The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  “He wanted money from his mother, and Ronny’s visit was part of the transaction.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Elizabeth said so.”

  “She would. She’s a cold woman.” She added as if in apology to the house: “I shouldn’t say that. She’s suffered a lot. And Stanley and I haven’t been much comfort to her. We’ve taken a great deal, and haven’t given much.”

  “What have you taken?”

  “Money.” She sounded angry at herself.

  “Does Elizabeth have much money?”

  “Of course—she’s wealthy. She must have made a fortune out of the Canyon Estates development, and she still has hundreds of acres left.”

  “They’re not producing much, except for a few acres of avocados. And she seems to have a lot of unpaid bills.”

  “That’s just because she’s rich. Rich people never pay their bills. My father used to run a small sports shop in Reno, and the ones who could best afford to pay were the very ones he had to threaten to take to court. Elizabeth has thousands a year from her grandfather’s estate.”

  “How many thousands a year?”

  “I don’t really know. She’s close-mouthed about her money. But she has it.”

  “Who gets it if she dies?”

  “Don’t say that!” Jean sounded scared and superstitious. She added in a more controlled voice: “Dr. Jerome says she’s going to be okay. Her attack was just the result of overexertion and strain.”

  “Can she talk all right?”

  “Of course. But I wouldn’t bother her today if I were you.”

  “I’ll take it up with Dr. Jerome,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my other question. Who gets her money when she dies?”

  “Ronny does.” Her voice was low, but her body was tense with feeling she couldn’t hold. “Are you worried about who will pay you? Is that why you’re hanging around here when you should be out looking for him?”

  I didn’t try to answer her, but sat and maintained a low profile for a while. Anger and grief were alternating in her like an electric current. She turned the anger against herself, taking the hem of her skirt between her hands and pulling at it as if she was trying to tear it.

  “Don’t do that, Jean.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? I hate this dress.”

  “Then take it off and put on another one. You mustn’t go to pieces.”

  “I can’t stand waiting.”

  “It may stretch out for a while, and you’ve got to stand it.”

  “Isn’t there anything more we can do? Can’t you go out and find him?”

  “Not directly. There’s too much ground to cover. And too much water.” She looked so cast down that I added: “But I do have one or two leads.” I got out the advertisement again, with its picture of Stanley’s father and Kilpatrick’s wife. “Have you seen this?”

  She bent her head over the clipping. “I didn’t see it until some time after it came out. Stanley placed it in the Chronicle without telling me, when we were in San Francisco last June. He didn’t tell his mother, either, and when she saw it she was furious.”

  “Why?”

  “She said he was bringing the whole scandal back to life. But I don’t suppose anyone cared, really, except for her and Stanley.”

  And Jerry Kilpatrick, I thought, and Jerry’s father, and possibly the woman herself. “Do you know who this woman is?”

  “Her name was Kilpatrick, according to Elizabeth. She was married to a local real estate man, Brian Kilpatrick.”

  “What kind of terms are he and Elizabeth on?”

  “Very good terms, I think. They’re partners, or co-investors, in Canyon Estates.”

  “What about Kilpatrick’s son Jerry?”

  “I don’t think I know him. What does he look like?”

  “He’s a lanky boy about nineteen, with long reddish brown hair and a beard. Very emotional. He hit me over the head with a gun last night.”

  “Is he the one who took Ronny away on the yacht?”

  “He’s the one.”

  “I may know him after all.” Her sight turned inward and stayed that way for a while, as if she was doing a sum in mental arithmetic. “He didn’t have a beard then, but I think he came to our house one night last June. I only saw him for a moment. Stanley took him into the study and shut the door. But I believe he had that clipping with him.” Her head came up. “Do you think he’s trying to strike back at us? Because his mother eloped with Stanley’s father?”

  “It’s possible. I think the boy really cares about his mother. In fact, he may be on his way to her now.”

