The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  “Does she owe you any money?”

  “Not a cent. She’s always been honest in our financial transactions. When she was behind for a while then, it really bothered her.”

  “If this case comes to trial-I don’t think it will, but if it should-would you be willing to testify to Ella’s good character?”

  “Yes, I would. And I’m not the only one. Her friends have been phoning her from the hospital-nurses and head nurses and even a doctor. They want to know if they can visit her in-jail.” She wrinkled her nose at the word. “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.”

  “Wait a day or two, Mrs. Cline. I’m trying to get her out. The trouble is, it’s going to cost money.”

  Something descended over her face, like a hard transparent glaze. “How much do you plan to charge?”

  “It isn’t money for me. It’s the bail. I haven’t been able to get it reduced.”

  “It’s five thousand dollars, isn’t it?” She made a clicking noise between tongue and teeth, which had the effect of dissolving the hard glaze. “I don’t possess anything like that kind of money.”

  “Five hundred dollars would do it, if we used a bail bondsman. But you wouldn’t get the five hundred back.”

  She narrowed her eyes and imagined her bank balance with five hundred dollars lopped off. “They charge, don’t they?”

  “Ten per cent.”

  “Isn’t there any other way?”

  “You could put up property, but that doubles the amount. Ten thousand dollars’ worth of property covers five thousand dollars cash bail.”

  “Ten thousand dollars’ equity?”

  “That’s right. I have to warn you, though, if Ella skipped, you’d lose your property.”

  “I realize that.” She narrowed her eyes again and imagined herself without her property. “It’s quite a thing to think about, but I’ll think about it. Don’t tell Ella we discussed this, will you? I wouldn’t want her to build up any false hopes.”

  “I won’t say a word on the subject. I take it there’s nobody else. No well-heeled friends or relatives?”

  She shook her head. “She has no one. That’s the lack in her life, somebody to look after her. She’s all right at the hospital, taking orders. But when she’s out in the world on her own, she needs someone to look after her-a good man. But then who doesn’t?”

  “Men,” I said. “We need a good woman. I have one, incidentally.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  She followed me out of the frothy little bedroom, across the diminutive rattan-furnished sitting room, to the door. “About this other thing, I’ll think about it. Do you think she’d run out and lose my property for me?”

  “Only if she were frightened.”

  “Of going to prison?”

  “Of being killed,” I said. “Did you ever see this Larry Gaines-the young man who fouled her up?”

  “No, he never came here, to my knowledge. I did meet Mr. Broadman on one occasion. He seemed harmless enough. But you never can tell about people.”

  “Sometimes you can, Mrs. Cline.”

  She got the message, and her smile returned it.

  chapter 13

  I DROVE THE SHORT two blocks from Mrs. Cline’s house to the hospital. It was a five-story brick building which stood in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. The quiet seemed oddly ominous to me. I couldn’t help wondering if Larry Gaines had suborned other hospital employees after Ella Barker turned him down. There was something chilling about the idea of criminals infiltrating a hospital.

  Perhaps the police had the same idea. There was a police car in the hospital parking lot. On my way to the morgue in the basement, I ran into Wills and Granada, almost literally.

  They were coming up the fire stairs with their heads thrust forward in identical attitudes. Granada had always imitated Wills’s movements and gestures. Wills stopped below me, with an impatient look, as if I was deliberately blocking his way. “What brings you here?”

  “The Broadman killing. Do you have a minute?”

  “No. But what can I do for you?”

  Granada came up past me without a word. His bitten hand was hidden in his pocket. He stood at the head of the iron stairs, lips and chin thrust out, like a Janizary waiting for orders.

  “I’m very much interested in the results of the autopsy on Broadman. Are they in?”

  “Yeah, I just got a report from Dr. Simeon. Why are you so interested?”

  “You know why I’m interested in Broadman. He seemed in fair shape at first. I can’t understand why he died.”

  “He died of his injuries,” Wills said shortly. “What specific injuries did he have?”

