The Ferguson Affair

chapter 29

SHE WAS SITTING UP in the long chair by the window, with the sky and sea behind her. The sea was ruffled and burnished by wind. Spinnakers stood on the horizon, as still to the eye as traveling moons.

She looked like a young barbarous queen. A scarf worn like a turban and held in place by jeweled pins concealed the places where the fire had scorched her hair. Jeweled dark harlequin spectacles hid her eyes. A silk robe covered her legs and the lower part of her body.

“I thought you were never going to come back,” she said to Ferguson. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Mr. Gunnarson, Holly. The man who rescued you from the fire.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Gunnarson.”

She held out her hand in a rather regal gesture and kept it out until I took it. It was limp and cold. What I could see of her face had a pale and lunar look.

Her voice barely moved her lips. “I’ve been wanting to thank you in person for all you did. You really plucked me burning, didn’t you? Like in that poem which my husband bought me a record of. By T. S. Eliot. I never heard of the label before, but the poem certainly sent me.”

Except for the last line, the little speech sounded rehearsed. The expressionlessness of her face gave it a ventriloquial effect. The entire scene had a staged quality.

If I had been feeling stronger, I’d have gone along with it for a while. But my knees were shaking with weakness and anger and doubt. “We’ve met before, Mrs. Ferguson.”

“I guess you could say we have, in a way. I wouldn’t remember, drugged like I was. The dirty ba-the dirty beggars drugged me.”

“You don’t remember shooting me?”

The room was silent for a long moment. I could hear the susurrus of the waves like whispering at the windows. The woman tipped up her chin to Ferguson, carefully, so as not to destroy the beauty of her pose. “What is he talking about, Ian?”

“Mr. Gunnarson claims you shot him last night.” He was watching her like a photographer, ready to click the shutter of his judgment. “There’s no doubt he was shot.”

“I didn’t shoot him, for gosh sake. Why would I shoot the man that was trying to help me?”

“That’s one of the questions I came here to ask you.”

“Are there others? You keep on pitching low curves at me like that one, I’ll ask my husband to chuck you out on your ear.”

Ferguson shook his head at her.

I said: “Why did you shoot me? You know perfectly well you did.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort. And don’t stand over me, I hate people standing over me.” A thin edge of hysteria had entered her voice.

Ferguson picked up a chair and placed it for me, a safe distance from her long chair. “Please sit down. There’s no need to stand, after all.”

I noticed as I sat down that Dr. Trench had slipped in behind me and was standing quietly just inside the door. The woman appealed to her husband, holding up both hands to him with the fingers stiff and spread. “Tell him he’s making a mistake, Fergie. You know I couldn’t have done it, I was out like a light. It must have been somebody else shot him. Or else he’s nuttier than a fruitcake himself.”

“Was somebody else there, Mrs. Ferguson?”

“I don’t know, honest. I don’t know who was there. They had me drugged, and I lost two whole days. You don’t have to take my word, ask Dr. Trench.” She craned her pretty neck to look past me.

The doctor stood there polishing his glasses. “This is no time to try to settle anything. Why don’t you let it lie for now, Gunnarson? Mrs. Ferguson’s had a rough two days.”

The third day was turning out to be no less rough. I heard a car coming down the lane and thought it was Wills, arriving on cue. I went with Ferguson to the door. It was Salaman.

“I want to talk to the lady in person,” he said.

“Say whatever you have to say to me. My-wife is far from well.”

“She’ll be farther from it unless she pays her bills.”

Ferguson said in an old, weary voice: “I’ll pay you. I’ll give you a check on the Bank of Montreal.”

“Don’t you do it, Fergie.” The woman had come up behind us in the hallway. She brushed past me and leaned on Ferguson’s arm. “This character knows we’re in trouble, he’s trying to shake you down. I don’t owe him or anybody else any sixty-five thou. I don’t owe him sixty-five cents.”

“She’s lying her little head off,” Salaman said. “She thinks she can gamble my money away and lie herself out of it.”

“I never gambled in my life. I never even put a dollar in a slot machine.”

“You’ve never even been in Miami, I bet.”

“That’s right, I haven’t.”

