The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 16

I left Gallorini sulking at the wheel and crossed the street. A verdigrised metal sign beside the entrance bore the title, “The Conquistador.” Depending from it on a piece of wire was a small sign made of weather-beaten cardboard: “Apartment for Rent.”

The wall inside the entrance was banked with brass mailboxes. Most of them showed the owners’ names on cards: nobody I knew. The card on number one was printed in green ink. Alec Girston, Manager. I pressed the bell push above it.

The front door buzzed ajar. The door of Apartment One was the first to my left. A stairway rose beyond it to the second floor. The air in the hallway was chilly and oppressive.

A woman’s voice said through the door: “What do you want?”

“You have an apartment for rent.”

That opened the door. A wispy-haired large-eyed woman looked out at me from the internal dimness:

“Mr. Girston isn’t here. Can you come back?”

“Not easily. I’m driving through. I noticed your sign and thought I’d see what you have.”

“But I’m not dressed.” She glanced down at the pink robe gathered carelessly at her bosom. She spread her hand on the dead white flesh above the robe. “I haven’t been too well this winter.”

She looked as though she’d been through a long illness. Her eyes were fogged by the basic doubts you get when your body lets go under you. The hollows of her temples and eyes were blue and sharply cut like shadows in snow. Though she wasn’t old, her mouth was beginning to seam.

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

The cheap words seemed to revive her spirits. “That’s all right. I’ll put something on and show you the flat myself. I think I can make the stairs all right.”

“The vacant one is upstairs?”

“Yessir. Were you wanting something down? Upstairs has many advantages. You get more light and air, especially when you’re on the corner.”

“This is an upstairs corner flat?”

“Yessir. It’s the most desirable one we have, when you consider the furnishings. They’re included in the rent.”

“How much is the rent?”

“We’re asking one-seventy-five on a year’s lease. The previous tenant had a year’s lease, it just ran out the end of the year. She left all her good furniture, which is what makes it such a steal.”

“Why did she leave it? Couldn’t she pay her rent?”

“Of course she could pay her rent.”

“I was only kidding. I believe I know her family, as a matter of fact.” We grew up together in the last twenty-four hours.

“You know Mrs. Smith’s family?”

“I think we’re talking about the same girl.”

“I wouldn’t call her a girl. She must be as old as I am.” The woman touched her faded hair and looked expectantly into the mirror of my eyes. What she saw there made her insistent: “I swear she’s as old as I am, though she does her best to cover it up with her paints and her bleached hair.”

Illness had made her reactions self-centered and dull. I took the mild risk of showing her Phoebe’s picture. She stabbed at it with her forefinger:

“This isn’t Mrs. Smith. It’s Mrs. Smith’s young daughter. She used the apartment for a while last fall.”

“I thought that’s what I said.”

Confusion puckered her eyes. It changed to concern, which wasn’t for herself.

“I hope she’s all right. I was worried about the girl.”

“What made you worried?”

“I don’t know. I never saw a young girl so sad and mournful. I would of tried to do something for her, but I was getting sick myself around about that time.”

“Around about what time?”

“The early part of November. She’s all right now, though, eh?”

“I haven’t seen her lately. When did she leave here?”

“She was only with us for a week or two – I don’t know how long exactly.”

“Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Not that I know of. Maybe my husband would know. I was in the hospital when she moved out. The flat’s been standing vacant ever since.”

“May I see it?”

“Yessir, I’ll put something on.” She plucked absently at her frilly breast. “You don’t have any dogs or children, do you? We don’t take dogs or children.”

“I live by myself,” I said. “Look, why don’t you give me the key and let me go up by myself?”

“I guess that would be all right.”

Her mules thumped softly away. I looked in through the open door. Her living room, if living was the word, smelled of perfumes and medicine and chocolates. The outside light sliced fiercely at the cracks between the slots of the Venetian blinds. Thin slanting rays flaked with dust leaned across the tangled sheets of a studio bed in one corner. A table crowded with medicine bottles stood beside the bed.

The woman trudged back into the room with a key in her hand: “Number Fourteen, it’s the last one on the right.”

I went up the stairs and along the hallway to the end. While I was fumbling at the lock, a typewriter behind the door of the next apartment drummed a brief inscrutable message and fell silent. The door opened directly into a dark room. The switch in the wall beside it turned on no light. I crossed to the windows and pulled back the heavy drapes.

Through the ornamental iron balcony, I could see Gallorini at the wheel of his cab. His head was cocked up sideways towards me as if he suspected snipers. He saw me, and withdrew his head into the cab’s yellow shell. Behind me, behind walls, the typewriter rattled again.

