The Wycherly Woman (23 page)

“Or I can hold you for twenty-four hours on an open charge. Which is precisely what I’m going to do.” He switched on the box on his desk and spoke into it briskly: “Thorne? I have another roomer for you. Come and get him, will you?”

I was bothered. A night in a nice modern jail was one thing. Sitting still for twenty-four hours while the Wycherly case went on without me was another thing. I said to Royal:

“Do you know Colton of the Los Angeles D.A.’s staff?”

“Heard of him.”

“Call him, will you? His home number is Granite 3-7481. Ask him about my record.”

“I’m not interested. Also, the County doesn’t have funds for long-distance calls on behalf of private parties. Call him yourself if you like—you’re entitled to a call.”

A stout man in deputy’s uniform came in without knocking. He gave me a practised look. “This the man, Captain?”

“This is the man. I want him in a cell by himself, and be sure to take his belt. Mr. Archer is very emotional.”

“Are you kidding?” I said.

Royal turned and looked at me the way men look at dogs. “This is no practical joke, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’re in, brother.”

“You said I could make a call.”

“To Colton in L.A.? You’ll be wasting your time. Colton or nobody else cuts any ice with us. This is a clean county, even if you and your buddies have been littering it up with corpses.”

I almost swung on Royal. I think he wanted me to, if only to take the dubiety out of the situation. Thorne inserted his shoulder between us and nudged me with it. “Do I take him away, Captain?”

“First I’ll make my call.”

“That’s your right and privilege,” Royal said with some unction. “My best advice to you is call your principal, if you have one, get his release on the information you’re sitting on. Maybe then—I say maybe—you and me can have a meeting of minds.”

“Intellectual slumming bores me.”

He missed it, or let it pass. “I’ll get your principal for you. Say the word.” He picked up one of the telephones on his desk.

“I’ll talk to Carl Trevor in Woodside.”

Thorne and Royal looked at each other. Then they both looked at me, with dawning approval. The atmosphere in the room began to warm up, as if Trevor’s name had jiggled a thermostat.

“Mr. Trevor was in this office just last night,” Royal said. “You’re working for Mr. Trevor?”

“I’m working for his boss.”

“You’re on the Wycherly disappearance?”

I nodded.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I don’t like being squeezed.”

“You got to admit you were asking for it,” Royal said. “Here. Sit at my desk.”

The atmosphere was getting so warm it made me a little sick. Royal dismissed Deputy Thorne, placed me in his own chair, gave Carl Trevor’s home number to the switchboard. He didn’t have to look it up.

He exchanged a few cordial words with Trevor and handed me the receiver. Trevor sounded old and spent:

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, Archer. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be in Redwood City?”

“I didn’t know it. I walked in on a killing.”

“Another killing?” he said wearily.

“Man named Quillan, ran a hole-in-the-wall record shop in San Carlos.”

“Who killed him?”

“Captain Royal thinks I did.”

Royal began to smile and wag his head.

“Is everybody going crazy?”

“Yes,” I said with my eye on Royal. “Everybody is going crazy. Do you feel like coming over here and straightening the Captain out?”

Royal made a pooh-pooh mouth and pantomimed with his hands a smooth unbroken flow of good fellowship and tolerant understanding.

“I’ll talk to him on the phone, that will be quicker.” Trevor’s voice faltered as though it had come up against an obstruction. “Archer. I want you to make a journey with me. Tonight.”

“Whereto?”

“Medicine Stone. I have a summer place there, as I think I told you. The local sheriff knows I’m Phoebe’s uncle, and he called me a little while ago. He thinks they may have found her car.”

“At your place?”

“A few miles from there. Underwater, in the sea. A fisherman spotted it the other day, but Sheriff Herman isn’t on the ball and he didn’t think anything of it until he got the teletype on Phoebe’s disappearance. I urged him to try and dredge it up tonight.”

“Is it a Volkswagen?”

“Apparently it is.”

He took a shuddering breath, as if he was coming up from underwater. I said I would pick him up in a few minutes. Royal followed me downstairs to give me back my gun.

T
HE FLOODLIGHTS
were on at Leafy Acres. Helen Trevor came out when I mounted the front steps. She shut the door softly behind her:

“May I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Archer?”

