The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  “Here’s your problem. In 1952 the people listed here lived in a certain town. I hope in California. I don’t know the name of the town, and that’s what I’m trying to find out, the name of the town.”

  “You don’t have to repeat yourself.” Mrs. Weinstein was getting interested. “So what do I do?”

  “Take these names over to the telephone company and check them against their out-of-town directories-especially the smaller ones. See if you can find a directory that contains most of these names. Start with the towns near here.”

  She peered at the list. “What about the first names?”

  “First names are not important. When you find the right grouping of last names, or anything approximating it, I want you to make a note of the addresses.”

  “It may not be so easy. 1952 is a long time ago, the way people move around nowadays.”

  “I know that. But give it a good try. It really is important.”

  “You can count on me.”

  Ferguson was waiting outside the clinic, standing in the shadow of the cornice. His eyes still held their unseeing expression; he seemed oblivious to the life of the town around him. Though we spoke the same language, more or less, I realized how much of a foreigner he was in southern California. He was doubly alienated by what had been happening to him.

  I leaned across to open the car door. “How’s your nose?”

  “My nose is the least of my worries,” he said as he got in. “I spoke to that Dr. Trench of yours.”

  “What did he say?”

  “My wife is over two months pregnant. It’s probably Gaines’s child she’s carrying.”

  “Did Trench say that?”

  “Naturally I didn’t ask him. But it’s obvious. No wonder she decided to run away with him. No wonder they needed money. Now they have it.” He grinned fiercely at nothing in particular. “Why didn’t she simply ask me for the money? I’d have given it to her.”

  “Would you?”

  He opened his hands and looked down into them. “I might have killed her. When I went after them today, I intended to kill them both. Then I saw that truck ahead coming into the intersection. I had the idea, for a split second, that I would kill myself. My reflexes wouldn’t let me.” His right foot thumped the floor of the car. “That’s a shameful admission for a man to have to make.” He didn’t explain whether he meant his suicidal intent or his failure to carry it out.

  I said: “I have an appointment with Michael Speare at three o’clock. Do you want me to drop you at home? It’s more or less on the way. You can make your accident report later.”

  “Yes. I’d better get home, in case they try to get in touch.”

  I set the car in motion and turned down Main Street toward the highway. “Do you have any idea where they’ve gone?”

  “No, and I don’t want you getting ideas. I have no desire to see them tracked down. Is that understood? I want nothing done to either of them.”

  “That may be hard to manage.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He was back in conflict with himself, wrestling with the obscure guilt he felt. “I blame myself, you see, almost as much as I blame her. I should never have talked her into marrying me. She belonged to another generation, she needed younger blood. I was a dreaming fool even to imagine I had anything to offer to a young, beautiful woman.”

  “Your attitude is very unselfish, Ferguson. I’m not so sure it’s wise.”

  “That’s a private matter, between me and my-me and my conscience.”

  “It isn’t wholly private. Gaines is a known criminal, wanted by the police.” I said in response to his hot and wounded look: “No, I haven’t broken your confidence and gone to the police. Gaines is wanted on other charges, burglary for one. If your wife is taken with him, there’ll be hell to pay all round. And what you want isn’t going to affect the outcome much.”

  “I know I can’t assume responsibility for what happens to her.” His generosity had limits after all, which made me believe in it more. “I simply refuse to have anything to do with hunting them down myself.”

  “That needs more thought, perhaps. Your wife may be more innocent than you assume. Gaines seems to be a con artist-one of those people who can talk birds out of trees. He may have sold her some fantastic story-”

  “Holly is not a fool.”

  “Any woman can be, when she’s infatuated. I take it you’re morally certain they’re lovers?”

  “I’m afraid so. He’s been sniffing after her for months. I let it go on right under my nose.”

  “Did you ever catch them in flagrante delicto?”

  “Nothing like that. I was gone a lot of the time, though. They had no end of opportunities. He danced attendance on her like a gigolo. They spent whole evenings together, in my house, pretending to read plays.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was there myself more than once. On other occasions Holly told me about it. No doubt she was afraid I’d find out anyway.”

  “What sort of explanation did she give you?”

  “The theory was that she was developing the fellow’s acting talent, and her own as well. She claimed she had to have someone to work out with.” He grunted. “I shouldn’t have been taken in by such a thin story. But she managed to convince me that she cared nothing for him personally. I actually thought she considered him a bit of an outsider, that she was simply using him for her own professional purposes.”

  I made a left turn onto the highway, and climbed the ramp which rose across lower town. “Did they have professional plans together?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Holly was thinking of trying the legitimate stage eventually.”

  “With your backing?”

  “That was the idea, I suppose.”

  “Did she ever try to persuade you to back Gaines?”

  “No. She knew what I thought of the fellow-a cheap gigolo.”

  “Did she pay him for his company?”

  “That would hardly be necessary. I fail to see what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m trying to find out if they had business dealings of any kind, before today’s transaction. Was he supplying her with drugs, by any chance?”