  I was watching Granada. If he heard what I said, or cared, he gave no sign. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a match held in his left hand, and flicked the match down the stairwell.

  “Broadman had head injuries,” Wills was saying. “You get a delayed reaction with them sometimes.”

  “I see. Is it all right with you if I talk to the pathologist?”

  “Go ahead. Dr. Simeon will tell you the same thing.”

  Wills’s voice was coldly polite. “Joe Reach mentioned you were going to take another crack at Barker.”

  “Miss Barker,” I corrected him. “I had another interview with her this morning.”

  “Any result?”

  “I’d prefer to discuss that in private.”

  Wills glanced down the empty stairs, then up to the landing where Granada was waiting.

  “This is private, isn’t it?”

  “Not private enough.”

  “Granada’s my right-hand man.”

  “He isn’t mine.”

  Wills gave me a dour look, but he called up the stairs to Granada: “I’ll meet you outside, Pike.” Granada left, and Wills turned to me. “What’s all the mystery about?”

  “No mystery, Lieutenant, at least as far as I’m concerned. My client tells me Gaines is mixed up with a blonde woman.”

  “We got that from other sources. She know who the blonde woman is?”

  “No.” I was hyperconscious of the line of truth that I was trying to straddle. “She doesn’t. She only saw her once.”

  “And that’s your special private information?”

  “There’s this.” I produced my lone piece of evidence, the sharkskin wallet, and handed it to Wills.

  He looked at it glumly. “What is this supposed to signify?”

  “It belonged to Gaines. Ella Barker kept it as a memento.”

  “How touching.” Wills flipped it open, and sniffed at it disparagingly. “It stinks of perfume. Did she give it to you?”

  “I found it in her apartment. She told me where it was. The girl is doing her best to co-operate.”

  “She can do better than this. Did Joe Reach talk to you about a polygraph?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “Why dillydally around? People are dying.”

  “One of them died of a policeman’s bullets. The other one died in a manner that’s not yet established to my satisfaction.”

  “To your satisfaction, for God’s sake.” Wills seldom swore. “Who do you think you are?”

  “An attorney trying to protect a client from harassment.”

  Wills rounded his mouth and blew out a gust of air. “Words. Big empty words. That’s all they are, and they make me sick to my stomach. What the hell is this all about? Are you trying to stick a knife in Granada’s back, or what?”

  “You reamed him out last night after the Donato shooting. Why?”

  “That’s between him and I. Not,” he added, “that it’s any big secret. It would have helped if Donato had lived to talk. He didn’t, so that’s that. Granada did his duty as he saw it.”

  “Do you always let him interpret his duties as he sees them?”

  Wills said stubbornly: “Pike Granada is a good officer. I’d rather have a hood like Donato dead, ten times over, than him.”

  “A
re you aware of his prior relations with Donato?”

  “Yes, I’m aware of it,” Wills said on a rising note. “Pike’s lived here all his life, he knows everybody in town, it’s one of his values to us.”

  “How well did he know Broadman?”

  “Pretty well, he worked the pawnshop detail-”

  The sentence dwindled off. Wills’s face took on the appearance of pitted silver. Then it darkened like silver tarnishing all in a moment. He said in his chest: “What is this?”

  “Granada had his hands on Broadman yesterday. Broadman was in fair shape before that. After that he died, very suddenly.”

  “Donato killed Broadman, you know that.”

  “Donato will never be able to deny it.”

  Wills looked at me in silence. The silence was stitched and woven through by the noises of the hospital, the quiet footsteps of nurses, wisps of voices, the closing of a door.

  “I don’t like this, Mr. Gunnarson. You’re running loose at the mouth, and I don’t like it. Granada’s one of my best men. What you’re saying is libel.”

  “You’re his superior. Who else would I communicate my suspicions to?”

  “You better not take ’em anywhere else, that’s for sure.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I don’t mean it that way. You want my opinion, you’ve gone off the deep end. You ought to be more careful what you say.”

