The Ferguson Affair

chapter 30

FERGUSON HIRED DETECTIVES. The FBI entered the case on the grounds that Gaines and Hilda were in unlawful flight. In two days the various agencies established that the pair had crossed no borders, taken no planes; and were not walking the streets of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, New York, Miami, or Boston.

Dr. Root let me out of the hospital on the afternoon of the third day. I found Ferguson’s check for two thousand dollars waiting in my office mail, and later used it to make a down payment on a house.

That same afternoon I asked Mrs. Weinstein to place a second call to Michael Speare in Beverly Hills. I was remembering things.

Speare hadn’t been in his office all day. His secretary, if that is what she was, finally relinquished his private number. I reached him there at seven o’clock at night.

He greeted me over the wire like a long-lost brother. “Good to hear from you, Bill. I’ve been following your adventures in the newspapers. Greatest thing since Pearl White in Plunder.”

“Thanks. I want to talk to you as soon as possible. Tonight.”

“Go right ahead.”

“In person.”

“What about?”

“Certain phases of my adventures involving you.”

“You mean Holly and this Gaines character? I’ve been thinking maybe I made a mistake about them. They probably weren’t as close as I imagined, you know how it is.”

“I know how it is, Speare. That’s just one of the things we have to discuss.”

He was silent for nearly a minute. Then he said in a chastened tone: “As a matter of fact, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. How’s about coming over for a drink?”

“You come here. I’m not driving yet.”

I told him how to find my office, and he agreed to be there in an hour. Shortly after eight o’clock I heard a racing motor die coughing in the street. Something told me it would be Speare. Through the window I watched him disembark from a low-slung silver car and take off his helmet and goggles.

In the full light of the anteroom I saw that he was a worried man. He had been treating his worry with alcohol, more alcohol than he could have drunk in an hour. When I ushered him into my private office I could smell his breath. He sat down as if he had eggs in his pockets. I shut the door. The sound of it made him jump.

“About those little discrepancies, Bill, you got to understand. I had a lot at stake in Holly’s career. Things have been tough in my business the last five years. And you got to admit I was only telling you what you wanted to hear.”

“Just don’t tell me any more lies.”

His face crumpled and uncrumpled. “Is this room bugged?”

“No.”

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“That’s not our problem. How well did you know Larry Gaines?”

“You don’t expect me to answer that one, do you? He’s wanted for a list of crimes as long as your arm. I’m not responsible for the morals of people I do business with.”

“You did business with Gaines?”

He caught himself up. “No. He came to me, wanted me to represent him. I didn’t think he had it. Besides, I didn’t like his looks. I wouldn’t touch him.”

“I heard different.”

“Oh?” His webbed eyeballs rolled. “Who from, Bill?”

I left his question hanging. “Why did Gaines pick you out to represent him?”

“It’s a long and sordid story. I don’t mean I did anything out of line. I was only trying to protect my client.”

“Then you don’t have any reason to suppress it. And you might as well tell the truth the first time around. If we have to go around a second time, we’ll do it up the street at the police station.”

“That’s a hell of a way to treat a man, when I came here willingly to co-operate.”

“Then co-operate.”

His eyes, his entire face, even his bald spot, had a fine glaze on them, like well-fired pottery. He rose and took a few steps away from me and then came back. He leaned on the top of my desk. “I came here to co-operate. I’m in a worse bind than you know. The whole thing started early last spring before Holly left me. That sister of hers, the one you’re looking for, ran up some bills in Palm Springs stores, using Holly’s name. I hired a detective to track the sister down. If she got into the papers, it wouldn’t be good. The sister was traveling with Gaines at the time-he was the one who put her up to the con game-and they gave my gumshoe quite a chase, all the way across the country.

“I kept the gumshoe after them because when he found out what they were doing, it looked pretty serious.

