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

was two-storied,
set far back from the street among trees, with an attached garage built into
the side of the hill. It was a handsome house for a woman on her way out.
                 After
a while I got tired of watching the unopening door. I
took off my coat and tie, folded them over the back of the seat, and rolled up
my sleeves. There was a long-spouted oilcan in the trunk, and I took it with
me. I walked straight up the driveway past the Buick and into the open door of
the garage.
                 The
garage was enormous, big enough to hold a two-ton truck with space for the
Buick to spare. The queer thing was that it looked as if a heavy truck had
recently been there. There were wide tire marks on the concrete floor, and
thick oil drippings.
                 A
small window high in the rear wall of the garage looked out on the back yard
just above the level of the ground. A heavy-shouldered man in a scarlet silk
sport shirt was sitting in a canvas deck chair with his back to me. His short
hair looked thicker and blacker than Ralph Sampson’s should have. I raised
myself on my toes and pressed my face against the glass. Even through its dingy
surface the scene was as vivid as paint: the broad, unconscious back of the man
in the scarlet shirt, the brown bottle of beer and the bowl of salted peanuts
in the grass beside him, the orange tree over his head hung with unripe oranges
like dark-green golf balls.
                 He
leaned sideways, the crooked fingers of his large hand groping for the bowl of
peanuts. The hand missed the bowl and scrabbled in the grass like a crippled
lobster. Then he turned his head, and I saw the side of his face. It wasn’t
Ralph Sampson’s, and it wasn’t the face the man in the scarlet shirt had
started out with. It was a stone face hacked out by a primitive sculptor. It
told a very common twentieth-century story: too many fights, too many animal
guts, not enough brains.
                 I
returned to the tire marks and went down on my knees to examine them. Too late
to do anything but stay where I was , I heard the
shuffling footsteps on the driveway.
                 The
man in the scarlet shirt said from the door: “What business you got messing
around in here? You got no business messing around in here.”
                 I
inverted the oilcan and squirted a stream of oil at the wall. “Get out of my
light, please.”
                 “What’s
that?” he said laboriously. His upper lip was puffed thick as a mouth guard.
                 He
was no taller than I was, and he wasn’t as wide as the door, but he gave that
impression. He made me nervous, the way you feel talking to a strange bulldog
on his master’s property. I stood up.
                 “Yes,”
I said. “You certainly got them, brother.”
                 I
didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his
chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute
rounds.
                 “What
do you mean, we got them? We ain’t got nothing , but
you get yourself some trouble you come selling your woof around here.”
                 “Termites,”
I said rapidly. He was close enough to let me smell his breath. Beer and salted peanuts and bad teeth. “You tell Mrs.
Goldsmith she’s got them for sure.”
                 “Termites?” He was flat on his heels. I could have knocked
him down, but he wouldn’t have stayed down.
                 ‘The tiny animals that eat wood.” I squirted more oil at the
wall. “The little muckers .”
                 “What
you got in that there can? That there can.”
                 “This
here can?”
                 “Yeah.” I’d established rapport.
                 “It’s
termite-killer,” I said. “They eat it and they die. You tell Mrs.