The Underground Man

chapter 26

When I got to San Francisco it was dark, and it had been raining. Out at sea beyond the Golden Gate a mass of clouds was moving in from the Farallon Islands. The offshore wind blowing across the bridge felt wet and cold on my face.

A rectangular yellow sign at the entrance to Haven Road said that it was “Not a Through Street.” I turned my car around and parked it, and continued on foot along the pitted asphalt. The scattered houses were hidden from the road, but I could see their lights shining through the trees.

A voice spoke softly from the darkness. “Lew?”

Willie Mackey appeared at the side of the road. He was wearing a dark raincoat, and his mustached face looked disembodied, like something called up at a seance. I moved in under the dripping trees with him and shook his gloved hand.

“They haven’t shown,” he said. “How hard is your information?”

“Just medium.” The hope that brought me north had turned over in my chest and was sinking heavily toward my stomach. “Is the Storm woman at home?”

“She’s there, but there’s nobody with her.”

“Do you know that?”

“Yep. Harold can see her through the side window.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Nothing much. Last time I checked with Harold, he said she seemed to be waiting.”

“I think I’ll go in and talk to her.”

Willie took hold of my arm, pinching the muscle just above the elbow. “Is that a good idea, Lew?”

“She may have heard from them. She’s the older boy’s mother.”

“All right, don’t let me stop you.” Willie released my arm and stepped aside.

I made my way up the washed-out gravel drive. The twin conical towers standing up against the night sky made the house look like something out of a medieval romance.

The illusion faded as I got nearer. There was a multicolored fanlight over the front door, with segments of glass fallen out, like missing teeth in an old smile. The veranda steps were half broken down and groaned under my weight. The door creaked open when I knocked.

Ellen appeared in the lighted hallway. Her mouth and eyes hadn’t changed very much since her picture was taken all those years before, and it made the gray in her hair seem accidental. She was wearing a dress with a long-sleeved jersey top and a long full skirt on which there were paint stains in all three primary colors. Her body moved with unconscious pride.

She looked both eager and fearful as she came to the door. “Who are you?”

“My name is Lew Archer. The door blew open when I knocked.”

“The latch needs fixing.” She jiggled the knob. “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

“You’re well informed.”

“Martha Crandall called me. She said you’re looking for her daughter.”

“Has Susan been here?”

“Not yet, but Martha spoke as if she intended to come.” The woman looked out past me into the darkness. “She said my son Jerry is traveling with her.”

“Right. And they have Leo Broadhurst’s grandson with them.”

She seemed puzzled. “How could Leo have a grandson?”

“He left a son behind him, remember. The son had a son. Ronny’s six years old, and he’s why I’m here.”

“What are they doing with a six-year-old?”

“I don’t know exactly. I was hoping to ask them.”

“I see. Won’t you please come in.” She gestured with a kind of awkward grace, and her breast lifted. “We can wait together.”

“You’re very kind, Mrs. Kilpatrick.”

The name displeased her, as if I’d brought it up to remind her of the past. She corrected me: “Miss Storm. I took it originally as a professional name. But I haven’t used any other name for years.”

“I understand you’re a painter.”

“Not a good one. But I work at it.”

She took me into a large, high-ceilinged room. The walls were hung with canvases. Most of them were unframed, and their whorls and splotches of color looked unfinished, perhaps unfinishable.

The windows of the room were heavily draped, except for a triple window in an embrasure. Through the trees outside I could see the lights of Sausalito scattered down the hillside.

“Nice view,” I said. “Do you mind if I draw the curtains?”

“Please do. Do you suppose they’re out there watching me?”

I looked at her, and saw that she was serious. “Who do you mean?”

“Jerry and Susan and the little boy.”

“It isn’t likely.”

“I know it isn’t. But I’ve been feeling watched, tonight. Drawing the curtains doesn’t really help. Whatever it is out there has X-ray eyes. Call it God, or call it the Devil. It hardly matters.”

I turned from the window and looked at her face again. It had a certain nakedness, unused to the pressure of eyes.

“I’ve been keeping you standing, Mr. Archer. Won’t you sit down?” She indicated a heavy old perpendicular chair.

“I’d rather sit in another room where we’re not so visible.”

“So would I, really.”

She led me through the front hallway into a kind of office under the stairs, so small it was claustrophobic. The slanting ceiling at its highest part was barely high enough to accommodate my head.

Gary Snyder’s broadside “Four Changes” was thumbtacked to the wall. Beside it and in contrast was an old engraving of a whaling ship beating its way through mountainous seas around a jagged black Cape Horn. There was an old iron safe in the corner with a legend on the door: “William Strome Mill and Lumber Co.”

