The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 28

I got to Trevor in the morning. He was sitting propped up in bed in his blinded room. His hands lay quiet on the covers.

He raised one of them in a weak salute. “Archer. How are you?”

“How are you, Trevor?”

“Surviving, it appears. I have to apologize for falling by the wayside the other night. I suppose I should apologize, too, for giving you a mistaken identification. Though it was natural enough under the circumstances. Even Homer had trouble ascertaining that the dead woman was his wife.”

He was watching me with the ragged awareness of a poker player after an all-night game. I stood at the foot of the bed and matched his look. It was a high hospital bed, so that our eyes were almost on a level.

“You made a false and deliberately misleading identification, and I know why.”

He lifted his hands like twin burdens and dropped them on his shrouded thighs. “So it’s like that. You’ve been doing some fairly deep digging, have you?”

“Digging your grave. Do you want to talk about the mess you’ve made?”

“Nothing would give me greater pain.”

“Then I’ll do the talking. The doctor didn’t allow me much time with you, and we have a lot of ground to get over. In the evening of last November second you picked up a poker in Catherine Wycherly’s house in Atherton and beat her fatally. I expect she was desperate and on the point of blowing the whistle on you: your motive was to silence her. But she didn’t die right away. She lived long enough to tell Phoebe that her father was responsible for the crime.

“Phoebe naturally assumed that she meant Homer. She’s very fond of Homer, and in the shock of the event she decided to take the blame on her own shoulders. Her obvious purpose was to protect her father. Dr. Sherrill would probably have a more complicated explanation.”

“You’ve talked to Sherrill?”

“Yes, and I’ve talked to Phoebe. I also have a tape recording of a conversation in which you and Catherine Wycherly discussed the fact that Phoebe was your child. The tape was made the night Phoebe saw you and her mother together in a taxi in San Mateo. You may recall the occasion.”

“I should. It was the beginning of all this. It’s appropriate to have it recorded for posterity.” He looked at me from eyes like rotting ice. “Does Phoebe know I’m her father?”

“No. She never will if I can help it. She has a chance for happiness, or at least a little peace, and you’re not going to louse it up again. She’s been living in the hell you and her mother fixed for her – two months in the hands of blackmailers, taking your rap for you. She finally broke down a few days ago and told Ben Merriman what her mother had said before she died: that her father was the guilty one.

“It meant something different to Merriman from what it meant to Phoebe. Merriman had the tape, and knew who her father was. When he got back from Sacramento he phoned your office and made an appointment with you. He was loaded with the money that he’d extorted from Phoebe, but he saw the possibility of more – an annuity for the rest of his life, or at least the rest of yours. He told you to meet him in the house where you had killed Catherine. No doubt that was part of his plan to screw up the pressure on you.

“He screwed it up too tight, and you repeated your crime. You rode a commuter’s train down from the City, got off at the Atherton station, walked to the house and kept your appointment with Merriman, walked back to the Atherton station, boarded the next train and got off a few minutes later to meet your wife in Palo Alto. No wonder you were looking sick when she drove you home. You’re looking sicker now.”

Trevor winced against his pillows, and covered his face with his hands. He didn’t seem to be overcome with emotion. He simply didn’t want me looking at his naked face.

“That left Stanley Quillan. Stanley wasn’t as tough as Merriman, he wasn’t as smart, and he didn’t know as much. He must have known your name, though, and been aware of the contents of the tape. He made it, after all. When he needed getaway money, he called you. You gave him a bullet in the head. Was it Merriman’s gun you used?”

Trevor sat hidden-faced and still. He wasn’t even breathing.

“Is that the way it happened, Trevor?”

He took his hands away from his face. It cost him an effort that made him gasp.

“More or less. It’s strange to hear it from the outside. You make it sound so crude and senseless.”

“It was really sensible and civilized?”

“Hardly. But let me ask you a question. What would you do if a pair of shakedown artists threatened the entire structure of your life, and you saw no way out?”

“Perhaps the same as you,” I said. “Then I would have to pay for it. Better to keep your nose clean in the first place.”

“You don’t understand.” I was hearing that from all sides. “You don’t understand how a man’s life can go sour. You start out with an innocent roll in the hay, and you end up having to kill people.”

“Twenty-odd years is a long time to be innocently rolling in the hay.”

“I see there’s no use trying to explain.” But he went on explaining: “I’m scarcely the bold seducer. Kitty was the only other woman in my life. I had no designs on her when she came into our house, though she was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. So fresh, so young. She was only eighteen. I kept my hands off her.”

“And that’s why you’re not here with her death on your hands.”

