The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

“Then you better get away from the door. Who’s Padilla?”

  “The bartender. Ferguson told him he’s waited long enough.” Droplets were forming on his face as they do on a cold glass. “Talk to him, won’t you? Explain that I’m utterly blameless. Utterly. I had nothing to do with his blessed wife’s departure.” He stepped sideways, tanglefooted, and leaned in the corner.

  “Why does he think you had?”

  “Because he’s insane. He makes mountains out of molehills. I merely called her into my office to take a telephone call.”

  “From Gaines?”

  “If so, he must have disguised his voice. I thought myself it was a woman’s voice-not one I recognized. But Ferguson seems to think I’m in cahoots with Gaines, simply because I called his wife out of the dining room.”

  “I hear you, Bidwell,” a voice said through the door.

  Bidwell jumped as if he’d felt an electric shock, then slumped against the wall as if the shock had killed him.

  “If I didn’t hear you, Bidwell, I could smell you. I could tell that you were in there by the smell.” The doorknob rattled. The voice outside rose an octave. “Let me in, you lily-livered swine. I want to talk to you, you Bidwell swine. And you know what about, Bidwell.”

  Bidwell shuddered each time he heard his name. He looked at me pleadingly. “Talk to him, will you? It only makes him angrier when I try to talk to him. You’re a lawyer, you know how to talk to people.”

  “What you need is a bodyguard.”

  Ferguson punctuated this remark with a heavy thud on the bottom of the door. “Open up, Bidwell, or I’ll kick the bloody well door down.”

  He kicked it again. One of the panels cracked, and sprinkled varnish on the rug.

  Bidwell said urgently: “Go out and talk to him. You have nothing to fear. He doesn’t hate you. I’m the one he hates.”

  Under Ferguson’s third kick, the cracked panel started to give. Standing to one side of it, I unlocked and opened the door.

  Ferguson kicked air and lurched in past me. He was a big man in his fifties, shaggy in Harris tweeds. His face was long and equine. Small eyes were closely and deeply set under his overhanging gray eyebrows. They scowled around the room. “Where is he? Where is the pandering little swine?”

  Bidwell was behind the door. He stayed there.

  “That’s pretty rough language, isn’t it?” I said.

  Ferguson swung his head to look at me. The movement tipped him off balance. He fell back against the side of the doorway. Something metallic in his jacket pocket rapped the door frame.

  “You better give me your gun, Colonel. It might go off and shoot you in the hip. Those hip wounds can be painful.”

  “I know how to handle firearms.”

  “Still, I think you better give me your gun, just for the present. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody-”

  “Wouldn’t I, though! I’m going to hurt Bidwell. I’m going to put a hole in that hide of his. And then I’m going to skin him and nail his coyote hide on his own front door to tan.”

  He sounded like a blustering drunk, but blustering drunks could be dangerous. “No, you’re not. I happen to be an attorney, and I’m arresting you. Now hand over your gun.”

  “To hell with you. You look to me like another one of Bidwell’s wife-stealing pretty boys.”

  He lunged toward me, lost his balance again, and hung onto the edge of the door. It closed enough to reveal Bidwell pasted to the wall behind it. Ferguson emitted a skirling cry, like bagpipes, and reached for his pocket.

  I inserted my left hand between his prominent adam’s-apple and the collar of his shirt, jerked him toward me, and hit him with my right hand on the jut of the jaw. I had always wanted to hit a Colonel.

  This one drew himself erect, marched stiffly to Bidwell’s desk, made a teetering half-turn on his heels, and sat down ponderously in Bidwell’s chair. He opened his mouth to speak, like an executive about to lay down company policy, then smiled at the foolishness of it all, and passed out. The swivel chair spilled him backward onto the floor.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Bidwell said. “He’ll sue us.”

  “We’ll sue him first.”

  “Impossible. You can’t bring suit against twenty million dollars. He’s capable of hiring the best lawyers in the country.”

  “You’re talking to one of them.” I was feeling slightly elated, after hitting a Colonel. “That’s the kind of suit I’ve always dreamed of bringing.”

