The Ferguson Affair

chapter 16

THE LONG BLUE CAR had smashed its nose on the side of an aluminum semitrailer. A policeman was directing traffic around the damaged vehicles. At the curb, another policeman was talking to a tough-looking man in oil-stained coveralls. They were looking down in attitudes of angry sympathy at a third man who was sitting on the curb with his face in his hands. It was Ferguson.

Whitey and his partner got out of the ambulance and trotted toward him. I was close on their heels. Whitey said to the policeman in a tone of whining solicitude: “Is the poor fellow badly hurt, Mahan?”

“Not too serious. But you better take him to Emergency.”

Ferguson lifted his head. “Nonsense. I don’t need an ambulance. I’m perfectly all right.”

It was an overstatement. Worms of blood crawled down from his nostrils to his mouth. His eyes were like starred glass.

“You better go along to the hospital,” Mahan said. “Looks to me like you bust your nose.”

“It doesn’t matter, I’ve broken it before.” Ferguson was a little high with shock. “What I need is a stiff drink, and I’ll be right as rain.”

Mahan and the ambulance men looked at each other with uneasy smiles. The man in coveralls muttered to no one in particular: “Probably had one too many already. He sure picked a hell of a time to run a red light.”

Ferguson heard him and lunged up to his feet. “I assure you I haven’t been drinking. I do assume full responsibility for the accident. And I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“I hope so. Who’s going to pay for the damage to the truck?”

“I am, of course.”

Ferguson was doing a fine job of setting himself up for a lawsuit. I couldn’t help interjecting: “Don’t say any more, Colonel. It may not have been your fault.”

Mahan turned on me hotly. “He was doing sixty down the Boulevard. He’s due for a pile of citations. Take a look at his skidmarks.”

I took a look. The broad black lines which Ferguson’s car had laid down on the concrete were nearly two hundred feet long.

“I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“It ain’t that simple, Mister. I want to know how it happened. What did you say your name was?”

I answered for him. “Ferguson. Colonel Ferguson is not obliged to answer your questions.”

“The hell he isn’t. Read the Vehicle Code.”

“I have, I’m an attorney. He’ll make a report to you later. At the present time he’s obviously dazed.”

“That’s right,” Whitey said. “We’ll take him along to the hospital, they’ll fix him up.”

He put his pale thin hand on Ferguson’s shoulder, like a butcher testing meat. Ferguson moved impatiently, stumbled on the curb, and almost fell. He glanced around at the growing circle of onlookers with something like panic in his eyes. “Let me out of here. My wife-” His hand went to his face and came away bloody.

“What about your wife?” Mahan said. “Was she in the car?”

“No.”

“How did the accident happen? What did you think you were doing?”

I stepped between them. “Colonel Ferguson will be in touch with you later, when he’s himself.”

I got hold of Ferguson’s bony elbow and propelled him through the gathering crowd to my car.

Mahan pursued us, waving citation blanks. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To a doctor. If I were you, officer, I wouldn’t push this any further right now.”

I opened the door for Ferguson. He got in, disdaining my assistance. Mahan stood and watched us drive away, his pad of blanks crumpled in his hand.

“You’re Johnny-on-the-spot, aren’t you?” Ferguson said.

“I happened to be listening to the local police calls, and got the first report of your accident. Do you have a doctor in town?”

“I never go to doctors.” He emitted a sort of snuffling neigh through his damaged nose. “Look here, I need a drink. Isn’t there someplace we can go for a drink?”

“If you say so.”

I took him to a bar and grill on the edge of the lower town. The noon-hour crowd had thinned down to a few tables of men drinking their lunches. I hustled Ferguson to the rear of the establishment and suggested he wash his face.

He came out of the men’s room looking a little better, and ordered rye on the rocks. I ordered a corned-beef sandwich. When the waiter was out of hearing, he pushed his battered face across the table toward me. His eyes were bleak. “What sort of a man are you? Can I trust you?”

“I think so.”

“You haven’t simply been hanging around hoping that some of my money will rub off on you?”

It was an insulting question, but I didn’t let it insult me. I was willing to put up with a good deal for the sake of candor. “It’s a natural human hope, isn’t it? Money isn’t an overriding motive with me. As you may have noticed.”

“Yes. You’ve talked to me straight from the shoulder. I’d like to feel I can do the same with you.” His voice altered. “God knows I have to talk to someone.”

