The Underground Man

chapter 9

She gave her son a sad dubious look, which he returned. But she backed away into the kitchen. Then I heard water running in a pan, and a gas burner blooping on.

“Did the girl come back, Fritz?”

He nodded.

“When was this?”

“Around noon, or a little later. I was eating my lunch.”

“What did she say?”

“She said Ronny was hungry. I gave him a half of a peanut butter sandwich. I gave her the other half.”

“Did she mention Stanley Broadhurst?”

“No. I didn’t ask her. But she was scared.”

“Did she say so?”

“She didn’t have to say so. I can tell. The boy was scared, too. I can tell.”

“What happened after that?”

“Nothing. She went away down the canyon.”

“On foot?”

“Yeah.” But his eyes were avoiding mine again.

“Are you sure she didn’t take your car?”

His head sank lower. He sat perfectly still like a yogi studying the center of his body.

“All right. She took my car. They drove away in my car.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

“I never thought of it. I was fertilizing – I had a lot on my mind.”

“Come off it, Fritz. The boy is gone and his father is dead.”

“I didn’t kill him!”

“I think I believe you. Not everybody will.”

He lifted his head and looked past Kelsey. His mother was moving around in the kitchen. He listened to the sounds she made, as if they might tell him what to say and think.

“Forget about your mother, Fritz. This is between you and me.”

“Close the door then. I don’t want her to hear me. Or him either.”

Kelsey stepped back out of the doorway and closed the door. I said to Fritz: “Did you let her take your car?”

“Yeah. She said Mr. Broadhurst wanted her to have it.”

“There’s more to it than that, Fritz, isn’t there?”

Shame suffused his face. “Don’t tell her.” He waved a loose hand toward the kitchen.

“Don’t tell her what?” I said.

“She let me touch her.” The memory, or the fantasy, shuddered through him. His scarred mouth smiled, leaving his eyes still sad. “I mean, she looked like a girl I used to know.”

“And you let her take your car.”

“She said she’d bring it back. But,” he added in a grieved tone, “she never did yet.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No.” He sat for a moment in a listening attitude. “I heard her drive down the canyon.”

“And the boy was with her?”

“Yessir. She made him go along with her.”

“Didn’t he want to go?”

“No.” He shook his head furiously, as if he were the boy himself. “But she made him.”

“How did she make him?”

“She said the bogy man would get him. She picked him up and put him on the seat and drove away with him.”

I got out my notebook and pen. “What kind of a car is it?”

“1953 Chevrolet sedan. She still runs good.”

“What color?”

“It’s partly the same old blue and partly red primer. I started to paint her, but I got too busy.”

“License?”

“You better ask my mother. She keeps track of everything around here. But don’t tell her.” He touched his mouth.

I went out into the kitchen. Mrs. Snow was at the gas stove, pouring boiling water into a brown teapot. The steam had clouded her glasses, and she turned to me in blank apprehension like a blind woman taken by surprise.

“The girl took your son’s car.”

She set down the teakettle with a crash. “I knew he did something wrong.”

“That’s not the point, Mrs. Snow. If you can give me the license number we’ll put out an alarm.”

“What will they do to Frederick?”

“Nothing. Can you give me the license number?”

She rummaged in a kitchen drawer, found an old leatherette memorandum book, and read aloud from it: “IKT 447.”

I wrote down the number. Then I returned to the front room and reported to Kelsey. Mrs. Broadhurst was slumped in the platform rocker. Her color was high and her eyes were partly closed.

“Has she been drinking?” I asked Kelsey.

“Not that I know of.”

Mrs. Broadhurst sighed, and made an effort to get up. She fell back onto the platform rocker, which creaked under her weight.

Mrs. Snow backed through the doorway from the kitchen. She was balancing a tray which held the brown teapot, containers of milk and sugar, and a bone-china cup and saucer which looked as if they had been worn thin. She set the tray on a table beside the platform rocker, and filled the teacup from the pot. I could see the dark tea rising through the cup.

She spoke to Mrs. Broadhurst with forced cheerfulness: “A spot of tea is good for whatever ails you. It will clear your brain and pep you up. I know just how you like it, with milk and sugar – isn’t that right?”

Mrs. Broadhurst said in a thick voice: “You’re very kind.”

She reached for the teacup. Her arm swung wide and loose, sweeping the teacup and the milk and sugar off the tray. Mrs. Snow got down on her knees and gathered the pieces of the broken cup as if it was a religious object. She darted into the kitchen for a towel and blotted up some of the tea from the threadbare carpet.

Kelsey had lifted Mrs. Broadhurst by the shoulders and kept her from falling out of the chair.

“Who’s her doctor?” I asked Mrs. Snow.

“Dr. Jerome. Do you want me to look up the number for you?”

“You could call him yourself.”

“What shall I say is the matter?”

“I don’t know. It could be a heart attack. Maybe you better call an ambulance, too.”

Mrs. Snow stood motionless for a second, as if all her responses had been used up. Then she went back into the kitchen. I heard her dialing.

I was getting restless. The missing boy was the main thing, and he was long gone by now. I gave Kelsey the license number of the gardener’s old car and suggested that he put out an all-points on it. He called the sheriff’s office.

I went outside. Jean was pacing back and forth on the broken sidewalk. Her short skirt and her long white legs gave her a harlequin aspect, like a sad clown caught on a poor street under a smoky sky.

“What on earth is going on in there?”

I told her what the gardener had told me and added that her mother-in-law was ill.

“She’s never been ill in her life.”

“She is now. We’re getting an ambulance for her.” As I spoke, I could hear it coming in the distance like the memory of a scream.

“What am I going to do?” Jean said, as if the ambulance was coming for her.

“Go with Mrs. Broadhurst to the hospital.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’d rather go with you.”

I didn’t know exactly what she meant, and neither, I thought, did she. I gave her my business card and an all-purpose answer: “We’ll keep in touch. Let my answering service know where you’re staying.”

She looked at the card as if it was in a foreign language. “You’re quitting on me, aren’t you?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Do you want money, is that it?”

“It can wait.”

“What do you want from me, then?”

“Nothing.”

She looked at me as if she knew better. People always wanted something.

The ambulance turned the corner. Its animal scream sank to a growl before it stopped in the road.

“This the Snow residence?” the driver called.

I said it was. He and his partner took a stretcher into the house and came out with Mrs. Broadhurst on it. As they lifted her into the back of the ambulance, she tried to sit up.

“Who pushed me?”

“Nobody, dearie,” the driver said. “We’ll give you a sniff of oxygen and that’ll perk you up.”

Jean said without looking at me: “I’ll follow along in her car. I can’t let her go to the hospital by herself.”

I decided it was time to deliver the green Mercedes to Mrs. Roger Armistead. Kelsey pointed out Crescent Drive, on the first ridge overlooking the city. There was smoke above it, pre-empting most of the sky.

Kelsey turned to me, the flesh around his eyes still crinkled by the long look he had taken. “Be careful if you’re going up that way. The fire is still on the move.”

I said I would be careful. “Can I drop you anywhere?”

“No thanks. I can use the pickup to get downtown. But first I want to do some further checking on Fritz.”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“Up to a point I do. But you never get all the facts on the first go-round.”

He went back toward the house. Mrs. Snow was standing framed in the doorway like a faded vestal virgin guarding a shrine.