“And you say it’s happened before?”
“At least once, maybe other times. That would explain a lot of things.”
“Do you have any notion who’s been doing it to you?”
“I know darn well who did it that time in Palm Springs. Mike Speare hired a detective to find out.”
“Who was it? Your mother?”
“Don’t be ridic. Momma’s no great moral figure, but she wouldn’t do a thing like that to me.”
“One of your sisters?”
“You’re sharp.” She said to Ferguson: “This boy is sharp.”
“Which one? Renee or June?”
She emitted a burst of laughter. It was a queer, high, bitter, rowdy laugh, hyphenating the tragic and the comic.
“My God,” she said, “I’m beginning to get the picture. Who do you think
“I know who you are, Hilda.”
“You may think you do, but you don’t. I happen to be June. Hilda was the one who used my professional name to run up bills in Palm Springs. I guess I should have done something about her then. But you sort of hate to sick the law on your own sister. I certainly wasn’t going to sick that hoodlum on her.
“I can’t blame her too much,” she added in a softer voice. “She always wanted to be a big name, an actress. If the truth be known, I caught the bug from Hilda. It must have driven her crazy when she saw me on the screen, and realized I was her little sister June.”
“You’re a generous woman to feel that way about her.”
“I can afford to be generous. I was the one that made it. And when I made it, I found out I didn’t want it. I wanted Fergie here. Thank the Lord I’ve got him.”
Her smile resembled her mother’s. It lit up her face like a ray which had traveled through light-years of darkness to this moment. She turned it on Ferguson, and he tried to respond. His mouth only grimaced. He was sweating out his own darkness.
“Hilda’s your oldest sister?”
“That’s right, she’s the oldest one, and I’m the second oldest. Hilda’s only our half-sister, though.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“I ought to.” Her smile faded. “It was no secret in our family. There were never any secrets in the Dotery family-the old man saw to that. When we were kids, he brought it up about three times a day, at mealtimes, that Hilda wasn’t his, or anybody’s. It was very nice for all of us, especially for Hilda.”
“She must have been somebody’s.”
“She was Momma’s. The father was some guy that Momma knew in Boston before the old man married her. The jerk ran out on her. He sent her a thousand bucks, which Dotery used to buy a car to come to California. That’s all I know about it.”
It was enough. Ferguson’s teeth were set like a wounded man’s biting on a rag.
His wife told her story to Wills when he arrived. I sat and monitored the interview, ready to suppress hearsay evidence and irrelevancies. I was Ferguson’s lawyer, after all, and Hilda was his daughter.
Wills sat slumped in a chair and listened without arguing. He looked very tired. There was a black smear of char on his right cheekbone. He shook his head at her when she had finished. Ashes fell from his hair, filling a shaft of sunlight with their particles.
“I wish you’d spoken up this morning, Mrs. Ferguson. Time is of the essence in these matters, and your sister could have traveled a long way since early this morning. In addition to which, we put out the word that Gaines is traveling alone.”
“But I didn’t know that Hilda was in it this morning.”
He looked at her unresponsively. “How could that be, Mrs. Ferguson? It was her phone call that decoyed you out of the Foothill Club and set you up for the sna-for the abduction.”
“I know that now,” she said. “I didn’t then. When Hilda phoned me the other night she said that she was Renee, my youngest sister. She just got in from San Francisco, she said, and she was down at the bus station. She said she was in trouble, and needed help. I believed her.”
“The girl’s in trouble, all right,” Wills muttered.
“You won’t be too hard on her, will you? Hilda isn’t too responsible, and Gaines has always led her around by the nose.”
He disregarded her question. “That’s another thing I don’t understand, Mrs. Ferguson. You knew what kind of a character Gaines was, going back to early days of childhood. You knew that he was using a false name. Yet you’ve been fraternizing with him these last months. No offense intended, but you must have been aware you were putting yourself in danger.”
She looked at her husband, rather guiltily. He looked guiltily back at her.
She said: “I was a damned fool, frankly. He told me he was reformed, that he was trying to live down his past and earn an honest living. I felt so lucky myself, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.” She changed the subject quickly. “What are you going to do to him and Hilda?”
“Find them.” Wills hunched his body forward, heavily, and held out his hands as if he was getting ready to receive a weight. There were lines of grime across his palms, and his fingernails were dirty. “Then it’s out of my hands.” He let his arms drop to his sides.
“Will Hilda go to jail for a long time?”
“She’ll be lucky if that’s all that happens to her. There’s no use beating around the bush, Mrs. Ferguson. This is a case of multiple murder. You know the penalty for premeditated murder.”
“But Hilda didn’t kill anyone herself.”
“She didn’t have to, to be guilty of murder. Ronald Spice says she was the one that phoned them and told them to knock off Secundina Donato. Even if Spice is lying, she’s tied to another murder, one we didn’t know about. We’ve been doing some digging at the scene of the fire, and we found human remains. There isn’t much left of whoever it was-”
Holly cried out, and turned her head away. She had reached her limit. Dr. Trench stepped in and ended the interview. As Wills and I left the room, she began to wail.
I couldn’t keep up with Wills, but he was waiting for me in his car. I got in beside him. “Whose body is it, Lieutenant?”
“You can’t call it a body-a piece of skull and some teeth and a few charred bones. I was hoping you could tell me who they belonged to. Who else was up there, besides you and Gaines and the sister?”
“Nobody else that I saw. Are the remains male or female?”
“I can’t tell for sure. Simeon probably can, but he hasn’t seen them yet. They look like a man’s teeth to me. Do you have any suggestions on the subject?”
“Not unless it’s Gaines himself.”
“That doesn’t seem too likely. As I see it, he and the woman made a clean getaway in your car. The Mountain Grove P.D. picked up your car about a block from his mother’s house. Apparently he had his own car stashed in her garage. There’s fresh oil spots on the floor, and she has no car of her own.”
“Did Mrs. Haines go with them?”
“Not her. The Grove police brought her in for questioning, but she claims to know nothing about them. She says she had a headache and took some sleeping pills, slept right through until the police woke her up. The chief there says she’s been off her rocker for years, in a harmless way. Ever since her boy got into trouble the first time.” Wills sighed. “Why can’t people stay out of trouble and lead a natural life?”
“You’d be out of a job.”
“Gladly. Dr. Root tells me, by the way, that he gave you the slug extracted from your shoulder. He shouldn’t have done that. It’s evidence.”
“Take it up with him.”
“I already did. Do you have it with you, Bill?” He was calling me Bill again.
“It’s in my room at the hospital. Do you want to drive me back there? I was intending to ask you for a lift.”
“Sure thing. You look as though you could use more hospital. As a matter of fact, you look like the wrath of God.”
