The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 24

I drove back up to the Peninsula. I was bone tired, in spite of my fifteen-dollar sleep. Still I was tugged along by a sense of people and places and meanings corning together, filled with that abstract kind of glee which a mathematician has when he’s just about to square the circle. He thinks.

The assistant manager of the telephone company in Palo Alto admitted after some palaver that the number from which Bobby Doncaster had been called belonged to a public telephone in a booth on the grounds of a gas station at Bayshore and Cedar Lane.

There were no cedars on Cedar Lane, no trees of any kind. Its asphalt roadway, pocked by traffic, ran through a housing tract that was already decaying into slum, and ended abruptly at the roaring highway. Harry’s Service station (We Give Blue Chip Stamps) was on the corner. I noticed the metal and glass telephone booth standing by itself like a sentry box at the edge of Harry’s lot.

I pulled in beside the pumps, and a quick gray man came running out of the office. He looked very eager and a little punchy, like a retired welterweight or a superannuated Navy mechanic. The name Harry was embroidered on the chest of his white coveralls.

“Yessir,” he announced.

“Fill her up. She ought to take about ten.”

While the gas was running, I got out and looked at the number of the telephone in the booth. Davenport 93489. I returned to my car and Harry. He was wiping away at the windshield as if he had a cleanliness compulsion.

“Need change to phone?”

“No thanks. I’m a detective working on a murder case.”

“What do you know.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic or naive.

“One of our suspects had a telephone call last night from that booth over there. That was shortly before six. Were you on duty?”

“Yeah, and I think I know the one you mean. You ain’t the first one that’s been asking for her.”

“A woman?”

“You’re not kidding.” He made the hourglass gesture with his hands. His wiping-rag flapped in the air. “Big blondie in a purple dress. I made change for her.”

“Change for what?”

“So she could phone long-distance. She gimme a fifty-dollar bill out of her shoe.”

“Where did she come from?”

“Up the hike.” Harry pointed up Cedar Lane towards the central section of Palo Alto. “She ankled it here like her feet were hurting.”

“Walking?”

“Yeah. That struck me funny, too. She looked like class.”

“Describe her.”

He described her. It was the Wycherly woman.

“You’re sure she was the one who made the phone call?”

“I couldn’t be wrong about that. Right in the middle of it, while she was talking, she hailed me over to the booth. She wanted to know the name of the nearest motel. That happens to be the Siesta. I told her she wouldn’t want to stay there. She said she would.”

“And did she?”

“I couldn’t say. She ankled off in that direction after she finished her phone call.”

“Which direction?”

“San Jose direction. The Siesta’s about a quarter mile that way, you can see the sign. It’s a crummy joint, like I tried to tell her. But she shut me up and went on talking into the phone.”

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Not a thing. I didn’t listen.”

“How was she acting?”

“Acting?”

“I mean, was she drunk or sober – did she seem to know what she was doing?”

“That’s what the other fellow wanted to know.” Harry scratched his head with black fingernails. “She walked straight, she talked straight. I guess you could say she was plenty nervous, though. Like I told the other fellow.”

“Big boy with red hair?”

“Naw, he wasn’t red-haired, and he was no boy. I think he was some kind of a doctor. He had the emblem on his car.”

“What kind of a car?”

“1959 light blue Impala two-door.”

“Did he give you his name?”

“Maybe he did. I don’t remember. I was pretty busy at the time.”

“What time?”

“Couple hours ago. I told him everything I told you. He went off in the direction of the Siesta.”

“Can you describe him?”

“I dunno. He looked like a doctor. You know how they give you the once-over like you was a patient. He had thick glasses, I noticed that, and he was well-dressed. He had on a brown tweed topcoat that must of set him back plenty.”

“How old?”

“Forty-five – fifty maybe. He had grey in his moustache. Older than me. And heavier.”

A road-grimed station wagon with an Oregon license came off the highway and stopped on the other side of the pumps. Three children in the back seat peered around with travel-drugged eyes, wondering if this was Disneyland. Jets went over. The driver of the station wagon gave Harry a Barney-Oldfield look across his wife. This was a pit-stop.

Harry said to me: “That will be five-oh-nine. You want the stamps?”

I paid him. “Skip the stamps. Keep the change. Thanks for the information.”

“Thank you.”

He ran around the pumps flapping his rag.

