The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  “How did you meet the girl?”

  “She was a salesgirl in Filene’s. I went there to buy a gift for Mother. She was very helpful, and it went on from there. It took me a week to get up the nerve to kiss her, and then that very night she let me have her. I took her to a hotel off Scollay Square. I shouldn’t have done that. She wasn’t a prostitute, she wanted to marry me. When we faced each other in that shabby hotel room, I realized that I was using her. I threw her down on the bed.”

  His voice cracked like an adolescent’s through his aging mask. It was a strange conversation, and getting stranger. I’d had a few others of its kind. In the tension of a legal contest, or the aftermath of a crime, old springs of emotion stir. Unsuspected fissures open into the deep past.

  “She’s been on my mind this past year,” Ferguson said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since I met Holly again.”

  “Again?”

  “I don’t mean ‘again.’ It’s just that Holly reminded me of her in so many ways. I believed I was being given a second chance-a second chance at happiness. When I didn’t deserve the first chance.”

  “What exactly did you do to the girl?”

  He didn’t answer directly. His eyes were turned downward, fixed on the past, like eyes watching underwater movements, a drowned girl or a swimmer or a monstrous shape compound of both. Like an insubstantial colloidal web, the truth or something near it formed between us slowly as he spoke.

  “Mother died that winter, and I had to go home for her funeral. I’ll never forget her face the night she said good-by to me in Boston Station. She was three months pregnant, unmarried and still working, but she looked so damn hopeful. She ate a dozen cherrystone clams, for the good of the child, she said, and assured me that she’d be fine while I was gone. I promised her I’d be back as soon as the estate was settled, and then we could be married. She believed me.

  “Perhaps I believed myself. I didn’t know certainly that I would never go back until the afternoon we buried Mother. It was a bitter day in the middle of February. The grave-diggers had to use pickaxes and blowtorches to break through the crust of the earth. The lake below the graveyard was nothing but a flat place under the snow. The wind swept down from the Arctic Circle across it.

  “They covered the chunks of frozen earth with that imitation green grass they used in those days: a little rectangle of horrible fake green in the middle of the flat white prairie, with wooden oil rigs standing on the horizon. I could never think of going back to Boston and marrying the girl. I couldn’t even imagine her face without the blackest feeling of melancholy. As I think I told you last night, I arranged with a lawyer in Boston to give her a thousand dollars.”

  “You could have gone in person, at least.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve had it on my conscience for twenty-five years.”

  “Weren’t you concerned about the child?”

  “I’ll be honest. My main concern was fear that she would search me out, turn up on my doorstep with the child in her arms. Or sue me. I was a rich man, you understand, and on my way to becoming richer. She was a girl from the Boston slums who couldn’t speak proper English. I was afraid that she would stand in my way.”

  “Your way to where?”

  He didn’t try to answer that question. It was rhetorical, anyway. I lay there wondering how much weight his conscience was able to bear. Though I felt sorry for the man, I couldn’t see any way out of telling him what I suspected. Perhaps it was in him already, unrecognized and unadmitted, but eating away at his marrow like moral strontium.

  “Why did you marry Holly?” I said.

  “I’ve told you why. When I saw her on the screen, then met her in the flesh, she was like my youth come back to me-a second springtime.” He broke off, shaking his head. “I must sound like a romantic fool.”

  “I think you were looking for something impossible. The worst of it is, when you want something impossible, you often get it. You married Holly because she resembled a girl you knew in Boston twenty-five years ago. Did you ever think of questioning that resemblance?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “What was the girl’s name?”

  “Mulloy. Kathleen Mulloy. I called her Katie.”

  “Did Holly ever tell you who her mother was?”

  “No.” He got up and came to the side of the bed. He walked with his eyes down, slowly, watching each step. “What sort of a woman is her mother? You mentioned that you spoke to her last night.”

  “She’s not a bad sort of woman, and quite good-looking. She looks like your wife twenty-five years older. Her name, as I think I said, is Kate Dotery. I don’t know what her maiden name was, but I can guess. She came originally from Boston, and she told me that Hilda was her eldest daughter. She also said something suggesting that Hilda was not a legitimate child.”

  Ferguson hung over me like a man falling through space at the end of a long tether. He reached the end of the tether. His head came up with a jerk.

  He walked mechanically to the window and stood with his rigid back to me. My room was four stories up. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of taking the final fall. Then the first deep shock hit him.

  He let out a coughing groaning grunt: “Augh!”

  I sat up with my legs over the edge of the bed, ready to go for him if he opened the window. He made a stumbling run for the bathroom door. I heard him being sick behind it.

  I got up and started to put on my clothes. I was half dressed when Ferguson came out.

  He looked like a man who had passed through a desperate crisis, a nervous breakdown, or an almost mortal illness. His eyes in their deep cavities were very bright, not with hope. His mouth was like blue iron. “What are you doing?”

  “I have to talk to your wife. Take me to her, will you?”

  “I will, if it has to be. Forgive my outburst. I’m not myself.”

  He helped me on with my shirt and jacket, and tied my shoelaces for me. He spoke like a supplicant from his kneeling position. “You won’t tell her, will you? What you just told me?”

