The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

MY OWN NAME, WM. GUNNARSON, stenciled on the stucco wall at the head of my parking slot, reminded me where I was and what I was doing. I turned off the engine and used my key to the back door of the building. There was a light behind the office door.

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” Mrs. Weinstein said. She looked tired, and her smile was wan. “I believe I’ve located the place you’re looking for. It’s a small city called Mountain Grove, inland from here about sixty miles, in the Valley. More than half of the names check out, and I have their addresses for you.”

  She handed me a carefully typed list. There were street and telephone numbers for six of the names, including an Adelaide Haines who lived on Canal Street. I felt a rush of satisfaction. I had been needing it.

  “No Dotery?” I said, and spelled it out.

  “No. It was an old telephone book, though, that they had at the answering service. While I was there, incidentally, some man called for you. Colonel Ferguson. He wants you to come out to his house, he said. He intimated that it was very urgent.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Twenty minutes or so. I just got here.”

  “You’re a treasure, Belle.”

  “I know. Buried treasure. Do you want to tell me what it’s all about?”

  “Tomorrow, perhaps, when I get back from Mountain Grove.”

  She looked at me with concern. “You’re not leaving town without going home? Mrs. G. has a stiff upper lip, but you don’t want to strain it.”

  “You’ve done me a big favor. Would you do me another?”

  “I know. Spend the night with Mrs. G. I could see that one coming a long way off.”

  “Will you?”

  “I’ll be glad to, Bill.” She seldom called me by my first name. “You take care of yourself. I like working for you, in spite of all the alarms and excursions.”

  The floodlights were burning outside Ferguson’s house, throwing Chirico shadows along the cliff and up the driveway. A dusty late-model Ford stood in the turnaround. I thought I knew it, and looked in. It was a rented car, according to the registration slip. A light hat with a sunburst band lay on the front seat.

  When Ferguson opened the door, the short and passionate man from Miami was standing close to his elbow. He said to Ferguson: “Who did you say this is?”

  “Mr. Gunnarson, my local attorney. This is Mr. Salaman, Mr. Gunnarson.”

  “I know him.”

  “That’s right,” Salaman said. “At the Foothill Club, in the parking lot. Why didn’t you tell me you were Ferguson’s lawyer? We could of got things settled there and then.” He smiled without showing his teeth.

  Ferguson looked drained and miserable. “Let’s not stand around in doorways, gentlemen.”

  We followed him into the big room that overlooked the ocean. Salaman took up a position in the middle of the room, like a proprietor. The swelling in his armpit was quite prominent in the light, radiating wrinkles across his gabardine jacket.

  “What is this all about?” I said.

  He nodded peremptorily at Ferguson. “Tell him.”

  Ferguson said in a husky voice: “Mr. Salaman is a businessman from Florida. He claims that my wife owes him a good deal of money.”

  “Claims is not the word. She owes it and she’s going to pay it.”

  “But my wife isn’t here. I told you I have no idea where she is.”

  “Don’t give me that.” Salaman wagged his head with sad tolerance. “You know where she is, you’ll tell me. If you don’t, well run her down. We got an organization behind us. But that would be doing it the hard way.”

  “I understood you were fond of the lady,” I said.

  “Not sixty-five grand worth. Anyway,” he added delicately, “we won’t go into the sex angle in front of her old man here. I don’t wanna interfere with anybody’s legal marriage. All I want is my sixty-five thousand.”

  “Sixty-five thousand for what?”

  “Value received. That’s what it says on the notes. Don’t think she didn’t sign notes.”

  “Let me see the notes.”

  “I don’t carry them with me. But get it through your head, it’s strictly legal. As you will find out if you make me go into court. But you don’t want that.”

  “No,” Ferguson said, “we don’t want that.”

  “What did the money go for?”

  Salaman flipped his hand palm upward, pointing the thumb at Ferguson. “Tell him.”

