The Underground Man (28 page)

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 everything 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.”

I thought she was wrong, but I didn’t argue. “Who bled you, Mrs. Broadhurst?”

“I have no wish to discuss it.”

I picked up Brian Kilpatrick’s card from the dresser and let her see it. “If someone has been extorting money from you, you have a chance to stop it now.”

“I said I don’t want to discuss it. There’s no one I can trust. There never has been since my father died.”

“You want it to go on?”

She gave me a closed bitter look. “I don’t want anything to go on. Not my life or anything. Certainly not this conversation. This inquisition.”

“I’m not enjoying it much myself.”

“Then go away. I can’t stand any more.”

She grasped the arms of the chair so that her knuckles whitened, and stood up. The action somehow forced me out of the room.

I wasn’t ready to face the dead man right away. I found the door to the fire stairs and started down to the ground floor, taking my time about it. The concrete stairs with their gray steel railings, set in a windowless concrete stairwell, were like part of a prison structure, ugly and just about indestructible. I paused on a landing halfway down and tried to imagine Mrs. Broadhurst in prison.

When I returned the boy Ronny to his mother, I had really accomplished what I set out to do. The business left unfinished was bound to be painful and nasty. I had no overriding desire to pin her husband’s murder on Mrs. Broadhurst.

The hot breath of vengeance was growing cold in my nostrils as I grew older. I had more concern for a kind of economy in life that would help to preserve the things that were worth preserving. No doubt Leo Broadhurst had been worth preserving—any man, or any woman, was—but he had been killed in anger long ago. I doubted that a jury in the present would find his widow guilty of anything worse than manslaughter.

As for the other homicides, it was unlikely that Mrs. Broadhurst had had a reason to kill her son or an opportunity to kill Albert Sweetner. I told myself I didn’t care who killed them. But I cared. There was a winding symmetry in the case that like the stairs themselves took me down to the sickly green corridor where Dr. Silcox consulted his dead witnesses.

I went through the office and opened the steel-sheathed mortuary door. What was left of Leo Broadhurst lay under a bright light on a stainless steel table. Silcox was probing at the skull. Its fine curve was the only remaining sign that Leo had been a handsome man in his day.

Kelsey and Purvis, the deputy coroner, were standing in the penumbra against the wall. I moved past them toward the table.

“Was he shot?”

Silcox looked up from his work. “Yes. I found this.”

He picked up a lead slug and displayed it on the palm of his hand. It looked like a misshapen .22 long. “Where did it pierce the skull?”

“I’m not sure it did. All I can find is a minor external crease which hardly could have been fatal.” With the bright point of his probe, he showed me the faint groove the bullet had made in the front of Broadhurst’s skull.

“What killed him then?”

“This.”

He showed me a discolored triangle which rang on the table when he dropped it. For a moment I thought it was an Indian arrowhead. Then I picked it up and saw that it was the broken-off tip of a butcher knife.

“It was lodged in the ribs,” the doctor said. “Evidently the tip of the knife snapped off when the knife was pulled out.”

“Was he stabbed from the back or the front?”

“The front, I’d say.”

“Could a woman have done it?”

“I don’t see why not. What do you think, Purvis?”

The young deputy detached himself from the shadows and stepped forward between me and Dr. Silcox. “I think we better talk it over in private.” He turned to me. “I hate to be a spoilsport, Mr. Archer, but you’ve got no right in here. You saw the sign on the door: ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ And you’re not authorized.”

I thought perhaps it was just a young man’s officiousness. “I am if you authorize me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Who says so?”

“The sheriff-coroner gives me my orders.”

“Who gives him
his
orders?”

The young man flushed. His face looked porous and purplish in the raw light. “You better get out of here, mister.”

I looked past him at Kelsey, who seemed embarrassed. I said to both of them:

“Hell, I located this body.”

“But you’re not authorized personnel.”

Purvis put his hand on the butt of his gun. I didn’t know him well and didn’t trust him not to shoot me. I left with anger and disappointment running hot and sour in my veins.

Kelsey followed me out into the corridor. “I’m sorry about this, Archer.”

“You weren’t a great deal of help.”

His gray eyes flinched a little and then set hard, while his mouth continued to smile. “The word came down from on high about you. And the Forest Service makes me go by the book.”

“What does the book say?”