She perched on the desk beside the telephone, and I sat on a teetering swivel chair. At these close quarters I could pick up her odor. It was pleasant but rather lifeless, like wood ash or dried leaves. I wondered vaguely if she was still used up by the passion that had driven her up the mountain with Leo Broadhurst.

She caught the look in my eye and misinterpreted it, though not by much:

“I’m not as far out as you think. I have had one or two mystical experiences. I know that each and every night is the first night of eternity.”

“What about the days?”

She answered shortly: “I do my best work at night.”

“So I’ve been told.”

She turned on me. She was quick on the uptake. “Has Martha been talking about me?”

“Just in the good sense. Martha said you saved her life when she was a kid.”

She seemed pleased to hear this, but not to be diverted. “You know about my affair with Leo Broadhurst, or you wouldn’t have brought his name up.”

“I brought it up to identify his grandson.”

“Am I being paranoid?”

“Maybe a little. You get that way living alone.”

“How do you know that, doctor?”

“I’m not a doctor, I’m a patient. I live alone.”

“By choice?”

“Not mine. My wife couldn’t live with me. But now I’m used to it.”

“So am I. I love my loneliness,” she said rather unconvincingly. “Sometimes I paint all night. I don’t need sunlight to do my kind of work. I paint things that don’t reflect the light – spiritual conditions.”

I thought of the paintings on the wall of the other room. They resembled serious contusions and open wounds. I said:

“Did Martha tell you about Jerry’s accident? Apparently he broke his arm.”

Her changeable face was pinched by compunction. “Where can he be?”

“On the road, unless he’s thought of a better place to go.”

“What’s he running away from?”

“You’d know better than I.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him in fifteen years.”

“Why not?”

She made a gesture with her hands which seemed to say that I knew all about her. It was the gesture of a woman who spent more time in thought and fantasy than in talking and living.

“My husband – my former husband hasn’t forgiven me for Leo.”

“I’ve been wondering what happened to Leo.”

“So have I. I went to Reno for my divorce, and he was supposed to join me there. But he never did. He stood me up cold.” Her voice was bitter but light, like an anger that was no longer fully remembered. “I haven’t seen him since I left Santa Teresa.”

“Where did he go?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard from him.”

“I heard he left the country.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Martha Crandall. She said she got it from you.”

The woman seemed a little confused. “I may have said something of the sort. Leo did a lot of talking about taking me to Hawaii or Tahiti.”

“He did more than talk, didn’t he? I understand he booked passage for two on an English freighter going to Honolulu by way of Vancouver. The Swansea Castle sailed from San Francisco about July 6, 1955.”

“And Leo was aboard?”

“He bought the tickets anyway. Weren’t you with him?”

“No. By that time I’d been in Reno for at least a week. He must have gone with another woman.”

“Or alone,” I said.

“Not Leo. He couldn’t stand to be alone. He had to have someone with him in order to feel really alive. Which is one reason I came back to this house after he left me. I wanted to prove that I could live alone, that I didn’t need him.

“I was born in this house,” she said, as if she’d been waiting fifteen years for a listener. “It was my grandfather’s house, and my grandmother raised me after my mother died. It’s interesting to come back to your childhood home. And creepy, too, like becoming very young and very old, both at the same time. The spirit that haunts the house.”

That was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirt – very young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo.

She made a nervous self-depreciating gesture. “Am I boring you?”

“Hardly. But I’m interested in Leo. I don’t know much about him.”

“Neither do I, really. For a couple of years I went to sleep every night thinking about him and woke up in the morning hoping to see him that day. But afterwards I realized I hardly knew him at all. He was just a surface, if you know what I mean.”

“Not exactly.”

“I mean, you know, he had no interior life. He did things well. But that’s all there was to him. He was what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“He took part in nine or ten landings in the Pacific, and after the war he raced his boat and competed in tennis tournaments and played polo.”

“That didn’t leave him much time for women.”

“He didn’t need much time,” she answered wryly. “Men without insides usually don’t. I know this sounds like bad-mouthing, but it really isn’t. I used to love Leo, and I probably still do. I don’t know how I’d feel if he walked in this minute.” She looked at the door.

“Is he likely to?”

She shook her head. “I don’t even know if he’s alive.”

“Do you have any reason to think he’s dead?”

“No. But I used to tell myself he was. It made it easier to bear. He never even bothered to phone me in Reno.”

“I gather you took it hard.”

“I cried a lot the first winter. But I crept in here and weathered it. Whatever happens to me now happens on canvas.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely?”

