“Does he believe his wife has met with foul play?”
“I think he does, in a way. Only he won’t admit it to himself. He keeps pretending she ran off with a guy, so he can be mad about it, instead of-scared.”
“You’re quite a psychologist, Tony.”
“Yeah. That will be twenty-five dollars, please.” But there was no laughter in his voice. He’d succeeded in frightening himself, as well as me.
We had crossed the ridge that walled off the valley from the coastal shelf. I could smell the sea, and sense its dark immensity opening below us. The rotating beam of a lighthouse scanned the night. It flashed along a line of trees standing on a bluff, on the flat roof of a solitary house, then seaward on a bank of fog which absorbed it like cotton batting.
Padilla turned down a hedged lane, a green trench carved out of darkness. We emerged in a turnaround at the rear of the flat-roofed house on the bluff. Parking as close to the door as possible, Padilla plucked Ferguson’s key ring from the ignition, opened the house, and turned on inside and outside lights.
We wrestled Ferguson out of the car and carried him through the house into a bedroom. He was as limp as a rag doll, but as heavy as though his bones were made of iron. I was beginning to be worried about him. I switched on the bed lamp and looked at his closed face. It was propped on the pillow like a dead man’s in a coffin.
“He’s okay,” Padilla said reassuringly. “He’s just sleeping now.”
“You don’t think he needs a doctor? I hit him pretty hard.”
“It’s easy enough to find out.”
He went into the adjoining bathroom and came back with a plastic tumbler full of water. He poured a little of it on Ferguson. The water splashed on his forehead and ran down into his hollow temples, wetting his thin hair. His eyes snapped open. He sat up on the bed and said distinctly: “What’s the trouble, boys? Is the dugout leaking again?”
“Yeah. It’s raining whisky,” Padilla said. “How you feeling, Colonel?”
Ferguson sat leaning on his arms, his high shoulders up around his ears, and permitted himself to realize how he was feeling. “I’m drunk. Drunk as a skunk. My God, but I’m drunk.” He thrust a hairy fist in one eye and focused the other eye on Padilla’s face. “Why didn’t you cut me off, Padilla?”
“You’re a hard man to say no to, Colonel. The hardest.”
“No matter, cut me off.”
Ferguson swung his heavy legs over the edge of the bed, got up on them like a man mounting rubber stilts, and staggered across the room to the bathroom door. “Got to take a cold shower, clear the old brain. Mustn’t let Holly see me like this.”
He walked into the stall shower fully clothed and turned on the water. He was in there for what seemed a long time, snorting and swearing. Padilla kept a protective eye on him.
I looked around the room. It was a woman’s bedroom, the kind that used to be called a boudoir, luxuriously furnished in silk and padded satin. A pink clock and a pink telephone shared the top of the bedside table. It was five minutes to ten. The thought of Sally went through me like a pang.
I reached for the telephone. It rang in my hand, as if I had closed a connection. I picked up the receiver and said: “This is the Ferguson residence.”
“Colonel Ferguson, please.”
“Sorry, the Colonel is busy.”
“Who is that speaking, please?” It was a man’s voice, quiet and careful and rather impersonal.
“A friend.”
“Is the Colonel there?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, he’s taking a bath.”
“Get him on the line,” the voice said less impersonally. “In a hurry, friend.”
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.
