The Underground Man

chapter 31

It was raining in Palo Alto, where Ronny and I had breakfast. It was raining in Gilroy and King City, and in Petroleum City it looked like rain.

I stopped at the Yucca Tree Inn to check on the Crandalls. Joy Rawlins was back on the desk. She told me Lester Crandall had rehired her that morning before he took off with his family for Los Angeles.

“Did you see Susan?” I asked her.

“Yeah. She’s calmed down quite a bit. All three of them seemed to be making more sense for a change.”

Before I left the Inn, I called the Santa Teresa office of the Forest Service. Kelsey wasn’t there, but I left a message for him: to meet me at noon, if possible, at Mrs. Broadhurst’s house. Then Ronny and I went back on the freeway for the final leg of our journey.

Using the buckle of a seat-belt as a microphone, the boy kept Space Control informed of our progress. Once he said into his imaginary mike:

“Daddy. This is Ronny. Do you hear me?”

We were just a few miles north of Santa Teresa, in what must have been familiar territory to him. He dropped the buckle and turned in the seat to speak to me directly:

“Is Daddy coming back?”

“No. He isn’t.”

“You mean he’s dead, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did the bogy man kill him?”

“I’m afraid he did.” This was the first real evidence I’d had from another witness that the man in Susan’s story of the murder was neither invention nor fantasy. “Did you get a good look at him, Ronny?”

“Pretty good.”

“What did he look like?”

“A bogy man.” His voice was hushed and earnest. “He had long black hair and a long black beard.”

“How was he dressed?”

“All in black. He had black slacks and a black top, and he was wearing black glasses.”

His voice was singsong, and it made me distrust his accuracy. “Was it anyone you knew?”

He seemed appalled by the idea. “No. I didn’t know him. He was the wrong size.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He wasn’t the same size as anybody I know.”

“The same size as who?”

“Nobody,” he said obscurely.

“Was he large or small?”

“Small, I think. I can’t help it if I didn’t know him.”

The boy was showing signs of strain, and I dropped my questioning of him. But he had a final question to ask me:

“Is Mommy okay?”

“She’s okay. You talked to her on the phone last night, remember?”

“I remember. But I thought maybe it was taped.”

“It was for real.”

“That’s good.” He fell against me and went to sleep.

He was still sleeping when we drove up the canyon to his grandmother’s house. His mother was waiting on the veranda steps. She ran across the driveway and opened the car door and lifted him out.

She held him until he struggled to be free. Then she set him down and gave me both her hands:

“I’ll never be able to thank you.”

“Don’t try. It worked out luckily for all of us. Except Stanley.”

“Yes. Poor Stanley.” There was a puzzled cleft, like a dry knife-cut, between her eyebrows. “What became of the blond girl?”

“Susan is with her parents. They’re going to get her psychiatric care.”

“And Jerry Kilpatrick? His father’s been calling me.”

“He’s staying with his mother in Sausalito for the present.”

“You mean you didn’t have either of them arrested?”

“No I didn’t.”

“But I thought they were kidnapers.”

“So did I, at one point. I was wrong. They’re a pair of alienated adolescents. They seem to have thought they were rescuing Ronny from the adult world. To a certain extent it was true. The girl saw your husband murdered yesterday. Fifteen years ago, when she was younger than Ronny, she witnessed another murder. If she reacted pretty wildly to this one, you can hardly blame her.”

The cleft between Jean’s penciled brows deepened. “Has there been another murder?”

“It appears so. Your husband’s father – Leo – didn’t run off with a woman after all. Apparently he was killed in the Mountain House and buried nearby. It’s what your husband and the girl were digging for yesterday.”

Jean looked at me in confusion. Perhaps she understood my words, but they laid too great a load on her stretched emotions. She looked around her, saw that Ronny had disappeared, and began to call his name quite frantically.

He came out of the house. “Where’s Grandma Nell?”

“She isn’t here,” Jean said. “She’s in the hospital.”

“Is she dead too?”

“Hush. Of course not. Dr. Jerome says she’ll be coming home tomorrow or the next day.”

“How is your mother-in-law?” I said to her.

“She’s going to be all right. Her EKG was virtually normal this morning, and so was her conversation. It gave her a tremendous lift when I told her you were on your way with Ronny. If you have the time, I know she’d love to have you drop in and see her.”

“Is she allowed visitors?”

“Yes.”

“I may do that.”

The three of us went inside. While Ronny inspected the stuffed bird collection, his mother filled me in on the past twenty-four hours. They had been mostly waiting. She had phoned the sheriff’s office, as I urged her to, but they had been unable to give her any protection. Brian Kilpatrick had expressed a willingness to come over. She told him it wasn’t necessary.

