The Underground Man Page 7

  “Hello, Roger.” The woman’s voice had changed. It was soft and musical, as if she was listening to it, tuning it carefully.

  The young man got up and took off his cap, showing neither surprise nor pleasure. “I didn’t expect a visit from you, Fran.”

  “The house on Crescent Drive just burned to the ground.”

  His face lengthened. “With all my clothes?”

  “You can always buy more clothes.” Her voice was partly serious and partly mocking, waiting for him to decide which way he wanted the meeting to go.

  He said a little belatedly: “Too bad about the house. You liked it, didn’t you?”

  “I liked it as long as you liked it.”

  “Are you planning to build again?”

  “I don’t know, Roger. What do you think?”

  He moved his heavy shoulders, shrugging off the threat of responsibility. “It’s really up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I feel like traveling.” She spoke with a kind of fake decisiveness, like a woman improvising. “I may go to Yugoslavia.”

  He turned and stared at me, as if he’d just discovered my presence. He was a good-looking man, perhaps ten years younger than his wife, with a strong impatient body. I noticed that his dark hair was thinning. He noticed that I noticed and ruffled it up with his hand.

  “This is Mr. Archer,” his wife said. “He’s a detective. He’s looking for the girl you had aboard the sloop.”

  “What girl?” But he looked at me with instant dislike and flushed.

  “The one who tried to fly too near the sun. Or was it the moon?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I had nothing to do with her.”

  “Do you know her full name?” I said.

  “Susan, I think. Sue Crandall.”

  His wife brightened up alarmingly. “I thought you said you had nothing to do with her.”

  “I didn’t. I chewed Jerry out for having her aboard, and he told me what her name was. I had to force it out of him.”

  “The story came to me differently,” she said. “I heard she spent Thursday night on Ariadne with you. The marina’s rather a public place for that sort of thing, isn’t it?”

  He answered somberly: “I don’t mess with young chicks. I spent Thursday night here by myself, drinking. The girl was taken aboard without my knowledge and without my permission.”

  “Where’s she from?” I said.

  “I don’t really know. Somewhere down south, according to Jerry—”

  His wife cut in: “How long have you known her?”

  He gave her a hard dull look. “Don’t be a broken record, Fran. I never met the Crandall girl. Ask Jerry Kilpatrick if you don’t believe me. The girl is his little friend.”

  “Who gave her the use of the Mercedes, if you didn’t?”

  “That was Jerry’s doing, too. I hate to blame it all on him, but that’s the truth. I chewed him out for it.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re not going to have the Mercedes from now on.”

  “To hell with you then.”

  He moved past her to the open stairs and stamped down to the ground floor. There were sounds like drawers being opened and shut, and closet doors being slammed.

  The house was frame, with open rafters and without insulation, so that the angry sounds reverberated through it. Fran Armistead winced at them, as if the violence was being inflicted on her body. She was afraid of her husband, I thought, and probably in love with him.

  She went down after him, looking strained and intent, like a woman descending voluntarily into hell. Their voices floated up the stairs, clearly audible in the intervals between the sounds of the surf.

  “Don’t be angry,” she said.

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You can have the Mercedes.”

  “I need some transportation,” he said reasonably. “Not that I’m going anywhere.”

  “No. You stay with me. I felt absolutely ghastly when the house burned. I felt as if my life was burning down. But it wasn’t, was it?”

  “I don’t know. What’s this about going to Yugoslavia?”

  “Don’t you want to go?”

  “What’s in Yugoslavia?”

  “We’ll stay here then. Does that suit you?”

  “For the present,” he said. “I may have had it with this town.”

  “On account of the girl? What’s her name—Susan?”

  “Listen. Do we have to go on about her? I never even saw her.”

  A door closed, and their voices became muffled. I began to hear more private sounds, and decided to go outside.

  It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the beach was littered with bodies. It was like a warning vision of the future, when every square foot of the world would be populated. I found a place to sit in the sand beside a youth with a guitar who lay propped against a girl’s stomach. I could smell her sun-tan oil, and I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like the animals in the ark.

  I got up and looked around me. Under the stratum of smoke which lay over the city, the air was harshly clear. The low sun was like a spinning yellow frisbee which I could almost reach out and catch.

  The thrusting masts of the marina looked dark and calcined against the light in the west. I took off my shoes and socks and carried them along the beach in that direction.

  chapter 11

  A concrete breakwater extended by a sandbar curved like a sheltering arm around the harbor and marina. A few boats, under motor or sail, were coming in from the sea through the marked channel. A multitude of other boats lay in the slips, from racing yachts to superannuated landing craft.

  I walked along beside the high woven-wire fence which divided the marina from the public parking lot. There were several gates in it but they all had automatic locks. I found a boat rental dock near the foot of the breakwater and asked the man in charge how to get to Ariadne.

  He gave me a suspicious look which took in my bare feet and the shoes I had tied together and slung over my shoulder.

  “Mr. Armistead’s not aboard, if he’s the one you’re looking for.”

  “What about Jerry Kilpatrick?”

  “I wouldn’t know about him. Go down to the third gate and try giving him a yell. You can see the boat from there, about halfway along the float on the left.”

  I put on my shoes and found the gate and the boat. She was a white sloop, poised on the quiet water in a way that made my breath come a little faster. A thin young man with straggling hair and a furred lower face was working over the auxiliary motor near her stern. I called to him through the locked gate.

  “Jerry?”

  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 o
f 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.

  chapter 12

  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.”