The Ferguson Affair

chapter 24

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE STREET, I found a public telephone booth outside a drugstore that was closed for the night. I stepped inside the glass cubicle and placed a collect call to my home in Buenavista. After repeated ringing, the operator said: “Your party does not answer, sir. Do you wish me to try again later?”

Fear stabbed me, twisting and turning into guilt. In the last few weeks Sally had given up going out at night. It was unlikely that she was visiting the neighbors at this hour. The Perrys and our other neighbors were all early risers.

“Do you wish me to try again later, sir?”

“Yes. I’m in a public booth. I’ll call again in a few minutes.”

I hung up and looked at my watch. It was just a few minutes short of midnight. Of course, Sally was asleep. She’d been sleeping heavily lately. The bedroom door was shut, and she hadn’t heard the phone.

Then I remembered that Mrs. Weinstein was supposed to be there with her. Death in his distorting mask slipped into the booth, to my right and a little behind me, just outside the angle of my vision. When I turned to look at him, he moved further behind me.

I tried my home number again. No answer. I called the Buenavista police, but the line was busy. I opened the door of the booth to breathe. Laughter and music came in gusts from the bar across the street. Bide-a-Wee, its flashing red neon said.

To hell with biding, I said to myself. To hell with Mountain Grove and its broken pasts, to hell with the Ferguson case. I wanted no part of it. The only thing I wanted was Sally safe in my arms. I could be home in an hour if I drove fast.

I ran back to my car and started the engine. But the case wouldn’t let me go. A man said behind me, under the engine’s roar: “Keep your hands where I can see them, Gunnarson. On the wheel. I have a gun pointed at the back of your head.”

I turned and saw his face in alternating reddish light and reddish darkness. It was secret and handsome in the half-light, with liquid-glinting eyes and metal-glinting hair. I recognized Haines from his photograph.

He was crouching in the space between the seats with my car blanket over his shoulders. He lifted his hand from under the robe and showed me a heavy revolver. “I’ll use this if I have to. Bear it in mind.”

There was no real menace in his voice, no feeling of any kind. Its emptiness was the alarming thing. It was the voice of the man from space who owed no human allegiance anywhere. Harry Haines, self-conceived out of nothing, a fatherless man with a gun, trying to steal reality for himself.

I could feel his breath on the side of my neck. It made me angrier than a blow would have. “Get out of my car. Go back to one of your women, Harry-Larry. Snuggle up under a skirt, you won’t feel so anxious.”

“Why, damn you,” he said. “I’ll kill you!”

“Mother wouldn’t like it.”

“You keep my mother out of this. You had no right to force your way into her house. She’s a respectable woman-”

“That’s right, she wouldn’t like it if you shot me. Right here in Mountain Grove, the scene of your early triumphs. Local boy makes good, again.”

“I’m doing better than you are, Gunnarson.”

His voice was painfully high. He didn’t take pressure well. I gave him another notch of it. “Sure, as a two-bit gunman you’re doing fine. I have about seven dollars in my wallet. You’re welcome to it if you’re that hungry.”

“Keep your money. You’ll need it for a down payment on a tombstone.”

He was a poor imitation of a storm trooper. But so were most of the originals. I’d read enough criminology to know that the cat burglars, the night walkers, were the really dangerous ones. They killed for unknown reasons at unexpected times. The reality they stole was ultimately death.

Gaines came over the back of the seat in a swift feline movement. He squatted on his knees beside me, thrusting the gun at my side. “Get going, straight ahead.”

“What did you do to my wife?”

“Nothing. Get going, I said.”

“Where is she?”

“Out on the town, for all I know. I never saw your frigging wife.”

“If she’s harmed in any way, you won’t last long. Do you understand that, Gaines? I’ll attend to you personally.”

I was stealing his lines and it made him nervous. He stammered slightly when he said: “S-shut up. G-get going now or I’ll b-blast you.”

He urged the gun into my side, handling it with more bravado than caution. Perhaps I had a fifty-fifty chance of taking him now. I wanted a better chance, something like ninety to ten. I had more to lose than he had. I hoped. I desperately hoped. And I got going.

The road ran northward out of town, straight as a yardstick through dark fields. I pushed the speedometer needle around past seventy, nearly to eighty. Whatever was going to happen, I wanted it over.

“Don’t drive so fast,” he said.

“Does it make you nervous? I thought you liked going fast.”

