The Ferguson Affair

the slot and training the thing on my car. It’s how I happened to see them.”

“Them?”

“Him. I meant to say him. Gaines. He pulled up beside my car, got out and retrieved the carton, and away he went. If I had had a deer rifle with me, I could have plugged him. I wish I had.”

“What kind of a car was he driving?”

“A fairly new car, green in color. I don’t know what make exactly. I’m not familiar with the cheaper makes.”

“It was one of the cheaper makes?”

“Yes, a Chevrolet perhaps.”

“Or a Plymouth?”

“It may have been a Plymouth. At any rate it was Gaines who got out and picked up the money. And I saw red. I sprinted the length of the pier and chased th-chased him in my car. You know the result.”

He gingerly touched his swelling nose with his fingertips.

“You don’t lie well, Colonel. Who was with Gaines in the green Plymouth?”

“No one.”

But he wouldn’t meet my eyes. His gaze roved around the room and fastened on an elk head high on the opposite wall above the bar. The waiter brought my sandwich. Ferguson ordered another double rye.

I ate mechanically. My mind was racing, fitting together pieces of fact. The picture was far from complete, but its outlines were forming.

“Was your wife in the car with Gaines?”

His head hung as if his neck had been broken. “She was driving.”

“Are you certain of the identification?”

“Positive.”

His second drink arrived. He drank it down like hemlock. Remembering the previous night at the Foothill Club, I persuaded him not to order a third. “We have some more talking to do, Ferguson. We don’t have to do it here.”

“I like it here.” His gaze repeated its circuit of the room, which was almost deserted now, and returned to the friendly elk.

“Ever hunt elk?”

“Indeed I have. I have several fine heads at home.”

“Where is home, exactly?”

“I keep most of my trophies in my lodge at Banff. But that’s not exactly what you mean, is it? You mean where I really live, and that’s hard to say. I have a house in Calgary, and I keep hotel suites in Montreal and Vancouver. None of them are places I feel at home.” Like other lonely men, he seemed glad to be relieved of the burden of loneliness. “Home for me was always the family homestead in Alberta. But it’s nothing but an oil field now.”

“You haven’t mentioned your place here.”

“No. I feel decidedly out of place in California. I came here because it offered investment opportunities, and because Holly was unwilling to leave California.”

“Was there conflict between you on the subject?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. I wanted to please her. We’ve only been married six months.” He’d been still and quiet for a few minutes, but the thought of his wife was too much for him. He twisted in his seat as though he’d been kicked in the groin. “Why are we beating around the bush, with this talk of homes and places?”

“I’m trying to get some idea of you and your situation. I can’t very well advise you in the dark. Would you object to some more personal questions, about your wife and your relationship?”

“I don’t object. In fact, it may help to clarify my own thinking.” He paused, and said in astonishment, like a man who has made a personal discovery: “I’m an emotional man, you know. I used to think of myself as a cold fish. Holly changed all that. I hardly know whether to be glad or sorry.”

“You’re pretty ambivalent about her, aren’t you? Running hot and cold, I mean.”

“I know what you mean, very well. I’m scalding and freezing. The two conditions are just about equally painful.” Ferguson kept surprising me. He added: “Odi et amo. Excrucior! Do you know Latin, Gunnarson?”

“Some legal Latin.”

“I’m no Latinist myself, but my mother taught me a little. That was Catullus. ‘I hate her and I love her, and I’m on the rack.’ ” His voice rose out of control, as if he was literally on the rack. Then he said in a deeper voice: “She’s the only person I’ve ever really loved. Except one. And I didn’t love her enough.”

“Have you been married before?”

“No. I’d reached the point of believing that marriage was not for me. I should have stuck to that. A man can’t expect to be lucky more than once.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to make a good deal of money. I knew instinctively that a man like me couldn’t be lucky in love. And I’ve always shied away from women. It’s nothing to be vain about, because I know the reason, but plenty of women have thrown themselves at my head.”

“Did Holly?”

“No, she didn’t. I was the pursuer in her case-very much the pursuer.”

“How did you happen to meet her?”

“It didn’t happen, in the strictest sense. I arranged to meet her. I saw her in a film last spring in London-I was over there for a trade meeting at Canada House-and decided I had to meet her, somehow. A few months later, at the end of July, I happened to be passing through Vancouver. I have interests in British Columbia, and some of my property was threatened by forest fires.

“I picked up a newspaper and saw Holly’s picture. Her film was to be shown at the Vancouver film festival, and she was to be a guest at the showing. I decided to stop over in Vancouver, and the forest fires be damned. All I could think about was meeting her in the flesh.”

“Do you mean to tell me you fell in love with her picture, at first sight?”

“Does that sound foolish and sentimental?”

“It sounds incredible.”

“Not if you realize how I felt. She was what I’d been missing all my life. She stood for the things I’d turned my back on when I was a young man. Love, and marriage, and fatherhood. A lovely girl that I could call my own.” He was talking like a man in a dream, a rosy sentimental dream of the sort that burns like celluloid and leaves angry ashes in the eyes.

“You felt all this simply because you’d seen her in a movie?”

“There was more to it than that. I prefer not to go into it.”

“I think you should go into it.”

“What purpose would it serve? That other girl had nothing to do with Holly, except that Holly reminded me of her.”

“Tell me about the other girl.”

“There’s no point in going into the subject of her, not at this late date. She was simply a girl I picked up in Boston twenty-five years ago, when I was at Harvard Business School. For a while I planned to marry her, and then I decided not to. Perhaps I should have.” He stared down into his empty glass, twisting and turning it like a crystal ball that revealed the past but kept the future hidden. “Holly seemed like a reincarnation of that girl in Boston.”

He fell silent. He seemed to have forgotten that I was sitting across from him.

“So you arranged to meet Holly,” I prompted him.

“Yes. It wasn’t difficult. I have strong connections in Vancouver, among them some of the backers of the festival. A dinner in her honor was set up, and I had the privilege of sitting beside her. She was charming, and so young.” His voice broke, leaving me unmoved. “It was like being given a second chance at youth.”

“Obviously, you made the most of your chances.”

“Yes. We got along from the start-in a perfectly straightforward, companionable way. And she didn’t know who I was. I was simply a fellow she met at a party who had a few business interests. That was the beauty of it. She