The Siesta Motor Court stood on scorched earth near a truck-stop diner. Its sign advertised Modern Housekeeping Facilities. Its cabins had cracks in the stucco as if they’d been leaned on by a giant hand, not lovingly. The place was a couple of levels below the Champion Hotel, which was not the Ritz.

I stopped beside the hutch marked Office, and climbed out onto crunching cinders. A cutdown A-model Ford was parked in front of a cabin at the rear. I went and looked at the steering-post. Bobby Doncaster’s name and his address in Boulder Beach were on the registration slip. I wrenched at the door of his present address. It was locked. The window beside it was covered with a cracked green blind.

A door opened somewhere behind me. A fat woman wearing a man’s sweater-coat over a flowered print dress came out of the office and undulated ponderously towards me. Earrings the size and color of brass curtain rings swung from her ears. She had soot-black hair with a single slash of white running back from her widow’s-peak tike a lightning scar.

“Roust out of it, you,” she said in a deep raw voice. “I know how to use this.”

She showed me a little nickel-plated revolver. It looked tiny as a toy in her large dimpled hand. She was breathing hard.

“I’m not a burglar, ma’am.”

“I don’t care who you are. Roust out of it.”

“I’m a detective. Put the gun up.”

I displayed an old special-deputy badge that the L.A. sheriff had given me for not particularly good conduct. She was impressed. She pushed the gun down her dress, where the bivalve of her bosom swallowed it.

“So what you want with us? We run a clean place. All that trouble last year was under a different management.”

I was keeping one eye on the door of the cabin. “Is the red-headed boy in there?”

“You want him?”

“I’m not the only one.”

She made a mournful face. “We’re not responsible for the people–”

“That’s not the point. Is he in there?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see him come back.”

I said to the cabin door: “Come out, Bobby, or I’m coming in.”

There was no response from inside. I leaned my shoulder against the flimsy door.

“What you think you’re doing?” the woman cried. “You don’t want to bust the door. Wait a minute now.”

She went away and came back jingling a key-ring. While she unlocked the door I took my gun out. It was gun day. I stepped into the dim blinded interior. It smelled of breaths and bodies. The furniture in the greenish gloom resembled underwater wreckage at a depth where nothing stirred.

The fat woman pulled a chain that turned on the ceiling light. It shone through a white glass globe like a fly-specked moon on a peeling veneer chest of drawers, a rug the color of packed earth, a double bed that had been slept in. Its sheets looked as if a pair of cell-mates had passed the night twisting them into ineffectual ropes for some frustrated escape. On the floor beside the bed a canvas overnight bag lay unzipped. It was stencilled with the initials R.D. and contained a change of underwear, some shirts and handkerchiefs, toothbrush and toothpaste and razor, and a checkbook whose last stub showed a balance of two-hundred-odd dollars in a Boulder Beach bank.

I glanced into the kitchenette. On the sinkboard a half-eaten hamburger with pink insides reposed on a paper plate. The dusty bland eyes of a cockroach regarded me from behind the remains of the hamburger. He was almost big enough to have eaten the other half. I didn’t shoot him.

Back in the main room, the fat woman was lowering herself onto the bed. The springs groaned under her. Her voice was like a continuation of the sound:

“I didn’t know if he came back or not, or if he was coming back. He must be, though. He left his bag and his car, and they didn’t check out.”

“Who’s with him?”

“His wife.” She couldn’t say it without a peculiar look. “Anyway, they registered as man and wife. I wondered if there was something funny at the time. But what can you do when you’re in die cabin business? Ask to see their marriage license and the results of their Wassermann test?” Her smile was rough and wry, like her wit. “What is he wanted for?”

“Suspicion of murder.”

“Too bad,” she said without turning a hair. “He looks like a decent boy. Maybe with her he was stepping out of his weight class. What did he do, kill her husband or something like that?”

“Something like that. When did they check in?”

“She came in last night around six, said her husband was joining her later. He got in around eleven or so.”

“What name did she give you?”

“Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

“Did they walk away from here?”

“No, this older man came asking for them – for her. He had a car – new blue Chevvie.”

“What did he look like?”

“Older man with a moustache.” She fingered her upper lip. “More of an Adolphe Menjou type moustache than a Charlie Chaplin. A nice-looking man, even with those great big glasses. He treated her nice enough, too, considering the provocation.”

“Provocation?”

She looked down at the twisted sheets, the mashed pillows. She took one of the pillows into her lap and began to plump it up. “He’s her husband, isn’t he?”

“No. I’m trying to find out who he is.”

“So who got themselves killed?”