“Forget about Kilpatrick.”

She gave me a slow look. “It wasn’t exactly what you think. He intended to bring his fiancee along.”

“Forget about her, too. What you need is a guard.”

“I have you.”

“But I won’t be staying. I wish I could persuade you to leave town.”

“I can’t. Grandma Nell is depending on me.”

“So is Ronny. You may have to make a choice.”

“You seriously think he’s still in danger?”

“I have to think so. He saw the man who murdered your husband.”

“Could he describe him?”

“Not really. He had a beard and a wig that were probably false. But I got the impression that it might just possibly be someone that Ronny knows. I wouldn’t press him on the subject. But if he does any spontaneous talking keep a record, will you? Every word if you can.”

“I will.”

She looked across the room at her son as if his round skull contained the secret meaning of her life. He said with the light of discovery on his face:

“There’s been a fire around here. I can see it and I can smell it. Who started the fire?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” I turned to his mother. “I want you to think about getting out of here before dark.”

“Nothing happened last night.”

“Your son wasn’t here last night. You’ll both be safer in the Wallers’ apartment in Los Angeles. Just say the word, and I’ll drive you–”

She cut me short: “I’ll think about it.” Then she softened her answer. “I’m really very grateful for the offer. Only it’s hard for me to think right now. I only know I can’t go back to Northridge.”

I heard the rising mutter of a car approaching the house and went outside. It was Kelsey, driving a Forest Service station wagon. He climbed out and gave me a semiofficial handshake. His suit was rumpled, and his eyes had a slight glare in them.

“I got your message, Archer. What’s on your mind?”

“There’s quite a lot to tell you. First, I’d like to know what you got from your witness yesterday. The coed who saw the bearded man driving the car.”

“That was all she saw,” Kelsey said with some disappointment. “All she could give me was a general description.”

“What about the car?”

“It was an older car. She couldn’t tell the make. She thought it had a California license, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. I’m going to take another crack at her today. Shipstad of the LAPD asked me to.”

“You got in touch with Arnie?”

“I called him this morning. He’s pretty well discarded the idea that the wig and the beard belonged to Albert Sweetner. They didn’t fit him at all well. Shipstad is trying to trace them through wig stores and cosmetic companies. But it’s a big job and it may take a while. It would help if we could get a better description of the man my witness saw.”

“He was fairly small,” I said, “if I can believe my witness. He was wearing black slacks, some kind of black shirt or sweater, and dark glasses. And there’s no doubt he murdered Stanley Broadhurst.” I filled him in on what I had learned in the last twenty-four hours. “Can we get hold of a bulldozer and a man to operate it?”

“I believe we left one on the campus, in case the fire came back. I can run it myself if it’s still there.”

“Do you think the fire will come back?”

“Not unless the wind plays us false. We set a successful backfire above Buckhorn Meadow this morning. We should have it under control in another twenty-four hours – maybe sooner if we get the rain that’s predicted.” He glanced at the moving sky. “I’m hoping for just enough rain to discourage Rattlesnake but not enough to bring the mountain down on us.”

Kelsey asked me to ride with him in the station wagon. In order to keep my freedom of movement I said that I would follow along in my car.

We drove out through the scorched mouth of the canyon and up into the foothills. The campus playing field, which had been swarming with men and machines the day before was almost deserted. A couple of maintenance men were picking up bottles and scraps of paper and replacing turf.

A tractor equipped with an earth-moving blade was standing in the lot behind the bleachers. While Kelsey was getting it started, I climbed to the top of the stands and looked around.

Whitecaps stippled the surface of the ocean. Above the coastline to the southeast, smoke hung like early twilight in the sky. At the other extreme of vision, storm clouds were moving down from the northwest, trailing black rain along the coastal mountains. It looked like a day of change.

Kelsey rode the tractor down the hillside trail. I followed along in his dust, carrying a spade I had borrowed from the maintenance men.

For twenty or thirty minutes I leaned on a sycamore trunk and watched the tractor push dirt in a slow back-and-forth rhythm. When it got about as deep into the earth as a man is tall, its leading edge jarred against metal and Kelsey nearly pitched head first from his seat.

He backed out of the gradual hole he had made and let me climb down into it. In a few minutes I had spaded clear enough of the metallic obstruction to see that it was a dark red car top blotched with the lighter red of rust and shaped like a Porsche roof.

I cleared the left front window and smashed it with the spade. The odor of corruption came out, dry and thin and shocking. In the hollow of the car’s body something wrapped in a rotting blanket lay on the front seat.

I stretched head down in the dirt and peered in at the dead man. The flesh was always the first to go, and then the hair, and then the bones, and finally the teeth. Leo Broadhurst was all bones and teeth.