The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  Padilla’s embarrassment had become acute. “That’s the way they talk when they get roused up.”

  Granada came out of the washroom. He groaned when he saw the woman sitting on the floor with head hidden and thighs glaring. He pointed his band-aided forefinger at her. “Get her out of here before I book her.”

  She wouldn’t move for me. I was a lawyer, subtler than policemen, as treacherous as doctors. Padilla brushed me aside politely. He lifted and wheedled her up to her feet, coaxed and propelled her into the corridor and along its gauntlet of official doors.

  “What happened?” the desk sergeant asked me.

  “She bit Granada.”

  “Did she, now?”

  chapter 9

  THE DOOR OF OUR APARTMENT opened directly into the living room. Sally was curled up asleep in the corner of the chesterfield. She had on the quilted bathrobe which I had given her for her twenty-third birthday. Her brushed hair shone like gold in the dim light of the turned-down lamp.

  I stood and looked at her. She stirred in her sleep, and made a small quiet noise. It reminded me of an infant’s gurgle. Except for the pearlike curve of her body, and the swelling breasts that threatened to burst her robe, she looked about twelve. I was kind of glad she wasn’t.

  I tiptoed into the kitchen, turned on the fluorescent light over the stove, and peered into the oven. It was still warm, though the gas had been turned off. My dinner was there, in a pyrex dish with a cover. I ate it off the sinkboard, standing up. The china clock looked down at me from the wall, pointing its hands accusingly at twelve midnight.

  I heard Sally’s slippered feet cross the living room.

  “So you finally decided to come home,” she said from the doorway.

  “Wait. The condemned man has the right to a last meal. It’s not precisely a legal right, perhaps, but it’s recognized by long tradition.” I put another piece of lamb in my mouth and smiled at her, munching.

  She didn’t smile back. “I hope it chokes you.”

  “On the contrary, it’s delicious.”

  “You are a liar, Bill Gunnarson. It’s dry as a bone. I can actually hear it crunching. And after all the trouble I went to with that dinner. Honestly, if I wasn’t so mad, I could cry.”

  “I’m sorry. It really is delicious, though. Have a slice.”

  “I couldn’t possibly eat anything,” she said distantly. “Don’t worry. I’ve had my dinner. I waited until after nine o’clock, and then I broke down and ate by myself. While you were out rampaging.”

  “Rampaging isn’t exactly the word.”

  “Give me a better one.”

  “Moiling and toiling. Chasing the buck. Seeking the bubble reputation.”

  “Please don’t try to be amusing. You’re about as funny as a crutch.”

  This stung me to retort that she could carry on for both of us in the wit department, what with her brilliant similes like the one about the crutch. I requested her permission to quote it to friends.

  She gave me a glazed and shiny look which reminded me of the china clock on the wall. “Maybe I can’t compete with movie actresses. I’m getting big and fat and physically repugnant. It’s no wonder you go off rampaging and leave me in the lurch.”

  “You’re not fat and repugnant. I wasn’t rampaging. I’ve never met a movie actress in my life. I didn’t leave you in the lurch.”

  “It felt like the lurch to me. You didn’t even telephone.”

  “I know. I tried, but things kept getting in the way.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Things and people,” I said vaguely.

  “What people? Who were you with?”

  “Wait a minute, Sally. We don’t ask that question, remember?”

  “I always tell you where I go, and who with, and everything.”

  “If I told you, I’d be a lousy lawyer.”

  “You can’t use your profession to cover up every time.”

  “Cover up what?”

  “Your failure as a husband,” she said shinily. “When a man deliberately avoids his own home the way you do, it’s easy enough to understand what it means. You’re essentially unmarried-a perennial bachelor. You don’t want the responsibility of a wife and family. No wonder you get fixated on your clients. It’s a safe relationship, an ego-feeding activity, which makes no demands on your essential self.”

  “That’s quite a mouthful,” I said. “What have you been reading?”

  “I am perfectly capable of observing the state of my own marriage and drawing the necessary conclusions. This marriage is in grave danger, Bill.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I have never been more serious in my life. Do you know what you are, Bill Gunnarson? You’re nothing but a profession that walks like a man. When I tried to tell you on the phone about my good report from Dr. Trench, you weren’t even interested. You don’t even care about Bill Gunnarson, Jr.”

  “I care about him very much.”

  “You may think you do, but you don’t. You spend days and weeks of your good time trying to save criminals from going to jail where they belong. But when I tell you that Bill Gunnarson, Jr., is going to have to have a room of his own, you fob me off with empty promises.”

  “My promises are not empty. I told you we’re going to find a bigger place, and we’re going to.”

  “When? After all the burglars and murderers are taken care of? When Bill Gunnarson, Jr., is an old man with a long gray beard?”

  “For God’s sake, Sally, he isn’t even born yet.”

  “How dare you swear at me?”

  She looked around her kitchen as if for the last time. Her glance went over my head, parting my hair like a stainless steel comb. She turned grandly and went out. Her hip bumped the door frame.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I wolfed the rest of my dinner, masticating it thoroughly. It was a good excuse for grinding my teeth.