“Shoot. In my profession you learn to listen, and you learn to forget.”

The waiter brought his drink. Ferguson sucked at it greedily and set the glass down with a rap. “I want to engage your professional services, Mr. Gunnarson. That will insure your forgetting, won’t it? Confidential relationship, and all that.”

“I take it seriously.”

“I don’t mean to be offensive. I realize I have been offensive, when this matter came up between us. I apologize.” He was trying to be quiet and charming. I preferred him loud and natural.

“No apology needed. You’ve been under quite a strain. But we’re not getting anywhere.”

“We have if we’ve reached an agreement. Will you be my legal adviser in this matter?”

“I’ll be glad to. So long as it doesn’t interfere with my representing my other client. Other clients.”

“How could that be?”

“We don’t need to go into detail. I have a client in the county jail who was involved with Larry Gaines. Innocently involved, like your wife.”

His eyes winced.

“And like your wife,” I added, “she’s suffering out the consequences.”

Ferguson took a deep, yawning breath. “I saw Gaines today. It’s why I lost my head. I threw discretion to the winds and tried to run him down. God knows what will happen now.”

“Have you delivered the money?”

“Yes. It’s when I saw him. I was instructed to procure a cardboard carton and place the money in it, then leave the carton on the front seat of my car, with the door unlocked. I parked the car where they told me to, on Ocean Boulevard near the foot of the pier, and left it standing there with the carton of money in it. Then I was supposed to walk out to the end of the wharf. It’s a distance of a couple of hundred yards.”

“I know the place. My wife and I often go there.”

“Then you probably remember that there’s a public telescope on the pier. I couldn’t resist dropping a dime in the slot and training the thing on my car. It’s how I happened to see them.”

“Them?”

“Him. I meant to say him. Gaines. He pulled up beside my car, got out and retrieved the carton, and away he went. If I had had a deer rifle with me, I could have plugged him. I wish I had.”

“What kind of a car was he driving?”

“A fairly new car, green in color. I don’t know what make exactly. I’m not familiar with the cheaper makes.”

“It was one of the cheaper makes?”

“Yes, a Chevrolet perhaps.”

“Or a Plymouth?”

“It may have been a Plymouth. At any rate it was Gaines who got out and picked up the money. And I saw red. I sprinted the length of the pier and chased th-chased him in my car. You know the result.”

He gingerly touched his swelling nose with his fingertips.

“You don’t lie well, Colonel. Who was with Gaines in the green Plymouth?”

“No one.”

But he wouldn’t meet my eyes. His gaze roved around the room and fastened on an elk head high on the opposite wall above the bar. The waiter brought my sandwich. Ferguson ordered another double rye.

I ate mechanically. My mind was racing, fitting together pieces of fact. The picture was far from complete, but its outlines were forming.

“Was your wife in the car with Gaines?”

His head hung as if his neck had been broken. “She was driving.”

“Are you certain of the identification?”

“Positive.”

His second drink arrived. He drank it down like hemlock. Remembering the previous night at the Foothill Club, I persuaded him not to order a third. “We have some more talking to do, Ferguson. We don’t have to do it here.”

“I like it here.” His gaze repeated its circuit of the room, which was almost deserted now, and returned to the friendly elk.

“Ever hunt elk?”

“Indeed I have. I have several fine heads at home.”

“Where is home, exactly?”

“I keep most of my trophies in my lodge at Banff. But that’s not exactly what you mean, is it? You mean where I really live, and that’s hard to say. I have a house in Calgary, and I keep hotel suites in Montreal and Vancouver. None of them are places I feel at home.” Like other lonely men, he seemed glad to be relieved of the burden of loneliness. “Home for me was always the family homestead in Alberta. But it’s nothing but an oil field now.”

“You haven’t mentioned your place here.”

“No. I feel decidedly out of place in California. I came here because it offered investment opportunities, and because Holly was unwilling to leave California.”

“Was there conflict between you on the subject?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. I wanted to please her. We’ve only been married six months.” He’d been still and quiet for a few minutes, but the thought of his wife was too much for him. He twisted in his seat as though he’d been kicked in the groin. “Why are we beating around the bush, with this talk of homes and places?”

“I’m trying to get some idea of you and your situation. I can’t very well advise you in the dark. Would you object to some more personal questions, about your wife and your relationship?”