  “No.”

  “It would drive her out of her mind.”

  Perhaps it already had.

  chapter 29

  SHE WAS SITTING UP in the long chair by the window, with the sky and sea behind her. The sea was ruffled and burnished by wind. Spinnakers stood on the horizon, as still to the eye as traveling moons.

  She looked like a young barbarous queen. A scarf worn like a turban and held in place by jeweled pins concealed the places where the fire had scorched her hair. Jeweled dark harlequin spectacles hid her eyes. A silk robe covered her legs and the lower part of her body.

  “I thought you were never going to come back,” she said to Ferguson. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Mr. Gunnarson, Holly. The man who rescued you from the fire.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Gunnarson.”

  She held out her hand in a rather regal gesture and kept it out until I took it. It was limp and cold. What I could see of her face had a pale and lunar look.

  Her voice barely moved her lips. “I’ve been wanting to thank you in person for all you did. You really plucked me burning, didn’t you? Like in that poem which my husband bought me a record of. By T. S. Eliot. I never heard of the label before, but the poem certainly sent me.”

  Except for the last line, the little speech sounded rehearsed. The expressionlessness of her face gave it a ventriloquial effect. The entire scene had a staged quality.

  If I had been feeling stronger, I’d have gone along with it for a while. But my knees were shaking with weakness and anger and doubt. “We’ve met before, Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “I guess you could say we have, in a way. I wouldn’t remember, drugged like I was. The dirty ba-the dirty beggars drugged me.”

  “You don’t remember shooting me?”

  The room was silent for a long moment. I could hear the susurrus of the waves like w
hispering at the windows. The woman tipped up her chin to Ferguson, carefully, so as not to destroy the beauty of her pose. “What is he talking about, Ian?”

  “Mr. Gunnarson claims you shot him last night.” He was watching her like a photographer, ready to click the shutter of his judgment. “There’s no doubt he was shot.”

  “I didn’t shoot him, for gosh sake. Why would I shoot the man that was trying to help me?”

  “That’s one of the questions I came here to ask you.”

  “Are there others? You keep on pitching low curves at me like that one, I’ll ask my husband to chuck you out on your ear.”

  Ferguson shook his head at her.

  I said: “Why did you shoot me? You know perfectly well you did.”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort. And don’t stand over me, I hate people standing over me.” A thin edge of hysteria had entered her voice.

  Ferguson picked up a chair and placed it for me, a safe distance from her long chair. “Please sit down. There’s no need to stand, after all.”

  I noticed as I sat down that Dr. Trench had slipped in behind me and was standing quietly just inside the door. The woman appealed to her husband, holding up both hands to him with the fingers stiff and spread. “Tell him he’s making a mistake, Fergie. You know I couldn’t have done it, I was out like a light. It must have been somebody else shot him. Or else he’s nuttier than a fruitcake himself.”

  “Was somebody else there, Mrs. Ferguson?”

  “I don’t know, honest. I don’t know who was there. They had me drugged, and I lost two whole days. You don’t have to take my word, ask Dr. Trench.” She craned her pretty neck to look past me.

  The doctor stood there polishing his glasses. “This is no time to try to settle anything. Why don’t you let it lie for now, Gunnarson? Mrs. Ferguson’s had a rough two days.”

  The third day was turning out to be no less rough. I heard a car coming down the lane and thought it was Wills, arriving on cue. I went with Ferguson to the door. It was Salaman.

  “I want to talk to the lady in person,” he said.

  “Say whatever you have to say to me. My-wife is far from well.”

  “She’ll be farther from it unless she pays her bills.”

  Ferguson said in an old, weary voice: “I’ll pay you. I’ll give you a check on the Bank of Montreal.”

  “Don’t you do it, Fergie.” The woman had come up behind us in the hallway. She brushed past me and leaned on Ferguson’s arm. “This character knows we’re in trouble, he’s trying to shake you down. I don’t owe him or anybody else any sixty-five thou. I don’t owe him sixty-five cents.”

  “She’s lying her little head off,” Salaman said. “She thinks she can gamble my money away and lie herself out of it.”

  “I never gambled in my life. I never even put a dollar in a slot machine.”

  “You’ve never even been in Miami, I bet.”

  “That’s right, I haven’t.”

  “Liar. You slept with me in Miami two months running last summer. What’s more, you liked it. Maybe you want to forget it, now that you’re married to Pops here, but I’m here to tell you that you can’t.”

  “Which two months last summer?” I said.

  “July and most of August. I wasn’t planning to bring this up, but the lady forced me to.”

  “I was in Canada all through August,” she said.

  “That’s true,” Ferguson said. “I can vouch for it.”

  “It takes more than that. I don’t like using muscle, but why are the ones with the most the hardest to collect from?” Salaman’s voice was rising. His hand went under his gabardine jacket, as if he felt a pain there, and came out holding an automatic. “Make with the checkbook, Pops. And take my advice, don’t try to stop the check.”

  “I don’t know what goes on here,” the woman said, “but we’re not paying money we don’t owe.”

  Salaman leaned toward her. “You’re Holly May, ain’t you?”