  Ten minutes later, after a hot shower not followed by a cold one, I climbed into bed behind her. Sally lay with her face to the wall. I put my hand in the soft fold of her waist. She pretended to be dead.

  I pushed my hand farther around her. Her skin was as smooth as milk. “I’m sorry, I should have phoned you. I got carried away by the case.”

  “It must be some case,” she answered after a while. “I was worried about you. The murder was in the paper. So I thought I’d calm myself down by reading that book on Successful Marriage-the one that Mother sent me. There’s a chapter in it that was very upsetting.”

  “About perennial bachelors?”

  She snorted slightly. “You’re not a perennial bachelor, are you, Bill? You want to be married to me and everything?”

  “And everything.”

  She turned toward me, but not all the way around. “I know, there hasn’t been much everything lately.”

  “I can wait for everything.”

  “And you don’t mind? The book says this is a bad time for men, because they’re so passionate. Is it a bad time for you?”

  “It’s a wonderful time.” I slid my hand down her belly. She was radiant even in darkness.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “Ouch what?”

  “Feel.”

  She moved my hand, and I could feel him kicking. He might turn out to be a her, of course, but the kicks felt like masculine kicks to me.

  Sally’s breathing slowed down into sleep. I turned over to go to sleep myself. The telephone rang like an alarm set off by my movement. I levitated, dropped to the floor running on tiptoe, and got to the damn thing before it could ring again.

  A muffled voice said: “Is that Gunnarson? William Gunnarson the lawyer?”

  “This is Gunnarson, and I’m an attorney.”

  “You want to go on being one?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  But I understood. There was a threat in the words, underlined by soft menace in the voice. I thought it was the same man who had called Ferguson, but I co
uldn’t be sure. The voice was blurred, as though the man at the other end of the line was talking through a mask. “You want to go on living, don’t you, Gunnarson?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Just a well-wisher.” He snickered. “If you do want to go on living, you better drop the case you’re on, and I mean any part of it.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You better give that some thought. You have a wife, I hear, and I hear she’s pregnant. You wouldn’t want her to take a bad fall or anything. So forget about Holly May and her little friends. You got that, Mr. Gunnarson?”

  I didn’t answer. The anger in my head was like scalding ice. I slammed the receiver down. The fraction of a second later I regretted the action, and picked it up again. There was nothing to be heard but the dial tone, the voice of idiot space. I laid the receiver down for the second time, more gently.

  But the bedroom light was on, and Sally was standing at the bedroom door.

  “What on earth was that, Bill?”

  I tried to recall the exact words I had spoken. I’d said too much to pretend that it was a wrong number.

  “Some drunk. He seems to have a grudge against someone.”

  “Against you?”

  “No. Not against me. Against everybody.”

  “You told him to go to hell.”

  “You would have, too, if you’d heard him.”

  “He upset you, didn’t he, William?”

  “I don’t like my sleep to be interrupted by maniacs.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing repeatable. Gibberish.”

  She accepted my explanation, at least for the present. We went back to bed, and she dropped off again like a lamb. I lay awake for a long time beside her quiet breathing.

  We had been married for nearly three years; tonight for the first time I was fully aware of her preciousness to me. But I was more determined than ever to stick with the case and do my duty in it. The problem was to know where my duty lay.

  Blue dawn was at the window before I went to sleep. The Perrys’ radio woke me at seven o’clock. It nearly always did. They were a couple of schoolteachers who lived on schedule for the purpose of improving themselves. Their morning schedule began with setting-up exercises.

  I flopped around on my side of the bed for a while, trying to shut out the announcer’s voice blaring through the wallboard. Finally I got up with that stiff gray insomniac feeling on my face. Sally went on sleeping like one of the seven sleepers.

  Since she was sleeping for two, I dressed quietly and went downtown for breakfast. I bought a morning paper on the way. The front page carried a picture of Donato, a huddled figure with a shock of black Indian hair sticking out from under the sheet that covered him.

  While I was waiting for my bacon and eggs, I read the accompanying news story. Granada was praised for his courage and marksmanship, and given credit for solving the series of burglaries. The story implied that the gang had other members besides Donato, but none of them was named, not even Gaines. I assumed that Wills was holding back, and had persuaded the local paper to go along.

  The waitress brought my breakfast. The eggs stared up from the plate like wide yellow eyes. The toast had a gunpowder flavor. I caught myself sitting tensely in the booth like a condemned criminal waiting for the executioner to throw the switch.

  It wasn’t purely empathy with Donato: I doubt that there’s such a feeling as pure empathy. For no clear reason, I’d put myself in the position of withholding information about a major crime. And the man whose request I was honoring wasn’t even a client.

  I sat there trying to convince myself that Ferguson had been having alcoholic delusions about his wife. Or that the whole thing was a publicity hoax. Movie actresses didn’t get themselves kidnapped in Buenavista. Most of our crimes were done in the lower town, cheap fraud or senseless violence. But my mind couldn’t evade the connection between the Broadman killing and the Ferguson case. And I knew in my bowels that the threatening call at midnight had been no hoax.

