The Wycherly Woman

Chapter 6

Highway 101 divides into two branches on the Peninsula. The western branch, Camino Real, doubles as the main street of a forty-mile-long city which stretches almost unbroken from San Francisco to San Jose. Its traffic movement is slow, braked by innumerable stop-lights. The name of the endless city changes as you go south and cross the invisible borders of municipalities: Daly City, Millbrae, San Mateo, San Carlos, Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos.

The eastern branch of the highway, which I took, curves down past International Airport, roughly following the shoreline of the Bay. Mapmakers call it 101 Alternate; the natives of the region call it Bloody Bayshore.

A million people live here between the Bay and the ridge, in grubby tracts built on fills, in junior-executive ranchhouse developments, in senior-executive mansions, in Hillsborough palaces. I’d had some cases on the Peninsula: violence and passional crime are as much a part of the moral landscape as P.T.A. and Young Republican meetings and traffic accidents. The social and economic pressures make life in Los Angeles seem by comparison like playing marbles for keeps.

I turned off Bayshore, where the drivers drive for keeps, into the bosky twilight peace of Atherton. A sheriff’s car with San Mateo County markings passed me cruising. I honked and got out and was told where Whiteoaks Drive was.

It paralleled Bayshore, about halfway between Bayshore and Camino Real: a quiet street of fairly large estates which was more like a country lane than a city street. Mrs. Wycherly’s number, 507, was engraved in a stone gatepost set in an eight-foot stone wall. The moulded iron gates were chained and padlocked.

Wired to one of them was a metal sign which looked like a For Sale sign. I got a flashlight out of my car. For Sale, Ben Merriman, Realtor, with an Emerson telephone number and a Camino Real address.

The white front of the house glimmered through trees. I turned my light towards it. Oaks on either side of the driveway converted it into a rough green chasm whose gravel floor was drifted with brown leaves and yellowing newspapers. It was an impressive Colonial house but it had an abandoned air, as though the colonists had given up and gone back to the mother country. Blinds and drapes were drawn across all the windows, upstairs and down.

I focused on the newspapers in the gravel. There were twelve or fifteen of them scattered around inside the gates. Some of them were wrapped in waxed paper, against rainy weather; several of them had been trampled into mud.

I reached through the bars, the side of my face against cold iron, and got hold of the nearest one, a San Francisco Chronicle still trussed with a string for delivery. I broke the string and read the date at the top of the front page. It was November 5, three days after Phoebe disappeared.

I wanted to see what was inside the house. I put on driving gloves and chinned myself on the top of the stone wall. No spikes or broken glass: the escalade would be easy.

“Get down off there!” a man’s voice said behind me. I dropped to the ground and turned. He loomed large in the darkness, a dim grey figure in a snap-brim hat.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Looking.”

“You’ve had your look. So beat it, Tarzan.”

I picked up my flashlight and turned the beam on him. He was a big man of about forty, handsome except for an up-turned clown’s nose and something about the eyes which reminded me of a Tanforan tout or a gambler on the Reno-Vegas circuit. He wore a sharp dark flannel suit and an indefinable air of failure pinned in place by a jauntily striped bow tie.

The nostrils in his upturned nose glared darkly at me. His teeth glittered in a downward grin:

“Take that light off me. You want me to smash it for you?”

“You could always try.”

He took a couple of steps towards me, as if he was walking uphill, then stood back on his heels. I kept the light on him. His pointed shoes fidgeted in the dirt.

“Who do you think you are?”

“Just a citizen, trying to find an old acquaintance. Her name is Mrs. Catherine Wycherly.”

“She doesn’t live here any more.”

“You know her?”

“I represent her.”

“In what capacity?”

“I’m responsible for the security of these premises. We don’t like prowlers and snoopers around here.”

“Where can I get in touch with Mrs. Wycherly?”

“I’m not here to answer questions. I’m here to see that nobody vandalizes this property.” There was a nasty little whine in his voice. He reached into his back pocket and matched it with a nasty little gun. “Now get.”

My gun was in the back seat of my car, which was just as well. I got.

Crossing Bayshore on an overpass, I felt as if I was crossing a frontier between two countries. There were some white people on the streets of East Palo Alto, but most of the people were colored. The cheap tract houses laid out in rows between the salt flats and the highway had the faint peculiar atmosphere of a suburban ghetto.

Sammy Green earned Sailors’ Union wages and lived in one of the better houses on one of the better streets, almost out of hearing of the highway and almost out of smelling of the Bay. His wife was a handsome young Negro woman wearing a party dress and a complicated hairdo, under which earrings sparkled.

She told me that her husband was in Gilroy for the night; he always visited his folks the second night of his vacation, and took the children with him. No his parents had no telephone, but she’d be glad to give me their address.

I asked her instead how to get to Woodside, where Phoebe’s aunt and uncle lived.