“Her daughter.”

The woman’s mouth drooped in sympathy. “No wonder she looks so sad. I know what sadness is. I lost a husband in World War Two. That’s when I started eating. I went right on even after I married Spurling.”

She placed one hand on her breast. Her fingers were pale and speckled like breakfast sausages. All of her flesh was lardlike: if you poked it the hole would stay. Some of it had run like candle wax down her ankles and over her shoes.

“Getting back to the man with the moustache, Mrs. Spurling, what did he say when he came here asking for her?”

“Just was she here, and he described her – big blonde, platinum blonde, in a purple dress. I told him she was here. He knocked on this here door and they let him in and then they had a pow-wow. It went on for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“What was said?”

“I couldn’t hear – just their voices. But it was quite a pow-wow. I guess she didn’t want to go with him, she wanted to stay here with her little red-headed friend. I saw her hanging back when he marched her out to his car.”

“Did she resist him?”

“She didn’t fight him, if that’s what you mean. But she was putting up an argument. The three of them were still arguing when they drove away. Funny thing is, the red-head appeared to be arguing against her.”

“Was the man taking them into custody, do you think?”

“It didn’t look like that to me. Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“Yes. The boy should be coming back for his car. I’ll wait here for him, if it’s all right with you.”

“No fireworks.”

“I don’t expect any.”

She got up, and the bed groaned in relief. In her slow mind, two thoughts came together with an impact which made the flesh of her face quiver: “My God, you mean he killed the blondie’s little girl?”

“That’s what I want to ask him, Mrs. Spurling.”

“And she spent the night with him? What kind of woman is she?”

“That’s what I want to ask her.”

I closed the door behind her and turned off the light. After a while my eyes got used to the green twilight, and I could see the cockroaches coming out like a small guerrilla army.

They retreated, as if they had outlying scouts, when Bobby came back to the cabin. I heard his footsteps on the path, and was waiting at the door when he came in. He saw the gun in my hand and went still. He had blue rings under his eyes, as if the night and the morning had drained his youth.

“Sit down, Bobby. We’ll talk.”

His feet arranged themselves to run. He couldn’t decide where to run to.

“Come in and sit down and hurry up about it.”

“Yes sir,” he said to the gun.

I turned on the light and frisked him. He shuddered as if my touch was contagious. Almost in reflex, regardless of the gun, he threw a short right uppercut at my chin. I caught it in my left hand and pushed him backwards. He took two tanglefooted steps and fell sideways across the bed. He wasn’t hurt, but he made no attempt to get up. I said:

“Your mother has changed her story, Bobby. You have no alibi. We know you went to San Francisco with Phoebe.”

He was silent, his face half-hidden in the tangled sheets. From the corner of his head one wide green eye watched me.

“You don’t deny it, do you?”

“No. But Mother didn’t know I went with Phoebe. I let on I was going to school early, and Phoebe picked me up at the edge of the campus.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s everybody’s business now,” I said.

“All right.” His voice rose defiantly. “We were going to get married. After she saw her father off, we were going to drive to Reno and get married. We were old enough, it’s no crime.”

“Getting married is no crime. But you never did get married.”

“It wasn’t my fault. I wanted to. It was Phoebe who changed her mind. She ran into a family situation. Don’t ask me what it was because I don’t know. I gave up and took a bus home.”

“From San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying. That same night, or early next morning, you were seen driving Phoebe’s car through a place on the coast named Medicine Stone. You know the place. The car was found yesterday, where you pushed it over the cliff. Her body was in it. And your feet are wet, boy, all the way up to your neck.”

He didn’t move or speak. He lay still as catatonia under the weight of my accusation.

“Why did you have to kill Phoebe? You were supposed to be in love with her.”

He raised himself on his arms and turned to face me, not quite squarely:

“You don’t understand anything about what happened.”

“Enlighten me.”

“A man doesn’t have to incriminate himself.”

“You’re a man?”

He stared up at the ceiling light, fingering his sad pink moustache. “I’m doing my best to be one.”

“You don’t prove manhood by killing girls.”

He brought his gaze down to my level. His eyes were bleak and dubious for twenty-one. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill anyone. But I’m willing to take the consequence for what I did do.”

“What did you do?”

“I drove the car down to Medicine Stone, like you said. I shoved it over the bluff and walked out to the highway and caught a bus.”

“Why did you do that?”

He peered into various corners of the room. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“What’s the use? Nobody will believe me, anyway.”

