The Wycherly Woman (16 page)

Trevor’s cigar had gone out. He removed it from his mouth and looked at it with distaste. “What do you have in mind?”

“Blackmail. That’s only a hunch, but it fits the picture. She’s a woman with a load of grief and guilt. A lot of money’s been running through her fingers, with no visible outlet. You ought to see the hotel she’s been living in. The Champion’s about one short step from hunger.”

Trevor shook his large head. “It doesn’t sound like Catherine. What’s happened to her?”

“I can think of better questions. What happened to Phoebe, and what did Ben Merriman have on Phoebe’s mother?”

“You’re assuming again, aren’t you?”

“I have to. I don’t know the facts.”

“Neither do I, but I’m morally certain you’re wrong. Parents don’t kill their own children, outside of Greek tragedy.”

“Don’t they? Read the papers. I admit they don’t usually wait until the children grow up.”

Trevor regarded me with loathing. “Do you know what you’re saying, man?”

“I know what I’m saying. It isn’t pretty. Murder never is.”

“You’re seriously accusing Catherine of murdering her own daughter?”

“I’m bringing it up as a possibility that should be looked into.”

“Why bring it to me?”

“Because you’re in a position to help me. Catherine Wycherly is running loose around the countryside with murder on her mind. I think we should try to get to her before something else happens, or before the police pick her up. But I can’t drop my other leads and go on concentrating on her, as I’ve been doing. I was hired to search for Phoebe.”

“But you think Phoebe’s dead.”

“It’s not proven, one way or the other. Until it is, I’m sticking to her trail.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Use your influence with Homer Wycherly. We need someone to put a tab on his ex-wife. I know a good San Francisco detective agency with associates in all the major cities. I’m going to talk to the head of the agency as soon as I leave here—man named Willie Mackey—but I can’t bring him into the case without Wycherly’s go-ahead. You can get it for me.”

“Can I?”

“It shouldn’t be hard. Wycherly already knows Mackey. Will you put in a call to him? I left him at the Boulder Beach Hotel. If he’s checked out, they’ll know where he is.”

“Why don’t you call him yourself?”

“He’s a hard man to talk to. You’ve had more practice at it.”

“Have I not.” He pressed the button of his intercom and asked his secretary to get him Homer Wycherly on long distance. He said to me: “I’ll talk to him in private if you don’t mind.”

I waited in the anteroom until Trevor called me back.

“Homer wants to talk to you.” He handed me the telephone with a helpless shrug of his shoulders.

“Archer here,” I said into it.

Wycherly’s voice came over the line, strained thin by distance and tension: “I hear you’ve gone against my express orders. I expressly told you I didn’t want my ex-wife brought into this. I’m telling you again, keep away from her.”

I didn’t like his tone. “Why? Does she know where the body is buried?”

“The body?” His voice became thick. “Is Phoebe dead? Is that the fact you’re trying to conceal from me?”

“I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Mr. Wycherly. I have no evidence that your daughter is dead, but she’s still very much missing. So is your ex-wife. And I think Mrs.
Wycherly may know more than she told me. You’re defeating your own ends if you don’t let me have her looked for.”

“By William Mackey? Is that what you’re trying to sell me?”

“He’s competent, and he has the connections. This case is getting bigger than we expected. I can use some help, both private and public. I want your authorization to work with Mackey and the local police.”

“You can’t have it! I don’t trust Mackey, and I don’t want the police butting into my private affairs. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do. I don’t know whether I have. A disappearance, a possible murder, isn’t a private affair. The police are already involved, anyway. Didn’t Mr. Trevor tell you about the killing of Ben Merriman?”

Trevor half-rose out of his chair, shaking his head at me.

“Ben who?” Wycherly said.

“Merriman. He’s a realtor on the Peninsula who had some business dealings with your wife. He was found murdered last night in her house in Atherton.”

“That has nothing to do with me. And nothing to do with Phoebe.”

“We can’t be certain of that.”

“I’m certain.” Uncertainty whispered and slithered through his voice.

I said: “It would be a good idea for you to come up here. You’d get a better feeling of what’s been going on.”

