Ross MacDonald - The Ferguson Affair

The trees that lined the parking lot were silver-dollar eucalyptus, appropriately enough. Their metallic leaves gleamed in the dying sunset. Twilight gathered in the folds of the foothills and rolled like blue fog down the valley, catching in the branches of scattered oaks. The slopes of the golf course dissolved away into darkness. Venus lit her candle in the western part of the sky. I thought of Sally and her leg of lamb. Some kind of cooked-meat smell was emanating from the clubhouse. Prime ribs of unicorn, perhaps, or breast of phoenix under glass.

The clubhouse was a rambling building with about an acre of red tile roof and many wings and entrances. Like the hills and trees around it, it had the air of having been there for a long time. I was beginning to feel indigenous myself. Not a member: nothing like that: a wild thing who lived in the neighborhood.

A car came up the road from town. Its headlights wavered like antennae before it entered the parking lot. It stopped just inside the stone gateposts.

A man got out and strode toward me busily. “Park it, bud.”

He was very short and wide, broad-faced, and pigeon-breasted, as if a pile driver had fallen on him in his formative years. He wore a light suit, a sunburst tie, and a light hat with a band that matched the tie. He had a voice like a foghorn and a breath, when he came up close, like the back room of a bar. “You deaf or something?”

I was feeling declassed and surly, but I answered mildly enough: “I’m not a parking attendant. Park it yourself.”

He didn’t move. “You must be the manager, eh?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on: “Nice place you got here. I’d like to pick up a club like this myself-high class, wealthy clientele, quiet surroundings. I could turn a place like this into a gold mine. How much do you make a week?”

“I have nothing to do with the management of the club.”

“I see.” For some obscure reason, he decided that I was a member and was snubbing him. He jerked a thumb at his car. “Don’t judge me by that Ford, it’s just a rental. Back home I keep a four-car garage, nothing in it but Caddies. I don’t wanna brag, but I could buy this place outright, cash on the line.”

“Bully for you,” I said. “Are you in the real-estate business?”

“I guess you could say I am, at that. Salaman’s the name.”

He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it. It hung in the air like a dead haddock. His eyes became bright and moist under his hat brim.

“So you won’t take the hand of friendship.” His voice was a blend of menace and sentimentality, like asphalt mixed with molasses. “Okay, no hard feelings. I never been in the State of Cal before, but it certainly isn’t the friendly place they said it was. It’s strickly from chillyville, if you want my opinion.”

He took off his hat and looked ready to weep into it. His hair was a frizzy black mass which sprang up vivaciously, adding inches to his height and altering his appearance. In spite of his illicit air, the man was queerly pathetic.

“Where do you come from, Mr. Salaman?”

He said as if he’d been waiting to be asked: “Miami, Florida. I’m in business there, various kinds of business. I flew out here for combined business and pleasure, you might say. Deductible expense. You got a member with you, name of Holly May?”

“Holly May?”

“You may know her as Mrs. Ferguson. I understand she married a man name of Ferguson since her and me were-friends.” He smacked his lips over the word or its connotations. “Just between us girls, big blondes were always my weakness.”

“I see.”

My noncommittal act was wearing thin. So was my patience.

“Do you know her?” Salaman said.

“As a matter of fact I don’t.”

“Isn’t she a member here? It said in the paper she was. It said that she was playing around with the lifeguard.”

He was standing almost on my toes, talking breathily up into my face. I pushed him away, not violently, but away. He went through a quivering transformation scene and came out of it haggard and yelping. “Keep your hooks off me, I blow your head off.”

His hand went under his jacket and tugged at a tumorous swelling in his armpit. Then he froze. His frozen snarl was a devil mask carved out of white and blue stone.

I croaked from a suddenly dry throat: “Go away. Back to the reservation.”

Oddly enough he went.

MY ILLUSION OF irresistible moral force evaporated when I looked around. Three men were coming up from the clubhouse to the parking area. Two of them were the plain-clothes men I had seen in the alley below Jerry Winkler’s hotel window. Salaman, I thought, must have built-in radar for police.

The third man wore a dinner coat with a professional air. He accompanied the policemen to their car and offered his regrets that he hadn’t been able to help them as much as he would have liked to. They drove away. He turned back toward the clubhouse, where I caught him at the door:

“I’m William Gunnarson, a local attorney. One of my clients is involved with an employee of the club. Would you be the manager?”

His bright and sorrowful eyes examined me. He had the nervous calm which comes from running other people’s parties, and a humorous mouth which took the curse off it. “I am tonight. Tomorrow I’ll probably be looking for a job. We who are about to die salute thee. Is it Gaines again? Ill-gotten Gaines?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Gaines is an ex-employee of ours. I fired him last week. I was just beginning to indulge in the hope that he was out of my hair for good. Now this.” He flipped his hand in the direction the police had taken.

“What was the trouble?”

“You undoubtedly know more about that than I do. Is he a burglary suspect, or something of the sort? I’ve just been talking to a couple of detectives, but they were terribly noncommittal.”

“We could trade information, perhaps.”

“Why not? My name is Bidwell. Gunnarson, did you say?”

“Bill Gunnarson.”

His office was oak-paneled, thickly carpeted, furnished with heavy, dark pieces. An uneaten steak congealed on a tray on the corner of his desk. We faced each other across it. I told him as much as I thought I needed to, and then asked him some questions. “Do you know if Gaines has left town?”

“I gather he has. The police implied as much. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising.”

“The fact that he’s wanted for questioning, you mean?”

“That, and other circumstances,” he said vaguely.

“Why did you fire him?”

“I’d sooner not divulge that information. There are other people involved. Let’s say it was done at the instance of one of the members, and leave it at that.”

I didn’t want to leave it at that. “Is there anything to the rumor that he made a rough pass at one of the ladies?”

Bidwell stiffened in his swivel chair. “Good Lord, is that around town?”

“I heard it.”

He stroked his mouth with his fingertips. His desk lamp lit only the lower part of his face. I couldn’t see his eyes.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. He simply showed too much interest in one of the members’ wives. He was very attentive to her, and perhaps she took a little too much advantage of it. Her husband heard about it, and objected. So I fired him.” He added: “Thank God I did fire him, before this police investigation came up.”

“Did Gaines give any indications that he was using his position here for criminal purposes? To pick out prospects for burglary, for instance?”

“The police asked me that. I had to answer no. But they pointed out that one or two of our members have been victims of burglary in the past six months. Most recently, the Hampshires.”