The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  “We won’t discuss it,” she said.

  I changed the subject, slightly. “How long have you and Stanley been separated?”

  “Just since yesterday. We’re not really separated. I thought if Stanley talked to his mother—” She paused.

  “That she’d take your side? I wouldn’t count on it.”

  She looked at me in some surprise. “Do you know Mrs. Broadhurst?”

  “No. But I still wouldn’t count on it. Does Mrs. Broadhurst have money?”

  “Am I—is it so obvious?”

  “No. But there has to be a reason for everything. Your husband sort of used his mother’s name to get Ronny away from you.”

  It sounded like an accusation, and she bowed her head under it. “Someone’s been talking to you about us.”

  “You have.”

  “But I didn’t say anything about Mrs. Broadhurst. Or the blond.”

  “I thought you did.”

  She went into deep thought. It sat prettily on her, softening the anxious angularity of her posture. “I know. Last night, after I called the Wallers in Tahoe, they called you and filled you in on me. What did Laura say, or was it Bob?”

  “Nothing. They didn’t call me.”

  “Then how do you know about the blond girl?”

  “Isn’t there always a blond girl?”

  “You’re putting me on,” she said in a younger voice. “And under the circumstances it isn’t very nice.”

  “Okay. I saw her.” I realized as I spoke that I was volunteering as a witness—her witness—and my last hope or pretense of staying out of her life was being talked away. “She was in the car with them when they left here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have stopped them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how.” She looked at her hands. All of a sudden her face was disorganized by a rueful flash of humor. “I could carry a wife sign, I guess, or sit down in front of the car. Or write a letter to an astronaut.”

  I interrupted her before she got hysterical. “At least he’s being open about it. And with the boy along, they’re not likely to do anything—” I let the sentence trail off.

  She shook her lovely head. “I don’t know what they’re likely to do. The fact that they’re being so open, as you say, is one of the things that worries me. I think they’re both crazy. I mean it. He brought her home from the office last night, and asked her to stay for dinner without consulting me. She was high on something when she arrived, and pretty vague in her answers.”

  “What kind of an office does Stanley have?”

  “He works for an insurance firm in Northridge—that’s where we live. She doesn’t work in the office—I don’t mean that. She wouldn’t last a day. Possibly she’s a student at the college or even a high school student. She’s young enough.”

  “How young?”

  “She can’t be more than nineteen. That was one of the things that made me suspicious right off. According to Stanley, she was an old school friend who’d got in touch with him at the office. But he’s at least seven or eight years older than she is.”

  “What was she high on?”

  “I have no idea. But I didn’t like the things she said to Ronny. I didn’t like them at all. I asked Stanley to get rid of her. He refused. So I called Laura Waller—and came here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have.”

  “I know that now. I should have stayed in my own house and had it out with them. The trouble is, Stanley and I haven’t been close for a long time. He’s been wrapped up in his own concerns and completely uninterested in me. It sort of deprives a girl of any ground to stand on.”

  “Did you want out of the marriage?”

  She considered the question soberly. “It never occurred to me. But maybe I do. I’ll have to think about it.” She stood up, leaning like a model on my desk, with one hip out. “But not now, Mr. Archer. I have to go to Santa Teresa. Will you drive me there, and help me get Ronny back?”

  “I’m a private detective. I do these things for a living.”

  “Laura Waller told me. It’s why I asked you. And of course I expect to pay you.”

  I opened the door and set the self-lock. “What else did Mrs. Waller tell you about me?”

  She said with her bright disorganized smile: “That you were a lonely man.”

  chapter 3

  I waited for her in the front room of the Wallers’ apartment. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. She came out carrying a large handbag, and coats for herself and the absent boy.

  I got my car out of the garage at the rear of the building, and we headed inland for the Ventura Freeway. The early afternoon sun glared on the traffic, flashing unpredictably on windshields and chromium. I turned up the air conditioning.

  “That feels good,” she said. Her presence beside me sustained an illusive feeling that there was an opening there into another time-track or dimension. It had more future than the world I knew, and not so bloody much traffic.

  After I made the turn onto Sepulveda, I spent a little time preparing a remark.

  “I seem to be getting less lonely, Mrs. Broadhurst.”

  “Call me Jean. Mrs. Broadhurst sounds like my mother-in-law.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not necessarily. She’s a pretty good woman—a lady, in fact, and a good sport. But underneath all that she’s terribly sad. I suppose that’s what manners are for, to cover up.”

  “What’s she so sad about?”

  “A lot of things.” She looked at the side of my face, my one visible eye. “You’re quite inquisitive, aren’t you, Mr. Archer?”

  “It’s my working habit.”

  “And you’re working?”

  “You asked me to. Did the fact that I live where I do have anything to do with your moving in below?”

  “The fact that you’re a detective?”

  “Roughly, yes.”

  “It may have. You may have been part of the whole Gestalt. Does it matter?”

  “To me it does. I don’t believe in coincidences. And I like to know exactly where I stand.”

