The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 14

He was waiting for me in the English room on the ground floor of the St. Francis. A busty brunette hostess pointed him out, sitting at a table in a panelled niche. She had the air of a cathedral guide pointing out the statue of some well-known local saint.

Willie was a flat-faced man in his late forties with black eyes that had never been surprised. He wore a narrow black moustache, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his Brooks Brothers suit; and managed to look a little like a headwaiter. Women adored him, if you could believe his personal decameron.

I liked him pretty well myself. Willie was no saint, but he was an honest man according to his lights, even if the lights were neon. He gave me a grip-teasing handshake:

“Nice to see you, Lew. I thought the Los Angeles jungle had swallowed you up for good.”

“I like to visit the provinces from time to time.”

He leered at me smugly with his moustache. Willie believed that there was an earthly paradise, and that San Francisco was it. We ordered Gibsons and steaks from a hovering waitress. She called Willie by name and looked at him as if she wanted to smell his carnation. He looked at her as if his carnation had a squirt gun concealed in it. When she was out of hearing, I said:

“I’m here on a case, as you know.”

“Yeah.” He rested his sharp dark elbows on the white tablecloth and pushed his flat face towards me. “You mentioned the magic name Wycherly on the phone. What goes on in the Wycherly family now?”

I told him.

“Daughter’s run out, eh?”

“Run out or been run out with.”

“Snatch, you think?”

“Not likely. They don’t wait two months to make a contact.”

“Two months, she’s been gone?”

I nodded. “Wycherly’s been out of the country, on a cruise. The girl had been going to school in Boulder Beach, living more or less on her own. She came up here to see her father off, was last seen herself leaving the docks in a taxi with her mother, Wycherly’s ex-wife.”

“Yeah, I saw in the papers she got her divorce. What’s she doing?”

“Right now she’s wandering around with a bad case of postmarital neurosis, babbling about death and murder. Wycherly’s going to pieces, too – I just talked to him on the phone. And I’m supposed to put it together and make it all come right in the end.”

“I could see a lot of this coming last year. The family was all ready to fly apart. You know those chocolate apples from Switzerland that fall into pieces when you tap them?”

“The question is who tapped Phoebe.”

“Yeah. Last seen with her mother, you say? What does the mother say?”

“Nothing useful. She’s practically certifiable, in my opinion.”

“I thought they took away your medical license. Have you made any attempt to trace the taxi?”

“I’m working on it now. You could help.”

He gave me a bland impermeable look. Our Gibsons came and we sipped at them, watching each other to see how quickly we were drinking this year. Willie put his glass down half-empty:

“You think the girl’s dead?”

“I hate to admit it to myself, but I have that feeling in my bones.”

“Homicide or suicide?”

“I haven’t given suicide any thought.”

“Maybe you ought to,” Willie said reflectively. “She’s a flighty kid. Is or was. I only saw her once, for about five minutes, but she made me nervous. I didn’t know if she was going to make a pass at me or run screaming from the room. She didn’t relate, if you know what I mean.”

“Spell it out.”

“She was carrying around a lot of sex that she didn’t know what to do with. A lot of sex and a lot of trouble. From what I saw of the family, she didn’t have much help growing up. Her mother couldn’t give it to her. She’s the same type herself, sexy-hysterical. You never can tell what females like that are going to do to themselves.”

“Or what other people are going to do to them.”

“You think it’s murder,” Willie said.

“I didn’t at first. I do now.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Another murder. It happened yesterday, down the Peninsula.”

“Man named Merriman, real-estate broker?”

“You make quick connections.”

“That was the only murder on the Peninsula yesterday. They had a good day.” He grinned. “Incidentally, I heard from a friend in the San Mateo Hall of Justice that they’re interested in Catherine Wycherly’s whereabouts. If you know where she is–”

“I don’t. That’s one of my problems. I talked to her in Sacramento last night. A friend of hers hit me with a tire-iron, then they took off for parts unknown.”

“I was wondering about the bandage.”

“It’s nothing serious. But we’ve got to get our hands on Catherine Wycherly.”

“We?”

“I need your help on this case. You’re equipped to handle a dragnet operation. I’m not.”

He made a sad face. “Sorry, Lew, I have other irons in the fire.”

“What happened between you and Wycherly last year?”

He shrugged, and finished his drink.

“You don’t like Wycherly, is that it?”

“I love him. I love his type. He’s got money in his head instead of brains. And he’s tricky, the way those spoiled slobs get. He pulled the rug out from under me.” Willie was showing signs of passion: his eyes were blacker and his nose was white. “The slob sent one of his troopers around to take my evidence away from me. Hick sheriff by the name of Hooper.”

“What evidence?”

“The letters he hired us to investigate. I handled the case personally, spent three or four solid days on it, between here and Meadow Farms. Just when I was hitting pay dirt, the slob yanked me.”

