The members straggling out in twos and threes from the nineteenth hole all looked as if they intended to live forever. Men with hand-polished leather faces who followed the sun from Acapulco to Juan-les-Pins, elderly striding women in sensible shoes complaining in anglicized accents about the price of drinks or the fact that the club was cutting costs on the heating system of the swimming pool.
One of them wondered audibly what had happened to that nice young pool attendant. A silver-haired man in a white scarf said, with some satisfaction, that the fellow had been fired. He’d made one pass too many at you-know-who, but in his opinion, which his voice caressed, the woman was just as much to blame as the lifeguard, what was his name? Too many new faces, slipping standards.
The trees that lined the parking lot were silver-dollar eucalyptus, appropriately enough. Their metallic leaves gleamed in the dying sunset. Twilight gathered in the folds of the foothills and rolled like blue fog down the valley, catching in the branches of scattered oaks. The slopes of the golf course dissolved away into darkness. Venus lit her candle in the western part of the sky. I thought of Sally and her leg of lamb. Some kind of cooked-meat smell was emanating from the clubhouse. Prime ribs of unicorn, perhaps, or breast of phoenix under glass.
The clubhouse was a rambling building with about an acre of red tile roof and many wings and entrances. Like the hills and trees around it, it had the air of having been there for a long time. I was beginning to feel indigenous myself. Not a member: nothing like that: a wild thing who lived in the neighborhood.
A car came up the road from town. Its headlights wavered like antennae before it entered the parking lot. It stopped just inside the stone gateposts.
A man got out and strode toward me busily. “Park it, bud.”
He was very short and wide, broad-faced, and pigeon-breasted, as if a pile driver had fallen on him in his formative years. He wore a light suit, a sunburst tie, and a light hat with a band that matched the tie. He had a voice like a foghorn and a breath, when he came up close, like the back room of a bar. “You deaf or something?”
I was feeling declassed and surly, but I answered mildly enough: “I’m not a parking attendant. Park it yourself.”
He didn’t move. “You must be the manager, eh?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on: “Nice place you got here. I’d like to pick up a club like this myself-high class, wealthy clientele, quiet surroundings. I could turn a place like this into a gold mine. How much do you make a week?”
“I have nothing to do with the management of the club.”
“I see.” For some obscure reason, he decided that I was a member and was snubbing him. He jerked a thumb at his car. “Don’t judge me by that Ford, it’s just a rental. Back home I keep a four-car garage, nothing in it but Caddies. I don’t wanna brag, but I could buy this place outright, cash on the line.”
“Bully for you,” I said. “Are you in the real-estate business?”
“I guess you could say I am, at that. Salaman’s the name.”
He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it. It hung in the air like a dead haddock. His eyes became bright and moist under his hat brim.
“So you won’t take the hand of friendship.” His voice was a blend of menace and sentimentality, like asphalt mixed with molasses. “Okay, no hard feelings. I never been in the State of Cal before, but it certainly isn’t the friendly place they said it was. It’s strickly from chillyville, if you want my opinion.”
He took off his hat and looked ready to weep into it. His hair was a frizzy black mass which sprang up vivaciously, adding inches to his height and altering his appearance. In spite of his illicit air, the man was queerly pathetic.
“Where do you come from, Mr. Salaman?”
He said as if he’d been waiting to be asked: “Miami, Florida. I’m in business there, various kinds of business. I flew out here for combined business and pleasure, you might say. Deductible expense. You got a member with you, name of Holly May?”
“Holly May?”
“You may know her as Mrs. Ferguson. I understand she married a man name of Ferguson since her and me were-friends.” He smacked his lips over the word or its connotations. “Just between us girls, big blondes were always my weakness.”
“I see.”
My noncommittal act was wearing thin. So was my patience.
“Do you know her?” Salaman said.
“As a matter of fact I don’t.”
“Isn’t she a member here? It said in the paper she was. It said that she was playing around with the lifeguard.”
He was standing almost on my toes, talking breathily up into my face. I pushed him away, not violently, but away. He went through a quivering transformation scene and came out of it haggard and yelping. “Keep your hooks off me, I blow your head off.”
His hand went under his jacket and tugged at a tumorous swelling in his armpit. Then he froze. His frozen snarl was a devil mask carved out of white and blue stone.
I croaked from a suddenly dry throat: “Go away. Back to the reservation.”
Oddly enough he went.
chapter 6
MY ILLUSION OF irresistible moral force evaporated when I looked around. Three men were coming up from the clubhouse to the parking area. Two of them were the plain-clothes men I had seen in the alley below Jerry Winkler’s hotel window. Salaman, I thought, must have built-in radar for police.
The third man wore a dinner coat with a professional air. He accompanied the policemen to their car and offered his regrets that he hadn’t been able to help them as much as he would have liked to. They drove away. He turned back toward the clubhouse, where I caught him at the door:
“I’m William Gunnarson, a local attorney. One of my clients is involved with an employee of the club. Would you be the manager?”
