The woman set the bottle down three-eighths full. Leaning on the desk, she lowered herself into the swivel chair that stood beside it. She twisted her hair in her fingers. It was dark at the roots, as if darkness had seeped up in capillary action from her mind.
“The crazy old bastard,” she said. “I bet he did it to him. He came to our house last week and said he was going to do it. Unless Ben paid him off.”
“Who?”
“Mandeville. Captain Mandeville. He walked right up to our front door with a forty-five revolver in his hand. Ben had to slip out through the patio and let me handle him. The old guy is as nutty as a fruitcake.”
“What did Mandeville want?”
“What does everybody want? Money.” She looked at me levelly. The quick one-two of grief and gin had stunned her into sobriety. “He claimed that Ben cheated him out of the money for his lousy house.”
“Is that true?”
“How do I know? I lived five years with Ben, from pillar to post and back again. I never did find out what went on in his head, or where all the money went. I never even got a house of my own, and him in real estate. Call it real estate.”
“What do you call it?”
“I gave up calling it anything. He’d work harder to turn a crooked buck—” She glanced up at me again, her mouth still open. She had lipstick on her teeth. “Why are you so interested in Ben? You don’t even know him.”
“No, I wish I had.”
“What is this? What are you trying to pull on me?”
“Nothing on you, Mrs. Merriman. I’m sorry about what happened. By the way, who was the blond lad with the chin-beard?”
The fresh gin was rising in her eyes, disturbing their focus and dissolving their meaning. She used it as a kind of mask, letting her eyes go entirely dead:
“I dunno who you mean.”
“You know who I mean. He came in here looking for your husband.”
“Oh, him,” she said with bleary cunning. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not. Anyway, who are you to call me a liar? You said you were a prospect. You’re no prospect.”
“I’m a prospector. Who was he, Mrs. Merriman?”
“I dunno. Some jerk Ben bums around with—used to, I mean.” The two tenses coming together cut her like scissors. Tears or gin exuded between her eyelids. “Go away and let me be. You were nice before. You’re not nice any more.” She added as if she was completing a syllogism: “I bet you’re just a lousy cop.”
“No.”
For once I wished I was. The cops, the lousy cops, would be arriving any time now. I was far from home base and suitable for framing. I said good night to her and went out through the front office. On the way I picked up a blotter with Merriman’s picture on it.
A sheriff’s car with a dying siren drifted out of the traffic stream and took my place at the curb as I pulled away. Young heads at the drive-in across the road became aware of it, wondering if it had come for them. Some dogs in the kennels next door had begun to howl.
chapter 9
I FOUND Captain Theodore Mandeville’s address in the telephone directory at the Atherton station. He lived in a large residential hotel on the main street of Palo Alto. It had a grandiose pillared portico, and a chintzy little lobby in which the smells of lavender and cigars waged a quiet battle of the sexes.
The woman behind the desk, who looked like the probable source of the lavender, told me that Captain Mandeville was in. She called him on a house phone and got permission from him to send me up.
He was waiting for me when I stepped out of the elevator—a lean brown old man with white hair and moustache and eyebrows like small auxiliary moustaches. He had on a grey flannel bathrobe over a boiled shirt and a black tie. His eyes were crackling black.
“I’m Captain Mandeville. What can I do for you, sir?”
I told him I was a private detective looking for a girl. “You may be able to give me some information about her family. The girl’s name is Phoebe Wycherly.”
“Mrs. Catherine Wycherly’s daughter?”
“Yes, I understand you’ve had some business dealings with Mrs. Wycherly.”
“I have, to my sorrow. But I don’t know her personally, and I never met the daughter. Just what do you mean when you say that she is missing?”
“She left school over two months ago. The last word I have on her, she was leaving the San Francisco docks on the afternoon of November second. She was getting into a taxi with her mother. Any information that you can give me about the mother—”
He broke in: “You’re not suggesting that she abducted her own daughter?”
“Hardly. But she may know where the girl is.”
“I know where the mother is, at any rate. Is that any help to you?”
“It would be a lot of help.”
“She’s staying in a hotel in Sacramento—rather shabby quarters for a woman of her status. The name of the place seems to have slipped my mind for the moment. I believe I have it written down somewhere. Come in and I’ll look it up.”
He led me down the hallway to his apartment and left me in the living room. Its narrow walls were hung with photographs. In one, a beautiful woman smiled dreamily from under a cloud of black hair. Most of the others were pictures of naval vessels, ranging from a World War One destroyer to a World War Two battleship. The battleship had been photographed from the air, and lay like a dark spearhead on crinkled metal sea.
Captain Mandeville came back into the room while I was looking at the battleship. “My last command,” he said. “My son Lieutenant Mandeville took that picture a few days before he was shot down at Okinawa. Rather good, isn’t it?”
“Very good. I was at Okinawa, on the ground.”
“Were you now? How interesting.” He didn’t pursue the subject. He handed me a ruled page torn from a memo pad on which “Champion Hotel” was written in pencil. “I seem to have misplaced the street address but you should be able to find it, easily. I had no trouble finding it, and I’m no detective.”
“You’ve seen Mrs. Wycherly recently?”
