The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  On second glance, it was a very fine photograph. The arrogant good looks of the girl jumped to the eye like a mask of pride and pain.

  “That was taken in San Francisco,” Mrs. Haines said conversationally, “by San Francisco’s leading photographer. I was very beautiful, wasn’t I? I gave recitals in Sacramento and Oakland. The Oakland Tribune said I had great promise. Then, unfortunately, I lost my voice. One misfortune followed another. My second husband fell from a window just as he was about to make a killing on the stock market. My third husband deserted me. Yes, deserted me. He left me to support our infant son as best I could with what remained of my music.”

  It was a speech from a play, a shadow play in the theater of her mind. She stood by the piano and declaimed it without feeling or gestures, in a monotone.

  “But you know all this, don’t you? I don’t want to borrow you-bore you with my sorrows. In any case, the clouds have silver linings. Hell has its hindrances.” She smiled her disorganized smile. “Sit down, don’t be bashful, let me make you some coffee. I still have my silver percolator, at least.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Afraid I’ll poison your cup?” Perhaps it was meant to be a humorous remark. It fell with a thud, and she went on as if it had been uttered by someone else, a third person in the room.

  “As I was saying, life has its compensations. Among my compensations, my voice is coming back, as happens in a woman’s prime occasionally.” She sang a cracked scale to prove it, sat down at the piano, and struck a cluster of notes as discordant as the cat’s chord. “Since my pupils dropped away-none of them had any talent anyway-I’ve had an opportunity to work with my voice again, and even do some composing. Words and music come to me together, out of thin air. Like that.”

  She snapped her fingers, struck another discord, and burst into improvised song. “Out of thin air, I don’t know where, You brought me a love so rich and rare. That’s two songs in five minutes.”

  “What was the other one?”

  “No chaperone,” she said. “It started to sing itself to me as soon as I said those words.” She raised her voice again to the same tuneless tune. “We’re all alone, No chaperone, And no one to bother on the telephone.”

  She laughed and turned on the piano stool to face me. The cat drifted onto her shoulder like a piece of brown floating fur, and ran down her body to the floor, where it stationed itself between her high-heeled feet.

  “He’s jealous,” she said with her nervous giggle. “He can tell that I’m attracted to you.”

  I sat on the arm of the disemboweled chair and looked as forbidding as I knew how. “I wanted to talk to you about your son, Mrs. Haines. Do you feel up to talking about him?”

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s a pleasure. I really mean it. The neighbors don’t believe me when I tell them how well Henry is doing. They think I can’t tell the difference between my dreams. In fact, I seldom have an opportunity to converse with a person of cultivation. The neighborhood has gone downhill, and I’m seriously thinking of moving.”

  “Moving where?” I said, in the hope of switching her mind to a more realistic track.

  “Buenavista, perhaps. I’d like that, but Henry’s opposed. He doesn’t want me getting in his way, I realize that. And I’m not equal to the high-flying people that he has the opportunity to rub elbows with. Perhaps I’ll just stay here and renovate the house.” She looked around the shabby room. The rug was threadbare, the wallpaper was fading, spiders had fogged the corners of the ceiling. “God knows it needs it.”

  The dream was wearing thin at the edges. I chopped at it with the harshest words I could bring myself to speak to her. “What are you going to use for money?”

  “Henry is generous with me, are you surprised? I hate to take money from him. He is, after all, a young man on his way up. He needs fluid capital, which is why I keep working at my little songs. One of them will be a hit, you know, and then I won’t be a burden on Henry’s shoulders. I fully expect to write a song which will sell a million copies. I’m not a stupid woman. And I recognize other intelligent people at sight. But you know that.”

  Her assumption that I knew whatever she knew was the most disquieting thing about her, of several disquieting things. I sat there caught between pity and something close to panic, wondering what Henry’s childhood had been like. Had he walked on the walls of her fantasies and believed they were solid earth? Or doubted the earth itself when his feet broke through the wallboard?

  “How does Henry make his money?”

  “He’s in business,” she answered with satisfaction. “Buying and selling art objects to a private clientele. It’s just a temporary thing, of course. Henry hasn’t given up his own artistic aspirations, as I’m sure you are aware. But Mr. Speare told him the time wasn’t ripe for him yet. He needed further study. So Henry went into business, he has a fine eye for value. Which it’s only fair to say he inherited from his mother.” Her smile was wide and toothy, a sudden manifestation which her mouth could hardly contain. “Do you know Henry well?”

  “Not as well as I’d like to. Were you referring to Michael Speare the agent?”

  “Yes. Henry hoped that Mr. Speare would represent him. But Mr. Speare said he needed more work before he made his professional debut. Art is a hard taskmistress, as I have good reason to know.”

  She spread out her fingers and flexed them several times. The cat rose on its hind legs and batted upward, playfully, at her hands.

  “Down, Harry,” she said. “I call him Harry.”

  I said from far left field: “Did Harry make contact with Speare through Hilda Dotery?”

  “Henry,” she corrected me. “I prefer not to discuss that. There are certain people I will not sully my tongue with. The Doterys are at the head of my personal blacklist.”