“Liar. You slept with me in Miami two months running last summer. What’s more, you liked it. Maybe you want to forget it, now that you’re married to Pops here, but I’m here to tell you that you can’t.”

“Which two months last summer?” I said.

“July and most of August. I wasn’t planning to bring this up, but the lady forced me to.”

“I was in Canada all through August,” she said.

“That’s true,” Ferguson said. “I can vouch for it.”

“It takes more than that. I don’t like using muscle, but why are the ones with the most the hardest to collect from?” Salaman’s voice was rising. His hand went under his gabardine jacket, as if he felt a pain there, and came out holding an automatic. “Make with the checkbook, Pops. And take my advice, don’t try to stop the check.”

“I don’t know what goes on here,” the woman said, “but we’re not paying money we don’t owe.”

Salaman leaned toward her. “You’re Holly May, ain’t you?”

“That’s my name, little man. It gives you no right-”

“You’re the movie actress, ain’t you?”

“I used to be in the movies.”

“You remember me, don’t you? Hairy-legs Salaman with the loving disposition?”

“I never saw you before in my life and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

“I hear you saying it. You used to tell it different.”

Ferguson looked at her in bitter doubt. She answered his look. “This boy has got me tabbed for somebody else. It happened another time last year, before I went to Canada. Some stores in Palm Springs sent me bills, and I hadn’t been in Palm Springs all winter.”

“Aw, cut it out.” Salaman reached for her face in a sudden movement and snatched off her harlequin glasses.

“Don’t you dare, you!”

“Hey!” Salaman said. “Come out in the light. I want to look at you.”

He took hold of her wrist, not roughly, but with an easy assumption of superior force, and pulled her out into the sun.

“Let go of my wife,” Ferguson cried. “I’ll break your bloody neck.”

Ferguson started to move on him. I tried to hold him. A bullet in the bowels was all he needed to complete his disaster. I couldn’t hold him with one arm. He tore himself out of my grasp.

The woman swung her body between her husband and the gun. She jerked her wrist free and grabbed her dark glasses out of Salaman’s hand. Salaman’s eyes remained intent on her face. Then he looked around at us. The gun muzzle followed his glance.

“What are you trying to pull on me? She ain’t Holly May. Where’s the real McCoy?”

“How would I know? There’s thousands of people look like me. They used to send me their pictures in the mail.” The woman let out a laugh of savage enjoyment. “Too bad, lover-boy, some gal conned you good. You better get out of here before somebody steals your wallet. And put that firearm away before you hurt somebody.”

“That isn’t a bad idea,” Trench said at my elbow. He walked toward Salaman with a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. “Put the cap pistol away and get out of here. I happen to be a skeet shooter, and this shotgun is loaded. Now get.”

Salaman got.

I noted his license number, and telephoned it in to the police station. If he had a criminal record, as he almost certainly had, concealed-weapons charges would keep him out of mischief for some time. This pleasant duty accomplished, I asked for Lieutenant Wills.

Wills was on his way in from the mountains. The desk sergeant said if it was urgent he could direct him by radio to Ferguson’s house. I told him it was urgent, and went back to the big front room. Meeting Trench in the hall, I asked him to absent himself for a while.

The moony spinnakers were strung out down the sea, ballooning home. Ferguson sat on a stool beside the woman’s chair, holding her hand. Or perhaps she was holding his hand. She was a powerful woman, whoever she was.

“Take off your glasses again, Mrs. Ferguson. Would you mind?”

She made a mouth at me. “I hate to. I look awful with this black eye.”

But she removed the harlequin glasses and let me look at her. The bruise was an old one, already turning green and yellow at the edges. She couldn’t have received it within the past fifteen hours. Besides, it was on the wrong side. Gaines was right-handed. The woman in the mountain house had been struck on the left side of the head by his revolver.

There were other, more subtle differences between that woman and the one in front of me. She had had a frozen face, as hard as a silver mask, and eyes like blowtorches which had burned holes in it. The face I was looking at was mobile and lively, in spite of the damage to it. The eyes and mouth were smiling.

“You’ll remember me.”

“For more reasons than one. Has somebody been masquerading as you?”

“It certainly looks like it.”

“And you say it’s happened before?”

