Ross Macdonald - 1960 - The Ferguson Affair (29 page)

 
          
He
struck and scratched at my grin with his free hand. I concentrated on the wrist
behind the knife. I forced it up to the level of my chest, ducked under it,
turning, and twisted it with the whole torque of my body. Something gave. The
knife fell between us.

 
          
I
picked it up, but it did me no great good. The woman was crawling away from the
light into the deep shadow. She found the gun and sat on the floor with it.
Resting the barrel between her pulled-up knees, she sighted along it and fired.

 
          
The
bullet hit my shoulder, turned me, and set me in motion. She fired again, but I
felt no second wound. I didn’t need one. I waded to the doorway in the floor’s
dissolving surface and fell slack. My head must have struck the door frame. I
dropped across the threshold of consciousness.

 
          
INTO THE LANDSCAPE of a hundred dreams.
I was out in the
orchard sailing chips in the creek. The rolling hills on the far side supported
white cumulus clouds. Above them the sun soared, brightening. It blasted my face
with heat. The creek dried up. I covered my eyes. When I looked up again, the
sun was red; the hills were black as lava, except where barns were burning. The
apples turned black on the trees and dropped in the black grass. I went into
the house to tell my father. “He’s dead,” said an old brown woman I didn’t
know. “They flit by the window, and what’s become of Sally?”

 
          
The
thought of her took hold of me and jerked me out of dream country. I felt floor
against my face, hot air on the back of my neck.

 
          
“There’s
a Santa Ana blowing,” I said. “Somebody left a window open.”

 
          
No
one paid any attention. I lifted my head and saw the firelight dancing on the
wall. It was a pretty sight, but it annoyed me. With the desert wind blowing,
it made no sense to build up the dying fire.

 
          
I
rolled over and sat up. One side of the room was alive with flames. They
fluttered toward me like ribbons in a fan draft, and toward the woman lying on
the floor. I thought with something approaching awe that Gaines had included
her in his plan of destruction. Her clothes were disarrayed as though she had
put up a struggle. A blue bruise spread from her temple across one eye.

 
          
I
started to crawl toward her, and discovered that my right arm wasn’t working.
Before I reached her, a tongue of flame licked at her
outflung
hand. Her fingers curled up away from it. Her whole body stirred sluggishly.
She wasn’t dead.

 
          
Which meant I had to get her out of there.
I scrambled to my
feet. Fire flapped like flags around her. I twisted my good hand in the tails
of her shirt and heaved. The shirt tore and came away from her body.

 
          
She
was becoming very important to me. Holding my breath against the heat, I caught
hold of her limp wrist and dragged her into the hallway. It was like a wind
tunnel. Air poured through the open front door. I pulled her out into the
blessed night.

 
          
The
fire was beginning to sing and surge behind me. In no time at all it would be a
roaring furnace. I looked for my car. It was gone. I maneuvered the unconscious
woman to the edge of the veranda, hauled her up to a sitting position, crouched
in front of her, and lifted her by the wrist across my good shoulder.

 
          
Somehow
I got my knees straightened out under her weight, and started down the
driveway. I had a fixed idea that I must get her as far as the road, in case
the trees caught fire. It wasn’t likely, after the winter rains, but I wasn’t
thinking too clearly.

 
          
The
trees on either side swayed mystically in the moonlight. I swayed not so
mystically. My faint and hunchbacked shadow mocked my movements. The soft
burden on my back seemed to increase with each step I took. Then it began to
slip.

 
          
Before
she slithered from my grasp entirely, I went to my knees at the side of the
drive and let her down carefully. We were still under trees, a hundred feet
short of the gate, but this would have to do. She lay like a marble torso
fallen from its plinth, waiting for someone to lift her back into place.

 
          
I
sat down heavily in the weeds beside her. I couldn’t have been so very far
gone, because her bare breasts disturbed me. I got my jacket off and covered
her with it.

 
          
The
right side of my shirt was dark and clammy. I felt the dark goo with my fingers
and only then recalled the shocking image of Hilda sighting across her knees
and firing. With my left forefinger I found the hole she had made, just under
my collarbone. It was wet and warm. I balled my handkerchief and held it
against the wound.

 
          
The
woman whimpered. Faint coppery lights were moving on her face. I thought for an
instant she was coming to,
then
realized it was the
fire’s reflection. The upstairs windows of the house were rectangles of twisted
orange and black. Black smoke boiled up toward the moon in clouds whose
bellying undersides were flame-lit and peppered with flying sparks.

 
          
The
Forest Service would be sure to sight it or get a report of it. They were
probably on their way now. I might as well relax until help arrived.

