The Underground Man

chapter 10

On my way up to Crescent Drive I punched on the car radio. It was tuned to a local station which was broadcasting continuous fire reports. The Rattlesnake Fire, as the announcer called it, was threatening the northeastern side of the city. Hundreds of residents were being evacuated. Smoke-jumpers were being flown in and additional firefighting equipment was on its way. But unless the Santa Ana stopped blowing, the announcer said, Rattlesnake might strike across the city all the way to the sea.

The Armistead house, like the Broadhurst house, was in debatable territory. I parked in the courtyard beside a black Continental. The fire was so close that I could sense its fibrillation when the engine died. Ashes like scant gray snow were sifting down onto the blacktop in the courtyard. I could hear water gushing somewhere at the rear.

The house was white and one-storied, set like a classical temple against a grove of cypress trees. It was so nicely proportioned that I didn’t realize how big it was until I hiked around it to the back. I passed a fifty-foot swimming pool at the bottom of which lay a blue mink coat, like the headless pelt of a woman, anchored by what looked like jewel boxes.

A tanned woman with short gray hair was spraying the cypresses with a hose. Beyond the cypresses, in the dry brush, a dark-haired man in dungarees was digging a furrow and beating out falling embers with his spade.

The woman was talking to the fire as if it was a crazy man or a wild dog –“Get back, you crummy bastard!”– and she turned to me almost gaily when I called her name.

“Mrs. Armistead?”

I saw when she turned that her gray hair was premature. Her face was a hot brown, cooled by slanting green eyes. Her body was elegant in a white slack-suit.

“Who are you?”

“Archer. I brought your Mercedes.”

“Good. I’ll send you a check, provided the car’s in good shape.”

“It is, and I’ll send you a bill.”

“In that case you might as well help out here.” Her downward smile made a white gash in her face. She gestured toward a spade which lay on brown cypress needles under the trees. “You could help Carlos dig that ditch.”

It sounded like a poor idea. I was in city clothes. But I peeled off my jacket and picked up the spade and went through the trees to help Carlos.

He was a sawed-off middle-aged Chicano who took my arrival as a matter of course. I worked behind him, broadening and deepening his furrow. It was almost certainly hopeless, a token scratch in the dirt across the base of the chaparral-covered hill. I could hear the fire very plainly now, breathing on the far side of the hill. Behind me the wind was soughing in the cypresses.

“Where’s Mr. Armistead?” I said to Carlos.

“I guess he moved onto the boat.”

“Where would that be?”

“In the marina.”

He gestured toward the sea. After a few more spadefuls, he added: “Her name is Ariadne.” He pronounced the name slowly and carefully.

“The girl?”

“The boat,” he said. “Mrs. Armistead told me it’s a Greek name. She’s crazy about Greece.”

“She looks a little like a Greek.”

“Yeah, I guess she does,” he said with a ruminative smile.

The sound of the fire became louder, and his face changed. We spaded some more. I was beginning to feel the work in my shoulders and in the palms of my hands. My shirt was pasted to my back.

“Is Mr. Armistead all by himself on the boat?”

“No. He’s got a boy with him. He calls him a crew, but I never seen him do any work on the boat. He’s one of these long-hairs, they call ’em.” Carlos raised his grimy hand to his head and caressed imaginary locks.

“Doesn’t Mr. Armistead like girls?”

“Yeah, he likes girls.” He added thoughtfully: “There was a girl on the boat the other night.”

“Blond girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see her?”

“My friend Pedro saw her when he was going out of the harbor yesterday morning. Pedro’s a fisherman – he gets up before the daylight. The girl was ’way up the mast and yelling like she was going to jump. The boy was trying to talk her down.”

“What did Pedro do?”

Carlos shrugged. “Pedro, he’s got children to feed. He don’t have time to stop and fool around with crazy girls.”

Carlos went back to his work with renewed concentration, as if he was digging a foxhole that would shelter him against the contemporary world. I worked along behind him. But it was clear that we were wasting our time.

The fire appeared at the top of the hill like a brilliant omniform growth which continued to grow until it bloomed very large against the sky. A sentinel quail on the hillside below it was ticking an alarm.

Carlos looked up at the fire and crossed himself. Then he turned his back on it and beckoned to me and walked away from his furrow through the trees.

One of the cypresses was beginning to smoke, high beyond the reach of Mrs. Armistead’s hose. She told Carlos to climb the tree.

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t do no good. The trees are gonna go, and maybe the house, too.”

The fire was coming down the hill, gathering speed and size. The trees had begun to sway. From the undergrowth beneath them, a bevy of stubby-winged quail flew up fighting for altitude over the house. Smoke like billowing darkness followed them.