“I don’t object. In fact, it may help to clarify my own thinking.” He paused, and said in astonishment, like a man who has made a personal discovery: “I’m an emotional man, you know. I used to think of myself as a cold fish. Holly changed all that. I hardly know whether to be glad or sorry.”

“You’re pretty ambivalent about her, aren’t you? Running hot and cold, I mean.”

“I know what you mean, very well. I’m scalding and freezing. The two conditions are just about equally painful.” Ferguson kept surprising me. He added: “Odi et amo. Excrucior! Do you know Latin, Gunnarson?”

“Some legal Latin.”

“I’m no Latinist myself, but my mother taught me a little. That was Catullus. ‘I hate her and I love her, and I’m on the rack.’ ” His voice rose out of control, as if he was literally on the rack. Then he said in a deeper voice: “She’s the only person I’ve ever really loved. Except one. And I didn’t love her enough.”

“Have you been married before?”

“No. I’d reached the point of believing that marriage was not for me. I should have stuck to that. A man can’t expect to be lucky more than once.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to make a good deal of money. I knew instinctively that a man like me couldn’t be lucky in love. And I’ve always shied away from women. It’s nothing to be vain about, because I know the reason, but plenty of women have thrown themselves at my head.”

“Did Holly?”

“No, she didn’t. I was the pursuer in her case-very much the pursuer.”

“How did you happen to meet her?”

“It didn’t happen, in the strictest sense. I arranged to meet her. I saw her in a film last spring in London-I was over there for a trade meeting at Canada House-and decided I had to meet her, somehow. A few months later, at the end of July, I happened to be passing through Vancouver. I have interests in British Columbia, and some of my property was threatened by forest fires.

“I picked up a newspaper and saw Holly’s picture. Her film was to be shown at the Vancouver film festival, and she was to be a guest at the showing. I decided to stop over in Vancouver, and the forest fires be damned. All I could think about was meeting her in the flesh.”

“Do you mean to tell me you fell in love with her picture, at first sight?”

“Does that sound foolish and sentimental?”

“It sounds incredible.”

“Not if you realize how I felt. She was what I’d been missing all my life. She stood for the things I’d turned my back on when I was a young man. Love, and marriage, and fatherhood. A lovely girl that I could call my own.” He was talking like a man in a dream, a rosy sentimental dream of the sort that burns like celluloid and leaves angry ashes in the eyes.

“You felt all this simply because you’d seen her in a movie?”

“There was more to it than that. I prefer not to go into it.”

“I think you should go into it.”

“What purpose would it serve? That other girl had nothing to do with Holly, except that Holly reminded me of her.”

“Tell me about the other girl.”

“There’s no point in going into the subject of her, not at this late date. She was simply a girl I picked up in Boston twenty-five years ago, when I was at Harvard Business School. For a while I planned to marry her, and then I decided not to. Perhaps I should have.” He stared down into his empty glass, twisting and turning it like a crystal ball that revealed the past but kept the future hidden. “Holly seemed like a reincarnation of that girl in Boston.”

He fell silent. He seemed to have forgotten that I was sitting across from him.

“So you arranged to meet Holly,” I prompted him.

“Yes. It wasn’t difficult. I have strong connections in Vancouver, among them some of the backers of the festival. A dinner in her honor was set up, and I had the privilege of sitting beside her. She was charming, and so young.” His voice broke, leaving me unmoved. “It was like being given a second chance at youth.”

“Obviously, you made the most of your chances.”

“Yes. We got along from the start-in a perfectly straightforward, companionable way. And she didn’t know who I was. I was simply a fellow she met at a party who had a few business interests. That was the beauty of it. She didn’t know I had money until we’d been seeing each other for several days.” Ferguson spoke of his money as if it was a communicable disease.

“Are you certain of that?”

“Quite certain.” He nodded emphatically, as though he had to reassure himself. “She didn’t know who I really was until it developed that she was going to Banff. I invited her to stay at my lodge there-properly chaperoned, of course. We got together a little party, and rode up in a private railway car that a friend of mine makes available to me.

“It was a wonderful trip. I felt terrifically excited, just to be with her. I don’t mean in a sexual way.” Ferguson’s eyes became faintly anxious whenever he approached the subject of sex. “I’ve had sex with various women, but the feeling I had for Holly was very much more than that. She was like a golden image sitting there by the train window. I didn’t like to stare directly at her, so I looked at her reflection in the window. I watched her reflected face with the mountains moving through it and behind it. I felt as though I was moving with her into the heart of life, a golden time. Do you understand me?”