  He snorted at me: “The notion is ridiculous!”

  “It’s not as strange as what we know she’s done. Leave the personal part out of it and consider. Your wife walked out on an assured fortune, and a man who would give her anything she wanted, in order to share the chances of a wanted criminal. Does it make any sense to you?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid it does.” He sounded querulous. The dressing in his nose had lightened and thinned his voice. “I’m the reason. I’m physically disgusting to her.”

  “Did she ever say so?”

  “I’m saying so. It’s the only possible inference. She married me for my money, but even that couldn’t hold her.”

  I looked sideways at him. Pain leered like skull bones through the flesh of his face. “I was simply a dirty old man pawing at her. I had no right to her.”

  “You’re not exactly an octogenarian. How old are you?”

  “We won’t discuss it.”

  “Fifty?”

  “Older than that.”

  “How much money are you worth?”

  His eyes veiled themselves like a bird’s. “I’d have to ask my accountants.”

  “Give me a bracket, anyway, to help fill in the picture. Let me assure you, I’m not trying to figure out the size of my retainer. We’ll set it at five hundred now, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Very well.” He actually smiled, at least on my side. God knew what he was doing with the other side of his face. “I suppose I could realize ten or twelve million if I had to. Why do you think it’s important?”

  “If your wife had been out for the money, she could have taken you for a lot more than two hundred thousand. Without sharing it with Gaines.”

  “How?”

  “By divorcing you. It happens every day, or don’t you re
ad the papers?”

  “I’ve given her no grounds.”

  “Never an unkind word?”

  “Practically never. I was very much in love with my wife. The fact is, I still am.”

  “Would you take her back if you had the chance?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.” His voice had changed, as his eyes had changed when I mentioned money. We had left the highway and were approaching the green lane that led to his house. “It’s hard to imagine her ever coming back.”

  But he had leaned forward, urging the car along in wild unconscious hopefulness.

  His shoulders slumped as he got out of the car. The house on the cliff had an abandoned air.

  Far out over the sea, a flight of birds blew in a changing line like a fragmentary sentence whose meaning was never quite intelligible. All the way in to Beverly Hills I kept thinking about those birds. They’d been too far out for me to identify, but it was the season when certain kinds of sea birds migrated, I didn’t know exactly where or why.

  chapter 18

  THE BUILDING WAS long and low, almost hidden from the street by discreet plantings. It had pastel pink walls and lavender doors which opened directly onto a kind of veranda. Michael Speare’s name was tastefully printed on one of the doors in lower-case letters, like a line from a modern poem.

  It was one of those so-called studio offices, meant to suggest that doing business with the occupants was an aesthetic experience. The girl at the front desk underlined the suggestion. She had Matisse lines, and a voice like violins at a nuptial feast. She used it to tell me that Mr. Speare wasn’t back from his afternoon calls. Did I have an appointment?

  I said I had, at three. She glanced at the clock imbedded in the blonde mahogany wall. It had no numbers on its face, but it seemed to indicate that it was ten minutes after three.

  “Mr. Speare must have been delayed. I expect him at any moment. Will you sit down, sir? And what was your name?”

  “William Gunnarson. It still is.”

  She looked at me like a startled doe, but “Thank you, sir,” was all she said. I sat down on an arrangement of molded plywood and glass tubing which turned out to be comfortable enough. The girl returned to her electric typewriter, and began to play kitten on the keys.

  I sat and watched her. She had reddish-brown hair, but in other respects her resemblance to Holly May was striking. It was a phenomenon I’d noticed before: whole generations of girls looked like the movie actresses of their period. Perhaps they made themselves over to resemble the actresses. Perhaps the actresses made themselves up to embody some common ideal. Or perhaps they became actresses by virtue of the fact that they already resembled the common ideal.

  My eyes were still on the girl, without quite taking her in. She became restless under my stare. Everything about her, varnished hair, shadowed lids, gleaming red lips, breasts that thrust themselves on the attention, was meant to attract stares and hold them. But the girl behind the attractions was uneasy when they worked.

  The advertisements didn’t tell you what to do next.

  She looked up at me, her green eyes defensively hard. A different voice, her own, said: “Well?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be obnoxious. I was struck by your resemblance to someone.”

  “I know. Holly May. People keep telling me that. A lot of good it does me.”

  “Are you interested in acting?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. I’d be home in Indiana, to coin a phrase. Raising brats.” The nuptial violins in her voice had gone badly out of tune. “Would you be in pictures?”

  “I played a starring role in the family album. That was as far as it went.”

  “The Family Album? I never heard of it. Has it been released?”

  “I keep it at home in a trunk,” I said. “The family album. Photographs.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “It was one of my feebler efforts. Forgive me.”

  “That’s all right,” she said magnanimously. “Mr. Speare says I got-I have no sense of humor, anyway.” She frowned at the clock. “I wonder what’s keeping him.”

  “I can wait. Do you know Holly May?”

  “I wouldn’t say I knew her. She left town a few months after I got this job. But I used to see her come in and out.”