  “Then we’ve got to find her,” Jean said.

  “I agree with you. If I can believe my informant, the ex-Mrs. Kilpatrick is living somewhere south of San Francisco, on the Peninsula.”

  She seized on the lead because it was the only one. “Will you go there for me? Today?”

  The life was coming back into her face. I hated to disappoint her. “I’d better stay here until we get something definite. Jerry sailed in the Ensenada race last summer, and he may have gone that way.”

  “To Mexico?”

  “A lot of young people are ending up there. But our lead on the Peninsula ought to be checked out.”

  She stood up. “I’ll go myself.”

  “No. You stay here.”

  “Here in this house?”

  “Here in town, anyway. I doubt that this is a kidnaping for ransom. But if it is, you’re the one they’ll be getting in touch with.”

  She looked at the phone as if it had just spoken. “I have no money.”

  “You’ve just been telling me about Mrs. Broadhurst’s money. You can raise some if you have to. As a matter of fact, I’m glad you brought the subject up.”

  “Because I haven’t paid you?”

  “I’m not anxious. But we’re going to need some actual cash pretty soon.”

  Jean was getting disturbed again. She moved around the little room, awkward and angry in her ill-fitting black dress.

  “I’m not going to ask Elizabeth for money. Of course, I could go and look for a job.”

  “At the moment, that isn’t very realistic.”

  She paused in front of me. We exchanged a quick stabbing glance. It carried the possibility that we could be passionate enemies or friends. There was angry heat stored up in her like deep hot springs beyond the reach of her marriage or her widowhood.

  She said in a more confident voice, as if she had somehow taken my measure: “Speaking of realism, what are you going to do to get my son back?”

  “I have a call in to a man named Willie Mackey who runs a detective agency in San Francisco. He knows the Bay area thoroughly and I’d like to co-opt him.”

  “Do that. I can raise the money.” She seemed to have made a decision involving more than money. “What are you going to do?”

  “Wait—and ask questions.”

  She made an impatient movement and sat on the couch again. “All you do is ask questions.”

  “I get tired of it, too. Sometimes people tell me things without being asked, but you’re not one of them.”

  She looked at me distrustfully. “That’s just another question, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly. I was thinking you’ve had a strange marriage.”

  “And you want me to tell you about it,” she stated.

  “If you want to, I’m willing to listen.”

  “Why should I?”

  “You got me into this.”

  The reminder touched off her anger again—it was very near the surface. “I’ve always known about voyeurs. But you’re an auditeur, aren’t you?”

  “What are you so ashamed of?”

  “I’m not ashamed,” she said hotly. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I sat without speaking for a couple of minutes. I suspected I was half in love with her, partly because she was Ronny’s mother but also because she was beautiful and young. The body sheathed
in her tight black dress seemed infinitely poignant.

  But her widowhood seemed to project around her a circle of shadow which I couldn’t enter. Besides, as I reminded myself, I was nearly twice her age.

  She was looking at me with candid eyes, as if she had heard my thoughts. “I hate to admit it,” she said, “I never have admitted it until now. My marriage was a failure. Stanley lived in a world of his own, and I couldn’t reach him. Maybe if he was alive, he would say the same thing about me. But we never actually discussed it. We just went our separate ways in the same house. I looked after Ronny, and Stanley got more and more wrapped up in searching for his father. I used to look in on him late at night sometimes, when he was working in his study. Sometimes he’d be just sitting there shuffling through his pictures and his letters. He looked like a man counting his money,” she said with her quick disorganized smile.

  “But I shouldn’t be making light of him,” she added. “I should have taken the whole thing much more seriously. The Reverend Riceyman advised me to. He said that Stanley was looking for his own lost self, and I’m beginning to realize he was right.”

  “I’d like to talk to Riceyman.”

