The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  Jean watched it come as if she dreaded its arrival. But when they laid it on the tail-gate of the truck she walked steadily toward it and looked down without flinching into the dirt-filled eyes. She pushed the dead man’s hair back and bent over to kiss his forehead. The action had a heightened reality, as if she was an actress playing a tragic role.

  She stayed beside her husband for some time. Kelsey didn’t question her or disturb her. He introduced me to the deputy coroner, a serious-faced young man named Vaughan Purvis.

  “What killed him, Mr. Purvis? The pickax wounds?”

  “I’d say the pickax wounds were secondary. He was stabbed in the side with a sharp instrument, probably a knife.”

  “Has the knife been found?”

  “No, but I plan to make a further search.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find it here.”

  I told Purvis and Kelsey about the dead man I’d found in Stanley’s house in Northridge. Kelsey said he’d be getting in touch with Arnie Shipstad. Deputy Purvis, who had been listening quietly, broke into unexpectedly emotional speech:

  “It looks like a conspiracy, probably the Mafia at work.”

  I said that I doubted the Mafia was involved. Kelsey pretended delicately not to have heard him.

  “Then what do you make of it all?” Purvis asked me. “Who stabbed him and drove that pickax into the back of his head? Who dug that grave for him?”

  “The blond girl is a prime suspect,” I said experimentally.

  “I don’t believe it,” Purvis said. “This ground is heavy adobe, and it’s dry—almost like brick. That hole went down at least four feet. I don’t believe any girl could have chopped it out.”

  “She may have had an accomplice. Or Stanley Broadhurst may have dug it himself. He was the one who borrowed the tools from the gardener.”

  Purvis looked puzzled. “Why would a man dig his own grave?”

  “He may not have known it was going to be his,” I said.

  “You don’t think he was planning to kill his son,” Purvis said, “like Abraham with Isaac in the Bible?”

  Kelsey let out a sardonic laugh, and Purvis went red with embarrassment. He trudged back toward the grave to pick up his spade.

  When he was out of hearing, Kelsey said:

  “The gardener may be lying about the tools. He may have come up here and used them himself. Don’t forget he lent the girl his car, and lied about it.”

  “Fritz is still on your list of suspects, then.”

  Kelsey scratched at his short gray hair. “He has to be. I’ve been doing a little digging into his record.”

  “He has a record?”

  “Not much of a one, but in my book it’s significant. When Fritz was in his late teens he was convicted of a sex crime. It was a first offense—at least that was known of—and the judge allowed him juvenile status and sent him to the county forestry camp.”

  “What crime did he commit?”

  “Statutory rape. I’m particularly interested, because these sex incidents sometimes crop up in the histories of firebugs. I’m not saying Fritz is a firebug—I have no evidence for that. But in camp he got interested in firefighting, and he even helped put out a couple of fires in the back country.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s indicative,” Kelsey said gravely. “Don’t quote me to any firemen—as a matter of fact, I used to be one myself—but firemen and firebugs are sometimes brothers under the skin. They’re both fascinated by fires. Apparently Fritz Snow was so fascinated that when he got out of camp he went to work for the Forest Service.”

  “I’m surprised they took him.”

  “He had some pretty good backing. Captain Broadhurst and his wife went to bat for him. The Forest Service didn’t make a fireman out of him, but they gave him some training and a job running a bulldozer. As a matter of fact, he helped to build that trail.” Kelsey pointed toward the trail which went down the side of the bluff into the canyon. “Fritz and his crewmates did a fair job—it’s still in pretty good shape after fifteen years. But he didn’t last long in the Forest Service. Too many personal problems, to put it mildly.”

  “Did they fire him on account of his personal problems?”

  “I don’t know why they fired him. There’s no notation in the file, and it was before my time.”

  “Fritz could tell you.”

  “Yeah. But it isn’t going to be easy. Yesterday afternoon, when I tried to talk to him again, his mother wouldn’t let me back into the house. She defends that hopeless son of hers like a wildcat.”

  “Maybe she’ll let me in. I want to talk to her anyway. The dead man in Northridge, Al Sweetner, picked up some money from Mrs. Snow last week.”

  “How much money?”

  “We’ll have to ask her.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten-fifteen now. Can you meet me out in front of her house at eleven?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Kelsey said. “I want to get in on the preliminary examination of this body. You go and talk to Fritz. There has to be a reason for all the fear he has in him.”

  Kelsey’s voice was cool and rather uncomprehending. He talked about fear as if he had never experienced that emotion. Perhaps the reason for his being a fire investigator, I thought, was a puzzled need to understand what made emotional types like Fritz commit their hot foolish crimes.

  “Who was the girl he raped?”

  “I don’t know who she was. The case was handled in Juvenile Court, and the record of it is sealed. I picked up my information from the old-timers at the courthouse.”

  chapter 19

  Jean was looking down into her husband’s face as if she wondered how it felt to be dead. When Purvis came marching back, with his spade over his shoulder, she gave a start and turned away. Purvis set the spade down quietly and carefully.

