The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  Keith Sterling, the D.A., was sitting at the prosecution table on the right, his iron-gray head bent over a stack of papers. The judge called him up to the bench, and resumed his upright posture.

  I went on: “It seems unjust to me that Ella Barker should have to remain in jail. I’m strongly convinced that her involvement in these burglaries was innocent. The stolen property she received came to her as a gift. Her only real fault was gullibility, which hardly seems grounds for punishment.”

  “She isn’t being punished,” Sterling said. “She’s simply being held for due disposition.”

  “The fact remains that she’s in jail.”

  “I set bail, Mr. Gunnarson,” the judge said.

  “But isn’t five thousand dollars rather high?”

  “Not in our opinion,” Sterling said. “It’s a serious crime she’s charged with.”

  “I mean it’s high in the sense that she can’t possibly make it. She has no family, no savings, no property-”

  The judge cut me short: “I don’t have time to hear further argument now.” He hitched his black robe up with one shoulder. The clerk, who had been watching for this signal, called court back into session.

  Sterling said to me in an undertone: “Take it up with Joe Reach, Bill. I think he wants to talk to you, anyway.”

  Joe was in his office on the second floor of the courthouse. He sat behind a desk littered with papers and law books with markers in them. He was the D.A.’s wheelhorse, and the Barker case would be one of a score that he was currently concerned with.

  He let me wait for a minute, then gave me the up-from-under look that he used on hostile witnesses. “Rough night, Bill? You look hungover.”

  “Not from drinking, that’s for sure. From thinking.”

  “Sit down. You still all roused up about the Barker girl? She must have a nest egg hidden away.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up. She’s broke. Five thousand dollars is high bail for a girl with no resources. A first offender who isn’t even guilty.”

  “So you keep saying. We differ. Judge Bennett set bail, anyway.”

  “I believe he’ll lower it if you people don’t object.”

  “But we do object.” Reach opened a drawer, produced a chocolate and almond bar, unwrapped it, broke it in two pieces, and handed me the smaller piece. “Here. For energy. We can’t have her jumping bail with murder in the picture. My advice to you is, leave it lay. Open up the question of bail, and you could get it raised.”

  “That sounds like persecution to me.”

  Reach munched at me ferociously. “I’m sorry you said that, Bill. She’s wormed her way into your sympathies, hasn’t she? Too bad. You’ve got to learn not to take these things so seriously.”

  “I take everything seriously. That’s why I don’t get along with frivolous people like you.”

  Reach looked pained. He was about as frivolous as the Supreme Court. “It strikes me I’m taking quite a lot from you this morning. Put the needle away, and do some more of your famous thinking. Try to look at the whole picture. Ella Barker’s boy-friend was the leading spirit in a burglary gang, and worse than that. But she won’t talk about him. She won’t co-operate in helping us find him.”

  “She’s co-operated fully, with all she knows. And incidentally, he wasn’t her boy-friend once she got a line on him.”

  “Why didn’t she come to us, then?”

  “She was afraid to. Nothing in law obliges people to run to you with everything they find out.” I heard what I said, and became obscurely aware that I was defending myself as well as Ella Barker.

  “She would have saved us all a lot of trouble, not to mention herself.”

  “So you’re punishing her.”

  “We’re not planning to give her a good citizenship award, that’s for sure.”

  “I say it’s cruel and unusual punishment-”

  “Save that for the courtroom.”

  “What courtroom? The calendar’s so full, she won’t be brought to trial for at least two weeks. Meantime she rots in jail.”

  “Is she willing to take a lie-detector test? That’s not just my question. The reporters are asking it.”

  “Since when are you letting the newspapers do your thinking for you?”

  “Don’t get warm now, Bill. This is an important case. It affects a lot of people in town, not just your one little client. If she could give us a lead to Gaines-”

  “All right. I’ll try her again. But I’m sure you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “I’m not sure about anything, Bill. You depend too much on preconceptions. Don’t. I’ve spent twenty years in this game, and people are always surprising me. Not only with their deviousness. With their goodness. Give Ella Barker a chance to surprise you, why don’t you?”

  “I said I’d see her again today. Let’s forget her now. There must be other potential leads to Larry Gaines. Didn’t he leave any traces in the place he rented?”

  “Not a vestige. He’s one of these men from Mars, which probably means he has a record, and ‘Larry Gaines’ is an alias. He took out a driving license last fall, under the name of Gaines, and refused to give the Bureau people his thumbprint.”

  “What kind of a car does he drive?”

  “Late-model Plymouth, green tudor. I’m giving you a lot of information. When do I get some back?”

  “Now. Gaines registered at Buenavista College last September. That means they’ll have his high-school transcript.”

  “They don’t, though. Wills was there this morning. Gaines registered provisionally, without a transcript. He said it would be along any day, but it never arrived. So they kicked him out.”

  “What was he going to study?”

  “Theater arts,” Reach said. “He’s an actor, all right.”

  chapter 12

  “HE TOLD ME HE ALWAYS wanted to be an actor,” Ella said. “Something big, but mainly an actor. I guess he’d make a good one.”

