The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  “You mean the ad?”

  “That’s right. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe he was putting me on, or I’m remembering wrong.”

  “Can you tell me where her house is?”

  “That,” she said, “is worth money.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “It says in the ad a thousand. If I took less, Al would kill me.”

  “Al won’t be coming back here.”

  She met my eyes and held them. “You’re telling me he’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She huddled on the edge of the bed, as if the knowledge of Al’s death had chilled her. “I never thought we’d make it to Mexico.” She gave me a cold darting look, like a harmless snake. “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “The cops?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He was on the run.” She looked around the room. “I’ve got to get out of here.” But she didn’t move.

  “Where was he on the run from?”

  “He broke out of prison. He talked about it once when he was high. I should have left him when I had the chance.” She stood up and made a frantic gesture. “What happened to my Volkswagen?”

  “The cops probably have it by now.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here. You take me out of here.”

  “No. You can take a bus.”

  She called me a few names, which didn’t bother me. But when I moved toward the door, she followed.

  “How much money will you give me?”

  “Nothing like a thousand.”

  “A hundred? That would take me back to Sac.”

  “Are you from Sacramento?”

  “My parents live there. But they don’t want to see me.”

  “What about Al?”

  “He has no parents. He came out of an orphanage.”

  “Where?”

  “Some city north of here. We stopped there on the way down. He pointed out the orphanage to me.”

  “You stopped at the orphanage?”

  “You’re all mixed up,” she said with condescension. “He showed me the orphanage when we passed it on the highway—we didn’t stop there. We stopped in town to get some money for gas and food.”

  “What town?”

  “One of those Santa places. Santa Teresa, I think it was.”

  “And how did you get the money for gas?”

  “Al got it from a little old lady. She gave him twenty dollars. Al’s very big with little old ladies.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “I dunno. She was just a little old lady in a little old house on a little old street. It was kind of a pretty street, with purple flowers in the trees.”

  “Jacarandas?”

  She nodded. “Flowering jacarandas, yeah.”

  “Was her name Mrs. Snow?”

  “I think that was the name.”

  “What about the woman in the ad? Where does she live?”

  A look of stupid cunning took hold of her face. “That’s worth money. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “I’ll give you fifty.”

  “Let me see it.”

  I got out my wallet and gave her the fifty-dollar bill that Fran Armistead had tipped me with. I was sort of glad to get rid of it, though here again I was conscious of buying and being sold at the same time, as if I’d made a down payment on the room and its occupant.

  She kissed the money. “I can really use it, it’s my ticket out of here.” But she looked around the room as if it was a recurrent nightmare she had.

  “You were going to tell me where the woman lives.”

  “Was I?” She was stalling, and uncomfortable about it. She forced herself to say: “She lives in this big old house in the woods.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I am not.”

  “What woods are you talking about?”

  “It’s on the Peninsula someplace. I didn’t pay good attention on the way. I was strung out on an Einstein trip.”

  “Einstein trip?”

  “When you go all the way out, past the last star, and space loops back on you.”

  “Where on the Peninsula?”

  She shook her head, the way you shake a watch that has stopped ticking. “I can’t remember. There’s all these little cities strung together. I can’t remember which one.”

  “What did the house look like?”

  “It was very old, two-storied—three-storied. And it had two little round towers, one on each side.” She erected her thumbs.

  “What color?”

  “Kind of gray, I think it was. It looked kind of grayish green through the trees.”

  “What kind of trees?”

  “Oak trees,” she said, “and some pines. But mostly oak trees.”

  I waited for a while.

  “What else do you remember about the place?”

  “That’s about all. I wasn’t really there, you know. I was out around Arcturus, looking down. Oh yeah, there was a dog running around under the trees. A Great Dane. He had a beautiful voice.” She woofed in imitation.

  “Did he belong to the house?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He acted lost, I remember thinking that. Will that help?”

  “I don’t know. What day was it?”

  “Sunday, I think. I said it was Sunday, didn’t I, that we left Sac?”

  “You haven’t given me much for my fifty.”

  She was dismayed, and afraid I’d take it back. “You could make love to me if you want.”

  Not waiting for my answer, she stood up and dropped the pink robe to the floor. Her body was young, high-breasted, narrow-waisted, almost too slender. But there were bruises on her arms and thighs like the hash-marks of hard service. She was a dilapidated girl.

  She looked up into my face. I don’t know what she saw there, but she said: “Al roughed me up quite a bit. He was pretty wild after all that time in prison. I guess you don’t want me, do you?”

  “Thanks, I’ve had a hard day.”

  “And you won’t take me with you?”

  “No.” I gave her my business card and asked her to call me collect if she remembered anything more.

  “I doubt I will. I’ve got a mind like a sieve.”

  “Or if you need help.”

  “I always need help. But you won’t want to hear from me.”

  “I think I can stand it.”

  Leaning her hands on my shoulders, she raised herself on her toes and brushed my mouth with her sad mouth.

