The Ferguson Affair

238 Pages·2016·0.95 MB·English

by  Macdonald Ross

Ross Macdonald
The Ferguson Affair
Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in
1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man
and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery
Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the
Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
Also by Ross Macdonald
The Dark Tunnel
Trouble Follows Me
Blue City
The Three Roads
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The Way Some People Die
The Ivory Grin
Meet Me at the Morgue
Find a Victim
The Name Is Archer
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
The Wycherly Woman
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill
Black Money
The Far Side of the Dollar
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
Sleeping Beauty
The Blue Hammer

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD EDITION, DECEMBER 2010
Copyright © 1960 by Ross Macdonald, and renewed 1988 by Margaret Millar
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, in 1960.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Buenavista and Mountain Grove are imaginary cities; their citizens and denizens are all imaginary, intended
to represent no actual persons living or dead. Some of them are fantastic. R.M.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Macdonald, Ross.
The Ferguson affair [by] Ross Macdonald.
New York, Knopf, 1960.
p. cm.
PZ3.M59943 Fe PS3525.I486
60009990
eISBN: 978-0-307-74078-6
www.blacklizardcrime.com
v3.1
To Al Stump
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Other Books by This Author
1
chapter
T , on the women’s floor of the county jail. I was
HE CASE BEGAN QUIETLY
there to interview a client, a young nurse named Ella Barker who had been
arrested on a stolen-property charge. Specifically, she had sold a diamond ring
which was part of the loot in a recent burglary; the secondhand dealer who
bought it from her reported the transaction to the police.
Our interview started out inauspiciously. “Why you?” she wanted to know. “I
thought that people in trouble had a right to choose their own lawyer. Especially
when they’re innocent, like me.”
“Innocence or guilt has nothing to do with it, Miss Barker. The judges keep an
alphabetical list of all the attorneys in town. We take turns representing
defendants without funds. My name happened to be next on the list.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Gunnarson. William Gunnarson.”
“It’s a funny name,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
She wasn’t intending to be rude, but she was suspicious of me. Fear made her
stiff and stupid. I wished we had a better place to talk than the visitors’
compartment of the jail.
“It’s an old Scandinavian name. Barker’s an English name, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. Does it matter?”
She was trying hard to be blasé, to find some armor she could put on against
her surroundings. She looked around the room, at the steel-paneled door with its
reinforced-glass peephole, the bars on the windows, the table and chairs bolted
to the steel floor. Her dark eyes strained wide, trying to take it all in and realize
her predicament. She had been in there one night.
“You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“No, I want to set up housekeeping and live in here the rest of my life.
Wouldn’t anybody?”
“I was going to suggest that the quickest way out would be to tell the truth.
Tell me how you got hold of the diamond ring you sold to Hector Broadman.”
“So you can broadcast it all over town?”
“I’m your attorney, Miss Barker. What makes you think I’d break your
confidence?”
“I know about lawyers,” she said cryptically. “And there’s nothing you can do
to make me talk, so there.”
She looked at me with a kind of bleak pride. In her thin, dark way, she wasn’t
a bad-looking woman. In decent surroundings, properly groomed, she could be a
handsome one—the kind of girl you’d want to give a ring to.
“Who gave you the ring, Miss Barker? I’m certain you didn’t steal it. You’re
not a burglar. Even the police don’t think you broke into the Simmons house
yourself.”
“Then why did they arrest me?”
“You know the answer to that as well as I do. We’ve had a number of
burglaries recently. There’s an organized gang at work in this area.”
“You think I’m a member of it?”
“I don’t. But your refusal to talk leads the police to that conclusion. They
know you’re covering up for criminals, and as long as you persist in that, it
seems to make you one of them. You’re doing yourself a grave injustice.”
She moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. I thought that she was
about to tell me the truth. But her dark gaze flickered down and away.
“I found that ring,” she said tonelessly. “I picked it up on the sidewalk on the
way home from the hospital. Just like I told the policemen.”
“You’re lying, Miss Barker. Somebody gave you that ring. If you’ll confide in
me, and let me handle it, I’m practically certain I can get you probation. But that
means making a clean breast of everything.”
“All right.” She touched her breast. “It was given to me, like an engagement
ring.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“A man. I met him on my vacation in San Francisco.”
She was a poor liar. She spoke in a hushed voice, as if she could somehow
avoid hearing herself lying.
“Can you describe him?”