  “But he didn’t do anything to me,” Bidwell said.

  “You sound disappointed.”

  Bidwell looked at me glumly. “No doubt I should thank you for saving my life. But, frankly, I don’t feel thankful.”

  I squatted by the recumbent man and got the gun out of his pocket. It was a cute little snub-nosed medium-caliber automatic, heavy with clip. I held it up for Bidwell to see.

  He refused to look at it. “Put it away. Please.”

  “So you got his gun,” somebody said from the doorway. “I talked him into handing over one gun, couple hours ago. But I guess he had another one in the car.”

  “Go away, Padilla,” Bidwell said. “Don’t come in here.”

  “Yessir.”

  Padilla smiled and came in. He was a curly-headed young man with a twisted ear, wearing a white bartender’s jacket. He looked over Ferguson with a professional eye.

  “There’s a cut on his chin. You have to hit him?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Mr. Bidwell would rather have been shot. But this is a nice rug. I didn’t want them to get blood all over it.”

  “It isn’t funny,” Bidwell said. “What are we going to do with him?”

  “Let him sleep it off,” Padilla answered cheerfully.

  “Not here. Not in my office.”

  “Naw, we’ll take him home. You tell Frankie to take over the bar, we’ll take him home, put him to bed. He won’t even remember in the morning. He’ll think he cut himself shaving.”

  “How do you know he won’t remember?”

  “Because I been making his drinks. He killed a fifth of Seagram’s since six o’clock. I kept pouring it into him, hoping that he’d pass out any minute. But he’s got a stomach like a charred oak barrel bound with brass.”

  He stooped and touched Ferguson’s stomach with his finger. Ferguson smiled in his sleep.

  chapter 7

  PADILLA KNEW WHERE Ferguson lived. He said that he had driven his blue Imperial home before. I went along for the ride, and the answers to some questions.

  “Were you acquainted with Larry Gaines?”

  “Used-to-be lifeguard? Sure. I figured him for a no-good, but it was not my business. I had a call-down with him first week he was here, back in September. He tried to buy a drink for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told him, get out of my bar and stay out.”

  Padilla pressed a button which opened the left front window of the car. He spat into the night air and closed the window again, glancing over his shoulder at Ferguson. “Don’t want to give him wind in his face. Might bring him to. That man’s got a capacity on him, I tell you.”

  I looked back at Ferguson. He was sleeping peacefully.

  “I suppose you know Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “Sure thing. She’s a damn fine woman. Always nice to the help, can hold her liquor, a real lady in my book. I’ve seen a lot of these Hollywood people when I was at the Oasis Club in Palm Springs. Most of them, they get their front feet in the trough, and bingo, they think they’re the kings of the world. But not Holly-Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “You call her Holly?”

  “Sure. She called me Tony, I called her Holly, in the bar, you know. You can’t make anything out of that. She’s democratic. Her parents were working people, she told me so herself.”

  “Was she democratic with Larry Gaines?”

  “So I hear.” He sounded disappointed, in Holly, perhaps in me. “I never saw them together. He stayed out of my territory. Something was going on t
here, but I’ll lay you odds it ain’t what people think. I saw a lot of her in the last six months, over the bar, and that’s when you see people plain. I’ve seen her handle a lot of heavy passes, some of them from experts. But she wasn’t having any. She isn’t that type at all.”

  “I heard different.”

  Padilla said aggressively: “I know there’s people don’t like her. So what? I didn’t say she was perfect. I said she isn’t the type to play around. If you ask me, I’d say she loved her husband. He isn’t much to look at, but the old boy must have his points. She always lit up like a candle when he came into the room.”

  “Then why did she walk out on him?”

  “I don’t think she did, Mr. Gunnarson. I think something happened to her. There she was, the life of the party one minute, and the next minute she was gone.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I dunno. I had my hands full at the bar. I didn’t see her leave. All I know is, she left and didn’t come back. And her husband’s damned worried about her. If you ask me, that’s what’s driving him crazy.”

  “What could have happened to her?”

