The Underground Man (9 page)

His head came up. I waved him toward me. He jumped down onto the slip and moved along it in a swift barefoot shamble. He was naked to the waist, and he walked with his bearded head thrust forward as though to cancel out his boy’s shoulders and his narrow hairless chest. His hands were so fouled with engine oil that he seemed to be wearing black gloves.

He regarded me somberly through the wire gate. “What can I do for you?”

“You lost your book.” I got out the copy of
Green Mansions
with his name on the flyleaf. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

“Let me see.” He started to open the gate, then clicked it emphatically shut again. “If my father sent you, he can drop dead. And you can go back and tell him that I said that.”

“I don’t know your father.”

“Neither do I know him. I never knew him. And I don’t want to know him.”

“That takes care of your father. What about me?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Don’t you want your book?”

“Keep it, if you can read. It’ll improve your mind, if you have a mind.”

He was a very hostile young man. I reminded myself that he was a witness, and there was no point in getting angry with him through a fence.

“I can always get somebody to read it to me,” I said.

He smiled quickly. The smile in the midst of his reddish beard seemed extraordinarily bright.

I said:

“There’s a small boy missing. His father was killed this morning—”

“You think I killed him?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t believe in violence.” His look implied that I did.

“Then You’ll want to help me find whoever killed him. Why don’t you let me in? Or come out and we can talk.”

“I like it this way.” He fingered the wire gate. “You look like the violent type to me.”

“The situation isn’t funny,” I said. “The missing boy is six years old. His name is Ronald Broadhurst. Do you know anything about him?”

He shook his tangled head. The beard that covered his lower face seemed to have overgrown his mouth and left him only his eyes to speak with. They were brown, and slightly starred, like damaged glass.

“A girl was with him,” I went on. “She was reading this book of yours last night in bed. Her name is Sue Crandall.”

“I don’t know her.”

“I’ve been told you do. She was here night before last.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“I think you would. You lent her this book, and you lent her Armistead’s Mercedes. What else did you lend her?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“She got stoned on something and climbed the mast. What did you give her, Jerry?”

A shadow of fear crossed his face. He converted it into anger. His brown eyes became reddish and hot, as if there was fire behind them. “I thought you were fuzz,” he said in a stylized way. “Why don’t you go away?”

“I want to talk to you seriously. You’re in trouble.”

“Go to hell.”

He trotted away along the slip. His hairy head seemed enormous and grotesque on his boy’s body, like a papier-mâché saint’s head on a stick. I stood and watched him vault into the cockpit of the boat and go back to work on the motor.

The sun was almost down now. When it reached the water, the entire sea and sky seemed to ignite, burning red in a larger fire than Rattlesnake.

Before it got dark I went through the parking lot looking for Fritz Snow’s old Chevrolet sedan. I couldn’t find it, but I had a persistent feeling that it had to be in the neighborhood. I began to search along the boulevard which paralleled the shore.

The western sky lost its color like a face going suddenly pale. The light faded gradually from the air. It clung for a long time to the surface of the water, which stretched out like a faint and fallen sky.

I walked for several blocks without finding the old Chevrolet. Street lights came on, and the waterfront was bleakly lit by the neon signs of motels and hamburger joints. I crossed to one of the latter and had a double hamburger with a paper sack of French fried potatoes, and coffee. I ate and drank like a starved man, and remembered that I hadn’t eaten since morning.

When I turned away from the bright counter, it was almost fully dark. I glanced up at the mountains, and was shocked by what I saw. The fire had grown and spread as if it fed on darkness. It hung around the city like the bivouacs of a besieging army.

I took up my search for the Chevrolet again, working through the motel parking lots and up the side streets toward the railroad tracks. As soon as I left the boulevard, I was in a ghetto. Black and brown children were playing quiet games in the near-darkness. From the broken-down porches of the little houses, their mothers and grandmothers watched them and me.

I found Fritz Snow’s half-painted Chevrolet in a rutted lane behind a dusty oleander hedge. There was music leaking out of it. A small man in a baseball cap was sitting behind the wheel.

“What are you doing, friend?”

“Playing my organ.” He put a mouth organ to his lips again and played a few bars of wheezy blue music. I’m guilty, it seemed to say, but I’ve suffered enough—so have you.

“You play very well.”

“It’s a gift.”

He pointed skyward through the roof of the car. Then he blew a few more bars, and shook the spit out of his mouth organ. He smelled of wine.

“Is this your car?” I asked him.

“I’m watching it for a friend.”

I got in beside him. The key was in the ignition, and I took it. He gave me a glinting apprehensive look.

“My name is Archer. What’s your name?”

“Amos Johnstone. You got no right or reason to bust me. I’m really and truly watching it for a friend.”

“I’m not a cop. Is your friend a young woman with a little boy?”

“That’s her. She gave me a dollar—told me to sit in the car till she came back.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I dunno, I don’t carry a watch. Only thing I can swear to, it was today.”

“Before dark?”

He peered at the sky as if nightfall had taken him by surprise. “Must have been. I bought some wine with the dollar, and it’s gone.” He glanced around at me. “I could use another dollar.”