 
          
It
arrived sooner than I expected. A single pair of headlights fanned up the
winding road, turned in at the gate without pausing. I got up onto my feet and
stumbled into the middle of the driveway.

 
          
The
headlights stopped a few feet short of me. Behind them I recognized the bulky
shape of an ambulance. Whitey and his partner Ronny climbed out on opposite
sides of the cab and converged on me.

 
          
“You
got here fast, boys.”

 
          
“That’s
our job.” Whitey looked me over in the glare of the headlights. “What happened
to you, Mr. Gunnarson?”

 
          
“I
have a shoulder wound that needs attention. But you better look after the woman
first.”

 
          
“What
woman?”

 
          
“Over
here,” Ronny said from the side of the road. His voice was vaguely familiar,
though I didn’t remember hearing him speak before. He switched on a flashlight
and examined her, turning up her eyelids, sniffing her breath.

 
          
“She
may be under drugs,” I said.

 
          
“Yeah.
It could be an overdose of morphine, or heroin.
There’s needle marks on her arm.” He indicated several dark pinpoints in the
white flesh of her upper arm.

 
          
“She
was talking and acting as though she was high on something.”

 
          
“Whatever
it is, she’s mighty low on it now.”

 
          
“You
mean she talked to you?” Whitey said. “What did she say?” There were dancing
orange gleams in the centers of his eyes, as if he was burning up with
curiosity.

 
          
“She
said a lot of things. They’ll keep. Let’s get a temporary dressing on this
shoulder.”

 
          
He
answered slowly. “I guess we better do that. Ronny, leave the pig lay for now.
I may need your help with Mr. Gunnarson.”

 
          
The
hinges of my knees were as loose as water. I barely made it to the ambulance.
They hoisted me up into the back, turned on the roof light, and let me down
gently on a padded stretcher. As soon as I was horizontal, my head began to
swim and my eyes played tricks. Whitey and Ronny seemed to hover over me like a
pair of mad scientists exchanging sinister smiles.

 
          
“Strap
his wrists,” Whitey said.

 
          
“That
won’t be necessary, I won’t fight you.”

 
          
“We
won’t take any chances. Strap his wrists, Ronny.”

 
          
Ronny
strapped my wrists to the cold aluminum sides of the stretcher. Whitey produced
a triangular black rubber mask attached to a narrow black tube.

 
          
“I
don’t need anesthetic.”

 
          
“Yes
you do. I hate to see people suffer, you know how I am.”

 
          
Ronny
snickered. “I know. Nobody else knows, but I know.”

 
          
Whitey
shushed him. He fitted the soft rubber mask over my nose and mouth. Its elastic
strap circled my head.

 
          
“Pleasant
dreams,” he said. “Breathe out and then breathe in.”

 
          
A
sense of survival deeper than consciousness made me hold my breath. Behind my
eyes, broken black pieces were falling into place. I had heard Ronny’s snicker
on the telephone.

 
          
“Breathe
out. Then breathe in.”

 
          
Whitey’s
face hung over me like one of the changing faces you see between sleeping and
waking at the end of a bad day. I raised my head against the downward pressure
of his hand. The end of the black tube was wrapped around his other hand. Using
both hands, he forced my head back down.

 
          
“Listen,”
Ronny said. “There’s a car coming up the hill.” After a listening silence: “It
sounds like a Mercury Special.”

 
          
“Cop
car?”

 
          
“Sounds
like it.”

 
          
“You
should have been monitoring the police calls. You goofed, man.”

 
          
“You
said you needed me in here.”

 
          
“I
don’t any more. I can handle him.”

 
          
“How’s
the patient doing?”

 
          
“He’ll
be gone in a minute. Get out there and give them a story. We pulled him out of
the fire, but he died of asphyxiation, poor fellow.”

 
          
He
leaned hard on the mask. I was far from gone. One of my sports was
diving
without a lung.

 
          
Ronny
leaned over to look at me. I doubled up my right leg and kicked him in the
middle of his face. It felt like stepping on a snail.

 
          
Whitey
said: “You devil!”

 
          
I
tried to kick him. He was beyond the reach of my flailing legs, bending over my
face with his full weight on me. The dark wheel of unconsciousness started to
spin in my head. I tried to breathe. There was nothing to breathe.

 
          
The
sound of a motor whining up the grade detached itself from the whirring of the
dark wheel. Before the two sounds merged again, headlights filled the ambulance
with light. The pressure was removed from my face. I caught a blurred glimpse
of Whitey standing over his prostrate partner with a black automatic in his
hand.

 
          
He
fired it. The ambulance interior multiplied its roar like an echo chamber. The
single sharp crack that followed was more than an echo. Whitey bowed like a
performer at the footlights, clasping his abdomen.