  Her tone was sardonic. She was finding her armor, hardening her personality against life in jail. Her eyes were sharp as the edges of broken dreams.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Look how he took me in. The great lover. When he gave me that diamond ring, that watch, I thought he’d bought them for me. Honest to God.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Nobody else around here does. Even the other girls think I’m holding out. They keep asking me questions about Larry, like I was really close to him, and knew all about him. I been asked so many questions, my head spins. I wake up in the middle of the night, and hear voices asking me questions. I’m going to go nuts if I don’t get out of here.”

  “If we can get our hands on Gaines, it’s going to help you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “That’s the question. It’s why I’m bothering you again.”

  “You’re not bothering me. It’s nice to see a friendly face, somebody I can talk to. I don’t mean to be snippy about the other girls, but they’re not my type at all. You ought to hear the way they talk about men.”

  “It’ll all wash out of your mind when you get out of here. You’re a nurse. Think of it as a sickness you have to go through.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I waited a minute, while her face composed itself. Outside the barred window the courthouse tower was stark white in the morning sun. On the balcony that encircled it, below the clock, a pair of tourists were looking out over the city. They leaned on the iron railing, a young man, and a young woman in a light blue dress and hat. It was the kind of dress and hat brides wore on honeymoons.

  Ella had followed my look. “Lucky people.”

  “You’ll be free soon. Your luck is all ahead of you.”

  “Let’s hope so. You’re nice to me, Mr. Gunnarson. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” She gave me a dim smile, her first.

  “You should smile more often. Your smile is your best feature.”

  It was a broad compliment, but no
t too broad for the occasion. She really smiled this time, and dropped five years. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Getting back to Gaines, if you can bear to-did he talk much about acting?”

  “No, just once or twice. He mentioned that he did some acting.”

  “Where?”

  “I think in high school.”

  “Did he say where he went to high school? Think hard.”

  Dutifully, she wrinkled up her forehead. “No,” she said after a pause, “he never mentioned that. He never told me anything about his past life.”

  “Did he talk about his friends?”

  “Just Broadman. He thought Broadman was a slob.”

  “Did he ever say anything about actors or actresses?”

  “No. He never even took me to the movies.” She added bitterly: “I guess he was saving his money for the blonde.”

  “What blonde do you mean?”

  “The one I caught him with, out in the canyon. I guess he was going with her all the time.”

  “All what time?”

  “When I thought he was my boy-friend, and maybe we’d get married, and everything. It’s really her he was interested in, probably.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “What she said.”

  “I didn’t know you ever talked to her. How often did you see her?”

  “Only the once-the time I told you about. When she was sitting there in Larry’s kimono. I remember exactly what she said, it made me feel so small. She laughed at me, and she said: ‘You little tomcat’-talking to Larry-‘have you been playing games behind my back?’ She said: ‘I’m not flattered by your choice of a-choice of a substitute,’ something like that.”

  A slow blush mounted from Ella’s neck to her cheeks. It softened her mouth, and then her eyes. She said in an unsteady voice that ranged up and down the register: “God, I made a fool of myself with that Gaines, didn’t I?”

  “Everybody’s entitled to one big mistake. You could have come out of it worse.”

  “Yeah, if he really had married me. I see that now. And you know, what you were saying about a sickness, it applies to me and him. He was like a sickness I had-a sickness pretending to be something else. All my dreams coming true in one handsome package. I knew it couldn’t be real, I just wanted it to be, so bad.”

  “Did he ever give you presents, besides the watch and the ring?”

  “No. He gave me flowers once. One flower, a gardenia. He said that it would be our flower. That was the night he let me in on the big robbery plan. Thank God I didn’t go for that, anyway.”

  “Do you have anything of his? Clothes, for example, that he may have left with you?”

  “What do you think I am? He never took off his clothes in my apartment!”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything wrong, Miss Barker. I thought you might have something personal of his. Some keepsake.”

  “No, all I had was the ring, and I sold that. I forgot about the watch.” She wrinkled up her brow again. “There’s something else I forgot. It doesn’t have any value, though. It’s just an old sharkskin wallet.”

  “Larry’s wallet?”

  “Yeah. I noticed one night when I gave him my picture-one of those wallet-sized pictures. I noticed that his wallet was all worn out. So I went downtown next day and bought him a new one, an alligator wallet. It cost me twenty dollars, with the tax. I gave it to him next time I saw him. He liked it. He took all his money and stuff out of the old one, and he was going to throw the old one away. I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Did he leave anything in the wallet?”

  “I don’t think so. But wait a minute. There was a piece of paper in the back compartment-something cut out of a newspaper.”

  “What newspaper?”

  “It didn’t say. It was just a piece cut out of the middle of a page.”

  “What was the piece about?”

  “A show, some kind of a show. I think it was a school play.”

  “Did you ever ask Larry about it?”

  “No. He would have thought I was silly, keeping it.”

  “You kept the clipping?”

  “Yeah, I tucked it back inside and kept it. You’d think it was money or something. How silly can a girl get?”

  “Do you still have it?”

  She nodded. “I forgot to throw it out. It’s in my apartment.”

