The Underground Man (30 page)

“Any of them,” Mrs. Snow said. “You never killed
any
of them.”

“I never killed any of them,” he repeated. “I didn’t kill Mr. Broadhurst, or Stanley, or—” He lifted his head. “Who was the other one?”

“Albert Sweetner.”

“I didn’t kill him, neither.”

“Either,” his mother said.

I turned to her. “Let him do his own talking, please.”

The sharpness in my voice seemed to encourage her son: “Yeah. Let me do my own talking.”

“I’m only trying to help,” she said.

“Yeah. Sure.” But there was a dubious questioning note in his voice. It issued in speech, though he kept his hangdog posture on the bed: “What happened to my wig and stuff?”

“Somebody must have taken it,” she said.

“Albert Sweetner?”

“It may have been Albert.”

“I don’t believe that. I think you took it,” he said.

“That’s crazy talk.”

His eyes came up to her face, slowly, like snails ascending
a wall. “You swiped it from under the mattress.” He struck the bed under him with his hand to emphasize the point. “And I’m not crazy.”

“You’re talking that way,” she said. “What reason would I have to take your wig?”

“Because you didn’t want me to chase the chicks. You were jealous.”

She let out a high little titter, with no amusement in it. I looked at her face. It was stiff and gray, as if it had frozen.

“My son’s upset. He’s talking foolishly.”

I said to Fritz: “What makes you think your mother took your wig?”

“Nobody else comes in here. There’s just the two of us. As soon as it was gone, I knew who took it.”

“Did you ask her if she took it?”

“I was afraid to.”

“My son has never been afraid of his mother,” she said. “And he knows I didn’t take his blessed wig. Albert Sweetner must have. I remember now, he was here a month ago.”

“He was in prison a month ago, Mrs. Snow. You’ve been blaming Albert for quite a number of things.” In the ensuing silence I could hear all three of us breathing. I turned to Fritz. “You told me earlier that Albert put you up to burying Leo Broadhurst. Is that still true?”

“Albert was there,” he answered haltingly. “He was sleeping in the stable near the Mountain House. He said the shot woke him up, and he hung around to see what would come of it. When I brought the tractor down from the compound, he helped me with the digging.”

Mrs. Snow moved past me and stood over him. “Albert told you to do it, didn’t he?”

“No,” he said. “It was you. You said that Martha wanted me to do it.”

“Did Martha kill Mr. Broadhurst?” I said.

“I dunno. I wasn’t there when it happened. Mother got me up in the middle of the night and said I had to bury him deep, or Martha would go to the gas chamber.” He looked around the narrow walls of the room as if he was in that chamber now, with the pellet about to drop. “She told me I should blame it all on Albert, if anybody asked me.”

“You’re a crazy fool,” his mother said. “If you go on telling lies like this, I’ll have to leave you and you’ll be all alone. They’ll put you in jail, or in the mental hospital.”

Both of them could end up there, I was thinking. I said: “Don’t let her scare you, Fritz. You won’t be put in jail for anything you did because she made you.”

“I won’t stand for this!” she cried. “You’re turning him against me.”

“Maybe it’s time, Mrs. Snow. You’ve been using your son as a scapegoat, telling yourself that you’ve been looking after him.”

“Who else would look after him?” Her voice was rough and rueful.

“He could get better treatment from a stranger.” I turned back to him: “What happened Saturday morning, when Stanley Broadhurst borrowed the pick and shovel?”

“He borrowed the pick and shovel,” Fritz repeated, “and after a while I got nervous. I went up the trail to see what they were doing up there. Stanley was digging right where his father was buried.”

“What did you do?”

“I went back down to the ranch and phoned
her.”

His wet green gaze rested on his mother. She made a shushing noise which narrowed into a hiss. I said over it:

“What about Saturday night, Fritz? Did you drive down to Northridge?”

“No sir. I was here in bed all night.”

“Where was your mother?”

“I don’t know. She gave me sleeping pills right after Albert phoned. She always gives me sleeping pills when she leaves me by myself at night.”

“Albert phoned here Saturday night?”

“Yessir. I answered the phone, but it was her he wanted to talk to.”

“What about?”

“They were talking about money. She said she had no money—”

“Shut up!”

Mrs. Snow raised her fist in a threat to her son. Though he was bigger and younger and probably stronger, he crawled away from her on the bed and huddled crying in the corner.