“Not too well.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it myself. I only know I’d lived for twenty-five years without that feeling. I’d been going through the motions for twenty-five years, piling up money and acquiring property. Suddenly Holly was the reason for it, the meaning of it all. She understood when I told her these things. We went on long walks together in the mountains. I poured out my heart to her, and she understood. She said that she loved me, and would share my life.”

Shock and whisky were working in him like truth serum. There was no trace of irony in his voice; only the tragic irony of the circumstances. He had founded his brief marriage on a dream and was trying to convince himself that the dream was real.

“And share your money, too?” I said.

“Holly didn’t marry me for money,” he insisted doggedly. “Remember that she was a successful actress, with a future. It’s true her studio had her tied up in a low-salaried contract, but she could have done much better if she’d stayed in Hollywood. Her agent told me she was bound to become a great star. But the fact is, she wasn’t interested in money, or in stardom. She wanted to improve herself, become a cultivated woman. That was the project we had in mind when we came here. We planned to learn together, read good books, study music and other worthwhile things.”

He looked around the shabby restaurant as if he had somehow fallen into a trap. I remembered the hooded harp and the white concert grand.

“Was your wife studying music seriously?”

He nodded. “She has a voice, you know. I engaged a voice teacher for her, also a speech teacher. She wasn’t happy about the way she spoke, her use of English. I’m no great grammarian myself, but I was always having to correct her.”

“All these lessons she was taking-were they her idea or yours?”

“They were her idea, originally. I’m still in my prime, and at first I wasn’t too fond of the notion that we should take a year or two out to develop our minds and all that. I went along with it because I loved her, because I felt grateful to her.”

“Grateful for what?”

“For marrying me.” He seemed surprised by my lack of understanding. Puzzled surprise was threatening to become his permanent expression. “I’m not a handsome man, and I’m not young. I suppose I can hardly blame her for running out on me.”

“It’s possible she hasn’t. Gaines may have been pointing a gun at her today.”

“No. I saw him get out of the car. She sat behind the wheel and waited for him.”

“Then he may have some other hold on her. How long has she known him?”

“Just since we’ve come here.”

“You’re sure?”

He shook his head. “I can’t be sure, no. She might have known him before, and pulled the wool over my eyes.”

“Do you know much about her background? Where she came from, what sort of girlhood she had?”

“She had a difficult girlhood, I don’t know where or how. Holly preferred not to talk about herself. She said when she married me, she intended to start a fresh page in her life, with no crying over spilt milk.”

“Have you met her parents?”

“No. I’m not even aware that they exist. It may be that she’s ashamed of them. She’s never told me her real name. She married me under her stage name.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Her agent did, Michael Speare. I met him last fall, when I was breaking her studio contract. His agency has her under a long-term contract which I couldn’t break.”

“Would you object if I talked to Speare?”

“You mustn’t tell him what’s happened.” Ferguson’s voice was almost plaintive. The past had opened like a wound, bleeding away his force. “Whether or not she deserves it, we have to protect Holly. If I could just get her out of this frightful mess she’s landed herself in-”

“I don’t see much hope of that. There is one thing you could do which we haven’t discussed. I know of some good private detectives in Los Angeles.”

“No! I’m not going in for that sort of thing.”

Ferguson struck the table with his fist. His glass jumped and rattled against my plate. Fresh blood began to run from his nose. I stood up and got him out of there.

“I’m taking you to a doctor,” I said in the car. “You must know some local doctor. If not, you can get one in the emergency ward of the hospital.”

“It isn’t necessary,” he said. “I’m perfectly all right.”

“We won’t argue, Colonel. Haven’t you ever been to a local doctor?”

“I don’t go to doctors. The blasted doctors killed my mother.” His voice was strained and high. Perhaps he heard himself, because he added in a calmer tone: “Holly visited the Buenavista Clinic once or twice.”

“It’s a good place. Who was her doctor?”

“Chap by the name of Trench.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite certain, yes.” He gave me a questioning look. “Is this Trench a quack of some sort?”

“Hardly. He’s my wife’s doctor. He’s the best obstetrician in town.”

“Is your wife going to-” Then he caught the rest of the implications, and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes,” I said, “she is. Is yours?”

“I don’t know. We never spoke of the matter.”

There seemed to be a number of things they hadn’t spoken of.