The Underground Man (24 page)

“Who’s we?”

“Mommy and me. But I don’t want to talk about what happened then. It was a long time ago when I blew my mind.”

“We’re talking about yesterday morning,” I said. “Was Stanley Broadhurst digging for a car?”

“That’s right—a little red sports car. But he never got down deep enough.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly. Ronny had to go to the john. I got the key from Mr. Broadhurst and took him to the one in the Mountain House. Then I heard Mr. Broadhurst yell. I thought he was calling me, and I went outside. I could see Mr. Broadhurst lying in the dirt. Another man was standing over him—a man with a black beard and long hippie hair. He was hitting Mr. Broadhurst with the pickax. I could see the blood on Mr. Broadhurst’s back. It made a red pattern, and then there was a fire under the trees, and that made an orange pattern. The man dragged Mr. Broadhurst in the hole and shoveled dirt on him.”

“What did you do, Susan?”

“I went back in and got Ronny, and we ran away. We sneaked down the trail into the canyon. The man didn’t see us.”

“Can you describe him? Was he young or old?”

“I couldn’t tell, he was too far away. And he had on big dark glasses—wraparounds—so I couldn’t make out his face. He must have been young, though, with all that hair.”

“Could it have been Albert Sweetner?”

“No. He doesn’t have long hair.”

“What if he was wearing a wig?”

She considered the question. “I still don’t think it was him. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about him. He said if I talked about him he would kill me.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. You can’t make me.”

Her face was struck white by the headlights of a passing car. She turned away as if they had been searching out her secrets.

We were approaching the entrance to Haven Road. I pulled off the pavement and stopped under the trees. The girl crouched against the door on the far side.

“You stay away from me,” she said between spasms of shivering. “Don’t you do anything to me.”

“What makes you think I would, Susan?”

“You’re the same as that Sweetner man. He said all he wanted me to do was tell him what I remembered. But he pushed me down onto the dirty old bed.”

“In the loft of the Mountain House?”

“Yes. He hurt me. He made me bleed.” Her eyes looked through me as if I was made of cloud and she was peering into the night behind me. “Something went bang. I could see the blood on his head. It made a red pattern. Mommy ran out the door and didn’t come back. She didn’t come back all night.”

“What night are you talking about?”

“The night they buried him near the sycamore tree.”

“That happened in the daytime, didn’t it?”

“No. It was dark night. I could see the light moving around in the trees. It was some kind of a big machine. It made a noise like a monster. I was afraid it would come and bury me. But it didn’t know I was there,” she said in her regressive fairy-tale voice.

“Where were you?”

“I hid in the loft until my mommy came back. She didn’t come back all night. She told me not to tell anybody, ever.”

“You’ve seen her, then, since it happened?”

“Of course I’ve seen her.”

“When?”

“All my life,” she said.

“I’m talking about the last thirty-six hours. Mr. Broadhurst was buried yesterday.”

“You’re trying to mix me up, like that Sweetner man.” She hugged her hands between her legs, and shuddered. “Don’t tell my mother what he did to me. I’m not supposed to let a man come near me. And I never will again.”

She looked at me with deep distrust. I was overcome by angry pity—pity for her and anger against myself. It was cruel to question her under the circumstances, stirring up the memories and the fears that had driven her almost out of life.

I sat beside her without speaking and considered her answers. They had seemed at first like a flight of ideas which took off from the facts and never returned to them. But as I sorted through the ideas and images, they seemed to refer to several different events which were linked and overlapping in her consciousness.

“How many times have you been in the Mountain House, Susie?”

Her lips moved, silently counting the occasions. “Three times, that I remember. Yesterday, when I took Ronny to the john. And a couple of days ago, when that man Sweetner hurt me in the loft. And once with my mother when I was a little girl, younger than Ronny. The gun went bang and she ran away and I hid in the loft all night.” The girl began to sob dryly and brokenly. “I want my mother.”

Her parents were waiting in front of the twin-towered house. Susan got out of my car and went toward them, feet dragging, head down. Her mother took her in her arms and called her pet names. Their warm coming together gave me a flicker of hope for both of them.