The room was expensively and badly furnished in a stuffy “modern” style that had been fashionable two or three years ago and was already old-fashioned. Bulky square-cut armchairs and a divan covered with boucle were grouped around a heavy free-form coffee-table. It reminded me of the three-walled rooms you sometimes see through the windows of furniture stores.

The bedroom contained a king-sized bed with a bare mattress which remembered the press of bodies. It was decorated in pink, with flouncy curtains and lampshades and wall-to-wall carpeting like pink quicksand. This room was so overpoweringly feminine that it made me feel enwombed.

I raised a blind and let in more light. A picture on the wall above the bed jumped out at me like a bright square chunk of chaos. It was very much like the Rorschach picture over Wycherly’s mantel in Meadow Farms. I took it off the wall to examine it: blobs and swirls and jagged lightning strokes of oil paint, in a bleached wood frame, signed with the initials C.W.

I reached up to hang it back on its hook. Two or three inches below the hook, a hole in the pink plaster had been roughly plugged with white plaster. The hole had been about as big as the tip of my little finger, or a .45-caliber bullet. I took out my penknife to dig out the plaster plug, and then thought better of it as the typewriter behind the wall started up again like a lackadaisical woodpecker.

I formed a powerful desire to know if the hole had been made by a bullet and went clear through the wall. I made a rough estimate of its height from the floor, about six feet, rehung Catherine Wycherly’s painting on it, and went and knocked on the door of Number Twelve.

A startling young woman answered. She had on a fuzzy orange sweater over a black leotard, no shoes. Her brilliant red hair was pulled up tight in a topknot and held in place by an elastic band. The topknot had a pencil skewered through it. Her eyes were the color of slightly adulterated sagebrush honey.

“I thought you were Stanley,” she whispered, but she didn’t sound particularly disappointed. Her honey-colored gaze poured down my frame. She adjusted hers to take advantage of the light behind her.

“I’m Lew. I’m flunking of moving in next door.”

“Oh. Good.”

“I heard you typing. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m working at the story of my life. I call it ‘Deep in the Heart of Darkness.’ You like that title?”

“I do like it.”

“I’m glad. Outside of Stanley, you’re the first person I tried it on. I thought you were Stanley. But Stanley doesn’t usually leave the shop until six.”

“Stanley’s your husband?”

“Not exactly,” she said, adjusting her posture a few inches here and there. “He’s letting me live with him while I finish my whatchamacallit – autobiography.” She was one of those whispering girls who said loud things.

“You’re going to be writing an autobiography.”

“I’m older than I look,” she said. “Twenty-four. I’ve had a very full life, and people kept telling me I should write it up. I mean, look how Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg cleaned up, writing up their youthful experiences. I’ve had many varied experiences.”

“I bet you have.”

“You may have heard of me. Jezebel Drake?”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“It’s just my professional name, my real name’s Jessie. Who wants to be a Jessie? So I called myself Jezebel after the song, and Drake after the hotel. I stayed there once, when I was in the chips. Which I am going to be again. I’ve got the looks. I’ve got the talent.”

She was talking more to herself than she was to me. I’d run into other young women like her: they believed the dream they lived in was their own dream because they had featured roles in it. She remembered me:

“Can I do anything for you?”

“I can think of several things. At the moment I’m trying to find out about the construction of this building.”

“The building?”

“The building. I work nights and sleep days. I want to be sure the walls are fairly soundproof.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Confidential work.”

She gave me another long slow look, estimating my value as material for autobiography. “Secret scientific stuff, like?”

“If I told you it wouldn’t be secret, would it? Do you mind if I check the walls on your side? I’ve already checked on my side.”

“Do you have to use equipment?”

“I tap them, manually. May I come in?”

“I guess it’s all right, since we’re going to be neighbors. At least I hope we are.”

The room was sparsely furnished with cheap black-iron pieces. Uncabineted stereo components and other sound equipment, including a tape recorder, were scattered around it. Against the wall I was interested in, a card table with a portable typewriter and a lighted desk-lamp on it stood in a drift of yellow paper.

I made a show of tapping the wall. There was no sign of the hole on this side. That didn’t mean much. A bullet could have expended itself between the layers of plaster, or caught in the lathing.

“How does it sound?” she said.

“All right, I guess.”

“You shouldn’t have any trouble sleeping in the daytime. I sleep a lot in the daytime myself. This place is real dead in the daytime. Everybody in it works but me.” One of her hips swung out as if in comment. She pressed it back into place with her hand. “Stanley keeps me up late at night.”

I didn’t dare ask her how. She answered the unasked question: “With his equipment. You’d think he’d get enough of it in the daytime, but he blasts my ears off half the night sometimes. He used to be a D-J.”

“Delinquent juvenile?”

“Disc jockey. Now he sells the stuff.”