  I went outside and folded Stanley Broadhurst’s ad into the green-covered book and locked up both of them in the trunk of my car. Then I drove home to West Los Angeles.

  Before I went to bed I called my answering service. Arnie Shipstad had left a message for me. The man whose body I’d found in Stanley Broadhurst’s house was a recent escapee from Folsom named Albert Sweetner, with a record of a dozen or so arrests. His first arrest occurred in Santa Teresa, California.

  chapter 16

  It was late at night, almost halfway to morning. I knocked myself out with a heavy slug of whisky and went to bed.

  In the dream that took over my sleeping mind I was due to arrive someplace in a very short time. But when I went out to my car it had no wheels, not even a steering wheel. I sat in it like a snail in a shell and watched the night world go by.

  The light coming through the bedroom blind changed from gray to off-white and woke me. I lay and listened to the early traffic. A few birds peeped. At full dawn the jays began to squawk and divebomb my window.

  I’d forgotten the jays. Their sudden raucous reminder turned me cold under the sheet. I threw it off and got up and put on my clothes.

  There was a last can of peanuts in the kitchen cupboard. I scattered the peanuts out the window and watched the jays come swooping into the yard. It was like watching a flashing blue explosion-in-reverse that put the morning world together again.

  But the central
piece was missing. I shaved and went out for breakfast and kept going.

  Miles below Santa Teresa, sooner than I expected, the fire came into view above the freeway. It had burned southward and eastward along the mountains, which were black and rimmed with flames. But the mass of air which had moved in from the sea the night before seemed to be holding it back from the coastal plain and the city.

  The wind was still coming from the sea. Where the freeway looped close to the water I could see the white spume drifting up from the shore and hear the surf crashing.

  I stopped at the Armistead beach house. The tide was high, and the broken water slid up the beach and wet the pilings that the house stood on. I knocked at the second-floor entrance at the rear.

  Fran Armistead came to the door wearing men’s pajamas. Her face was swollen with sleep. Her hair was sticking up like ruffled feathers.

  “Do I know you?” she said not unpleasantly.

  “Archer,” I prompted her. “I brought your car back. We were fellow-refugees from the fire.”

  “Of course. It’s rather fun being a refugee, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe the first time. Is your husband here?”

  “I’m afraid he isn’t. He went out very early.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “He’s probably at the marina. Roger’s dreadfully upset about his boat. When Mr. Kilpatrick phoned him this morning, he didn’t even know that it was gone.”

  “I take it it hasn’t been heard from.”

  “It hadn’t been when he left here. Roger’s terribly angry with the Kilpatrick boy. I don’t know what he’ll do to him when he catches him.”

  “Were Roger and Jerry Kilpatrick pretty close?”

  She gave me a hard look. “Not in the way you mean. Roger is terribly masculine.”

  She shivered, and hugged herself. I drove to the marina and parked in the almost deserted public lot. It was still very early in the morning.

  I could see through the wire fence that Ariadne’s slip was still empty. Roger Armistead was standing on the float, looking out to sea in an attitude that seemed consciously statuesque. Brian Kilpatrick was near him, facing me. The two men seemed remote, yet tensely conscious of each other, as if they had quarreled.

  Kilpatrick saw me at the gate. He came up the gangplank and let me through. He was wearing the same clothes, and he looked as if he had slept in them, or tried to.

  “Armistead’s in a filthy mood, I warn you,” Kilpatrick said. “He blames me for this mess. Hell, I’ve barely seen Jerry in the last couple of months. He’s been running out of my control. Armistead practically adopted him. I can’t assume responsibility.” But he moved his heavy shoulders as if the weight of his son was strapped to his back.

  “Where would Jerry take the boat? Do you have any idea?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I’m not a yachtsman. Which is one of the reasons Jerry took up sailing. If I’d been interested in the sea, he’d have gone in for golf.”

  Kilpatrick had slipped in the course of the night. His voice was querulous.

  “North or south?” I said.

  “Probably south. Those are the waters he knew. Maybe out to the islands.”

  He pointed to the offshore islands which lay on the horizon like blue whales. In the twenty-mile span between them and the shore, there was nothing visible on the surface of the water.

  “Have you informed the sheriff?”

  He looked at me in some embarrassment. “Not yet.”

  “You said you were going to talk to him last night.”

  “I tried to, honestly. He was out on the fire line. As a matter of fact he still is.”

  “There must be other officers on duty.”

  “There are some. But all they can think about is the fire. They’re involved in a major catastrophe, you know.”

  “So is Jerry.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. He’s my son.” He gave me an anxious sidelong look. “I heard from Crandall again, early this morning. I gather you went to see him after all.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He blames the whole thing on Jerry, naturally. Boys always get the blame where a girl’s concerned. According to Crandall’s version, his daughter never caused them any trouble at all, until now. That’s hard to believe.”