He hardly seemed to hear me. “She was the one who took pity on me. Sex is a dirty word to my wife: she lost a child in the first year of our marriage: after that I never slept in her room. I was still a young man when Kitty came to stay with us. She saw my need for her, and she took pity on me. She came to my room one night and offered herself to me.

“It wasn’t entirely a deed of charity. She was due to be married to Homer in a few weeks, and she was a virgin. She elected me to break her in. It doesn’t sound romantic, I know, but we caught fire from each other. I learned what it is to treasure a woman’s body. For a week or two of nights, I was back in Eden with the dew on the grass.

“Then Kitty missed a period, and got scared. I couldn’t catch her. I wanted to, of course. But I had a way to make, and a wife. Helen would have stripped me, with Homer’s willing assistance. I’d worked my way up from a twenty-dollar-a-week job in the Meadow Farms bank, and I couldn’t see myself starting all over again at thirty-two. We did the best we could with the situation. Kitty let Homer have her before their wedding and convinced him when the baby came that it was slightly premature.

“The next few years were rugged ones for me. It grew on me like a disease – the realization that I’d had the one thing worth having. A little warmth and companionship in the void. I’d had it and given it up, in favor of security, I suppose you’d call it. Security. The great American substitute for love.”

“But you went on seeing her.”

“No, I did not, except of course in the most casual way. She wanted to give her marriage a chance, she said. I found out years later that she was deeply offended with me for not divorcing Helen and marrying her.

“She was in love with me,” he said with mournful pride. “Naturally her marriage didn’t work out. I doubt it would have worked out if I had never existed. She and Homer lived like enemies, fighting over the child. My child. You know what Bacon has to say about your children: that they’re your hostages to fortune. It’s a grinding thing to know that and feel it, as I have, and be unable to do anything much about it. I sat on the sidelines watching them make a hash of Phoebe’s life as well as their own. The not so innocent bystander.

“That went on for nearly twenty years. Then, a couple of years ago, my heart went back on me. A close brush with death affects a man’s thinking. When I came out of it I determined to get something more out of life – something more than going up to the city and entertaining the right people and staving off the next coronary.

“I went back to Kitty. She was willing. Her marriage, as I said, had not worked out. She felt very much as I did, that she had missed the best part of life.

“She wasn’t the girl she had been. She’d aged and coarsened and lost some of her looks and most of her gentleness. There had been other men. Still we had something between us – something that was better than nothing. When we were together, at least we weren’t alone.

“She got a place where we could be together two or three times a month. Unfortunately she rented it through Merriman. I suspect from something he said that he had been one of the other men. He had an ascendancy over her–”

“Something he said when?”

“The night I killed him. He talked about her, as though she was a common whore. It was one of the reasons I killed him. Yes, I see the irony. I killed a man for defaming the character of a woman I had killed two months before.”

“You still haven’t explained why you killed her.”

“I can’t, really. I suppose the sheer involvement became too much for me. I tried to break away from her when Merriman and Quillan started to blackmail her. It looked as though I would be next, and the game wasn’t worth the candle any more. After her divorce she went to pieces very rapidly. She seemed to expect me to pick up the pieces. I had barely enough stuff to get through the motions of everyday life. I couldn’t take her on.”

“I thought you already had.”

“I mean in a full-scale way – divorce and remarriage and all the trimmings. I couldn’t face all that, and I told her so. She got more and more desperate, and more threatening. She was going to ruin me if I didn’t bail her out. The whole thing came to a head on that last day. Homer was leaving the country, rich and free; she was being swindled out of what money she had; she was under bad pressures. During the famous leavetaking in Homer’s stateroom, she was on the verge of blurting everything out.

“I went to see her that night, to try and make her understand what she was doing to me, to all of us. She wouldn’t listen to reason. Phoebe was coming to visit her, she said, and she intended to tell the girl the whole story. I tried to convince her that it was too late for that. When I couldn’t, I took the poker and silenced her, as you said. It was an ugly way for it to end.” He might have been criticizing a scene in a play.

“When did you undress her, and why?”

“She undressed herself. It was one of her means of persuasion which had worked on me in the past. But I felt no desire for her. For some time now the only real desire I’ve had is a desire for death. Darkness and silence.”

He sighed. “Everything was very silent for two months. I had no idea what had happened to Kitty’s body. I wasn’t even aware that Phoebe was missing. Normally I kept in some sort of touch with her, but I was afraid to do that now. I was afraid to do anything that might stir up the situation.

“Then Merriman called my office the other afternoon. He insisted I keep an appointment with him in Kitty’s empty house. You know the outcome of that. I searched Merriman’s clothes and car in the hope that he might have the tape with him. He hadn’t, but I found his gun, and the money.