Lester Crandall stood off to one side, looking shut out. He moved toward me with an uncertain light in his eye, an uncertain gait, as if the world was moving away from under him and I was the one who had set it spinning.

“Your sidekick”—he gestured toward the house, and I assumed he meant Willie—“your sidekick told me you talked her in off the bridge. I’m very grateful to you.”

“I’m glad I reached her in time. Why don’t you say something to her, Mr. Crandall?”

He stole a sideways look at her. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Tell her you’re glad she didn’t kill herself.”

He shook the idea off. “I wouldn’t dignify it. She had to be faking.”

“She wasn’t. She’s attempted suicide twice in the last four days. It won’t be safe to take her home unless you get her proper medical care.”

He turned to look at the two women, who were moving across the veranda into the house. “Susie didn’t get hurt, did she?”

“She’s physically and mentally hurt. She’s been drugged and raped. She’s witnessed at least one murder and possibly two. You can’t expect her to handle these things without psychiatric help.”

“Who raped her, for God’s sake?”

“Albert Sweetner.”

Crandall became very still. I sensed the core of force in his aging body. “I’ll kill the dirty son.”

“He’s already dead. Maybe you knew that.”

“No.”

“You haven’t seen him in the past few days?”

“I only saw him once in my life. That was about eighteen years ago, when they sent him up to Preston for stealing my car. I was a witness at the trial.”

“I heard he paid a visit to the Yucca Tree Inn the summer he got out of Preston. Don’t you remember?”

“All right, I saw him twice. What does that prove?”

“You can tell me what happened.”

“You know what happened,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be bringing it up. He tried to wreck my marriage. He probably spent his three years in Preston figuring out how to do it. He said he was Susie’s father, and he was going to make a legal claim to her. I beat him up.” He struck the palm of his left hand with his right fist, more than once. “I hit Martha, too. And she took Susie and left me. I don’t blame her. She didn’t come back for a long time after that.”

“Did she go with Albert Sweetner?”

“I don’t know. She never told me. I thought I was never going to see Susie or her again. It was like my life had gone to pieces. Now it’s gone to pieces for sure.”

“You have a chance to put it back together. You’re the only one who can.”

His eyes caught my meaning and held it. But he said: “I don’t know, Archer. I’m getting old—I’ll be sixty on my next birthday. I shouldn’t have taken on the two of them in the first place.”

“Who else would have?”

He answered me emphatically. “Plenty of men would have married Martha. She was a raving beauty. She still is.”

“We won’t argue about that. Have you thought about where you’re going to spend the night?”

“I thought we’d drive back as far as the Yucca Tree. I’m pretty worn out myself, but Martha always seems to have something left.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Back to the Palisades. One thing, it’s handy to the Medical Center. I thought I’d take her in there and have her checked,” he said, as if it was entirely his own idea.

“Do that, Lester. And take good care of her. She witnessed a murder yesterday, as I said, and the murderer may try to silence her.” I told him about the bearded man and the false hair I had found on Al Sweetner’s body.

“Does that mean Sweetner did the Broadhurst killing?”

“Whoever did it wants us to think so. But it’s hardly possible. I saw Sweetner in Northridge around the time that Stanley Broadhurst was killed.” I hesitated. “Where were you about that time, by the way?”

“Somewhere in Los Angeles, looking for Susie.”

I didn’t ask him if he could prove it. Perhaps in recognition of this, he got out his wallet and offered me several hundred-dollar bills. But I didn’t want to take anything from him or owe him anything before the case was ended.

“Put your money away,” I said.

“Don’t you like money?”

“I may send you a bill when this thing is over.”

I went inside. Willie Mackey was sitting in the front hall with Ronny on his knee. He was telling the boy about an old con he had known who had tried to swim ashore from Alcatraz.

I found Martha Crandall and her daughter in the front room. They were sitting side by side in the bay window, their pretty blonde heads close together.

