Ross Macdonald - 1960 - The Ferguson Affair (32 page)

 
          
FERGUSON
APPEARED shortly after lunch. He hadn’t shaved. He looked frowzy and harried, a
Quixote who had tilted at windmills once too often and found out they were
giants after all.

 
          
“You’re
late.”

 
          
“I
came at all because I owe you a great deal—Holly’s life. But you should not
have forced me to leave her. Her life is still in danger. I couldn’t possibly
leave the house until Dr. Trench got there.”

 
          
“Trench
says she’s in fairly good shape.”

 
          
“Physically
she is, thank God. She’s emotionally upset. We had a most disturbing phone call
this morning. That Florida jackanapes,
Salaman
,
insists on seeing her.”

 
          
“Don’t
let him.”

 
          
“How
can I stop him? I have no recourse to law.”

 
          
“Are
you going to pay him?”

 
          
“I
don’t know. Holly tells me she owes him nothing. She never heard of the man
until today.”

 
          
“And
you believe her?”

 
          
Ferguson
came unconsciously to attention. “I believe my wife implicitly.”

 
          
“How
does she explain the alleged abduction?”

 
          
“I
resent your use of the phrase.”

 
          
“That’s
your privilege. How does she explain it?”

 
          
“She
has no knowledge of it. Her mind is a blank from the time that she left the
Club.”

 
          
“She’ll
have to do better than the old blackout gambit. You saw her in Gaines’s car
when he picked up your money.”

 
          
“I
was mistaken. It must have been someone else.” He cupped his hand protectively
around his bulbous nose.

 
          
“Is
that what Mrs. Ferguson says?”

 
          
“We
haven’t discussed the incident.”

 
          
“Don’t
you think you better? She can fill you in on a lot of interesting facts, about
Gaines, and about herself.”

 
          
He
stood above me shivering. It wasn’t a cold enough day to make a Canadian
shiver.

 
          
“Damn
you, I resent this, bitterly. I’m going to have to ask you to retract.”

 
          
“What
exactly do you want me to retract?”

 
          
“The whole allegation that she was involved with him in any immoral
way.”

 
          
“I
got the idea from you.”

 
          
“I
was mistaken, tragically mistaken. I misunderstood their
relationship—exaggerated it. It was simply an old man’s jealousy.”

 
          
“What
about the child she’s carrying?”

 
          
“The
child is mine. She had nothing at all to do with Gaines, in that sense. She was
simply giving the fellow a helping hand. My wife is a remarkable woman.”

 
          
His
eyes had taken on a euphoric glare. I began to feel the dimensions of the dream
that held him. It included his passion for his wife, his hope of a second
youth, and now the belief that she would give him a child. I knew precisely how
he felt about that.

 
          
But
the dream had to be destroyed, and I was the one elected to destroy it. “Your
wife’s real name is Hilda Dotery. Does the name mean anything to you?”

 
          
“Not
a thing.”

 
          
“It
does to some other people. I have witnesses to prove that Hilda Dotery has been
mixed up with Gaines for the last seven years, ever since they were high-school
delinquents together. His real name, incidentally, is Henry Haines.”

 
          
“Who
are these witnesses?”

 
          
“Their parents, Adelaide Haines, James and Kate Dotery.
I
talked to all three of them last night in Mountain Grove.”

 
          
“They’re
lying.”

 
          
“Somebody
is. I assure you that I’m not. There’s no doubt at all in my mind that the
kidnapping was a phony one, and that your wife was Gaines’s partner in it.
That’s not the worst of it. She shot me last night. Assault with intent to
commit murder is a very ugly charge, but there’s not much use beating around
the bush. You can’t keep her shut up at home and expect this thing to blow
over. I want complete co-operation from both of you, starting now.”

 
          
Ferguson
shook his fist at me. The light in his eyes was dancing out of control. “You’re
like all the rest. You think you have me on the hip, that you can bleed me for
money.”

 
          
I
sat up and slapped his fist away with my good arm. “You’re pretty fouled up on
the money angle, aren’t you?
The man with the Midas touch.
You may be right at that, Ferguson, in reverse. If you weren’t loaded, nobody
in his senses would come within a hundred yards of you. You’re merely trouble
that walks like a man.
Stupid trouble.
Stupid, ignorant trouble.
You’re so morally stupid you don’t
know where you’re hurt, or what’s hurting you.”

 
          
I
was hurting him now. He blinked and shuddered under the impact of the words.
They seemed to strike through to his knowledge of himself. He walked away from
the bed and sat in a chair in the corner behind the door, nursing his hurt.

 
          
He
spoke after a time. “You’re right about the money—the idea of money. It’s been
a root of evil in my life. My father died poor, and he was a better man than I
shall ever be.”

