“The gardener may be lying about the tools. He may have come up here and used them himself. Don’t forget he lent the girl his car, and lied about it.”
“Fritz is still on your list of suspects, then.”
Kelsey scratched at his short gray hair. “He has to be. I’ve been doing a little digging into his record.”
“He has a record?”
“Not much of a one, but in my book it’s significant. When Fritz was in his late teens he was convicted of a sex crime. It was a first offense – at least that was known of – and the judge allowed him juvenile status and sent him to the county forestry camp.”
“What crime did he commit?”
“Statutory rape. I’m particularly interested, because these sex incidents sometimes crop up in the histories of firebugs. I’m not saying Fritz is a firebug – I have no evidence for that. But in camp he got interested in firefighting, and he even helped put out a couple of fires in the back country.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s indicative,” Kelsey said gravely. “Don’t quote me to any firemen – as a matter of fact, I used to be one myself – but firemen and firebugs are sometimes brothers under the skin. They’re both fascinated by fires. Apparently Fritz Snow was so fascinated that when he got out of camp he went to work for the Forest Service.”
“I’m surprised they took him.”
“He had some pretty good backing. Captain Broadhurst and his wife went to bat for him. The Forest Service didn’t make a fireman out of him, but they gave him some training and a job running a bulldozer. As a matter of fact, he helped to build that trail.” Kelsey pointed toward the trail which went down the side of the bluff into the canyon. “Fritz and his crewmates did a fair job – it’s still in pretty good shape after fifteen years. But he didn’t last long in the Forest Service. Too many personal problems, to put it mildly.”
“Did they fire him on account of his personal problems?”
“I don’t know why they fired him. There’s no notation in the file, and it was before my time.”
“Fritz could tell you.”
“Yeah. But it isn’t going to be easy. Yesterday afternoon, when I tried to talk to him again, his mother wouldn’t let me back into the house. She defends that hopeless son of hers like a wildcat.”
“Maybe she’ll let me in. I want to talk to her anyway. The dead man in Northridge, Al Sweetner, picked up some money from Mrs. Snow last week.”
“How much money?”
“We’ll have to ask her.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten-fifteen now. Can you meet me out in front of her house at eleven?”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Kelsey said. “I want to get in on the preliminary examination of this body. You go and talk to Fritz. There has to be a reason for all the fear he has in him.”
Kelsey’s voice was cool and rather uncomprehending. He talked about fear as if he had never experienced that emotion. Perhaps the reason for his being a fire investigator, I thought, was a puzzled need to understand what made emotional types like Fritz commit their hot foolish crimes.
“Who was the girl he raped?”
“I don’t know who she was. The case was handled in Juvenile Court, and the record of it is sealed. I picked up my information from the old-timers at the courthouse.”
chapter 19
Jean was looking down into her husband’s face as if she wondered how it felt to be dead. When Purvis came marching back, with his spade over his shoulder, she gave a start and turned away. Purvis set the spade down quietly and carefully.
He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and took out a black leather folder with Stanley’s name printed in gold inside. It contained his driver’s license and other identification, a number of credit cards and membership cards, and three dollar bills.
“He didn’t have much left,” the young man said.
I was struck by the feeling in his voice. “Did you know Stanley Broadhurst?”
“I knew him just about all my life, starting back in grade school.”
“I thought he went to private school.”
“He did, after he left grade school. He had some kind of trouble that summer, and his mother put him in a special school.”
“The summer his father went away?”
“That’s right. Stanley had a lot of bad luck in his life.” He spoke with a certain awe. “I used to envy him back there in grade school. His people were rich, and we were as poor as Job’s turkey. But I’ll never envy him again.”
I looked around for Jean. She had wandered off in the direction of the stable, and seemed to be searching for a means of escape. She reminded me of the frightened doe I had seen the day before, but there was no fawn with her.
When I reached her, she was standing beside the incinerated car. “Was this ours?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you have transportation, Mr. Archer? I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Elizabeth’s house. I spent the night at the hospital.”
I told Kelsey where we were going and said I might see him later, in the pathology department of the hospital. Jean and I started up the hillside path. She took the lead, moving quickly, like a woman trying to climb out of the present.
Near the bleachers where my car was parked, a number of plywood tables had been set up on trestles. A hundred or more men were seated at them, eating mulligan stew dispensed by a motorized chuckwagon.
Most of the men looked up as we passed. Some whistled; a few cheered. Jean kept going, her head down. She climbed into my car as if she was being pursued.
“It’s my fault,” she said in self-loathing. “I shouldn’t be wearing these clothes.”
We drove a long way around through the outskirts of the city. I tried to question her about her husband, but she was unresponsive. She sat with her head down, deep in her own thoughts.
When we entered Mrs. Broadhurst’s canyon, she straightened up and began to look around her. The fire had come down nearly as far as the entrance to the canyon and left its scorch-marks on the trees and on the hillside brush.
Most of the houses in Canyon Estates were untouched. A few had been burned, as if picked out at random. There was nothing left of one house but a stone fireplace and a statue of Venus standing up out of rubble and wilted pipes. A man and a woman were poking among the ruins.
The random pattern of the fire persisted as we went further into the canyon. Mrs. Broadhurst’s avocado trees seemed unharmed, but the olive trees beyond them had burned black. The eucalyptus trees that towered over the tile roof of the house had lost most of their branches and all their leaves. The barn had burned. The house itself was scorched but intact.
Jean had a key, and we went in together. The closed house was full of the bitter smell of fire, and seemed abandoned. The worn Victorian furniture looked ready for the junk heap.
Even the mounted birds in their glass cases looked as if they had seen better days. An acorn woodpecker had only one glass eye. The breasts of the robins had faded. They looked like imitation birds made to lend life to a dead and scruffy world.
“Excuse me,” Jean said. “I’ve got to find something black.”
She disappeared into the other wing of the house. I had decided to call Willie Mackey, a San Francisco detective who had worked with me on other cases. Looking for a telephone, I went into a kind of den adjoining the living room. There were ancestral tintypes on the walls. A man with mutton chop whiskers and a high winged collar glared at me from a black frame, as if daring me to make something of his whiskers.
His look reminded me of Mrs. Broadhurst, but it didn’t help me to understand her. I had seen her young and forceful, then sick and doddering. I needed something to fill up the gap between those versions of her, something that would explain why her husband had left her or why her son hadn’t been able to.