“S-sure. I used to d-drag-race, here on this very road. B-but right now I want you to slow down to sixty. I don’t want the HP on my tail.”

“Maybe you’d like to do the driving.”

“Oh, certainly, and let you hold the g-gun.”

“Is it such fun holding the gun?”

“Shut up!” he cried in a sudden yapping rage. “Shut up and slow down like I said.”

He pressed the muzzle of the revolver into the soft place below my ribs. I slowed down to sixty. There were lights ahead, an island of bleak color on the darkness, where the road joined the east-west highway.

“You’re g-going to make a left turn here. I don’t want any funny stuff.”

I slowed still more as we approached the intersection, and stopped for the red light. Two cars were being gassed at a bright, bare all-night station. In the adjacent lunchroom, people sat at the counter with their backs to me.

“You heard me, d-didn’t you? No funny stuff. Let me know you heard me.” He thrust the gun into me with all his force. He was no longer interested in self-protection. The light had turned green. He was interested in imposing his will on me. “Let me know you heard me.”

I remained silent.

“Let me know you heard me,” he said urgently.

I sat with my teeth clenched, my hands turning white on the wheel. The moment stretched out like rotten elastic. A pair of headlights plunged up out of the fields of night behind us. The traffic light turned red again.

One of the cars left the gas station and rolled out onto the highway. It passed in front of us going east, gathering speed. I felt invisible. The hot valley wind blew through my bones like the breath of nothingness.

“What are you trying to do?” Gaines said. “Are you trying to make me k-kill you?”

I was trying to gather the animal courage to open the door of my car and get out and walk over to the gas station. The thought of what I had to lose held me paralyzed. The plunging headlights on the road behind were nearer and brighter. In a few more seconds they’d be on me like a spotlight, making a zone of safety that I could walk through.

They filled the car with sudden shadows. Though the traffic signal was still against us, they swerved to pass. I heard the squeal of tires and caught a glimpse of a pale adolescent face at the wheel. A girl clung like a huge blonde limpet to the driver’s body.

He made a grandstand turn in front of me, double-clutched his hot rod, and fled eastward down the highway trailing noise. No use to me, no use to anybody.

I made a left turn on the green.

A late moon had risen over the mountains, blurred large by thin clouds. The highway climbed through foothills toward it, then rose in sweeping arcs into the pass. I could feel the pressure in my ears.

We passed the sign that marked the summit. I caught a glimpse of the curved aluminum sea far ahead and below. A long beam flashed out from its edge, possibly from the lighthouse on Ferguson’s cliff.

“Are we going back to Buenavista?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But you’re not going back there, now or any time. You can k-kiss the place good-by.”

“To hell with you and your cheap threats.”

“You think I’m cheap, eh? You called me a two-bit g-gunman. Think again. My g-grandfather had a summer place up here, a real showplace. In addition to the spread he had in the valley. I’m not the b-bum you think.”

“How does your grandfather prevent you from being a bum?”

“I have background, see? You’re stupid for a lawyer. My g-grandfather was loaded. He had two houses, b-big ones.”

“Why tell me?” A plague on both his houses.

“I wouldn’t want you to d-die in ignorance. You better slow down. We’ll be coming to the turnoff in a minute.”

It was marked by a boulder which jutted out of the cut-bank. Some crank or prophet had scrawled on the boulder in whitewash: “We die daily.”

I turned into a gravel road worn bare by the rains of many winters. The bank above it was crenelated by erosion. Below in the canyon, moonlight drenched the treetops. An owl hooted softly and mournfully.

I was keenly aware of these things, their strangeness and their beauty. I thought of turning hard left over the edge, holding on and taking my chances, letting the deep trees catch me if they could. I must have given away the thought somehow. Gaines said: “Don’t do it. You’re a d-dead man if you try it. Just keep on driving until we reach the g-gate.”

I did as I was told. My patience was wearing thin, though, and my time was running out. I wished that I could read Gaines’s mind as he had just read mine. Apparently he had cast me for a role in his fantasy. He wanted to hurt me, and he wanted to impress me. Both halves of the double role were dangerous.

Coming out of a long climbing curve, the headlights flashed on gateposts of squared stone. The gates themselves had rusted off their hinges and leaned crazily.

“Turn in here. This is it, James. The ancestral acres.” There was a weird, sardonic sorrow in his voice.

The driveway was half overgrown with weeds which brushed against the underside of the car. On either side, eucalyptus trees hung in the moony air like shapes of mist congealing into cloud. The house loomed dark at the end of the avenue.