  “Where in your apartment?”

  “In the bureau, the top drawer of the bureau in the bedroom. I have a little redwood chest I call my treasure chest. I put it in there. Mrs. Cline will let you in.” She shook her head. “I hate to think what her opinion of me must be.”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t changed. Do I need a key to get into this treasure chest?”

  “Yeah, it’s locked. But I don’t know where the key is. I must have lost it. It doesn’t matter, though. Break it open. I can get another.”

  She raised her head and looked at me levelly with soft, bright eyes.

  Mrs. Cline stood breathing on my shoulder and watched me open the bureau drawer. She was a short, egg-shaped woman wearing an upside-down nest of gray hair. She had snappy, suspicious eyes, a generous mouth, and an air of frustrated decency. Without saying anything about it, she left me in no doubt that my presence in Ella’s bedchamber was a violation of feminine privacy.

  I lifted out the little redwood chest. It had brass corners and a brass lock.

  “Do you have a key for it?” Mrs. Cline said.

  “No. Ella lost it. She authorized me to break it open.”

  “That would be a pity. She’s had it ever since high school. Here, let me see.”

  She clamped the box between her thick arm and her thicker chest, plucked an old-fashioned steel hairpin from her head, and went to work on the lock. It came open.

  “You’d make a good burglar, Mrs. Cline.”

  “That isn’t funny, young man, under the circumstances. But then I know you lawyers get very callous. We knew lawyers. Cline was an accountant, he worked with lawyers in Portland, Oregon. Portland, Oregon, was our home. But after his demise, I couldn’t bear to stay on in the old town. Every building, every street corner, had its memory. So I said to myself, it’s time to start a new chapter.”

  She stopped, when I was expecting her to go on. But that was all. She had told me her life story.

  The contents of the treasure box told Ella’s life story, in fragments of another language: a Valentine from a boy named Chris who had written in brackets under his signature: “Your nice”; a grammar-school report card in which Ella was praised for obedience and neatness, and gently chided for lack of leadership; snapshots of girls of high-school age, including Ella, and one or two boys; an enlarged photograph of three people: a smiling man in a boiler-plate blue suit and a straw hat, a wistful woman who looked like an older version of Ella, and a small girl in a starchy dress who was her younger self, with the same hopeful dark eyes. There was a high-school graduation program in which her name was listed, a dance program almost full of young men’s names, a black-bordered card announcing the death of Asa Barker, and a gold-bordered card announcing Ella Barker’s graduation from nursing school.

  Larry Gaines was represented by a brown gardenia and a worn sharkskin wallet.

  I opened the back compartment of the wallet and found a tired old clipping, which was beginning to come apart at the folds. As Ella had said, it seemed to be a review of a high-school play. Part of it, including the headline and byline, was missing. The rest of it said:

  Dorothy Drennan was her usual charming self in the role of ingenue. Claire Zanella and Marguerite Wood were charming as the bride’s-maids. Stephen Roche and Hilda Dotery performed excellently as the comic servant couple and had the large audience of friends and parents in stitches, as did Frank Treco and Walter Van Horn with their usual live-wire antics.

  The surprise of the evening was Harry Haines in the demanding role of Jack Treloar. Harry is a newcomer to local high-school theatrics, and impressed us all wit
h his talent. Also to be commended are Sheila Wood and Mesa McNab, who performed well in supporting roles, as did Jimmie Spence. The play itself left something to be desired in the writing department, but our young Thespians made it an enjoyable evening for all concerned.

  The sentences about Harry Haines had been underlined in pencil. For a boy of that name, I thought, Larry Gaines would be a natural alias. I turned the clipping over. The other side carried a news-service story about Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the Presidency, late in the fall of 1952. I folded the clipping carefully, replaced it in the wallet, and dropped the wallet in my jacket pocket.

  Mrs. Cline had picked up the Valentine, and was studying it. “Ella is a nice girl-one of the best I ever had in my apartment building. It’s a pity she had to get into trouble.”

  “Her only crime was lack of judgment. They don’t keep people in jail for showing poor judgment.”

  “You mean she really isn’t guilty?”

  “I’m convinced she isn’t.”

  “The police are convinced she is.”

  “They always are, when they arrest people. It takes more than that to make them guilty.”

  “But Lieutenant Wills showed me the watch that was stolen.”

  “Ella didn’t know it was stolen.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so. Stolen property doesn’t fit in with my idea of Ella.”

  “What’s your idea of Ella?”

  “I’ve always considered her a good, sound country girl-no saint, of course, but a girl that you can count on. She nursed me through a bad spell last summer, when my blood pressure was acting up, and she’d never take a cent for it. There aren’t many like that any more. I tried to make it up to her when she was sick in the winter, but then I’m not a nurse. I was worried about her the way she lay around, with those big brown eyes of hers.”

  “When was this?”

  “In January. She cried through most of that month. The doctor said there was nothing the matter with her physically, but she couldn’t seem to summon up the energy to go to work. That was when she got so far behind. I lent her the money to go up north for a few days, the beginning of February-that seemed to snap her out of it.”