The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 25

The sanitarium was in a neighborhood of large old frame houses and new apartment buildings. A massive one-story structure that looked like an overgrown ranchhouse, it stood far back from the street behind a wire net fence masked with a cypress hedge. The driveway curved around a broad lawn where outdoor furniture was set out, chaises and gaily colored umbrellas. A solitary white-haired woman sat on one of the chaises in the middle of the intensely green grass. She was looking at the sky as if it had just been created.

A concrete ramp for wheel chairs sloped up from the driveway to the door. There was a judas window set into the door, and a bell push in the bare wall beside it. I got out of the car. Bobby stayed where he was.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, but I better stay out here. Dr. Sherrill doesn’t like me.”

“I want you along.”

Reluctantly, he followed me up the ramp. I rang the bell and waited. The little window in the door snapped open. A nurse in a cap peered out at us:

“What is it, sir?”

“I have to see Dr. Sherrill.”

“Is it about a patient?”

“Yes. Her name is Phoebe Wycherly. I represent her father. My name is Archer.” I added, though the words felt strange on my tongue: “This is Mr. Doncaster, her fiance.”

She left us standing in a drab green corridor which ran the length of the building. Twelve or fifteen doors opened on to it. At the far end a young man in a bathrobe was walking towards us very slowly like a diver with weights on his feet. We were there for several minutes, but he didn’t seem to get any nearer.

A man in a white smock opened one of the doors and said, “Come in here, gentlemen.”

He stood with careful formality beside the door as we entered. I wasn’t impressed by my first look at Sherrill. His thin moustache had a touch of vanity. Magnified by thick glasses, his dark brown eyes seemed womanish.

His office was small and unimposing. A bare oak desk with a swivel chair behind it, a leather armchair, a leather couch, took up most of the floor space. A wall of shelves spilled books onto the floor: everything from Gray’s Anatomy to Mad magazine.

Bobby started to sit on the couch, then flinched away. He balanced himself tentatively on one arm of the armchair. I sat on the couch. I had to resist an impulse to put my feet up. Sherrill watched us over the desk with eyes like mirrors:

“Well, gentlemen?”

Bobby leaned forward, hugging one high knee. “How is Phoebe?”

“You left her only two hours ago. I told you she should be sequestered for at least two days, possibly much longer. You certainly can’t see her again today, Mr. Doncaster.” Sherrill spoke without much emphasis, but there was a steady force behind his words.

“I brought him here,” I said. “He told me a story which has legal repercussions, to put it mildly. You may know parts of it.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“I’m a private detective. Homer Wycherly, the girl’s father, hired me several days ago to look for her. Until this afternoon, when I talked to Bobby here, I thought she was dead. Murdered. It turns out she was a fugitive from justice.”

“Justice,” the doctor repeated softy. “Do you represent justice, Mr. Archer?”

“No.” I did, in a sense. It would take too long to figure out what sense. “I simply want you to understand the situation.”

“It’s good of you to share your understanding with me.”

“I haven’t, doctor. That’s going to take some time.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t much time. As a matter of fact, I have a patient scheduled now. Perhaps we can arrange to discuss this later on tonight, if you feel we have to.”

“It won’t wait,” I said bluntly. “Have you had a chance to talk to Phoebe at all?”

“Not really. I plan to see her after dinner. You must realize I’m a busy man, I had an hour set aside for her last night, but that was washed out when she ran away. Fortunately, she came back today, more or less of her own free will.”

“Did she come here of her own accord in the first place?”

“Yes. I’d seen her twice last year, and when she felt troubled again she had the good sense to come back. She seems considerably more troubled now than she was last year. But she did come back on her own, and that’s an excellent sign. It means she recognizes the need for help.”

“How did she get here?”

“She flew over from Sacramento early yesterday morning and took a taxi from the airport.”

“Why did she run away again yesterday afternoon?”

“It’s hard to answer that. Evidently she’s more upset than I thought, and needed more security. She was given ground privileges, and I suppose she panicked. I shouldn’t have exposed her to so much freedom.”

“What time did she take off?”

“About this time. Speaking of time, the patient I’m supposed to be with sweats blood when I miss an appointment.” He rose, and looked at his watch. “It’s five-ten. If you’ll come back at eight, I’ll have had my hour with Phoebe, and we can go further into these matters.”

“Where is she now?”

“In her room, with a special nurse. After yesterday’s fiasco, I’m taking no further chances with her security.” He added, with a withering glance at Bobby: “I spent a good part of the night trying to trace her. She’s a valuable girl.”

Trevor had used the same words about his niece.

“How ill is she?”