His bright and sorrowful eyes examined me. He had the nervous calm which comes from running other people’s parties, and a humorous mouth which took the curse off it. “I am tonight. Tomorrow I’ll probably be looking for a job. We who are about to die salute thee. Is it Gaines again? Ill-gotten Gaines?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Gaines is an ex-employee of ours. I fired him last week. I was just beginning to indulge in the hope that he was out of my hair for good. Now this.” He flipped his hand in the direction the police had taken.
“What was the trouble?”
“You undoubtedly know more about that than I do. Is he a burglary suspect, or something of the sort? I’ve just been talking to a couple of detectives, but they were terribly noncommittal.”
“We could trade information, perhaps.”
“Why not? My name is Bidwell. Gunnarson, did you say?”
“Bill Gunnarson.”
His office was oak-paneled, thickly carpeted, furnished with heavy, dark pieces. An uneaten steak congealed on a tray on the corner of his desk. We faced each other across it. I told him as much as I thought I needed to, and then asked him some questions. “Do you know if Gaines has left town?”
“I gather he has. The police implied as much. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising.”
“The fact that he’s wanted for questioning, you mean?”
“That, and other circumstances,” he said vaguely.
“Why did you fire him?”
“I’d sooner not divulge that information. There are other people involved. Let’s say it was done at the instance of one of the members, and leave it at that.”
I didn’t want to leave it at that. “Is there anything to the rumor that he made a rough pass at one of the ladies?”
Bidwell stiffened in his swivel chair. “Good Lord, is that around town?”
“I heard it.”
He stroked his mouth with his fingertips. His desk lamp lit only the lower part of his face. I couldn’t see his eyes.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. He simply showed too much interest in one of the members’ wives. He was very attentive to her, and perhaps she took a litt
le too much advantage of it. Her husband heard about it, and objected. So I fired him.” He added: “Thank God I did fire him, before this police investigation came up.”
“Did Gaines give any indications that he was using his position here for criminal purposes? To pick out prospects for burglary, for instance?”
“The police asked me that. I had to answer no. But they pointed out that one or two of our members have been victims of burglary in the past six months. Most recently, the Hampshires.”
Bidwell’s voice was rigidly controlled, but he was under great strain. A drop of sweat formed at the tip of his nose, grew heavy and filled with light, and fell off onto his blotter. It made a dark red stain, like blood, on the red blotter.
“How did you happen to hire Gaines in the first place?”
“I was taken in. I pride myself on my judgment of people, but I was taken in by Larry Gaines. He talked well, you know, and then there was the fact that the college sent him. We nearly always get our lifeguards from Buenavista College. In fact, that may be why Gaines registered there.”
“He actually registered at the local college?”
“So they tell me. Apparently he dropped out after a few days or weeks. But we went on assuming that he was a college student. He was a little old for the role, but you see a lot of that these days.”
“I know,” I said. “I went through college and law school after Korea.”
“Did you, now? I never did make it to college myself. I suppose that’s why I feel a certain sympathy for young people trying to educate themselves. Gaines traded on my sympathy, and not only on mine. Quite a few of the members were touched by his scholarly aspirations. He has a certain charm, I suppose-rather greasy, but potent.”
“Can you describe him?”
“I can do better than that. The police asked me to rake up some pictures of him. Gaines was always getting himself photographed. He did a lot of picture-taking himself.”
Bidwell brought five or six glossy prints out of a drawer and handed them to me. Most of them showed Gaines in bathing trunks. He was slim-hipped and wide-shouldered. He held himself with that actorish air, self-consciousness pretending to be self-assurance, which always made me suspicious of a man. His crew-cut head was handsome, but there was a spoiled expression on his mouth, something obtuse in his dark eyes. In spite of the costume, the tan, the molded muscles, he had the look of a man who hated the sun. I placed his age at twenty-five or six.
Keeping one of the pictures, I gave the rest back to Bidwell. “May I have a look at your membership list?”
It was lying on top of his desk, and he pushed it across to me: several sheets of foolscap covered with names in a fine Spencerian hand. The names were alphabetically grouped, and each was preceded by a number. Patrick Hampshire was number 345. Colonel Ian Ferguson was number 459.
“How many members do you have?”
“Our by-laws limit us to three hundred. The original membership were numbered from one to three hundred. When a member-ah-passes on, we retire his number, and issue a new one. The roster runs up to 461 now, which means that we’ve lost 161 members since the club was founded, and gained a corresponding number of new members.”
He recited these facts as if they constituted a soothing liturgy. I wondered if he was talking to me simply to keep from talking to himself.
“Did Gaines have much to do with the Hampshires, do you know?”
“I’m afraid he did. He gave the Hampshire youngsters some swimming lessons in their private pool.”
“The Fergusons?”
He thought about his answer, pushing out his lower lip, and quickly retracting it. “I hadn’t heard that they were burglarized.”
“Neither had I. Their number is 459. That means they’re recent members, does it?”