It was a two-storied house with walls of stone and a round stone tower at each end. It had been built to resist time, but time and weather were winning out against it. Mountain winds had torn off shingles and left ragged holes in the roof. The windows on the upper floor were smashed; the windows on the lower floor were boarded up. There was a light behind one of the boarded front windows.

“My mother used to live here in the summers when she was a girl.” As if it were the conclusion of the same line of thought, Gaines added: “G-get out now, I’ll be right behind you. One false move and I fire, see?”

His voice was small in the silence. Drifts of leaves and fallen branches and twisted strips of bark littered the ground. They crackled under our feet. The moon peered down through flimsy cloud like an acned blonde roused behind her curtains by our noise. Our shadows fell jerkily across the veranda and lengthened up the door into the darkness under the veranda roof.

Gaines thrust his leg out past me and kicked the ancestral door. A woman’s voice answered, its brassiness hushed by alarm. “Who is it?”

“Larry. Open up. I brought a friend with me.”

A bolt squealed. The door opened an inch, and then a foot. The woman who called herself Holly May looked out.

“What friend? You got no friends.”

She slouched in the doorway, narrow-eyed. A dead cigarette hung down from the corner of her mouth. Her body gave off a sense of sleeping danger, immediate as an odor.

“It isn’t exactly a friend,” Gaines said. “It’s the lawyer Ferguson hired.”

“Why did you have to cart him up here?”

“I p-picked him up in Mountain Grove. I couldn’t let him run loose.”

“Well, don’t just stand there, bring him in.”

Gaines ushered me in with the gun. The woman bolted the door behind us. We went down a vast dark hallway into a vaster room.

One end of the room was lit by a gasoline lantern which stood in the nearest corner. Its hissing circle of brightness fell with shuddering violence on the very light housekeeping arrangements which Gaines and the woman had set up: a canvas sleeping bag on the bare floor, a rustic bench blanched by rain and sun, a few glowing coals in the great stone fireplace, bread and cheese and an open can of beans laid out on a page of newspaper which carried the picture of Donato, under his sheet.

I wondered when they planned to start spending Ferguson’s money. Or had they involved themselves in crime merely to reduce themselves to this? To make a brief impossible marriage in a corner of the wrecked past.

“Stand b-back against the wall alongside the fireplace,” Gaines said to me. “On the far side away from the lantern. And stand still, you hear me?”

I stood against the wall in silence.

“You hear me?” Gaines said. “Let me know you hear me.”

I could see him clearly for the first time. He was a good-looking man, if you didn’t look too closely. But his eyes were small and brilliant with trouble. They moved like ball bearings magnetized by the woman. Her presence seemed to focus his personality, and also to diminish it.

He stood with one hand on his hip, the other holding the gun. He might have been posing for a photograph: rebel without a cause years later and still without a cause; or actor in search of a role, looking for the crime that would complete his nothingness. I guessed that his life was a series of such stills, forced into the semblance of action by fits and starts of rage.

“Let me know you hear me, G-gunnarson.”

I stood silent. He glanced down anxiously at his gun, as if it might suggest an action to him, turn in his hand like a handle and open the door on manhood. The gun jerked. A bullet tore the floor in front of me and sprinkled my legs with slivers.

Among the dying echoes of the shot, the woman said: “Don’t get gun-happy, Larry. We’re not the only people in these hills.”

“You can’t hear it outside, the walls are too thick. I used to come up here when I was a kid and shoot at targets.”

“Human targets?” I said. “Was that your boyhood hobby?”

The woman tittered like a broken xylophone. Unkempt as she was, her bleached hair stringy as hemp, her hips bulging in a pair of men’s jeans, she dragged at the attention. Her eyes were blowtorch blue in a white, frozen face.

“Have yourself a good look, lawyer. It’s going to have to last you a long time.”

“Are you going someplace, Hilda?”

“Hey,” she said to Gaines, “he knows my real name. Did you have to tell him my real name, stupid?”

“D-don’t you call me stupid. I can think rings around you any day of the week.”

She moved toward him. “If you have such a brilliant brain, what did you bring him here for? He knows me. He knows my name. It’s a hell of a note.”

“Your mother and D-dotery told him. I don’t know how he got to them, but I caught him outside their store in the G-grove.”

“What in merry hell are we going to do with him now? We’re supposed to be hitting the road tonight.”