“At least once, maybe other times. That would explain a lot of things.”

“Do you have any notion who’s been doing it to you?”

“I know darn well who did it that time in Palm Springs. Mike Speare hired a detective to find out.”

“Who was it? Your mother?”

“Don’t be ridic. Momma’s no great moral figure, but she wouldn’t do a thing like that to me.”

“One of your sisters?”

“You’re sharp.” She said to Ferguson: “This boy is sharp.”

“Which one? Renee or June?”

She emitted a burst of laughter. It was a queer, high, bitter, rowdy laugh, hyphenating the tragic and the comic.

“My God,” she said, “I’m beginning to get the picture. Who do you think I am?”

“I know who you are, Hilda.”

“You may think you do, but you don’t. I happen to be June. Hilda was the one who used my professional name to run up bills in Palm Springs. I guess I should have done something about her then. But you sort of hate to sick the law on your own sister. I certainly wasn’t going to sick that hoodlum on her.

“I can’t blame her too much,” she added in a softer voice. “She always wanted to be a big name, an actress. If the truth be known, I caught the bug from Hilda. It must have driven her crazy when she saw me on the screen, and realized I was her little sister June.”

“You’re a generous woman to feel that way about her.”

“I can afford to be generous. I was the one that made it. And when I made it, I found out I didn’t want it. I wanted Fergie here. Thank the Lord I’ve got him.”

Her smile resembled her mother’s. It lit up her face like a ray which had traveled through light-years of darkness to this moment. She turned it on Ferguson, and he tried to respond. His mouth only grimaced. He was sweating out his own darkness.

“Hilda’s your oldest sister?”

“That’s right, she’s the oldest one, and I’m the second oldest. Hilda’s only our half-sister, though.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“I ought to.” Her smile faded. “It was no secret in our family. There were never any secrets in the Dotery family-the old man saw to that. When we were kids, he brought it up about three times a day, at mealtimes, that Hilda wasn’t his, or anybody’s. It was very nice for all of us, especially for Hilda.”

“She must have been somebody’s.”

“She was Momma’s. The father was some guy that Momma knew in Boston before the old man married her. The jerk ran out on her. He sent her a thousand bucks, which Dotery used to buy a car to come to California. That’s all I know about it.”

It was enough. Ferguson’s teeth were set like a wounded man’s biting on a rag.

His wife told her story to Wills when he arrived. I sat and monitored the interview, ready to suppress hearsay evidence and irrelevancies. I was Ferguson’s lawyer, after all, and Hilda was his daughter.

Wills sat slumped in a chair and listened without arguing. He looked very tired. There was a black smear of char on his right cheekbone. He shook his head at her when she had finished. Ashes fell from his hair, filling a shaft of sunlight with their particles.

“I wish you’d spoken up this morning, Mrs. Ferguson. Time is of the essence in these matters, and your sister could have traveled a long way since early this morning. In addition to which, we put out the word that Gaines is traveling alone.”

“But I didn’t know that Hilda was in it this morning.”

He looked at her unresponsively. “How could that be, Mrs. Ferguson? It was her phone call that decoyed you out of the Foothill Club and set you up for the sna-for the abduction.”

“I know that now,” she said. “I didn’t then. When Hilda phoned me the other night she said that she was Renee, my youngest sister. She just got in from San Francisco, she said, and she was down at the bus station. She said she was in trouble, and needed help. I believed her.”

“The girl’s in trouble, all right,” Wills muttered.

“You won’t be too hard on her, will you? Hilda isn’t too responsible, and Gaines has always led her around by the nose.”

He disregarded her question. “That’s another thing I don’t understand, Mrs. Ferguson. You knew what kind of a character Gaines was, going back to early days of childhood. You knew that he was using a false name. Yet you’ve been fraternizing with him these last months. No offense intended, but you must have been aware you were putting yourself in danger.”

She looked at her husband, rather guiltily. He looked guiltily back at her.

She said: “I was a damned fool, frankly. He told me he was reformed, that he was trying to live down his past and earn an honest living. I felt so lucky myself, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.” She changed the subject quickly. “What are you going to do to him and Hilda?”

