The Underground Man

chapter 19

Jean was looking down into her husband’s face as if she wondered how it felt to be dead. When Purvis came marching back, with his spade over his shoulder, she gave a start and turned away. Purvis set the spade down quietly and carefully.

He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and took out a black leather folder with Stanley’s name printed in gold inside. It contained his driver’s license and other identification, a number of credit cards and membership cards, and three dollar bills.

“He didn’t have much left,” the young man said.

I was struck by the feeling in his voice. “Did you know Stanley Broadhurst?”

“I knew him just about all my life, starting back in grade school.”

“I thought he went to private school.”

“He did, after he left grade school. He had some kind of trouble that summer, and his mother put him in a special school.”

“The summer his father went away?”

“That’s right. Stanley had a lot of bad luck in his life.” He spoke with a certain awe. “I used to envy him back there in grade school. His people were rich, and we were as poor as Job’s turkey. But I’ll never envy him again.”

I looked around for Jean. She had wandered off in the direction of the stable, and seemed to be searching for a means of escape. She reminded me of the frightened doe I had seen the day before, but there was no fawn with her.

When I reached her, she was standing beside the incinerated car. “Was this ours?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Do you have transportation, Mr. Archer? I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Elizabeth’s house. I spent the night at the hospital.”

I told Kelsey where we were going and said I might see him later, in the pathology department of the hospital. Jean and I started up the hillside path. She took the lead, moving quickly, like a woman trying to climb out of the present.

Near the bleachers where my car was parked, a number of plywood tables had been set up on trestles. A hundred or more men were seated at them, eating mulligan stew dispensed by a motorized chuckwagon.

Most of the men looked up as we passed. Some whistled; a few cheered. Jean kept going, her head down. She climbed into my car as if she was being pursued.

“It’s my fault,” she said in self-loathing. “I shouldn’t be wearing these clothes.”

We drove a long way around through the outskirts of the city. I tried to question her about her husband, but she was unresponsive. She sat with her head down, deep in her own thoughts.

When we entered Mrs. Broadhurst’s canyon, she straightened up and began to look around her. The fire had come down nearly as far as the entrance to the canyon and left its scorch-marks on the trees and on the hillside brush.

Most of the houses in Canyon Estates were untouched. A few had been burned, as if picked out at random. There was nothing left of one house but a stone fireplace and a statue of Venus standing up out of rubble and wilted pipes. A man and a woman were poking among the ruins.

The random pattern of the fire persisted as we went further into the canyon. Mrs. Broadhurst’s avocado trees seemed unharmed, but the olive trees beyond them had burned black. The eucalyptus trees that towered over the tile roof of the house had lost most of their branches and all their leaves. The barn had burned. The house itself was scorched but intact.

Jean had a key, and we went in together. The closed house was full of the bitter smell of fire, and seemed abandoned. The worn Victorian furniture looked ready for the junk heap.

Even the mounted birds in their glass cases looked as if they had seen better days. An acorn woodpecker had only one glass eye. The breasts of the robins had faded. They looked like imitation birds made to lend life to a dead and scruffy world.

“Excuse me,” Jean said. “I’ve got to find something black.”

She disappeared into the other wing of the house. I had decided to call Willie Mackey, a San Francisco detective who had worked with me on other cases. Looking for a telephone, I went into a kind of den adjoining the living room. There were ancestral tintypes on the walls. A man with mutton chop whiskers and a high winged collar glared at me from a black frame, as if daring me to make something of his whiskers.

His look reminded me of Mrs. Broadhurst, but it didn’t help me to understand her. I had seen her young and forceful, then sick and doddering. I needed something to fill up the gap between those versions of her, something that would explain why her husband had left her or why her son hadn’t been able to.

The room contained among other things a black leather couch which made me want to lie down, and a kneehole desk made of burnished cherrywood. There was a telephone on the desk, sitting on top of a worn leather folder.

I sat down at the desk, with my knees snug in the knee-holes, and dialed Willie Mackey’s office on Geary Street in San Francisco. The girl on duty switched me to his apartment on the top floor of his building.

Another girl answered in a less businesslike voice, and then Willie came to the phone.

“Call me back, Lew. You caught me in the midst of the act of love.”

“You call me.” I read off Mrs. Broadhurst’s phone number to him.

Then I lifted the phone and opened the leather folder under it. There were several sheets of foolscap in the folder, and a faded map drawn in ink on creased and yellowing paper. The map showed about half of the Santa Teresa coastal plain; roughly penned in at the back of it were foothills and mountains resembling thumb-prints and paw-prints.

In the upper righthand corner of the map, someone had written:

The top sheet of foolscap was covered with Spencerian handwriting. Under the heading “ ‘Memories,’ by Elizabeth Falconer Broadhurst,” I read:

At this point the Spencerian writing began to deteriorate:

Toward the end, the handwriting went to pieces. It straggled across the lined yellow page like a defeated army.

I started to go through the drawers of the desk. The top one on the righthand side was stuffed with bills. Some of them had been unpaid for months and had special little messages written across them: –“Immediate payment will be appreciated,” “In case of further delay, the matter will be placed in the hands of legal counsel.”

In the second drawer I found an old wooden gun case and opened it. Fitted into its shaped felt lining were a pair of German target pistols. They were old, but oiled and gleaming like strange blue jewels.

I lifted one of the pistols out of the case and hefted it in my hand. It was so light and so well balanced that it seemed to come up of its own accord to eye level and let me sight along it. I aimed it at the picture of the man with the whiskers, but that only made me feel foolish. I carried it to the window to find something better to aim at.

No birds. But there was a circular bird feeder on a metal pole set in cement. A rat was eating the few kernels of grain left in the feeder. I pointed the empty gun at him. He ran down the pole and disappeared in the black ravine.