The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  “Does she spend much time on the Strip?”

  “No sir, she never goes there—not to my knowledge.”

  “Why did you?”

  “A policeman suggested it to me. He said it’s a port of missing girls and he thought I might see her there.”

  “What kind of boys does she run with?”

  “She doesn’t have too much to do with boys. She’s gone to some supervised parties, of course, and we’ve sent her to dancing school for years—ballroom as well as ballet. But as for boys, frankly I’ve discouraged it, the state of the modern world being what it is. Most of her friends and acquaintances are girls.”

  “What about Jerry Kilpatrick? I understand he visited your daughter.”

  Crandall flushed. “Yes. He came here back in June. He and Sue seemed to have a lot to talk about, but they shut up when I came into the room. I didn’t like that.”

  “Didn’t you have an argument with him?”

  He gave me a quick narrow look. “Who told you that?”

  “Your wife did.”

  “Women always talk too much,” he said. “Yes, we had an argument. I tried to straighten the boy out on his philosophy of life. I asked him in a friendly way what he planned to do with himself, and he said all he wanted was just to get by. I didn’t think that was a satisfactory answer, and I asked him what would happen to the country if everybody took that attitude. He said it had already happened to the country. I don’t know what he meant by that, but I didn’t like his tone. I told him if that was his philosophy of life he could leave my home and not bother coming back. The little twerp said he’d be glad to. And he left and never did come back. Which was good riddance of bad rubbish.”

  Crandall’s face was dusky red. A pulse at the side of his forehead throbbed. My sore head throbbed in sympathy.

  “Mrs. Crandall thought at the time I’d made a mistake,” he said. “You know how women are. If a girl isn’t married or at least engaged by age eighteen, they think she’s bound to be an old maid.” Crandall lifted his head as if he’d picked up a signal that was inaudible to me. “I wonder what Mother’s doing in the library.”

  He got up and opened the door of the room, and I followed him down the hall. His body moved heavily and dolefully, as if it was weighted down by a kind of despair which hadn’t yet reached his consciousness.

  The sound of a woman crying came through the library door. Mrs. Crandall was standing up and sobbing against a wall of empty shelves. Crandall went to her and tried to quiet her shaking back with his hands.

  “Don’t cry, Mother. We’ll get her back.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Susan will never come back here. We had no right to bring her here in the first place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t belong in this place. Everybody knows it except you.”

  “That’s not true, Mother. I’ve got a higher net worth than anybody on this block. I could buy and sell most of them.”

  “What good is net worth? We’re like fish out of water. I’ve got no friends on this street—and neither has Susan.”

  His large hands grasped her shoulders and forced her to turn and face him. “That’s just your imagination, Mother. I always get a friendly smile and nod when I drive past. They know who I am. They know I’ve got what it takes.”

  “Maybe you have. It doesn’t help Susan—or me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Just live,” she said. “I’ve been trying to pretend that everything is okay. But now we know it isn’t.”

  “It will be. I guarantee it. Everything will be hunky-dory again.”

  “It never was.”

  “That’s nonsense, and you know it.”

  She shook her head. He reached up and stopped her movement of denial with his hands, as if it was merely a physical accident. He pushed the hair back from her forehead, which looked clear and untroubled in contrast with her tear-streaked face.

  She leaned on him, letting him hold her up. Her face on his shoulder was inert, and unaware of me, like that of a woman who had drowned in her own life.

  Walking in a kind of lockstep, they went out into the hallway and left me alone in the room. I noticed a small red-leather book lying open on a corner table, and I sat down to look at it. The word “Addresses” was stamped in gold on the cover, and inside on the flyleaf the girl had written her name in an unformed hand: “Susan Crandall.”

  There were three other girls’ names in the book, and one boy’s name, Jerry Kilpatrick. I realized what Susan’s mother had been crying about. The family had been a lonely trio, living like actors on a Hollywood set, and now there were only two of them to sustain the dream.

  Mrs. Crandall came into the room and startled me out of my thoughts. She had combed her hair and washed her face and made it up quickly and expertly.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Archer, I didn’t mean to break down.”

  “Nobody ever does. But sometimes it’s a good idea.”

  “Not for me. And not for Lester. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he’s an emotional man, and he loves Susan.”

  She came over to the table. Her grief still clung to her body like a perfume. She was one of those women whose feminine quality persisted through any kind of emotional weather.

  “You hurt your head,” she said.

  “Jerry Kilpatrick did.”

  “I admit I made a mistake about him.”

  “So did I, Mrs. Crandall. What are we going to do about Susan?”

  “I don’t know what to do.” She stood above me sighing, leafing over the empty pages of the address book. “I’ve talked to the girls she knows, including the ones in here. None of them were really friends. All they ever did together was go to school or play tennis.”

  “That wasn’t much of a life for an eighteen-year-old girl.”