 
          
Pike
Granada came into the ambulance and took the rubber thing off me before I
followed Broadman and Secundina all the way into darkness.

 
          
SPOTLIT
ON A BLACK, jagged landscape, Sally was being carried away by a gorilla who was
wooing her in Spanish. I caught them and tore off the gorilla suit. Then I was
wrestling with a man whose name I couldn’t remember. I opened my eyes and saw
Lieutenant Wills scowling at me through bars.

 
          
“You
can’t keep me in jail,” I think I said. “Judge Bennett will give me a writ of
habeas corpus.”

 
          
Wills
grinned at me balefully. “It will take more than that to spring you out of
this.”

 
          
I
sat up swearing. My head took off from my shoulders and flew around the big dim
room, bumping into empty beds. It looked more like a dormitory than a jail.

 
          
“Take
it easy, now.” Wills leaned on the barred side that turned my bed into a sort
of cage. Grasping my good shoulder, he pressed me back onto the
pillowless
sheet. “You’re in the recovery room in the
hospital. You just got out of the operating room.”

 
          
“Where’s
Sally? What happened to Sally?”

 
          
“Nothing
happened to her, except in the course of nature. She gave birth to a little
girl last night.
Six pounds ten ounces.
The two of
them are right here in this same hospital, down on the third floor.
Both doing well.”

 
          
“Is
that where she went last night?”

 
          
“This
is where she went. What bothers me is where you went, and why. What were you
doing up in the mountains there?”

 
          
“Hunting deer by moonlight out of season.
Arrest me,
officer.”

 
          
Wills
shook his head curtly. “Get off the pentothal jag. This is serious, Bill. You
ought to know how serious. Pike Granada says you were within seconds of getting
smothered to death. It he hadn’t been keeping an eye on those ambulance
drivers, you would have been a goner.”

 
          
“Thank
Granada for me.”

 
          
“I’ll
do that, with pleasure. You owe him personal thanks, though, and maybe an
apology, eh? Just for good measure, he gave you a pint of his own blood this
morning.”

 
          
“Why
would Granada do that?”

 
          
“He
happens to be your blood type, and the bank was out of your type and you needed
it. You needed it in more ways than one, maybe. You could do with a little
Spanish blood in your veins. And a little cop blood.”

 
          
“Rub
it in.”

 
          
“I
don’t mean to do that. But you gave me a bad ten minutes yesterday, until I had
a chance to talk to Pike. You know what you are, don’t you?
Prejudiced.”

 
          
“The
hell I am.”

 
          
“Prejudiced,”
Wills repeated. “You may not realize it, but you don’t like cops, and you don’t
like Spanish people. If you want to practice law in this town, do it
effectively, you’re going to have to get to know la
Raza
,
understand ’
em
.”

 
          
“What
does la
Raza
mean?”

 
          
“The Spanish-American people.
They call themselves that.
It’s a proud word, and they’re a proud people. You don’t want to undersell
them, Bill. They have a lot of ignorance, a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. But
they make their contribution to this town. Look at Granada. He came up out of
the gangs, sure, but you don’t judge a man by what he did in his crazy teens.
You judge him by his contribution over the long hike.”

 
          
“I
get the message.”

 
          
“Good.
I thought I’d get my oar in while you were still feeling no pain. You were
pretty hot against Granada.”

 
          
“I
was half convinced that he killed Broadman.”

 
          
“Yeah.
We all know different now, thanks to Granada. He
figured out for himself that Whitey Slater and his partner Ronald Spice were
the guilty ones. I didn’t buy it myself at first, so Granada followed through
on his own time. After Doc Simeon told him Mrs. Donato was killed the same way
Broadman was, he stuck to Spice and Slater like a leech.”

 
          
“Why
didn’t he arrest them?”

 
          
“Premature.
He wanted them to take him to their leader.”

 
          
“Have
you caught Gaines?”

 
          
“Not
yet.” Wills sat down solidly, and crossed his legs. “I was hoping for some help
from you on that, and other matters.”

 
          
“I
don’t want to be
inhospital
—inhospitable,” I said.
“But I happen to have a wife and a new baby that I’m eager to see.”

 
          
“Forget
them for now. You’d never make it down to the third floor anyway. And I have
some things I want to ask you about. There’s been a lot of talk about a
kidnapping. Was there a kidnapping?”

 
          
“Technically,
yes. Gaines kidnapped me in Mountain Grove last night. He took me to the
mountain lodge where Granada found me. Gaines and I had a fight there, which he
more or less won.”

 
          
“He
shot you?”