  “You’re lucky if you do.”

  “Is that a threat?” I said.

  “It’s more of a confession. I was thinking about myself—and where I stand.”

  “While you’re confessing—did you send Ronny out this morning to help me feed the birds?”

  “No.” Her tone was definite. “That was his own idea.” She added: “If you don’t believe in coincidence, there’s not much room for spontaneity, either. In your world.”

  “It isn’t my world. I’m interested in the whole Gestalt you mentioned. Tell me about it.”

  She said haltingly: “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

  “Everything that led up to this.”

  “You take it seriously, don’t you?” I could hear the slight edge of surprise in her voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I take it seriously, too. After all it’s my life, and it’s going to pieces. But as for explaining it, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Just give me the pieces. You’ve already started, with Mrs. Broadhurst. What’s she so sad about?”

  “She’s getting old.”

  “So am I, and I’m not sad.”

  “Aren’t you? Anyway, it’s different for a woman.”

  “Isn’t Mr. Broadhurst getting old?”

  “There is no Mr. Broadhurst. He ran away with another woman some years ago. Stanley seems to be repeating the pattern.”

  “How old was he when his father took off?”

  “Eleven or twelve. Stanley never talks about it, but it was the main event of his childhood. I have to remember that when I’m judging him. When his father left, I think he felt even worse than his mother did.”

  “How do you know, if he never talks about it?”

  “You ask good questions,” she said.
>
  “Give me a good answer, Jean.”

  She took her time. I couldn’t see her face, but peripheral vision made me aware of her sitting beside me with her hands in her lap. Her head was bowed over her empty hands as if she was trying to untie a knot or unwind a ball of string.

  “My husband has been looking for his father for some time,” she said, “and gradually breaking up. Or maybe I’ve got it turned around. He’s been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together.”

  “Did Stanley have a breakdown?”

  “Nothing as definite as that. But his whole life has been a kind of breakdown. He’s one of those overconfident people who turns out to have no confidence at all. And it makes him stupid. He barely got through the university. As a matter of fact, that was how I met him. I was in his French class, and he hired me to tutor him.” She added with a kind of ironic precision: “The tutorial relationship persisted into our marriage.”

  “It can be tough on a man, to be married to a woman smarter than he is.”

  “It can be tough on the woman, too. But I didn’t say I was smarter than Stanley, exactly. He’s just a man who hasn’t found himself.”

  “Is he looking?”

  “He’s been looking terribly hard, for a long time.”

  “For his father.”

  “That’s the way he puts it to himself. He seems to feel that when his father ran out on him, it robbed his life of its meaning. That sounds like nonsense, but it isn’t really. He’s angry at his father for abandoning him; at the same time he misses him and loves him. The two together can be paralyzing.”

  The depth of feeling in her voice surprised me. She cared for her husband more than she admitted.

  We crossed the low pass and began the descent into the valley. Above its floor, layers of brown dust were stacked in the air, obscuring the mountains on the far side. Like something in an old movie, a World War Two bomber labored up from Van Nuys Airport and turned north. It was probably headed for the fire in Santa Teresa.

  I didn’t mention this to the woman beside me. Another thought had begun to nag at my mind. If Stanley was following in his father’s footsteps and running away with a girl, he wouldn’t be likely to head straight for the town where his mother lived. Las Vegas, or possibly Mexico, was a more likely destination.

  We passed a “Northridge” sign. I glanced at the woman. She was bent forward, unwinding her invisible ball of string.

  “How far is your house from the freeway?”

  “About five minutes. Why?”

  “We ought to check there. We don’t know that Stanley took the boy to Santa Teresa.”

  “You think they may be at the house?”

  “It isn’t likely, but it’s possible. Let’s have a look, anyway.”

  It was on a street named College Circle, one of a group of brand new houses with two-story porticoes supported by large wooden pillars. They were differentiated by their colors. The Broadhurst house was dark blue with light blue pillars.

  Jean went in at the front door. I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters. A grape-stake fence separated the back yard from the neighbors’.

  The garage door was locked. I went around to the window at the side. The only car in the double garage, a green Mercedes sedan, bore no resemblance to the black convertible Stanley had been driving.

  Jean opened the back door of the house from the inside. She gave me an appalled look, and came running across the grass to the garage window.

  “They’re not in there, are they?”

  “No.”

  “Thank heaven. I thought for a minute they’d committed suicide or something.” She stood beside me at the window. “That’s not our car.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “It must be hers. I remember now—she and Stanley came in separate cars last night. She has her nerve—leaving her car in my garage.” Jean turned toward me, her face hardening. “Incidentally, she slept in Ronny’s bed. I don’t like that.”

  “Show me.”

  I followed her in through the back door. The house was already showing signs of abandonment. In the kitchen, unwashed dishes were piled in the sink and on the counters. On the top of the free-standing stove were a skillet half full of congealed grease and a saucepan containing something that smelled like pea soup but looked like cracked green mud. And there were flies.