Mrs. Armistead went on spraying the trees with her ineffectual hose. Carlos moved past her to the faucet and turned it off. She stood with the dripping nozzle in her hand, facing the fire.

It made a noise like a storm. Enormous and hot and wild, it leapt clumsily into the trees. The cypress that had been smoking burst into flames. Then the other trees blazed up like giant torches in a row.

I took Mrs. Armistead by the hand and pulled her away. She resisted jerkily, instinctively, like a woman who had trouble taking direction. She held onto the hose as long as she could, and finally dropped it in the grass.

Carlos was waiting impatiently by the pool. Fire was falling around him, sputtering and turning black in the blue water.

“We better get out of here,” he said. “We might could be cut off if she jumps the driveway. What do you want me to do about the fur coat?”

“Leave it in the pool,” she said. “It’s too hot for mink.”

I didn’t exactly like the woman, but I was beginning to take her personally. I gave Carlos the key to the Mercedes and went with her to the Lincoln Continental.

“You can drive if you like,” she said. “I’m a little done in.”

She grimaced. The admission cost her pain. As we followed the Mercedes down the driveway, she added a kind of explanation: “I love those quail. I’ve been feeding them and watching them ever since we built the house. They were finally beginning to feel safe. They brought their chicks right into the yard this spring.”

“The quail will come back.”

“Maybe so. I wonder if I will.”

We came to a turnaround which overlooked the city. Carlos pulled the Mercedes off the road, and I followed him. Smoke hung over the city, giving it a sepia tint like an old photograph. We climbed out of the cars and looked back at the house.

The fire bent around it like the fingers of a hand, squeezing smoke out of the windows and then flame. We got back into our cars and turned downhill. It was my second evacuation of the day, and it made me feel slightly paranoid until I thought of the reason. The people I was getting involved with could afford to live in the open outside the city, right up against nature.

There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them. I asked Mrs. Armistead how long she had lived in the house.

“Just four years. Roger and I came up here from Newport and built it. It was part of an attempt to hold our marriage together, on the analogy of having a child.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Only each other,” she answered in a wry voice. Then she added: “I wish I had a daughter. I wish even more that my husband had a daughter.”

“On account of the blond girl?”

She turned toward me suddenly, with a kind of suppressed violence. “Just what do you know about the girl?”

“Very little. I’ve only seen her once, at a distance.”

“I’ve never seen her at all,” the woman said. “She sounds like a kook. But it’s hard to tell about young people nowadays.”

“It always was.”

She was still watching my face. “You said that you’re a detective. Just what has the girl done?”

“I’m trying to find out.”

“But you didn’t just pick her at random. She must have done something wrong, besides taking the Mercedes. What did she do?”

“Ask Roger.”

“I intend to. But you haven’t explained why you’re so interested in her.”

“She ran away with a six-year-old boy. It amounts to child stealing.” I held back the rest of the story.

“Why would she do a thing like that?” When I failed to answer that question, she asked another: “Is she on acid or some other drug?”

“She may be.”

“I thought so.” She spoke with a kind of bitter satisfaction. “She went off the deep end the night before last, literally. She ended up jumping into the harbor. Jerry had to go in after her.”

“Who’s Jerry?”

“The boy who lives on the boat. Roger calls him his crew, for want of a better word.”

“What do you call him?”

“His last name is Kilpatrick.”

I remembered the book in my pocket, with “Jerry Kilpatrick” inscribed on the flyleaf in pencil. “Do you know who he is?”

“He’s the son of Brian Kilpatrick, a real estate man in town. As a matter of fact Mr. Kilpatrick sold us that piece of property on the ridge.”

“Is that how your husband met Jerry?”

“I think so. You could ask Roger.”

“When will we be seeing Roger?”

“Quite soon, if he’s at the beach house.”

We were passing through the center of the city. The main street was clogged with traffic, and the sidewalks were crowded. It was strange to see the people going about their business without apparent concern for the fire at the edges of the town. The people were moving more quickly than usual, perhaps, as if their lives had speeded up and might come to an end suddenly.

Following Carlos in the Mercedes, I turned onto Maritime Drive, which took us along the ocean to a row of beach houses curving around a bay. Carlos led me into a parking lot behind the houses, and I drew up beside the Mercedes. “While I’m thinking about it,” Mrs. Armistead said, “I’ll pay you now. How much?”

“A hundred will do it.”

She produced a money clip made of gold in the shape of a dollar-sign and laid a hundred-dollar bill across my upper leg. Then she put a fifty on top of it.

“That’s a tip,” she said.

I took the money, since I needed it for expenses, but I felt vaguely declassed by the transaction, like a repossession man. It gave me a certain sympathy for Roger, even before I met him.