  “But Henry knows Hilda Dotery? They were in a high-school play together, weren’t they?”

  Without obvious alteration, her smile had become an angry grin. “I won’t discuss her. She brought filth into my house. Henry was a good clean-living young man before she corrupted him. That Dotery girl was the source of all his terrible troubles.”

  “What did she do to him?”

  “She attached herself to him like a succubus, she taught him wicked things. I caught them in the attic, right in this very house.” The cat had begun to moan and pace, whipping back and forth like a bigger cat in a cage. “They pretended to be dressing up, trying on costumes for a play, but I knew what they were doing. She had a bad name already at that early age. I picked up a piece of rope that was on the wall, and I drove her out of here half dressed as she was, down the attic stairs and out the back door. I’m not a violent woman, you know that. But Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, didn’t he? You know your Bible, I’m sure, a man of your brain power.”

  Her flattery, if that is what it was, had a quality of sardonic mockery. Her most affirmative statements seemed to be expressions of dreadful doubt. I was conscious of a darkness in her, a hidden self operating her smiles and gestures like a puppeteer. But the strings were tangled.

  “ ‘Harry,’ I said to him, he was Harry then: ‘Your mother loves you as no one else will ever. Promise me on your bended knee you will never see her again.’ I told him about the awful things that can happen to a boy, the disasters and the diseases. He was very meek and mild. He cried in my lap, and he promised that he would be a good boy forever. But he betrayed me, betrayed my confidence in him.”

  The cat stood still, like a cat in a frieze, transfixed by her high, thin voice. Its moaning changed to a snarling, and its long tail erected itself.

  “Be quiet, Harry. I had the same trouble with you until I had you fixed. Didn’t I, boy?” she asked liltingly. “But you still love your mother, don’t you, boy? Eh, Harry?”

  She crooked her finger. The cat jumped into her lap and rolled itself into a ball, perfectly still. She stroked it, talking to it in infantile language.

  I broke in on the
ir conversation. “You mentioned some trouble Henry had, Mrs. Haines. What sort of trouble?”

  “Yes. They blamed things on him, incredible things, things he didn’t do and would never have done. Those nights they said he broke into the houses, he was safe at home with me. Or else he was down at the library, or going to the movies to study acting techniques. He never drank or anything. The one night he came home with something on his breath, it was because some men forced him. They waylaid him in an alley and forced a bottle of whisky to his mouth. He spat it out and told them what he thought of them. And those things they found in the little room in the basement which I fixed up for him, he bought them fair and square from a boy he knew at school.”

  Her hands were stroking the cat rapidly.

  “I know why they blamed him. I understand it only too well. It was his running around with that Dotery girl. Bad associations make bad reputations. The rumors were flying around about him, and what could I do with a fatherless boy and a living to make in this godforsaken hole? Could I go out on the streets and argue with them? Or stand up in court to defend him?

  “His lawyer said he might as well confess, or they wouldn’t admit him to Juvenile Court. They’d judge him as a man and send him off to the penitentiary. So he naturally confessed. He told me that very night it was all lies. He wasn’t the cat burglar, he swore to me that he wasn’t. But how could he prove it? A man is guilty until he’s proved innocent. You’re a lawyer, you know that. And there was the stuff in the basement which he’d bought from that nasty boy who ran away from school.

  “I went to the principal and I told him the facts in the case. He flatly refused to have the boy tracked down, the boy who really was the burglarizer. He flatly refused, and I began to see that the principal and the chief of police were covering up the real villains for reasons of their own. I could guess their reasons from what I learned of the white-slave traffic when I was a young girl. The chloroformed handkerchiefs, the whited sepulchers. I wrote a letter to the governor, and when he didn’t answer, I telephoned him personally. I told him who I was, my father was one of the founders of the Mountain Grove Water District, a wealthy man in his time, and a good party worker all his life. But in the modern world there’s no loyalty up or down.

  “All I got for my pains, they sent a man to threaten me. He threatened to lock me up in an asylum if I brought pressure on the governor. That’s how high the conspiracy went, as high as the State Capitol. I saw that it was no use. They sent my son to reform school, and he was gone for years. Nothing was done to the actual criminals. It’s the same old story-after all, they crucified Christ.”

  Her fingers were tight on the cat, and tightening. It exploded out of her lap, crossed the room like long brown vapor, and settled in the corner behind my chair. She got down on her knees beside the chair, reaching for it, calling seductively: “Come to Mother. Come on now, Harry. Mother didn’t mean to hurt you, boy.”

  It stayed out of her reach. Looking down at her nape, I could see the gray tendrils that the dye had missed. Her perfume rose to my nostrils like the odor of funeral flowers over the scent of corruption.

  “Is the Dotery family still in town?”

  “How would I know?” She sat back on her haunches and looked up at me angrily. “I assure you that I have nothing to do with people like that. My father was a respectable man, a monied man in his day. He was a member of an old Ohio family. Where do the Doterys come from? Nobody knows. They’re people without a history.”

  She went back to calling the cat. “Come now, Harry. Don’t be silly, lover. Mother knows you’re just being coy. She didn’t mean to hurt hims.”