  The boy’s room on the second floor was papered with pictures of friendly animals. The bedclothes were rumpled and twisted, as if the girl visitor had spent a troubled night. The red marks of her mouth were on the pillow, like a signature, and under the pillow was a copy of the novel Green Mansions bound in faded green cloth.

  I examined the flyleaf of the book. It had a bookplate with an engraving of an angel or a muse writing in a scroll with a peacock-plume pen. The name on the bookplate was Ellen Strome. Under it another name was inscribed in pencil: Jerry Kilpatrick.

  I closed the book and slipped it into my jacket pocket.

  chapter 4

  Jean Broadhurst came into the room behind me. “At least he didn’t sleep with her.”

  “Where did your husband sleep?”

  “In his study.”

  She showed me the little room on the ground floor. It contained a few shelves of books, a closed rolltop desk, an unmade daybed, and a gray steel filing cabinet standing like a cenotaph at the head of the bed. I turned to the woman:

  “Does Stanley usually sleep in here?”

  “You ask some pretty personal questions.”

  “You’ll get used to it. I take it that he does usually sleep in here.”

  She colored. “He’s been working at night on his files. He doesn’t like to disturb me.”

  I gave the top drawer of the filing cabinet a tentative pull. It was locked.

  “What kind of files does he keep in this?”

  “It’s his father’s file,” she said.

  “His father’s file?”

  “Stanley keeps a file on his father—everything he’s been able to dig up about him, which isn’t much. And all the false leads—the dozens of people he’s talked to or written to, trying to find out where his father is. It’s been his main occupation these last couple of years.” She added wryly: “At least I’ve known where he was keeping himself nights.”

  “What sort of a man was his father?”

  “I don’t actually know. It’s funny, with all this information”—she tapped the metal side of the filing cabinet—“Stanley doesn’t really talk about him at all. He has long silences on the subject. His mother has even longer silences. I do know he was a captain of infantry in the Pacific. Stanley has a picture of him in uniform. He was a good-looking man with a nice smile.”

  I looked around at the paneled plywood walls. They were empty except for a business calendar which alleged that it was still the month of June.

  “Where does he keep the picture of his father?”

  “In plexiglass, so it doesn’t get worn out.”

  “What would wear it out?”

  “Showing it to people. He also has pictures of him playing tennis, and riding a polo pony, and one at the wheel of his yacht.”

  “I gather his father had a lot of money?”

  “Quite a lot. At least Mrs. Broadhurst has.”

  “And her husband walked out on it and her for the sake of a woman?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Who was the woman?”

  “I have no idea. Stanley and his mother don’t discuss the subject. All I know is that Mr. Broadhurst and the woman eloped to San Francisco. Stanley and I spent two weeks in San Francisco last June. Stanley tramped around the city with his pictures. He covered most of the downtown district before he was through. I had quite a time getting him to come back with us. He wanted to quit his job and go on searching the Bay area
.”

  “Assuming he finds his father, what then?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think Stanley knows, either.”

  “You said he was eleven or twelve when his father left. How long ago was that?”

  “Stanley’s twenty-seven now. Fifteen years.”

  “Can he afford to quit his job?”

  “No, he can’t. We owe a good deal of money, to his mother and other people. But he’s getting so irresponsible, it’s all I can do to keep him on the job.” She was quiet for a moment, looking at the blank walls of the room, the calendar which hadn’t been changed in several months.

  I said: “Do you have a key to the filing cabinet?”

  “No. There’s only the one, and Stanley keeps it. He keeps the rolltop desk locked, too. He doesn’t like me to look at his correspondence.”

  “Do you think he’s been corresponding with the girl?”

  “I have no idea. He gets letters from all over. I don’t open them.”

  “What’s her name, do you know?”

  “She said her name was Sue, at least she told Ronny that.”

  “I’d like to take a look at the registration of that Mercedes. What about a key to the garage?”

  “That I have. I keep it in the kitchen.”

  I followed her out to the kitchen, where she opened a cupboard and took the key off a nail. I used it to open up the garage. The key of the Mercedes was in the ignition. There was no registration, but crumpled in the back of the dash compartment I found an auto insurance invoice made out to a Mr. Roger Armistead of 10 Crescent Drive in Santa Teresa. I copied the name and address in my black notebook and climbed out of the car.

  “What did you find?” Jean said.

  I showed her my open notebook. “Do you know Roger Armistead?”

  “I’m afraid not. Crescent Drive is a good address, though.”

  “And that Mercedes is worth a lot of money. Stanley’s old school friend seems to be loaded. Or else she stole it.”

  Jean made a quick quelling motion with her hand. “Please don’t talk so loudly.” She went on in a voice that was conscious of the neighbors beyond the grape-stake fence: “That story of his was ridiculous. She couldn’t possibly be his old school friend. She’s at least six or seven years younger, as I said. Besides, he attended a private boys’ school in Santa Teresa.”