  “I know that. I’ve tried to promote things for her, but nothing worked. She was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s real. I’ve been fearful all along that she’d go on the run. And now she has.”

  I asked Mrs. Crandall to show me the girl’s room, if she didn’t mind.

  “I don’t mind. But don’t mention it to Lester. He wouldn’t like it.”

  She took me to a large room with a sliding glass door which opened onto a patio. In spite of its size, the room seemed crowded. The bedroom furniture, ivory with gold trim, was matched by stereo and television sets and a girl’s work desk with a white telephone. The place suggested a pampered prisoner expected to live out her life in a single room.

  The walls were hung with mass-produced psychedelic posters and pictures of young male singing groups which only seemed to emphasize the silence. There were no pictures or other traces of any actual people the girl might have known.

  “As you can see,” her mother said, “we gave her everything. But it wasn’t what she wanted.”

  She opened the wardrobe closet for my inspection. It was stuffed with coats and dresses like a small army of girls crushed flat for storage and smelling of. sachet. The chest of drawers was full of sweaters and other garments, like shed or unused skins. The single drawer of the dressing table was jammed with cosmetics.

  There was a telephone directory lying open on the white desk. I sat on the cushioned chair in front of it and switched on the fluorescent desk lamp. The directory was open to the motel section of the yellow pages, and at the bottom of the righthand page was a small advertisement for the Star Motel.

  I didn’t think that this could be a coincidence, and I pointed it out to Mrs. Crandall. It suggested nothing to her. Neither did my description of Al.

  I asked her to give me a recent photograph of Susan. She took me into another room, which she called her sewing room, and produced a pocket-sized high school graduation picture. The clear-eyed blond girl in it looked as if she would never lose her purity or youth or grow old or die.

  “That’s the way I used to look,” h
er mother said.

  “There’s still a strong resemblance.”

  “You should have seen me when I was in high school.”

  She wasn’t boasting, exactly. But a little earthiness was asserting itself behind her careful manner. I said:

  “I wish I had. Where did you go to high school?”

  “Santa Teresa.”

  “Is that why Susan went up there?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Do you have relatives in Santa Teresa?”

  “Not any more.” She changed the subject. “If you get any word of Susan, will you let us know right away?”

  I promised, and she handed me the picture as if to seal the bargain. I put it in my pocket along with the green-covered book, and left the house. The shadows of the palms lay like splash-marks of dark liquid on the pavement and across the roof of my car.

  chapter 15

  The Star Motel stood with its rear end on pilings in a narrow crowded place between the highway and the sea. The lights of the all-night service station beside it shone on its yellow stucco walls and on the weathered “Vacancy” sign which hung on the office door.

  I went in and tapped the hand bell on the counter. A man came plodding out of the back room and peered at me through his creased and sleepy face.

  “Single or double?”

  I told him I was looking for a man, and I started to give him a description of Al. He cut me short with a shake of his frowzy head. An anger that floated like a pollution near the surface of his life came up in his throat and almost choked him.

  “You got no right to wake me up for that. This is a business establishment.”

  I laid two dollar bills on the counter. He sucked his anger back into his body and picked up the money.

  “Many thanks. Your friend and his wife are in room seven.”

  I showed him Susan’s picture. “Has she been here?”

  “Maybe she has.”

  “You’ve seen her or you haven’t.”

  “What’s the rap?”

  “No rap. She’s just a floating girl.”

  “Are you her father?”

  “Just a friend,” I said. “Has she been here?”

  “I think she was, a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen her since. Anyway,” he said with a slanted grin, “you got your two dollars’ worth.”

  I left him and moved along the railed gallery. A high tide was slapping disconsolately at the pilings. The reflection of the neon from the service station floated on the water like iridescent waste.

  I knocked on the door and made its tin 7 rattle. The narrow band of light which rimmed the door widened as it opened. The woman behind it tried to close it again when she saw my face, but I put my arm and shoulder in the opening and slid inside.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “I only want to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Sorry. I lost my memory.” She seemed to mean it literally. “Some days I can’t remember my own name.”

  Her voice was flat. Her face was without expression, though it was marked by the traces of past expressions around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth. She looked both young and old. Her body was muffled in a quilted pink robe, and I couldn’t tell if she was a well-preserved middle-aged woman or a dilapidated girl. Her eyes were the color of the darkness in the corners of the room.

  “What is your name?”

  “Elegant.”

  “That’s a striking name.”

  “Thank you. I picked it one day when I was feeling that way. I haven’t felt that way for quite some time now.”

  She looked around the room as if to blame her environment for this. The bedclothes were tangled and dragging on the floor. Empty bottles stood on the dresser among tooth-marked pieces of old hamburgers. The chairs were hung with her discarded clothing.

  “Where’s Al?” I said.

  “He should be back by now, but he isn’t.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “AI Nesters, he calls himself.”

  “And where’s he from?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell anybody that.”

