The Ferguson Affair

chapter 2

WILLS LET ME RIDE along in the back of his black Mercury. Granada drove, using the siren. In the streets behind us another siren was howling contrapuntally. Before we were out of the Mercury, an ambulance pulled in to the yellow curb behind us.

Broadman’s store stood in a poor neighborhood between a tamale shop and a run-down hotel. Its windows were obscured by hand-lettered signs: WE BUY AND SELL EVERYTHING, INCLUDING KITCHEN SINKS. OLD GOLD BOUGHT: HIGHEST PRICES. The interior resembled the nest of a giant magpie, choked with the debris of people’s lives. In the dusty gloom halfway down the store, a white hat hovered like a puff of ectoplasm. A dismal voice called out from under it: “Here he is, back here.”

Wills and Granada strode toward the white hat and the voice. They moved as policemen do, with heavy purpose carrying a hint of menace. The ambulance men, a tall one and a short one, trotted behind them light-footed as shadows, and I brought up the rear.

A bald man with a bright wig of blood was sitting up on a couch. He was supported by a brown, thin man who wore the white hat and apron of a short-order cook. The bloody man was breathing loudly, gasping his breath in and groaning it out. His eyes rolled up toward us, like veined white eggs under his bird’s-nest eyebrows. He pulled away from the man who was holding him up, got to his feet somehow, took a few tottering steps like a fat enormous infant learning to walk, and went to his knees. He crawled away from us into a forest of furniture, making small noises.

“What’s the matter with Broadman?” Wills said.

“See for yourself.” The white-hatted man was yellow with compunction, or with panic of his own. “Somebody clobbered him on the head, hard.”

“Who hit him, Manuel?” Granada said.

Manuel shrugged, carefully. His neck and face were rigid, as if the big starched hat on his head were a chunk of ice he had to keep balanced there. “How do I know? The walls are thick, I was busy serving tamales. Then I heard him yelling.” His eyes dropped. There were blood spots on his apron.

“We’ll attend to the poor chap,” said one of the lads in white, the taller one.

I gave him a second look, and saw that he was no lad. He was forty, at least, with blue bags under his eyes. Still he had that willowy look-the look of a middle-aging man who can’t give up the illusive airs of youth. His sidekick was much younger, bright-eyed and plump like a slightly shopworn cherub.

“Yeah,” Wills said dryly. “You do that, Whitey.”

Broadman was trying to crawl under a Hollywood bed. It stood too close to the floor. He rooted at it with his damaged head.

The ambulance men got hold of him with firm and gentle hands. One on each side, they raised him to his feet. He bucked like a wall-eyed bronco in their arms.

“Now, now,” the tall old youth kept saying. “You had a hard knock, old chap, but you’ll be good as new. We’ll get you to a doctor, and he’ll fix you up.”

Broadman kicked at them. They lifted him clear of the floor, making soothing sounds, with male nurses’ almost masochistic patience.

“Is he scared of something?” Granada said.

Broadman answered him, in a high and terrible voice: “I don’t want to go! You can’t make me go to the hospital.”

He renewed his floundering struggles. The ambulance men were tiring. The short one had a livid scratch on his chin. There were tears in Whitey’s pale eyes, and his mousy hair was dark with sweat.

“Can’t you give us a hand, Sergeant?”

“You said you’d handle him. I didn’t want to get in bad with the union.” Granada’s half-smile was sardonic.

“Get with it, Pike,” Wills snapped. “This isn’t doing Broadman any good.”

Granada was a powerful, bull-shouldered man. With his help Broadman was quickly subdued. They carried him out spread-eagled and head down, and still convulsive. A crowd gathered around the ambulance, buzzing like flies at the sight of blood, while the attendants strapped him to a stretcher.

Granada took the head of the stretcher, and Whitey and his partner took the foot. They hoisted Broadman into the back of the ambulance.

The hurt man cried out once more: “I won’t go! Gotta keep store. They rob me behind my back. Robbers and killers!”

