The Underground Man (15 page)

“I have, but the volunteer pilots are up to their necks.”

“You could detach one plane and send it out to the islands. They may have anchored out there.” From where I stood I could see the islands, embossed on the slanting sea.

“I’ll consider it,” the sheriff said. “If there’s anything else, you can take it up with Joe Kelsey. He has the full cooperation of my office.”

“There’s one other thing, sheriff.”

He bowed his head in weary patience. I produced the green-covered book and got out Stanley Broadhurst’s ad from the San Francisco
Chronicle
.

The sheriff took the clipping in his hands and studied it. Kilpatrick moved to his shoulder and looked at it, too. The two men lifted their eyes at the same time and exchanged a glance of dubious recognition.

“The man is Leo Broadhurst, of course,” the sheriff said. “Who’s the woman, Brian? Your eyes are better than mine.”

Kilpatrick swallowed. “My wife,” he said. “My ex-wife, that is.”

“I thought it was Ellen. Where is she now?”

“I have no idea.”

The sheriff handed the clipping back to me. “Is this connected with Stanley Broadhurst’s death?”

“I think so.”

I started to tell Tremaine something about the background of the case, and the dead man Al. He waved me into silence. “Take it up with somebody else. Take it up with Kelsey. Will you do me that favor, both of you? The fire boss expects to be out of here before noon tomorrow, and I’m helping him plan the move.”

“Where are you moving to?” Kilpatrick said.

“Buckhorn Meadow, about sixteen miles east of here.”

“Does that mean that the city is out of danger?”

“I think it should be by tomorrow, anyway. But the worst is yet to come.” He looked up at the bare black slope of the mountain above us. “The first real rain, and we’ll all be drowning in mud.”

The sheriff opened the door of the trailer. As he levered his bulk through the narrow opening, I caught a glimpse of
a tall man in a Forest Service jacket bowed over a map. He had a graying Scandinavian head, and he looked like a Viking trying to navigate a sea of land.

I turned to Kilpatrick. “You didn’t tell me Leo Broadhurst ran away with your wife.”

“I told you last night she left me. I don’t usually bare my bosom to strangers.”

“Is she still with Broadhurst?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. They don’t report to me.”

“Did you divorce her?”

“She divorced me soon after she left here.”

“And married him?”

“I assume so. They didn’t send me a wedding invitation.”

“Where did she divorce you?”

“In Nevada.”

“Where is she now—in the Bay area?”

“I haven’t the slightest notion where she is. Now if you don’t mind we’ll change the subject.”

But he couldn’t leave it alone. Anger or some other emotion was running through him in a gross vibration which made his voice tremble.

“That was a dirty trick you pulled on me just now, showing that picture to Sheriff Tremaine.”

“What was dirty about it?”

“It put me on the spot in front of him. You could at least have brought it up in private. You didn’t have to shoot me down in public.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was your wife.”

He gave me a look of disbelief so naked that it made me question myself. Perhaps I had had a hunch just below the level of consciousness.

“Let me have another look at that picture,” he said.

I handed him the clipping. He stood and examined it,
oblivious of the action around him and the clatter of helicopters overhead, like a man on the rim of the present peering down into the deep past. When he looked up, his face had been changed by it. It seemed older and more defensive.

He gave me back the clipping. “Where did you get this? From Jerry?”

“No.”

“Did Stanley Broadhurst put that ad in the
Chronicle?”

“Apparently,” I said. “Have you seen it before?”

“I may have. I don’t remember if I did.”

“Then how would you know it was printed in the
Chronicle?”

He answered smoothly: “I simply took it for granted. The styling looks like the
Chronicle.”
After a moment’s intense thought, he added: “San Francisco is mentioned in the text.”

It was too good an answer, but I let it pass. “What made you ask if I got the ad from your son Jerry?”

“It was just a thought,” he said with a one-sided grimace. “Jerry’s been very much on my mind, and I happen to know he reads the
Chronicle
. He thinks San Francisco is the center of the known world.”

