The Ferguson Affair

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 and 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.”

My mind picked its way back through the obstacle course of the night’s events, to the previous afternoon. Broadman had cried out in fear and rage. Granada had been in the ambulance alone with him, ostensibly soothing him. He had soothed him very effectively, perhaps.

“I couldn’t see what happened,” I said. “What is your friend’s name-the nurse’s aide?”

“I promised her I wouldn’t pass it on. That promise I keep.”

“Why would Granada kill Broadman?”

“To keep him quiet. Broadman knew Granada is a crook.”

“A member of the burglary gang?”

“Maybe.”

“But if Granada was in on the burglaries, Gus would know.”

“They didn’t tell Gus everything.”

“So you can’t say for sure that Granada was involved?”

“No, but I think he was. When Gus bust into a house or a store he always knew where the cops were, and he didn’t do it by X ray. He had a pipeline to them.”

“He told you that?”

She nodded emphatically. The shawl slipped down from her head. Her hair was uncombed and matted, like torn black felt. She covered it, with a quick and angry gesture.

“But he didn’t say it was Granada?”

“No. He didn’t say that. Maybe he didn’t know. There wasn’t much I couldn’t get out of him, if he had it in him.”

Her refusal to make a blanket accusation against Granada was the most convincing element in her story so far. After stating my suspicions to Wills, I was having a reaction. I had to be very sure of Granada’s guilt before I spoke out again.

“Who else was in the gang, Secundina?”

“Nobody else that I know of.”

“No women?”

Her eyes shrank to bright dark points turned on me from the ambush of her shawl. “You got no call to point a finger at me. I did my best to talk Gus out of doing what he was doing.”

“I don’t mean you. You’re not the only woman in the world. Didn’t Gaines have any girl-friends?”

Her heavy black lashes came down and veiled her eyes completely. “No. I mean, how would I know?”

“I heard he was running with a blonde.”

Her eyelids quivered, but her mouth was stubborn. “Then you heard more than I did.”

“Who is she, Secundina?”

“I told you I didn’t know about any blonde. I never ever see the guy. Maybe twice in the last two months.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean where did you see Gaines? What was he doing?”

“I don’t remember,” she said stolidly.

“Have you known Gaines long?”

“Gus did. He knew him for six-seven years. He met him in Preston, and after they got out, they drove around the country for a while, living off of the country. Then Gus came back and married me, but he used to talk about this Harry. Gaines called himself Harry in those days. He was kind of a hero to Gus, he did such wild things.”

“Like what?”

“Like conning people and stealing cars and driving faster than anybody and all like that. Crazy stuff. I warned Gus when he took up with Gaines again, last fall. I warned him that Gaines was trouble. He didn’t listen to me. He never had the brains to listen to me.”

She gazed across the street at the hospital. A local bus stopped at the opposite corner, and the student nurses got on. Secundina became aware of the bus as it roared away. “Now I missed my bus.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“What’s the use of go home?” she cried in a raw voice. “So I can tell my children they got no father? What’s the use of anything?”

She sat like a monument to her own grief. Something had broken in her, releasing the bitter forces of her nature. She seemed to be submitting to them, hoping they would destroy her.

There was nothing I could think of to say, except: “Your children need you, Mrs. Donato. You have to think of them.”

“To hell with them!”

But she was terrified by her words. She crossed herself, and started to mutter a prayer. In spite of the cool shade of the pepper tree, I was beginning to sweat. I’d never been so conscious of the wall between my side of town and hers.

A dirty black Buick convertible came down the street in front of the hospital. Tony Padilla was driving, slowly, looking for someone. He saw us on the bench and drew in to the red curb.

“Hello, Mr. Gunnarson,” he said in a subdued voice. “I was in the hospital looking for you, Mrs. Donato. Your sister said I should bring you home. You want to get in?” He leaned across the front seat and opened the door for her.

I caught a glimpse of her tiny, high-arched foot. Red toenails gleamed through the plastic toe of her shoe. “May I see you for a minute, Tony?”

“You see me,” he said across her. He didn’t want to talk to me, and was using her as a buffer.

“What happened to Colonel Ferguson? I thought you were holding his hand.”

“Until he gave me the brush-off. He went to drop the money off-”

“Where?”

“I dunno. He didn’t tell me, didn’t want me along. So I went down to Secundina’s place. I wanted to talk to her some more. Her sister said she was here at the hospital.” He smiled and shrugged automatically, and glanced at the watch on his wrist. “I just got time to take her home before I go to work.”

He put his car in gear.