  She crawled into the corner. The cat walked away from her clutching hands disdainfully, and went behind the piano. It was a game, perhaps a nightly one. But the knowing cat and the crawling woman with the twisted stockings were getting me down.

  “Where do the Doterys live?”

  She must have heard the impatience in my voice. She got to her feet and returned to the piano stool, sitting down with prim politeness as if I’d interrupted her housekeeping.

  “The Doterys,” I said. “Where do they live?”

  “You’re angry. Don’t be angry. Everyone gets angry with me and then I want them to die, another sin on my conscience. You’re a lawyer, you should understand. They used to live over a store on the other side of town. They used the store as a front for their activities. I don’t know if they still do, I haven’t ventured out that way for years. Sometimes I see a woman in the market who resembles Mrs. Dotery in appearance. She may be someone sent to trap me into admissions. So I never speak to her, of course, but I watch her to see if she steals anything. If I could catch her, just once, it would reveal the whole conspiracy.”

  “There is no conspiracy.” I didn’t know if it was the right thing to say, but I had to say it, before the entire room was fogged by spiderwebs.

  She was shocked into silence for a long moment. “I must have misunderstood what you said. I understood you to say there was no conspiracy.”

  “There isn’t, in the sense you’re talking about.”

  She nodded. “I see. I see what you are. I took you for an intelligent man of good will. But you’re another false one, another enemy of my son.”

  I got to my feet. “Mrs. Haines, have you ever discussed these matters with a doctor?”

  “What would a doctor know about it?”

  “He might be able to give you some good advice.”

  She knew what I meant, I think, and even considered it for a little. But she couldn’t contain her anguished rage in the face of reality. “Are you casting aspersions on my sanity?”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” She struck her thigh with her fist. “I was talking to you in good faith, while you’ve been sitting there thinking false thoughts about me. Henry knows the truth of what I’ve been saying. They sent him to reform school on a trumped-up charge. They’ve been hounding him and harrying him for over seven years now. Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ask him.”

  “I would if I knew where he is.”

  “Henry said he was coming-” She clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Coming here? When?”

  “Next week. Next month. You’re not going to worm and wangle anything more out of me. I don’t know what you’re doing coming here denying facts as plain as the nose on your face.”

  “I may be mistaken, Mrs. Haines.” There was no point in arguing with her. I moved toward the door. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  She rose and stood between me and the door. From the awkward fierceness of her movement, she might have been on the point of attacking me. But there was no harm in her. The harm she was capable of had long since been done. The rage that lived in her vitals had died down, and left her eyes empty and her mouth slack. The lipstick which her hand had smeared was like blood on a wound.

  She showed herself to me for the first and only time. The woman who lived in her central desolation, obscured by sleight of mind and shadow play, said: “Is it bad trouble he’s in?”

  “I’m afraid so. Do you want to talk about it, Mrs. Haines?”

  “No. No. My head.”

  She clutched her dark head as if it were an animal that had to be subdued. The cat came out from behind the piano, and rubbed its flank on her leg. She got down on her knees to speak to it: “There you are, Harry. He’s a great comfort to his old mother, isn’t he? He loves his muzzers, doesn’t he?”

  The cat permitted itself to be stroked again.

  chapter 23

  I BOUGHT A CUP OF COFFEE and a piece of pie, for energy, in a restaurant on the main street. It was crowded with young people. The jukebox was playing rock-music for civilizations to decline by, man. The waitress who served me said yes, they had a business directory somewhere. She found it for me.

  James Dotery was listed as the proprietor of the North End Variety Store. His residence was at the same address. I got
directions from the waitress, tipped her fifty cents, which seemed to surprise her, and drove out that way.

  The store was in one of those badly zoned areas which clog the approaches to so many cities and towns. Grocery and liquor stores and taverns were intermingled with motels and private houses. The buildings had an improvised air, though most of them were old enough to be dilapidated.

  James Dotery’s store was on the ground floor of a two-story stucco shoebox. Its windows were sparsely furnished with warped hula hoops, packages of pins, fluorescent socks, plastic ice cubes containing flies, and other unlikely merchandise. A hand-lettered sign taped to the glass announced that everything was reduced twenty-five per cent.

  There was a light on the second story. The door that led to it was standing partly open. Climbing the dark stairs, I felt a lift of excitement. You would have thought Holly May herself was waiting for me in an upstairs room.

  The aproned woman who opened the apartment door came very near to sustaining the illusion. I didn’t have to ask her if she was Holly’s mother. She had the same facial structure and the same coloring except for her graying brown hair. She was very good-looking, and well-preserved for a woman of forty or more.

  “Mrs. Dotery?”

  “That’s me.”

  I handed her my card. “My name is William Gunnarson.”

  “If it’s Dotery you want, he ain’t home. You’ll probably find him down at the Bide-a-Wee.” She studied my card in a puzzled way. “I warn you, though, he hates insurance salesmen. Dotery hates anything that reminds him he ain’t gonna live forever like God Almighty.”

  “I’m not a salesman of any kind, Mrs. Dotery. I’m a lawyer.”