The Underground Man (19 page)

“Do you know what made them leave?”

“I guess the strain got to be too much for them. It was almost too much for me. I was just about ready to quit my job when they finally did take off.”

“Where did they go?”

“They went to San Francisco, so I’ve heard, and neither one of them ever did come back here. I don’t know what they lived on. He had no profession, and no money of his own. Knowing both of them, my guess would be that she got a job in the Bay area, and she’s probably supporting him to this day. He isn’t what you call a practical man.”

“What kind of a woman is she?”

“The arty type, but a lot more practical than she ever let on. She pretended to have her head in the clouds, but her feet were made of clay. Sometimes I really felt sorry for her. She used to follow him with her eyes as if she was a dog and he was her master. I’ve often thought about it since—how a woman with a husband of her own and a little boy could feel like that for another woman’s husband.”

“I gather from his picture that he was a good-looking man.”

“That’s true. Where did you see his picture?”

I got out Stanley’s advertisement and showed it to her. She gave it a look of recognition:

“This is the clipping Albert Sweetner had the other day.
He wanted to make sure that the man was Captain Broadhurst. I told him it was.”

“Did he ask about the woman?”

“He didn’t have to. Albert knew Mrs. Kilpatrick from away back. She was his home-room teacher at the high school when Albert was living in our home.” She wiped her glasses and bent over the clipping again. “Who put this ad in the paper?”

“Stanley Broadhurst.”

“Where would he get the cash for a thousand-dollar reward? He doesn’t have one nickel to rub against another.”

“From his mother. At least that was the idea.”

“I see.” Her eyes came up from the clipping, full of the past. “Poor little Stanley. He was still trying to find out what went on in the Mountain House.”

The woman’s insight continued to surprise me. Her mind had been sharpened by trouble, and exercised by years of defensive tactics on behalf of Fritz. I realized she’d been talking to me for a purpose, fending me off with stories like an aging Scheherazade, laying down a barrage of words between me and her son.

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one.

“Do you have to go?” Mrs. Snow said eagerly.

“If I could have a few minutes with Frederick first—”

“You can’t. I won’t permit it. He’s always blaming himself for things he didn’t do.”

“I can make allowances for that.”

She shook her head. “It’s unfair of you to ask. I’ve told you a lot more than Frederick ever could.” She added with a kind of angry bravado: “If there’s anything more you want to know, ask me.”

“There is one thing. You mentioned a Christmas card that Marty Nickerson sent Frederick.”

“It wasn’t a Christmas card, exactly—just a greeting on a
postcard.” She got up. “I think I can find it if you want to see it.”

She went through the doorway into the kitchen. I heard a second door open and close, and then a mumble of talk through the thin walls. I could hear Frederick’s voice rising hysterically, his mother’s voice quieting him down.

She came out with a postcard which she handed me. The colored picture on the face of the card showed the front of a two-story motel whose sign said: “Yucca Tree Motor Inn.” It had been postmarked in Petroleum City on December 22, 1952. The message was handwritten in faded green ink:

The phone rang in the kitchen. Mrs. Snow jumped as if an alarm had sounded. But she pulled the kitchen door shut behind her before she answered it.

A moment later she opened the door again. “It’s Mr. Kelsey,” she said, holding her mouth as if the name tasted bitter. “He wants to talk to you.”

She stepped to one side to let me pass and stayed in the doorway to listen.

Kelsey’s voice was urgent: “The
Ariadne’s
been sighted by one of the volunteer pilots in the sheriff’s aero-squadron. She’s grounded in Dunes Bay.”

“What happened to the kids aboard her?”

“That isn’t clear. But it doesn’t sound too good. According to my information she’s breaking up in the surf.”

“Exactly where?”

“Just below the state park. Do you know the place?”

“Yes. Where are you? I can pick you up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t leave town right now. I have a lead in the Stanley Broadhurst killing. I shouldn’t leave the fire area, anyway.”

“What’s the lead?”