“Go ahead.”

“Please don’t tell my husband I intervened. I’m worried about Carl, deeply concerned for his health. I’m convinced he shouldn’t make this—this nocturnal excursion with you.”

“It’s his idea.”

“I realize that.” She sighed, and rubbed her gray throat. The glare of the floodlights made her eyes seem huge and frantic. “Carl has always taken on more than his strength can bear. I know he appears to be a powerful man. He isn’t, really. He had a coronary less than two years ago.”

“How bad a coronary?”

“He barely survived it. Only my prayers brought him through, I do believe. The doctor told me another attack would—might possibly kill him. And I can’t live without him, Mr. Archer. Please don’t let him go with you.”

“I can hardly stop him. Don’t worry, I’ll do the driving.”

“It’s not just the driving I’m worried about. It’s the emotional shock he may meet at the other end. He’s had a night and a day of terrible strain already. The only thing that’s kept him going is the hope that she is alive. If he should discover that Phoebe is dead—”

Her voice lost itself in dry shallows. She turned her face away from the light, perhaps for fear of what I’d see in it. Her hatchet profile was caricatured by her shadow on the door. She was an unattractive woman who knew she was unattractive, had probably known it the day she lifted her bridal
veil for her husband’s kiss. Such knowledge could make a wife possessive as hell.

“You’d better take it up with your husband directly, Mrs. Trevor.”

“I tried to. He wouldn’t listen. He treats me as an enemy, when all I’m trying to do is save his life. He insists on rushing around like a madman—it’s part of his illness.”

“I doubt that. Phoebe is important to him.”

“Too important,” she said bitterly. “He puts her ahead of me—ahead of his own welfare. I wasn’t able to give him a child, you see. He’s been fixated on my brother’s child ever since she was born.” She added on a deep breaking wave of feeling: “God chose to make me barren.”

Her fingers crept down from her throat to her meager breast. Her face was fierce and haggard. I was beginning to feel some of the angry strain that knotted Trevor’s arteries.

“Will you please tell your husband I’m here? I promise to look after him as well as I can. If his heart kicks up I’ll take him to a doctor. But I think you’re borrowing trouble, Mrs. Trevor.”

“I assure you I’m not. He looked like death itself when he came down from the city. He didn’t even take his nap, and he was up all last night.”

“He can sleep in the car.”

“You don’t
care
about him.”

“I care in a different way. A man has to do what he has to do.”

“You men!”

It was a declaration of war. She turned abruptly and went into the house, not inviting me to go along. I leaned on the wall and looked across the weirdly shadowed lawn. A fuller moon than last night’s was rising behind the trees. It gleamed through their branches like a woman’s breast pressing against wrought iron.

Trevor came out quickly, slamming the door. He nodded
to me and glanced up at the moon as if its rising was an augury. His features had sharpened in the course of the day. His eyes were bright and dry.

“I’m not so sure you should make this trip,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. I feel fine. Has Helen been putting bees in your bonnet, by any chance?”

“She brought up the fact of your coronary.”

“Nonsense. It’s completely healed.” He doubled his fist and struck out at the air, to demonstrate his fitness. “I ride, I swim. But she goes on trying to make a bloody invalid out of me. Let’s go, eh?”

He practically raced me to the car. Inside, I could hear him breathing hard and trying to conceal it. His wife called from the veranda:

“Carl? Have you got your digitalis?”

He growled something inarticulate. Her voice rose to a bird’s scream: “Carl? Your digitalis?”

“I have the damn stuff,” he muttered, and I amplified his answer: “He has it, Mrs. Trevor.”

She watched us go, rigid and gray-faced. Following Trevor’s directions, I turned right out of the driveway onto a blacktop road that rose between black trees towards the moon.

“It’s good of you to do this for me, Archer. I wouldn’t admit it to Helen but frankly I didn’t feel like driving to Medicine Stone by myself.”

“I’m not doing it for you. I’m just as interested in the outcome as you are.”

“How could you be? You don’t even know her.”

“No. But I haven’t entirely given up hope of that.”

“Then you don’t think it’s her car they found?”

