The Underground Man

chapter 32

I left Kelsey widening and deepening the hole around the buried car and phoned the sheriff-coroner’s office from the college. Then I drove down the hill and paid another visit to Fritz Snow’s house.

Somewhat to my surprise, Fritz answered the door himself. He was dressed in an old brown cardigan and slacks, with worn sneakers on his feet. His shoulders were bowed and his eyes bleared as if the weekend had lasted a generation and aged him by that much.

He blocked my entrance with his soft reluctant body. “I’m not supposed to let anybody in.”

“You wanted to talk to me yesterday.”

“Did I?” He seemed to be trying to remember. “Mother will slay me if I do.”

“I doubt that, Fritz. The secret’s out anyway. We just dug up Leo Broadhurst.”

His heavy gaze came up to my face. He seemed to be trying to read his future in my eyes. I could read it in his: a future of fear and confusion and trouble, resembling his past.

“May I come in for a minute?”

“I guess so.”

He let me in and closed the door behind me. He was breathing audibly, as if the action had used up most of his strength.

“You told me yesterday that you buried Mr. Broadhurst. I thought you meant Stanley. But you meant his father Leo, didn’t you?”

“Yessir.” He looked around the sparse room as if his mother might have bugged it. “I did a terrible thing. Now I’ve got to suffer for it.”

“Did you kill Leo Broadhurst?”

“No sir. All I did, I buried him with my ’dozer when he was already dead.”

“Who put you up to it?”

“Albert Sweetner did.”

He nodded in confirmation of his own statement, then looked at me to see if I believed it. I neither believed nor disbelieved it.

“Albert Sweetner made me do it,” he said.

“How could Albert make you do it?”

“I was ascared of him.”

“You must have had more of a reason than that.”

Fritz shook his head. “I didn’t want to bury him. I got so nervous I couldn’t run the machine. Albert tried to take it back to the compound. He ran it in the ditch off Rattlesnake Road, and they caught him with it and sent him back to prison.”

“But you got off scot-free?”

“I did that time except that I got fired and put in the nursing home. They never found out about Mr. Broadhurst.”

“Does your mother know what you and Albert did?”

“I guess she does. I told her.”

“When did you tell her?”

He considered the question. “Yesterday, I guess it was.”

“Before I was here, or after?”

“I don’t remember.” Fritz was showing signs of moral strain. “You keep coming back and back. And my memory keeps jumping around on me. I keep remembering when Digger got my daddy.”

“When Digger got him?”

“That’s right, when they buried him out at the cemetery. I could hear the dirt plunking down on the coffin.” Tears formed on his face as if it was deliquescent, drawing moisture from the air.

“Did you tell your mother before I was here, or after?”

“After, I think it was. After you were here. She said if I told another soul they’d send me straight off to prison.” He lowered his tangled head and gave me an up-from-under look. “Will they send me to prison now?”

“I don’t know, Fritz. Are you sure that you and Albert didn’t kill him?”

The idea seemed to shock him. “Why would we do a thing like that?”

I could think of several reasons. Leo Broadhurst had been lucky, and they had not. He had married the richest woman around. He had tumbled the prettiest girl, and got her with child, and Albert and Fritz had taken the rap for it.

Fritz was alarmed by my silence. “I swear I didn’t kill him. I swear it on the Bible.” There was an actual Bible on the table, and he rested his palm on the black cloth cover. “See, I swear it on the Bible. I never killed anybody in my life. I don’t even like to trap a gopher. I hate to step on a snail. They’ve all got feelings!”

He was weeping actively again, possibly over the deaths of snails and the agonies of gophers. Above the watery noises he was making I heard a car in the street and looked out through the front window. An old white Rambler pulled up at the curb behind my car. Mrs. Snow got out with a heavy paper bag in her arms. She was wearing a raincoat over slacks.

I went outside, closing the door on Fritz. His mother stopped abruptly when she saw me.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I had a talk with your son.”

“Can’t I leave the house without you persecuting him?”

“That’s hardly the case. Fritz told me he buried Leo Broadhurst’s body. I understand he told you, too, so we needn’t argue about it.”

“That’s nonsense, he’s talking nonsense.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We dug Leo up this afternoon. It hasn’t been established yet, but I think that he’s been dead for fifteen years.”

“Frederick knew all this and didn’t tell me?”

“He told you yesterday, didn’t he?”

She bit her lip. “He told me some kind of a story. I thought he was making it up out of whole cloth.” Her face brightened alarmingly. “Maybe he is making it up. His head’s always full of stories.”

“He didn’t invent the dead man, Mrs. Snow.”

“Are you sure it’s Captain Broadhurst?”

“Reasonably sure. The body was in his red Porsche.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Almost directly under the place where Stanley was buried. Stanley was trying to uncover his father when he was killed. Whoever killed him probably shot his father as well.”

“And you blame Frederick?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But if he buried the captain, as he says, he’s an accessory.”

“Does that mean he’ll go to prison?”

“He could.”

She was appalled. Her thin face was stretched taut across her skull. It was like a foreglimpse of her mortality, and it made me realize how deeply involved she was with her son’s fate.

She stood in silence for a minute, glaring up and down the street as if to dare the neighbors to pity her. There was no one in sight except for a few brown children too young to care.

It was early afternoon, but the day had darkened. I looked up at the sky. Black clouds were moving across it like a sliding lid. Under them the town looked bright and strange. A little rain had begun to fall on the sidewalk and on my head and on the woman’s.