The Armisteads’ beach house was a driftwood-gray building which we entered at the rear on the second-floor level. We moved past an open stairwell into the main room. It was furnished nautically, with brass, a wall barometer, captain’s chairs.

Through the sliding glass windows at the front I could see a youngish man sitting on the balcony. He was sportily clad in a blue T-shirt and a boating cap, but he was watching the people on the beach from a distance, like a spectator sitting in a theatre box.

“Hello, Roger.” The woman’s voice had changed. It was soft and musical, as if she was listening to it, tuning it carefully.

The young man got up and took off his cap, showing neither surprise nor pleasure. “I didn’t expect a visit from you, Fran.”

“The house on Crescent Drive just burned to the ground.”

His face lengthened. “With all my clothes?”

“You can always buy more clothes.” Her voice was partly serious and partly mocking, waiting for him to decide which way he wanted the meeting to go.

He said a little belatedly: “Too bad about the house. You liked it, didn’t you?”

“I liked it as long as you liked it.”

“Are you planning to build again?”

“I don’t know, Roger. What do you think?”

He moved his heavy shoulders, shrugging off the threat of responsibility. “It’s really up to you, isn’t it?”

“Well, I feel like traveling.” She spoke with a kind of fake decisiveness, like a woman improvising. “I may go to Yugoslavia.”

He turned and stared at me, as if he’d just discovered my presence. He was a good-looking man, perhaps ten years younger than his wife, with a strong impatient body. I noticed that his dark hair was thinning. He noticed that I noticed and ruffled it up with his hand.

“This is Mr. Archer,” his wife said. “He’s a detective. He’s looking for the girl you had aboard the sloop.”

“What girl?” But he looked at me with instant dislike and flushed.

“The one who tried to fly too near the sun. Or was it the moon?”

“I wouldn’t know. I had nothing to do with her.”

“Do you know her full name?” I said.

“Susan, I think. Sue Crandall.”

His wife brightened up alarmingly. “I thought you said you had nothing to do with her.”

“I didn’t. I chewed Jerry out for having her aboard, and he told me what her name was. I had to force it out of him.”

“The story came to me differently,” she said. “I heard she spent Thursday night on Ariadne with you. The marina’s rather a public place for that sort of thing, isn’t it?”

He answered somberly: “I don’t mess with young chicks. I spent Thursday night here by myself, drinking. The girl was taken aboard without my knowledge and without my permission.”

“Where’s she from?” I said.

“I don’t really know. Somewhere down south, according to Jerry–”

His wife cut in: “How long have you known her?”

He gave her a hard dull look. “Don’t be a broken record, Fran. I never met the Crandall girl. Ask Jerry Kilpatrick if you don’t believe me. The girl is his little friend.”

“Who gave her the use of the Mercedes, if you didn’t?”

“That was Jerry’s doing, too. I hate to blame it all on him, but that’s the truth. I chewed him out for it.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re not going to have the Mercedes from now on.”

“To hell with you then.”

He moved past her to the open stairs and stamped down to the ground floor. There were sounds like drawers being opened and shut, and closet doors being slammed.

The house was frame, with open rafters and without insulation, so that the angry sounds reverberated through it. Fran Armistead winced at them, as if the violence was being inflicted on her body. She was afraid of her husband, I thought, and probably in love with him.

She went down after him, looking strained and intent, like a woman descending voluntarily into hell. Their voices floated up the stairs, clearly audible in the intervals between the sounds of the surf.

“Don’t be angry,” she said.

“I’m not angry.”

“You can have the Mercedes.”

“I need some transportation,” he said reasonably. “Not that I’m going anywhere.”

“No. You stay with me. I felt absolutely ghastly when the house burned. I felt as if my life was burning down. But it wasn’t, was it?”

“I don’t know. What’s this about going to Yugoslavia?”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“What’s in Yugoslavia?”

“We’ll stay here then. Does that suit you?”

“For the present,” he said. “I may have had it with this town.”

“On account of the girl? What’s her name – Susan?”

“Listen. Do we have to go on about her? I never even saw her.”

A door closed, and their voices became muffled. I began to hear more private sounds, and decided to go outside.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the beach was littered with bodies. It was like a warning vision of the future, when every square foot of the world would be populated. I found a place to sit in the sand beside a youth with a guitar who lay propped against a girl’s stomach. I could smell her sun-tan oil, and I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like the animals in the ark.

I got up and looked around me. Under the stratum of smoke which lay over the city, the air was harshly clear. The low sun was like a spinning yellow frisbee which I could almost reach out and catch.

The thrusting masts of the marina looked dark and calcined against the light in the west. I took off my shoes and socks and carried them along the beach in that direction.