 
          
“I
was shot, yes, and out for a while. He set fire to the house, probably by
smashing a gasoline lantern, and left me to burn.”

 
          
“And Mrs. Ferguson?
He left her to burn, too?”

 
          
“Evidently
he did. I came to in time to get her out. Is she all right?”

 
          
Wills
answered carefully. We were fencing, and both of us knew it. “It’s hard to
tell. Her husband is having her privately looked after. He says he doesn’t
trust the hospital, with all the shenanigans going on. I’m wondering if he
doesn’t know more than I do about the shenanigans going on.”

 
          
“Have
you talked to him?”

 
          
“Just for a second, when he picked up his wife in the emergency
ward.
He wasn’t communicating, and I can’t force him to. He hasn’t done
anything criminal, that I know about. The wife is another matter, now. I can’t
figure what she was doing up in a mountain hideout with a wanted man. Was she
there voluntarily?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.”

 
          
“You
must have some opinion on the subject. You saw her there with Gaines, didn’t
you?”

 
          
“I
saw her.”

 
          
“Was
she tied up, or confined, or under duress?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.”

 
          
“How
can you help knowing?” Wills said sharply.

 
          
“There
are various forms of duress, including the psychological.”

 
          
“Was
she conscious?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“Did
he threaten her?”

 
          
“Yes.
As a matter of fact, he hit her with a gun.”

 
          
“Same
gun he shot you with?”

 
          
“Same
gun,” I said, but I was beginning to sweat. I hardly knew why I was framing my
answers so as to protect the woman. I was in no condition to work out a
conflict of conscience. The worst of these conflicts is the tendency they have
to crop up when a man isn’t equal to handling them.

 
          
Wills
sensed my indecision. “This psychological duress you mentioned, it’s an
interesting idea. What does it boil down to, the fact that he had something on
her?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.”

 
          
He
said as if at random: “Poor kid, they had to walk her for nearly two hours. She
was loaded to the gills with morphine, did you know that?”

 
          
“I
suspected she was drugged, yes.”

 
          
“Is
she an addict? Is that what Gaines had on her?”

 
          
“Your
guess is as good as mine.”

 
          
“I
doubt that. You’ve had opportunities to talk to them, her and her husband both.
I understand you’ve been seeing quite a bit of him in the last day or two.”

 
          
“I
saw him once or twice. He’s pretty good man, in case you’re in doubt about
that.”

 
          
“Would
you vouch for the wife, too?”

 
          
“I
hardly know her.” The sweat was soaking through my hospital gown. Unless I
concentrated on my vision, I tended to see Wills in duplicate. One of him was
too many at the moment. “Why don’t you go away and let me enjoy my misery in
peace?”

 
          
“I’m
sorry, Bill, honestly. But these are questions that need answering. Ronald
Spice’s unsupported statement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. He
confessed crimes that never even occurred. And some that did, of course.”

 
          
“I’d
like to see that statement.”

 
          
“I’ll
show it to you, soon as we get copies. I also wanted to show you a statement we
got from a better witness than Spice—manager of the local Bank of America. It
says that Ferguson drew a lot of cash out of his savings account yesterday. So
much cash they had to borrow from their Los Angeles branches. Do you know what
Ferguson did with all that cash?”

 
          
“I
know what he told me.”

 
          
“What
did he do with it?”

 
          
“Ask
him.”

 
          
“I’m
asking you, Bill. You’re a rash young fellow, but you’re basically sensible,
and you’re building a position in this town. You wouldn’t lie there and try to
sit on a major crime at this late date.”

 
          
“There
have been several major crimes. Which one are you referring to?”

 
          
“Kidnapping.
Spice says Gaines ran out with his and his
partner’s share of two hundred thousand dollars.
Two hundred
thousand dollars which Ferguson paid to Gaines as ransom for Mrs. Ferguson.
He says she was snatched from the Foothill Club while he and his partner stood
by, monitoring our calls on their short wave so we wouldn’t get in the way.
Which incidentally they’ve been doing all through this wave of
burglaries.
It was a neat little system they had, passing along
information on hospital patients and then keeping track of our movements while
Gaines and Gus Donato burglarized their houses.

 
          
“According
to Spice, they did the same thing yesterday noon when Ferguson made the
money-drop. They were supposed to get a cut of it, twenty-five grand apiece for
services rendered. But Gaines ran out on them with the whole bundle. You can
understand why Ronald Spice is spouting like a whale. Of course he’s trying to
cheat the fireless cooker, too. Not that we’d make a deal with scum like that.”

 
          
Wills
was hoarse with anger. “Scum of the earth, masquerading as public servants,
using their position to knock off injured people. You know what they are. They
almost did it to you.”