She gave me a hard look, to see if I was trying to move in on her. She must have seen that I wasn’t, because she said:

“I’m lonely all the time – at least I used to be, until I learned to live alone. You know what I mean, if you live alone. The terrible humiliation and self-pity, with no one to blame for anything but yourself.”

“I know what you mean.” I brought her back to the subject of her marriage, which seemed to lie hidden at the center of the case. “Why did you leave your husband?”

“It was all over between us.”

“Didn’t you miss him and the little boy?”

“Not Brian. He got rough with me – you can’t forgive a man once he does that. He threatened to kill me if I tried to take Jerry with me, or even see him. Of course I missed my son, but I learned to live without him. I don’t need anyone, literally.”

“How about figuratively?”

Her smile was deep and revealing, like a glimpse of the lights and shadows inside her head. “Figuratively is another matter. Of course I’ve felt like a dropout from the world. The worst loneliness I felt was for the children. Not just my own child – the children I taught in school. I keep seeing their faces and hearing their voices.”

“Like Martha Crandall?”

“She was one of them once.”

“And Albert Sweetner, and Fritz Snow.”

She gave me a disenchanted look. “You’ve been doing quite a lot of research on me. Believe me, I’m not that important.”

“Maybe you’re not. But Albert and Fritz and Martha keep cropping up. I gather they came together in your high school class.”

“Unfortunately, they did.”

“Why do you say unfortunately?”

“The three of them made an explosive combination. You’ve probably heard about their famous trip to Los Angeles.”

“I’m not quite clear about who the ringleader was. Was it Albert?”

“The authorities thought so at the time. He was the only one of the three who had a juvenile record. But I think it was originally Martha’s idea.” She added thoughtfully: “Martha was the one who came out of it best, too. If you can use that word about a forced marriage to an older man.”

“Who was the father of her child? Albert Sweetner?”

“You’ll have to ask Martha that.” She changed the subject: “Is Albert really dead? Martha said on the phone that he was.”

“He was stabbed to death last night. Don’t ask me who was responsible, because I don’t know.”

She looked down sorrowfully as if the dead man was in the room at her feet. “Poor Albert. He didn’t have much of a life. Most of his adult life was spent in prison.”

“How do you know that, Miss Storm?”

“I tried to keep in touch with him.” She added after a little hesitation: “As a matter of fact he came here to this house last week.”

“Did you know he’d escaped from the pen?”

“What if I did?”

“You didn’t turn him in.”

“I’m not a very good citizen,” she said with some irony. “It was his third conviction, and he was due to spend most of the rest of his life in prison.”

“What was he in for?”

“Armed robbery.”

“Weren’t you afraid of him when he came to your door?”

“I never have been. I was surprised to see him, but not afraid.”

“What did he want from you? Money?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t able to give him much. I haven’t sold a picture for some time.”

“Did you give him anything else?”

“Some bread and cheese.”

I was still carrying the green-covered book. I got it out of my pocket.

“That looks like a book I used to own,” Ellen said.

“It is.” I showed her the book-plate in the front.

“Where did you get this, anyway? Not from Al Sweetner?”

“From your son Jerry, ultimately.”

“He kept it?” She seemed starved for any dry crumb from the past she had abandoned.

“Evidently he did.” I pointed out his penciled signature on the flyleaf. “But the thing I wanted to show you is inside.” I opened the book and took the clipping out. “Did you give this to Al Sweetner?”

She took it in her hand and studied it. “Yes, I did.”

“What for?”

“I thought it might be worth some money to him.”

“That was a pretty double-edged act of charity. I can’t believe your motives were entirely altruistic.”

She flared up, rather weakly, as if nothing was worth getting really angry about. “What do you know about my motives?”

“Only what you tell me.”

She was silent for a minute or two. “I suppose I was curious. I’d been holding onto this clipping all summer, wondering what I ought to do about it. I didn’t know who had originated it. And of course I didn’t know what had happened to Leo. I thought perhaps Albert could find out for me.”

“So you turned him loose on Santa Teresa. That was kind of a crucial thing to do.”

“What was so crucial about it?”

“Albert is dead, and so is Stanley Broadhurst.” I spelled out the details for her.

“Then it was Stanley who placed this ad in the Chronicle,” she said. “I’d have got in touch with him if I had known. But I thought it was probably Elizabeth.”

“What made you think that?”

“I can remember when this picture was taken.” She smoothed it on her knee, as if it was a feather she had found. “Elizabeth took it, before she knew that Leo and I were lovers. It brings back everything. Everything I had and everything I lost.”

There were romantic tears in her eyes. My own eyes remained quite dry. I was thinking of everything that Elizabeth Broadhurst had lost.