“Take it easy now,” I heard Granada say in a voice that was surprisingly gentle. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Broadman had lapsed into silence. Granada’s voice went on in a calming rhythm. “You don’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll look after your store for you, Hector, that’s what we’re for.”

Granada climbed out and said to Whitey: “I think I got him quieted down. Better get him to emergency in a hurry. His injuries may be worse than they look.”

Whitey climbed in. The ambulance roared away, scattering spectators. One of them, a dark woman in a shawl, spoke up in a sepulchral whisper. “Whoever done it, Broadman had it coming to him.”

The crowd began to disperse, perhaps to avoid association with these sentiments.

Granada raised his voice. “You people from the neighborhood, come into the store, please, all of you. Mr. Broadman has been assaulted, maybe robbed. Any information you can give us will be appreciated.”

Reluctantly, in twos and threes, the people who had gathered moved into the front of the store. There were nearly twenty of them, the desk clerk from the hotel next door, the tamale man and several other Spanish-Americans, women in shabby dresses with frightened eyes, a pensioner leaning on a cane, and the dark Cassandra in the shawl.

They took up awkward positions on Broadman’s collection of old furniture. Granada asked them questions while Wills prowled the store. I sat on a worn leather hassock to one side and listened to the answers, hoping for something that would help my client.

Nothing helpful was said. The inhabitants of Pelly Street seemed to lose their power of speech in the presence of the law. When Granada asked the woman in the shawl what she’d meant by her remark, she said she had heard at fourth or fifth hand that Broadman lent money at twenty per cent per week. He had a lot of enemies, but nobody that she knew.

The old man with the cane acted as if he might know something more: nobody could be as deaf and senile as he pretended to be. But he wasn’t telling. I made a note of his name: it was Jerry Winkler, and he said he lived in the hotel next door.

Granada saved Manuel for the last, and bore down hard on him. But the blood spots on his apron were easily explained. He had found Broadman half-conscious on the floor and helped him onto the couch. Then he phoned the police. Otherwise he had done nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing.

“Didn’t Broadman say anything to you?”

“He said they tried to rob him.”

“Who tried to rob him?”

“He didn’t say. He said that he was going to fix them himself. He didn’t want me to call the-call you, even.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

Granada dismissed him with an angry gesture, then called him back from the door.

“You want something else, Mr. Granada?”

Granada said with a flashing grin which the rest of his heavy face failed to support: “I just wanted to be remembered to your brother.”

“Gus remembers you already. My sister-in-law Secundina is reminding him all the time.”

Without obvious alteration, Granada’s grin become a scowl. “That’s nice. Where is Gus right now?”

“Gone fishing. I gave him the day off.”

“He’s working for you now, eh?”

“You know that, Mr. Granada.”

“But he used to work for Broadman, isn’t that right?”

“You know that, too. He quit. I needed help.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. I heard Broadman fired him the other day.”

“People say a lot of things that are not true, Mr. Granada.” Manuel put ironic emphasis on the “Mister.”

“Just don’t you be one of them. And tell Gus I want to see him when he comes back from fishing.”

Manuel went out balancing his heavy hat.

“Pelly Street,” Granada said to himself. He stood up and said briskly to me: “This could be a grudge case, Mr. Gunnarson. Twenty per cent a week is pretty good motivation for somebody that hasn’t got it. I’ve heard before now that Broadman grinds the faces. He’s probably one of these unknown millionaires. You know, like the bums they vag with bankbooks sewn into their rags.”

“I wish somebody would sew a nice fat bankbook into one of my suits.”

“I thought all lawyers were wealthy.”

We walked toward the rear of the store where Wills had disappeared. A rectangular area had been partitioned off and fenced and roofed with steel netting. The reinforced wire door was standing open, with its heavy padlock gaping, and we went into Broadman’s unusual office.

An old-fashioned black iron safe squatted in one corner of the wire enclosure. An unmade cot, pillow end against the safe, was partly hidden by a huge old desk. A telephone with the receiver off lay on the desk among a drift of papers. Reaching to replace the receiver, I almost fell through a hole in the floor. Granada grasped my arm with fingers like steel hooks. “Watch it, Mr. Gunnarson.”

