The Ferguson Affair

chapter 11

I DROVE UNDER THE COLISEUM arches of the overpass and through an area of truckyards and lumberyards. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood and burned diesel oil. Along the high wire fences of the trucking firms, against the blank walls of the building-materials warehouses, dark men leaned in the sun. I turned up Pelly Street.

The court where the Donato family lived was a collection of board-and-batten houses which resembled chickenhouses, built on three sides of a dusty patch of ground at the end of an alley. A single Cotoneaster tree, which can grow anywhere, held its bright red berries up to the sun. In the tree’s long straggling shade a swarm of children played gravely in the dust.

They were pretending to be Indians. Half of them probably were, if you traced their blood lines. An old woman with a seamed Indian face overlooked them from the doorstep of one of the huts.

She pretended not to see me. I was the wrong color and I had on a business suit and business suits cost money and where did the money come from? The sweat of the poor.

I said: “Is Mrs. Donato here? Secundina Donato?”

The old woman didn’t raise her eyes or answer me. She was as still as a lizard in my shadow. Behind me the children had fallen silent. Through the open doorway of the hut, I could hear a woman’s voice softly singing a lullaby in Spanish.

“Secundina lives here, doesn’t she?”

The old woman moved her shoulders. The shrug was almost imperceptible under her rusty black shawl. A young woman holding a baby appeared in the doorway. She had Madonna eyes and a mournful drooping mouth which was beautiful until it spoke. “What are you looking for, Mister?”

“Secundina Donato. Do you know her?”

“Secundina is my sister. She isn’t here.”

“Where is she?”

“I dunno. Ask her.” She looked down at the silent old woman on the doorstep.

“She won’t give me an answer. Doesn’t she understand English?”

“She understands it, all right, but she ain’t talking today. One of her boys got shot last night. I guess you know that, Mister.”

“Yes. I want to talk to Secundina about her husband.”

“Are you a policeman?”

“I’m a lawyer. Tony Padilla sent me here.”

The old woman spoke in husky, rapid Spanish. I caught Padilla’s name, and Secundina’s, and that was all.

“You a friend of Tony Padilla?” the young woman said.

“Yes. What does she say?”

“Secundina went to the hospital.”

“Is she hurt?”

“Her Gus is there in the morgue.”

“What did she say about Tony Padilla?”

“Nothing. She says Secundina should have married him.”

“Married Tony?”

“That’s what she says.”

The old woman was still talking, head down, her gaze in the dust between her cracked black shoes.

“What else does she say?”

“Nothing. She says a woman is a fool to go to the hospital. Nobody ain’t gonna make her. The hospital is where you die, she says. Her sister is a medica.”

I started for the hospital, but got waylaid by the thought of other things I should do. My first duty was to Ella Barker. She was starting her third day in jail, and I’d promised to try and have her bail reduced. While I didn’t have too much hope of accomplishing this, I had to make the attempt.

My timing was good. It was just eleven by the courthouse clock, and when I entered the courtroom, the court was taking a recess. The jury box was half full of prisoners, which meant that the break would be a short one. The prisoners were handcuffed together in pairs. They sat stolid and mute under the guard of an armed bailiff. Most of them looked like the men who leaned on the walls and fences off Pelly Street.

Judge Bennett came in from his chambers, trailing his black robe. I caught his eye, and he nodded. The judge was an impressive man in his sixties. He reminded me of my grandmother’s Calvinist God, minus the beard and plus a sense of humor. The judge’s sense of humor didn’t show in court. Whenever I made the trek across the well of the old high-ceilinged courtroom up to the bench, I had to fight off the feeling that it was judgment day and my sins had found me out.

The judge leaned sideways to speak to me, as if to detach himself from the majesty of the law. “Good morning. How is Sally?”

“Very well. Thank you.”

“She must be approaching the end of her term.”

“Any day now.”

“Good for her. I like to see nice people having children.” His wise, experienced gaze rested on my face. “You’re showing the tension, William.”

“It isn’t Sally I’m concerned about at the moment. It’s the young Barker woman.” I hesitated. “Mr. Sterling ought to hear what I have to say, Your Honor.”

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.”