Ross MacDonald - The Ferguson Affair

Her smile resembled her mother’s. It lit up her face like a ray which had traveled through light-years of darkness to this moment. She turned it on Ferguson, and he tried to respond. His mouth only grimaced. He was sweating out his own darkness.

“Hilda’s your oldest sister?”

“That’s right, she’s the oldest one, and I’m the second oldest. Hilda’s only our half-sister, though.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“I ought to.” Her smile faded. “It was no secret in our family. There were never any secrets in the Dotery family-the old man saw to that. When we were kids, he brought it up about three times a day, at mealtimes, that Hilda wasn’t his, or anybody’s. It was very nice for all of us, especially for Hilda.”

“She must have been somebody’s.”

“She was Momma’s. The father was some guy that Momma knew in Boston before the old man married her. The jerk ran out on her. He sent her a thousand bucks, which Dotery used to buy a car to come to California. That’s all I know about it.”

It was enough. Ferguson’s teeth were set like a wounded man’s biting on a rag.

His wife told her story to Wills when he arrived. I sat and monitored the interview, ready to suppress hearsay evidence and irrelevancies. I was Ferguson’s lawyer, after all, and Hilda was his daughter.

Wills sat slumped in a chair and listened without arguing. He looked very tired. There was a black smear of char on his right cheekbone. He shook his head at her when she had finished. Ashes fell from his hair, filling a shaft of sunlight with their particles.

“I wish you’d spoken up this morning, Mrs. Ferguson. Time is of the essence in these matters, and your sister could have traveled a long way since early this morning. In addition to which, we put out the word that Gaines is traveling alone.”

“But I didn’t know that Hilda was in it this morning.”

He looked at her unresponsively. “How could that be, Mrs. Ferguson? It was her phone call that decoyed you out of the Foothill Club and set you up for the sna-for the abduction.”

“I know that now,” she said. “I didn’t then. When Hilda phoned me the other night she said that she was Renee, my youngest sister. She just got in from San Francisco, she said, and she was down at the bus station. She said she was in trouble, and needed help. I believed her.”

“The girl’s in trouble, all right,” Wills muttered.

“You won’t be too hard on her, will you? Hilda isn’t too responsible, and Gaines has always led her around by the nose.”

He disregarded her question. “That’s another thing I don’t understand, Mrs. Ferguson. You knew what kind of a character Gaines was, going back to early days of childhood. You knew that he was using a false name. Yet you’ve been fraternizing with him these last months. No offense intended, but you must have been aware you were putting yourself in danger.”

She looked at her husband, rather guiltily. He looked guiltily back at her.

She said: “I was a damned fool, frankly. He told me he was reformed, that he was trying to live down his past and earn an honest living. I felt so lucky myself, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.” She changed the subject quickly. “What are you going to do to him and Hilda?”

“Find them.” Wills hunched his body forward, heavily, and held out his hands as if he was getting ready to receive a weight. There were lines of grime across his palms, and his fingernails were dirty. “Then it’s out of my hands.” He let his arms drop to his sides.

“Will Hilda go to jail for a long time?”

“She’ll be lucky if that’s all that happens to her. There’s no use beating around the bush, Mrs. Ferguson. This is a case of multiple murder. You know the penalty for premeditated murder.”

“But Hilda didn’t kill anyone herself.”

“She didn’t have to, to be guilty of murder. Ronald Spice says she was the one that phoned them and told them to knock off Secundina Donato. Even if Spice is lying, she’s tied to another murder, one we didn’t know about. We’ve been doing some digging at the scene of the fire, and we found human remains. There isn’t much left of whoever it was-”

Holly cried out, and turned her head away. She had reached her limit. Dr. Trench stepped in and ended the interview. As Wills and I left the room, she began to wail.

I couldn’t keep up with Wills, but he was waiting for me in his car. I got in beside him. “Whose body is it, Lieutenant?”

“You can’t call it a body-a piece of skull and some teeth and a few charred bones. I was hoping you could tell me who they belonged to. Who else was up there, besides you and Gaines and the sister?”

“Nobody else that I saw. Are the remains male or female?”

“I can’t tell for sure. Simeon probably can, but he hasn’t seen them yet. They look like a man’s teeth to me. Do you have any suggestions on the subject?”

“Not unless it’s Gaines himself.”

“That doesn’t seem too likely. As I see it, he and the woman made a clean getaway in your car. The Mountain Grove P.D. picked up your car about a block from his mother’s house. Apparently he had his own car stashed in her garage. There’s fresh oil spots on the floor, and she has no car of her own.”

“Did Mrs. Haines go with them?”

“Not her. The Grove police brought her in for questioning, but she claims to know nothing about them. She says she had a headache and took some sleeping pills, slept right through until the police woke her up. The chief there says she’s been off her rocker for years, in a harmless way. Ever since her boy got into trouble the first time.” Wills sighed. “Why can’t people stay out of trouble and lead a natural life?”

“You’d be out of a job.”

“Gladly. Dr. Root tells me, by the way, that he gave you the slug extracted from your shoulder. He shouldn’t have done that. It’s evidence.”

“Take it up with him.”

“I already did. Do you have it with you, Bill?” He was calling me Bill again.

“It’s in my room at the hospital. Do you want to drive me back there? I was intending to ask you for a lift.”

“Sure thing. You look as though you could use more hospital. As a matter of fact, you look like the wrath of God.”

I caught a glimpse of my face in the rear-view mirror, and concurred. I’d been going on nerve ever since Ferguson’s Boston adventure shocked me out of bed. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and dozed all the way to the hospital.

The nurse in charge at the third-floor station opened her mouth to upbraid me. She closed it again when Wills stepped out of the elevator behind me. I was probably being arrested. I certainly deserved it, her look said.

I opened the drawer of the bedside table and handed him the pillbox. He dumped its contents into his hand, growling over them. “Fragmented. We probably can’t do anything with it.”

“What do you want to do with it?”

“Just hold it in readiness,” he said, “until we get our hands on the gun. Who shot you, Bill, Gaines or the woman?”

“She did.”

“And then she dragged her unconscious sister out and changed clothes with her?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s what I guessed. You thought you were covering up for Mrs. Ferguson. The girl you were actually covering for may turn out to be the most vicious killer of them all. There’s a hole in that piece of skull we found, looks like a bullet hole, spang in the middle of the forehead. She left three people to burn up in that fire, you and the sister and a third party who was probably dead already. Who was the third party, Bill? You must have some idea.”

I remembered the second shot Hilda had fired, just before I knocked myself out on the door frame. I’d assumed it was aimed at me.