  Padilla sighed. “You don’t know this town like I do, Mr. Gunnarson. I was born and brought up here, right down at the end of Pelly Street. There’s people who will knock you off for the change in your pockets. And Holly-Mrs. Ferguson-was wearing fifty grand in diamonds last night.”

  “How do you know what her jewels were worth?”

  “Don’t get suspicious of me now. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of that lady’s head. Show me the bum that would, and I’ll beat him within an inch of his life.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “About the diamond brooch? Hell, she told me. Her husband gave it to her, and she was kind of bragging. I warned her to shut up about it. Even at the Foothill Club, you don’t want to broadcast-Hey!” The car swerved under the pressure of his hands. “You think that Gaines was after her jewels?”

  “It’s possible.” Two versions of Holly May were forming in my mind, but they refused to combine into a single understandable woman. “Have you spoken to anybody about your suspicions?”

  “Just to Frankie, he’s my helper. I tried to talk to Mr. Bidwell, but he didn’t want to hear it. And the Colonel had enough on his mind already.”

  “Does he believe his wife has met with foul play?”

  “I think he does, in a way. Only he won’t admit it to himself. He keeps pretending she ran off with a guy, so he can be mad about it, instead of-scared.”

  “You’re quite a psychologist, Tony.”

  “Yeah. That will be twenty-five dollars, please.” But there was no laughter in his voice. He’d succeeded in frightening himself, as well as me.

  We had crossed the ridge that walled off the valley from the coastal shelf. I could smell the sea, and sense its dark immensity opening below us. The rotating beam of a lighthouse scanned the night. It flashed along a line of trees standing on a bluff, on the flat roof of a solitary house, then seaward on a bank of fog which absorbed it like cotton batting.

  Padilla turned down a hedged lane, a green trench carved out of darkness. We emerged in a turnaround at the rear of the flat-roofed house on the bluff. Parking as close to the door as possible, Padilla plucked Ferguson’s key ring from the ignition, opened the house, and turned on inside and outside lights.

  We wrestled Ferguson out of the car and carried him through the house into a bedroom. He was as limp as a rag doll, but as heavy as though his bones were made of iron. I was beginning to be worried about him. I switched on the bed lamp and looked at his closed face. It was propped on the pillow like a dead man’s in a coffin.

  “He’s okay,” Padilla said reassuringly. “He’s just sleeping now.”

  “You don’t think he needs a doctor? I hit him pretty hard.”

  “It’s easy enough to find out.”

  He went into the adjoining bathroom and came back with a plastic tumbler full of water. He poured a little of it on Ferguson. The water splashed on his forehead and ran down into his hollow temples, wetting his thin hair. His eyes snapped open. He sat up on the bed and said distinctly: “What’s the trouble, boys? Is the dugout leaking again?”

  “Yeah. It’s raining whisky,” Padilla said. “How you feeling, Colonel?”

  Ferguson sat leaning on his arms, his high shoulders up around his ears, and permitted himself to realize how he was feeling. “I’m drunk. Drunk as a skunk. My God, but I’m drunk.” He thrust a hairy fist in one eye and focused the other eye on Padilla’s face. “Why didn’t you cut me off, Padilla?”

  “You’re a hard man to say no to, Colonel. The hardest.”

  “No matter, cut me off.”

  Ferguson swung his heavy legs over the edge of the bed, got up on them like a man mounting rubber stilts, and staggered across the room to the bathroom door. “Got to take a cold shower, clear the old brain. Mustn’t let Holly see me like this.”

  He walked into the stall shower fully clothed and turned on the water. He was in there for what seemed a long time, snorting and swearing. Padilla kept a protective eye on him.

  I looked around the room. It was a woman’s bedroom, the kind that used to be called a boudoir, luxuriously furnished in silk and padded satin. A pink clock and a pink telephone shared the top of the bedside table. It was five minutes to ten. The thought of Sally went through me like a pang.

  I reached for the telephone. It rang in my hand, as if I had closed a connection. I picked up the receiver and said: “This is the Ferguson residence.”

