The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 15

A short wide man in a horsehide windbreaker and a peaked cap was standing with the dispatcher on the sidewalk outside the hotel. He came toward me smiling. His scar made an extra fold along his jaw.

“You the man that wantsa talk to me?”

“If you’re Garibaldi.”

“That’s what they call me since grade school. Giuseppe Garibaldi, he’s my personal hero.” He laughed, and made an exultant gesture which wrote his personality large on the air. “My real name is Gallorini. Nick Gallorini.”

“Mine’s Lew Archer.”

“Glad to meet you, Lew,” he said expansively, and took off his driving glove to shake my hand. He was big-nosed, flap-eared, hammered-down; his dark eyes were wild and gentle like the eyes of certain animals and birds. “You got a problem?”

“Missing girl.”

“Too bad. You want to sit in the cab and tell me about it?”

His cab was the last in line. We sat in the back of it and lit cigarettes.

“Your daughter, maybe?” he said. “Or a friend?”

“Daughter of a friend. You drove her and her father to the docks about two months ago. He was sailing on the President Jackson. She went aboard the Jackson with him, asked you to wait.” I got out Phoebe’s picture and showed it to him.

“I remember her.” There was gloom in his voice.

“Good for you. What happened after that?”

“Nothing happened, not that day. I wait like she said, must have been nearly an hour. She finally comes off the ship with one of the officers and this lady with her. Turns out to be her mother, she called her mother.”

“How were the two of them getting along?”

“All right.” He nodded judicially. “They had a little argument on the way back, but it didn’t amount to nothing. The girl had a car stashed someplace, and the mother wanted her to drive her down the Peninsula to her home. I caught that, because I live down that way myself – got a nice three-bedroom in Sharpe Park – bought it when North Beach went to the dogs, the wife says move, we moved.” He smiled triumphantly, and pointed a downward thumb at a passing cable car.

“What did the girl say?”

“She said she couldn’t drive her mother home, she had a date with a man. The mother wanted to know what man. The girl wouldn’t tell her. That was what the fuss was about.”

“The mother made a fuss?”

“Yeah, she was under the weather, like. She said her loved ones were cutting her out. The girl said that wasn’t true. She said she loved her. She was a nice girl to hear her talk – lotta good feeling in her.” The gloom in his voice was deepening, and staining his susceptible eyes. “I got a daughter of my own almost as old as her, thatsa why we had to move out of North Beach.”

I prompted him: “Where did you drive them?”

“Dropped the girl right here at the St. Francis. The mother I took down to the SP station.”

“Did the girl go into the hotel?”

“I guess so. I didn’t notice.”

“Did she say anything at all about the man she had the date with?”

He considered the question. “No. She clammed up about him. That was what the mother didn’t like. She didn’t calm down until the girl promised to drive down and see her later.”

“Did she say when?”

“I think she said that same evening,” Gallorini looked at me sideways through smoke. “Listen, I got a good memory but I’m no electronic brain. Why don’t you take it up with her old lady?”

“She isn’t talking.”

“She won’t help find her own daughter? Holy Mother. I knew there was trouble there, that more was going on than they were saying. That’s one reason I remember the conversation.”

“What are the other reasons you remember?”

Gallorini was silent for a time. He butted his cigarette and dropped the butt into the breast pocket of his wind-breaker. Suddenly he gripped my knee:

“Listen, are you a cop?”

“I have been. I’m in private work now.”

“You picking her up as a runaway or what?”

“I hope that’s all that’s happened to her. Her father hired me to find her dead or alive. She hasn’t been seen since the day he sailed.”

“Thatsa where you’re wrong about that.” An emotion I didn’t understand added faint feminine endings to some of his words. “I saw the little girl myself, week or ten days later. More like ten days, it was.”

I sat up straight. “Where?”

“On the road at night – I was filling in nights that week. I had this fare to the airport, eleven o’clock plane, and I was deadheading back. I saw her standing there on the Broadway overpass. It was raining, coming down cats and dogs, and she was standing there in the rain beside the parapet. My headlights caught her face, and I sort of reckanized her, or I probably would of gone right on. Also I got a funny idea that maybe she was getting ready to jump down onto Bayshore.”

The St. Francis doorman signalled for a cab. The line moved forward ahead of us. Gallorini made a move to get out and climb into the front seat.

“Hold it,” I said. “You’re on my time. This is important, if you’re sure it was the same girl.” I showed him Phoebe’s picture again. “This girl.”

He barely glanced at the picture. “I’m sure. I talked to her, see. I picked her up.” Pushing suspicion away with his hands, he added: “I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I thought she was somebody I knew, see, maybe a friend of my daughter from the high school. So I U-turned and went back. She was still standing there, no raincoat, with her dress all wet and her hair striped down her face. I didn’t know who she was until she said something. I got a good ear for people’s voices.” He pointed to his ear with a dirty fingernail.

“What did she say?”