  Ferguson swallowed a bitter grin. It almost choked him. “Holly lost some money gambling shortly before we were married. She didn’t have the cash to cover her losses. She borrowed from a finance company which is run by a Miami gambling corporation. Mr. Salaman is the major stockholder. The amount was less than fifty thousand, originally, but apparently the interest has mounted up.”

  “Interest and service charges. It’s more than six months overdue. And it costs money to collect money. Now an op-a man in your position, Colonel, I’d think you’d want to pay up.”

  I said: “Would this be blackmail, by any chance?”

  Salaman looked hurt. “I’m sorry you used that word, Mister. If you’re smart, though, you’ll tell your boss to pay up. It wasn’t just the tables the lady blew her money on.”

  Ferguson had turned to the window. He spoke with his face hidden, but I could see his ghostly reflection forcing out the words. “Some of the money went for drugs, Gunnarson. If we can believe this man, she started gambling to procure money for drugs. She got in deeper and deeper.”

  “What drugs?”

  Salaman shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t know. I’m no pusher.” He smiled his sealed smile. “All I know is what I read in the papers. Like what it said in the columns about her and the lifeguard. This would make a nice splash in the papers.”

  Ferguson turned back to the room. He was as pale as his reflection. “What is this?”

  “It sounds like blackmail to me,” I said.

  Salaman said: “The hell it is. Your boy here isn’t too bright, pops. My advice to you is trade him in on another mouthpiece but fast. You need a boy that’s hep to the public-relations angles, that’s what makes and breaks. I got a right to protect my legitimate interests.”

  “I understand that,” Ferguson said with a dismal look at me. “I don’t have the money on hand.”

  “Tomorrow will do. Tomorrow at the latest. I can’t sit around in this burg while you make up your mind. I got to get back to some action. How about this time tomorrow?”

  “What if I don’t pay then?”

  “Your little doll won’t be making no more movies. Maybe horror movies.” Salaman showed his teeth. They were bad.

  Ferguson said in a thin and desperate voice: “You’re holding her somewhere, aren’t you? I’ll gladly pay you if you give her back.”

  “Are you nuts?” Salaman swung around to face me. “Is this a nuthouse? Is the old guy nuts?”

  “You haven’t answered his question.”

  “Why should I? It don’t make sense. If I had Holly, she’d be here doing the asking. On her knees.”

  “You implied you could put your hands on her.”

  “Sooner or later, sure. I can send out a private circular to all the gambling spots, all the major bookies. Sooner or later she’ll turn up at one of them. But the longer I have to wait, the more it costs. And it ain’t only money I mean, bear it in mind.”

  “My client and I want to discuss this in private.”

  “Sure you do.” Salaman flung out his hand in a generous arc. “Discuss it all night if you want. Just come up with the right answer by tomorrow. And don’t try to get in touch with me. I’ll be in touch with you.” He saluted us with two fingers and walked out. I heard the Ford go up the drive.

  Ferguson broke the silence. “What am I going to do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Pay them, I suppose.”

  “Do you have the money?”

  “I can phone Montreal. It’
s not the money I’m concerned about.” He added after another silence: “I don’t know what sort of a woman I married.”

  “You didn’t marry a saint, that’s evident. Your wife is having her troubles. She was having them before she became your wife. Have you considered cutting your losses?”

  “I don’t follow, Gunnarson. I’m not feeling myself.”

  He sat down on a long chair, his head resting limply on the back, one leg dragging on the floor.

  “You’re not responsible for her debts, unless you want to be.”

  “I can’t let her down,” he said weakly.

  “She let you down.”

  “Perhaps. But I still care for her. I don’t care about the money. Why is everything always put to me in terms of money?”

  There was no answer to that question, except that he had money, and had used it to marry a woman half his age. The question was addressed to the ceiling, anyway. He announced to the ceiling: “Damn it, I hate to give in to their dirty threats. But I’m going to pay them their dirty money.”

  “That may not be wise. It could lead to a long series of payments. It’s possible, in fact, that you’ve paid them once already.”

  He sat up blinking. “How?”

  “The money you delivered to Gaines and your wife today-it may be the first installment and this is the second.”

