Ross Macdonald - 1960 - The Ferguson Affair

Ross Macdonald

The Ferguson Affair
~ Ross Macdonald

 
          
To
Al Stump

 
          
THE
CASE BEGAN QUIETLY, on the women’s floor of the county jail. I was there to
interview a client, a young nurse named Ella Barker who had been arrested on a
stolen-property charge. Specifically, she had sold a diamond ring which was
part of the loot in a recent burglary; the secondhand dealer who bought it from
her reported the transaction to the police.

 
          
Our
interview started out inauspiciously. “Why you?” she wanted to know. “I thought
that people in trouble had a right to choose their own lawyer.
Especially when they’re innocent, like me.”

 
          
“Innocence
or guilt has nothing to do with it, Miss Barker. The judges keep an
alphabetical list of all the attorneys in town. We take turns representing
defendants without funds. My name happened to be next on the list.”

 
          
“What
did you say your name was?”

 
          
“Gunnarson.
William Gunnarson.”

 
          
“It’s
a funny name,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

 
          
She
wasn’t intending to be rude, but she was suspicious of me. Fear made her stiff
and stupid. I wished we had a better place to talk than the visitors’
compartment of the jail.

 
          
“It’s
an old Scandinavian name. Barker’s an English name, isn’t it?”

 
          
“I
guess so. Does it matter?”

 
          
She
was trying hard to be blasé, to find some armor she could put on against her
surroundings. She looked around the room, at the steel-paneled door with its
reinforced-glass peephole, the bars on the windows, the table and chairs bolted
to the steel floor. Her dark eyes strained wide, trying to take it all in and
realize her predicament. She had been in there one night.

 
          
“You
want to get out of here, don’t you?”

 
          
“No,
I want to set up housekeeping and live in here the rest of my life. Wouldn’t
anybody?”

 
          
“I
was going to suggest that the quickest way out would be to tell the truth. Tell
me how you got hold of the diamond ring you sold to Hector Broadman.”

 
          
“So
you can broadcast it all over town?”

 
          
“I’m
your attorney, Miss Barker. What makes you think I’d break your confidence?”

 
          
“I
know about lawyers,” she said cryptically. “And there’s nothing you can do to
make me talk, so there.”

 
          
She
looked at me with a kind of bleak pride. In her thin, dark way, she wasn’t a
bad-looking woman. In decent surroundings, properly groomed, she could be a
handsome one—the kind of girl you’d want to give a ring to.

 
          
“Who
gave you the ring, Miss Barker? I’m certain you didn’t steal it. You’re not a
burglar. Even the police don’t think you broke into the Simmons house
yourself.”

 
          
“Then
why did they arrest me?”

 
          
“You
know the answer to that as well as I do. We’ve had a number of burglaries
recently. There’s an organized gang at work in this area.”

 
          
“You
think I’m a member of it?”

 
          
“I
don’t. But your refusal to talk leads the police to that conclusion. They know
you’re covering up for criminals, and as long as you persist in that, it seems
to make you one of them. You’re doing yourself a grave injustice.”

 
          
She
moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. I thought that she was about
to tell me the truth. But her dark gaze flickered down and away.

 
          
“I
found that ring,” she said tonelessly. “I picked it up on the sidewalk on the
way home from the hospital.
Just like I told the policemen.”

 
          
“You’re
lying, Miss Barker. Somebody gave you that ring. If you’ll confide in me, and
let me handle it, I’m practically certain I can get you probation. But that
means making a clean breast of everything.”

 
          
“All right.”
She touched her breast. “It was given to me,
like an engagement ring.”

 
          
“Who
gave it to you?”

 
          
“A man.
I met him on my vacation in San Francisco.”

 
          
She
was a poor liar. She spoke in a hushed voice, as if she could somehow avoid
hearing herself lying.

 
          
“Can
you describe him?”

 
          
“He
was very good-looking, tall, dark, and handsome like they say. Only he wasn’t
so tall. He was about your size. About your age, too,” she concluded lamely.

 
          
“What
was his name?”

 
          
“He
didn’t tell me his name. I only met him the once.”

 
          
“But
he gave you an engagement ring—a diamond worth four or five hundred dollars.”

 
          
“He
probably didn’t know how much it was worth. Anyway, it was love at first
sight.” She tried to look pleased and proud, to make the fantasy real for
herself.

 
          
“If
you’re going to
lie
, Miss Barker, you might as well
stick to the story that you found it on the sidewalk.”

 
          
She
plucked at her skirt with fingernails from which the polish was flaking. “I
don’t see why you want to give me a bad time. You’re worse than Lieutenant
Wills. Why don’t you leave me be?”

 
          
“I
will when you tell me the truth.”

