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

forward over the bar with her chin in her hands, looking straight down
into her half-empty liqueur glass. The pride that had kept her body erect and
organized her face had seeped away. She was hunched there tasting the
bitterness at the bottom of her life, droning out elegies: “He never took care
of himself, but he had the body of a wrestler and the head of an Indian chief.
He was part Indian. Nothing mean about him, though. One sweet
guy. Quiet and easy, never talked much. But
passionate, and a real one-woman man, the last I ever seen. He got T. B.
and went off in one summer. It broke me up. I never got over it since. He was
the only man I ever loved.”
                 “What
did you say his name was?”
                 “Bill.”
She looked at me slyly. “I didn’t say. He was my foreman. I had one of the
first big places in the valley. We were together for a year, and then he died.
That was twenty-five years ago, and I been feeling ever since I might as well
be dead myself.”
                 She
raised her large tearless eyes and met my glance in the mirror. I wanted to
respond to her melancholy look, but I didn’t know what to do with my face.
                 I
tried smiling to encourage myself. I was a good Joe after all. Consorter with
roughnecks, tarts, hard cases and easy marks; private eye at the keyhole of
illicit bedrooms; informer to jealousy, rat behind the walls, hired gun to
anybody with fifty dollars a day; but a good Joe after all. The wrinkles formed
at the corners of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the
teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a
coyote’s sneer. The face had seen too many bars, too many rundown hotels and
crummy love nests, too many courtrooms and prisons, post-mortems and police
lineups, too many nerve ends showing like tortured worms. If I found the face
on a stranger, I wouldn’t trust it. I caught myself wondering how it looked to
Miranda Sampson.
                 “To
hell with the three-day parties,” Mrs. Estabrook said. “To
hell with the horses and the emeralds and the boats. One good friend is
better than any of them, and I haven’t got one good friend. Sim Kuntz said he
was my friend, and he tells me I’m making my last picture. I lived my life
twenty-five years ago, and I’m all washed up. You don’t want to get mixed up
with me, Archer.”
                 She
was right. Still, I was interested, apart from my job. She’d had a long journey
down from a high place, and she knew what suffering was. Her voice had dropped
its phony correctness and the other things she had learned from studio coaches.
It was coarse and pleasantly harsh. It placed her childhood in Detroit or
Chicago or Indianapolis, at the beginning of the century, on the wrong side of
town.
                 She
drained her glass and stood up. “Take me home, Archer.”
                 I
slid off my stool with gigolo alacrity and took her by the arm. “You can’t go
home like this. You need another drink to snap you back.”
                 “You’re
nice.” My skin was thin enough to feel the irony. “Only I can’t take this
place. It’s a morgue. For Christ’s sake,” she yelled at the bartender, “where
are all the merrymakers?”
                 “Aren’t
you a merrymaker, madam?”
                 I
pulled her away from the start of another quarrel, up the steps and out. There
was a light fog in the air, blurring the neons . Above
the tops of the buildings the starless sky was dull and low. She shivered, and
I felt the tremor in her arm. “There’s a good bar next street up,” I said. “The Valerio ?”
                 “I
think that’s it.”
                 “All right. One more drink, then I got to go home.” I opened
the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder
heavily. I