  “You think that Salaman is behind the kidnapping?”

  “It wasn’t a kidnapping, Colonel. That seems to be clear by now. I keep getting further evidence that your wife conspired with Gaines to collect that money. She may have needed it to pay these gambling debts, if these really are gambling debts. Did she ever mention them to you?”

  “No.”

  “Or ask you for large sums of money?”

  “She didn’t have to. I provided her with ample funds for her needs.”

  “Maybe she didn’t think so. A drug habit, for instance, can be terribly expensive.”

  “You may think I’m a fool,” he said, “but I simply cannot believe that she is an addict, or ever was. I’ve been living with her here for six months, and never noticed the slightest indication.”

  “No peculiar-smelling cigarettes around the house?”

  “Holly doesn’t even smoke tobacco.”

  “Does she possess a hypodermic syringe? Have needle-marks on her arms or legs?”

  “The answer is no to both questions. Her limbs were as clean as a peeled willow.”

  “Did she use barbiturates?”

  “Very occasionally. I disapproved of them. Holly often said that whiskey was the only tranquillizer she needed.”

  “She drank quite heavily, didn’t she?”

  “We both did.”

  “Drinking doesn’t often go with drug addiction. She may have stopped using drugs and started using alcohol as a substitute. Has she always been a heavy drinker?”

  “No. When I first met her in Vancouver, she hardly touched the stuff. I suppose I taught her to drink. She was rather-she was frightened at first, in our relationship. Drinking made it easier for her. But she hasn’t been drinking nearly so much in the last few weeks.”

  “Pregnant women usually do cut down.”

  “That’s it.” Ferguson’s eyes were moist and bright in his craggy face. “She was afraid of injuring the child-Gaines’s child!”

  “How do you know it’s his? It could be yours.”

  “No.” He shook his head despondently. “I know where I stand, I won’t try to blink the facts. I had no right to expect so much out of life. I tell you, it’s a judgment on me. I’ve had it coming to me, all these years.”

  “Judgment for what?”

  “My moral rottenness. Years ago I got a young girl pregnant, then I turned my back on her. When Holly turned her back on me, I was only getting my just deserts.”

  “That’s not rational thinking.”

  “Is it not? My father used to say that the book of life is like a giant ledger. He was right. Your good actions and your bad actions, your good luck and your bad luck, balance out. Everything comes back to you. The whole thing works like clockwork.”

  He made a downward guillotining gesture with the edge of his hand. “I threw that little girl in Boston out of my life, gave her a thousand dollars to shut her up. And when I did that, I condemned myself. Condemned myself to the hell of money, do you understand me? In my life everything comes back to money. But Good Christ, I’m not made of money. I care for other things. I care for my wife, no matter what she’s done to me.”

  “What do you think she’s done to you?”

  “She’s defrauded and betrayed me. But I can forgive her, honestly. I owe it not only to her. I owe it to that little girl in Boston. You don’t know me, Gunnarson. You don’t know the depths of evil in me. But I have depths of forgiveness in me, too.”

  He had been taking a moral beating, and wasn’t handling it well. I said: “We’ll talk it over tomorrow. Before you make any final decisions, you’ll want all the facts about your wife and her activities.”

  He closed his fists on his knees and cried hoarsely: “I don’t care what she’s done!”

  “Surely that will depend on the extent of her crimes.”

  “No. Don’t say that.”

  “You still want her back, don’t you?”

  “If I can have her. Do you think there’s a chance?” His hands turned over and opened and clutched air.

  “I guess there’s always a chance.”

  “You don’t see any hope in the situation,” Ferguson stated. “But I do. I know myself, I know my wife. Holly’s a lost child who has done some foolish things. I can forgive her, and I feel sure we can make a go of it.”

  His eyes shone with a false euphoric brightness. It made me uneasy.

  “There’s not much use in talking about that now. I’m on my way out of town. I’m hoping to find out something more definite about her background and her connection with Gaines. Will you hold off everything until tomorrow? Including too much thinking.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “A town in the valley, Mountain Grove. Did Holly ever speak of the place?”