“He traced them to San Antonio and dug up a dentist there who’d put crowns on Hilda’s teeth, Hollywood style. The dentist led him to a crooked plastic surgeon who specialized in fugitives from justice. He’d given Hilda a nose bob and some other touches, working from a photograph of Holly. From San Antonio the two of them went to Houston, where she promoted herself a wardrobe. Then on to sucker-land.

“The suckers in Miami weren’t having any, not the respectable ones with the big money. Hilda looked like Holly, but she lacked the class. She had to settle for fringe benefits, using Holly’s name to gamble on. She fell into the hands of a cookie named Salaman-the hood they arrested in L.A. the other day. When my man caught up with her finally, she was living with Salaman, paying off the interest on the money that she owed him. She was still using Holly’s name, and Salaman thought he was sleeping with a star, bragging around town about it. I flew to Miami the end of August to put a stop to it.”

“Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

“I did. At least I thought I did. I gave her twenty-four hours to crawl back into the woodwork and stop damaging my client.”

“Holly wasn’t your client at the end of August.”

“I know, but I was hoping to get her back. And I anticipate what you’re going to say, that I was too soft-hearted. I should have turned Hilda and Gaines over to the police, and saved us all a lot of tragedy. I’ve always been too softhearted where women-”

I cut him short. “What happened after that?”

“Nothing. I paid the detective off, with my own money, and flew on home.”

“Will he confirm your story?”

“Certainly, if you could reach him. Only, he’s retired to Honolulu.”

“What’s his name?”

“Smith. I forget his first name.”

“I know a police detective named Wills,” I said. “If I can’t get the truth out of you, he can.”

“The truth is all I’ve been telling you.”

“Tell me more of it.”

“You can’t get blood out of a stone, Bill.”

I picked up my phone, dialed the police station, and asked for Lieutenant Wills. The desk sergeant said I could probably get him at home.

Speare seized my arm and spilled whisky-flavored words over my face. “Listen, no cops, the publicity would ruin me. Hang up.”

He spoke with the sincerity of panic. I hung up.

“You got to understand, Bill. How could I tell it was going to turn out the way it did? I thought I was acting in Holly’s best interests. She married an old man for his money. I thought she’d be better off working, in fact I know it. I know my clients like a book, better than they know themselves.”

“What did you do? I think I know, but I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

“Nothing much. I brought Gaines and Hilda back here and kept them on the hook for a while, wondering what to do with them. Some way or other they got the idea that I’d be pleased and happy if Holly’s marriage didn’t work out too well. I talk too much sometimes when I’ve been drinking-”

“I’ll translate that. You blackmailed Gaines and Hilda into coming out here and trying to break up Holly’s marriage.”

“That’s a rough way to put it, Bill. Gaines needed no urging. He had his own ideas about Holly May. I think he got delusions of grandeur traveling with her double. He told me one night when he was high that he was going to take her away from Ferguson and marry her himself.”

“What was he high on?”

“Heroin. They both take heroin when they can get it.”

I stood up behind my desk. Speare sat down quickly, for fear I was going to hit him. I almost hit him anyway, with my left hand. “That was a fine plan you had, turning loose two hopped-up criminals on your ex-client.”

“It wasn’t such a good idea, Bill. I didn’t know it was going to turn out this way.” His face had broken up like crackleware. “Look. I’ll make a deal with you. Forget about this little business, keep my name out of it, and I’ll give you something you really want.”

“I have everything I really want.”

“You don’t have Gaines and the woman,” he said softly.

“You know where they are?”

“I might.”

“Let’s have it.”

“I said a deal. If this thing spills in the L.A. press, I’m a nothing man, I’m dead. I’m back selling stockings from door to door.”

“Have you sold stockings from door to door?”

“Not in recent years, but my uncle does. I guess I can always get my old job back, if you insist on ruining me.” He watched me through his pathos. He was sobering up. “Do I deserve to be ruined, Bill?”

“Stop calling me Bill.”

“Whatever you say. Do we make a deal?”

