The Wycherly Woman (12 page)

“Yes. Have you seen her, Jerry?”

“Can’t say that I have. ’Course I’m not on duty all the time. I can see the resemblance, though. Add on twenty years and twenty pounds—she’s her mother’s daughter all right. I got an eye for resemblances.” The half-pint of beer had made him loquacious. His eyes came up to mine like an old hound’s. “Your daughter took off on you, too, eh? You got family trouble for sure.”

“I know it.” I was glad I wasn’t Wycherly. But I was beginning to feel his load of grief, as if I’d assumed it magically with his name. “You’re certain you’ve never seen this girl?”

“Certain as I can be. The only people that come to see your lady was the two men—the old one she wouldn’t let in, and Firstest with the Mostest.”

“And the one she left with tonight?”

“Yeah. Him.” He got up wagging his head. “Don’t you go using that gun on him, mister. Take Jerry Dingman’s advice.”

“Thanks for the advice. And thanks for the beer.”

When he had shuffled out, I got out the gun, which was in a shoulder holster, and put it on.

M
ONEY FLOWED THROUGH
the state capital like an alluvial river, and the Hacienda Inn was one of the places where the golden silt was deposited. It lay off the highway to the north of the city, sprawled on its golf course like a separate village. A Potemkin village, maybe, or the kind the French kings built near Versailles so they could play at being peasants on sunny afternoons.

On this late night with its lowering moon, some of the paisanos who frequented the Inn were still awake. Light and laughter spilled from scattered massive bungalows, and from the big main building: a Spanish ranch-house with delusions of grandeur. I found a parking place in the dark lot beside it, and went in.

The elegant vacuous youth at the registration desk said that Mrs. Wycherly was not registered.

“She may be using her maiden name.” I went on before he could ask me what it was: “She’s a big platinum blonde wearing dark glasses, and she’s supposed to have checked in here within the last couple of hours.”

“You must mean Miss Smith—”

“That’s right. Her maiden name is Smith. I have an important message from her family.”

“It’s pretty late to call her bungalow,” he said doubtfully.

“She’d want you to. It’s urgent.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Archer. I represent the family.”

He made the call. No answer.

“I’m sure she’s in the hotel.” He glanced up at the electric
clock on the wall: it was nearly one-thirty. “You may find her in the Cantina. She asked me where it was when she registered.”

The Cantina was on the far side of a great flagstone courtyard. Twenty or so late-night revellers sat or leaned at the bar—an old carved mahogany monstrosity with a pitted brass rail which had probably been salvaged from some Mother Lode ghost town. Behind it a white-jacketed Filipino moved with speed and precision against a big mirror.

His customers were a mixed batch: a trio of beefy types wearing white Stetsons and Gower Gulch clothes; two men who looked like a legislator and a lobbyist sitting on either side of a redhead who looked like a bribe; a noisy party of businessmen and their wives; a pair of honeymooners gazing at each other with rapturous circles under their eyes. And beyond them, at the end of the bar, a blonde woman in dark glasses sitting alone with an empty stool beside her.

I slid onto the stool. She didn’t seem to notice. She was staring into the glass in her fist like a fortuneteller studying her crystal. She rotated the glass in her fingers, and flakes of gold swirled in the colorless liquid.

I searched out the reflection of her face in the mirror. She was heavily made up. Under the paint, her flesh seemed swollen and bruised, not just by violence, but by the padded blows of sorrow and shame. Even so, I could see that she had once been attractive.

She was dressed and groomed like a woman who knew she wasn’t attractive any more. Her hair, bleached the color of tin, was tangled as if her fingers had been busy in it. Her dark purple dress didn’t go with her hair. She wasn’t a thin woman, but the dress bagged on her as if she’d been losing weight.

The Filipino bartender broke in on my observations: “What will you have to drink, sir?”

“The stuff the lady’s drinking looks interesting. With the gold in it.”

“Goldwater? It’s okay if you like a sweet drink. Isn’t that right, ma’am?”

She grunted noncommittally. I said to her: “I’ve never tried goldwater. How does it taste?”

Her masked eyes swung towards me. “Lousy. But go ahead and try it. Everything tastes lousy to me.” Her voice was fairly cultivated, but it had undertones of ugliness and despair.