Something in the baseboard had caught my eye. I got down on my knees. It was a hole in the wood the size and shape of a bullet-hole, but no bullet had made it. It had obviously been drilled, then refilled with wood paste which had dried a different color from the wood.

“What is it?” she said. “Termites?”

Call them termites. The hole behind the picture, the hole in the baseboard, the tape recorder, which belonged to a sound expert, combined to suggest one thing. The bedroom next door had been wired for sound from this room.

“Could be. How long have you been living here, Miss Drake?”

“Just since the beginning of the year. I was working up until Christmas, but they raided the place. What do termites do?”

“They infest the foundations and penetrate the walls.”

“You mean the whole place might fall down?” With a downward shrug of her shoulders, flutter of hands, bending at the knee, she enacted the whole place falling down.

“It could happen. It isn’t likely, but I’d better talk it over with your friend.” Your friend the termite. “Where does he work?”

“He doesn’t work, exactly. I mean, Stanley has his own record shop. It’s in the new shopping center this side of San Carlos.”

“I think maybe I know Stanley. What’s his last name?”

“Quillan.”

“Heavy-set blond boy?”

“That’s my boy,” she said, without pride of ownership, “if you talk to him, do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell him I let you into the flat. He’s awfully jealous.” Her hip popped out, repeating its silent comment.

“Known him long?”

“Just since the first of the year. That’s why he’s so jealous. I picked – I mean I met him at a New Year’s party at his sister’s house. It was a kind of a rough party, and I lost my date in the crush. Bad scene. But Stanley took over.” She smiled in bright dismay. “That’s the kind of thing that’s always happening to me. But I always land on my feet like a cat.” She jumped a few inches in the air and landed on her feet like a cat. “Speaking of cats, his sister didn’t like it me taking up with Stanley. She thinks she’s very hot stuff since she got married. But I’ve known Sally Quillan when she was prowling the Tenderloin for free drinks. And I happen to know that Stanley got canned last year for taking payola. Oops, I’m talking too much. I always talk too much when I meet somebody I like.”

She covered her mouth with both hands and looked at me between her heavy eye-shadow. “If you see Stanley, you won’t tell him what I said, will you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“He might hit me where it shows,” she said smiling. “Don’t even mention this conversation. We’ll keep it between ourselves, huh?”

That suited me. Before I left, I showed her Phoebe’s picture. She had never seen the girl, or heard of a Miss Smith or a Mrs. Smith in the next apartment.

“See you later, neighbor,” she said at the door.

I went downstairs and paused outside the door of the manager’s apartment to adjust my face. It felt from the inside as if I had it on a little crooked. The manager’s wife called out when I knocked:

“The door’s unlatched.”

She was lying among the pillows on her studio bed:

“Forgive me if I don’t get up. All that talking before there tired me out. You took long enough.” She peered up through the dimness into my face. “Is there something the matter with the apartment?”

I gave my face another internal yank. When you sense your face as a talking mask stuck to the front of your skull, it’s time to go for a long walk on the beach. I didn’t have time. I produced a grin:

“I like the apartment very much.”

She stirred and brightened. “You won’t do better than one-seven-five for a separate-bedroom flat in a good neighborhood like this one. With furnishings like that. How did you like the furnishings?”

“Fine. But I don’t quite understand about them. You say they belonged to the previous tenant, Mrs. Smith?”

She nodded. “That’s why it’s such good stuff. Mrs. Smith had money, I imagine you know that. When she moved in, she threw out everything that belonged to the building and put in all new stuff. It’s still in practically new condition, as you can see. She hardly ever used the place. I don’t think she was in it one night a week.”

“What did she use it for?”

“She said she did some painting as a hobby, and she wanted a place where she could get away and paint.” She squinted at me. “Seems to me you’re very much interested in Mrs. Smith. Just how well do you know her?”

“She’s only a passing acquaintance. But I don’t want to get in dutch with her. Won’t she be wanting her furniture back?”

“No, she just left it sitting. I think she told Alec she couldn’t be bothered moving it. Take it up with Alec, he’ll explain.”

“Do you and your husband own the Conquistador?”

“Not us. I wish we did. The owner lives in Sausalito. We hardly ever see him.”

“How long ago did Mrs. Smith move out?”

“Months ago. I haven’t seen her for months. Then that girl of hers used the flat a little while. It’s been empty since November. If Mrs. Smith wanted her furniture, she had plenty of chance to claim it. But take it up with Alec, he’s the one that had the dealings with her.”

“When will your husband be back?”

“He always gets home by suppertime. If you want to set a time for this evening, I’ll tell him that you’re coming.” She hunched herself up to a sitting position. “I don’t believe you mentioned your name?”

I mentioned my name, and said that I would be back around suppertime.