“You haven’t given it much of a try.”

“I tell you I didn’t kill her.”

“Who killed her if you didn’t? Catherine Wycherly?”

He let out a kind of snuffling laugh. It was neither loud nor long, but it played hell with my nerves.

“What is it with you and Catherine Wycherly? A mother-image you couldn’t resist? Or is it more of a business relationship?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ll never understand.”

“Tell me what happened last November second.”

“I’ll go to the gas chamber first.”

His voice was high and cracking. He looked around the cabin walls as if he was in that final place and could smell cyanide. Outside, heavy feet shuffled on the path. There was a tentative knocking at the door:

“Is it all right?”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Spurting.” Everything was dandy. “We’ll be out of here shortly.”

“That’s good. The sooner the better.”

She went away. I said to the wretched boy:

“You have about one more minute. If you can’t come up with something sensible, we’ll shift the proceedings over to the Hall of Justice. Once I’ve delivered you there, with the evidence against you, you’re practically certain to be held for trial. This isn’t a threat, it’s one of the facts of life. You don’t seem to know too many of them.”

I could see the workings of his mind nickering in his eyes. “You don’t know everything you think you know, either. I didn’t kill Phoebe. She isn’t even dead.”

“Don’t give me that. We found her body.”

“I can prove she’s alive, I know where she is.” The words came out in a rush, ahead of the hand he raised to cover his mouth.

“If you know where she is, take me to her.”

“I will not. You’ll give her a going-over, and she can’t stand it. She’s been through enough. She’s not going through any more, not if I can help it.”

“You can’t help it,” I said. “There was a body in that car. You say it wasn’t Phoebe. Who was it?”

“Her mother. Phoebe killed her mother in November. I got rid of the body for her. I’m just as guilty as she is.”

He straightened, breathing deeply, as if he’d got rid of a weight he couldn’t hold any longer. I felt it settling on me.

“Where is she, Bobby?”

“I’m not going to tell you. Do what you want to with me. You’re not going to touch her.”

He had that knight-errant look in his eyes, that Galahad fluorescence compounded of idealism and hysteria and sublimated sex. Not so very sublimated, perhaps. I put my gun away and sat and tried to think of the right words.

“Listen to me, Bobby. You realize I have to have more than your word for all this. I have to see her in the flesh. I have to talk to her.”

“You just want to get your hooks on her.”

“What hooks?” I held out my hands. “I’m on her side, no matter what she’s done. Her father hired me, remember. I’ve been breaking my neck trying to find her for him. You can’t sit there and prevent it.”

“She’s in good hands,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t want her taken out of them.”

“What’s the doctor’s name?”

That startled him. “You’ll never get it from me.”

“I don’t need to get it from you. Knowing as much as I know, the police could locate her before dark. But let’s keep them out of it, for now.”

He sat with his head down. I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his young passionate skull. It came out in fragmentary sentences:

“It wouldn’t be fair, you can’t punish her, she’s not responsible. She didn’t plan it or anything.”

“Were you there?”

His head came up sharply. His face was the color of cooked veal. “I was there in a sense. I was waiting outside in her car. Phoebe didn’t want me to come into the house with her. She said she had to talk to her mother alone.”

“You’re talking about her mother’s house in Atherton?”

“Yes. I drove Phoebe down from San Francisco that evening. She didn’t feel like driving herself. She was awfully jittery.”

“When was this?”

“About eight o’clock at night. She met her mother on the ship that afternoon and promised to come and see her. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Phoebe said she wanted to be reconciled with her before we got married. But it didn’t work out. Nothing worked out.”

His voice broke. I waited.

“She was in the house for about twenty minutes, and I thought everything was fine. Then she came out with – she had the poker in her hand, dripping red. She said I had to get rid of it for her. I asked her what she’d done. She took me into the house and showed me. Her mother was lying in front of the fireplace with her head all bloody. Phoebe said we had to get rid of the body and cover the whole thing up.” His eyes were tormented. He closed them and spoke from a blind face: “I wanted to save her from punishment. You mustn’t punish her. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

“I’m not in the punishment business. I’ll do everything I can for her. You have my word.”

“You won’t tell the police where she is, if I tell you?”

“No. I’ll have to tell her father, of course. Sooner or later the police will have to be told.”

“Why?”

“Because a crime has been committed.”

“Will they put her in jail?”

“That depends on her condition, and the nature of the crime. It may have been murder, or manslaughter, or even justifiable homicide. Phoebe may be psychologically unable to stand trial.”