The doctor spread his hands. “You’re asking impossible questions, at an impossible time. I’d say offhand she’s more upset than ill. She’s over four months pregnant, and that’s enough by itself to account for – ah – unconsidered behavior on the part of an unmarried young woman. She’s been doing a certain amount of acting-out.”

“What do you mean by acting-out?”

“Enacting her fantasies and fears instead of suffering them.” Sherrill’s long patience was fraying. “This is hardly the occasion for me to give you a short course in psychiatry.”

My patience had never been long: “When you get around to talking to Phoebe, there are some specific questions you’d better ask–”

“You mistake my function. I don’t ask questions. I wait for answers. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

Sherrill reached for the doorknob. I said to his back:

“Ask her if she shot and killed Stanley Quillan yesterday afternoon. Ask her if she beat Ben Merriman to death the other night.”

Sherrill turned. His eyes were black and opaque as charcoal. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious. She killed her mother with a poker last November. Doncaster was a witness.”

His black glance shifted to Bobby, who nodded solemnly.

“Who were these other men?” Sherrill said to me.

“A pair of blackmailers.”

“You say she killed them?”

“I want you to ask her whether she did. If you don’t ask her, let me. There are some answers we can’t just sit around waiting for, and some problems that aren’t just in the mind.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Sherrill said. “I’ll talk to her now. Wait here.”

He went out with his smock flapping around his legs. Bobby subsided into the armchair. He looked at me as if he was sick of me, sick of the world and everybody in it. In twenty-one years he hadn’t had time to get ready for so much trouble. You had to start training for it very young these days.

“You didn’t tell me she was pregnant.”

“That’s why we were going to get married.”

“You’re the father?”

“Yes. It happened last summer at Medicine Stone.”

“Everything happens at Medicine Stone. You’ve put it on the map, boy.”

He hung his head. I went to the window and looked out between the slats of the Venetian blind. The window overlooked a large enclosure paved with flagstones and surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence. A brightly frocked woman holding a raised parasol stood like a mannequin in one corner of the fence. Her face was so heavily powdered that she looked as though she’d stuck it into a flour barrel. A middle-aged man with his chin on his chest was shuffling back and forth across the flagstones, taking one step on each.

“You really think she killed Merriman?” Bobby said in a weak voice.

“It was your idea.”

“I was afraid–” He tried to complete the thought but didn’t know how to.

“For a boy who’s afraid you’ve got yourself into deep trouble.”

“I’m not a boy.” He clutched the arms of the big chair and tried to fill it, to become old and large.

“Boy or man, you’re up against it.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me if Phoebe – if she’s really finished. I never expected much out of life anyway.”

I sat on the couch near him. “Still, life has to go on.”

“My life doesn’t.”

“It will. Why fight it? You don’t want to be a dead loss to the world. You have certain qualities it can use. Courage is one of them. Loyalty is another.”

“Those are just abstract words. They don’t mean anything. I’ve studied semantics.”

“They do, though. I learned that studying life. It’s a course that goes on and on. You never graduate or get a diploma. The best you can do is put off the time when you flunk out.”

“I’ve already flunked,” he said. “They’ll never let me finish college or anything. They’ll lock me up, probably for the rest of my life.”

“That I doubt. What sort of a record do you have?”

“With the police? I have no record. None at all.”

“How did you get involved with Phoebe Wycherly?”

“I didn’t get involved with her. I fell in love with her.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Yes. From the first time I met her on the beach, I knew that she was for me.”

“Have you ever been in love before?”

“No, and there won’t be anybody else, ever. That is it. I don’t care what she’s done.”

He had courage, as I’d said. Or stubbornness raised to the nth power, which is almost as good as courage.

“We still don’t know for certain,” I said. “Tell me about Merriman. How did he get into the picture?”

Bobby ran his tongue along the lower edge of his moustache. “He just walked in. He had an appointment with Mrs. Wycherly, and the front door was standing open. He must have heard us in the living room. Phoebe was crying and I was doing my best to comfort her. Merriman walked in and caught us red-handed. He was going to call the police. Phoebe begged him not to, and he relented. He said he would co-operate with her – with us – if we would co-operate with him.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“It was something to do with selling the house. Mrs. Wycherly was going to sell the house through him, that’s what their appointment was about. He was angry because the– because her death interfered with the sale.”

“Did Merriman suggest hiding the body?”

“Yes. We were going to bury her at first, in the garden behind the house. But he said sooner or later it would be found there. I was the one who thought of throwing it in the sea. He helped me carry her out to Phoebe’s car.”

“You said she had no clothes on, is that right?”

“Yes. We wrapped her in a blanket.” A shadow of that image crossed his eyes.

“What happened to her clothes?”

“They were lying on the chesterfield.”

“Did Phoebe undress her?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t understand what happened, Mr. Archer. I took off right after that.”