“No. I tried to, but she wouldn’t see me. She’s a stubborn woman, and I suspect a foolish one.” His mouth quivered. His eyes sparkled like pieces of coal under his white eyebrows.
“Would you mind expanding on that? I don’t want to pry, but I don’t understand what Mrs. Wycherly has been up to. Or what’s been going on about the sale of your property.”
“It’s a long story, and I’m afraid a sordid one. I don’t pretend to understand it thoroughly myself, which is why I’ve hired a lawyer. I should have gone to a lawyer six months ago.”
“When Mrs. Wycherly bought your house from you?”
“She didn’t buy it from me. There’s the rub. The fact that she didn’t cost me twenty-five-thousand dollars. Which I could ill afford, let me assure you. A real-estate sharper named Merriman cheated me out of twenty-five-thousand dollars.”
“Did Mrs. Wycherly have a hand in it?”
“No, I don’t accuse the lady of that. No doubt she was just as much a victim as I. On the other hand, she hasn’t been much help. I went to the trouble of getting her address from the escrow company, and I made a special trip to Sacramento to try to enlist her co-operation. She flatly refused to see me, as I said.” His voice shook with controlled rage. “But look. You don’t want to go into all this. I have no wish to go into it, certainly. I made a bloody fool of myself, and at my age that can be painful.”
“How were you cheated, Captain?”
“I’m not sure I can explain. My lawyer could. But the case is pending before the Real Estate Commission, and I doubt that he would be willing to discuss it with you. It’s nothing to do with this missing girl of yours, in any case.”
“I’m not too sure of that.”
“Well, if you insist. Sit down, sir.”
He picked up a Yachting magazine which lay open on a chair, waved me into th
e chair with it and sat down opposite me:
“Mrs. Mandeville died last spring and very shortly afterward my housekeeper left: it seems she couldn’t stand my temper unalloyed by Mrs. Mandeville’s presence. I decided to sell my house in Atherton and move into cozier quarters. This fellow Merriman got wind of my intention, I don’t know how, and approached me. He offered to sell my house for me and give me a fifty per cent kickback on the commission. I’m not a businessman, and I didn’t realize that the very offer was illegal. Merriman represented it as a favor from one old Navy man to another; he’d been in the Reserve during the last war.
“I don’t know how he got in. The man’s a rascal. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I’ve found out since, from a friend in the Bureau of Personnel, that he was asked to resign his commission in 1945. He was a supply officer stationed in the Eleventh District at the time, and he was using his position to sell San Diego building lots to enlisted men. In addition to which, he had unpaid gambling debts—the man’s an inveterate gambler.
“Unfortunately for me, I knew nothing of all this when I gave him authority to sell my house for me. He came to the house at my invitation and looked the place over. He pretended not to be greatly impressed. In fact, he bore down heavily on its drawbacks—the old-fashioned plumbing, the need for repainting and decorating, that sort of thing. With the current tightness of money, he told me I would be lucky to sell the house and land for fifty thousand dollars.
“It sounded to me like a reasonable figure. When I had the place built, some thirty years ago, it cost me no more than twenty-five thousand, including the acreage. I’m no student of real-estate values, and a hundred per cent profit seemed a veritable bonanza.
“Besides,” he added, “I was keen to get out of there. I built the house for Mrs. Mandeville, and after she went the place was a whispering gallery of memories. I sold it to the first man who made an offer. He offered me the full fifty thousand, and I took it gratefully.”
“What man was that?”
“I’m afraid his name escapes me. He claimed to be a radio executive who was being transferred from Los Angeles. He was transferred, all right,” the old man said grimly. “I’ve learned since that he was a disc jockey, so-called, on some minor radio station in the South. The station fired him for accepting payments from record companies. He’d been on the Peninsula for some time, looking for a job, and he’d often been seen in Merriman’s company.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have friends,” he said. “I asked my friends to make some discreet inquiries, belatedly. They discovered that a few days after this fellow bought my house from me for fifty thousand he turned around and resold it to Mrs. Wycherly for seventy-five. Merriman handled both deals, of course. He double-escrowed the property, as they say.”
“Was your first buyer acting as a stand-in for Merriman?”
“That is what we strongly suspect. My lawyer and I have asked the Real Estate Commission to look into it. I’ve always hated litigation, but when a man’s been defrauded of nearly a third of his capital—” Overcome with outrage, he couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Who is your lawyer, Captain?”
“Chap named John Burns, completely dependable, I’ve known Burns at the Yacht Club for years. He tells me this isn’t the first time that Merriman has been suspected of double dealing. I’m determined that it shall be the last.”
“What does Mr. Burns think of your chances of getting your money back?”
“We have a fair chance, he believes, if the thieves still have the money. It’s hard to deal with these fly-by-nights, but we intend to bring the utmost legal pressure on Merriman. Unless he refunds the difference to me, he’s bound to lose his license. He may, anyway.”
“Did Merriman know this?”