I stepped back from an open trap door through which a flight of wooden steps descended into watery yellow gloom. Granada put the telephone together. It rang immediately. Wills came up the steps three at a time and lifted the receiver out of Granada’s hand. “I’ll take it, Pike.”

Wills’s face was streaked with sweat. It grew pale as he listened to what was said, throwing the grimy streaks into relief.

“Too bad. You better send over the identification squad. Got that?” Wills hung up and said to Granada: “Broadman died.”

“Did those blows on the head kill him?”

“We’ll go on that assumption unless the autopsy shows different. All we know for certain right now, he was D.O.A. See what you can turn up in the basement, Pike. There’s a lot of old rugs and mattresses down there, looks like somebody’s been heaving them around. I didn’t find anything significant, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”

“What am I looking for?”

“A blunt instrument, with blood on it.” As Granada went down the steps, Wills turned to me. “I’m glad you stuck around, Counselor, I want to talk to you. This changes things for your client.”

“For better or worse?”

“That’s largely up to her, wouldn’t you say? And up to you. She’s been in jail the past twenty-four hours, which makes her the one member of the gang who has clean hands, as far as this killing is concerned. There’s no sensible reason why she shouldn’t talk to us, and maybe save herself a long trip.”

“How could she know anything about this murder?”

“I don’t claim she knows anything about it specifically. But she must be able to identify the other members of the gang. If she comes clean-” Wills raised his hands in a gesture which didn’t go with his personality: the freeing of an imaginary bird. “Understand me, I’m not suggesting a deal. But where would we be if the people of the world didn’t co-operate?”

Just where we were, I thought, because they didn’t. Still, I was impressed by Wills’s attempt to talk my language.

“You blame this murder on the burglary gang?”

He nodded. “We’ve suspected for some time that Broadman was fencing for them-acting as one of their outlets, anyway. We got our first tangible evidence last week. An ormolu clock turned up in one of the L.A. auction rooms. A member of their robbery detail happened to spot it because it was unique, and checked with our circular. The clock was taken in the Hampshire burglary, out in the Foothill district, and it was part of a shipment from Broadman’s store.

“Broadman had a story ready, of course. He bought the ormolu clock from a little old lady in reduced circumstances that he’d never seen before. How did he know it was stolen? He had our pawn-shop list, sure, but his eyes were bad. If he spent all his time reading police lists, what would happen to business?”

Wills leaned on the desk and looked out thoughtfully through the wire netting. The jumbled contents of the store were evidence piled on evidence that you couldn’t take it with you.

“Broadman would have been better off in jail,” he said, “but the clock wasn’t enough to arrest him for. We couldn’t prove he had guilty knowledge. He knew we were on to him, though. And he wanted out. When Ella Barker sold him that hot diamond yesterday, he was on the phone practically before she was out of the store.”

“You think he knew that diamond ring was stolen?”

“I’m sure of it. He also knew who she was.”

“Can you prove that, Lieutenant?”

“I can. I’m telling you this to give you a chance to climb in off that limb. Broadman was a patient in the hospital five-six months ago. Ella was one of his nurses. They got to be quite good friends. Ask her, when you ask her about the watch. And make sure you get an answer, you’ll be doing her a favor. Honest to God, I’d hate to see that little client of yours get herself run over by a steam roller.”

“You think of yourself as a steam roller, do you?”

“The law,” Wills said.

More law arrived, with cameras and fingerprint kits. I went out into the street. The sunlight hurt my eyes. It was reflected like glancing knives from the chrome of the two police cars at the curb.

They drew attention on the poor street, a kind of reverse attention. Passers-by averted their heads from the cars, as if they hoped to escape their black influence. I guessed that the rumor of Broadman’s death had spread across town like a prophecy of disaster to Pelly Street.

Jerry Winkler leaned on his cane in front of the hotel, an unstable tripod supporting a heavy gray head. Carefully redistributing his weight, he raised his cane and flourished it. I went over to him.

“I heard that Broadman died, son.”

“Yes, he died.”