  “He may believe it. He and his wife seem to be slightly out of touch.” My mind came up with a stereoscopic view of the girl alone in her white room at home, and the girl at the Star Motel with Al Sweetner.

  “I wish you hadn’t gone to Crandall,” Kilpatrick said in an aggrieved voice. “It complicates things. He could make things rough for me if he wanted to.”

  “I’m sorry. I have to follow my case where it leads.”

  “It’s your case, is it?”

  “I’m willing to share it. If you’ll wait a few minutes, we’ll go and find your friend the sheriff. How about it?”

  “If you say so.”

  I left Kilpatrick at the gate and spoke to Armistead’s back. He turned deliberately. He looked both sad and angry in a strangled inexpressive way. He was wearing a yachting cap and blazer, and an ascot at his throat.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this, last night? Now we may never get her back.” Armistead sounded as if he was talking about a woman he had lost, or the dream of a woman. “She could be a hundred miles from here by now, or at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Have you told the Coast Guard?”

  “Yes I have. They’ll keep an eye out for her. But they’re not exactly in the business of tracking down stolen boats.”

  “This isn’t a simple case of theft,” I said. “I guess you know the girl’s aboard, and a little boy.”

  “Kilpatrick told me that.”

  Armistead’s eyes narrowed and seemed to fasten on an ugly vision. He rubbed his knuckles in the sockets of his eyes, and turned his back on me again.

  The waves were coming over the breakwater, shattering in green streaming water. Even the water in the marina was unquiet, lifting the float under our feet and letting it fall. The world was changing, as if with one piece missing the whole thing had come loose and was running wild.

  Armistead walked out to the seaward end of the float. I followed him. He was a closed man, but I thought he might be getting more ready to open.

  “I understand Jerry’s a pretty good friend of yours.”

  “He was. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I went on anyway. “I don’t blame you for being browned off. I feel the same way. He hit me over the head with a revolver last night. It looked and felt like a .38.”

  He said, after some hesitation: “I kept a .38 on the boat.”

  “And I suppose he took it with him?”

  “I suppose he did. I’m not responsible.”

  “That’s what Kilpatrick says, too. Nobody’s responsible. The thing I’m trying to get at is Jerry’s motivation. What do you think he’s trying to accomplish?”

  “Pure destruction, for all I know.”

  “I hope not.”

  “He broke faith with me.” Armistead sounded resentful and betrayed, like a sailor who had come to the edge of a flat world. “I trusted him with my boat. I let him live aboard her all summer.”

  “Why?”

  “He needed a place. I don’t mean just a place to live. A place in the scheme of things. And I thought the sea would do it for him.” He paused. “I was a yacht bum when I was Jerry’s age. That was my main thing, if you want the truth. I couldn’t stand life ashore any more than Jerry could. All I ever wanted was to get outside”—his arm swept seaward—“and be with the wind and the water. You know, the sea and the sky.”

  Like many divided and inarticulate men, Armistead had an old-fashioned poetic streak. I tried to keep him talking.

  “Where did you live when you were a boy?”

  “Near Newport. That’s where I met my wife. I used to crew for her first husband.”

  “Jerry is supposed to hav
e met Susan Crandall in Newport.”

  “He may have. We sailed down there in June.”

  I showed him the girl’s picture, but he shook his head. “So far as I know, he never brought a girl aboard—her or any other girl.”

  “Until Thursday?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What happened Thursday night? I’d like to get it straight.”

  “So would I. I gather from the scuttlebutt that the girl got high on something. She climbed the mast and dove into the water. She barely missed one of the pilings. This was about dawn on Friday morning.”

  “I understand Jerry’s on drugs.”

  His face closed up. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “His father admits he’s been using them.”

  Armistead glanced toward the gate. Kilpatrick was still there.

  “A lot of people use them,” he said.

  “The question may be important.”

  “All right. I tried to discourage it, but he was using pep pills and other dangerous drugs. It’s one of the reasons I let him live aboard.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He was less likely to get into trouble on the boat. At least, that was my theory.” His face turned sullen again.

  “You’re fond of the boy.”

  “I tried to be a father to him, or a big brother. I know that sounds like corn. But I thought he was a good one, in spite of the drugs. What makes them so important?”

  “I think the girl Susan had some kind of a breakdown. And she may have killed a man yesterday. Have you heard about the murder?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “The victim was a man named Stanley Broadhurst.”

  “I know a Mrs. Broadhurst who lives here.”

  “She’s his mother. Do you know her well?”

  “We don’t know anyone here really well. The ones I know best are the harbor people. Fran has her own friends.”

  He glanced around the harbor restlessly like a sailor who had gone to sea in his youth and never moved back ashore. He looked at the town with uncomprehending eyes. It hung like a city made of fog or smoke between the restless sea and the black mountains.

  “I’m not connected with any of this,” Armistead said.

  “Except through Jerry.”

  He frowned. “Jerry is finished and done with as far as I’m concerned.”

  I could have told him that it wasn’t that easy. Jerry’s real father seemed to know it already.