The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald

  “Does your mother know what you and Albert did?”

  “I guess she does. I told her.”

  “When did you tell her?”

  He considered the question. “Yesterday, I guess it was.”

  “Before I was here, or after?”

  “I don’t remember.” Fritz was showing signs of moral strain. “You keep coming back and back. And my memory keeps jumping around on me. I keep remembering when Digger got my daddy.”

  “When Digger got him?”

  “That’s right, when they buried him out at the cemetery. I could hear the dirt plunking down on the coffin.” Tears formed on his face as if it was deliquescent, drawing moisture from the air.

  “Did you tell your mother before I was here, or after?”

  “After, I think it was. After you were here. She said if I told another soul they’d send me straight off to prison.” He lowered his tangled head and gave me an up-from-under look. “Will they send me to prison now?”

  “I don’t know, Fritz. Are you sure that you and Albert didn’t kill him?”

  The idea seemed to shock him. “Why would we do a thing like that?”

  I could think of several reasons. Leo Broadhurst had been lucky, and they had not. He had married the richest woman around. He had tumbled the prettiest girl, and got her with child, and Albert and Fritz had taken the rap for it.

  Fritz was alarmed by my silence. “I swear I didn’t kill him. I swear it on the Bible.” There was an actual Bible on the table, and he rested his palm on the black cloth cover. “See, I swear it on the Bible. I never killed anybody in my life. I don’t even like to trap a gopher. I hate to step on a snail. They’ve all got feelings!”

  He was weeping actively again, possibly over the deaths of snails and the agonies of gophers. Above the watery noises he was making I heard a car in the street and looked out through the front window. An old white Rambler pulled up at the curb behind my car. Mrs. Snow got out with a heavy paper bag in her arms. She was wearing a raincoat over slacks.

  I went outside, closing the door on Fritz. His mother stopped abruptly when she saw me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I had a talk with your son.”

  “Can’t I leave the house without you persecuting him?”

  “That’s hardly the case. Fritz told me he buried Leo Broadhurst’s body. I understand he told you, too, so we needn’t argue about it.”

  “That’s nonsense, he’s talking nonsense.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “We dug Leo up this afternoon. It hasn’t been established yet, but I think that he’s been dead for fifteen years.”

  “Frederick knew all this and didn’t tell me?”

  “He told you yesterday, didn’t he?”

  She bit her lip. “He told me some kind of a story. I thought he was making it up out of whole cloth.” Her face brightened alarmingly. “Maybe he is making it up. His head’s always full of stories.”

  “He didn’t invent the dead man, Mrs. Snow.”

  “Are you sure it’s Captain Broadhurst?”

  “Reasonably sure. The body was in his red Porsche.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Almost directly under the place where Stanley was buried. Stanley was trying to uncover his father when he was killed. Whoever killed him probably shot his father as well.”

  “And you blame Frederick?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But if he buried the captain, as he says, he’s an accessory.”

  “Does that mean he’ll go to prison?”

  “He could.”

  She was appalled. Her thin face was stretched taut across her skull. It was like a foreglimpse of her mortality, and it made me realize how deeply involved she was with her son’s fate.

  She stood in silence for a minute, glaring up and down the street as if to dare the neighbors to pity her. There was no one in sight except for a few brown children too young to care.

  It was early afternoon, but the day had darkened. I looked up at the sky. Black clouds were moving across it like a sliding lid. Under them the town looked bright and strange. A little rain had begun to fall on the sidewalk and on my head and on the woman’s.

  The heavy brown grocery bag was beginning to slip out of her arms. I took it from her and followed her inside. Fritz had retreated into the back, but both of us seemed to feel his amorphous presence virtually filling the house.

  His mother carried her groceries into the kitchen. When she came back into the front room she noticed that the Bible on the table was slightly out of place. She pushed it back into the exact center before she turned to me:

  “Frederick is crying his heart out in his room. You can’t put him in prison. He wouldn’t last six months. You know what they do in prison to helpless boys—the dreadful cruelties and the wickedness.”

  I knew, but I didn’t want to dwell on it. “He isn’t a boy.” I remembered that Mrs. Broadhurst had said the same thing forty-eight hours ago.

  “He might as well be,” Mrs. Snow said. “Frederick has always been my little boy. I’ve done my best to protect him, but he gets led astray. He does what people tell him to do, and then he has to suffer for it. He suffers terribly. He almost died when they put him in forestry camp.”

  Her thin body was vibrating with feeling. It was hard to believe that body, breastless and almost hipless, had mothered the large soft boy-man in the bedroom.

  “What do you want me to do with him, Mrs. Snow?”

  “Leave him here with me. Let me look after him, like I always have.”

  “That will be up to the authorities.”

  “Do they know what he did?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you have to tell them?”

  “I’m afraid so. There’s a murder involved.”

  “You’re still talking about the murder of Captain Broadhurst?”

  “Yes. That’s the only one your son’s mixed up in. I hope.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” She looked at me intently. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul. You say Captain Broadhurst was shot?”

  “Apparently he was.”

  “With a .22-caliber pistol?”

  “We don’t know yet. What were you going to tell me?”