“Did Jerry see a copy of this ad?”

“He may have. How would I know?”

“I think you do know, Kilpatrick.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think.”

He brought up his clenched fist, ready to swing at me. I got ready to block it. He pulled his fist in to his chest and looked down at it as if it was a small animal which had momentarily got out of control. Then he turned abruptly and went behind the bleachers, moving in hurried uncertainty as if he was going to be sick.

I went after him at a little distance. He was leaning against a supporting post with his head hanging. The look I surprised on his face was one of terrible disappointment.

He straightened up and put on an expression of weary patience which fitted the lines of his face. “You’re giving me a hard time,” he said to me. “Why?”

“You’re a hard man to get information from.”

“Really? I’ve practically told you my life story. It isn’t all that interesting.”

“I think it is. You’ve as good as admitted that Jerry saw a copy of this ad. It could explain a number of things.”

“I’m not admitting anything, but give me a for-instance.”

“He may have got in touch with Stanley Broadhurst and helped to stir him up.”

“Stanley didn’t need any stirring up. He’s been hipped on this subject for years. He never forgave his father for leaving him and his mother.”

“Did you ever discuss it with Stanley?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you tell him that your wife ran off with his father?”

“I didn’t have to. He knew it very well. Everyone knew it.”

“Who do you mean by ‘everyone’?”

“All the people concerned. The affair was no great secret in town, but at least most people have forgotten it by now.” Kilpatrick was beginning to look sick again. “Couldn’t we forget it, too? It isn’t my favorite subject.”

“How does Jerry feel about it?”

“He blames me—I told you that. It suits him to believe that his mother left me because I deserved it.”

“Has he ever visited her?”

“Not to my knowledge. You don’t quite understand the situation. Ellen left me fifteen years ago and cut off all contact. The last word I had from her was her divorce notice, and that came from her lawyer in Reno.”

“What was the lawyer’s name?”

“I couldn’t tell you at this late date.”

I got out the green-covered book again, opened it to the flyleaf, and showed Kilpatrick the bookplate with the peacock-plume engraving.

“Ellen Strome was your ex-wife’s maiden name, I gather.”

“Yes.”

“If Jerry hasn’t seen her, where did he get this book?”

“She left it in the house. She left a lot of her things behind.”

“Why did she go so abruptly?”

“It wasn’t so abrupt. I saw it coming. She didn’t really like me, and she didn’t like my business. I was just another real estate salesman in those days. She didn’t approve of my seven-day week, with the phone ringing all the time and having to be nice to little old ladies from Dubuque. Ellen wanted something more refined. More romantic.” His voice was laced with sarcasm and regret.

“Is that what Leo Broadhurst was—romantic?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m not a woman. Broadhurst didn’t come in on my wave-length that way.”

“How did he come in?”

“He went for women the way some men go deer-hunting—pitting his skills, you know? Ellen shouldn’t have taken him so seriously. Neither should his son Stanley. But I think maybe Stanley was trying to convince himself that there was some deep significance to his father’s affair. He wanted to find his father and get an explanation out of him.”

“Who killed Stanley?”

Kilpatrick lifted his heavy shoulders and let them drop. “Who knows? I doubt that the murder’s connected with that old business.”

“It almost has to be,” I said.

Kilpatrick looked at me levelly. A kind of angry brotherhood had been growing between us. It was partly based on
the fact, which he didn’t know, that my wife had walked out on me and sent me divorce papers through a lawyer. And partly that we were two middle-aging men, and three young people had slipped away over the curve of the world.

“Okay,” he said. “Jerry saw the ad in the
Chronicle
. That was around the end of June. He recognized his mother from her pictures, and he seemed to think I should do something about it. I told him he was simply making trouble for himself. It was his mother’s choice to walk out on us. We couldn’t do anything now but try to forget it.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He walked out on me, too. But you know all this.” Kilpatrick seemed to be losing interest in his own life.

He got into his car and headed back toward the gate. I walked in the opposite direction, to the western side of the college grounds.

