The Underground Man

chapter 3

I waited for her in the front room of the Wallers’ apartment. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. She came out carrying a large handbag, and coats for herself and the absent boy.

I got my car out of the garage at the rear of the building, and we headed inland for the Ventura Freeway. The early afternoon sun glared on the traffic, flashing unpredictably on windshields and chromium. I turned up the air conditioning.

“That feels good,” she said. Her presence beside me sustained an illusive feeling that there was an opening there into another time-track or dimension. It had more future than the world I knew, and not so bloody much traffic.

After I made the turn onto Sepulveda, I spent a little time preparing a remark.

“I seem to be getting less lonely, Mrs. Broadhurst.”

“Call me Jean. Mrs. Broadhurst sounds like my mother-in-law.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily. She’s a pretty good woman – a lady, in fact, and a good sport. But underneath all that she’s terribly sad. I suppose that’s what manners are for, to cover up.”

“What’s she so sad about?”

“A lot of things.” She looked at the side of my face, my one visible eye. “You’re quite inquisitive, aren’t you, Mr. Archer?”

“It’s my working habit.”

“And you’re working?”

“You asked me to. Did the fact that I live where I do have anything to do with your moving in below?”

“The fact that you’re a detective?”

“Roughly, yes.”

“It may have. You may have been part of the whole Gestalt. Does it matter?”

“To me it does. I don’t believe in coincidences. And I like to know exactly where I stand.”

“You’re lucky if you do.”

“Is that a threat?” I said.

“It’s more of a confession. I was thinking about myself – and where I stand.”

“While you’re confessing – did you send Ronny out this morning to help me feed the birds?”

“No.” Her tone was definite. “That was his own idea.” She added: “If you don’t believe in coincidence, there’s not much room for spontaneity, either. In your world.”

“It isn’t my world. I’m interested in the whole Gestalt you mentioned. Tell me about it.”

She said haltingly: “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Everything that led up to this.”

“You take it seriously, don’t you?” I could hear the slight edge of surprise in her voice.

“Yes.”

“I take it seriously, too. After all it’s my life, and it’s going to pieces. But as for explaining it, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Just give me the pieces. You’ve already started, with Mrs. Broadhurst. What’s she so sad about?”

“She’s getting old.”

“So am I, and I’m not sad.”

“Aren’t you? Anyway, it’s different for a woman.”

“Isn’t Mr. Broadhurst getting old?”

“There is no Mr. Broadhurst. He ran away with another woman some years ago. Stanley seems to be repeating the pattern.”

“How old was he when his father took off?”

“Eleven or twelve. Stanley never talks about it, but it was the main event of his childhood. I have to remember that when I’m judging him. When his father left, I think he felt even worse than his mother did.”

“How do you know, if he never talks about it?”

“You ask good questions,” she said.

“Give me a good answer, Jean.”

She took her time. I couldn’t see her face, but peripheral vision made me aware of her sitting beside me with her hands in her lap. Her head was bowed over her empty hands as if she was trying to untie a knot or unwind a ball of string.

“My husband has been looking for his father for some time,” she said, “and gradually breaking up. Or maybe I’ve got it turned around. He’s been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together.”

“Did Stanley have a breakdown?”

“Nothing as definite as that. But his whole life has been a kind of breakdown. He’s one of those overconfident people who turns out to have no confidence at all. And it makes him stupid. He barely got through the university. As a matter of fact, that was how I met him. I was in his French class, and he hired me to tutor him.” She added with a kind of ironic precision: “The tutorial relationship persisted into our marriage.”

“It can be tough on a man, to be married to a woman smarter than he is.”

“It can be tough on the woman, too. But I didn’t say I was smarter than Stanley, exactly. He’s just a man who hasn’t found himself.”

“Is he looking?”

“He’s been looking terribly hard, for a long time.”

“For his father.”

“That’s the way he puts it to himself. He seems to feel that when his father ran out on him, it robbed his life of its meaning. That sounds like nonsense, but it isn’t really. He’s angry at his father for abandoning him; at the same time he misses him and loves him. The two together can be paralyzing.”

The depth of feeling in her voice surprised me. She cared for her husband more than she admitted.

We crossed the low pass and began the descent into the valley. Above its floor, layers of brown dust were stacked in the air, obscuring the mountains on the far side. Like something in an old movie, a World War Two bomber labored up from Van Nuys Airport and turned north. It was probably headed for the fire in Santa Teresa.

I didn’t mention this to the woman beside me. Another thought had begun to nag at my mind. If Stanley was following in his father’s footsteps and running away with a girl, he wouldn’t be likely to head straight for the town where his mother lived. Las Vegas, or possibly Mexico, was a more likely destination.

We passed a “Northridge” sign. I glanced at the woman. She was bent forward, unwinding her invisible ball of string.

“How far is your house from the freeway?”

“About five minutes. Why?”

“We ought to check there. We don’t know that Stanley took the boy to Santa Teresa.”

“You think they may be at the house?”

“It isn’t likely, but it’s possible. Let’s have a look, anyway.”

It was on a street named College Circle, one of a group of brand new houses with two-story porticoes supported by large wooden pillars. They were differentiated by their colors. The Broadhurst house was dark blue with light blue pillars.

Jean went in at the front door. I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters. A grape-stake fence separated the back yard from the neighbors’.

The garage door was locked. I went around to the window at the side. The only car in the double garage, a green Mercedes sedan, bore no resemblance to the black convertible Stanley had been driving.

Jean opened the back door of the house from the inside. She gave me an appalled look, and came running across the grass to the garage window.

“They’re not in there, are they?”

“No.”

“Thank heaven. I thought for a minute they’d committed suicide or something.” She stood beside me at the window. “That’s not our car.”

“Whose is it?”

“It must be hers. I remember now – she and Stanley came in separate cars last night. She has her nerve – leaving her car in my garage.” Jean turned toward me, her face hardening. “Incidentally, she slept in Ronny’s bed. I don’t like that.”

“Show me.”

I followed her in through the back door. The house was already showing signs of abandonment. In the kitchen, unwashed dishes were piled in the sink and on the counters. On the top of the free-standing stove were a skillet half full of congealed grease and a saucepan containing something that smelled like pea soup but looked like cracked green mud. And there were flies.

The boy’s room on the second floor was papered with pictures of friendly animals. The bedclothes were rumpled and twisted, as if the girl visitor had spent a troubled night. The red marks of her mouth were on the pillow, like a signature, and under the pillow was a copy of the novel Green Mansions bound in faded green cloth.

I examined the flyleaf of the book. It had a bookplate with an engraving of an angel or a muse writing in a scroll with a peacock-plume pen. The name on the bookplate was Ellen Strome. Under it another name was inscribed in pencil: Jerry Kilpatrick.

I closed the book and slipped it into my jacket pocket.