“And left Phoebe with Merriman?”

“I had to.” His forehead was wet. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stayed with his head leaning sideways on his fist. “He told me to get out and not come back. I had to co-operate with him. The one thing I had on my mind was keeping her out of jail. I know now there are worse things than jail.”

He sighed. He was coming out of two months in the moral deep freeze, beginning to feel himself alive in the world once more. His face was painful to look at. I stood up at the window. The woman with the parasol hadn’t moved. She looked as though she hadn’t moved or changed her style since 1928. A flight of blackbirds blew across the green and yellow sky. The man with the hanging head lifted his head and shook his fist at the disappearing birds.

The light was beginning to fade. Somebody called the bird-hater into the building. Dutifully, he plodded in out of sight. A nurse wearing a cardigan over her white uniform approached the woman with the parasol. The two of them walked towards the building in slow time. A door closed.

Twilight sifted into the room and gradually filled it. Neither of us bothered to turn on a light. I felt as cold and still as a fish in a dark bowl.

The chair-leather creaked under Bobby’s hand. All I could see of him was his white face and his hands gripping the chair arms.

“I can’t explain why I did what I did. I couldn’t see any other way to handle it. Afterwards I just kept waiting and hoping. Waiting to hear from Phoebe, hoping that something possible would come of it. I might have known that nothing possible would.” He said in a despairing voice in which a man’s deep tones were somehow mingled: “This is going to kill my mother.”

“I don’t think so. I talked to her last night.”

“Last night she didn’t know.”

“She was suspicious, from the first. She believed that you’d done something seriously wrong.”

“Mother thought that?”

“Yes. She believed she was protecting you for a murder you’d committed.”

“That’s funny,” he said. “I felt as if I had committed a murder. I dreamed on the bus going home that I had murdered her.”

I didn’t know if he meant Phoebe or her mother or his own mother. I didn’t ask him. It seemed almost irrelevant in this slow-motion underwater world.

Dr. Sherrill irrupted into the room. He closed the door quickly behind him, as though pursuers were reaching for the tail of his smock. He switched on the desk-lamp.

“Mr. Archer, can you tell me how to get in touch with Phoebe’s father? I promised her yesterday not to, but the situation has altered.”

So had he. His face was deeply troubled in the upward light.

“Homer Wycherly should be in Terranova. We can probably reach him through the sheriff there. That can wait until you tell me what she said.”

“What she said is confidential.” The steady force behind his words was running stronger than ever. His voice shook with it.

“It will stay confidential with me.”

“I’m sorry. As a doctor, I have the right of silence where my patients are concerned. You have no such privilege under the law.”

“You’re assuming trial conditions.”

“Am I?” Sherrill threw a distrustful look at Bobby. “We’ll continue this in private, Mr. Archer.”

“You can trust me,” Bobby said. “I’d never repeat anything that would hurt Phoebe. Didn’t I prove that in the last two months?”

“This isn’t a personal matter. Please wait outside, Mr. Doncaster. All the way outside, if you don’t mind.”

Bobby got up and went out, looking dejected. When Sherrill had closed the office door, I said:

“Did the girl confess those killings? You can at least give me a yes or no.”

Sherrill’s lips were tight. They spelled the word, “Yes,” as if it tasted sour.

“Did she go into her motives?”

“She outlined the circumstances. They provide a motive, certainly. I don’t think we’d better discuss them.”

“I think we should.”

“I can’t and won’t break a patient’s confidence.” The doctor sat down behind his desk with a kind of magisterial formality.

“You may not have to. I got it from Bobby Doncaster that Merriman walked into Mrs. Wycherly’s house in Atherton and caught the two of them with her body. He used the situation to set up a blackmail scheme – not his first. Merriman and his brother-in-law Quillan had been blackmailing Catherine Wycherly before they got their teeth into Phoebe. They simply transferred the bite from mother to daughter. They kept Phoebe on ice for a while in her mother’s San Mateo apartment, then hauled her off to Sacramento and forced her to impersonate her mother – made her put on weight, wear her mother’s clothes, and so on, so that she could pass for her. The point of all this was to go on collecting Catherine Wycherly’s alimony checks, and eventually the check for the sale of the house which Merriman was negotiating for the dead woman. Phoebe had to keep her alive, you might say, long enough to cash the check and turn the proceeds over to Merriman.”

“I see you know all about it,” Sherrill said. “It was a horrible scheme, a cruel refinement of punishment. The most horrible aspect of it was that it fitted in with the girl’s need to punish herself for what she had done to her mother. She also had a very strong unconscious need – I noticed it last spring – to identify with her mother. Even the forced feeding to put on weight coincided with her unconscious urges, as well as the fact of her pregnancy.”

