“What happened to the kids aboard her?”
“That isn’t clear. But it doesn’t sound too good. According to my information she’s breaking up in the surf.”
“Exactly where?”
“Just below the state park. Do you know the place?”
“Yes. Where are you? I can pick you up.”
“I’m afraid I can’t leave town right now. I have a lead in the Stanley Broadhurst killing. I shouldn’t leave the fire area, anyway.”
“What’s the lead?”
“Your man with the long black wig was seen in the area yesterday. He was driving an old white car along Rattlesnake Road. A coed from the college was taking a walk there, and she saw him shortly before the fire started.”
“Is it a positive identification?”
“Not yet. I’m going to talk to her now.”
Kelsey hung up. Turning away from the phone, I noticed that the door of Fritz’s room was ajar. One of his moist eyes appeared at the crack like the eye of a fish in an underwater crevice. His mother, at the other door, was watching him like a shark.
“How are you, Fritz?” I said.
“I feel just terrible.”
He opened the door wider. In his rumpled pajamas he looked less like a man than an ill-kept boy. His mother said:
“Go back in your room and be quiet.”
He shook his frowzy head. “I don’t like it in there. I keep seeing things in there.”
“What do you keep seeing, Fritz?” I said.
“I keep seeing Mr. Broadhurst in his grave.”
“Did you bury him?” I said.
He nodded, and began to cry, nodding and crying like a human pump. His mother moved between us. Leaning her slight weight against his amorphous body, she pushed him back into his room.
She closed the door on him and locked it and turned on me, holding the key like a weapon. “Please get out of here now. You’ve got him all upset.”
“If he buried Stanley Broadhurst yesterday, you can’t very well hush it up. You’re crazy to try.”
She let out a kind of terrier noise which was meant to be a laugh. “I’m not the one that’s crazy. He no more buried Mr. Broadhurst than I did. You people have got him so confused and frightened that he doesn’t know what he did or what he saw. Except that I know for a fact he didn’t do anything wrong. I know my son.”
She spoke with such assurance that I almost believed her. “I still think he knows more than he told us.”
“He knows a good deal less, you mean. He doesn’t know what he knows. And I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself, badgering a widow and her only son. If the doctor finds him in this condition, he’ll want to commit him to the State Hospital.”
“Has he been committed before?”
“He nearly was, years ago. But Mrs. Broadhurst said she’d pay for the nursing home.”
“This was in 1955?”
“Yes. Now will you please get out of my kitchen? I didn’t invite you in here, but I’m inviting you out.”
I thanked her, and left the house. At the curb in front of it, a middle-aged man in sports clothes was climbing out of a yellow sports car. He lifted a medical bag out of the boot and came toward me. His gray hair and light blue eyes were in contrast to his high color.
“Dr. Jerome?”
“Yes.” His look was inquiring.
I told him who I was and what I was doing. “Mrs. Stanley Broadhurst hired me. How is Elizabeth Broadhurst, by the way?”
“She’s suffering from exhaustion, which brought on a mild heart attack.”
“Is she talkable?”
“Not today. Possibly tomorrow. But I’d stay off the subject of her son – and her grandson.” The doctor took a deep breath and sighed with unexpected feeling. “I just had a look at Stanley’s body in the morgue. I hate to see a young man die.”
“Was it the stab wound that killed him?”
“I would say so.”
“Were you his doctor?”
“I was for most of his life – as long as he lived at home. And I still saw him from time to time. He liked to check in with me when he had a problem.”
“What sort of problems did he have?”
“Emotional problems. Marital problems. I really can’t discuss them with a third party.”
“You can’t hurt Stanley. He’s dead.”
“I’m aware of that,” the doctor said with some asperity. “The problem I’m interested in is who stabbed him to death and buried him.”
“Your patient Fritz Snow says he buried him.”
I watched the doctor for his reaction. His bland eyes didn’t shift. His high hard color remained unchanged. He even smiled a little.
“Don’t believe him. Fritz is always confessing something.”
“How do you know it isn’t true?”
“Because he’s been my patient for over twenty years.”
“Is he insane?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. He’s hypersensitive, and he tends to blame himself for everything. When he gets emotionally upset, he loses all sense of reality. Poor Fritz has been a frightened boy all his life.”
“What’s he frightened of?”
“His mother, among other things.”
“So am I.”
“So are we all,” the doctor said with a glint of amusement. “She’s a powerful little woman. But she probably got that way because she had to. Her late husband was very much like Fritz. He had a hard time holding any job. I suppose their basic trouble was genetic, and there’s still not much we can do about heredity.”
We both glanced toward the house. Mrs. Snow was monitoring us from the front window. She let the curtain fall back into place.
“I really have to get in to see my patient,” Jerome said.
“Perhaps we can have a talk about him some time when you’re free. Whether or not Fritz is innocent, as you say, he has been connected with the main suspect in Stanley’s death.” I told him about Al Sweetner, and Kelsey’s new lead. “And we know Fritz had access to the tools that were used to dig Stanley’s grave. On top of that, he told me that he buried him.”
The doctor shook his gray head slowly from side to side. “If the sky fell, Fritz would find a way to blame himself. As a matter of fact, there’s a pretty good possibility that Stanley dug his own grave.”
“The deputy coroner and I were speculating about that possibility.”
“This isn’t entirely speculation on my part,” Jerome said. “When I examined Stanley’s body just now, I noticed blisters on his hands.”
“What kind of blisters?”
“Ordinary water blisters, on the insides of both hands.” He touched the palm of his left hand with the wide spatulate fingers of his right. “The kind of blisters a man gets from digging he isn’t used to. I admit it’s hard to understand why a man would dig his own grave.”
“He may have been forced to do it.” I said. “Al Sweetner, the man in the wig, was a hard case when he was alive. It’s possible he stood over Stanley with a gun. Or Stanley may have had some other compelling reason.”
“What reason?”
“I don’t know. He may have intended to bury somebody else. He had a young girl with him, as well as his son.”
“What happened to them?”
“I’m on my way to find out.”
chapter 23
Dunes Bay was at the end of a winding county road off Highway 1. Above the wind-carved hills of sand which rose northward along the shore, clouds were streaming inland like torn pennants. It looked as if a storm was on the way.
The kiosk at the entrance to the state park was closed and empty. I drove on through to the parking lot which overlooked the ocean. About three hundred feet out, where the waves were breaking, the white sloop lay on her side. Further out a flock of pelicans circled and dived for fish.
Three people were watching Ariadne from the beach. They weren’t the three that I was looking for. One was a man in a state park uniform. Near him but not with him, a couple of boys with long sun-faded hair leaned on their surfboards.