Ross MacDonald - The Ferguson Affair

I was tempted to argue, but I sensed an urgency here which tied my tongue. I went to the door of the bathroom. Padilla was helping Ferguson to take off his soggy tweeds. Ferguson was shivering so hard that I could feel the vibrations through my feet.

He looked at me without recognition. “What do you want? Padilla, what does he want?”

“You’re wanted on the telephone, Colonel. Can you make it all right?”

Padilla helped him across the room.

Ferguson sat on the bed and lifted the receiver to his ear. He was naked to the waist, goose-pimpled and white except for the iron-gray hair matted on his chest. He listened with his eyes half shut and his face growing longer and slacker. I would have supposed he was passing out again if he hadn’t said, several times, “Yes,” and finally: “Yes, I will. You can depend on that. I’m sorry we didn’t make contact until now.”

He replaced the receiver, fumblingly, and stood up. He looked at Padilla, then at me, from under heavy eyelids. “Make me some coffee, will you, Padilla?”

“Sure.” Padilla trotted cheerfully out of the room.

Ferguson turned to me. “Are you an FBI man?”

“Nothing like that. I’m an attorney. William Gunnarson is my name.”

“You answered the telephone?”

“Yes.”

“What was said to you?”

“The man who called said he wanted to speak to you. In a hurry.”

“Did he say why?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m certain.”

His tone was insulting, but I went on humoring him. I didn’t know how sober he was, or how rational.

“And you’re not an officer of the law?”

“In a sense, I am. I’m an officer of the court, but enforcement is not my business. What’s this all about, Colonel?”

“It’s a personal matter,” he said shortly. “May I ask what you’re doing in my wife’s room?”

“I helped Padilla to bring you home from the Foothill Club. You were out.”

“I see. Thank you. Now do you mind leaving?”

“When Tony Padilla is ready. We used your car.”

“I see. Thank you again, Mr. Gunnarson.”

He’d lost interest in me. His eyes moved restlessly around the walls. He uttered one word in a tearing voice: “Holly.” Then he said: “A fine time to get stinking drunk.”

He walked across the room to a dressing table, and leaned to examine his face in the mirror above it. The sight of his face must have displeased him. He smashed the mirror with one blow of his fist.

“Knock it off,” I said in my sergeant voice.

He turned, and answered meekly enough. “You’re right. This is no time for childishness.”

Padilla looked through the doorway. “More trouble?”

“No trouble,” Ferguson said. “I merely shattered a mirror. I’ll buy my wife another in the morning. How about that coffee, Tony?”

“Coming right up. You better put on something dry, Colonel. You don’t want to catch pneumonia.”

Padilla seemed to be fond of the man. I could hardly share his feeling, and yet I stayed around. The phone call, and Ferguson’s reaction to it, puzzled me. It had left the atmosphere heavy and charged.

Padilla served coffee in the living room. It was a huge room with windows on two sides, and teak paneling in a faintly nautical style. The lap of the surf below, the intermittent sweep of the lighthouse beam, contributed to the illusion that we were in the glassed-in deckhouse of a ship.

Ferguson drank about a quart of coffee. As the effects of alcohol wore off, he seemed to grow constantly more tense. Wrapped in a terrycloth robe, he bore a queer resemblance to a Himalayan holy man on the verge of having a mystical experience.

He finally rose and went into another room. I could see through the archway, when he switched on the light, that it contained a white concert grand piano and a draped harp. A photograph of a woman, framed in silver, stood on the piano.

Ferguson picked it up and studied it. He clasped it to his chest. A paroxysm went through him, making his ugly face uglier. He looked as if he was weeping, dry-eyed, in silence.

“Poor guy,” Padilla said.

He went as far as the archway, and paused there, deterred by the privacy of grief. I wasn’t so sensitive. I went in past him. “Ferguson, was that phone call about your wife?”

He nodded.

“Is she dead?”

“They claim not. I don’t know.”

“ ‘They’?”

“Her abductors. Holly has been abducted.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Yes. They demand two hundred thousand dollars for her return.”

Padilla whistled softly behind me.

“Have they called you before?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t home. I haven’t been here much in the past day.”

“This phone call was your first communication from them?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so at the time? We might have had some chance of tracing the call.”

“I don’t want anything done along those lines. I didn’t even intend to tell you and Padilla. I’m sorry now that I did.”

“You can’t handle a thing like this all by yourself.”

“Why not? I have the cash. They’re welcome to it if they give Holly back to me.”

“You have two hundred thousand dollars in cash?”

“I have more than that. I had it transferred to the local Bank of America because I’ve been intending to buy some property here. I can draw it out when the bank opens in the morning.”

“When and where are you supposed to pay them?”

“He said I was to wait for further instructions.”

“Did you recognize his voice on the telephone?”

“No.”

“Then it wasn’t Larry Gaines?”

“It wasn’t Gaines, no. It wouldn’t make any difference to me if it was. They have her. I’m willing to pay for her.”

“It may not be quite that simple. I hate to say this, Colonel, but this could be a shakedown. Some petty crook may have heard that your wife is missing, and is trying to cash in on the fact.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” The thought sat heavy on him for a moment. Then he shook it off. “But it can’t be the case. Even if it were, I’d have to go ahead with it.”

He was still holding the photograph against his chest. He polished its glass with his sleeve and held it up to the light, gazing at it almost reverently. The pictured woman was a blonde in her middle twenties.

Ferguson set the picture on the piano, very carefully, as if it were an icon whose exact position might somehow affect his wife’s fate. I took a closer look at it, and remembered seeing the same face on movie marquees and in the newspapers.

It had the standard perfections of her trade, but it had an individual cast as well. It was a face which had known trouble, and smiled back at it. The smile was a little too bold for comfort. The knowledge in the eyes was a little too definite. Holly May would be interesting to know, but perhaps not easy to live with.

“It’s a good picture of her,” Padilla said at my shoulder. “You ever see her?”

“Not in the flesh.”

“Christ, I hope she’s all right. I was afraid that something happened to her, I told you that. But I didn’t think it could be a snatch.”

Ferguson moved between us and the picture. Perhaps he was jealous of our stares. I could understand why jealousy of Gaines had been eating him. He was at least twice his wife’s age, and not nearly so pretty. An unlikely match, in spite of all the money he had, or was supposed to have.

“I want you men to keep this affair to yourselves,” Ferguson said. “It’s of the utmost importance that you do. If the authorities get wind of it, it will put her life in danger.”

“The dirty crumbs,” Padilla growled. “Is that what they said on the telephone?”