  “I think I know who shot him. I can’t swear to it, but I think I know. If I can tell you, and it turns out to be right, can you make it easier for Frederick?”

  “I can try.”

  “They’ll listen to you.” She nodded her head emphatically. “Will you promise to use your influence?”

  “Yes. What information do you have?”

  “It’s more of a general picture. Ever since Stanley was killed on Saturday, the whole thing has been coming back to me. I was at the Broadhurst house that night, looking after Stanley. It was the same night that Frederick misused his tractor and lost his job. The whole thing fits together.”

  “Exactly what happened?”

  “Give me a chance to tell you.” She sat down in the platform rocker rather abruptly, as if the effort of memory had fatigued her. “The two of them, Captain Broadhurst and Mrs. Broadhurst, had a bad quarrel at dinner. I was in and out of the dining room. They didn’t say much in my presence, but I gathered they were quarreling over a woman—a woman he had stashed in the Mountain House. I thought at first it was the Kilpatrick woman, because the name of Kilpatrick came up. But it turned out it was that Nickerson girl—Marty—and she had her little girl with her. Captain Broadhurst was planning to go away with her and the little girl. He had tickets on a steamship to Hawaii which he had just bought, and Mrs. Broadhurst found out.”

  “How did she find out?”

  “Mr. Kilpatrick told her, according to what she said. The man in the travel agency was a friend of Mr. Kilpatrick’s.”

  I felt a change behind my eyes, as if a physical adjustment had occurred there. My witnesses were beginning to chime with each other. Mrs. Snow went on w
ith her story:

  “It was a nasty quarrel, as I said. Mrs. Broadhurst went into the long history of his womanizing. He turned around and blamed it all on her. I won’t tell you the names he called her. But he claimed she hadn’t been a wife to him in ten years, and he got up and stomped out.

  “Poor little Stanley was sick and shaking. He was having his dinner in the kitchen with me but he couldn’t help hearing the quarrel, and he was old enough to know what it meant. He ran out and tried to stop his father, but Captain Broadhurst roared away in his sports car. Then his mother got ready to leave the house. Stanley wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t take him. She asked me to put him to bed, which I did. But after that I was busy in the kitchen, and he slipped out on me. I remember the shock it gave me when I went to check his bedroom and saw his empty pillow.

  “I got another shock when I was going through the rooms looking for him. Mrs. Broadhurst’s pistol case—the one her father left her—was sitting on top of the desk in the study. The box of shells was lying there open, and one of the pistols was gone.” She looked up, unseeing, remembering. “I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I waited for her and Stanley to come home.”

  She sat in her platform rocker, resigned but somehow expectant, as if she was still waiting for that night to end. “They were gone for well over an hour. And when they came home, mother and son, they came home together. Their feet were wet from the night grass, and they were both white and scared-looking. Mrs. Broadhurst hustled Stanley off to bed and dismissed me. When I got home my own boy was missing from his bed. It was a bad night for mothers.”

  “And a bad night for sons,” I said. “Do you think Stanley saw his father killed?”

  “I don’t know. I do know he heard the shot. He told me later his mother killed an owl—that was the explanation she gave Stanley. But I think that he suspected she shot his father. I think the suspicion kept growing on him, but he couldn’t face up to it. He kept trying to prove that his daddy was alive, right up until the day of his own death.”

  “Did he ever discuss his father’s death with you?”

  “Not his death. We never mentioned death. But he sometimes asked me what I thought had happened to his father. And I used to tell him stories—that his father had gone to live in another country, like Australia, and maybe he would be coming back some day.” Her eyes came up to my face, clear and intense. “What else could I do? I couldn’t tell him what I suspected—that his mother shot his father.”

  “And your son buried him.”

  “I didn’t know that at the time.” But her voice hurried away from the point. “Even if I had, I wouldn’t have told Stanley, or anyone else. A woman’s got to look out for her own flesh and blood.”

  chapter 33

  I left her and drove through pouring rain to the hospital. It was a four-story concrete building occupying a city block and surrounded by clinics and medical office buildings. A Pink Lady in the lobby told me that Mrs. Broadhurst was able to receive visitors and gave me the number of her room on the fourth floor.

  Before going up I paid a visit to the pathology department. The office and lab were on the ground floor at the end of a sickly green corridor lined with heating pipes. A sign on the door said: “Authorized Personnel Only.”

  A stoic-faced man in a white smock greeted me with polite disinterest. The name board on his desk said: “W. Silcox, M.D.” He told me that the body of Leo Broadhurst hadn’t arrived yet, but was expected shortly.

  Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, the doctor’s eyes showed a certain professional eagerness. “I understand there’s quite a lot of him left.”

  “Quite a lot. You should look for gunshot wounds, particularly in the head. I’ve talked to a couple of witnesses who think he was shot there. But my witnesses aren’t entirely dependable. We need concrete evidence.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. I tend to learn more from dead people than I do from living ones.”

  “Do you still have Stanley Broadhurst’s body?”

  “It’s in the mortuary. Would you like to see it?”

  “I have. I wanted to check with you on cause of death.”

  “Multiple stab wounds, with some kind of long knife.”

  “Front or back?”