He clucked, red tongue vibrating between his bearded lips. “That makes it murder, don’t it?”

“It would seem to.”

“And you’re a lawyer, ain’t you?” He touched my arm with a veined, knobbed hand. “I’m Jerry Winkler, everybody knows me. I never been a witness in a trial. Friend of mine was once. He told me they pay the witnesses.”

“It doesn’t amount to more than a few dollars. The court simply pays you for lost time.”

“I got lots of time to lose.” He rubbed his furred chin and peered up at my face like a hungry old dog hoping for a bone. “And mighty few dollars.”

“Do you have information about Broadman’s death?”

“Maybe I do, if it’s worth my while. You want to come up to my room and chin a little?”

“I have a little time to lose, Mr. Winkler. My name is Gunnarson.”

He led me through the musty lobby, up narrow, foot-worn steps, along a narrow hallway to his cubbyhole at the rear. It contained an iron bed, a washstand, a bureau with a clouded mirror, an old-fashioned rocking chair, and the atmosphere of lonely waiting time.

He made me sit in the rocker beside the single window, which looked out on an alley. Slowly and painfully, he lowered himself onto the bed and sat hunched forward, still leaning on his cane.

“I want to do what’s right. On the other hand, I don’t want to end up worse than I was before.”

“How would you do that?”

“Ramifications. Everything has its ramifications. Try living on a sixty-dollar pension if you think it’s so easy. I get my clothes at the Starvation Army, but I still run out before the end of the month. Sometimes Manuel give me free dinners along at the end of the month.”

“Did Manuel kill Broadman?”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say nothing yet. I want to do my duty, sure, but there’s no harm trying to get a little money out of it, is there?”

“You’re obliged to give information to the authorities, Mr. Winkler. You’re in hot water now for holding out on them.”

“I didn’t hold out. I just remembered, is all. My memory ain’t so good.”

“What did you remember?”

“What I seen.” He hesitated. “I thought it would be worth something.”

The little room and the sly, sad old man cramped me and oppressed me. I made a gesture I couldn’t afford, took a five-dollar bill out of my rather flat wallet, and held it out to him. “This will buy a few dinners, anyway.”

He took it with a beaming smile. “Sure will. You’re a good boy, and Jerry Winkler will remember you in his prayers.” Without any change in tone, he said: “It was Gus Donato that smashed up Broadman. Manuel’s young brother Gus.”

“Did you see it happen, Mr. Winkler?”

“No, but I seen him go in, and I seen him come out. I was sitting here at the window, thinking about the old days, when Gus drives this pickup into the alley. He gets this tire iron out of the back of the pickup and shoves it down his pant leg and sneaks in the back entrance of Broadman’s store. A few minutes later he comes out carrying a burlap bag on his back. He chucks it into the pickup and goes back for more.”

“Could you tell what was in the bag?”

“No. It was all chunky with stuff, though. So were the others. He made four or five trips, bringing out those bags, put them all in the pickup and drove away.”

I gazed into his washed-out eyes. “Are you certain of your identification?”

“Dead certain.” He thumped the bare board floor with his cane. “I see Gus Donato all the time. And this time I paid him special mind because he ain’t allowed to drive a car.”

“Is he too young?”

“Naw, he’s plenty old enough. But they don’t let them drive when they’re on parole. He had a lot of trouble with cars, that’s how he got arrested in the first place.”

“Is Gus a friend of yours?”

“I wouldn’t say that. His brother Manuel is a good friend.”

“You mentioned that you see Gus all the time.”

“Sure, in Manuel’s place. He’s been washing dishes for Manuel since Broadman fired him last week.”

“Why did Broadman fire him?”

“I never did get it straight. It was something about a clock, a little gold clock. Gus shipped it off someplace that he wasn’t supposed to. I heard Manuel and Broadman arguing about it in the alley.”

I opened the window. Two men in plain clothes were confering at the back door of Broadman’s establishment. They looked up at me suspiciously. I pulled my head in and closed the window.

“You don’t miss much, Mr. Winkler.”

“Try not to.”