“We’d better wait and see. How far is it to Medicine Stone?”

“Just about a hundred miles from my driveway.”

The trees increased in size as we climbed into the hills. The
road became a tunnel cut by my headlight beams out of branching darkness, which closed behind us. Trevor said after a while:

“This killing you say you walked in on—is it connected with Phoebe in any way?”

“In several ways. Through her mother, for one. I’d give a good deal to talk to Catherine Wycherly again.”

“I thought you were going to have her looked for.”

“Willie Mackey refused to take the assignment.”

“Why?”

“He’s too busy,” I said diplomatically. “Then other things came up. A lot of other things came up. I’ll get back to the problem of having her looked for tomorrow.”

He turned towards me heavily. I could feel his straining eyes almost palpable on my face:

“You think Catherine killed Ben Merriman, don’t you?”

“And possibly Stanley Quillan, the record-shop proprietor.”

“I can’t believe it. What motive would she have?”

“They took her for her money. Merriman used his brother-in-law Quillan to buy the Mandeville house for less money than it was worth. They turned around and sold it to Catherine Wycherly for more money than it was worth.”

“You don’t commit murder because somebody cheats you in a real-estate deal.”

“It wasn’t just a real-estate deal. Merriman sold the house again the other day and forced Mrs. Wycherly to give him most of the money she got for it.”

“How could he force her to do that?”

“The obvious answer is blackmail.”

“Blackmail for what?”

“I only know what people tell me. I talked to a man in San Mateo today—manager of an apartment house called the Conquistador. Phoebe stayed there for some days after her disappearance, in an apartment which her mother had leased. Quillan lived in the apartment next door. He had Phoebe’s
bedroom bugged. I don’t pretend to understand the situation, but it wasn’t a good one. The manager, Girston, told me further that Phoebe left the Conquistador in Merriman’s company.”

“Where did they go?”

“Apparently she was on her way to see her mother in Sacramento. She never got there, if Catherine Wycherly can be believed; which I doubt.”

“All of this is new to me,” Trevor said thoughtfully. “At least it means that Phoebe has been seen alive since November second.”

“I have several witnesses to that.”

“You think she’s been killed since then?”

“We’d better let the evidence tell us, when we get to it.”

That held Trevor, as it was intended to. We had begun the long descent from the ridge. The trees fell away; the darkness opened; the sea spread out before us, paved down the middle with broken moonlight. We drove south on the coastal highway for over an hour, between bare fields and deserted beaches, through redwood forest that blotted out the sky, along rising bluffs. On our right the moon slid up the darkness, trailing its broken silver on the surface of the ocean.

Trevor glanced at the water every now and then. “I can’t believe she’s in there,” he said once, but he was shivering.

Medicine Stone was a wide place in the highway among the redwoods. It seemed to be largely composed of tourist lodges faced with unpeeled logs. Its main building was a combination of general store, gas station, motel, post office, and coffee shop. The coffee shop spilled light through its front window. Someone had scrawled in soap on the glass: Breakfast Twenty-four Hours. Above it a red neon sign, incongruous with the surrounding trees, bore the name Gayley.

Trevor and I went in. The little café was empty, but I heard the slop and clatter of dishwashing in a back room. I rapped with a quarter on the formica counter. An old man
came out of the back room wiping his hands on the front of his long white apron.

“Sorry, gemmen,” he said around ill-fitting false teeth, “I can’t serve you. Mrs. Gayley’s cook, and she ain’t here. Nobody’s here ‘ceptin’ me, and they don’t let me cook. Account of I ain’t been checked by the County Health.” The spider-webs of senility dimmed his eyes and drew his mouth into a one-sided grin.

Trevor said: “Where is everybody?”

“Down at the beach. They’re trying to bring up a car that went over the cliff. That’s what they get for racing around in their roadsters. Bang. Kerplash.”

“Can you tell us where the place is?” Trevor said impatiently.

“Let’s see. You headed south?”

“South.”

“Then it’s the second turn on your right, about two miles down the road. Just follow it all the way. Only not too far all the way.” He guffawed. His false teeth slipped down and lent him a ghastly look, like a laughing skull.

“Did the car go over at Painted Cove?”