The Underground Man

chapter 13

It cost me fifty dollars, paid in advance, to be driven to Northridge, where I’d left my car in Stanley Broadhurst’s garage. The driver wanted to talk, but I shut him off and caught an hour’s sleep.

I woke up with a pounding head when we left the Ventura Freeway. I told the driver to stop at a public pay phone. He found one and gave me change for a dollar. I dialed Lester Crandall’s number.

A woman’s voice which sounded as if it was being kept under strict control said: “This is the Crandall residence.”

“Is Mr. Crandall home?”

“I’m afraid he isn’t. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Where is he?”

“On the Strip.”

“Looking for Susan?”

Her voice became more personal. “Yes, he is. Are you a friend of Lester’s?”

“No. But I’ve seen your daughter. She isn’t in Los Angeles. May I come and talk to you, Mrs. Crandall?”

“I don’t know. Are you a policeman?”

I told her what I was, and gave her my name, and she responded with her address. It was on a street I knew off Sunset Boulevard.

The cab took me under the freeway to Northridge. I’d kept the key to the Broadhurst garage. I asked the driver to wait while I used the key and made sure my car was still there. It was, and it started. I went out to the street and dismissed the driver.

When I went to the back of the house a second time, I looked around more carefully. Some light came from the neighbor’s on the other side of the grape-stake fence. I noticed that the back door of Stanley Broadhurst’s house was slightly ajar. I opened it all the way and turned on the kitchen lights.

There were marks in the wood around the lock which showed that it had been jimmied. It occurred to me that the man who had done the job might still be inside. I didn’t want to run into him accidentally. Burglars seldom intended to kill anyone, but they sometimes killed when they were caught by surprise in their dark fantasy.

I turned off the kitchen lights and waited. The house was silent. From outside I could hear the pulsing hum of the arterial boulevard I had just left.

The neighbors were listening to the late news on television. In spite of these normal sounds, I felt a physical anxiety close to nausea. It got worse when I went into the hallway.

Perhaps I smelled or otherwise sensed the man in the study. In any case, when I switched on the light he was lying there in front of the broken desk, grinning up at me like a magician who had pulled off the ultimate trick.

I didn’t recognize him right away. He had a black beard and mustache and long black hair which seemed to grow peculiarly low on his forehead. I found on closer inspection that the hair was a wig which didn’t fit him too well. The beard and mustache were false.

Under the hair was the dead face of the man who called himself Al and had come to the house to ask for a thousand dollars. Come once too often. The front of his shirt was wet and heavy with blood, and there were stab wounds under it. He smelled of whisky.

The inside breast pocket of his cheap dark suit bore the label of a San Francisco department store. The pocket itself was empty, and so were his other pockets. I lifted him to feel for a wallet in his hip pockets. There was none.

I checked my notebook for the address he had given me: the Star Motel, on Pacific Coast Highway below Topanga Canyon. Then I looked at the rolltop desk which he had evidently broken open. The wood around the locking mechanism was splintered, and the rolltop section was stuck in a half-open position.

I couldn’t force it far enough back to release the drawers, which stayed locked. But in one of the pigeonholes I found a pair of photographs of a young man and a young woman who at first glance looked alike. Clipped to the photographs was a piece of paper with the printed heading: “Memo from the desk of Stanley Broadhurst.”

Someone, presumably Stanley, had written laboriously on it: “Have you seen this man and woman? According to witnesses they left Santa Teresa early in July, 1955, and traveled to San Francisco by car (red Porsche, Calif. license number XUJ251). They stayed in San Francisco one or two nights, and sailed July 6 en route to Honolulu via Vancouver on the English freighter Swansea Castle. A thousand-dollar reward will be paid for information about their present whereabouts.”

I took another look at the pictures attached to it. The girl had dark hair and very large dark eyes which looked up rather dimly out of the old photograph. Her features seemed to be aquiline and sensitive, except for her heavy passionate mouth.

The man’s face, which I took to be Captain Broadhurst’s, was less open. There were well-shaped bones in his face and hard, staring eyes set obliquely in them. The resemblance between him and the girl turned out to be superficial when I compared them. His bold stare kept him hidden in a way, but I guessed that he was a taker. She looked like a giver.

I turned to the filing cabinet. Its top drawer had been forced, so violently that it couldn’t be properly closed. It was full of letters carefully arranged among manila dividers. The postmarks ranged over the past six years.

I picked out a fairly recent one whose return address was the Santa Teresa Travel Agency, 920 Main Street.

I looked at an older letter which was handwritten on the stationery of a Santa Teresa church and signed by the pastor, a Reverend Lowell Riceyman.

I looked down at the dead man, and thought of the other dead man on the mountain. The Reverend Riceyman had given Stanley good advice, which he had failed to take. A feeling of embarrassment and regret went through me. It wasn’t exactly grief for Stanley, though it included that.

It also included the realization that I had to call the police. I left the phone in the study untouched and went back to the kitchen. As soon as I switched on the lights, I noticed the empty brown whisky bottle standing among the dishes in the sink.

I called the Valley headquarters of the LAPD and reported a homicide. During the nine or ten minutes that the police took to answer the call, I walked halfway along the block and found Al’s Volkswagen, locked. At the very last minute, when I could already hear the siren, I remembered that the engine of my car was running. I went out to the garage and turned it off.

I had a light hat in the trunk. I used it to cover my damaged head, and met the patrol car out in front of the house. The man next door came out and looked at us and went back into his house without saying anything.

I took the officers in through the back door, pointing out the jimmy marks. I showed them the dead man and told them briefly how I had happened to find him. They made a few notes and put in a call for a homicide team, suggesting politely that I stick around.

I told my story in greater detail to a captain of detectives named Arnie Shipstad, whom I had known since he was a detective-sergeant with the Hollywood division. Arnie was a fresh-faced Swede with shrewd sensitive eyes which registered the details of the study as precisely as the cameras of his photographer did.

The dead man had his picture taken with and without his wig and beard and mustache. Then he was carefully rolled onto a stretcher and carried out.

Arnie lingered. “So you think he came here for money?”

“I’m sure he did.”

“But he got something different. And the man who promised him money is dead, too.” He picked up Stanley’s memo, which I had shown him, and read aloud: “ ‘Have you seen this man and woman?’ Is this what it’s all about?”

“It could be.”

“Why do you think he came here in disguise?”

“I can think of a couple of possible reasons. He may be wanted. I’d lay even money that he is wanted.”

Arnie nodded in agreement. “I’ll check him out. But there’s another possibility, too.”

“What’s that?”

“He may have been wearing the outfit for fun and games. Quite a few swingers use longhair wigs when they go quail-hunting. This one may have been planning to pick up his money and have a night on the town.”

I had to admit there was something in the idea.