The Ferguson Affair

chapter 5

THERE WAS A POLICE SEAL on the front door of Broadman’s store. I peered through the dusty pane. The evening light fell slanting across the furniture and bric-à-brac which Broadman had laid up against hard times, before time stopped for him.

I became aware of voices next door, a woman’s voice raised high, and a man’s growling under it. I strolled over and looked in through the window of the tamale shop. The man in the white hat was arguing across the counter with a black-haired woman. Her hands gripped the edge of the counter as if it was a high ledge from which she would fall to her death if she let go.

“But they will kill him,” she cried.

“Let them. He asked for it.”

“What will I do if they kill him?”

“You’ll be better off.”

His eyes were brown liquid slits under his white hat. They widened when they saw me through the glass door. I tried it. It was locked.

He shook his head curtly, and waved me away. The movement of his arm was jerky, like a semaphore’s. I pointed at a sign in the window which said: OPEN 7 A.M. TO MIDNIGHT. He came around the counter, opened the door about a foot, and thrust his nose out. His nose was longer and sharper than it had appeared in the afternoon.

“I’m closed, I’m sorry. There’s a good place around the corner on Main Street.” Then he gave me a second look. “Are you a policeman? I saw you with Mr. Granada this afternoon.”

“I’m a lawyer, William Gunnarson. Could I talk to you a little, Mr. Donato?”

“I have already talked about my brother, to the police.”

The woman had crowded up behind him. She was a young pretty woman, but her face was puffed and dissolute with trouble. She said with one hand in her tangled licorice hair:

“Tell him nothing!”

“Be quiet, Secundina. You are a fool.” He turned back to me, trying to control his feelings. Their pressure forced the flesh of his face into stark shapes, like cracked clay. “I see, you have heard that my brother is wanted by the police. You want to offer your services?”

“That wasn’t my idea. I want to talk about your neighbor Broadman. Your ex-neighbor.”

Donato didn’t seem to hear me. “I have no need for a lawyer. I have no money to pay a lawyer.” I guessed he was using me to continue his argument with the woman. “If I had money I would go and buy a nice new rope and hang myself.”

“Liar,” she said. “You have a savings account. And he is your only brother.”

“I am his only brother, too. What has he done for me?”

“He worked for you.”

“He broke dishes. He mopped the floor and left it dirty. But I paid him, I kept you eating.”

“Big shot!” Her mouth curled.

“Gus is the big shot. He throws his weight, and I pick up the pieces. This time there’s one big piece, a dead man. I can’t pick it up.”

“But he is innocent.”

“Like the Devil himself, innocent.”

Her teeth flashed. “Dirty liar, you must not say that.”

“And Gus is the one who tells the truth? I tell you, I am finished with Gus. He’s not my brother. He can live or die, I don’t want to know about it.” He turned to me. “Go away, Mister, eh?”

“Where is your brother?”

“Out in the tules someplace. How do I know? If I knew, I’d go out and bring him in. He took my pickup.”

“He borrowed it,” Mrs. Donato said. “He wants to bring it back. He wants to talk to you.”

“Have you seen him, Mrs. Donato?”

Her face closed up. “I didn’t say that.”

“I must have misunderstood you. Can we go someplace and talk? I have some questions I’d very much like to ask you.”

“What about?”

“People you may have heard of. There’s a man named Larry Gaines, for instance, who works as a lifeguard at the Foothill Club.”

Her eyes became hard and dim and dusty, like the glass eyes you see in deer heads. “I never been there in my life. I don’t know nobody out there.”

“You know Tony Padilla,” her brother-in-law said. He looked at her significantly.

“Who’s he, Mr. Donato?”

“Fellow tends bar at the Foothill Club.”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“Nothing,” he said impassively. “We don’t, neither. Excuse us now, Mister, how about it? You see what family trouble I got. This is a bad time to visit.”

Gently and firmly, he shut the door in my face.

I took a taxi to the Foothill Club and told the driver not to wait. There was a police Mercury with undercover plates among the Cadillacs and sports cars in the tree-shaded parking lot. I was in no mood to talk to policemen. I leaned against the trunk of one of the trees, as far as possible from the Mercury, and waited for Wills’s detectives to come out.

The mere idea of detectives at the Foothill Club was incongruous. It was one of those monumentally unpretentious places where you could still imagine that the sun had never set on the international set. It cost five thousand dollars to join, and membership was limited to three hundred. Even if you had the five thousand, you had to wait for one of the members to die. And then take a blood test, for blueness.