 
          
“Say
I do tell—tell you all about that fellow in San Francisco. His
name,
and everything. What happens then?”

 
          
“I
think I can get you off. He’s here in
Buenavista
,
isn’t he? Are you in love with him?”

 
          
“Don’t
make me laugh.” But she was far from laughing. “Say you do get me off. What
happens then?”

 
          
“To you, nothing.
The worst you can expect is a couple of
years on probation.”

 
          
“You
think so, eh? I bet I wouldn’t last a couple of years.”

 
          
“Probation
isn’t so bad.”

 
          
“I
don’t mean that. I mean this.”

 
          
She
drew her finger across her throat, and sucked air audibly between tongue and
teeth. Her violent gesture surprised me, and disturbed me. It seemed to
frighten her more than she was already frightened. The blood rushed to her
heart, and left her face sallow.

 
          
“Have
you been threatened?”

 
          
She
fingered her lower lip and nodded, very slightly, as if there were spies at the
barred windows.

 
          
“Who
threatened you?”

 
          
She
was silent, her eyes on my face.

 
          
“If
it was a member of the burglary gang, you’ll be doing us all a favor by naming
him. You’ll be helping me, the police, yourself.
And doing
the community a service.”

 
          
“Sure,
and end up in the cemetery. Why don’t you go away and leave me alone, Mr.
Gunnarson? You just don’t understand. I want to help you and all, and get out
of here. But I want to go on living, too.”

 
          
“Who
threatened you?”

 
          
She
shook her head twice, fiercely and stubbornly. She rose and went to the window.
Her hospital shoes were quiet on the steel plates. She stood with her back to
me, looking out across the courthouse grounds at the tower with its clock.

 
          
I
sat and glared at the back of her sleek dark head. I couldn’t guess what
secrets lay coiled inside of it, but I was morally certain that they weren’t
criminal secrets. Ella lacked the earmarks of the type: the dull-eyed
resignation, the wild flares of rebelliousness, the indescribable feral odor of
sex that has grown claws.

 
          
The
harsh rasp of a turning key cut into my thoughts. The matron who had let me in
opened the heavy door. “Lieutenant Wills would like to see you, sir.”

 
          
The
girl at the window started visibly,
then
got herself
under control. She remained staring out through the bars as if she was
mesmerized by the clock in the tower. I went out into the corridor.

 
          
Detective-Lieutenant
Harvey Wills was leaning on the balustrade above the spiral stairwell. He was a
man in his fifties with nearly thirty years of law enforcement extending like
an uphill road behind him. He had short gray hair, a pugnacious prow of a nose.
His coloring and his bearing went with the steel-gray angularities of the jail.

 
          
“I
don’t like this,” I said when the matron had closed the door. “It’s hard enough
questioning a client in these surroundings without the police department
horning in.”

 
          
“That
wasn’t my intention. Something came
up,
I thought
you’d like to know.” Wills added in a mildly questioning tone: “Is she giving
you a difficult time?”

 
          
“She’s
frightened.”

 
          
“Then
why doesn’t she break down and give us the facts we need? This is a big case,
Bill—seventeen burglaries with a total take in money and property close to
forty thousand. I got my first break in five months on it when that little
client of yours walked into Broadman’s store with Mrs. Simmons’s diamond ring.”

 
          
“She
doesn’t deny that she sold the ring. But it doesn’t prove that she’s involved
with the burglary gang.”

 
          
“It
does when you put it together with certain other facts. I’ll tell you
something, because I don’t want to see you climbing way out on a limb. There’s
one outstanding fact linking more than half of these burglaries together. In
nine instances, nine out of seventeen, one or more members of the victimized
family were in the hospital at the time the burglary occurred. The other
members of the family, if any, were visiting the hospital. It’s pretty clear
that someone inside the hospital tipped off the gang each time that the coast
was clear.”

 
          
“Why
blame Ella Barker? There must be two hundred people on the hospital staff.”

 
          
“Two
hundred and forty-seven, we’ve been checking them out for months. But only one
of them sold a diamond ring from the Simmons burglary. Only the one had a
platinum watch from the Denton job hid in her bureau drawer.”

 
          
“What
platinum watch are you talking about?”

 
          
“This one.”
With a slight conjurer’s flourish, Wills
produced an object wrapped in tissue paper. He undid the wrapping and showed me
a wafer-thin ladies’ watch. “We found it in Ella Barker’s apartment this
morning. Mrs. Denton has identified it as hers.”

 
          
I
felt
an emptiness
at my back, as though the room where
Ella was waiting had gone down like an elevator. I realized that I had invested
fairly heavily in the girl. Perhaps my belief in her innocence was mistaken.
Perhaps her unresponsiveness was sullen caginess, her fear a natural fear of
what she had coming to her.