Росс Макдональд - The Ferguson Affair

“I don’t believe it.”

“That’s your privilege.” Padilla’s tone made it clear that he did believe it. “Then I won’t bother going into the rest of it.”

“Is there more?”

“Yeah. I’ll give it to you if you want. It may be a lot of crazy talk. Like I said, I hope it is. There must be some truth in it, though, because it checks out. This business about the kidnapping, for instance. Secundina got wind of it long ago. She didn’t know what the job was going to be, neither did Gus. But it was going to be big – a lot of money for everybody, enough to solve all their problems.” Padilla grinned ironically.

“Who all are involved?”

“She doesn’t know that. Gus was one, of course. And this character Gaines. Gus knew him from way back, met him in Preston years ago under another name.”

“What name?”

“Secundina doesn’t know. Gus didn’t tell her everything. Most of what she learned, she had to pick up for herself. She did find out that Gaines was the leader, anyway after Broadman broke with the gang. Broadman goofed some way, and the cops threw a scare into him. He decided to pull in his horns. He didn’t want any part of the big deal. Sexy says that’s why they killed him. He was ready to turn State’s evidence against them.”

I was losing my scepticism of Padilla’s story. It tied in with some of the things I knew. A split between Gaines and Broadman would account for Broadman’s handling of Ella Barker’s diamond ring.

“Does Secundina admit that Gus killed Broadman?”

“No. She claims that Gus was sent to take care of Broadman. Gaines told him to gather up the loot in Broadman’s basement and knock the old boy off. But Gus couldn’t go through with it. He’d never killed a man. He hit Broadman a couple of times and beat it. She saw Gus right after, that same afternoon, and he was ashamed of himself for chickening out. You get that? He was ashamed . She didn’t make that up.”

“But maybe he did.”

“Gus? He’s – he was no better than a moron.”

“Then he could have been mistaken about what happened. He may have struck Broadman a fatal blow without knowing it.”

Padilla said: “You’re sure Broadman wasn’t choked to death?”

“I’m not sure, no. Why do you ask?”

“Secundina thinks he was.”

“By Granada?”

“No names mentioned,” Tony said. He wasn’t a timid man, but he looked frightened. “I don’t know what to do about all this, Mr. Gunnarson. I been carrying it around ever since she spilled it in my lap. It’s too big for me to handle.”

“I’ll talk to her. Where does she live?”

“In a court in lower town.” He gave me the address, and I wrote it down.

Tony got out and looked up at the sky. A high jet was cutting white double tracks across it, towing along them at a distance rattling loads of sound. Ferguson’s telephone rang, like a tiny protest.

I started for the service entrance. Padilla was there ahead of me, blocking my way.

“What’s the matter with you?”

He answered me quietly. “It’s his baby, Mr. Gunnarson. Let him handle it.”

“You think he’s qualified?”

“As much as anybody is, I guess.”

Padilla flicked his twisted ear with a fingertip and held his hand outspread beside his face. Ferguson’s voice was a murmur far inside the house; then almost a shout: “Holly! Is that you, Holly?”

“My gosh, he’s talking to her,” Padilla said.

He’d forgotten his intention of keeping me out. We went in together. Ferguson met us in the central hallway. His weathered face was broken with joy. “I talked to her. She’s alive and well, and she’ll be home today.”

“Not kidnapped, after all?” I said.

“Oh, they’re holding her, all right.” He seemed to consider this a minor detail. “But they haven’t mistreated her. She told me so herself.”

“You’re sure it was your wife you talked to?”

“Absolutely certain. I couldn’t be mistaken about her voice.”

“Was it a local call?”

“So far as I could tell.”

“Who else did you talk to?” Padilla said.

“A man – one of her captors. I didn’t recognize his voice. But it doesn’t matter. They’re releasing her.”

“Without ransom?”

He looked at me with displeasure. In the relief of hearing from his wife, he didn’t want to be reminded of obstacles to her return. Relief like that, I thought, was very close to despair.

“I’m paying the ransom,” he said in a flat voice. “I’m glad to do it.”

“When and where?”

“With your permission, I’ll keep my instructions to myself. I have a schedule to meet.”

He turned with awkward haste and walked a rather erratic course to his bedroom. It was large, with an open blue fall to the sea from one window; and so austerely furnished that it seemed empty. There were photographs of his wife on the walls and the bare surfaces of the furniture, and several of the Colonel himself. He lounged with raw-boned rakishness in battle dress, under a hat like a pancake. He stood on his hands on a pair of parallel bars. One photograph showed him standing straight and alone against a flat prairie landscape under an empty sky.

“What are you doing in here, Gunnarson?”

“Are you sure that phone call wasn’t phony?”

“How could it be? I spoke directly to Holly.”

“It wasn’t a tape you heard?”

“No.” He considered this. “What she said was responsive to what I said.”

“Why would she co-operate with them?”

“Because she wants to come home, of course,” he said with a large, stark smile. “Why shouldn’t she co-operate? She knows that I don’t care about the money. She knows how much I love her.”

“Sure she does,” Padilla said from the doorway, and beckoned me with his head.

There were feelings in the air, like a complex electricity, which I didn’t understand. Moving jerkily, galvanically, Ferguson went to a wall mirror and started to take off his shirt. His fingers fumbled at the buttons. In a rage of impatience, he tore it off with both hands. Buttons struck the glass like tiny bullets.

Ferguson’s reflected face was gaunt. He saw me watching him, and met my gaze in the mirror. His eyes were old and stony, his forehead steaming with sweat. “I warn you. If you do anything to interfere with her safe return, I’ll kill you, I have killed men.”

He said it without turning, to his reflection and me.

I DROVE UNDER THE COLISEUM arches of the overpass and through an area of truckyards and lumberyards. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood and burned diesel oil. Along the high wire fences of the trucking firms, against the blank walls of the building-materials warehouses, dark men leaned in the sun. I turned up Pelly Street.

The court where the Donato family lived was a collection of board-and-batten houses which resembled chickenhouses, built on three sides of a dusty patch of ground at the end of an alley. A single Cotoneaster tree, which can grow anywhere, held its bright red berries up to the sun. In the tree’s long straggling shade a swarm of children played gravely in the dust.

They were pretending to be Indians. Half of them probably were, if you traced their blood lines. An old woman with a seamed Indian face overlooked them from the doorstep of one of the huts.

She pretended not to see me. I was the wrong color and I had on a business suit and business suits cost money and where did the money come from? The sweat of the poor.

I said: “Is Mrs. Donato here? Secundina Donato?”

The old woman didn’t raise her eyes or answer me. She was as still as a lizard in my shadow. Behind me the children had fallen silent. Through the open doorway of the hut, I could hear a woman’s voice softly singing a lullaby in Spanish.