  “So would I. Unfortunately he’s dead.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Old age. I really miss him. He was a nice man, with a lot of understanding. But I didn’t listen to him. I was angry, and jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Of Stanley and his parents, and their wrecked marriage. I felt as if it was competing with my own marriage, gradually edging it out of the picture. Stanley was living more and more in the past, and getting more and more impatient with me. Maybe if I had tried harder, I could have stopped him. Then all at once it was too late. That ad he placed in the Chronicle touched off this whole disaster, didn’t it?”

  I didn’t have to answer her. The phone rang.

  It was Willie Mackey. “Hello, Lew. Mission accomplished. Now what can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a woman, aged forty or so. When she left Santa Teresa fifteen years ago her name was Ellen Strome Kilpatrick. She was traveling with a man named Leo Broadhurst. He may or may not be living with her now. According to my slightly freaked-out informant, she’s staying on the Peninsula now, in an old house two or three stories high, with a pair of towers. And trees around it, oaks and some pines.”

  “Can’t you pinpoint it any better? There are still a lot of trees on the Peninsula.”

  “There was a Great Dane in the neighborhood a week ago today. He acted lost.”

  “What’s Ellen’s background?”

  “She’s the divorced wife of a real estate man here in Santa Teresa; Brian Kilpatrick. He told me that she graduated from Stanford.”

  Willie uttered a clicking sound of satisfaction. “That means we start in Palo Alto. The Stanford grads go back there like homing pigeons. Do you have a picture of Ellen Strome Kilpatrick?”

  “I have one from an ad in the Chronicle that came out late in June. It shows her and Leo Broadhurst as of fifteen years ago when they arrived in San Francisco, using the name Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Smith.”

  “I have the ad in my clipping file,” Willie said. “As I recall, it offers a thousand-dollar reward.”

  “You have a good memory for money.”

  “Yes, I do. I just got married again. Am I in line for the reward?”

  “Unfortunately the man who offered it is dead.” I told him how Stanley had died, and the rest of it.

  “What makes Ellen so important?”

  “I intend to ask her. Don’t you ask her, though. When you find her let me know and I’ll take it from there.”

  I said goodbye to him and then to Jean. Her mood had changed, and she didn’t want me to go and leave her alone. Before I closed the front door of the house I could hear her angry crying.

  chapter 21

  Along Mrs. Snow’s street the jacaranda blossoms hung like purple clouds caught and condensing on the branches of the trees. I sat in my car for a minute and rested my eyes on them. Brown-skinned children were playing in the yard next door.

  The curtain over Mrs. Snow’s front window twitched like an eyelid with a tic. Then she came out and approached my car. She was wearing rusty silk that resembled armor and her face was blanched with powder, as if she was expecting an important visitor.

  Not me. She said in controlled fury: “You have no right to do this. You’re persecuting us.”

  I climbed out and stood with my hat in my hand. “That’s not my intention, Mrs. Snow. Your son’s an important witness.”

  “But he doesn’t have to talk without a lawyer. I know that much—he’s been in trouble before. But this time he’s as innocent as a little newborn babe.”

  “That innocent?”

  She stood unsmiling, blocking the way to her house. The elders of the family next door, sensing the possibility of trouble, quietly came outside. They drifted in our direction like a forming audience.

  Mrs. Snow gave them a long look, in which anger congealed into something very like fear. She turned to me:

  “If you insist on talking, come inside.”

  She took me into her little front room. The tea that Mrs. Broadhurst had spilled stained the rug like the old brown evidence of a crime.

  Mrs. Snow stayed on her feet, and kept me standing.

  “Where’s Fritz?”

  “My son is in his room.”

  “Can’t he come out?”

  “No, he can’t. The doctor is coming to see him. I don’t want you getting him all upset, the way you did yesterday.”

  “He was upset before I talked to him.”

  “I know that. But you made it worse. Frederick is weak in his feelings. He has been since he had his nervous breakdown. And I’m not going to let you send him back to the nursing home if I can help it.”

