Ross Macdonald - 1960 - The Ferguson Affair (2 page)

 
          
“All
I want to do,” Wills said, “is ask her how she got hold of it. Surely you don’t
have any objections to that.”

 
          
“I’ll
ask her.”

 
          
But
before we could summon the matron, a man called up the stairs: “Lieutenant?
You up there?”

 
          
Wills
leaned over the balustrade. “What is it, Granada?”

 
          
“Trouble on Pelly Street.”

 
          
“What
kind of trouble?”

 
          
Sergeant
Granada thrust his dark, saturnine face up through the curved shadows in the
stairwell. “Somebody tried to knock off Hector Broadman.”

 
          
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 rundown 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.”