One of the Stetsons rapped on the bar with a Reno dollar.

“Sir?” the bartender said impatiently. “You want the goldwater?”

I went on making a production out of it. “I don’t know.” I said to the woman: “Doesn’t the gold get stuck in your throat?”

“It’s very thin gold leaf. You don’t even know it’s there.”

“All right, I’ll try it,” I said, as though she’d talked me into it. “Anything for kicks.”

The bartender poured my drink from a bottle labelled “Danziger Goldwasser.”

“That’s what I used to think,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

She leaned towards me, half in earnestness and half in the pull of gravity that exerts itself at the end of a long evening. I caught a glimpse of the eyes behind her glasses. In their depths was a lost and struggling spirit asking wordlessly for help.

“Anything for kicks,” she said. “That used to be my philosophy of life. It doesn’t work out the way you expect it to. Kicks include getting kicked in the head by a horse.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“You might say so. A horse of another color. A dark horse.” Her heavy red mouth twisted mirthlessly.

She pulled herself upright and held herself that way. She wasn’t drunk, or if she was she was able to carry it. Whatever was the matter with her went deeper than drink. She seemed to be holding herself still in the middle of vertigo; it tugged at my sympathy like the turning edge of a whirlpool.

I had a counterimpulse to walk out of the bar and away from the Hacienda and her. She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.

And succeeding. I raised my drink and said with false cheer: “Luck to the gold drinkers.”

She sipped at hers. “You didn’t say what kind of luck, good or bad. Not that it matters, people don’t get their wishes. Wishing-wells are to drown in. But I mustn’t go on like that. I’m always pitying myself, and that’s neurotic.”

She made a visible effort, and focused her attention on me: “Speaking of luck, you don’t look as if you had too much luck in your life. Some of those kicks you say you go for were kicks in the head, I bet.”

“I’ve had my share.”

“I knew it. I have a feeling for faces—people’s faces. I always did have, since I was a young kid. Especially men.”

“You’re not so old now,” I said. What I was hoping for was a personal relationship with Mrs. Wycherly, the kind of relationship in which she would talk freely without knowing she was being questioned, “How old are you?”

“I never tell my age. On account of I’m a hundred. Like Lord Byron when he was thirty-five or so and he was asked his age when he registered at some hotel, I think it was in Italy. He told them he was a hundred.
I
know how he felt. He died the following year at Missolonghi. Lovely story, isn’t it, with a happy ending and all. You like my story?”

“It’s a load of laughs.”

“I have a million of them. Morbid tales for little people by the old lady of the sea. I think of myself as the old lady of the sea.” Her mouth twisted. “I’m spooky, aren’t I?”

I said she wasn’t, in my chivalrous way, but spooky was the word for her. I drank the rest of my goldwater. It was sweet and strong.

“It’s like drinking money,” she said. “How does it taste to you?”

“I like the taste of money. But the drink is a little too sweet for me. I’m going to switch to Bourbon.”

She looked past me along the bar. The honeymooners had drifted away.

“You’d better hurry up then. This place is going to close up any minute. While you’re ordering, you might as well order me another.” She added abruptly: “I’ll pay for it.”

I ordered for both of us, and insisted on paying. “I can afford to buy you a drink. My name is Lew Archer, by the way.”

“How do you do, Lew.”

This time we clicked glasses.

“I’m Miss Smith.”

“Not married?”

“No. Are you?”

“I was at one time. It didn’t take.”

“I know the problem,” she said. “I’ve lived with it. Call it living. What do you do for a living?”

“I sort of live off the country.”

“I don’t get it. What do you
really
do? No, wait, let me guess. I’m good at guessing people’s occupations.” She sounded like a bored child looking for a game to play.

“Go ahead and guess.”

Her gaze slipped down from my face to my shoulders, as if she was looking for a place to cry on. Tentatively, her hand came out and palped my left bicep. She had pretty hands, except for the tips of the fingers, which had been bitten.

“Are you a professional athlete? You seem to be in very good trim, for a middle-aged man.”

It was a mixed compliment.

“Wrong. I’ll give you two more guesses.”

“What do I win if I guess right?”