“We’ll knock him off. What else can we do?” His voice was shallow, almost devoid of expression. He glanced down at the gun and said more forcefully: “Knock him off and burn the frigging place down. We can d-dress him in some of my clothes, see, we’re about the same size. Once he’s cremated, nobody will know the d-difference. Even the Rover boys won’t know the d-difference.”

“You’re going to cut them out, then?”

“I always did intend to cut them out. It isn’t a big enough melon to slice so many ways. It’s why I wanted Broadman out, why I tipped off the cops on D-donato.” He strutted at the edge of the light. “I’m not so stupid, bag. Anyway, what contribution did the Rover boys make? I’m the brains, they’re nothing better than errand boys.”

“They did your dirty work for you.”

“That’s what I mean, I’m the brains. They’d crucify their g-grandmothers for a stick of H. Let the k-kill-crazy bastards stay here and take the rap. I’ll send them a postcard from South America.”

Her blue gaze jumped like a gas flame at his face. “You mean we will, don’t you?”

“We will what?”

“Send them a postcard from South America, stupid. We’re going there together, aren’t we?”

“Not if you g-go on calling me stupid.”

“What in hell is this, Larry?”

“You keep a civil tongue, talking to me.”

“Oh, sure. The mastermind. The big brain.” She snarled at him: “Let me see those tickets.”

“They’re not here. I don’t have them.”

“You went down to the Grove to pick them up. Didn’t Adelaide buy them?”

“Of course she did. They’re in my car. Everything’s in my car.”

“How do I know there are two tickets?”

“I’m telling you. Do you think I’d stand you up at this late date?”

“If you thought you could get away with it. Only you can’t.”

It resembled a conversation on a lower floor of merry hell, where two dead souls re-enacted a meaningless scene forever. It was the meaninglessness that made it hell. I dug deep for the most meaningful words I could find. “Listen to me. Hilda. Ferguson’s very fond of you, he’s ready to forgive you. Why throw yourself away on thieves and psychos? You still have some kind of future if you’ll take it.”

Gaines moved on me jerkily. His boot soles thumped the floor as if he had poor contact with reality.

“I’m no psycho, d-dad.” He offered the gun in evidence, leveling it at my middle. “Take it back or I k-kill you now. I’m going to k-kill you anyway. I’d just as soon k-kill you now.”

Hilda stepped between us. “Let the man speak his piece.”

“What the hell for?”

“He’s funny. He gives me kicks.” She was looking at me like a lost soul out of hell.

“You’ve had your k-kicks.” He smiled at her malignly.

“What’s on your mind? Are you taking Adelaide with you instead of me? I wouldn’t put it past you, mother lover.”

One of his sudden rages went through him like a hemorrhage. It drained his face of color. “D-don’t call me that. You want to d-die, too?”

“Christ, you’re the one that’s kill-crazy. You better give me that gun.”

“I wouldn’t trust you with it.”

“Hand it over, little man,” she growled. Her breasts were thrust out under her shirt, aggressive as nose cones.

“D-don’t give me orders.”

The gun wavered toward her. She reached for the muzzle. Gaines looked horribly torn, ready to faint. He raised the gun and struck her with it on the side of the head. She went to her knees like a supplicant.

I stepped around her and hit him in the soft place below his ribs. He opened his mouth to grunt. I smashed it with my right fist. He ran rapidly backward across the room and slammed into the wall on the far side. The gun clacked on the floor and skittered away into shadow.

I went after Gaines. He didn’t come to meet me. He stayed against the wall, gasping for breath, until I was almost on top of him. Then he moved very quickly. His fist came out from under his windbreaker with a blade projecting upward from it.

I rushed him and got both hands on the arm behind the fist. We were face to face for an instant, static and straining. Before the instant was over, I knew that I was stronger than he was. The knowledge made me grin.

He struck and scratched at my grin with his free hand. I concentrated on the wrist behind the knife. I forced it up to the level of my chest, ducked under it, turning, and twisted it with the whole torque of my body. Something gave. The knife fell between us.

I picked it up, but it did me no great good. The woman was crawling away from the light into the deep shadow. She found the gun and sat on the floor with it. Resting the barrel between her pulled-up knees, she sighted along it and fired.

The bullet hit my shoulder, turned me, and set me in motion. She fired again, but I felt no second wound. I didn’t need one. I waded to the doorway in the floor’s dissolving surface and fell slack. My head must have struck the door frame. I dropped across the threshold of consciousness.