The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  “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 woma
n 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.

  “Sit down.” She patted the bed beside her. “Sit down and tell me about yourself, Lew. That’s your name, isn’t it—Lew?”

  “Lew.” I sat beside her, keeping a space between us. “I’d rather hear about you. Do you live alone?”

  “I have been.” She looked sideways at an inside door which led to another part of the bungalow.

  “Divorced?”

  “Divorced from reality.” She grimaced. “True confession title: Mother went to Reno to get a divorce from reality.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “We won’t go into that. Or anything else about me. You don’t want to hear about me. I live in hell.”

  The words were melodramatic, but there was a throb of horror in her voice. She tilted up her damaged face. Behind the dark glasses under the inert and swollen flesh, I could see the fine bone structure. She had once been a handsome girl, as handsome as Phoebe. She seemed to read my thought, and the pity in it verging on contempt:

  “Do we have to have that light? It kills me.”

  I turned on the bedlight and turned off the overhead light. When I came back to her, she had upended the bottle again like a crazy astronomer holding a telescope to her blind mouth. Her white throat shimmered as the whisky went down.

  “Drink up,” she said in a thickening voice. “You’re making me drink alone, and that’s not cricket.”

  “I have to drive. You’ll be passing out if you keep drinking at this rate.”

  “Will I?” She raised herself and held the bottle upright between her knees. “It isn’t as easy as you think. Passing out. Or even if you do make it, you wake up in the middle of the night with the boogies. The boogies are fun.”

  “You have a lot of fun.”

  “I’m a fun girl from way back. Drink up your drink, then I want to ask you something.”

  I took a swallow. “About killing people?”

  “We’ll come back to that. I want to know if you have underworld connections.”

  “Would I tell you if I had?”

  “I mean it seriously. Alcohol doesn’t work too well for me, I find. I’ve been thinking I ought to try drugs. They say it’s the best way out there is.”

  “Way out of where?”

  “Living in hell,” she said quite casually. “I could use a little relief from all the thinking. And I’ve got some money, if that’s what’s bothering you. All I need is the right connections.”

  “You won’t get it through me. Stick to whisky.”

  “But I don’t like to drink. I really don’t. I only use it to shut off the thinking at night.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She looked down at her body, discovered her bare knees, covered them with her skirt. “I’m so ugly since I put on all this weight. Aren’t I ugly?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “It’s my ugly soul, it shows in my face. I’m an outlaw, just like you. I bet your soul is ugly, too.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Is that why you carry a gun?”

  “I carry it for protection.”

  “Protection against who? Whom?” Her lips had trouble forming the word.

  “People like you,” I said with the best smile I could muster.

  She wasn’t fazed in the least. She nodded solemnly, as if we were coming to an understanding. A cold quick frisson went up my back.

  “Have you ever really killed anybody, Lew?”

  “Yes,” I said, in the hope of unsticking the stuck record. “Eleven or twelve years ago, I killed a man named Puddler who tried to kill me.”

  She leaned towards me confidentially. Her head gravitated towards my shoulder. She raised it, grasping the bottle as if it presented her only handhold in space:

  “I’m being killed, too.”

  “How?”

  “Little by little, a piece at a time. First he ruined my soul, then he ruined my body, then he ruined my face.” She set the bottle down on the bedside table and removed her dark glasses. “Look what he did to my face.”

  Both of her eyes were blacked. The bruises had been ineptly touched up with liquid make-up. She put on the glasses again.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “I’ll tell you his name when the time comes.”

  Her head subsided on my shoulder like a frowzy bird coming home to roost. She reached across my chest and touched the shape of the gun. Her fingers caressed it through the cloth of my jacket.

  “I want you to kill him for me,” she said dreamily. “I can’t go on like this. Hell push me over the edge.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I’ll tell you that when you promise to do it. I’ll pay you well.”

  “Show me the money.”

  She got up with difficulty and started across the room towards the chest of drawers. She stopped in the middle of the floor, turned and went in a shambling run to the bathroom. I heard her retching through the open door.

  I tried the other inner door. It was locked. I went to the chest of drawers and opened her lizardskin purse. It contained a clutter of make-up materials, lipstick, eye-shadow, liquid powder, tissues, a bottle of patent sleeping medicine, and a woman’s wallet made of red leather and decorated with rhinestones. The wallet was thick with bills. It also held a driver’s license issued the previous year to Mrs. Homer Wycherly, Rural Route Two, Meadow Farms; and a number of business cards. One of them was Ben Merriman’s.

  I put everything back in the purse and snapped the silver clasp shut before she came out of the bathroom. She was staggering, and clutching her heavy stomach. Her face had a greenish tinge under the paint.

  “I guesh I dunno how to drink,” she said, and collapsed on the bed.

  I bent over her blind, deaf head. “Who is he?”

  “Whoosh who?”

  “The man you want me to kill.”

  Her head rolled back and forth among the crumpled clothes. “Funny. I can’t remember ’shname. He shells real ’shtate on the Peninshula. He ruined me—ruined everything. I had to shpill everything.”

  “Ben Merriman?”

  “Thash the man. Did I tell you ’shname before?”

  “What did you spill to him, Mrs. Wycherly?”

  “Wunyou like to know?”

  Her eyes closed. She went out like a light. Her mouth was burned dry by neat whisky, and her breath came harshly through it. I felt more deeply than ever that blend of pity and shame which kept me at my trade among the lost, battered souls who lived in hell, as she did.

  I
couldn’t rouse her again by ordinary means, talking or shaking her. I took the whisky bottle into the bathroom, emptied it in the sink and filled it with ice water; some of which I poured over her face. She woke and struggled up on her arms like Lazarus, looking at me out of underground eyes. Water dripped from her chin.

  “What is this?” she said distinctly.

  “You passed out. I was worried about you. I decided to bring you to.”

  “You had no right,” she complained. “I’ve been trying all day to get to sleep. And all last night.”

  She dabbed at her wet face with a corner of the bedspread. Her eye-shadow ran like the paint on sad clowns’ faces. I brought her a towel from the bathroom. She snatched it out of my hand, scrubbed her face and neck with it. With most of the make-up off she looked naked and younger. The bruises around her eyes stood out.

  She blinked up at me. “What was I saying? What did I say before?”

  “You hired me to kill a man.”

  “Who?” she said like a child listening to a story.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I was awful drunk.”

  She still was, in spite of the cold douche. The whisky would be coming back on her soon.

  “Ben Merriman?” she said. “Is that the one?”

  “That’s the one. Why do you want him killed, Mrs. Wycherly?”

  She gave me a sly dull look. “You know my name.”

  “I’ve known your name for some time. Why do you want Ben Merriman killed?”

  “I don’t. I’ve changed my mind. Forget it.” She wagged her disordered bright head slowly from side to side. “Forget the whole thing.”

  “That won’t be easy. Merriman is already dead. He was beaten to death tonight in your house in Atherton.”

  “I don’t believe you.” But the horror that was in her like a chronic disease seeped into her eyes.

  “You believe me.”

  She wagged her head some more; it swung loosely on her neck. “Why should I? You’re just another liar. Why should I take the word of a cheap crook?”

  “You’ll be reading it in the papers, if they let you have the papers in your cell.”

  She got up unsteadily, looking at me with fear and loathing. “Nobody’sh gonna put me away. You get out of here.”

  “You invited me in.”

  “That wash the mistake of the week. Get out.”