  “I don’t believe so. Did she use to live there?”

  “Possibly. I’ll report to you in the morning. Will you be all right tonight?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I haven’t given up hope, not by a long shot. I’m full of hope.”

  Or of despair so sharp, I thought, that he couldn’t feel its edge biting into him.

  chapter 22

  THE MOUNTAINS WHICH GAVE the town its name lay on the horizon to the west and south like giants without eyes. Against their large darkness and the larger darkness of the sky, the lights on the main street flung a meretricious challenge.

  It was like a hundred other hinterland main streets, with its chain stores and clothing stores closed for the night, restaurants and bars and movie houses still open. Perhaps there were more people on the sidewalks, more cars in the road, then you’d see in the ordinary town after ten at night. Most of the pedestrians were men, and many of them wore the hats and high-heeled boots of ranch hands. The young men at the wheels of the cars drove like an army in rout.

  I stopped at a gas station, bought two dollars worth of gas out of my last ten-dollar bill, and asked the proprietor to let me consult his telephone directory. He was an old man with a turkey-red face and eyes like chips of mica. He watched me through the window of his office to make sure that I didn’t steal the directory off its chain.

  It said that Mrs. Adelaide Haines lived at 225 Canal Street, which was the address that Mrs. Weinstein had set down. The red-faced man told me where it was. I drove across town at the legal speed limit, fighting down my excitement.

  Canal Street was lined with trees and houses a generation old. Number 225 was a wooden bungalow with a light on the porch, filtered green through a passion vine which grew thick to the eaves. A card in the front window became legible as I mounted the front steps: VOICE AND PIANO TAUGHT.
r />   I pressed the bell push beside it, but no audible bell rang. I knocked on the screen door. The holes in the screen had been ineffectually mended with what looked like hairpins. An aging woman, for whom the idea of hairpins had prepared me, opened the inside door.

  She was tall and fine-boned and thin to the point of emaciation. Her face and neck were roughened by years of valley sun, and the fingers at her throat were conscious of it. In spite of this, she had some style, and a kind of desperate, willful youthfulness. Her thick black hair was coiled on her head like sleeping dangerous memories.

  “Mrs. Haines?”

  “Yes. I am Mrs. Haines.” The cords in her throat worked like pulleys to produce the syllables. “Who are you, sir?”

  I gave her my card. “I’m William Gunnarson, a lawyer from Buenavista. You have a son named Harry, I believe.”

  “Henry,” she corrected me. “I called him Harry when he was a child. His grownup name is Henry.”

  “I see.”

  Threading her genteel accents was a wild and off-key note. I looked at her face more closely. She was smiling, but not as mothers smile when they speak of their sons. Her lips seemed queerly placed against the bone structure. They were open and stretched to one side, in an off-center leer.

  “Henry isn’t at home, as you probably know.” She looked past me at the dark street. “He hasn’t lived at home for years. But you know that. He’s living in Buenavista.”

  “May I come in, Mrs. Haines? You may be interested in what I have to say. I know I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I’m all alone here. But of course you realize that. We won’t have a chaperone.”

  A nervous giggle escaped the hand which she pressed to her mouth a second too late. Lipstick came off on her fingers. They were vibrating like a tuning fork as she unlocked the screen door.

  Her perfume flooded over me as I entered. She was wearing so much perfume that it hinted at panic.

  She ushered me into a fair-sized front room which was obviously her studio. An upright grand piano as old as the house stood against one inner wall. A Siamese cat jumped straight up into the air from a mohair armchair which was in process of being disemboweled. The cat hung in the air for a long instant, glaring at me with its hazel eyes, then reached for the arm of the chair with stretching legs. It landed on the piano stool with all four feet together like a mountain goat, struck one angry chord on the keyboard, and rebounded to the piano top. There it slunk and slalomed among metronomes and music racks, and crouched behind a old-fashioned photograph of a girl in a cloche hat.