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

the
lamp: brilliant green tropical plants against a white desert sky, with single
eyes staring between the fronds. The pattern changed as I looked at it. The
eyes disappeared and reappeared again. I sat down on a batch of them.
                 She
was at the portable bar in the corner beside the fireplace. “What are you
drinking?”
                 “Whisky and water.”
                 She
brought me my glass. Half of its contents slopped out en route, leaving a trail
of dark splotches across the light-green carpet. She sat down beside me,
depressing the cushioned seat. Her dark head swayed toward my shoulder and
lodged there. I could see the few iron-gray strands the hairdresser had left in
her hair so it wouldn’t look dyed.
                 “I
can’t think of anything I want to drink,” she whined. “Don’t let me fall.”
                 I
put one arm around her shoulders, which were almost as wide as mine. She leaned
hard against me. I felt the stir and swell of her breathing, gradually slowing
down.
                 “Don’t
try to do anything to me, honey, I’m dead tonight. Some other night….” Her
voice was soft and somehow girlish, but blurred. Blurred like the submarine
glints of youth in her eyes.
                 Her
eyes closed. I could see the faint tremor of her heartbeat in the veins of her
withering eyelids. Their fringe of curved dark lashes was a vestige of youth
and beauty which made her ruin seem final and hard. It was easier to feel sorry
for her when she was sleeping.
                 To
make certain that she was, I gently raised one of her eyelids. The marbled
eyeball stared widely at nothing. I took away my arm and let her body subside
on the cushions. Her breasts hung askew. Her stockings were twisted. She began
to snore.
                 I
went into the next room, closed the door behind me, and turned on the light. It
shone down from the ceiling on a bleached mahogany refectory table with
artificial flowers in the center, a china cabinet at one side, a built-in
buffet at the other, six heavy chairs ranged around the wall on their haunches.
I turned the light off and went into the kitchen, which was neat and well
equipped.
                 I
wondered for an instant if I had misjudged the woman. There were honest
astrologists - and plenty of harmless drunks. Her house was like a hundred
thousand others in Los Angeles County, almost too typical to be true. Except for the huge garage and the bulldog that guarded it.
                 The
bathroom had walls of pastel-blue tile and a square blue tub. The cabinet over
the sink was stuffed and heaped with tonics and patent medicines, creams and
paints and powders, luminol , nembutal , veronal . The
hypochondriac bottles and boxes overflowed on the back of the sink, the laundry
hamper, and the toilet top. The clothes in the hamper were female. There was
only one toothbrush in the holder. A razor but no shaving
cream, nor any other trace of a man.
                 The
bedroom next to the bathroom was flowered and prettied in pink like a prewar
sentimental hope. There was a book on the stars on the bedside table. The
clothes in the closet were women’s, and there were a great many of them, with
Saks and Magnin labels. The undergarments and
night-clothes in the chest of drawers were peach and baby blue and black lace.
                 I
looked under the twisted mass of stockings in the second drawer and found the
core of strangeness in the house. It was a row of narrow packages held together
with elastic bands. The packages contained money, all in bills, ones and fives
and tens. Most of the bills were old and greasy. If all the packages assayed
like the one I examined, the bottom of the drawer was lined with eight or ten
thousand dollars.
                 I
sat on my heels and looked at all that money. A bedroom drawer was hardly