“You know as well as I do. Where local law enforcement is involved, I’m instructed to respect their jurisdiction.”

“What are they planning to do? Bury this case for another fifteen years?”

“Not if I can help it. But my main responsibility is the fire.”

“The killings and the fire are tied together, and you know it.”

“Don’t tell me what I know.”

He turned and went back into the room with the dead man and the authorized personnel.

When I went outside the rain was coming down harder than ever. Water was running in the street, washing the detritus of summer downhill toward the sea.

The nearer I got to the mountains, the more water there was. Driving up Mrs. Broadhurst’s canyon was very much
like making my way upstream in a shallow watercourse. Long before I reached the ranch house I could hear the roaring of the creek behind it.

Brian Kilpatrick’s black car was standing in front of the house. An artificial-looking blond whom I didn’t recognize at first was sitting in the front seat. When I approached the black car I saw that she was Kilpatrick’s fiancée, as he called her.

“How are you feeling today?” I said.

She lowered the electric window and peered at me through the rain. “Do I know you?”

“We met Saturday night at Kilpatrick’s place.”

“Really? I must have been stoned.” Her lips stretched in a smile which asked for my complicity. Behind it she seemed terribly uneasy.

“You were stoned. Also you were a brunette.”

“I was wearing a wig. I change them to suit my mood. People tell me I’m very mercurial.”

“I can see that. What kind of a mood are you in?”

“Frankly, I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared of all this water. And the mud is coming loose above Brian’s house. He’s got tons of it in his patio already. That’s why I’m sitting here in this car. But I don’t like it here much, either.”

“What’s Brian doing inside?”

“Business, he said.”

“With Jean Broadhurst?”

“I guess that’s her name. Some woman called him and he dashed right over here.” She added as I turned toward the house: “Tell him to hurry, will you?”

I went in without knocking and closed the front door carefully behind me. The noise of the creek was humming through the house, covering the small sounds my movements made.

There was no one in the living room. A light shone from the open door of the study. When I went nearer I could hear Jean’s voice:

“I don’t like this. If Mrs. Broadhurst wants these things, she could have asked me for them.”

Kilpatrick answered her in a throwaway tone: “I’m sure she didn’t want to bother you.”

“But I am bothered. What does she want in the hospital with business papers and guns?”

“I assume she wants to get things shipshape in case anything happens to her.”

“She isn’t planning to kill herself?” Jean’s voice was thin and breathless.

“I sincerely hope not.”

“Then why does she want the guns?”

“She didn’t say. I’m simply trying to keep her happy. After all, she is my business partner.”

“Still I don’t think I should let you—”

“But she just called me.”

“I think I’ll call her back.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

His voice had a threat in it. There was the scrape of feet and a woman’s gasp. I stepped into the doorway. Jean was sprawled on the black leather couch, white-faced and breathing hard. Kilpatrick was standing over her with the telephone receiver in his hands.

“Try someone your own size,” I said.

He moved as if he was going to attack me. I wanted him to, and perhaps he saw that. The color drained from his face, so that the broken veins stood out like abrasions.

He offered me a shameful little smile which didn’t change his reddened apprehensive eyes. “Jean and I had a little misunderstanding. Nothing serious.”

She got up, smoothing her skirt. “I think it’s serious. He pushed me down. He’s taking some of my mother-in-law’s things.”

She indicated the black briefcase standing beside the desk. I picked it up.

“I want that,” Kilpatrick said. “It belongs to me.”

“You may get it back eventually.”

He reached for it. I swung it away from his grasp. In the same movement I leaned my shoulder into him and walked him backward. He came up hard against the opposing wall and slouched there like a man hanging on a nail. I went over him for weapons, found none, and stepped back.

For a moment his face wore the look of terrible disappointment that I had surprised on it the day before. He was losing everything, and watching it go.

“I’m going to take this up with Sheriff Tremaine,” he said.

“I think you should. He’ll be interested in what you’ve been doing to Mrs. Broadhurst.”

“I’m her best friend, if you want the truth. I’ve been looking after her interests for many years.”

“She calls it bleeding her.”

He seemed surprised. “Did she say that?”

“She used the word. Don’t you like it?”

He was still against the wall. His reddish-brown hair was turning dark with sweat and falling over his high freckled forehead. He pushed it back with his fingers, carefully, as if a neat appearance might make all the difference.