  “Can’t you control Granada?”

  I spoke the words in anger, and regretted them as soon as they were out. The pain in my eyes was intense, and jabbing deeper into my head. The worst of it was, I couldn’t tell if it was the pain of knowledge or ignorance.

  Wills let out an inarticulate sound, and made a reflex motion, striking the wall with the back of his hand. He became aware of the wallet he was holding.

  “Here. This is worthless.”

  Perhaps he meant to hand it to me, but it flew from his hand and slid down the iron stairs. I went down after it, and he went up after Granada. The fire door closed behind him.

  Dr. Simeon was a middle-aging man with traces of a dedicated look. His office was a corner room with small windows set high in the wall, and fluorescent lighting which was probably never turned off. Under it, the doctor was as pale as one of his own cadavers.

  “The results of a head injury can be surprising,” he said. “There’s often a delayed reaction, as I’ve just been telling Lieutenant Wills. It results from hemorrhaging, and the formation of a blood clot.”

  “Did you find a blood clot?”

  “No, I didn’t. And there was no actual fracture of the skull.” He raised a finicky, nicotine-stained hand and drummed a few dull bars on the front of his own skull. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking of taking another whack at him.”

  “You mean you haven’t done a complete post-mortem?”

  “It was as complete as seemed called for. I found some cerebral hemorrhaging, probably enough to account for death.” He was hedging.

  “You’re not satisfied that he died of his head injuries, are you?”

  “Not entirely. I’ve seen people walking around with equally serious injuries. Not,” he added dryly, “that I recommend walking around regardless as therapy for head injuries.”

  “What killed him if they didn’t? Was he strangled?”

  “I’ve seen no indications to that effect. There are nearly always external marks, broken veins under the skin. I’ve found no such marks outside, and nothing in the internal neck structures.”

  “Are you sure?”

  It was a poor question. The pathologist gave me a quick bright look. I had injured him in his professional pride.

  “You can have a look at the body yourself if you like.”

  It lay open on a table in the next room. I tried, but I couldn’t go near it. I’d softened up considerably since Korea. A chill seemed to emanate from the body. I realized that the impression was fantastic: the room was simply cold. But I couldn’t go near Broadman.

  Simeon regarded me with satisfaction. “I’m going to go into the thoracic cavity. I’ll let you know if I discover anything, Mr. Gunnarson.”

  I hardly heard him. Through an archway half obscured by rubberized curtains, I could see the wall of drawers in the adjoining room. One of the drawers was partly open. An old woman in black sat on a stool beside it, her head bowed and hooded by a shawl.

  Simeon passed through the archway and touched her shoulder gently. “You mustn’t stay here in this chill, Mrs. Donato. You’ll catch cold.”

  I thought it was Gus Donato’s mother. Then she turned up her face, with her eyes like black blisters. It was Donato’s widow, Secundina.

  “I hope I catch double ammonia and die,” she said.

  “That doesn’t make sense. Go home now and get some rest, and you’ll feel better.”

  “I can’t sleep. My head goes round in circles.”

  “I’ll give you a sleeping prescription. You can fill it at the hospital pharmacy.”

  “No. I wanna stay here. I got a right. I wanna stay here with Gus.”

  “I can’t permit you to. It isn’t healthy. Come into my office now,” Simeon said firmly. “I’ll give you that prescription.”

  “I got no money.”

  “I’ll make it no charge.”

  He grasped her upper arm and half lifted her from the stool. She went along with him on dragging feet.

  chapter 14

  I WAS WAITING OUTSIDE the hospital pharmacy when she emerged, blinking her eyes against the noon sun.

  “Mrs. Donato?”

  She didn’t know me immediately, just as I hadn’t known her. Close up, in the sunlight, I saw what the night and the morning had done to her. Her generation had changed. The looks and gestures of youth had dropped away. What remained was the heavy stolidity of middle age. Gravity pulled at her flesh, and the sun was cruel.