“Maybe we’ll get to that. Where did the young lady go?”

“Down the street.” He gestured in the direction of the marina.

“And she took the boy with her?”

“Yessir.”

“Was he all right?”

“He was scared.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He didn’t say a word to me. But he was shivering like a puppy.”

I gave the man a dollar and started back to the marina.
He played me some farewell music which merged with the voices of the children playing in the dark.

There were a few scattered lights on the boats along the slips. A steadier, more brilliant light shone over the wire gate from the top of a metal pole. I took a quick look around and went over the gate, snagging one leg on the barbed wire across the top of it and coming down hard on my back on the slanting gangway. It shook me, and I stayed down for a minute.

My blood was beating in my ears and eyes as I approached the sloop. There was a light in the cabin, but no one on deck that I could see. In spite of the circumstances, there was something secret and sweet about the dark water, and something beautiful about the boat, like a corralled horse at night. I climbed over the railing into the cockpit. The mast towered up against the obscure sky.

There was a scuffling noise in the cabin. “Who’s that?” It was Jerry’s voice. He opened the hatchway and stuck out his head. His eyes were wide and glaring, and his open mouth was like a dark hole in his beard. He looked like Lazarus coming out of the tomb.

I reached for him, got hold of his body under the arms, lifted him up, and set him down hard in the cockpit on his back. He stayed down, as if he had hit his head. I felt a twinge of shame at hurting a boy.

I went down the ladder into the cabin, past a ship-to-shore radio and a chart table. On one of the two lower bunks a girl-shaped body was lying under a red blanket with only its blond hair showing, spilling like twisted gold across the pillow.

I pulled the blanket off her face. Her expression was queerly impassive. Her eyes looked at me from some other place, almost as if she was ready to die or perhaps already had.

Something besides her body was moving under the blanket. I stripped it off. She was holding the small boy against her, with one arm curled around his head and her hand over his mouth. He lay still beside her. Even his round blue eyes were perfectly still.

They flickered past me. I turned in the cramped space. Jerry was crouched on the ladder with a revolver held in both his hands.

“Get off this boat, you grungy pig.”

“Put the gun away. You’ll hurt somebody.”

“You,” he said. “Unless you get off here now. I’m in charge of this boat, and you’re trespassing.”

It was hard to take him seriously, but the gun helped. He waved it at me, and moved to one side. I climbed out past him, undecided whether I should try to take him or pass.

My indecision made me slow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shift the gun in his hands and swing it up by the barrel. I failed to avoid its fall. The scene spun away.

I was watching the cogwheels of the universe turning. It resembled, on a large scale, one of those boxes of gears that engineers fool around with in their spare time. I seemed to be able to see the whole apparatus at once, and to understand that the ratio of output to input was one to one.

Quiet water lapped at the edge of my attention. The side of my face was against a flat rough surface which seemed to rise and fall. The air seemed cooler, and I thought for a while that I was on the boat. Then I got up onto my hands and knees and saw that I was on the slip and that the space where
Ariadne
had lain was an oblong of dark water.

I dipped up some of the water in my hand and splashed it on my face. I was dizzy and depressed. I hadn’t taken the bearded boy seriously enough, and mishandled both him and the situation. I checked my wallet: the money was still in it.

I made my way up the gangway to a public rest station in the parking lot. I washed my face again, without looking too closely at it, and decided not to mess with the swelling on my head, which had stopped bleeding.

I found a pay phone, with a directory chained to it, on the outside wall of the building and called the sheriff’s office. The deputy on duty told me that the sheriff and most of his officers were in the fire zone. He was swamped with calls and had no one to send out.

I dialed the local Forest Service number. The female voice of an answering service informed me that no calls were taken after business hours, but she agreed to accept a message for Kelsey. I dictated a telegraphic version of recent events and listened to the operator read it back to me in a bored voice.

Next I looked up Brian Kilpatrick in the Real Estate section of the yellow pages. Both home and business numbers were listed for him. I called Kilpatrick’s home, got him immediately, and asked him if I could come and see him. He sighed.

“I just sat down with a drink. What’s on your mind?”

“Your son Jerry.”

“I see. Are you an officer?” His carefully modulated voice had flattened out.

“A private detective.”

“Does this have to do with the trouble at the harbor yesterday morning?”

“I’m afraid it does, and it’s getting worse. May I come and talk to you?”

“You still haven’t said what about. Is a girl involved in this?”

“Yes. She’s a young blond named Susan Crandall. Susan and your son and a little boy named Ron Broadhurst have taken off—”

“Is that Mrs. Broadhurst’s grandson?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Where in the name of heaven have they gone?”

“To sea. They took the Armistead yacht.”

“Does Roger Armistead know about this?”

“Not yet. I called you first.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You’d better come over as you suggest. Do you know where I live?” He gave me the address, twice.

I called a cab and repeated the address to the driver. He was one of the loquacious ones. He talked about fires and floods, earthquakes and oil spills. Why, he wanted to know, would anyone want to live in California? If things got any worse, he was going to move his family back to Motown. That was a city.

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.”