The Ferguson Affair

her with drugs, by any chance?”

He snorted at me: “The notion is ridiculous!”

“It’s not as strange as what we know she’s done. Leave the personal part out of it and consider. Your wife walked out on an assured fortune, and a man who would give her anything she wanted, in order to share the chances of a wanted criminal. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Yes. I’m afraid it does.” He sounded querulous. The dressing in his nose had lightened and thinned his voice. “I’m the reason. I’m physically disgusting to her.”

“Did she ever say so?”

“I’m saying so. It’s the only possible inference. She married me for my money, but even that couldn’t hold her.”

I looked sideways at him. Pain leered like skull bones through the flesh of his face. “I was simply a dirty old man pawing at her. I had no right to her.”

“You’re not exactly an octogenarian. How old are you?”

“We won’t discuss it.”

“Fifty?”

“Older than that.”

“How much money are you worth?”

His eyes veiled themselves like a bird’s. “I’d have to ask my accountants.”

“Give me a bracket, anyway, to help fill in the picture. Let me assure you, I’m not trying to figure out the size of my retainer. We’ll set it at five hundred now, if that’s all right with you.”

“Very well.” He actually smiled, at least on my side. God knew what he was doing with the other side of his face. “I suppose I could realize ten or twelve million if I had to. Why do you think it’s important?”

“If your wife had been out for the money, she could have taken you for a lot more than two hundred thousand. Without sharing it with Gaines.”

“How?”

“By divorcing you. It happens every day, or don’t you read the papers?”

“I’ve given her no grounds.”

“Never an unkind word?”

“Practically never. I was very much in love with my wife. The fact is, I still am.”

“Would you take her back if you had the chance?”

“I don’t know. I think so.” His voice had changed, as his eyes had changed when I mentioned money. We had left the highway and were approaching the green lane that led to his house. “It’s hard to imagine her ever coming back.”

But he had leaned forward, urging the car along in wild unconscious hopefulness.

His shoulders slumped as he got out of the car. The house on the cliff had an abandoned air.

Far out over the sea, a flight of birds blew in a changing line like a fragmentary sentence whose meaning was never quite intelligible. All the way in to Beverly Hills I kept thinking about those birds. They’d been too far out for me to identify, but it was the season when certain kinds of sea birds migrated, I didn’t know exactly where or why.

chapter 18

THE BUILDING WAS long and low, almost hidden from the street by discreet plantings. It had pastel pink walls and lavender doors which opened directly onto a kind of veranda. Michael Speare’s name was tastefully printed on one of the doors in lower-case letters, like a line from a modern poem.

It was one of those so-called studio offices, meant to suggest that doing business with the occupants was an aesthetic experience. The girl at the front desk underlined the suggestion. She had Matisse lines, and a voice like violins at a nuptial feast. She used it to tell me that Mr. Speare wasn’t back from his afternoon calls. Did I have an appointment?

I said I had, at three. She glanced at the clock imbedded in the blonde mahogany wall. It had no numbers on its face, but it seemed to indicate that it was ten minutes after three.

“Mr. Speare must have been delayed. I expect him at any moment. Will you sit down, sir? And what was your name?”

“William Gunnarson. It still is.”

She looked at me like a startled doe, but “Thank you, sir,” was all she said. I sat down on an arrangement of molded plywood and glass tubing which turned out to be comfortable enough. The girl returned to her electric typewriter, and began to play kitten on the keys.

I sat and watched her. She had reddish-brown hair, but in other respects her resemblance to Holly May was striking. It was a phenomenon I’d noticed before: whole generations of girls looked like the movie actresses of their period. Perhaps they made themselves over to resemble the actresses. Perhaps the actresses made themselves up to embody some common ideal. Or perhaps they became actresses by virtue of the fact that they already resembled the common ideal.

My eyes were still on the girl, without quite taking her in. She became restless under my stare. Everything about her, varnished hair, shadowed lids, gleaming red lips, breasts that thrust themselves on the attention, was meant to attract stares and hold them. But the girl behind the attractions was uneasy when they worked.

The advertisements didn’t tell you what to do next.

She looked up at me, her green eyes defensively hard. A different voice, her own, said: “Well?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be obnoxious. I was struck by your resemblance to someone.”

“I know. Holly May. People keep telling me that. A lot of good it does me.”

“Are you interested in acting?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. I’d be home in Indiana, to coin a phrase. Raising brats.” The nuptial violins in her voice had gone badly out of tune. “Would you be in pictures?”

“I played a starring role in the family album. That was as far as it went.”

“The Family Album? I never heard of it. Has it been released?”

“I keep it at home in a trunk,” I said. “The family album. Photographs.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It was one of my feebler efforts. Forgive me.”

“That’s all right,” she said magnanimously. “Mr. Speare says I got-I have no sense of humor, anyway.” She frowned at the clock. “I wonder what’s keeping him.”

“I can wait. Do you know Holly May?”

“I wouldn’t say I knew her. She left town a few months after I got this job. But I used to see her come in and out.”

“What sort of person was she?”

“It’s hard for me to tell. Some of the girls in the studios thought she was real cool-real down-to-earth, no airs about her and all. At least that was what they said. With me she was always standoffish. I don’t think she liked me.” After a pause, she said: “Maybe she didn’t like me because I look like her. She did a double take the first time she ever saw me.”

And after another pause: “Some people think I’m better-looking than her, even. But a fat lot of good it does me. I tried to get Mr. Speare to get me a job standing in for her. He said I didn’t know how to handle myself. So I took this course in standing, walking and standing. It cost me a hundred and sixty dollars, and just when I was getting real good at it, she had to go and give up the movie business.”

“That was a tough break for you,” I said. “I wonder why she left.”

“She wanted to get married. But it’s still a good question if you ever saw him. Why a girl would give up a career to marry him. Of course they say he owns half the oil in Canada, but he’s just an ugly old man. I wouldn’t marry him for all the money in the world.”

Her voice and her look were faintly doubtful. She sat with her green gaze resting unconsciously on me, balancing Ferguson’s money against his personal charms.