  “What sort of person was she?”

  “It’s hard for me to tell. Some of the girls in the studios thought she was real cool-real down-to-earth, no airs about her and all. At least that was what they said. With me she was always standoffish. I don’t think she liked me.” After a pause, she said: “Maybe she didn’t like me because I look like her. She did a double take the first time she ever saw me.”

  And after another pause: “Some people think I’m better-looking than her, even. But a fat lot of good it does me. I tried to get Mr. Speare to get me a job standing in for her. He said I didn’t know how to handle myself. So I took this course in standing, walking and standing. It cost me a hundred and sixty dollars, and just when I was getting real good at it, she had to go and give up the movie business.”

  “That was a tough break for you,” I said. “I wonder why she left.”

  “She wanted to get married. But it’s still a good question if you ever saw him. Why a girl would give up a career to marry him. Of course they say he owns half the oil in Canada, but he’s just an ugly old man. I wouldn’t marry him for all the money in the world.”

  Her voice and her look were faintly doubtful. She sat with her green gaze resting unconsciously on me, balancing Ferguson’s money against his personal charms.

  “You know Colonel Ferguson, do you?”

  “I saw him once. He marched in here one day last summer. Mr. Speare was in conference with some very important clients, but that made no difference to him. He walked into Mr. Speare’s private office and started an argument, right in front of a producing star.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “Her studio didn’t want her to get married. Neither did Mr. Speare. You can hardly blame him. She had a chance to be a real big name. But that wasn’t good enough for her.” She went into meditation again. “Imagine getting the breaks she got, and not even wanting them.”

  A man in a blue Italian suit and a confidential tie came in breathing dramatically. When I stood up, I was tall enough to look down at the bald spot on top of his sleek dark head.

  “Mr. Speare?”

  “Yeah. You must be Gunnarson. I’m twenty minutes late. They were taping a new show and a lady who shall be nameless got hysterical when they wouldn’t let her use her idiot cards. So I had to hold her hand, in case you wonder where I got the talon wounds. Come in, will you?”

  I followed him along a skylit corridor to a room which contained, in addition to office equipment, a couch and a portable bar. He went to the latter like a homing pigeon. “I need a drink. Will you join me?”

  “A short bourbon will be fine.”

  He poured me a long one, and himself another. “Sit down. How do you like the furniture? The drapes? I chose everything myself, I wanted a place where a man can relax as he creates.”

  “You’re an artist, are you?”

  “More than that,” he said between gulps of bourbon. “I create artists. I make names and reputations.”

  He flung his empty hand toward the wall beside his desk. It was covered with photographs of faces, the bold, shy, wistful, arrogant, hungry faces of actors. I recognized some of the faces, but didn’t see Holly May’s among them. Most of them were actors who hadn’t been heard of for years.

  “How is Holly?” he said, reading my mind. “I took her picture down, in a moment of childish pique. But I still keep it in my desk drawer. Tell her that.”

  “I will if I see her.”

  “I thought you were her lawyer.”

  “I’m her husband’s lawyer.”

  A kind of gray sickness touched his face for an instant. He covered his bald spot with his left hand, as if he fe
ared scalping or had already been scalped; and gulped the remainder of his drink. This gave him strength to clown it. “What does he want? The rest of my blood? Tell him I’m all out of blood, he can go to a blood bank.”

  “Did he treat you so badly?”

  “Did he? He fixed me good. Three years of work, building her up, talking her into parts, keeping her out of trouble, all gone to bloody hell. Just when she was really getting hot, she had to marry him. He’s a rough man. As you doubtless know if you work for him.”

  “I don’t work for him. I give him legal advice.”

  “I see.” He poured himself another drink. “Does he take it?”

  “I’m hoping he will.”

  “Then advise him to take a running jump in the Pacific Ocean. I know a nice deep place, complete with sharks.” He fortified himself with half of his second drink, and said: “Well, let’s have it. What does he want from me, and what is it going to cost me?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be frank with you.” But not so very frank. “I came to you more or less on my own, for information.”

  “What about?”

  “Mrs. Ferguson.”

  He considered this, and drew the conclusion I wanted him to. “How is the marriage working out?”

  “It isn’t. You’ll keep this to yourself, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said, struggling to suppress his glee. “I knew it couldn’t last. A doll like Holly, a girl with her future, tying herself to a dodo. Who’s divorcing who?”

  “It’s too early to talk in those terms. Put it this way. Colonel Ferguson married a woman he knew nothing about. Six or seven months later he’s decided that perhaps he ought to look into her background. I thought perhaps you could help.”

  “Let down her back hair, eh? I wouldn’t want to do that to a client, not even an ex-client. Besides,” he said with a lopsided smile and a pass at the top of his head, “what do I get out of it?”

  He had a fishy look. I felt no compunction in playing him like a fish. “She’s under contract to you, isn’t she? If she works?”

  “Why should she go back to work, with the kind of settlement he can make on her?”

  “There won’t be any settlement, if he divorces her. Or gets an annulment.”