The heavy brown grocery bag was beginning to slip out of her arms. I took it from her and followed her inside. Fritz had retreated into the back, but both of us seemed to feel his amorphous presence virtually filling the house.

His mother carried her groceries into the kitchen. When she came back into the front room she noticed that the Bible on the table was slightly out of place. She pushed it back into the exact center before she turned to me:

“Frederick is crying his heart out in his room. You can’t put him in prison. He wouldn’t last six months. You know what they do in prison to helpless boys – the dreadful cruelties and the wickedness.”

I knew, but I didn’t want to dwell on it. “He isn’t a boy.” I remembered that Mrs. Broadhurst had said the same thing forty-eight hours ago.

“He might as well be,” Mrs. Snow said. “Frederick has always been my little boy. I’ve done my best to protect him, but he gets led astray. He does what people tell him to do, and then he has to suffer for it. He suffers terribly. He almost died when they put him in forestry camp.”

Her thin body was vibrating with feeling. It was hard to believe that body, breastless and almost hipless, had mothered the large soft boy-man in the bedroom.

“What do you want me to do with him, Mrs. Snow?”

“Leave him here with me. Let me look after him, like I always have.”

“That will be up to the authorities.”

“Do they know what he did?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you have to tell them?”

“I’m afraid so. There’s a murder involved.”

“You’re still talking about the murder of Captain Broadhurst?”

“Yes. That’s the only one your son’s mixed up in. I hope.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” She looked at me intently. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul. You say Captain Broadhurst was shot?”

“Apparently he was.”

“With a .22-caliber pistol?”

“We don’t know yet. What were you going to tell me?”

“I think I know who shot him. I can’t swear to it, but I think I know. If I can tell you, and it turns out to be right, can you make it easier for Frederick?”

“I can try.”

“They’ll listen to you.” She nodded her head emphatically. “Will you promise to use your influence?”

“Yes. What information do you have?”

“It’s more of a general picture. Ever since Stanley was killed on Saturday, the whole thing has been coming back to me. I was at the Broadhurst house that night, looking after Stanley. It was the same night that Frederick misused his tractor and lost his job. The whole thing fits together.”

“Exactly what happened?”

“Give me a chance to tell you.” She sat down in the platform rocker rather abruptly, as if the effort of memory had fatigued her. “The two of them, Captain Broadhurst and Mrs. Broadhurst, had a bad quarrel at dinner. I was in and out of the dining room. They didn’t say much in my presence, but I gathered they were quarreling over a woman – a woman he had stashed in the Mountain House. I thought at first it was the Kilpatrick woman, because the name of Kilpatrick came up. But it turned out it was that Nickerson girl – Marty – and she had her little girl with her. Captain Broadhurst was planning to go away with her and the little girl. He had tickets on a steamship to Hawaii which he had just bought, and Mrs. Broadhurst found out.”

“How did she find out?”

“Mr. Kilpatrick told her, according to what she said. The man in the travel agency was a friend of Mr. Kilpatrick’s.”

I felt a change behind my eyes, as if a physical adjustment had occurred there. My witnesses were beginning to chime with each other. Mrs. Snow went on with her story:

“It was a nasty quarrel, as I said. Mrs. Broadhurst went into the long history of his womanizing. He turned around and blamed it all on her. I won’t tell you the names he called her. But he claimed she hadn’t been a wife to him in ten years, and he got up and stomped out.

“Poor little Stanley was sick and shaking. He was having his dinner in the kitchen with me but he couldn’t help hearing the quarrel, and he was old enough to know what it meant. He ran out and tried to stop his father, but Captain Broadhurst roared away in his sports car. Then his mother got ready to leave the house. Stanley wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t take him. She asked me to put him to bed, which I did. But after that I was busy in the kitchen, and he slipped out on me. I remember the shock it gave me when I went to check his bedroom and saw his empty pillow.

“I got another shock when I was going through the rooms looking for him. Mrs. Broadhurst’s pistol case – the one her father left her – was sitting on top of the desk in the study. The box of shells was lying there open, and one of the pistols was gone.” She looked up, unseeing, remembering. “I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I waited for her and Stanley to come home.”

She sat in her platform rocker, resigned but somehow expectant, as if she was still waiting for that night to end. “They were gone for well over an hour. And when they came home, mother and son, they came home together. Their feet were wet from the night grass, and they were both white and scared-looking. Mrs. Broadhurst hustled Stanley off to bed and dismissed me. When I got home my own boy was missing from his bed. It was a bad night for mothers.”

“And a bad night for sons,” I said. “Do you think Stanley saw his father killed?”

“I don’t know. I do know he heard the shot. He told me later his mother killed an owl – that was the explanation she gave Stanley. But I think that he suspected she shot his father. I think the suspicion kept growing on him, but he couldn’t face up to it. He kept trying to prove that his daddy was alive, right up until the day of his own death.”

“Did he ever discuss his father’s death with you?”

“Not his death. We never mentioned death. But he sometimes asked me what I thought had happened to his father. And I used to tell him stories – that his father had gone to live in another country, like Australia, and maybe he would be coming back some day.” Her eyes came up to my face, clear and intense. “What else could I do? I couldn’t tell him what I suspected – that his mother shot his father.”

“And your son buried him.”

“I didn’t know that at the time.” But her voice hurried away from the point. “Even if I had, I wouldn’t have told Stanley, or anyone else. A woman’s got to look out for her own flesh and blood.”