“You’re going too fast for me.”

“Deliberately putting on weight, as Phoebe has been doing, can be an expression of anxiety and self-hatred. The self feels itself as heavy and gross and tries to invest itself with a gross, heavy, body. I’m simplifying, of course, but the general idea is recognized in the literature – in Binswanger’s classic case-history of Ellen West, for example. Lindner’s more popularized study of bulimia in The Fifty-Minute Hour is an even closer parallel, since Ellen West was psychotic, and Phoebe almost certainly is not.”

“What is she, doctor? The question is legally important, as you know.”

“I can’t make a diagnosis. Not yet. I think she hasn’t decided herself which way she’s going to go – towards reality, or towards illness. She’s still the same essentially neurotic girl who came to me last year, but now she’s under really terrible pressures. As she keeps saying, she’s been living in hell.” Sherrill’s face drooped with sympathy.

“Why did she come to you last year?”

“I never really got to the bottom of it. I only saw her twice, and then she terminated. Her resistance was very high: I couldn’t get her to talk about herself. Ostensibly she came to me because she was concerned about her family. Her mother was suing her father for divorce at the time. Phoebe blamed herself for the family breakup.”

“Did she say why?”

“It had to do with some scurrilous letters the family had received. Apparently they were the proximate cause of the blowup between her parents. I don’t pretend to understand the situation.”

“Did Phoebe write those letters?”

“It’s possible that she did. While she didn’t come right out with it, she seemed to feel responsible for them. You have to remember, on the other hand, that she’s a self-blamer, as many neurotics are. She tends to blame herself for everything that happens. This Merriman was lucky in his choice of a blackmail victim.”

“Lucky is hardly the word. He ended up as the victim.”

Sherrill looked at me as though he intended to speak. Instead he busied himself packing a pipe from a leather pouch. He lit it with a match whose leaping flame was reflected in his glasses. The circle of light from his desk-lamp filled up with shifting layers of blue-grey smoke. He narrowed his eyes, as if he was trying to descry a permanent shape or meaning in the smoke.

“We’re all victims, Archer, until we stop victimizing each other. Not that I’m crying over Merriman. He deserved to die, if any man does.”

“We all die, anyway, sooner or later. Too bad a sick girl had to be his executioner.”

“She didn’t actually carry it out herself,” the doctor said. “At least she claims not. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you know so much already it seems pointless to hold back. She employed a professional killer to do the job, on both Merriman and – what was the other blackmailer’s name?”

“Quillan, Stanley Quillan. Did she name the killer?”

“She says she never knew his name. According to her account – and frankly I’m dubious about its accuracy – she ran into this thug in the bar of the hotel where she was staying, the Hacienda on the outskirts of Sacramento. She’d been drinking, and she was in a dark and vengeful mood. This fellow picked her up, they got into conversation, she happened to notice that he was carrying a gun. She invited him to her room and after some further conversation she paid him money on the spot to kill the man who had been tormenting her. That’s her story.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I have to believe that something of the sort happened. Her story is pretty circumstantial, but it can’t have occurred as casually as she says. You don’t just walk into a bar and pick up a gunman to do your killing for you.”

“It has happened. Did she describe the gunman?”

“Yes, in some detail, and it wasn’t the kind of detail you get in hallucination or delusion. There’s no doubt in my mind that he exists. He’s a man in his early forties, quite good-looking in a raffish way, she says, with dark hair, blue-grey eyes; about six feet one or two, heavily built and muscular, with the air of an athlete. She took him at first for a professional athlete.” Sherrill puffed more smoke and peered at me through it. “She might very well have been describing you.”

“She was.”

He yanked his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t understand. You can’t mean she hired you to murder those men?”

“She tried to hire me to liquidate Merriman. That was two nights ago: Merriman was already dead. I went along with the gag, up to a point, because I believed she was Catherine Wycherly and I was trying to find out what she knew about Merriman’s death. She didn’t know about it at all, unless she’s a very good liar. She simply wished him dead, ex post facto.”

“She’s certainly been lying to me.” Sherrill’s eyes held a hurt expression. It changed to a more hopeful one: “Isn’t it possible, in the light of this, that her entire confession is a tissue of lies? She may be trying to attach to herself all the guilt that’s floating around loose.”

“Or she may have made a false confession to avoid making a true one.” I stood up. “Why don’t we ask her?”

“Both of us?”

“Why not? I’m walking evidence that she lied. The issue has to be settled one way or the other.”

“But she’s in a very chancy condition.”

“The whole world is,” I said. “If she can survive Merriman and Quillan, she can survive me. Anyway, you said yourself she didn’t know which way to jump, in the direction of illness or reality. Let’s give her another jump at reality.”