I gave it some thought. It didn’t take much thought, with the entire country being ransacked for the pair.

“It’s a deal. Give me Gaines and the woman, and I’ll forget you. With pleasure.”

“I can’t guarantee Gaines for sure. Hilda says he ran out on her. But she should be able to lead you to him.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“Oh yes. I’ve talked to her. You think I blackmailed her! She’s been blackmailing me!”

“What for, or need I ask?”

He hung his head. His bald spot shone like a wet egg. He covered it with a hand that was pocked with droplets of sweat. “She threatened to wreck my reputation unless I gave her money. I guess she’s afraid to spend the ransom money. Or else Gaines really did run out on her. I’ve been putting her off with peanuts for the last two days, and incidentally slowly going crazy. She’s sitting there like a ticking bomb. Last night she threatened to shoot me-”

“Sitting where? Where is she?”

“I’ll tell you. Is it a deal?”

“I said it was.”

He raised his eyes to my face and studied it. “I guess I can trust you. I got to trust somebody. Anything to get her off my back. She’s holed up in a beach shack between the Palisades and Malibu, on 101 Highway.” He gave me the address. “It’s a brown shingle shack on the right-hand side of the highway, just a few hundred yards past a drive-in named Jack’s. I was supposed to meet her there tonight, with five thousand dollars.”

“What time tonight?”

“Now. I’m supposed to be there now.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“All right. Whatever you say. Now that we’ve got this business settled, how about a short one to celebrate?”

“I don’t keep liquor here.”

“Do you mind if I run out for a quick one? I need a drink but badly.”

“Go ahead.”

He scuttled out. I telephoned Ferguson.

Speare never did come back. His silver racing car was still parked in front of my office, helmet and goggles on the seat, when Ferguson and I left. Ferguson drove, and I talked, from Buenavista to Malibu.

Beyond the deserted beach, the ocean was the color of iron. The moon had shrunk to a sliver of itself. At Zuma we could hear the surf thundering in like doom.

“It’s a beastly situation,” Ferguson said.

“They get that way sometimes when you let them lie for a quarter of a century.”

“Please don’t moralize. I’ve had the whole thing out with myself. There’s nothing you can say that I haven’t already thought.”

“Have you had it out with your wife?”

“Yes. She’s going to stay with me whatever comes. This thing has brought us closer somehow-closer than we were. I know now that she loves me.”

“You’re lucky to have such a woman.”

“I realize that, Gunnarson. Both Holly and I have realized a number of things. I thought I could start a brand-new life at the age of fifty-six, as if I hadn’t already had a life. Holly was doing the same thing in her way. She tried to turn her back on everything, her family, the whole past. But the past has its revenges.

“It has its compensations, too,” he added. “We went to see Holly’s mother yesterday, in Mountain Grove. I imagined that she’d spent her life hating me. She hasn’t. She forgave me years ago. It’s good to be forgiven.”

“Has she had any word from Hilda?”

“Not recently. Hilda showed up there several weeks ago. She managed to convince her mother that she was the one who had become an actress and married-a wealthy man.” He was embarrassed by this reference to himself.

“Tell me, Ferguson, does Hilda know that you’re her father?”

“I’m not certain. Kate Dotery said she told her my name when Hilda was a young girl. The chances are that Hilda doesn’t remember.”

“If she does remember, it may explain the crime-I mean the crime she attempted against her sister. There’s no question she left her to burn.”

“I know, and it wasn’t her first attempt. She attacked Holly several times before, once with a butcher knife, once with a pan of hot grease. I think that’s the basic reason why Holly severed connections with her family. The butcher-knife episode occurred just a day or two before she ran away. She took off with a stocking salesman named Sperovich when she was sixteen. Holly’s had a hard life, too.”

There was nothing in his voice but sympathy, and an undertone of sadness. The jealousy and the rage, the desperate hopefulness, had burned out. He drove at a steady sixty toward whatever final revenge the past was going to take.

