The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 23

I lugged the old Royal out to my car and drove across town to the Boulder Beach Inn. At ten minutes to five in the morning the place was like a catacomb. The night clerk looked at me the way night clerks were always looking at me, with dubiety tinged by the suspicion that the customer might be right and I might be a customer:

“What can I do for you, Sir?”

“Is Homer Wycherly still here?”

He didn’t answer me directly. “Mr. Wycherly wouldn’t like to be disturbed at this hour. If you’d like to leave a message–”

“I work for Wycherly. What time did he ask to be called?”

He consulted his schedule. “Eight o’clock.”

“Call me at the same time, please. I’m checking in. How much for a room?”

He told me.

“I’m renting, not buying.”

He simpered delicately and handed me a pen. I registered. A Negro bell hop emerged from the shadows and led me to a room at the rear of the building where I stripped to my underwear, crawled dirty between clean sheets, and went out like a light.

I caught three hours of sleep at five dollars an hour. But the old movie projector I was using for a brain wouldn’t shut down. It kept on grinding out aquatic scenes in which I became immersed, sinking like a spent swimmer in coiling cold water, through deepening zones of chill where the dead thronged like memories, their lank hair drifting in the underwater currents. I saw her plainly, flayed flesh worn dowdily on her skeleton, little fish swimming in and out of the sockets of her eyes.

I woke up with Phoebe’s name in my dry mouth and a bell ringing inside my head or just outside my head. I opened my eyes to the full white horror of morning. The bedside telephone rang at me again. I picked up the heavy iron dumbbell which the management had substituted for the receiver.

“You asked to be called at eight, sir,” a girl’s voice said.

“I must have been insane.”

“Yessir.”

“Wait a minute. Have you called Mr. Homer Wycherly yet?”

“Yessir, just this minute.”

“Get him on the line for me, will you please?”

“Yessir.”

I propped myself up on the pillow. Something peculiar happened: I lost my sense of orientation in space. The facing wall slanted over me, the bed leaned backwards under me. I was stuck with my legs up in a corner of space, and space tipped over like a chair.

“Who is it?” the iron dumbbell said in a voice like Wycherly’s.

I answered doubtfully, upside down in the angular white horror: “This is Archer.”

Space jiggled a little. It started to right itself. I tried to lean forward and help it but I was stuck in its corner, immobilized by a stronger pull than gravity. I didn’t want Phoebe to be dead. I didn’t want to have to tell her father that she was.

“Archer? Where are you calling from?”

“I’m here in the hotel. I have news for you.”

“What news? Have you found her?”

“No. You haven’t heard then.”

“Heard what?”

“I’d rather tell you in person. May I come around to your bungalow in fifteen minutes?”

“Please do.”

I hung up. The walls of the room were vertical. Space was back where it belonged, up and down and across and from side to side. I took advantage of this circumstance by getting out of bed and having a quick shower and a shave. My eyes in the bathroom mirror looked scared as hell, or of it.

On the way to Wycherly’s bungalow I got the typewriter out of the trunk of my car.

“What on earth is that?” he said when he opened the door.

“A Royal typewriter, vintage about 1937. Do you recognize it?”

“Bring it in and let me see it properly.”

I followed him into the living room and set down the heavy machine on a coffee table near the windows. He looked it over with eyes like boiled blue onions.

“It could be Catherine’s old typewriter. At least she had one very like it. Where did you dredge it up?”

“Your daughter’s roommate had it. Phoebe lent it to her before she left.”

Wycherly nodded. “I remember now. Catherine left it behind in the house, and Phoebe took it off to college last fall.”

“Where was it last Easter?”

“In my house in Meadow Farms. Catherine used to keep it in her sitting room. She liked to have an office model handy.”

“Is she an expert typist?”

“She was at one time. She used to be a secretary before I married her. This machine dates from that period.”

“Did she ever do any typing for you in more recent times? Last spring, for instance?”

“She helped me out occasionally, yes.” An edge of old malice entered his voice: “When she was in a conciliatory mood, and available.”