“She said she wanted no cab, she had no money. So I said I’d give her a free ride if it wasn’t too far. It ain’t legal but what the hell, I couldn’t just leave her standing there in the rain, in her condition.”

“What was her condition?”

“It wasn’t so hot,” he said compunctiously. “She didn’t make too good sense, and I thought what will happen to her if a gang of wolves come along and grab her up. Even if she didn’t jump.”

“How do you mean, she wasn’t making sense?”

“The way she talked, the way she acted. I finally got her into the cab, I practically had to lift her in.” He enacted the scene as he sat, one arm curled around imaginary shoulders. “I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said out of this world. Those were her words. Out of this world.”

Gallorini shook his head angrily.

“I said I didn’t have rocket propulsion. She didn’t think that was funny. I told her she should be home in bed, not running around in the wet. She thought that was funny. ‘Where’s home?’ she said, and she let out a laugh. I didn’t like the sound of it. I finally got it out of her that she had relatives in Woodside. A long haul, but I said I’d take her there. She offered me her wrist watch – she had on this little gold wrist watch, and she offered to give it to me for the fare. I said to hell with that, I didn’t want no wrist watch.

“Then she said she didn’t want to go to Woodside anyway. She couldn’t face her aunt, something like that, she hated her already.”

“Her aunt hated her?”

“Thatsa what she said. I tried to find out her aunt’s name, but she wasn’t saying. She wouldn’t even tell me her own name. I tried to ask her, what about her mother. That was when she broke down, sort of. She said she might as well go back to the apartment. So I took her where she said. It was only a short haul, a couple of miles.” He grinned wryly. “It didn’t buy the kids no shoes, but I was glad I did it.”

I gave him five of Wycherly’s dollars. “That’s for the short haul.”

Pleasure and embarrassment struggled for his face. Embarrassment won. “Hell, I wasn’t pressing for pay. I only did what any man would do.”

“Keep it. I’m not finished with you.”

The words were wrong: fear danced up in his eyes:

“You think I did something to her.”

“No, I mean I want the rest of your story, all of it.”

He said with the fear still bright and hard in his pupils: “That’s all there is. I drove her up to her door and she went in. She offered me the wrist watch again, but I couldn’t take her wrist watch away from her.” He added with a kind of compulsive candor: “Besides, it was one of those deals that maybe next day the cops would be around asking me for it. She was trouble, see. I hate to say it about a young girl, but she was a lot different from the first time I saw her. She’d went downhill in a handcar.”

“In a week or ten days?”

“It can happen overnight.”

“What sort of a place was she staying at?”

“Nothing special one way or the other. One of those old apartment houses on Camino, down San Mateo way.”

“Show it to me.”

It was a two-story stucco building with decorative tiling along the roof-edge like red icing on a slightly decaying cake. The once-white facade was dingy, streaked with rust from the iron balconies on the second floor. They gave the place a barred-up, uninviting look.

Gallorini had pulled into the curb across from the building. I parked behind him and leaned in his window:

“You’re sure this is the place?”

“Uh-huh. I took a special note of it.” He was looking at it as if its shabby attractions fascinated him.

“Why? Were you planning to come back?”

“Maybe. Just to collect for the haul, you know.”

“In cash or kind?”

“I don’t get you.” His whole personality backed away from me. It left his face where it was, close up to mine, but empty. “You trying to get me in trouble? I didn’t do nothing to her. Would I lead you all the way down here just to put my own neck in a noose?”

It was an interesting question. Some murderers and sexual psychopaths did precisely that. Their necks kept hankering for the rope: they broke their arms trying to lasso themselves. I offered Gallorini a little piece of string:

“Which apartment is she in?”

“Upstairs corn–” He closed his teeth on the middle of the word.

“Did you go in with her?”

He shook his head so hard that his cheeks wobbled. “How do you know she has an upstairs corner apartment?”

His eyes were small and troubled, squinched close in to the base of his big nose as if for protection:

“Okay, so I went in with her. She asked me to. She said she was scared to go in by herself.”

“What was she scared of?”

“She didn’t say. She was soaking wet and shivering with the cold. I couldn’t just leave her that way. I helped her out of her wet clothes, and then she kind of passed out on me.”

“Was she drinking?”

“Not with me, she wasn’t. Maybe she took a pill. Anyway, she got woozy. I helped her into her bedroom and put her to bed.”

“You do this for all your customers?”

“It’s happened before. I dunno why you’re giving me a bad time. I didn’t do anything out of line.” He bit on his thumbnail and regarded me over his fist. “I gotta daughter of my own, see. Anyway, I had no chance to do anything even if I wanted to which I didn’t. This character barged in, see.”

“Who was he?”

“Some blondie guy. I thought at the time he was prob’ly living with her. He acted like he owned her.”

“What did he do?”

“Gave me hell and told me to get out.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Yeah, he’s a blondie guy, about my size. He had a little chin beard, and kind of bulgy blue eyes. He was a nasty-talking son but what could I do? I got.”