“Your man with the long black wig was seen in the area yesterday. He was driving an old white car along Rattlesnake Road. A coed from the college was taking a walk there, and she saw him shortly before the fire started.”

“Is it a positive identification?”

“Not yet. I’m going to talk to her now.”

Kelsey hung up. Turning away from the phone, I noticed that the door of Fritz’s room was ajar. One of his moist eyes appeared at the crack like the eye of a fish in an underwater crevice. His mother, at the other door, was watching him like a shark.

“How are you, Fritz?” I said.

“I feel just terrible.”

He opened the door wider. In his rumpled pajamas he looked less like a man than an ill-kept boy. His mother said:

“Go back in your room and be quiet.”

He shook his frowzy head. “I don’t like it in there. I keep seeing things in there.”

“What do you keep seeing, Fritz?” I said.

“I keep seeing Mr. Broadhurst in his grave.”

“Did you bury him?” I said.

He nodded, and began to cry, nodding and crying like a human pump. His mother moved between us. Leaning her slight weight against his amorphous body, she pushed him back into his room.

She closed the door on him and locked it and turned on
me, holding the key like a weapon. “Please get out of here now. You’ve got him all upset.”

“If he buried Stanley Broadhurst yesterday, you can’t very well hush it up. You’re crazy to try.”

She let out a kind of terrier noise which was meant to be a laugh. “I’m not the one that’s crazy. He no more buried Mr. Broadhurst than I did. You people have got him so confused and frightened that he doesn’t know what he did or what he saw. Except that I know for a fact he didn’t do anything wrong. I know my son.”

She spoke with such assurance that I almost believed her. “I still think he knows more than he told us.”

“He knows a good deal less, you mean. He doesn’t know what he knows. And I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself, badgering a widow and her only son. If the doctor finds him in this condition, he’ll want to commit him to the State Hospital.”

“Has he been committed before?”

“He nearly was, years ago. But Mrs. Broadhurst said she’d pay for the nursing home.”

“This was in 1955?”

“Yes. Now will you please get out of my kitchen? I didn’t invite you in here, but I’m inviting you out.”

I thanked her, and left the house. At the curb in front of it, a middle-aged man in sports clothes was climbing out of a yellow sports car. He lifted a medical bag out of the boot and came toward me. His gray hair and light blue eyes were in contrast to his high color.

“Dr. Jerome?”

“Yes.” His look was inquiring.

I told him who I was and what I was doing. “Mrs. Stanley Broadhurst hired me. How is Elizabeth Broadhurst, by the way?”

“She’s suffering from exhaustion, which brought on a mild heart attack.”

“Is she talkable?”

“Not today. Possibly tomorrow. But I’d stay off the subject of her son—and her grandson.” The doctor took a deep breath and sighed with unexpected feeling. “I just had a look at Stanley’s body in the morgue. I hate to see a young man die.”

“Was it the stab wound that killed him?”

“I would say so.”

“Were you his doctor?”

“I was for most of his life—as long as he lived at home. And I still saw him from time to time. He liked to check in with me when he had a problem.”

“What sort of problems did he have?”

“Emotional problems. Marital problems. I really can’t discuss them with a third party.”

“You can’t hurt Stanley. He’s dead.”

“I’m aware of that,” the doctor said with some asperity. “The problem I’m interested in is who stabbed him to death and buried him.”

“Your patient Fritz Snow says he buried him.”

I watched the doctor for his reaction. His bland eyes didn’t shift. His high hard color remained unchanged. He even smiled a little.

“Don’t believe him. Fritz is always confessing something.”

“How do you know it isn’t true?”

“Because he’s been my patient for over twenty years.”

“Is he insane?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. He’s hypersensitive, and he tends to blame himself for everything. When he gets emotionally upset, he loses all sense of reality. Poor Fritz has been a frightened boy all his life.”

“What’s he frightened of?”

“His mother, among other things.”

“So am I.”

“So are we all,” the doctor said with a glint of amusement. “She’s a powerful little woman. But she probably got that way because she had to. Her late husband was very much like Fritz. He had a hard time holding any job. I suppose their basic trouble was genetic, and there’s still not much we can do about heredity.”