  “Front. In the abdomen. He was also struck at the base of the skull with the pickax.”

  Going up in the elevator to the fourth floor, I almost envied Silcox his unliving witnesses. They were past lying, past hurting and being hurt.

  I checked in with the girl at the nurses’ station. She said that Mrs. Broadhurst was feeling much better, but I should limit my visit to ten minutes or so.

  I tapped on the door of Mrs. Broadhurst’s private room and was bidden to come in. The room was full of flowers in and out of season—roses and carnations, exotic lilacs. A vase of yellow daffodils on the dresser had Brian Kilpatrick’s card standing on edge against it.

  Mrs. Broadhurst was sitting up in an armchair beside the streaming window. She had on a multicolored robe which seemed to reflect the flowers in the room, and she looked quite well. But there was a basic hopelessness about her eyes which tied my tongue for a moment.

  She spoke first: “You’re Mr. Archer, aren’t you? I’m glad to see you—to have a chance to thank you.”

  I was taken by surprise. “What on earth for?”

  “My grandson’s safe return. His mother phoned me a short time ago. With my son—my son Stanley gone—Ronny is all I have left.”

  “He’s a good boy, and he seems to be all right.”

  “Where did you find him? Jean wasn’t quite clear about it.”

  I gave her a collapsed account of my weekend and said in conclusion: “Don’t blame the girl too much. She saw your son killed, and it threw her. All she could think about was saving Ronny.”

  I remembered as I said it that Susan had witnessed two murders, fifteen years apart. And I asked myself: if Mrs. Broadhurst killed her husband, was it possible that she had also killed her son, or had him killed? I found I couldn’t ask her. Filled with her fragile gratitude, and the flowers her friends had sent her, the room wouldn’t let such questions be spoken aloud.

  As witnesses often do, Mrs. Broadhurst provided an opening herself. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand about the girl. What did you say her name was?”

  “Susan Crandall.”

  “What was she doing on the mountain with my son and grandson?”

  “I think she was trying to understand the past.”

  “I don’t quite follow. I’m very stupid today.” Her voice and eyes divided her impatience between herself and me.

  “Susan had been there before,” I said, “when she was a small child. She went there with her mother one night. Perhaps you remember her mother. Her maiden name was Martha Nickerson, and I believe she used to work for you.”

  The displeasure in her voice and eyes deepened. “Who have you been talking to?”

  “Quite a number of people. You’re just about the last one on my list. I was hoping you could help me to reconstruct what happened at the Mountain House that night about fifteen years ago.”

  She shook her head, and stayed with her face half-averted. Profiled against the window, her head was like a classical medallion laid over the rain-blurred image of the city.

  “I’m afraid that I can’t help you. I wasn’t there.”

  “Your husband was, Mrs. Broadhurst.”

  The cords in her neck pulled her head around. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “He never left the place. He was shot and buried there. We dug him up this afternoon.”

  “I see.” She didn’t tell me what she saw, but it seemed to make her eyes grimmer and smaller. The bones in her face became more prominent as if in imitation of the dead man’s. “It’s over then.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “It is for me. You’re telling me that both my men are dead—my husband and my son. You’re telling me that I’ve lost everythi
ng I held dear.”

  She was struggling to assume a tragic role, but there was a doubleness in her which spoiled her resonance. Her words sounded exaggerated and hollow. I was reminded of the ambivalent words that she had written about her father, staggering across the yellow foolscap toward the edge of breakdown.

  “I think you’ve known that your husband was dead and buried for fifteen years.”

  “That simply isn’t true.” But the doubleness persisted in her voice as if she was listening to herself read lines. “I warn you, if you make this accusation publicly—”

  “We’re very private, Mrs. Broadhurst. You don’t have to put on a front with me. I know you quarreled with your husband that night and followed him up the mountain afterwards.”

  “How can you know that if it isn’t so?” She was playing a game that guilty people play, questioning the questioner, trying to convert the truth into a shuttlecock that could be batted back and forth and eventually lost. “Where did you get this alleged information, anyway? From Susan Crandall?”

  “Part of it.”

  “She’s scarcely a reliable witness. I gather from what you’ve told me that she’s emotionally disturbed. And she couldn’t have been more than three or four at the time. The whole thing must be fantasy on her part.”

  “Three-year-olds have memories, and they can see and hear. I have pretty good evidence that she was in the Mountain House, and saw or heard the shot. Her story jibes with other things I know. It also helps to explain her emotional trouble.”

  “You admit that she’s disturbed?”

  “She has a hangup. Speaking of hangups, I wonder if Stanley didn’t witness the shot, too.”

  “No! He couldn’t have.” She drew in her breath audibly, as if she was trying to suck back the words.

  “How do you know if you weren’t there?”

  “I was at home with Stanley.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he followed you up there and heard his father shot, and for the rest of his life he tried to forget it. Or prove that it was just a bad dream he had.”

  She had been talking like an advocate who doubted his client’s innocence. Now she gave up on it. “What do you want from me? Money? I’ve been bled white.” She paused, and looked at me with despairing eyes. “Don’t tell Jean I have nothing left. I’d never see Ronny again.”