The members straggling out in twos and threes from the nineteenth hole all looked as if they intended to live forever. Men with hand-polished leather faces who followed the sun from Acapulco to Juan-les-Pins, elderly striding women in sensible shoes complaining in anglicized accents about the price of drinks or the fact that the club was cutting costs on the heating system of the swimming pool.

One of them wondered audibly what had happened to that nice young pool attendant. A silver-haired man in a white scarf said, with some satisfaction, that the fellow had been fired. He’d made one pass too many at you-know-who, but in his opinion, which his voice caressed, the woman was just as much to blame as the lifeguard, what was his name? Too many new faces, slipping standards.

The trees that lined the parking lot were silver-dollar eucalyptus, appropriately enough. Their metallic leaves gleamed in the dying sunset. Twilight gathered in the folds of the foothills and rolled like blue fog down the valley, catching in the branches of scattered oaks. The slopes of the golf course dissolved away into darkness. Venus lit her candle in the western part of the sky. I thought of Sally and her leg of lamb. Some kind of cooked-meat smell was emanating from the clubhouse. Prime ribs of unicorn, perhaps, or breast of phoenix under glass.

The clubhouse was a rambling building with about an acre of red tile roof and many wings and entrances. Like the hills and trees around it, it had the air of having been there for a long time. I was beginning to feel indigenous myself. Not a member: nothing like that: a wild thing who lived in the neighborhood.

A car came up the road from town. Its headlights wavered like antennae before it entered the parking lot. It stopped just inside the stone gateposts.

A man got out and strode toward me busily. “Park it, bud.”

He was very short and wide, broad-faced, and pigeon-breasted, as if a pile driver had fallen on him in his formative years. He wore a light suit, a sunburst tie, and a light hat with a band that matched the tie. He had a voice like a foghorn and a breath, when he came up close, like the back room of a bar. “You deaf or something?”

I was feeling declassed and surly, but I answered mildly enough: “I’m not a parking attendant. Park it yourself.”

He didn’t move. “You must be the manager, eh?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on: “Nice place you got here. I’d like to pick up a club like this myself-high class, wealthy clientele, quiet surroundings. I could turn a place like this into a gold mine. How much do you make a week?”

“I have nothing to do with the management of the club.”

“I see.” For some obscure reason, he decided that I was a member and was snubbing him. He jerked a thumb at his car. “Don’t judge me by that Ford, it’s just a rental. Back home I keep a four-car garage, nothing in it but Caddies. I don’t wanna brag, but I could buy this place outright, cash on the line.”

“Bully for you,” I said. “Are you in the real-estate business?”

“I guess you could say I am, at that. Salaman’s the name.”

He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it. It hung in the air like a dead haddock. His eyes became bright and moist under his hat brim.

“So you won’t take the hand of friendship.” His voice was a blend of menace and sentimentality, like asphalt mixed with molasses. “Okay, no hard feelings. I never been in the State of Cal before, but it certainly isn’t the friendly place they said it was. It’s strickly from chillyville, if you want my opinion.”

He took off his hat and looked ready to weep into it. His hair was a frizzy black mass which sprang up vivaciously, adding inches to his height and altering his appearance. In spite of his illicit air, the man was queerly pathetic.

“Where do you come from, Mr. Salaman?”

He said as if he’d been waiting to be asked: “Miami, Florida. I’m in business there, various kinds of business. I flew out here for combined business and pleasure, you might say. Deductible expense. You got a member with you, name of Holly May?”

“Holly May?”

“You may know her as Mrs. Ferguson. I understand she married a man name of Ferguson since her and me were-friends.” He smacked his lips over the word or its connotations. “Just between us girls, big blondes were always my weakness.”

“I see.”

My noncommittal act was wearing thin. So was my patience.

“Do you know her?” Salaman said.

“As a matter of fact I don’t.”

“Isn’t she a member here? It said in the paper she was. It said that she was playing around with the lifeguard.”

He was standing almost on my toes, talking breathily up into my face. I pushed him away, not violently, but away. He went through a quivering transformation scene and came out of it haggard and yelping. “Keep your hooks off me, I blow your head off.”

His hand went under his jacket and tugged at a tumorous swelling in his armpit. Then he froze. His frozen snarl was a devil mask carved out of white and blue stone.

I croaked from a suddenly dry throat: “Go away. Back to the reservation.”

Oddly enough he went.