  I left the ugly eggs on my plate and went to the police station. Wills wasn’t in yet, but the sergeant on duty at the desk assured me that he would have the men in the patrol cars keep an eye on my home. By the time I had walked the several blocks to the office, past the familiar faces of the downtown buildings, I felt better. Nothing could happen to Sally in Buenavista.

  My office was one of a suite of two, with an anteroom between, on the second floor of an old mustard-colored stucco court behind the post office. In the middle of the imitation flagstone courtyard there was a fountain, a dry concrete concavity inhabited by a lead dolphin which had long since emitted its last watery gasp.

  I shared the suite and Mrs. Weinstein with another attorney, a middle-aged man named Barney Millrace who specialized in tax and probate work. We were not partners. I was on my way up, I hoped; Barney Millrace was on his way down, I feared. He was a quiet drinker, so quiet that I sometimes forgot about him for days.

  Bella Weinstein never let me forget her. She was a widow, fortyish, dark, and intense, who had appointed herself my personal goad. She looked up from her desk when I walked into the anteroom. Fixing me with her eye, she said in a congratulatory way: “You’re early this morning, Mr. Gunnarson.”

  “That’s because I’ve been up all night. Rampaging and carousing.”

  “I bet. You have an appointment at nine-fifteen with Mrs. Al Stabile. I think she wants a divorce again.”

  “I’ll head her off. Did she say why?”

  “She didn’t go into the gory details. But I gather Stabile’s been rampaging and carousing again. You see where it leads. Also, a man named Padilla tried to reach you.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just a few minutes. He left a number. Shall I call him back?”

  “Right away, yes. I’ll take it inside.”

  I closed the door of my office and sat down at the ancient golden-oak roll-top desk which I had imported at great expense from the Pennsylvania town where I was born. My father had willed it to me, along with the small law library which took up most of the shelves along one wall.

  It’s oddly pleasing to sit at your father’s desk. Diminishing, too. It’s a long time before you begin to feel that you’re up to it. I was beginning.

  Padilla was on the line when I lifted the receiver. “Mr. Gunnarson? I’m out at Colonel Ferguson’s. He says I got to make this fast.”

  “What is it, Tony?”

  “I don’t want to go into it over the phone. Can you come out here?”

  “Why don’t you come to my office?”

  “I would, but I hate to leave the Colonel. He needs somebody to hold his hand.”

  “The hell I do,” I heard Ferguson say. Then his voice roared in my ear: “Get off the line!”

  I got off the line, and started out through the anteroom. Mrs. Weinstein detained me with one of her complex looks; it combined satire, pathos, and despair.

  “Are you going out, Mr. Gunnarson?” she said in her polite, furious monotone.

  “Yes. Out.”

  “But Mrs. Stabile will be here in a few minutes. What can I say to her?”

  “Tell her I’ll see her later.”

  “She’ll go to another lawyer.”

  “No, she won’t. Stabile won’t let her.”

  chapter 10

  FERGUSON’S HOUSE WAS IMPRESSIVE by daylight, a green and gray modern structure of stone and wood and glass, distributed in unobtrusive low shapes which blended with the landscape and the seascape.

  The door opened as my car entered the turnaround. Colonel Ferguson came out, trailed by Padilla. Padilla looked a little soiled and sallow, but he managed a smile. Ferguson was grimly unsmiling. The lines in his face were deep and inflexible. Heavy beard, jet black and pure white mixed, sprouted around the scab on his chin.

  He came up to my car. “What in hell do you want?”

  “I’m naturally worried about your wife-”

  “It�
��s my affair. I’m handling it.”

  I got out. “It’s my affair, too, whether I like it or not. You can’t expect me simply to sit by.”

  “It’s what I have to do.”

  “You haven’t had any further messages?”

  “No. I’ll tell you this, though it’s none of your business. I’ve been in touch with the manager of the bank. They’ll have the money ready for me.”

  “Since you’ve gone that far, don’t you think you should take the further step of going to the authorities?”

  He bristled. “And get Holly killed?”

  “You can go to them on the quiet, without any fanfare.”

  “What good will that do, if her abductors have a pipeline to the police?”

  “I don’t believe they have. They’re trying to scare you, paralyze you so you won’t act. I know the local police, as I told you last night. They’re a decent bunch.”

  Padilla looked uneasy. I shared his feeling, to some extent, but suppressed it. Ferguson was listening to me, his long jaw calipered between thumb and fingers. I noticed that the nail of his thumb was bitten down to the raw.

  “I’m taking no chances,” he said.

  “You may be taking the worst possible chance.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Your wife may be dead now.”

  I’d meant to shock him, but he was appalled by the thought. His jaw gaped, showing his lower teeth. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “She’s dead, is she? They found her dead?”

  “No. But it could happen, that they should find her dead.”

  “Why? I intend to pay them the money. All they want is the money. Why should they harm her? The money means nothing to me-”

  I cut him short. “There’s a good chance that you’ll pay your money and still not see her again. Do you understand that, Ferguson? Once they’ve got the money, there’s no advantage to them in returning her to you. No advantage, and a great deal of risk.”

  “They wouldn’t take the money and kill her anyway.”

  “They’re killers, some of them at least. She’s in danger every hour she’s with them.”