Ross MACDONALD - The Underground Man

Nearly everything had been said. But we seemed to be held together by a feeling, impersonal but almost as strong as a friendship or a passion, that there was still more to say. The past was unwinding and rewinding like yarn which the two of us held between us.

“What about Elizabeth Broadhurst?” I said. “How did a man like Leo happen to marry a woman like Elizabeth?”

“The war brought them together. He was stationed at a military base near Santa Teresa, and she was active in the USO. She was a handsome woman when she was young. Socially prominent. Wealthy. She had all the obvious qualifications.” For the first time Ellen’s face was pulled to one side by malice. “But she was a failure as a wife.”

“How do you know?”

“Leo told me all about their marriage, such as it was. She was a frozen woman, a daddy’s girl.”

“The frozen ones sometimes explode.”

“I know they do.”

I said carefully: “Do you think she shot Leo?”

“It’s possible. She threatened to. It’s one reason I left Santa Teresa and tried to take Leo with me. I was afraid of Elizabeth.”

“That doesn’t prove she’s a murderer.”

“I know that. But I’m not just being subjective. Jerry told me something as we were talking just now.” Her voice wisped off, and so did her attention, as if she was listening to an internal voice.

“What did Jerry tell you?”

“He was telling me why he couldn’t go back to Brian – to his father. Elizabeth Broadhurst came to their house one night this summer to talk to Brian. There was more than just talk involved. She was crying and yelling, and Jerry couldn’t help overhearing everything. Brian had been extorting money from her. And not only money. He’d forced her into some kind of a real estate partnership in which she put up the land and he put up very little or nothing.”

“How could he force her into it?”

“That’s the question,” she said.

Ellen went to bed alone. I got the sleeping bag out of the trunk of my car and slept across the door of Ronny’s room.

The old house creaked like a ship sailing through the dangerous world. I dreamed I was rounding the Horn.

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.”