Ross MACDONALD - The Underground Man

He took me to an upper-middle residential area on the side of the city which was not yet threatened by the fire. Kilpatrick’s modern ranch house lay on a floodlit pad on the side of a brush-covered slope. I had left the cool air lower in the city, and hot wind blew in my face when I got out of the cab. I told the driver to wait.

Kilpatrick came out to meet me. He was a big man wearing an open-necked sport shirt over slacks. There was graying red hair on both his head and his chest. In spite of the drink in his hand, and the dead-fish gleam of previous drinks in his eyes, his large handsome face was sober, almost lugubrious.

He offered me his hand, and peered at my injured head. “What happened to you?”

“Your son Jerry happened to me. He hit me with a gun-butt.”

Kilpatrick made a commiserating face. “I want to say right now I’m heartily sorry. But,” he added, “I’m not responsible for what Jerry does. He’s gotten beyond my control.”

“So I gather. Can we go inside?”

“By all means. You’ll be wanting a drink.”

He ushered me into a bar and game room which overlooked a brilliantly lighted pool. Beside the pool a woman with black hair and gleaming copper-colored legs was sitting in a long chair which concealed the rest of her. A portable radio on a table beside her was talking to her like a familiar spirit. A silver cocktail shaker stood by the radio.

Kilpatrick closed the venetian blinds before he turned up the light. He said that he was drinking martinis, and I asked for scotch and water, which he poured. We sat facing each other across a round table which had a chessboard made of light and dark squares of wood inlaid in its center.

He said in a cautious measured voice: “I suppose I better tell you that I heard from the girl’s father earlier today. He found my son’s name in his daughter’s address book.”

“How long has the girl been missing from home? Did Crandall say?”

Kilpatrick nodded. “A couple of days. She walked out on her parents Thursday.”

“Did Crandall say why?”

“He doesn’t know why, any more than I do.” He added in a discouraged voice which made him sound like an old man: “We’re losing a whole generation. They’re punishing us for bringing them into the world.”

“Do the Crandalls live in town here?”

“No.”

“How do your son and their daughter happen to know each other?”

“I have no idea. All I know is what Crandall told me.”

“What’s Crandall’s full name and where does he live?”

Kilpatrick lifted his palm in a traffic-halting gesture. “Before I tell you anything more, you’d better fill me in on the ramifications. How does the Broadhurst boy come into this? What are they planning to do with him?”

“There may not be any plan at all. It looks as if they’re playing it by ear. But on the other hand it may be a kidnaping. It is now, in the legal sense.”

“For money? Jerry claims that he despises money.”

“Money isn’t the only motive for kidnaping.”

“What else is there?” Kilpatrick said.

“Revenge. Power. Kicks.”

“That doesn’t sound like Jerry.”

“What about the girl?”

“I gather she’s a fairly nice girl from a fairly nice family. Maybe not a happy girl, her father said, but a girl you can depend on.”

“That’s what Lizzie Borden’s father used to say about her.”

Kilpatrick gave me a shocked look. “It’s a pretty farfetched comparison, isn’t it?”

“I hope so. The man she was traveling with today – the little boy’s father – was killed with a pickax.”

Kilpatrick’s face grew pale, setting its broken veins in relief. He finished his martini, and sucked audibly at the dry glass.

“Are you telling me Stanley Broadhurst has been killed?”

“Yes.”

“You think she murdered him?”

“I don’t know. But if she did, the Broadhurst boy is probably a witness.”

“Was Jerry there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did this murder take place?”

“At the head of Mrs. Broadhurst’s canyon, near a cabin called Mountain House. Apparently the fire was started at the same time.”

Kilpatrick began to drum on the table with his glass. He got up and went to the bar, searching along the shelves of bottles behind it for something guaranteed to relieve anxiety. He came back to the table empty-handed, and soberer than ever.

“You should have told me about this when you called me in the first place. I never would have–” His voice broke off, and he glared at me distrustfully.

“You never would have let me in or talked to me,” I said. “Where does Crandall live?”

“I’m not saying.”

“You might as well. None of this will be a secret for long. The only positive thing we can do is try and head off Jerry and the girl before they make more trouble.”

“What more could they do?”

“Lose the boy,” I said. “Or kill him.”

He looked at me narrow-eyed. “Just what’s your interest in the boy?”

“Mrs. Stanley Broadhurst hired me to get him back.”

“So you’re on the other side.”

“The boy’s side.”

“Do you know him?”

“Slightly.”

“And you care about him personally?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you have some faint idea of how I feel about my son.”

“I’d have a better idea if you’d cooperate fully. I’m trying to head off trouble for you and your son.”

“You smell like trouble to me,” he said.

That stopped me for a minute. He had a salesman’s insight into human weakness, and he’d touched on a fact which I didn’t always admit to myself – that I sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.

With some idea of changing the subject a little, I brought out the green-covered book with his son’s name penciled on the flyleaf.

“How did Sue Crandall get hold of this?”

After some thought, he said: “I suppose Jerry took it when he left. I don’t pay too much attention to the books. My wife was the intellectual in the family. She graduated from Stanford.”

“Is Mrs. Kilpatrick at home?”

He shook his head. “Ellen left me years ago. The girl out by the pool is my fiancée.”

“How long ago did Jerry leave?”

“A couple of months. He moved onto the yacht in June. But actually he left me a year ago, as far as any real relationship is concerned. That was when he went away to college.”

“He’s in college?”

“Not any more,” Kilpatrick said in a disappointed voice. “He could have handled it easily. I was all set to send him right through to a master’s in business administration. But he refused to make the effort. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know the answer.” He reached across the table for the book and closed it on his son’s name.

“Is Jerry on drugs?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

But his eyes were dubious and avoided mine. The conversation was running down, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. He was afraid of involving his son in murder.

“You knew about the incident on the yacht,” I said. “When the girl jumped overboard.”

“That’s right. I got the word from the harbor people. But I didn’t know that drugs were involved.”

Kilpatrick leaned toward me abruptly and took hold of my untouched scotch and water. “If you’re not going to use that, I am,” he said, and drank it down.

We sat in opposing silences. He was studying the inlaid board as if there were chessmen on it, most of them mine. Finally he looked up and met my eyes.

“You think she got drugs from Jerry, don’t you?” he said.

“You’re the authority on Jerry.”

“No more,” he said. “But I suspected he was using drugs. It was one of the bones of contention between us.”