Ross MacDonald - The Ferguson Affair

“Maybe you better go home.”

“He knows where I live. He was there early this morning, shouting at the front door.”

“I think you should have him picked up. He may be dangerous.”

“He is. He is dangerous. But I cannot and will not bring the police into this. There is simply too much at stake.”

“What, exactly?”

“The reputation of the club. There hasn’t been a major scandal here since the Abernathy suicide pact, and that was before my tenure. All I can do now is hold on and hope that something will happen to save us at the eleventh hour.”

“Let’s hope so, Mr. Bidwell.”

“Call me Arthur, if you like. Here, let me pour you a drink.”

“No, thanks.”

He was trying to prolong the conversation. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t the eleventh hour, but it was nearly the ninth. The Ella Barker case had led me far afield, and threatened to lead me further. It was time to go home to Sally. The thought of her was like a stretching elastic which never quite snapped.

But sometimes it went on stretching.

The phone on Bidwell’s desk rang. He lifted the receiver with an effort, as if it were a heavy iron dumbbell. He listened to a scratchy voice, and said: “For God’s sake, Padilla, I told you to head him off… No! Don’t call them, that’s an order.”

Bidwell sprang to the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. He leaned against it with his arms spread out, like someone getting ready to be crucified. “Padilla says he’s coming here now.”

“Then you better get away from the door. Who’s Padilla?”

“The bartender. Ferguson told him he’s waited long enough.” Droplets were forming on his face as they do on a cold glass. “Talk to him, won’t you? Explain that I’m utterly blameless. Utterly. I had nothing to do with his blessed wife’s departure.” He stepped sideways, tanglefooted, and leaned in the corner.

“Why does he think you had?”

“Because he’s insane. He makes mountains out of molehills. I merely called her into my office to take a telephone call.”

“From Gaines?”

“If so, he must have disguised his voice. I thought myself it was a woman’s voice-not one I recognized. But Ferguson seems to think I’m in cahoots with Gaines, simply because I called his wife out of the dining room.”

“I hear you, Bidwell,” a voice said through the door.

Bidwell jumped as if he’d felt an electric shock, then slumped against the wall as if the shock had killed him.

“If I didn’t hear you, Bidwell, I could smell you. I could tell that you were in there by the smell.” The doorknob rattled. The voice outside rose an octave. “Let me in, you lily-livered swine. I want to talk to you, you Bidwell swine. And you know what about, Bidwell.”

Bidwell shuddered each time he heard his name. He looked at me pleadingly. “Talk to him, will you? It only makes him angrier when I try to talk to him. You’re a lawyer, you know how to talk to people.”

“What you need is a bodyguard.”

Ferguson punctuated this remark with a heavy thud on the bottom of the door. “Open up, Bidwell, or I’ll kick the bloody well door down.”

He kicked it again. One of the panels cracked, and sprinkled varnish on the rug.

Bidwell said urgently: “Go out and talk to him. You have nothing to fear. He doesn’t hate you. I’m the one he hates.”

Under Ferguson’s third kick, the cracked panel started to give. Standing to one side of it, I unlocked and opened the door.

Ferguson kicked air and lurched in past me. He was a big man in his fifties, shaggy in Harris tweeds. His face was long and equine. Small eyes were closely and deeply set under his overhanging gray eyebrows. They scowled around the room. “Where is he? Where is the pandering little swine?”

Bidwell was behind the door. He stayed there.

“That’s pretty rough language, isn’t it?” I said.

Ferguson swung his head to look at me. The movement tipped him off balance. He fell back against the side of the doorway. Something metallic in his jacket pocket rapped the door frame.

“You better give me your gun, Colonel. It might go off and shoot you in the hip. Those hip wounds can be painful.”

“I know how to handle firearms.”

“Still, I think you better give me your gun, just for the present. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody-”

“Wouldn’t I, though! I’m going to hurt Bidwell. I’m going to put a hole in that hide of his. And then I’m going to skin him and nail his coyote hide on his own front door to tan.”

He sounded like a blustering drunk, but blustering drunks could be dangerous. “No, you’re not. I happen to be an attorney, and I’m arresting you. Now hand over your gun.”

“To hell with you. You look to me like another one of Bidwell’s wife-stealing pretty boys.”

He lunged toward me, lost his balance again, and hung onto the edge of the door. It closed enough to reveal Bidwell pasted to the wall behind it. Ferguson emitted a skirling cry, like bagpipes, and reached for his pocket.

I inserted my left hand between his prominent adam’s-apple and the collar of his shirt, jerked him toward me, and hit him with my right hand on the jut of the jaw. I had always wanted to hit a Colonel.

This one drew himself erect, marched stiffly to Bidwell’s desk, made a teetering half-turn on his heels, and sat down ponderously in Bidwell’s chair. He opened his mouth to speak, like an executive about to lay down company policy, then smiled at the foolishness of it all, and passed out. The swivel chair spilled him backward onto the floor.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Bidwell said. “He’ll sue us.”

“We’ll sue him first.”

“Impossible. You can’t bring suit against twenty million dollars. He’s capable of hiring the best lawyers in the country.”

“You’re talking to one of them.” I was feeling slightly elated, after hitting a Colonel. “That’s the kind of suit I’ve always dreamed of bringing.”

“But he didn’t do anything to me,” Bidwell said.

“You sound disappointed.”

Bidwell looked at me glumly. “No doubt I should thank you for saving my life. But, frankly, I don’t feel thankful.”

I squatted by the recumbent man and got the gun out of his pocket. It was a cute little snub-nosed medium-caliber automatic, heavy with clip. I held it up for Bidwell to see.

He refused to look at it. “Put it away. Please.”

“So you got his gun,” somebody said from the doorway. “I talked him into handing over one gun, couple hours ago. But I guess he had another one in the car.”

“Go away, Padilla,” Bidwell said. “Don’t come in here.”

“Yessir.”

Padilla smiled and came in. He was a curly-headed young man with a twisted ear, wearing a white bartender’s jacket. He looked over Ferguson with a professional eye.

“There’s a cut on his chin. You have to hit him?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Mr. Bidwell would rather have been shot. But this is a nice rug. I didn’t want them to get blood all over it.”

“It isn’t funny,” Bidwell said. “What are we going to do with him?”

“Let him sleep it off,” Padilla answered cheerfully.

“Not here. Not in my office.”

“Naw, we’ll take him home. You tell Frankie to take over the bar, we’ll take him home, put him to bed. He won’t even remember in the morning. He’ll think he cut himself shaving.”

“How do you know he won’t remember?”

“Because I been making his drinks. He killed a fifth of Seagram’s since six o’clock. I kept pouring it into him, hoping that he’d pass out any minute. But he’s got a stomach like a charred oak barrel bound with brass.”