The Underground Man

chapter 33

I left her and drove through pouring rain to the hospital. It was a four-story concrete building occupying a city block and surrounded by clinics and medical office buildings. A Pink Lady in the lobby told me that Mrs. Broadhurst was able to receive visitors and gave me the number of her room on the fourth floor.

Before going up I paid a visit to the pathology department. The office and lab were on the ground floor at the end of a sickly green corridor lined with heating pipes. A sign on the door said: “Authorized Personnel Only.”

A stoic-faced man in a white smock greeted me with polite disinterest. The name board on his desk said: “W. Silcox, M.D.” He told me that the body of Leo Broadhurst hadn’t arrived yet, but was expected shortly.

Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, the doctor’s eyes showed a certain professional eagerness. “I understand there’s quite a lot of him left.”

“Quite a lot. You should look for gunshot wounds, particularly in the head. I’ve talked to a couple of witnesses who think he was shot there. But my witnesses aren’t entirely dependable. We need concrete evidence.”

“That’s what I’m here for. I tend to learn more from dead people than I do from living ones.”

“Do you still have Stanley Broadhurst’s body?”

“It’s in the mortuary. Would you like to see it?”

“I have. I wanted to check with you on cause of death.”

“Multiple stab wounds, with some kind of long knife.”

“Front or back?”

“Front. In the abdomen. He was also struck at the base of the skull with the pickax.”

Going up in the elevator to the fourth floor, I almost envied Silcox his unliving witnesses. They were past lying, past hurting and being hurt.

I checked in with the girl at the nurses’ station. She said that Mrs. Broadhurst was feeling much better, but I should limit my visit to ten minutes or so.

I tapped on the door of Mrs. Broadhurst’s private room and was bidden to come in. The room was full of flowers in and out of season – roses and carnations, exotic lilacs. A vase of yellow daffodils on the dresser had Brian Kilpatrick’s card standing on edge against it.

Mrs. Broadhurst was sitting up in an armchair beside the streaming window. She had on a multicolored robe which seemed to reflect the flowers in the room, and she looked quite well. But there was a basic hopelessness about her eyes which tied my tongue for a moment.

She spoke first: “You’re Mr. Archer, aren’t you? I’m glad to see you – to have a chance to thank you.”

I was taken by surprise. “What on earth for?”

“My grandson’s safe return. His mother phoned me a short time ago. With my son – my son Stanley gone – Ronny is all I have left.”

“He’s a good boy, and he seems to be all right.”

“Where did you find him? Jean wasn’t quite clear about it.”

I gave her a collapsed account of my weekend and said in conclusion: “Don’t blame the girl too much. She saw your son killed, and it threw her. All she could think about was saving Ronny.”

I remembered as I said it that Susan had witnessed two murders, fifteen years apart. And I asked myself: if Mrs. Broadhurst killed her husband, was it possible that she had also killed her son, or had him killed? I found I couldn’t ask her. Filled with her fragile gratitude, and the flowers her friends had sent her, the room wouldn’t let such questions be spoken aloud.

As witnesses often do, Mrs. Broadhurst provided an opening herself. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand about the girl. What did you say her name was?”

“Susan Crandall.”

“What was she doing on the mountain with my son and grandson?”

“I think she was trying to understand the past.”

“I don’t quite follow. I’m very stupid today.” Her voice and eyes divided her impatience between herself and me.

“Susan had been there before,” I said, “when she was a small child. She went there with her mother one night. Perhaps you remember her mother. Her maiden name was Martha Nickerson, and I believe she used to work for you.”

The displeasure in her voice and eyes deepened. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Quite a number of people. You’re just about the last one on my list. I was hoping you could help me to reconstruct what happened at the Mountain House that night about fifteen years ago.”

She shook her head, and stayed with her face half-averted. Profiled against the window, her head was like a classical medallion laid over the rain-blurred image of the city.

“I’m afraid that I can’t help you. I wasn’t there.”

“Your husband was, Mrs. Broadhurst.”

The cords in her neck pulled her head around. “How can you possibly know that?”

“He never left the place. He was shot and buried there. We dug him up this afternoon.”

“I see.” She didn’t tell me what she saw, but it seemed to make her eyes grimmer and smaller. The bones in her face became more prominent as if in imitation of the dead man’s. “It’s over then.”

“Not entirely.”

“It is for me. You’re telling me that both my men are dead – my husband and my son. You’re telling me that I’ve lost everything I held dear.”

She was struggling to assume a tragic role, but there was a doubleness in her which spoiled her resonance. Her words sounded exaggerated and hollow. I was reminded of the ambivalent words that she had written about her father, staggering across the yellow foolscap toward the edge of breakdown.

“I think you’ve known that your husband was dead and buried for fifteen years.”

“That simply isn’t true.” But the doubleness persisted in her voice as if she was listening to herself read lines. “I warn you, if you make this accusation publicly–”

“We’re very private, Mrs. Broadhurst. You don’t have to put on a front with me. I know you quarreled with your husband that night and followed him up the mountain afterwards.”

“How can you know that if it isn’t so?” She was playing a game that guilty people play, questioning the questioner, trying to convert the truth into a shuttlecock that could be batted back and forth and eventually lost. “Where did you get this alleged information, anyway? From Susan Crandall?”

“Part of it.”

“She’s scarcely a reliable witness. I gather from what you’ve told me that she’s emotionally disturbed. And she couldn’t have been more than three or four at the time. The whole thing must be fantasy on her part.”

