Read Ross Macdonald - 1960 - The Ferguson Affair for Free Online Page B

He throws his weight, and I pick up the pieces. This time
there’s one big piece, a dead man. I can’t pick it up.”
                 “But
he is innocent.”
                 “Like
the Devil himself, innocent.”
                 Her
teeth flashed. “Dirty liar, you must not say that.”
                 “And
Gus is the one who tells the truth? I tell you, I am finished with Gus. He’s
not my brother. He can live or die, I don’t want to
know about it.” He turned to me. “Go away, Mister, eh?”
                 “Where
is your brother?”
                 “Out in the tules someplace. How
do I know? If I knew, I’d go out and bring him in. He took my pickup.”
                 “He
borrowed it,” Mrs. Donato said. “He wants to bring it back. He wants to talk to
you.”
                 “Have
you seen him, Mrs. Donato?”
                 Her
face closed up. “I didn’t say that.”
                 “I
must have misunderstood you. Can we go someplace and talk? I have some
questions I’d very much like to ask you.”
                 “What about?”
                 “People
you may have heard of. There’s a man named Larry Gaines, for instance, who
works as a lifeguard at the Foothill Club.”
                 Her
eyes became hard and dim and dusty, like the glass eyes you see in deer heads.
“I never been there in my life. I don’t know nobody out there.”
                 “You
know Tony Padilla,” her brother-in-law said. He looked at her significantly.
                 “Who’s
he, Mr. Donato?”
                 “Fellow
tends bar at the Foothill Club.”
                 “What’s
he got to do with this?”
                 “Nothing,”
he said impassively. “We don’t, neither. Excuse us now, Mister, how about it?
You see what family trouble I got. This is a bad time to visit.”
                 Gently
and firmly, he shut the door in my face.
                 I
took a taxi to the Foothill Club and told the driver not to wait. There was a
police Mercury with undercover plates among the Cadillacs and sports cars in the tree-shaded parking lot. I was in no mood to talk to
policemen. I leaned against the trunk of one of the trees, as far as possible
from the Mercury, and waited for Wills’s detectives to come out.
                 The
mere idea of detectives at the Foothill Club was incongruous. It was one of
those monumentally unpretentious places where you could still imagine that the
sun had never set on the international set. It cost five thousand dollars to
join, and membership was limited to three hundred. Even if you had the five
thousand, you had to wait for one of the members to die. And then take a blood
test, for blueness.
                 The
members straggling out in twos and threes from the nineteenth hole all looked
as if they intended to live forever. Men with hand-polished leather faces who
followed the sun from Acapulco to Juan-les-Pins, elderly striding women in
sensible shoes complaining in anglicized accents about the price of drinks or
the fact that the club was cutting costs on the heating system of the swimming
pool.
                 One
of them wondered audibly what had happened to that nice young pool attendant. A
silver-haired man in a white scarf said, with some satisfaction, that the
fellow had been fired. He’d made one pass too many at you-know-who, but in his
opinion, which his voice caressed, the woman was just as much to blame as the
lifeguard, what was his name? Too many new faces, slipping
standards.
                 The
trees that lined the parking lot were silver-dollar eucalyptus, appropriately
enough. Their metallic leaves gleamed in the dying sunset. Twilight gathered in
the folds of the foothills and rolled like blue fog down the valley,