  He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and took out a black leather folder with Stanley’s name printed in gold inside. It contained his driver’s license and other identification, a number of credit cards and membership cards, and three dollar bills.

  “He didn’t have much left,” the young man said.

  I was struck by the feeling in his voice. “Did you know Stanley Broadhurst?”

  “I knew him just about all my life, starting back in grade school.”

  “I thought he went to private school.”

  “He did, after he left grade school. He had some kind of trouble that summer, and his mother put him in a special school.”

  “The summer his father went away?”

  “That’s right. Stanley had a lot of bad luck in his life.” He spoke with a certain awe. “I used to envy him back there in grade school. His people were rich, and we were as poor as Job’s turkey. But I’ll never envy him again.”

  I looked around for Jean. She had wandered off in the direction of the stable, and seemed to be searching for a means of escape. She reminded me of the frightened doe I had seen the day before, but there was no fawn with her.

  When I reached her, she was standing beside the incinerated car. “Was this ours?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Do you have transportation, Mr. Archer? I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Elizabeth’s house. I spent the night at the hospital.”

  I told Kelsey where we were going and said I might see him later, in the pathology department of the hospital. Jean and I started up the hillside path. She took the lead, moving quickly, like a woman trying to climb out of the present.

  Near the bleachers where my car was parked, a number of plywood tables had been set up on trestles. A hundred or more men were seated at them, eating mulligan stew dispensed by a motorized chuckwagon.

  Most of the men looked up as we passed. Some whistled; a few cheered. Jean kept going, her head down. She climbed into my car as if she was being pursued.

  “It’s my fault,” she said in self-loathing. “I shouldn’t be wearing these
clothes.”

  We drove a long way around through the outskirts of the city. I tried to question her about her husband, but she was unresponsive. She sat with her head down, deep in her own thoughts.

  When we entered Mrs. Broadhurst’s canyon, she straightened up and began to look around her. The fire had come down nearly as far as the entrance to the canyon and left its scorch-marks on the trees and on the hillside brush.

  Most of the houses in Canyon Estates were untouched. A few had been burned, as if picked out at random. There was nothing left of one house but a stone fireplace and a statue of Venus standing up out of rubble and wilted pipes. A man and a woman were poking among the ruins.

  The random pattern of the fire persisted as we went further into the canyon. Mrs. Broadhurst’s avocado trees seemed unharmed, but the olive trees beyond them had burned black. The eucalyptus trees that towered over the tile roof of the house had lost most of their branches and all their leaves. The barn had burned. The house itself was scorched but intact.

  Jean had a key, and we went in together. The closed house was full of the bitter smell of fire, and seemed abandoned. The worn Victorian furniture looked ready for the junk heap.

  Even the mounted birds in their glass cases looked as if they had seen better days. An acorn woodpecker had only one glass eye. The breasts of the robins had faded. They looked like imitation birds made to lend life to a dead and scruffy world.

  “Excuse me,” Jean said. “I’ve got to find something black.”

  She disappeared into the other wing of the house. I had decided to call Willie Mackey, a San Francisco detective who had worked with me on other cases. Looking for a telephone, I went into a kind of den adjoining the living room. There were ancestral tintypes on the walls. A man with mutton chop whiskers and a high winged collar glared at me from a black frame, as if daring me to make something of his whiskers.

  His look reminded me of Mrs. Broadhurst, but it didn’t help me to understand her. I had seen her young and forceful, then sick and doddering. I needed something to fill up the gap between those versions of her, something that would explain why her husband had left her or why her son hadn’t been able to.

  The room contained among other things a black leather couch which made me want to lie down, and a kneehole desk made of burnished cherrywood. There was a telephone on the desk, sitting on top of a worn leather folder.

  I sat down at the desk, with my knees snug in the knee-holes, and dialed Willie Mackey’s office on Geary Street in San Francisco. The girl on duty switched me to his apartment on the top floor of his building.

  Another girl answered in a less businesslike voice, and then Willie came to the phone.

  “Call me back, Lew. You caught me in the midst of the act of love.”

  “You call me.” I read off Mrs. Broadhurst’s phone number to him.

  Then I lifted the phone and opened the leather folder under it. There were several sheets of foolscap in the folder, and a faded map drawn in ink on creased and yellowing paper. The map showed about half of the Santa Teresa coastal plain; roughly penned in at the back of it were foothills and mountains resembling thumb-prints and paw-prints.

  In the upper righthand corner of the map, someone had written:

  U.S. Land Commission

  Robert Driscoll Falconer

  Ex Mission Santa Teresa

  Filed in office June 14, 1866

  John Berry

  The top sheet of foolscap was covered with Spencerian handwriting. Under the heading “ ‘Memories,’ by Elizabeth Falconer Broadhurst,” I read:

  The Santa Teresa County Historical Society has asked me to set down some notes concerning my family. My paternal grandfather, Robert Driscoll Falconer, was the son of a Massachusetts scholar and businessman and a student and disciple of Louis Agassiz. Robert Driscoll Falconer fought in the Union Army and on May 3, 1863, was wounded, almost mortally, at the Battle of Chancellorsville. But he lived to tell me about it in his old age.