“Three-year-olds have memories, and they can see and hear. I have pretty good evidence that she was in the Mountain House, and saw or heard the shot. Her story jibes with other things I know. It also helps to explain her emotional trouble.”

“You admit that she’s disturbed?”

“She has a hangup. Speaking of hangups, I wonder if Stanley didn’t witness the shot, too.”

“No! He couldn’t have.” She drew in her breath audibly, as if she was trying to suck back the words.

“How do you know if you weren’t there?”

“I was at home with Stanley.”

“I don’t think so. I think he followed you up there and heard his father shot, and for the rest of his life he tried to forget it. Or prove that it was just a bad dream he had.”

She had been talking like an advocate who doubted his client’s innocence. Now she gave up on it. “What do you want from me? Money? I’ve been bled white.” She paused, and looked at me with despairing eyes. “Don’t tell Jean I have nothing left. I’d never see Ronny again.”

I thought she was wrong, but I didn’t argue. “Who bled you, Mrs. Broadhurst?”

“I have no wish to discuss it.”

I picked up Brian Kilpatrick’s card from the dresser and let her see it. “If someone has been extorting money from you, you have a chance to stop it now.”

“I said I don’t want to discuss it. There’s no one I can trust. There never has been since my father died.”

“You want it to go on?”

She gave me a closed bitter look. “I don’t want anything to go on. Not my life or anything. Certainly not this conversation. This inquisition.”

“I’m not enjoying it much myself.”

“Then go away. I can’t stand any more.”

She grasped the arms of the chair so that her knuckles whitened, and stood up. The action somehow forced me out of the room.

I wasn’t ready to face the dead man right away. I found the door to the fire stairs and started down to the ground floor, taking my time about it. The concrete stairs with their gray steel railings, set in a windowless concrete stairwell, were like part of a prison structure, ugly and just about indestructible. I paused on a landing halfway down and tried to imagine Mrs. Broadhurst in prison.

When I returned the boy Ronny to his mother, I had really accomplished what I set out to do. The business left unfinished was bound to be painful and nasty. I had no overriding desire to pin her husband’s murder on Mrs. Broadhurst.

The hot breath of vengeance was growing cold in my nostrils as I grew older. I had more concern for a kind of economy in life that would help to preserve the things that were worth preserving. No doubt Leo Broadhurst had been worth preserving – any man, or any woman, was – but he had been killed in anger long ago. I doubted that a jury in the present would find his widow guilty of anything worse than manslaughter.

As for the other homicides, it was unlikely that Mrs. Broadhurst had had a reason to kill her son or an opportunity to kill Albert Sweetner. I told myself I didn’t care who killed them. But I cared. There was a winding symmetry in the case that like the stairs themselves took me down to the sickly green corridor where Dr. Silcox consulted his dead witnesses.

I went through the office and opened the steel-sheathed mortuary door. What was left of Leo Broadhurst lay under a bright light on a stainless steel table. Silcox was probing at the skull. Its fine curve was the only remaining sign that Leo had been a handsome man in his day.

Kelsey and Purvis, the deputy coroner, were standing in the penumbra against the wall. I moved past them toward the table.

“Was he shot?”

Silcox looked up from his work. “Yes. I found this.”

He picked up a lead slug and displayed it on the palm of his hand. It looked like a misshapen .22 long. “Where did it pierce the skull?”

“I’m not sure it did. All I can find is a minor external crease which hardly could have been fatal.” With the bright point of his probe, he showed me the faint groove the bullet had made in the front of Broadhurst’s skull.

“What killed him then?”

“This.”

He showed me a discolored triangle which rang on the table when he dropped it. For a moment I thought it was an Indian arrowhead. Then I picked it up and saw that it was the broken-off tip of a butcher knife.

“It was lodged in the ribs,” the doctor said. “Evidently the tip of the knife snapped off when the knife was pulled out.”

“Was he stabbed from the back or the front?”

“The front, I’d say.”

“Could a woman have done it?”

“I don’t see why not. What do you think, Purvis?”

The young deputy detached himself from the shadows and stepped forward between me and Dr. Silcox. “I think we better talk it over in private.” He turned to me. “I hate to be a spoilsport, Mr. Archer, but you’ve got no right in here. You saw the sign on the door: ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ And you’re not authorized.”

I thought perhaps it was just a young man’s officiousness. “I am if you authorize me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Who says so?”

“The sheriff-coroner gives me my orders.”

“Who gives him his orders?”

The young man flushed. His face looked porous and purplish in the raw light. “You better get out of here, mister.”

I looked past him at Kelsey, who seemed embarrassed. I said to both of them:

“Hell, I located this body.”

“But you’re not authorized personnel.”

Purvis put his hand on the butt of his gun. I didn’t know him well and didn’t trust him not to shoot me. I left with anger and disappointment running hot and sour in my veins.

Kelsey followed me out into the corridor. “I’m sorry about this, Archer.”

“You weren’t a great deal of help.”

His gray eyes flinched a little and then set hard, while his mouth continued to smile. “The word came down from on high about you. And the Forest Service makes me go by the book.”

“What does the book say?”

“You know as well as I do. Where local law enforcement is involved, I’m instructed to respect their jurisdiction.”

“What are they planning to do? Bury this case for another fifteen years?”

“Not if I can help it. But my main responsibility is the fire.”

“The killings and the fire are tied together, and you know it.”

“Don’t tell me what I know.”

He turned and went back into the room with the dead man and the authorized personnel.