  “Colonel Ferguson, please.”

  “Sorry, the Colonel is busy.”

  “Who is that speaking, please?” It was a man’s voice, quiet and careful and rather impersonal.

  “A friend.”

  “Is the Colonel there?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, he’s taking a bath.”

  “Get him on the line,” the voice said less impersonally. “In a hurry, friend.”

  I was tempted to argue, but I sensed an urgency here which tied my tongue. I went to the door of the bathroom. Padilla was helping Ferguson to take off his soggy tweeds. Ferguson was shivering so hard that I could feel the vibrations through my feet.

  He looked at me without recognition. “What do you want? Padilla, what does he want?”

  “You’re wanted on the telephone, Colonel. Can you make it all right?”

  Padilla helped him across the room.

  Ferguson sat on the bed and lifted the receiver to his ear. He was naked to the waist, goose-pimpled and white except for the iron-gray hair matted on his chest. He listened with his eyes half shut and his face growing longer and slacker. I would have supposed he was passing out again if he hadn’t said, several times, “Yes,” and finally: “Yes, I will. You can depend on that. I’m sorry we didn’t make contact until now.”

  He replaced the receiver, fumblingly, and stood up. He looked at Padilla, then at me, from under heavy eyelids. “Make me some coffee, will you, Padilla?”

  “Sure.” Padilla trotted cheerfully out of the room.

  Ferguson turned to me. “Are you an FBI man?”

  “Nothing like that. I’m an attorney. William Gunnarson is my name.”

  “You answered the telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was said to you?”

  “The man who called said he wanted to speak to you. In a hurry.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I’m certain.”

  His tone was insulting, but I went on humoring him. I didn’t know how sober he was, or how rational.

  “And you’re not an officer of the law?”

  “In a sense, I am. I’m an officer of the court, but enforcement is not my business. What’s this all about, Colonel?”

  “It’s a personal matter,” he said shortly. “May I ask what you’re doing in my wife’s room?”

  “I helped Pa
dilla to bring you home from the Foothill Club. You were out.”

  “I see. Thank you. Now do you mind leaving?”

  “When Tony Padilla is ready. We used your car.”

  “I see. Thank you again, Mr. Gunnarson.”

  He’d lost interest in me. His eyes moved restlessly around the walls. He uttered one word in a tearing voice: “Holly.” Then he said: “A fine time to get stinking drunk.”

  He walked across the room to a dressing table, and leaned to examine his face in the mirror above it. The sight of his face must have displeased him. He smashed the mirror with one blow of his fist.

  “Knock it off,” I said in my sergeant voice.

  He turned, and answered meekly enough. “You’re right. This is no time for childishness.”

  Padilla looked through the doorway. “More trouble?”

  “No trouble,” Ferguson said. “I merely shattered a mirror. I’ll buy my wife another in the morning. How about that coffee, Tony?”

  “Coming right up. You better put on something dry, Colonel. You don’t want to catch pneumonia.”

  Padilla seemed to be fond of the man. I could hardly share his feeling, and yet I stayed around. The phone call, and Ferguson’s reaction to it, puzzled me. It had left the atmosphere heavy and charged.

  Padilla served coffee in the living room. It was a huge room with windows on two sides, and teak paneling in a faintly nautical style. The lap of the surf below, the intermittent sweep of the lighthouse beam, contributed to the illusion that we were in the glassed-in deckhouse of a ship.

  Ferguson drank about a quart of coffee. As the effects of alcohol wore off, he seemed to grow constantly more tense. Wrapped in a terrycloth robe, he bore a queer resemblance to a Himalayan holy man on the verge of having a mystical experience.

  He finally rose and went into another room. I could see through the archway, when he switched on the light, that it contained a white concert grand piano and a draped harp. A photograph of a woman, framed in silver, stood on the piano.

  Ferguson picked it up and studied it. He clasped it to his chest. A paroxysm went through him, making his ugly face uglier. He looked as if he was weeping, dry-eyed, in silence.

  “Poor guy,” Padilla said.