“I can’t. I’m to see the college chancellor this afternoon. Tonight I have a meeting scheduled with the entire board of trustees.”

“What can they do for you?”

“They’re going to admit that they’re at fault,” Wycherly said grimly. “I’m going to force them to admit official negligence. They claim they cabled me some time after Phoebe left, and notified Missing Persons as well. But I never received
any cable. Such a thing could never have happened at Stanford!”

“That’s sort of a side issue, isn’t it?”

“You may think so. I don’t. They’re going to know who they’re dealing with before I’m through with them.”

I suspected they knew already: a foolish man full of passions he couldn’t handle.

“If you won’t come up here,” I said, “please give me the authority to co-opt Mackey. It won’t cost more than you can afford.”

“It isn’t a matter of money. It’s a matter of principle. I won’t touch Mackey, do you understand. If you can’t find my daughter without chasing red herrings up blind alleys—by God, I’ll get someone who can.”

His receiver crashed down, and there was nothing on the line but angry silence. I gave Trevor the dead telephone:

“He hung up on me. Is the whole family nuts?”

“Homer’s naturally upset. He’s very fond of Phoebe, and he never could handle situations well. You can be just as glad he isn’t here.”

“Maybe. But what in hell does he think he’s doing, calling meetings with the college trustees?”

“I suppose he’s doing the best he can with his problems. He’s always been a great one for official meetings.” Trevor’s tone was mildly satirical. “Incidentally, you were a bit rough on him. I didn’t like that remark about where the body was buried.”

“I’m a detective,” I said, “not a wet nurse. Anyway, I was doing him a favor. He doesn’t know what’s hitting him. I think it would be better if he knew.”

“Do you know, Archer?” A trace of satire lingered in his voice.

“I have a feeling. It isn’t a nice feeling.”

He sat down heavily. “I think you’re dead wrong, about
Catherine and Phoebe. For that matter, Catherine and Merriman. It doesn’t fit in with what I know of Catherine. She isn’t a bad woman, really, underneath her rugged exterior.”

“People change, under pressure. She’s been under some kind of intense pressure.”

“No doubt. I’m beginning to feel the pressure myself.” He produced a small brown bottle from a desk drawer and took a capsule from it.

“Digitalis,” he said. “Excuse me.”

His mouth had turned grey. He leaned forward in his chair and rested his head on the desk-top. It lay there like a big pinkish brown egg half fledged with hair. He groaned, and said to the polished wood:

“Poor Phoebe.”

“You love her, don’t you?”

He lifted his heavy head, and gave me an upward slanting look, like a man spying up out of a hole. There were bitter lines of grief around his mouth:

“That’s a God damn silly question. I don’t mess with young girls.”

“You can love them without messing with them.”

“Yes. I know.” His mouth softened, and the color was returning to his lips. “I do love her.”

“It would be possible for you to authorize Mackey, you know. It doesn’t have to be Wycherly.”

“You want me to lose my job?”

“I don’t think you’re in any danger of losing your job.”

“You don’t, eh?” He looked around his handsome office. “Homer’s in a chancy mood, and he’s never liked me, not really. In-laws never really like each other. If you want the truth, he’s been looking for an excuse to push me out of the business. Not that he’s capable of running it himself.”

“You could get another job. There’s only the one girl.”

Trevor showed his teeth, not at me. He was biting into the decision he had to make. He made it:

“Go ahead and use Mackey. I’ll pay for him, if Homer won’t. And if there’s any beef, I’ll take the responsibility.”

H
E WAS WAITING FOR ME
in the English room on the ground floor of the St. Francis. A busty brunette hostess pointed him out, sitting at a table in a panelled niche. She had the air of a cathedral guide pointing out the statue of some well-known local saint.

Willie was a flat-faced man in his late forties with black eyes that had never been surprised. He wore a narrow black moustache, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his Brooks Brothers suit; and managed to look a little like a headwaiter. Women adored him, if you could believe his personal decameron.

I liked him pretty well myself. Willie was no saint, but he was an honest man according to his lights, even if the lights were neon. He gave me a grip-testing handshake:

“Nice to see you, Lew. I thought the Los Angeles jungle had swallowed you up for good.”