“You wrote a letter to Willie Mackey last spring, about the threatening letters you received. Did Mrs. Wycherly type it for you?”

“I believe she did. On second thought, I remember that she did. I preferred to keep it in the family – the fact that I was hiring a detective.”

“Can you type yourself?”

“I never learned, no.”

“Not even with one finger?”

“No. I’ve never manipulated one of these things in my life.” He stroked his hair with a nervous hand. “What is the relevance of all this, if any?”

“I had a talk with Mackey yesterday. At my request, since I’m employed by you, he filled me in on those ‘Friend of the Family’ letters. It’s my opinion they were typed on this typewriter.”

“For God’s sake!” He slumped on the mohair sofa and pressed his hand to the side of his face as if it needed holding together. “You’re not suggesting that Catherine wrote them herself.”

“The facts suggest it.”

“But you don’t know what was said in them. It’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible in this case. Who else had access to the typewriter?”

“Anyone in the house, anyone who came to the house. Servants, guests, anyone. Catherine’s rooms were in a wing by themselves, and she was seldom in them. There’s no lock on the sitting room, either. Understand me, I hold no brief for my ex-wife, but she simply couldn’t have written those letters. They slandered her.”

“People have been known to slander themselves.”

“But what purpose could she have had?”

“To make trouble, break up the marriage. She wouldn’t have needed to have a rational motive.”

“Are you implying that Catherine was irrational?”

“Is. I saw her the night before last, Mr. Wycherly. I don’t know what her emotional state was nine months ago. She’s in a bad way now.”

He lifted his hands and thrust them out away from him, fingers stiff. He might have been trying to fend off furies.

“Is this your great news? I thought you were going to tell me something – something hopeful about Phoebe.” His arms dropped to his sides, and his fingers plucked at the buttons on the sofa. “What good are these excursions into the wretched past? I know that Catherine is capable of anything. I even suspected that she wrote those letters.”

“Is that why you took Mackey off the case?”

He nodded. His head stayed low, as if it was too heavy for his neck.

“Were the allegations in the letters true? Specifically, was she having an affair with another man last spring?”

“I suspected that she was. I had no proof. I had no real desire to look for proof. I loved my wife, you see.”

I didn’t see, but I heard him saying it.

“From the first of last year,” he went on, “she spent a great deal of time away from home. She never would tell me where she went, where she stayed. She claimed to have a studio somewhere, that she went away to paint.”

“She had an apartment in San Mateo,” I said. “The chances are she was sharing it with a man or men. Assuming that, do you have any idea who he or they might have been?”

“No.”

“Did you ever question her on the point?”

“Not directly. Frankly, I hesitated to. She sometimes had such violent reactions.”

“Did she ever offer to kill anyone?”

“Many times.”

“Who did she threaten?”

“Me,” he said dismally.

“I’m going to ask you a question you won’t like. Did you prepare those ‘Friend of the Family’ letters yourself, to satisfy your doubts about your wife?”

Mrs. Wycherly wasn’t the only one who had violent reactions. He got up blotched and roaring, shaking both fists at me like a child in a tantrum: “How dare you, you garbage-raker!” He called me other names. I waited for him to subside. It didn’t take long. He fizzled out like a damp firecracker, sputtering: “That’s insane. You must be crazy.”

“Then humor me. Answer the question.”

“I had nothing to do with those ugly letters. They came as a fearful blow to me.”

“How did they affect Phoebe?”

“She was upset, in her quiet way. She takes things quietly, but deep and hard.”

“And your wife?”

“Catherine was very cool about the whole thing. It’s one reason I asked her to type the letter to Mackey. I wanted to see how she’d react.”

“How did she?”

“She was perfectly cool and calm – which wasn’t usual for her. She stayed that way throughout the entire business. Then the week after Easter she went to Reno, and her lawyers wrote me asking for a settlement.”

“Were you surprised by that development?”

“I’d reached the point,” he said, “Where nothing had the power to surprise me. Nothing in this world.”