“She is,” he said. “I realized last night how badly disturbed she is. She talked strangely, and she kept laughing and crying.”

“What does the doctor say, Bobby?”

“He didn’t say much to me. He thought that I was the one who talked her into walking away from his sanitarium. It was the other way round. She phoned me after she left his place and asked me to meet her here at this motel.” He looked around the room as if it was an image of his future, dismal and disreputable and confined. “When I saw this place I wanted to take her out of it right away, but she was afraid to show herself in the open. I spent half the night trying to talk her into going back to the sanitarium. Then today the doctor tracked her down, and between the two of us we got her back there.”

“You haven’t told me where yet.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to.”

He looked at me with stubborn suspicion. Like so many other young people, including some of the best ones, he acted like a displaced person in the adult world.

“Come on, Bobby. We’re wasting valuable time.”

“What’s so valuable about time? I wish I could take a sleeping pill and wake up ten years from now.”

“I wish I could take one in reverse and wake up ten years ago. But maybe it’s just as well I can’t. With all that practice, I’d probably make the same mistakes all over again, in spades.”

That was the right thing to say, for some odd reason. Bobby responded:

“I’ve made some terrible mistakes.”

“Twenty-one is a good age to make them. You don’t have to go on compounding them.”

“But what is going to happen to us?”

“We’ll have to wait and see. A lot depends on you right now. Take me to her, Bobby.”

“Yeah,” he said with a final look around. “Let’s get out of this place.”

I locked my car and rode along with Bobby. The sanitarium wasn’t far, he told me over the noise of the exhaust. It was run by a Palo Alto psychiatrist named Sherrill, whom Phoebe had consulted in her last semester at Stanford.

“Did she come back to him on her own?”

“She must have. There wasn’t anybody with her.”

“How did she get here from Sacramento?”

“I didn’t know she was in Sacramento. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the last two months.”

“When did she come back to the Peninsula?”

“Yesterday morning. Dr. Sherrill said she turned up at his place about eight o’clock.”

“When did she leave the sanitarium?”

“Some time yesterday afternoon. It doesn’t matter now. She’s safe now.”

He stopped for a red fight, and made a right turn off Bayshore. I was thinking of Stanley Quillan listening to happy music in the back room of his shop, not many miles from where we were.

“Did Phoebe have a gun with her last night?”

“Of course not. She doesn’t have a gun.”

“Can you be sure?”

“She had nothing with her at all. Just the clothes that she was wearing, and they weren’t hers.”

“How do you know that?”

“They didn’t fit her. She’s put on a lot of weight, but even so her dress was too big for her. It didn’t suit her, either. It made her look old. It made her look like her mother when–”

The car swerved under the pressure of his hands. We were on a quiet, tree-lined street named after the poet Cowper. He pulled the car into the curb and braked abruptly. I left handprints on the windshield.

“I saw her mother when she was dead,” he went on in a hushed voice. “She had no clothes on. She was big and white. We wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the back of Phoebe’s car. I had to bend up her legs.” He bowed until his forehead touched the steering-wheel. Both of his hands were gripping the curved steel. His knuckles gleamed white. “It was a terrible thing to do.”

“Why did you do it?”

“They said – Phoebe said that it was the only way. We had to get rid of the body. I couldn’t leave her to it by herself.”

“She wasn’t by herself.”

He turned his head, his cheek pressed hard against his straining knuckles. “I was with her. Is that what you mean?”

“Who else was?”

“Nobody. We were alone in the house.”

“You said ‘they.’ The dead woman didn’t tell you to put her in the water.”

“It was a slip of the tongue.”

“It was a slip, all right. Who else are you trying to cover up for, Bobby?”

“I’m not trying to cover up for him.”

“It was a man, then. Name him.”

The glaze of stubbornness came down over his face again.

“I think I can name him for you,” I said. “Did Ben Merriman walk in on the festivities?”

“He didn’t say who he was.”

From the magpie nest of my inner pocket, I produced the blotter with Merriman’s picture on it. It was getting dog-eared.

“Is this the man?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you mention him before?”

“Phoebe said last night I wasn’t to.”

“Did she give you a reason?”

“No.”

“But without a reason of any kind, you let a disturbed girl make your decision for you?”

“I had a reason, Mr. Archer. I saw his picture in yesterday’s paper. He was beaten to death in that same house. Now Phoebe will be blamed for that, too.”