  “I’m Gunnarson the lawyer, Mrs. Donato. I was with Tony Padilla last night. Tony and I had a little talk this morning. He said you had some important information.”

  She let her face fall inert. Her whole body went stupid. “Tony must of been dreaming. I don’t know nothing.”

  “It had to do with your husband’s death,” I said. “And other matters. He said Gus didn’t kill Broadman.”

  “Don’t you say that.”

  Her fingers closed like pincers on my arm.

  She looked around her at the sunlit street corner. Some student nurses were waiting by the bus stop, twittering like white-breasted birds. Secundina’s circling glance seemed to press reality away. It formed a zone of strangeness, empty and cold, a vacuum in the sunlight into which darkness surged from the darkness in her head.

  I took her elbow and set her in motion. Her body moved slowly and reluctantly. We crossed the street to the bus stop on the diagonally opposite corner. An unoccupied concrete bench stood under a pepper tree. I persuaded her to sit down. The shadow of the pepper tree fell like cool lace on our faces.

  “Tony said that your husband didn’t kill Broadman.”

  “Did he?”

  “I gather that you think Granada did.”

  She stirred in her trance of sorrow. “What does it matter what I think? I can’t prove nothing.”

  “Maybe not, but other people can.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Dr. Simeon. The police.”

  “Don’t make me laugh. They like it the way it is. It’s all finished and done with.”

  “Not in my book it isn’t.”

  She regarded me with dull-eyed suspicion. “You’re a lawyer, ain’t you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I got no money, no way of getting none. My brother-in-law Manuel has money, but he is not interested. So there’s nothing in it for you, not a thing.”

  “I realize that. I’m simply trying to get at the truth.”

  “You running for something?”

  “I might at that, someday.”

  “Then go an
d run on somebody else’s time. I’m tired and sick. I wanna go home.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “No, thank you.”

  But she couldn’t maintain her aloofness. She began to speak in Spanish, and in a different voice which buzzed and crackled like fire. It was like the voice of another personality, in which her youth and her sex and her anger survived. Her body came alive, and her face changed its shape.

  I couldn’t understand a word. “Say it in English, Secundina.”

  “So you can run down to the courthouse and get me locked up?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She was silent for a minute, though her lips continued to move. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Information about the Broadman killing.”

  “I told it all to Tony. Get it from him.”

  “Is it true?”

  She flared up darkly. “You calling me a liar?”

  “No. But would you swear to it in court?”

  “I’d never get to court, you know that. He’d do it to me, too.”

  “Who would?”

  “Pike Granada. He always used to be hot for me. And when I wouldn’t let him, he got a down on me. He tried to force me one night out at the icehouse. Gus nicked him good with a knife. So he turned Gus in to the cops for stealing a car. They picked me up, too. When I got out of Juvie, Pike took it out on me.”

  “That was a long time ago, I thought.”

  “It started a long time ago. He’s been taking it out on me and Gus ever since. Last night the bastard had to go and shoot him.”

  “He was doing his duty, wasn’t he?”

  “He didn’t have to shoot him. Gus never carried no gun. He didn’t have the guts to carry a gun. He let Granada shoot him down like a dog.”

  “Why do you hate Granada so much?”

  “He’s a crooked cop. A cop is bad enough. A crooked cop is the worst animal there is.”

  “You still claim he murdered Broadman?”

  “Sure he did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hear things.”

  “Voices?”

  “I’m not nuts, if that’s what you think. I got a friend, a nurse’s aide in emergency. She’s been working in the hospital twenty years. She knows things the doctors never hear of. She said that Broadman was dead when they brought him in. She said he looked to her like he was strangulated. And Manuel saw Granada crawl into the ambulance with him. Granada was in there talking to Broadman, but Broadman wasn’t saying anything.” She gave me a sideways glance that was dark and heavy. It was like the knowledge of evil itself peering out between her eyelids. “You were there, weren’t you? You saw it happen.”