“Presumably. I told his wife. I went to his house last week and tried to talk to him, but he slipped out the back way. The woman tried to tell me that his skill in salesmanship was what made the difference in the price, that my house was only worth fifty thousand dollars after all. But I happen to know that they had it listed again last week, at eighty!” He pounded his knee with his veined fist. “God damn them to hell, they’re nothing but sea-lawyers. Sea-lawyers, salesmen, paid liars, are taking over the country!”
The Captain’s face had turned the color of cordovan. “I shouldn’t attempt to talk about it. It’s too hard on my coronaries. Let the law take care of Merriman and his cohorts.”
“Have you ever thought of taking care of him yourself?”
His hot eyes turned frosty. “I don’t understand you, sir.”
“I heard you threatened Merriman with a gun.”
“I don’t deny it. I thought I could frighten him into honesty. But he wouldn’t even talk to me face to face. He hid behind his wife’s skirts—”
“Have you seen him today, Captain Mandeville?”
“No. I haven’t seen him for some time. I take no pleasure in the sight of him, and my lawyer advised me not to approach him again.”
“Did you?”
“Certainly not. What are you getting at, sir?”
“Merriman was beaten to death within the last three hours, in your old house on Whiteoaks Avenue.”
His face went pale in patches. “Beaten to death? It’s a dreadful thing to say about any man, but I can’t say I’m sorry.”
“Did you do it, Captain, or have it done?”
“I did not. The accusation is outrageous, outlandish.”
“His widow is making it, though. You can expect a visit from the police before long. Can you account for the last three hours?”
“I resent the question.”
“No matter. I have to ask it.”
“But I don’t have to answer it.”
“No.”
He rose trembling. “Then I’ll ask you to leave. I’ll be glad to explain myself to the duly constituted authorities.”
I hoped he could.
chapter 10
THE HIGHWAY RAN across flatland, prairie-like under the moon, to the edge of the Sacramento River. In the queer pale light the abrupt bridge which spanned the river resembled the approach to an ancient fortified city. The slums on the other side of the river didn’t do much to dispel the illusion. The night girls prowling the late streets, the furtive men in the doorways, looked sunk and lost forever in deep time.
The Champion Hotel was on the edge of the slums. It hadn’t subsided into them yet, but it appeared to be slipping. It was a narrow six-story building with a grimy stone face, put up around the turn of the century, when it had probably been a good family hotel. Now it had the air of a place where you could get cheap lodging without amenities you couldn’t afford: a place for one-night stands and last stands.
In a bar-and-grill next door people were singing “Auld Lang Syne.” An old man wearing a faded maroon uniform and a stubble of beard was guarding the unbesieged door of the Champion. He crossed the sidewalk on mincing feet. His shoes had been cut across the toes to make room for bunions, and his voice rose through his withered body like the audible complaint of the bunions themselves:
“You can’t park here, mister. Got to keep the curb clear. If you want to come into the hotel, you can leave your car in the parking lot around the corner. You planning to register?”
“I might as well.”
“Okay, you go around the corner to the left. You can’t go to the right, anyway, on account of they turned it into a one-way street five-six years ago.” He seemed to resent this change. “Better lock up your car, and you can come back through the alley if you want. It’s shorter that way. I’ll turn on the light at the side door. You want me to take your luggage?”
“Thanks, I can carry it myself.” Not having any.
The parking lot was a dark quadrangle hemmed in by the lightless walls of business buildings empty for the night. Carrying my brief case for appearance’s sake, I walked along the alley to the side door where the old bellhop was waiting. The
naked yellow insect-repellant bulb over the door splashed jaundice on his face. He accepted my brief case as if he didn’t really expect a tip.
A woman with thyroid eyes and chins sat behind the desk in the deserted lobby. She offered me a room with bath for two-fifty, two dollars without. I didn’t really want to stay there. The migrant years had flown through the place and left their droppings.
The Captain had made a mistake, I thought, perhaps a deliberate one. It didn’t seem likely that Mrs. Wycherly had ever lived in the Champion. I decided to find out, before I contracted for a night-long date with depression.
The thyroid eyes were going over me, trying to decide if I was too choosy or too broke. “Well? You want the two-fifty with the bath, or the two-dollar one? I’ll have to ask you to pay in advance,” she added, with a glance at the worn brief case which the old bellhop was holding.
“I’ll be glad to. But it just occurred to me, my wife may have taken a double room.”
“Your wife a guest here?”
“She’s supposed to be.”
“What’s her—what’s your name?”
“Wycherly,” I said.
The fat woman and the old man exchanged a look whose meaning I didn’t catch. She said with something in her voice that was patronizing, almost pitying:
“Your wife was here for quite a bit. But she moved out tonight, less than an hour ago.”
“Where did she move to?”
“I’m sorry, she left no forwarding address.”
“Was she leaving town?”
“We have no way of knowing. I’m very sorry, sir.” She sounded as if she meant it. “Do you still want a room? Or not?”
“I’ll take the one with the bath. I haven’t had a bath for a long time.”
“Yessir,” she said imperturbably. “I’ll put you in 516. Would you sign the register please?”
I signed myself H. Wycherly. After all, he was paying for the room. I gave the woman a fifty-dollar bill, which she had a hard time making change for. The bellhop watched the transaction with great interest.
The Wycherly Woman Page 8