 
          
I
asked him about his father, partly because I was interested, but mainly because
it was a way in. I’d begun to understand that it wasn’t happenstance that
Ferguson had been victimized by a pair of young criminals. He was one of those
victims whose natures, whose whole lives, set them up for a particular crime.

 
          
The
elder Ferguson had been a sheep rancher who came out from Scotland around the
turn of the century and homesteaded near a hamlet named Wild Goose Lake. He
went back overseas with the Scots Grenadiers and died at
Vimy
Ridge.

 
          
“I
tried to follow him,” Ferguson said. “Though I was underage, I managed to
enlist in 1918. But I never got out of the country, in that war. It was just as
well: Mother needed me to help run the ranch. We had hard sledding for nearly
ten years, until oil and gas were discovered on our section.

 
          
“You
mustn’t imagine that it was a bonanza, not at first. But enough money began to
come in so that I was able to go to college, finally. By the time I finished my
degree in Edmonton, we had more money than we knew what to do with. Mother
decided that I should have some specific training in business.

 
          
“She
sent me, more or less against my will, to take a course at Harvard Business
School. I didn’t do too well there. For one thing, I was worried about Mother:
she hadn’t been strong the last few years; the years of struggle had been too
much for her. And then I got involved with the girl I told you about, the one I
betrayed.

 
          
“It’s
a wretched thing for a man to have to confess. It’s still hard for me to relate
it to myself. I’d never been in the States before, you see. Whatever happened
below the border seemed unreal to me, like life on Mars. My actual life was
back in Alberta, where Mother was slowly dying and dictating long letters to
her nurse telling me how to conduct myself.

 
          
“I
conducted myself very badly, as it turned out. I was in my late twenties, but
I’d never had a girl, in the physical sense. I realized before long that I
could have the girl if I wanted her. I had all the money I needed, and she came
from a desperately poor family. They lived in a crowded flat somewhere in the
wilds of South Boston.”

 
          
“How
did you meet the girl?”

 
          
“She
was a salesgirl in Filene’s. I went there to buy a gift for Mother. She was
very helpful, and it went on from there. It took me a week to get up the nerve
to kiss her, and then that very night she let me have her. I took her to a
hotel off
Scollay
Square. I shouldn’t have done that.
She wasn’t a prostitute, she wanted to marry me. When we faced each other in
that shabby hotel room, I realized that I was using her. I threw her down on
the bed.”

 
          
His
voice cracked like an adolescent’s through his aging mask. It was a strange
conversation, and getting stranger. I’d had a few others of its kind. In the
tension of a legal contest, or the aftermath of a crime, old springs of emotion
stir. Unsuspected fissures open into the deep past.

 
          
“She’s
been on my mind this past year,” Ferguson said. “I haven’t been able to stop
thinking about her since I met Holly again.”

 
          
“Again?”

 
          
“I
don’t mean ‘again.’ It’s just that Holly reminded me of her in so many ways. I
believed I was being given a second chance—a second chance at happiness.
When I didn’t deserve the first chance.”

 
          
“What
exactly did you do to the girl?”

 
          
He
didn’t answer directly. His eyes were turned downward, fixed on the past, like
eyes watching underwater movements, a drowned girl or a swimmer or a monstrous
shape compound of both. Like an insubstantial colloidal web, the truth or
something near it formed between us slowly as he spoke.

 
          
“Mother
died that winter, and I had to go home for her funeral. I’ll never forget her
face the night she said good-by to me in Boston Station. She was three months
pregnant, unmarried and still working, but she looked so damn hopeful. She ate
a dozen cherrystone clams, for the good of the child, she said, and assured me
that she’d be fine while I was gone. I promised her I’d be back as soon as the
estate was settled, and then we could be married. She believed me.

 
          
“Perhaps
I believed myself. I didn’t know certainly that I would never go back until the
afternoon we buried Mother. It was a bitter day in the middle of February. The
grave-diggers had to use pickaxes and blowtorches to break through the crust of
the earth. The lake below the graveyard was nothing but a flat place under the
snow. The
wind swept
down from the Arctic Circle
across it.

 
          
“They
covered the chunks of frozen earth with that imitation green grass they used in
those days: a little rectangle of horrible fake green in the middle of the flat
white prairie, with wooden oil rigs standing on the horizon. I could never
think of going back to Boston and marrying the girl. I couldn’t even imagine
her face without the blackest feeling of melancholy. As I think I told you last
night, I arranged with a lawyer in Boston to give her a thousand dollars.”

 
          
“You
could have gone in person, at least.”

 
          
“You
don’t have to tell me that. I’ve had it on my conscience for twenty-five
years.”

 
          
“Weren’t
you concerned about the child?”

 
          
“I’ll
be honest. My main concern was fear that she would search me out, turn up on my
doorstep with the child in her arms. Or sue me. I was a rich man, you
understand, and on my way to becoming richer. She was a girl from the Boston
slums who couldn’t speak proper English. I was afraid that she would stand in
my way.”