  He came to the Pacific Coast to recuperate from his injuries and acquired, in part through purchase but chiefly through marriage, a holding of several thousand acres which became known as Falconer Ranch. Much of this ranch was originally part of the Mission Lands, secularized in 1834 and becoming part of a Mexican Land Grant which passed by way of my grandmother to my grandfather, and thence to my father, Robert Falconer, Jr.

  It is difficult for me to write objectively about my late father. He was the third in the male line of Falconers to attend Harvard College. He was more of a naturalist and scholar than a rancher or businessman. My father has been criticized for dissipating some of the family holdings. His reply would be that he had more important things to do with his life. He became a noted amateur ornithologist, author of the first checklist of native species to be found in the Santa Teresa region. His rich collection of skins both local and exotic became the nucleus of the bird collection of the Santa Teresa Museum.

  At this point the Spencerian writing began to deteriorate:

  I have heard false rumors that my father was a wanton killer of songbirds and that he killed them because he loved to kill. Nothing could be further from the truth! He killed birds only for scientific reasons, in order to preserve the evanescent beauty of their markings. He loved the colorful little fliers which science compelled him to shoot.

  I can attest to this from personal observation. I accompanied my father on many of his expeditions here and abroad, and many were the times I came upon him weeping openly over the perforated body of the warbler, or the thrush, which he held in his kind masculine hand. Sometimes we wept together, he and I, hid in some wooded recess of our home canyon. He was a good man and a crack shot, and when he bestowed the gift of death he did so instantly, painlessly, with no mistake about it. Robert Driscoll Falconer, Jr., was a god come down to earth in human guise.

  Toward the end, the handwriting went to pieces. It straggled across the lined yellow page like a defeated army.

  I started to go through the drawers of the desk. The top one on the righthand side was stuffed with bills. Some of them had been unpaid for months and had special little messages written across them:—“Immediate payment will be appreciated,” “In case of further delay, the matter will be placed in the hands of legal counsel.”

  In the second drawer I found an old wooden gun case and opened it. Fitted into its shaped felt lining were a pair of German target pistols. They were old, but oiled and gleaming like strange blue jewels.

  I lifted one of the pistols out of the case and hefted it in my hand. It was so light and so well balanced that it seemed to come up of its own accord to eye level and let me sight along it. I aimed it at the picture of the man with the whiskers, but that only made me feel foolish. I carried it to the window to find something better to aim at.

  No birds. But there was a circular bird feeder on a metal pole set in cement. A rat was eating the few kernels of grain left in the feeder. I pointed the empty gun at him. He ran down the pole and disappeared in the black ravine.

  chapter 20

  “What in the world are you doing?” Jean said behind me.

  “Playing games.”

  “Put it away, please. Elizabeth wouldn’t like you to be handling her pistols.”

  I returned the gun to its case. “They’re a pretty pair.”

  “I don’t think so. I hate all guns.”

  She fell silent, but her eyes were full of further things to say. The girl had changed her short bright dress for a black one that covered her knees but didn’t fit her. She reminded me of an actress again, this time a young woman playing the part of an older one.

  “Do I look all right?” She sounded anxious, as if in the absence of her son, the death of her husband, she doubted who she was.

  “You couldn’t look any other way.”

  She pushed the compliment away as if it might contaminate her and backed onto the couch, pulling her legs up under her black skirt so that they were completely hidden.

&n
bsp; I closed the gun case and put it away. “Were those her father’s guns?”

  “Yes. They belonged to Elizabeth’s father.”

  “Does she use them?”

  “If you mean does she shoot birds now, the answer is no. The guns are precious relics of the great man. Everything in this house is some kind of a relic. I feel like one myself.”

  “Is that Elizabeth’s dress?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Are you thinking of living in this house?”

  “I may. It suits my mood.”

  She bowed her head and sat in a listening attitude as if the black dress was wired for sound like a space suit. “Elizabeth used to shoot a lot of birds. She taught Stanley to do it. It must have worried him, or he wouldn’t have told me about it. Apparently it worried his mother, too. She gave up shooting entirely long before I knew her.

  “But my father never did,” she said surprisingly, “at least not as long as my mother stayed with him. My father loved to shoot at anything that moved. And mother and I had to pluck the quail he shot, and the pigeons. After my mother left my father, I never went back to see him.”

  She had jumped from Stanley’s family to her own without any transition. Wondering why, I said:

  “Are you thinking of going back to your family now?”

  “I have no family. Mother’s remarried and living in New Jersey. The last I heard of my father he was running a sport-fishing boat in the Bahamas. Anyway, I couldn’t face either of them. They’d blame me for everything that’s happened.”

  “Why?”

  “They just would, that’s all. Because I went away and put myself through school. Neither of them approved of my doing that. A girl is supposed to do what she’s told.” Her voice was stony with resentment.

  “Who do you blame for everything that’s happened?”

  “Myself, of course. But I blame Stanley, too.” She lowered her eyes again. “I know that’s a dreadful thing to say. I can forgive him for the girl. And all that foolish business about his father. But why did he have to take—bring Ronny with him?”