“I’ll carve you a plaque.”

“Oh, fine. I need one for my grave.”

Her heavy gaze went over me some more. I could feel it like
a tangible pressure. I squirmed a little. My jacket gaped open. She said in a husky whisper:

“You’re carrying a gun. Are you a policeman?”

“You have one more guess.”

“Why are you wearing a gun?”

“That’s a question, not a guess.”

“You could give me a hint. You
did
say you lived off the country. Are you outside the law?”

There were possibilities in the role. “Keep your voice down,” I said, and looked away from her along the bar in that sudden jerky movement I’d seen men make in other bars when I came in to put the arm on them.

The redhead and her escorts were on their way out. The Stetson brothers were talking in rapt religious voices about Aberdeen Angus bulls. The businessmen were persuading each other to have one for the road. As if the road needed it, their wives’ expressions said.

The woman’s hand touched my shoulder. Her breath tickled my ear. “Why do you carry a gun?”

“We won’t talk about it.”

“But I want to talk about it,” she said in a wheedling tone. “I’m interested. Are you a gangster—a gunman?”

“This is the end of the guessing game. You wouldn’t like the answers.”

“Yes, I would. Maybe I would.”

For the first time she seemed fully alive, but not with the kind of life I wanted to share. She circled her lips with the pale tip of her tongue:

“What do you use your gun for?”

“We won’t talk about it here. Do you want to get me arrested?”

She whispered: “We could talk in my place. I have a bottle in my bungalow. They’re about to close the Cantina anyway.”

She picked up her lizardskin purse. I went along with her,
across the courtyard, up a garden path where black moon-shadows crouched and pounced in the late wind blowing up from San Francisco Bay.

She fumbled in her purse for the key, fumbled at the lock. It was dark inside when she opened the door. She stood in the dark and let me walk into her. Her body trembled against me. It was softer and warmer than I’d supposed.

Her mind was harder and colder: “Have you ever killed anybody? I don’t mean in the war. I mean in real life.”

“This is real life?”

“Don’t joke. I want to know. I have a reason.”

“I have a better reason for keeping quiet.”

“Come on,” she wheedled. “Tell Mother.”

She pressed herself against me. We were both aware of the gun in its harness between us. I felt as though I was being offered a large and dangerous gift I didn’t want. Her pointed breasts were like soft bombs against me.

“I think you’re exciting,” she said in an unexcited way.

She was a crude and awkward operator, naïve for a woman of her alleged experience. No doubt her mind was running on one or two cylinders. I was beginning to wonder if she was disturbed. There were undertones and overtones in everything she said, like a steady growling and screaming below and above the range of my ears.

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“I haven’t had a chance to get to know you.”

Against my neck, she hummed a few notes of a song about getting to know people. She got a grip on the back of my head. I felt her tongue on my lips, like a hot snail. I broke her masseuse grip:

“You promised me a drink.”

“Don’t you like women?” Coming from her, the question had a queer pathos. She leaned on me like a woman sliding down a wall. “I know I’m not so pretty any more.”

“Neither am I, and I’ve had a long hard day.”

“Working over a hot gun?”

“Not all day. I do all my killing before breakfast. I like to sprinkle a little human blood on my porridge.”

“You’re awful. We’re two awful people.”

She reached for the light switch, humming another song. Her singing voice was surprisingly light and girlish. A faint poignant regret went through me that I hadn’t got to her sooner. Much sooner, in another place and time, on a different errand.

The room jumped up around us, colored and strange. She’d only had it a little while, but there were clothes on the bed and floor, as though she’d picked through every dress in her wardrobe looking for something becoming. The Navajo rugs on the floor were crumpled as if she’d been kicking at them.

A bottle of whisky and a smudged glass stood on the limed oak chest of drawers. She put down her purse beside the bottle, poured me a heavy slug in the glass and handed it to me slopping over the rim. She drank from the bottle herself, pouring the stuff down like a rank amateur or a far-gone alcoholic. It was a lovely party.

It got lovelier. She sprawled on the bed regardless of her clothes, hugging the bottle like a headless baby. Her skirt crept up above her knees. Her legs were remarkably good, but not for me. I watched her the way you watch an old late movie that you’ve seen before.