I took hold of Mrs. Snow’s arm. She was taut and trembling. I drew her into the kitchen and shut the door on the dissolving man. She leaned on the counter beside the kitchen sink, shivering as though the house was chilly.

“You killed Leo Broadhurst, didn’t you?”

Mrs. Snow didn’t answer me. She seemed to have been overcome by a terrible embarrassment that tied her tongue.

“You didn’t stay in the ranch house that night when Elizabeth Broadhurst and Stanley went up the mountain. You went up there after them and found Leo lying unconscious and stabbed him to death. Then you came back here and told your son to bury him and his car.

“Unfortunately Albert Sweetner knew where the body was buried, and eventually he came back here hoping to turn his knowledge into money. When Stanley failed to show up with the money Saturday night, Albert phoned here and tried to get some more out of you. You drove down to Northridge and killed him.”

“How could I kill him—a big strong man like Albert?”

“He was probably dead drunk when you got to him. And it never occurred to him that he was in danger from you. It never occurred to Stanley, either, did it?”

She remained silent, though her mouth was working.

“I can understand why you killed Albert and Stanley,” I said. “You were trying to cover up what you’d done in the past. But why did Leo Broadhurst have to die?”

Her eyes met mine and blurred like cold windows. “He was half dead already, lying there in his blood. All I did was put him out of his misery.” Her clenched right hand jerked downward convulsively, reenacting the stabbing. “I’d do the same for a dying animal.”

“It wasn’t compassion that made you murder him.”

“You can’t call it murder. He deserved to die. He was a wicked man, a cheat and a fornicator. He got Marty Nickerson pregnant and let my boy take the blame. Frederick has never been the same since then.”

There was no use arguing with her. She was one of those paranoid souls who kept her conscience clear by blaming everything on other people. Her violence and malice appeared to her as emanations from the external world.

I crossed the room to the phone and called the police. While the receiver was still in my hand, Mrs. Snow opened a drawer and took out a butcher knife. She came at me in a quick little dance, moving to jangled music I couldn’t hear.

I caught her by the wrist. She had the kind of exploding strength that insane anger releases. But her strength soon ran out. The knife clattered on the floor. I pinned her arms and held her until the police arrived.

“You’ll shame me in front of the neighbors,” she said desperately.

I was the only one watching as the patrol car moved
away through the brown water with Fritz and his mother sitting behind a screen in the back seat. I followed them downtown, thinking that quite often nowadays the low-life subplots were taking over the tragedies. I gave a more prosaic explanation to a team of police detectives and a stenotypist.

My statement was interrupted by a phone call from Brian Kilpatrick’s fiancee. Kilpatrick had walked into his game room and shot himself.

The briefcase I took from him, containing Elizabeth Broadhurst’s guns and records, was in the trunk of my car. I let it stay there unreported for the present, though I knew all the facts of Leo Broadhurst’s death would have to come out at Edna Snow’s trial.

Before night fell, Jean and I and Ronny drove out of town.

“It’s over,” I said.

Ronny said, “That’s good.” His mother sighed.

I hoped it was over. I hoped that Ronny’s life wouldn’t turn back toward his father’s death as his father’s life had turned, in a narrowing circle. I wished the boy a benign failure of memory.

As though she sensed my thoughts, Jean reached behind him and touched the back of my neck with her cold fingers. We passed the steaming remnants of the fire and drove on south through the rain.

ROSS MACDONALD

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

Books by Ross Macdonald

Blue City
The Dark Tunnel
Trouble Follows Me
The Three Roads
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The Way Some People Die
The Ivory Grin
Meet Me at the Morgue
Find a Victim
The Name is Archer
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
The Ferguson Affair
The Wycherly Woman
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill Black Money
The Far Side of the Dollar
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
Sleeping Beauty
The Blue Hammer

THE BARBAROUS COAST

The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver-screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won’t stay hidden.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27903-3

THE IVORY GRIN

A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he’s being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, rundown small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s mysteriously gone missing.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27899-9

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Lew finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands—including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald’s masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70866-4

THE DOOMSTERS

Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman’s parents, Senator Hallman and his wife, Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint but they’ve been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty dealing, the family seems to be on the receiving end of a karmic death blow. With two already dead and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27904-0

THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer’s hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27898-2

THE GOODBYE LOOK

Lew is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7

THE INSTANT ENEMY

At first glance, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie and Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by Hachett’s coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27905-7