  “Why not?”

  She made a vague impatient gesture. “You ask too bloody many questions. Who do you think you are?”

  I didn’t try to answer that. “How long ago did Al leave here?”

  “Hours. I don’t know exactly. I don’t keep track of the time.”

  “Was he wearing his longhair wig and mustache and beard?”

  She gave me a blank look. “He doesn’t wear any of those things.”

  “That you know of.”

  She showed a flicker of interest, even a little anger. “What is this? Are you trying to tell me he’s doubletiming me?”

  “He may be. When I saw him tonight, he was wearing a black wig and a beard to match.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “Northridge.”

  “Are you the man who promised him the money?”

  “I represent that man.” It was true in a way—I was working for Stanley Broadhurst’s wife. But the statement made me feel as if I was mediating between two ghosts.

  Another flicker of interest appeared in her eyes. “Do you have the thousand for him?”

  “Not that much.”

  “You could leave me what you have.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Enough for a bindle anyway.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Twenty dollars would fix me up for tonight and all day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll think about it. I’m not sure Al delivered on his side of the bargain.”

  “You know he did, if you’re with it. He’s been hanging around for days waiting to be paid off. How much longer do you expect him to wait?”

  The answer was forever, but I didn’t say it. “I’m not sure what he did was worth a grand.”

  “Don’t tell me that. It was the figure mentioned.” Her vague eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you’re fronting for the money man? What’s his name—Broadman?”

  “Broadhurst. Stanley Broadhurst.”

  She relaxed on the edge of the bed. Before she got suspicious again, I showed her the photograph of Susan which Mrs. Crandall had given me. She looked at it with a kind of respectful envy and passed it back to me.

  “I was almost as pretty as that at one time,” she said.

  “I bet you were, Elegant.”

  The sound of her name pleased her, and she smiled. “Not so long ago as you might think.”

  “I can believe it. Do you know this girl?”

  “I’ve seen her once or twice.”

  “Recently?”

  “I think so. I don’t keep good track of time, I’ve got too much on my mind. But she was here in the last two or three days.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  “You’ll have to ask Al. He made me go out and sit in the bug. Fortunately, I’m not the jealous type, that’s one good quality I have.”

  “Did Al make love to her?”

  “Maybe he did. I wouldn’t put it past him. But mainly he was trying to get her to talk. He made me mix up some acid in a Coke. That was supposed to loosen her up.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He took her away someplace, and that was the last I saw of her. But I guess it had to do with the Broadman business. Broadhurst? That was what Al had on his mind all week.”

  “What day was she here? Thursday?”

  “I don’t remember offhand. I’ll try to figure it out.” Her lips moved in calculation, as if between that day and this she had crossed some sort of international dateline. “It was Sunday when we left Sac, I know that for certain. He took me to San Francisco to answer the ad, and we spent Sunday night there and came down here on Monday. Or was it Tuesday? What day is this again?”

  “Saturday night. Early Sunday morning.”

  She counted on her fingers, the days and nights crossing her eyes like shadows. “I guess he m
ade his contact Wednesday,” she said. “He came back here and said we could cross the border by Saturday at the latest.” She looked at me in sudden alienation. “Where is the money? What happened to it?”

  “It hasn’t been paid yet.”

  “When do we get it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know what Al was supposed to do for it.”

  “It’s simple enough,” she said. “There were this guy and this girl, and Al was supposed to locate them. You know that if you work for Broadhurst.”

  “Broadhurst doesn’t confide in me.”

  “But you’ve seen the ad from the Chronicle, haven’t you?”

  “Not yet. Do you have a copy?”

  I was moving too fast for her, and her face closed up. “Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t. What do I get out of it?”

  “I promise you’ll get something. But if the ad came out in the San Francisco Chronicle, a million people must have seen it. You might as well show it to me.”

  She considered this proposition. Then she got a worn suitcase out from under the bed, opened it, and handed me a folded and refolded clipping. It was a two-column ad about six inches high, reproducing the pictures I had found in Stanley Broadhurst’s rolltop desk. The accompanying text had been changed in part:

  Can you identify this couple? Under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Smith, they arrived in San Francisco by car on or about July 5, 1955. It is believed they took passage for Vancouver and Honolulu aboard the Swansea Castle, which sailed from San Francisco July 6, 1955. But they may still be in the Bay area. A thousand-dollar reward will be paid for information leading to their present whereabouts.

  I turned to the woman who called herself Elegant. “Where are they?”

  “Don’t ask me.” She shrugged, and the movement disarranged her robe. She pulled it close about her. “I think maybe I saw the woman.”

  “When?”

  “I’m trying to remember.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Al didn’t tell me that. He didn’t tell me anything, really. But we stopped at her house on the way down here, and I got a look at her face when she came to the door. She’s older now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same woman.” She considered the question further. “Maybe not, though. It seems to me Al got that clipping from her.”