“I like to visit the provinces from time to time.”

He leered at me smugly with his moustache. Willie believed that there was an earthly paradise, and that San Francisco was it. We ordered Gibsons and steaks from a hovering waitress. She called Willie by name and looked at him as if she wanted to smell his carnation. He looked at her as if his carnation had a squirt gun concealed in it. When she was out of hearing, I said:

“I’m here on a case, as you know.”

“Yeah.” He rested his sharp dark elbows on the white tablecloth and pushed his flat face towards me. “You mentioned
the magic name Wycherly on the phone. What goes on in the Wycherly family now?” I told him.

“Daughter’s run out, eh?”

“Run out or been run out with.”

“Snatch, you think?”

“Not likely. They don’t wait two months to make a contact.”

“Two months, she’s been gone?”

I nodded. “Wycherly’s been out of the country, on a cruise. The girl had been going to school in Boulder Beach, living more or less on her own. She came up here to see her father off, was last seen herself leaving the docks in a taxi with her mother, Wycherly’s ex-wife.”

“Yeah, I saw in the papers she got her divorce. What’s she doing?”

“Right now she’s wandering around with a bad case of postmarital neurosis, babbling about death and murder. Wycherly’s going to pieces, too—I just talked to him on the phone. And I’m supposed to put it together and make it all come right in the end.”

“I could see a lot of this coming last year. The family was all ready to fly apart. You know those chocolate apples from Switzerland that fall into pieces when you tap them?”

“The question is who tapped Phoebe.”

“Yeah. Last seen with her mother, you say? What does the mother say?”

“Nothing useful. She’s practically certifiable, in my opinion.”

“I thought they took away your medical license. Have you made any attempt to trace the taxi?”

“I’m working on it now. You could help.”

He gave me a bland impermeable look. Our Gibsons came and we sipped at them, watching each other to see how quickly we were drinking this year. Willie put his glass down half-empty:

“You think the girl’s dead?”

“I hate to admit it to myself, but I have that feeling in my bones.”

“Homicide or suicide?”

“I haven’t given suicide any thought.”

“Maybe you ought to,” Willie said reflectively. “She’s a flighty kid. Is or was. I only saw her once, for about five minutes, but she made me nervous. I didn’t know if she was going to make a pass at me or run screaming from the room. She didn’t relate, if you know what I mean.”

“Spell it out.”

“She was carrying around a lot of sex that she didn’t know what to do with. A lot of sex and a lot of trouble. From what I saw of the family, she didn’t have much help growing up. Her mother couldn’t give it to her. She’s the same type herself, sexy-hysterical. You never can tell what females like that are going to do to themselves.”

“Or what other people are going to do to them.”

“You think it’s murder,” Willie said.

“I didn’t at first. I do now.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Another murder. It happened yesterday, down the Peninsula.”

“Man named Merriman, real-estate broker?”

“You make quick connections.”

“That was the only murder on the Peninsula yesterday. They had a good day.” He grinned. “Incidentally, I heard from a friend in the San Mateo Hall of Justice that they’re interested in Catherine Wycherly’s whereabouts. If you know where she is—”

“I don’t. That’s one of my problems. I talked to her in Sacramento last night. A friend of hers hit me with a tire-iron, then they took off for parts unknown.”

“I was wondering about the bandage.”

“It’s nothing serious. But we’ve got to get our hands on Catherine Wycherly.”

“We?”

“I need your help on this case. You’re equipped to handle a dragnet operation. I’m not.”

He made a sad face. “Sorry, Lew, I have other irons in the fire.”

“What happened between you and Wycherly last year?”

He shrugged, and finished his drink.

“You don’t like Wycherly, is that it?”

“I love him. I love his type. He’s got money in his head instead of brains. And he’s tricky, the way those spoiled slobs get. He pulled the rug out from under me.” Willie was showing signs of passion: his eyes were blacker and his nose was white. “The slob sent one of his troopers around to take my evidence away from me. Hick sheriff by the name of Hooper.”

“What evidence?”

“The letters he hired us to investigate. I handled the case personally, spent three or four solid days on it, between here and Meadow Farms. Just when I was hitting pay dirt, the slob yanked me.”