We both glanced toward the house. Mrs. Snow was monitoring us from the front window. She let the curtain fall back into place.

“I really have to get in to see my patient,” Jerome said.

“Perhaps we can have a talk about him some time when you’re free. Whether or not Fritz is innocent, as you say, he has been connected with the main suspect in Stanley’s death.” I told him about Al Sweetner, and Kelsey’s new lead. “And we know Fritz had access to the tools that were used to dig Stanley’s grave. On top of that, he told me that he buried him.”

The doctor shook his gray head slowly from side to side. “If the sky fell, Fritz would find a way to blame himself. As a matter of fact, there’s a pretty good possibility that Stanley dug his own grave.”

“The deputy coroner and I were speculating about that possibility.”

“This isn’t entirely speculation on my part,” Jerome said. “When I examined Stanley’s body just now, I noticed blisters on his hands.”

“What kind of blisters?”

“Ordinary water blisters, on the insides of both hands.” He touched the palm of his left hand with the wide spatulate
fingers of his right. “The kind of blisters a man gets from digging he isn’t used to. I admit it’s hard to understand why a man would dig his own grave.”

“He may have been forced to do it.” I said. “Al Sweetner, the man in the wig, was a hard case when he was alive. It’s possible he stood over Stanley with a gun. Or Stanley may have had some other compelling reason.”

“What reason?”

“I don’t know. He may have intended to bury somebody else. He had a young girl with him, as well as his son.”

“What happened to them?”

“I’m on my way to find out.”

Dunes Bay was at the end of a winding county road off Highway 1. Above the wind-carved hills of sand which rose northward along the shore, clouds were streaming inland like torn pennants. It looked as if a storm was on the way.

The kiosk at the entrance to the state park was closed and empty. I drove on through to the parking lot which overlooked the ocean. About three hundred feet out, where the waves were breaking, the white sloop lay on her side. Further out a flock of pelicans circled and dived for fish.

Three people were watching
Ariadne
from the beach. They weren’t the three that I was looking for. One was a
man in a state park uniform. Near him but not with him, a couple of boys with long sun-faded hair leaned on their surfboards.

I got my binoculars out of the trunk of my car and focused them on the sloop. She was dismasted, and her rigging hung overside like a torn net. Her hull appeared to be sprung and heavy with water. She rose up sluggishly when the long surge lifted her, then fell back clumsily on her side. My breathing labored as if in empathy.

I went down to the beach on a wooden walkway half drifted over with sand. The state park man turned to meet me, and I asked him if the young people had been rescued.

“Yessir. They got ashore.”

“All three of them?”

“Yessir. These boys here were a great help.”

Following his gesture, I looked at the two surfers. They returned my look with a kind of wary pride, as if they distrusted any possible adult approval.

“They’re okay,” the older one said. They nodded their heads in solemn unison.

“Where are they now?”

He shrugged his limber shoulders. “Somebody came and picked them up in a station wagon.”

“What kind of a station wagon?”

He pointed toward the park official. “Ask him.”

I turned to the man, who looked like somebody’s son-in-law. He answered me uncomfortably: “It was a blue Chevy wagon, recent model. I didn’t get the license number. I had no reason to. I didn’t know at the time that they were fugitives.”

“The little boy isn’t a fugitive. He may be a kidnaping victim.”

“He didn’t act like one.”

“How did he act?”

“Scared. But not scared of them particularly. He went along with them without any trouble.”

“Where did they take him?”

“To the station wagon.”

“I know that. Who was driving it?”

“A big woman in a wide-brimmed hat.”

“How did she know they were here?”

“I let the blond girl use my phone. I had no way of knowing that they—”

“Can you trace the call?”

“I don’t see how, unless it was long-distance. I’ll give it a try, though.”

He plodded toward the walkway, shielding his face against the blowing sand. I followed him up the entrance kiosk and waited while he used the phone inside it. He came out shaking his head, with his hands spread loosely.