An hour or so ago the big old house had been as quiet as a hermitage. Now it seemed more like a family service agency. I was hoping that the whole thing wouldn’t blow up in my face.

Deciding to risk it, I caught Martha Crandall’s eye and beckoned her over to my side of the room.

“What is it?” she said impatiently, with a backward look at Susan. “I hate to leave her.”

“You may have to, though.”

She looked at me in dismay. “You mean you’re going to put her away?”

“You may decide to, temporarily. She’s got a lot on her mind, and she’s suicidal.”

The woman’s shoulders made a heavy movement which was meant to be lighter. “That was just a grandstand play, she says so herself.”

“So are a lot of successful suicides. Nobody knows where the grandstanding leaves off and the thing turns dead serious. Anyone who even threatens suicide needs counseling.”

“That’s what I’m trying to give her. Counseling.”

“I mean professional counseling, from a psychiatrist. I’ve discussed this with your husband, and he says he’ll take her to the Medical Center tomorrow. But you’re the one who will have to carry the ball and follow through. It might be a good idea if you talked to the shrinks together.”

She seemed appalled. “Am I such a rotten mother?”

“I didn’t say that. But I don’t think you’ve ever leveled with her, have you?”

“What about?”

“Your own bad times.”

“I couldn’t,” she said with vehemence. “Why not?”

“I’d be ashamed.”

“Let her know you’re human, anyway.”

“I am that,” she said. “All right, I’ll do it.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Sure it is. I love her, you know. Susie’s my little girl. Not so little any more, either.”

She turned back toward her daughter, but I stopped her and led her into the furthest corner of the room. Ellen’s canvases hung along the wall like imperfectly remembered hallucinations.

She said: “What else do you want from me?”

“A few words of truth. I want to know what happened fifteen years ago, when Albert Sweetner visited the Yucca Tree.”

She looked at me as if I’d slapped her. “This is a lousy time to bring that up.”

“It’s the only time we have. I understand you left your husband. What happened after that?”

The woman pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Has Lester been talking?”

“Some. But not enough. He knows you walked out on him and took Susan along. And he knows you came back eventually. But he doesn’t know what happened in between.”

“Nothing happened. I thought it through and changed my mind, that’s all. Anyway, this is strictly my private business.”

“Maybe it would be if you’d kept it strictly private. But other people got mixed up in it. One of them was Susan, and she was old enough to remember.”

Martha Crandall looked at her daughter with guilty curiosity. The girl said:

“You’re talking about me, aren’t you? It isn’t very nice.”

Her tone was quite impersonal and remote. She sat very still in the embrasure like an actress forbidden to step out through the proscenium into the welter of reality. Her mother shook her head at her, and then at me.

“I can’t take this. And I don’t have to,” she said.

“What do you propose to do? Let Susan work it out for herself without any help from you?”

Martha hung her head like a naughty child. “Nobody ever helped me.”

“Maybe I can help you, Mrs. Crandall. Al Sweetner told your husband that he was Susan’s father. But I don’t think he could have been. Not even an Al Sweetner would force his own daughter.”

“Who told you he did that?”

“Susan told me.”

“Do we have to talk about these things?” Her look was reproachful, as if I’d made them real by naming them.

“If Susan could, we can.”

“When did you talk to her?”

“Between the bridge and here.”

“You had no right—”

“The hell I didn’t. She’s been under terrible pressure. She had to let it out some way.”

“Pressure from what?”

“Too many deaths,” I said. “Too many memories.”

Her eyes widened like lenses, as if they were trying to pick up faint light from the past. But all I could see in their centers was my own head reflected in miniature, twice.

“What did Susan tell you?” she said.

“Not very much. She really didn’t intend to tell me anything, but the memories forced their way out. Wasn’t she
with you in the Mountain House one night in the summer of 1955?”

“I don’t know what night you’re talking about.”

“The night Leo Broadhurst was shot.”

Her fringed eyelids came down over her eyes. She swayed a little, as if the memory of the shot had wounded her. I held her upright, and felt the warmth of her living flesh on my hands.