From the edge of the mesa a path meandered downhill toward the decimated grove where the fire had started. I could see a panel truck there, and two men moving around it, small in the distance. One of them moved with clumsy speed, like Kelsey.

I went down the path, which passed through burned-out areas in the brush. A firebreak had been bulldozed along a
line that ran roughly parallel with the path, and below it. There were places where the fire had jumped the firebreak, but it had been put out on the other side, the side where the city lay. The live body of the fire, when I looked back, seemed to be far up the mountainside and moving away eastward.

The hillside path was littered with black sticks and gray ashes. Stepping carefully among the leavings of the fire, I worked my way down to the broad shelf where the Broadhurst family’s mountain cabin had stood. It had been built of wood, and there was virtually nothing left but several sets of bedsprings, a stove, a blackened tin sink.

I passed the place where the stable had been. The burned-out body of Stanley’s convertible was sitting in the open, its tireless rims sunk in the ashes of the building. It looked like a relic of an ancient civilization, ruined and diminished by the passage of centuries, already half buried among their droppings.

The panel truck had a sheriff-coroner’s decal on the side. It was parked in the lane that led up to the ridge road. There was someone in the cab, but the morning glare on the windshield kept me from seeing who it was.

Beyond the truck, through the denuded trees, I could see a uniformed man digging and Kelsey watching him. There was a pile of dirt between them. A
déjà vu
feeling gave me a twinge of basic doubt, as if the burial and the digging-up might be repeated daily from now on.

Jean Broadhurst got down out of the truck and lifted her hand to me. She had on the same mod clothes as the day before, and against the surreal background of burned trees she looked more than ever like a lost and widowed Columbine. She was wearing no makeup. Even her mouth was pale.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said.

“They asked me to come with them and identify Stanley’s body.”

“They’re a little late about getting to it, aren’t they?”

“Mr. Kelsey couldn’t get a deputy coroner here until now. But it doesn’t matter to Stanley. And it doesn’t matter to me.”

She was in a chancy mood, rational and composed and on the edge. I wanted to tell her I had seen her son, but I couldn’t think of a way that wouldn’t scare her. I asked her how her mother-in-law was doing.

“She’s suffering from exhaustion. But Dr. Jerome says she has great recuperative powers.”

“Does she remember about this?” I motioned toward the digging.

“I don’t really know. The doctor told me not to bring up anything painful, which rather tends to limit the conversation.”

Jean was trying hard to sustain a style. But the effort she was making had the effect of silencing me. We stood and looked at each other in embarrassment, as if we shared some guilty knowledge.

“I caught a glimpse of Ronny last night,” I said.

“What are you trying to tell me? That he’s dead?” Her somber eyes were ready for any horror.

“He was very much alive.” I told her where, and when.

“Why didn’t you let me know last night?”

“I was hoping to bring you better news.”

“That means there isn’t any.”

“At least he isn’t dead, and there was no sign that he was being mistreated.”

“But why did they
take
him? What are they trying to do?”

“That isn’t clear. It’s a complex case involving a number of
people, and at least one known criminal. Do you remember the man who came to your house in Northridge yesterday?”

“The one who wanted money? How could I forget him?”

“He came back later and broke into your house. I found him dead in your husband’s study last night.”

“Dead?”

“Somebody knifed him. Does anyone besides your family have access to your house?”

“No, not anyone.” She was trying to comprehend this second death. “Is his body still in the house?”

“No, it was taken out. I called the police. But the study is pretty much of a shambles.”

“It hardly matters,” she said. “I’ve decided not to go back to that house, ever.”

“This is a poor time to make a decision.”

“It’s the only time I have.”

The rhythmic sound of spading had ceased in the grove, and Jean turned toward the sudden emptiness. The digging man was almost out of sight in the hole. Like a man growing laboriously out of the earth, he stood up with Stanley’s body clasped in his arms. He and Kelsey laid the body on a stretcher and brought it toward us through the naked tree trunks.