“Yes, it does,” he said with vehemence. “The committee’s responsible, of course, but I have power of veto. I should have used it.”
“Why?”
“I believe you know why.” He rose, and walked to the wall, then turned from it abruptly as if he’d seen handwriting on it. He came back to the desk and leaned above me on his fingertips. “Let’s not beat around the bush, shall we?”
“I haven’t been.”
“All right. I admit I have. I make no apologies. The situation is explosive.”
“You mean the situation between Colonel Ferguson and his wife?”
“That’s part of it. I see you do know something about it, and I’m going to be candid with you. This club is on the brink of a major scandal. I’m doing all I can to avert it.” His tone was portentous; he might have been telling me that war had just been declared. “Look at this.”
Bidwell opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a folded newspaper clipping. He unfolded it with shaking hands, spreading it out on the blotter for me to read:
Rumor hath it that ex-movie-tidbit Holly May, who was too sweet-smelling for movietown, is trying to prove the old saw about the Colonel’s lady. Her partner in the Great Experiment is a gorgeous hunk of muscle (she seems to think) who works as a marine menial in her millionaire hubby’s millionaire clubby. We ordinary mortals wish that we could eat our fake and have it, too. But gather ye sub-rosas while ye may, Mrs. Ferguson.
Bidwell read it over my shoulder, groaning audibly. “That came out last weekend in a syndicated column which went all over the country.”
“It doesn’t prove anything.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s ghastly publicity for us. Can I depend on you, Mr. Gunnarson?”
“To do what?”
“Not to repeat to others what you’ve just said to me?”
I hadn’t really said anything, but he imagined I had. “I won’t, unless my client’s interests are affected. You have my word.”
“How would your client’s interests be affected?”
“She’s suspected of being in complicity with Gaines. She was involved with Gaines, but innocently. She was in love with him.”
“Another one in love with him? How does he do it? I admit he’s a handsome brute, but that’s as far as it goes. He’s raw.”
“Some like them raw. I take it Mrs. Ferguson is one of those who do.”
“She and her husband aren’t too delightful themselves. I’ve made two big mistakes in the past year, hiring Gaines, and admitting the Fergusons to membership. Those two mistakes have combined into the biggest mistake of my life.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“Can’t it? My life may be in danger.”
“From Gaines?”
“Hardly. He’s long gone. They may be in Acapulco by now, or Hawaii.”
“They?”
“I thought you knew. The Holly May creature went with him. And Colonel Ferguson blames me for the whole thing. He’s out in the club bar now, lapping up rye whisky. I think he’s building up his courage to kill me.”
“Are you serious, Bidwell?”
He leaned forward into the light. His eyes were intensely serious. “The man’s a maniac. He’s been drinking ever since she took off, and he’s taken it into his head to blame me for the elopement.”
“When did she leave?”
“Last night, from here. She and her husband were having dinner in the dining room. There was a telephone call for her. She took it, and then walked right out of the club. Gaines was waiting in the parking lot.”
“How do you know?”
“One of the members saw him there, and mentioned it to me later.”
“Did you tell the police about this?”
“I should certainly say I didn’t. This is a delicate situation, Mr. Gunnarson. An insane situation, but a delicate one.” He managed a small pale smile. “Ours is the most respected club west of the Mississippi-”
“It won’t be if one of the members shoots the manager for conspiring with a lifeguard against Holly May’s chastity.”
“Please don’t spell it out.” He closed his eyes, and shuddered. “At least, if he did shoot me, it would be
the end of my worries.”
“You almost mean that, don’t you?”
He opened his eyes, wide. “I almost do.”
“Does Ferguson have a gun?”
“He has an entire arsenal. Really. He’s a big-game hunter, among other things. He actually enjoys killing.”
“Maybe you better go home.”
“He knows where I live. He was there early this morning, shouting at the front door.”
“I think you should have him picked up. He may be dangerous.”
“He is. He is dangerous. But I cannot and will not bring the police into this. There is simply too much at stake.”
“What, exactly?”
“The reputation of the club. There hasn’t been a major scandal here since the Abernathy suicide pact, and that was before my tenure. All I can do now is hold on and hope that something will happen to save us at the eleventh hour.”
“Let’s hope so, Mr. Bidwell.”
“Call me Arthur, if you like. Here, let me pour you a drink.”
“No, thanks.”
He was trying to prolong the conversation. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t the eleventh hour, but it was nearly the ninth. The Ella Barker case had led me far afield, and threatened to lead me further. It was time to go home to Sally. The thought of her was like a stretching elastic which never quite snapped.
But sometimes it went on stretching.
The phone on Bidwell’s desk rang. He lifted the receiver with an effort, as if it were a heavy iron dumbbell. He listened to a scratchy voice, and said: “For God’s sake, Padilla, I told you to head him off… No! Don’t call them, that’s an order.”
Bidwell sprang to the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. He leaned against it with his arms spread out, like someone getting ready to be crucified. “Padilla says he’s coming here now.”
The Ferguson Affair Page 4