“Find them.” Wills hunched his body forward, heavily, and held out his hands as if he was getting ready to receive a weight. There were lines of grime across his palms, and his fingernails were dirty. “Then it’s out of my hands.” He let his arms drop to his sides.

“Will Hilda go to jail for a long time?”

“She’ll be lucky if that’s all that happens to her. There’s no use beating around the bush, Mrs. Ferguson. This is a case of multiple murder. You know the penalty for premeditated murder.”

“But Hilda didn’t kill anyone herself.”

“She didn’t have to, to be guilty of murder. Ronald Spice says she was the one that phoned them and told them to knock off Secundina Donato. Even if Spice is lying, she’s tied to another murder, one we didn’t know about. We’ve been doing some digging at the scene of the fire, and we found human remains. There isn’t much left of whoever it was-”

Holly cried out, and turned her head away. She had reached her limit. Dr. Trench stepped in and ended the interview. As Wills and I left the room, she began to wail.

I couldn’t keep up with Wills, but he was waiting for me in his car. I got in beside him. “Whose body is it, Lieutenant?”

“You can’t call it a body-a piece of skull and some teeth and a few charred bones. I was hoping you could tell me who they belonged to. Who else was up there, besides you and Gaines and the sister?”

“Nobody else that I saw. Are the remains male or female?”

“I can’t tell for sure. Simeon probably can, but he hasn’t seen them yet. They look like a man’s teeth to me. Do you have any suggestions on the subject?”

“Not unless it’s Gaines himself.”

“That doesn’t seem too likely. As I see it, he and the woman made a clean getaway in your car. The Mountain Grove P.D. picked up your car about a block from his mother’s house. Apparently he had his own car stashed in her garage. There’s fresh oil spots on the floor, and she has no car of her own.”

“Did Mrs. Haines go with them?”

“Not her. The Grove police brought her in for questioning, but she claims to know nothing about them. She says she had a headache and took some sleeping pills, slept right through until the police woke her up. The chief there says she’s been off her rocker for years, in a harmless way. Ever since her boy got into trouble the first time.” Wills sighed. “Why can’t people stay out of trouble and lead a natural life?”

“You’d be out of a job.”

“Gladly. Dr. Root tells me, by the way, that he gave you the slug extracted from your shoulder. He shouldn’t have done that. It’s evidence.”

“Take it up with him.”

“I already did. Do you have it with you, Bill?” He was calling me Bill again.

“It’s in my room at the hospital. Do you want to drive me back there? I was intending to ask you for a lift.”

“Sure thing. You look as though you could use more hospital. As a matter of fact, you look like the wrath of God.”

I caught a glimpse of my face in the rear-view mirror, and concurred. I’d been going on nerve ever since Ferguson’s Boston adventure shocked me out of bed. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and dozed all the way to the hospital.

The nurse in charge at the third-floor station opened her mouth to upbraid me. She closed it again when Wills stepped out of the elevator behind me. I was probably being arrested. I certainly deserved it, her look said.

I opened the drawer of the bedside table and handed him the pillbox. He dumped its contents into his hand, growling over them. “Fragmented. We probably can’t do anything with it.”

“What do you want to do with it?”

“Just hold it in readiness,” he said, “until we get our hands on the gun. Who shot you, Bill, Gaines or the woman?”

“She did.”

“And then she dragged her unconscious sister out and changed clothes with her?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s what I guessed. You thought you were covering up for Mrs. Ferguson. The girl you were actually covering for may turn out to be the most vicious killer of them all. There’s a hole in that piece of skull we found, looks like a bullet hole, spang in the middle of the forehead. She left three people to burn up in that fire, you and the sister and a third party who was probably dead already. Who was the third party, Bill? You must have some idea.”

I remembered the second shot Hilda had fired, just before I knocked myself out on the door frame. I’d assumed it was aimed at me.

“There was no third party, unless he or she was out of sight with the unconscious sister. You may have turned up the victim of an old killing.”

“That’s possible, too.”

Wills went away at last. I undressed with shaking hands. The head nurse came in to fix my bed and give me hell. Dr. Root dropped by and gave me hell. Sally came up in a wheelchair and gave me hell.

Very mild hell. She had the baby with her. I passed out more or less content, wishing my little nameless girl a better fate than some.