“Did you bring your gun, Ferguson?”

“I did. I don’t intend to use it, unless Gaines is there. I have no compunction for him.”

The highway climbed away from the sea among coastal hills. The hills were dark and barren. There was very little traffic. Ferguson let the long grade slow the car. He was driving mechanically.

“Do you believe this Speare is telling the truth? She’s actually there?”

“She’s there, all right. Speare had nothing to gain by inventing the story.”

“What am I going to say to her, Gunnarson?”

“Nothing that you can say will change the situation very much. Tell her you’re her father, you want to help her.”

“But what good can I do her?”

“We’ll be helping her simply by bringing her in.”

“And after that?”

“She’ll need the best criminal lawyer and the best psychiatrists your money can procure. They won’t be able to get her off, of course, but they can save her from the extreme penalty. No one with strong financial backing is ever executed.”

“Money again, eh?”

“Be glad you have it, for your daughter’s sake.”

“I don’t know. If it hadn’t been for my money, me and my money, Hilda would never have been born-never conceived. Or else she’d have had a father, a decent bringing-up.”

“How do you know? You can’t second-guess the past. All you can do is learn to live with it.”

“You have a good deal of understanding, Gunnarson.”

“More than I had a week ago, anyway. We all have.”

We were near the top of the grade. Ferguson had slowed to thirty-five or forty. A pair of headlights came up behind us rapidly. A low-slung car went by like a silver bullet. I caught a glimpse of a goggled, helmeted head.

“I think that’s Speare,” I said. “He may be planning to double-cross us. Can you drive faster?”

Ferguson pressed the accelerator to the floor. The heavy car gathered speed and soared over the crest of the hill. Below, the road curved back toward the sea. At the end of the curve a red sign flashed: JACK’S DRIVE-IN.

Speare’s silver car swung wide on the curve and almost went off onto the left-hand shoulder. I saw it pause, incredibly, like a bird in flight, and heard the screech of its brakes. A tiny skirted figure, black in the headlights, was running across the highway. She stopped in the middle, facing the weaving car with something in her hand. The something spurted fire. The car flung her off the road before I heard the shot, and slewed on for another hundred feet.

We got to her before Speare did. I knew her by the shape of her body. Ferguson went to his knees beside her. He touched her ruined head.

Speare came trotting, throwing off his goggles as he ran.

“I didn’t mean to do it. You saw her run out in the road. She tried to shoot me. I did my best to avoid her, but I couldn’t. You’re a witness, Bill.”

His eyes were headline black. He clutched my arm, babbling and shaking. People began to gather, like Martians dropped from the pierced sky.

Ferguson had the dead woman in his arms.

“Who is she? Do you know her?” somebody said.

He looked up at the Martians and their sky. A shudder went through him, violent and unwilled as the spasm that had engendered her. “She’s my daughter,” he said in a clear voice. “My daughter Hilda.”

The Highway Patrol found the gun in the ditch. It turned out to be Gaines’s revolver, and it held three empty shells and three loaded shells. A dentist from San Antonio, Texas, identified the charred jawbone Wills had dug out of the ashes. It was the jawbone of a man he had done some fillings for the previous May. The name on the charts and X rays was Larry Grimes.

Hilda’s second shot had not been aimed at me.

In due course the bones of her son were released to Adelaide Haines for burial. Wills attended the funeral, he told me later. He was interested in the fact that Mrs. Haines had paid thirty-five hundred dollars for a bronze casket with silver embellishments.

Wills followed her home after the service to ask her a few questions. She tried to buy him off with ten thousand dollars in cash. He found the rest of the money her son had left with her inside the case of her upright grand piano. He found also a first-class airline ticket to Rio de Janeiro, made out in the name of the Reverend Cary Caine.

As for the diamond brooch, the nurse who undressed Mrs. Haines in the psychiatric ward of the Mountain Grove Hospital discovered that she was wearing it pinned to her slip under her black mourning.