MacDonald Ross
The Moving Target
- Язык: en
- Формат: fb2
- Размер: 202.44 kB
- Жанр: крутой детектив
Ross MacDonald
THE MOVING TARGET
1949
1
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 weren’t 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 canyon’s 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?”
“I’m 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. I’m 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 you’re 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 didn’t know whether the job would last an hour or a month.
“I’ll put your bag in the storeroom,” the housekeeper said. “I don’t think you’ll 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 woman’s 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: “I’m on the sun deck. What do you want?”
“Mr. Archer’s here – the 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 didn’t 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. “I’ve heard about you. When Millicent