“I had no intention of keeping the money for myself. If the other fellow – Quillan – tried to carry on the blackmail game, I thought I would use it to pay him off. I liked the irony of that.” He was making a desperate effort to hold his style.

“Why didn’t you do it if you liked it so much?”

“I tried to. I went to Quillan’s shop and tried to go through with the payoff. But he recognized the source of the money. He said things I couldn’t endure. I shot him with Merriman’s gun, as you guessed. It was a senseless crime, and I admit it. After I talked to Phoebe in Sacramento, I no longer had any real hope of pulling it out. I could have taken the money, I suppose, and left the country. But I had no heart for it.”

He heard the double meaning in the word, and touched his rib-cage in a gingerly way, as if it held a sick animal which might bite him.

“How did you reach Phoebe?”

“I found a bill in Merriman’s pocket, a paid bill from the Champion Hotel, made out in Kitty’s name. I conceived the wild idea that she had survived somehow, that Merriman’s accusation was only a bluff. I flew to Sacramento that night after I talked to Royal, rented a car at the airport and drove to the Champion. When Phoebe came to the door of her room I still believed she was Kitty. There was very little light, and I was very willing to believe it. I thought some miracle had saved her, and saved me.

“I took her in my arms. Then she spoke to me. She told me who she was and what she was doing there.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. There was nothing I could tell her, then or ever. I did do my best for her, though. I gave her money and got her out of that wretched room into a decent place. The Hacienda was only a temporary expedient, of course. I saw as I talked to her that she needed medical care. I was in need of it myself. I was so completely exhausted by this time that I had to lie down in the other room of her bungalow. I wasn’t up to so much stress and activity.”

“Like hitting people on the head with a tire-iron?”

“I’m sorry about that, Archer. I heard the two of you in her room. I had to stop you in some way. I was afraid she’d talk herself into a murder trial.”

“Or talk you into one.”

“There was that possibility, of course.”

“Your tense is wrong, and it’s more than a possibility.”

My words hung between us on the air. “Have you been to the police?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re planning to go to them, of course.”

“I couldn’t keep them out of this even if I wanted to, and I don’t.”

“It won’t do Phoebe any good to put me on trial for murder. She’s had her fill of disasters. She deserves a chance at life, as you yourself said. You don’t want to saddle her with the knowledge that she’s the bastard child of a murderer.”

“She doesn’t know you’re her father. She doesn’t have to.”

“It’s bound to come out if there’s a trial.”

“Who will bring it out? You and I are the only ones who know.”

“But what about Catherine’s dying words?”

“Phoebe can be persuaded that she misheard them.”

“Yes. She actually did mishear them, in a sense, didn’t she?”

Trevor sat and studied me. His eyes closed and opened from time to time, so slowly that he seemed to be alternating between death and life.

“Phoebe is my chief concern,” he said. “I care nothing for myself. I’m thinking of her solely.”

“You should have been thinking of her when you killed her mother.”

“I was thinking of her. I wanted to protect her from the ugly reality. It’s uglier now, and I still want to protect her. I believe I proved something when I brought her back to Dr. Sherrill. I knew the chance I was taking.”

“You proved something.”

“Will you do something for me, and incidentally for her? My clothes are in the closet there.” He gestured towards a door on the far side of the room beside the bureau. “I have some digitalis capsules in the pocket of my coat – more than enough to kill me. I tried to get to them before you came, but I collapsed and had to be lifted back into bed.” He took a breath which whistled in his nostrils. “Will you bring me my coat?”

I was still on my feet, facing him. Nothing had changed about Trevor except his eyes. They were glittering and sharp-edged like the broken blue edges of reality.

I didn’t know what I was going to say until I said: “In return for a written confession. It doesn’t have to be long. Do you have writing paper?”

“There’s some in the bedside drawer, I think. But what can I possibly write?”

“I’ll tell you what to say if you like.”

I got a tablet of stationery out of the drawer and handed him my pen. He wrote on his knee to my dictation:

“ ‘I confess the murder of Catherine Wycherly last November second. She resisted my advances.’ ”

Trevor looked up. “That’s rather corny.”

“What do you suggest?”

“No explanation at all.”

“There has to be one,” I said. “ ‘She resisted my advances. I also killed Stanley Quillan and Ben Merriman, who were blackmailing me for her murder.’ Sign it.”

He wrote slowly and painfully, frowning over his penmanship. I lifted the tablet from his blue-nailed hands. He had added after his signature:

“May God have mercy on my soul.”

And on mine, I thought. I tore out the page and laid it on the bureau, out of Trevor’s reach. Shadows lay tike sleeping dogs behind the closet door. Darkness and silence. We didn’t speak again.

The End