Read Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) for Free Online

stir him up, and it made me angry. The red room made me angry.
It was like the inside of a sick brain, with no eyes to see out of, nothing to
look at but the upside-down reflection of itself. I got out.

  5
                 I
pressed the bell, and in a minute a rich female voice gurgled in the
speaking-tube. “Who is it, please?”
                 “Lew
Archer. Is Morris home?”
                 “Sure.
Come on up.” She sounded the buzzer that opened the inner door of the apartment
lobby.
                 She
was waiting when I reached the head of the stairs, a fat and fading blonde,
happily married. “Long time no see.” I winced, but she didn’t notice. “Morris
slept in this morning. He’s still eating breakfast.”
                 I
glanced at my watch. It was three thirty. Morris Cramm was night legman for a columnist and worked from seven in the evening to five
in the morning.
                 His
wife led me through a living-room-bedroom combination crowded with papers and
books and an unmade studio bed. Morris was at the kitchen table, in a bathrobe,
staring down two fried eggs that were looking up at him. He was a dark little
man with sharp black eyes behind thick spectacles. And behind the eyes was a card-index
brain that contained the vital statistics of Los Angeles.
                 “Morning,
Lew,” he said, without getting up.
                 I
sat down opposite him. “It’s late afternoon.”
                 “It’s
morning to me. Time is a relative concept. In summer when I go to bed the
yellow sun shines overhead - Robert Louis Stevenson. Which lobe of my brain do
you want to pick this morning?”
                 He
italicized the last word, and Mrs. Cramm punctuated
it by pouring me a cup of coffee. They half convinced me I had just got up
after having a dream about the Sampsons . I wouldn’t
have minded being convinced that the Sampsons were a
dream.
                 I
showed him the picture signed “Fay.”
                 “Do
you know the face? I have a hunch I’ve seen it before, and that could mean
she’s in pictures. She’s a histrionic type.”
                 He
studied the piece of cardboard. “Superannuated vampire. Fortyish, but the picture’s maybe ten years old. Fay Estabrook.”
                 “You
know her?”
                 He
stabbed an egg and watched it bleed yellow on his plate. “I’ve seen her around.
She was a star in the Pearl White era.”
                 “What
does she do for a living?”
                 “Nothing much. Lives quietly. She’s
been married once or twice.” He overcame his reluctance and began to eat his
eggs.
                 “Is
she married now?”
                 “I
wouldn’t know. I don’t think her last one took. She makes a little money doing
bit parts. Sim Kuntz makes a place for her in his pictures. He was her director
in the old days.”
                 “She
wouldn’t be an astrologist on the side?”
                 “Could be.” He jabbed viciously at his second egg. It
humiliated him not to know the answer to a question. “I got no file on her,
Lew. She isn’t that important any more. But she must have some income. She
makes a moderate splash. I’ve seen her at Chasen’s .”
                 “All by herself, no doubt.”
                 He
screwed up his small serious face, chewing sideways like a camel. “You’re
picking both lobes, you son of a gun. Do I get paid for wearying my lobes?”
                 “A
fin,” I said. “I’m on an expense account.” Mrs. Cramm hovered breastily over me and poured me another cup
of coffee.
                 “I’ve
seen her more than once with an English-remittance-man type.”
                 “Description?”