in the morning. Crap! I
should weep if he throws me out of pictures. I got independent means.”
                 “You
look like a businesswoman,” I said encouragingly.
                 “You’re
nice, Archer.” The line was beginning to get me down. “Taking
care of an old hag like me. You wouldn’t like me if I told you where I
got my money.”
                 “Try
me.”
                 “But
I’m not telling you.” Her laugh was ugly and loose, in a low register. I
thought I caught overtones of mockery in it, but they may have been in my head.
“You’re too nice a boy.”
                 Yeah,
I said to myself, a clean-cut American type. Always willing
to lend a hand to help a lady fall flat on her face in the gutter.
                 The
lady passed out again. At least she said nothing more. It was a lonely drive
down the midnight boulevard with her half-conscious body. In the spotted coat
it was like a sleeping animal beside me in the seat, a leopard or a wildcat
heavy with age. It wasn’t really old - fifty at most - but it was full of the
years, full and fermenting with bad memories. She’d told me a number of things
about herself, but not what I wanted to know, and I was too sick of her to
probe deeper. The one sure thing I knew about her she hadn’t had to tell me:
she was bad company for Sampson or any incautious man. Her playmates were
dangerous - one rough, one smooth. And if anything had happened to Sampson
she’d know it or find out.
                 She
was awake when I parked in front of her house. “Put the car in the drive. Would
you, honey?”
                 I
backed across the road and took the car up the driveway. She needed help to
climb the steps to the door, and handed me the key to open it. “You come in. I
been trying to think of something I want to drink.”
                 “You’re
sure it’s all right? Your husband?”
                 Laughter
growled in her throat. “We haven’t lived together for years.”
                 I
followed her into the hallway. It was thick with darkness and her two odors,
musk and alcohol, half animal and half human. I felt slippery waxed floor under
my feet and wondered if she’d fall. She moved in her own house with the blind
accuracy of a sleepwalker. I felt my way after her into a room to the left,
where she switched on a lamp.
                 The
room it brought out of darkness was nothing like the insane red room she had
made for Ralph Sampson. It was big and cheerful, even at night behind closed
Venetian blinds. A solid middle-class room with post-Impressionist
reproductions on the walls, built-in bookshelves, books on them, a
radio-phonograph and a record cabinet, a glazed brick fireplace with a heavy
sectional chesterfield curved in front of it. The only strangeness was in the
pattern of the cloth that covered the chesterfield and the armchair under