  I felt a twinge of shame, simply because she was small and female and indomitable. But she was standing in my way, and the lost boy was somewhere on the other side of her.

  “Do you know Al Sweetner, Mrs. Snow?”

  She compressed her lips, and shook her head. “I never heard of him.” But the eyes behind her spectacles were watchful.

  “Didn’t Al come by your house last week?”

  “He may have. I’m not home all the time. What was that name again?”

  “Al Sweetner. He was killed last night. The Los Angeles police told me he escaped from Folsom Prison.”

  Her dark eyes brightened like a nocturnal animal’s caught by a flashlight. “I see.”

  “Did you give him money, Mrs. Snow?”

  “Not much. I gave him a five-dollar bill. I didn’t know that he escaped from prison.”

  “Why did you give him money?”

  “I felt sorry for him,” she said.

  “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But he needed gas to get out of town, and I could spare him five dollars.”

  “I heard you gave him twenty.”

  She looked at me without wavering. “What if I did? I had no change. And I didn’t want him hanging around until Frederick got home from work.”

  “Was he a friend of Frederick’s?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a friend. Al was a friend to no one, including himself.”

  “But you knew him.”

  She sat down, stiffly upright, on the edge of the platform rocker. I sat on a chair nearby. Her face was closed and intent. She looked like a woman who had taken a deep breath and submerged herself.

  “I’m not denying I knew him. He lived with us here in this house for a while when he was a boy. He was already in trouble, and the county was looking for a foster home. It was either that or the Preston Reformatory. Mr. Snow was still living then, and we agreed to take Albert into our home.”

  “That was generous of you.”

  She shook her head abruptly. “I don’t claim that. We needed the money. We wanted to keep our home together, for Frederick, and Mr. Snow was
ailing, and prices were sky-high in those days, too. Anyway, we took Albert in and did our best for him. But he was a hard case already—there wasn’t much we could do to straighten him out. And he was a bad influence on Frederick. We were trying to make up our minds what to do when he solved the question for us. He stole a car and ran away with a girl.”

  “And Frederick was involved, wasn’t he?”

  She drew in a long breath like a diver coming up for air. “You’ve heard about it, have you?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Then you probably heard it all wrong. A lot of people blamed Frederick for the whole thing, because he was the oldest. But Albert Sweetner was old beyond his years, and so was the girl. She was only fifteen or so but you can take my word for it, she was experienced. Frederick was easily led, like putty in their hands.”

  “Did you know the girl?”

  “I knew her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Marty Nickerson. Her father was a construction man—when he worked. They lived in a motel at the end of this street. The way I got to know Marty, she used to help in the kitchen when Mr. and Mrs. Broadhurst had a party. I was keeping house for the Broadhursts at the time. Marty was a pretty little thing, but hard as nails. She was the real ringleader, if you want my opinion. And she was the one who got off scot-free, of course.”

  “Exactly what happened?”

  “They stole a car, as I said. It must have been Marty’s idea because they stole it from a man she knew—he owned the motel where she lived. Then the three of them ran off to Los Angeles. That was her idea, too—she wanted to be a movie actress and she was crazy to go and live in Los Angeles. They lasted three days and nights down there, sleeping in the car and scrounging for food. Then the three of them got caught trying to lift some goods from a day-old bakery shop.”

  She was talking with a kind of unconscious gusto, as if the adventure had been hers as well as her son’s. The feeling became conscious, and she repressed it, forcing iron disapproval on her face.

  “The worst of it was, Marty Nickerson turned up pregnant. She was underage, and Frederick admitted he had carnal knowledge of her and the judge and probation people gave him a hard choice. He could stand trial as an adult and take his chances on going to the pen. Or he could plead guilty in Juvenile Court and get probation with six months in forestry camp. The lawyer said we shouldn’t try to fight it—they bear down hard if you fight them in Juvenile Court—so Frederick went to forestry camp.”