  “That’s my name, little man. It gives you no right-”

  “You’re the movie actress, ain’t you?”

  “I used to be in the movies.”

  “You remember me, don’t you? Hairy-legs Salaman with the loving disposition?”

  “I never saw you before in my life and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

  “I hear you saying it. You used to tell it different.”

  Ferguson looked at her in bitter doubt. She answered his look. “This boy has got me tabbed for somebody else. It happened another time last year, before I went to Canada. Some stores in Palm Springs sent me bills, and I hadn’t been in Palm Springs all winter.”

  “Aw, cut it out.” Salaman reached for her face in a sudden movement and snatched off her harlequin glasses.

  “Don’t you dare, you!”

  “Hey!” Salaman said. “Come out in the light. I want to look at you.”

  He took hold of her wrist, not roughly, but with an easy assumption of superior force, and pulled her out into the sun.

  “Let go of my wife,” Ferguson cried. “I’ll break your bloody neck.”

  Ferguson started to move on him. I tried to hold him. A bullet in the bowels was all he needed to complete his disaster. I couldn’t hold him with one arm. He tore himself out of my grasp.

  The woman swung her body between her husband and the gun. She jerked her wrist free and grabbed her dark glasses out of Salaman’s hand. Salaman’s eyes remained intent on her face. Then he looked around at us. The gun muzzle followed his glance.

  “What are you trying to pull on me? She ain’t Holly May. Where’s the real McCoy?”

  “How would I know? There’s thousands of people look like me. They used to send me their pictures in the mail.” The woman let out a laugh of savage enjoyment. “Too bad, lover-boy, some gal conned you good. You better get out of here before somebody steals your wallet. And put that firearm away before you hurt somebody.”

  “That isn’t a bad idea,” Trench said at my elbow. He walked toward Salaman with a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. “Put the cap pistol away and get out of here. I happen to be a skeet shooter, and this shotgun is loaded. Now get.”

  Salaman got.

  I noted his license number, and telephoned it in to the police station. If he had a criminal record, as he almost certainly had, concealed-weapons charges would keep him out of mischief for some time. This pleasant duty accomplished, I asked for Lieutenant Wills.

  Wills was on his way in from the mountains. The desk sergeant said if it was urgent he could direct him by radio to Ferguson’s house. I told him it was urgent, and went back to the big front room. Meeting Trench in the hall, I asked him to absent himself for a while.

  The moony spinnakers were strung out down the sea, ballooning home. Ferguson sat on a stool beside the woman’s chair, holding her hand. Or perhaps she was holding his hand. She was a powerful woman, whoever she was.

  “Take off your glasses again, Mrs. Ferguson. Would you mind?”

  She made a mouth at me. “I hate to. I look awful with this black eye.”

  But she removed the harlequin glasses and let me look at her. The bruise was an old one, already turning green and yellow at the edges. She couldn’t have received it within the past fifteen hours. Besides, it was on the wrong side. Gaines was right-handed. The woman in the mountain house had been struck on the left side of the head by his revolver.

  There were other, more subtle differences between that woman and the one in front of me. She had had a frozen face, as hard as a silver mask, and eyes like blowtorches which had burned holes in it. The face I was looking at was mobile and lively, in spite of the damage to it. The eyes and mouth were smiling.

  “You’ll remember me.”

  “For more reasons than one. Has somebody been masquerading as you?”

  “It certainly looks like it.”

  “And you say it’s happened before?”

  “At least once, maybe other times. That
would explain a lot of things.”

  “Do you have any notion who’s been doing it to you?”

  “I know darn well who did it that time in Palm Springs. Mike Speare hired a detective to find out.”

  “Who was it? Your mother?”

  “Don’t be ridic. Momma’s no great moral figure, but she wouldn’t do a thing like that to me.”

  “One of your sisters?”

  “You’re sharp.” She said to Ferguson: “This boy is sharp.”

  “Which one? Renee or June?”

  She emitted a burst of laughter. It was a queer, high, bitter, rowdy laugh, hyphenating the tragic and the comic.

  “My God,” she said, “I’m beginning to get the picture. Who do you think I am?”

  “I know who you are, Hilda.”

  “You may think you do, but you don’t. I happen to be June. Hilda was the one who used my professional name to run up bills in Palm Springs. I guess I should have done something about her then. But you sort of hate to sick the law on your own sister. I certainly wasn’t going to sick that hoodlum on her.

  “I can’t blame her too much,” she added in a softer voice. “She always wanted to be a big name, an actress. If the truth be known, I caught the bug from Hilda. It must have driven her crazy when she saw me on the screen, and realized I was her little sister June.”

  “You’re a generous woman to feel that way about her.”

  “I can afford to be generous. I was the one that made it. And when I made it, I found out I didn’t want it. I wanted Fergie here. Thank the Lord I’ve got him.”

  Her smile resembled her mother’s. It lit up her face like a ray which had traveled through light-years of darkness to this moment. She turned it on Ferguson, and he tried to respond. His mouth only grimaced. He was sweating out his own darkness.

  “Hilda’s your oldest sister?”

  “That’s right, she’s the oldest one, and I’m the second oldest. Hilda’s only our half-sister, though.”