“Why?”

“Ask him. He’s your baby.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Sure. I was getting too close to home. There were indications that those letters were an inside job. Indications, hell. I had the proof. I made the mistake of taking Wycherly seriously and going to him with it. I should have gone to the Post Office Inspectors. Maybe I could have headed this whole thing off.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You weren’t intended to. The point is I want no part of Homer Wycherly or his affairs.”

Our steaks arrived. I postponed further argument until we had eaten. But even with T-bone in his belly, Willie was adamant:

“No sir. I’m loaded with work as it is. If I was unemployed, I wouldn’t go back to work for Wycherly. Tell you what I’ll do, though, simply as a favor to a friend. I’ll put out the word to my informers to be on the lookout for the girl. Dead or alive.”

“That’s something.”

“You want something else?”

“Copies of those letters, if you have them.”

“It wouldn’t be ethical.” He was baiting me. “But then, neither is Wycherly. Come over to the office, I’ll see what I have in the files.”

We walked to his office, a four-or-five room suite on the second floor of an old building on Geary Street. His inner sanctum was a large front room furnished with a Persian carpet, old mahogany furniture, a couch. Wanted circulars and mug shots were Scotch-taped to the walls. A glass showcase containing hand-guns, knives, saps and brass knuckles stood in a corner between a water cooler and a set of steel filing cabinets which took up one whole wall.

He unlocked a W drawer, rummaged in it and came up with a folder whose paper contents he spread out on his desk:

“Here’s the letter Wycherly sent me in the first place.”

I picked it up and read it. It was cleanly typewritten under the letterhead of the Wycherly Land and Development Company, Meadow Farms; and it was brief and to the point:

It was one of those Laocoön signatures, half-choked in its own serpentines and curlicues.

“He gave me the letters when I got there,” Willie said. “I Thermofaxed ’em. I’d just as soon you don’t tell Wycherly I kept copies. I always keep copies.”

He handed me two limp heavy yellowish sheets on which the anonymous letters had been reproduced. They had no dates, no headings. I sat at his desk and read one:

Then the other:

“Lovely stuff,” I said. “What did Wycherly have to say about the cuckold angle?”

“I didn’t ask him. He didn’t encourage me to ask personal questions. He simply wanted me to track down the poison-penner and stop him. So he said. But when I started to get warm, he stopped me.”

“Warm in what way?”

“That seems to have slipped my mind.”

“You’re a liar, nothing ever does. You said something about an inside job.”

“Did I?” He half-sat on the edge of his desk and kicked a pointed toe at me sadistically. “I wouldn’t want to throw you into conflict.”

“Give.” I said.

“You asked for it. Take a second look at those letters, the one from Wycherly and the others. You read ’em for content. Now read ’em for physical characteristics, comparatively.”

I compared the three documents, Wycherly’s letter to Mackey was evenly and neatly typed, with business-school spacing and paragraphing. The letters from “A Friend of the Family” were sloppily done, by amateurish fingers. But all three looked as if they had been typed on the same typewriter.

“Similar typewriter characteristics,” I said. “Same type, same degree of wear, same idiosyncrasies. The ‘e’ is out of alignment, for example. I’d like to see what a typewriter expert has to say about them.”

“I did, Lew. Wycherly’s original letter to me and the poison-pen letters were done on the same machine – a prewar Royal.”

“Whose?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when the slob yanked me. Clearly it’s a machine he has access to. I asked his permission to inspect all his typewriters, in his home and in his office. He wouldn’t let me. No doubt he had his reasons.”

“You think he wrote those letters himself?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out. His letter to me could have been typed by a secretary – it’s a professional piece of work – and the letters to the family by Wycherly himself. Note that they were addressed to ‘The Wycherly Family,’ instead of any particular member of it. He could have been trying to stir up trouble in his own family, force his wife into an open confession. I’ve seen crazier things done, for crazier reasons.”

“You take those accusations seriously?”

“I don’t know. Catherine Wycherly is a fairly hot dish for a woman her age. And whoever was trying to stir up the animals succeeded. She did divorce him.”

I looked the letters over again. “You don’t seem to take them seriously as threatening letters. I do. That combination of paranoia and righteousness bothers me. I’ve seen it in homicidal maniacs.”

“So have I. Also in ministers of the gospel,” Willie added sardonically.

“In either case, it doesn’t go with what I know about Wycherly.”

“I agree. But he could have been pretending to be a crackpot. I think whoever wrote them was putting it on. They’re pretty exaggerated.”

“Wycherly isn’t that smart.”

“Maybe not.” Willie looked at his watch. “I don’t want to rush you, Lew.”

I got up to go. “Let me take this letter and these copies?”

“You’re welcome to them. I have no use for them. You’re welcome to the whole damn Wycherly caboodle.”

I walked uphill back to Union Square, kicking at pigeons. And got my break, if you could call it that.