“How did Phoebe feel about the divorce?”

“She was deeply hurt and shocked.”

“Children take sides when their parents divorce. Which side did your daughter take?”

“Mine, naturally. I thought I’d made that clear the other day. We seem to be going back and forth over the same old ground.”

I was putting off breaking new ground, for fear the shock of Phoebe’s death would make him unavailable for questioning. I still had questions to ask him:

“You recall the day you sailed, and Mrs. Wycherly came aboard?”

“To wish me bon voyage,” he said wryly. “I’m not likely to forget it.”

“Were you aware that Phoebe left the ship with her mother?”

“They left my stateroom together, at least Phoebe followed her out. I had no idea that they left the ship in each other’s company.”

“They rode away together in a taxi. They seemed to be good friends for the moment. At least Phoebe agreed to visit her mother in Atherton that evening.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It’s my business to find out such things. It’s also my business to ask you if you left the ship that evening.”

“For heaven’s sake, are you suspicious of me?”

“Suspicion is my occupational hazard, Mr. Wycherly. You didn’t tell me the sailing was delayed till the morning of the third. You let me assume it went off on schedule.”

“I’d forgotten about the delay. It slipped my mind.”

“That could happen, I suppose. Surely you remember, though, if you left the ship that evening.”

“I did not. I resent the question. I resent your whole line of questioning. It’s insulting and contemptible and I won’t put up with it.” He glared at me with warmed-over rage in his eyes. He couldn’t hold it. In a voice that was almost querulous, he said: “What are you getting at?”

“I’m trying to get at a situation that led to a death. Three deaths, as a matter of fact, and one near miss. How’s your cardiovascular system, Mr. Wycherly?”

“All right. At least it was all right when I had my last checkup, shortly before I sailed. Why?”

“Carl Trevor had a heart attack last night.”

“Carl did? I’m sorry to hear it,” he said in a light queer voice. A strange expression entered his eyes, a foxy curiosity. “How is he?”

“I don’t know. It’s his second attack, and it hit him hard. I left him in the hospital in Terranova.”

“What on earth is he doing in that primitive hole?”

“Recovering, I hope. He and I went to Medicine Stone to look into a report that a car had been found in the sea. It turned out to be your daughter’s car, and it had a body in it, a woman’s body. Trevor identified her. Then he keeled over.”

“Was it Phoebe?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Wycherly.”

He went to the window and stood there for quite a long time looking out at the empty morning. Something indescribable happened to his body. It seemed to me as I watched him that the knowledge of his grief entered his body. When he turned back into the room the foxy look had been wiped from his eyes and mouth. He said in a deeper voice than I’d heard from him:

“So that’s your news. My daughter is dead.”

“I’m afraid so. There is one element of doubt – a discrepancy among the facts I’ve collected. According to one set of facts, Phoebe went into the sea the night of November second: her car was seen around midnight going through Medicine Stone.”

“Was she driving it?”

“I’m not prepared to report on who was driving it. As I said, there’s a discrepancy. According to another set of facts, Phoebe was living in her mother’s apartment in San Mateo for a week after November second. I should say that a girl who called herself Smith and who fits Phoebe’s description was living there.”

Hope flared up in his eyes. “Smith was my wife’s maiden name. Phoebe would naturally use it. It means she’s still alive.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t, Mr. Wycherly. Your brother-in-law Trevor made a positive identification of her body. You might say it was confirmed by his heart attack.”

“I see what you mean. Carl was very fond of her.” He paced up and down the room, a fat bear of a man caged by reality. “No fonder than I was,” he said, as if that helped. He turned to face me, his face slack and naked in the tight. “Where is Phoebe now?”

“In the morgue in Terranova. It might be a good idea for you to go up there, today. Please don’t get your hopes up. She isn’t pretty or easy to look at, and I’m very much afraid that you’ll recognize your daughter.”

“But you said she was alive in San Mateo, long after she was supposed to be dead. It must be another girl you found in the water.”

“No. It’s more likely that it was another girl who was seen in San Mateo.”