The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  I brought her back to the point. “Have you ever seen this girl?”

  She studied the picture for a long time. “I think so. I can’t be sure. I think I have seen her face before now. Where would I have seen her?”

  “In this room, maybe.”

  “No,” she said flatly. “There was nobody in the room with your wife. She slept alone, I can tell by the bedclothes. I watch the bedclothes, see. When they try to double up in a single, I tell Mr. Fillmore.”

  “You may have seen her on the street.”

  “Maybe.” She handed the picture back to me. “I’m sorry I do not remember. I can only say I have seen her.”

  “Recently?”

  “I think so.” She wrinkled her brow in concentration; nothing came. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where. I see so many. But she is beautiful.”

  I thanked her and went to the window, tearing a leaf from my notebook. The paper was too opaque to make a tracing. I made a copy instead, reproducing the slanting characters as closely as possible.

  “Caray!” Tonia whispered at my shoulder. “What is that?”

  “A name.”

  “An evil name?”

  “A good name.”

  “I cannot read,” she said. “It frightens me.”

  “It’s my daughter’s name, Tonia. There’s no need to be frightened.”

  But she was crossing herself when I left her.

  Mr. Fillmore, the manager, was in his office behind the main desk. He was one of those slightly confused middle-aged men who needed someone to remind him that his dark suit could use a pressing and that his lank hair stuck up like weeds at the back. I introduced myself as Homer Wycherly. I was stuck with the name and the tragicomic role as long as I stayed around the Champion Hotel.

  The name seemed to impress Fillmore. He rose up out of his early-morning doldrums and offered me his hand and a chair. “Delighted to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m concerned about my wife, Catherine. She occupied Room 323 until she checked out last night. I don’t know where she is now.”

  “I’m sorry.” His face fell into doleful grooves, left by the harrows of circumstance. “I hate to say this, but I believe you have reason to be concerned. Your wife is a very sad woman, Mr. Wycherly. I’ve seen a lot of them, and I never saw a sadder.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “I did, yes. I happened to be on the desk when she checked in. That was a day or two before Christmas. I remember particularly because frankly I was a little surprised that a lady like her would choose to stay at the Champion.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?”

  He leaned across the desk, so close I could count his pores. He had a lot of pores. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m proud of my little hotel, for what it is, but I’ve worked in better places, let me assure you. I recognize a lady when I see one. Their clothes, their manner of speech. And ladies like Mrs. Wycherly don’t normally stay at the Champion.”

  “She may have been short of money.”

  “I doubt that very much. She was well provided for, as you know.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “She showed me one of your alimony checks.” He was startled by his own directness, and went on in a flustered tone: “I mean, I have no wish to pry into your personal affairs, but it was a certified check for three thousand dollars. She mentioned that she got one every month.”

  “I’m glad she felt free to confide in you,” I said, with a hint of the needle in my voice.

  “Oh, it wasn’t that. She wanted me to cash it, and she was assuring me it was genuine. As I’m sure it was,” he added hastily, “but I had to tell her I couldn’t possibly cash it. It was New Year’s Day, the banks were closed, I had no way of raising three thousand dollars. I offered to take it for collection, but Mrs. Wycherly said she couldn’t wait.”

  “What did she do with the check?”

  “I guess she cashed it at the bank. At any rate, she paid her bill next day.”

  “Where did the check come from? Do you remember?”

  “I’m afraid not. She mentioned it was her home-town bank.” He looked at me with a trace of doubt in his boiled-onion eyes. “You should know.”

  “Yes, but I was wondering how it reached her, on New Year’s Day.”

  “It came by Special Delivery. She asked me to notify her when it arrived.” The doubt in his eyes became more apparent. “Please don’t misunderstand me—it wasn’t a phony check?”

  “The check was well-backed,” I said stuffily.

  “Of course. I knew it was.” The thought of my imaginary bank account made him emotional. “I know a lady when I see one, and I’m sure you won’t take it amiss if I offer you a piece of advice. Look to your lady, Mr. Wycherly. This can be a dangerous town for a lady going it alone with or without a purseful of money. Especially with. There are toughs and drifters galore in this town.” Fillmore permitted himself to stare directly at the bandage on my head. “Maybe you found that out for yourself. Mrs. Silvado told me you were injured.”

  “I fell and hit my head on the curb.”

  “In our parking lot? I hope not.”

  “On the public street,” I said. “The falling sickness runs in the family.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  His hand went to his head in a nervous gesture. He discovered the tuft of hair sticking up at the back, mechanically took out a comb and ran it through his thin locks. The tuft stayed where it was. He put the comb away in his breast pocket.

  “While we’re on the subject of sickness,” I said, “I’m grateful to you for looking after my wife.”

  “I tried to. We do our best. But she refused to see the doctor.” He went on apologetically: “Of course Dr. Broch isn’t the best medical man in the world, but his office happens to be nearby and he’s the one we call.”

  “I talked to the doctor last night. He thinks she’s suffering from depression.”

  “So he told me. It agrees with my own observation.”

  “Did she mention any reason for being depressed?”

  “Not a hint. Sheer loneliness, maybe.” There was a catch in his voice, as though he had experienced the condition. “At any rate she locked herself in her room and wouldn’t budge from it for four or five days.”

  “Exactly when was this?”

  “At the beginning of the month. It started the day she paid her first week’s bill, January second. It went on for nearly a week. I called the doctor in the middle of the week, but she wouldn’t accept treatment. Eventually she came out of it on her own, but I could tell by looking at her that she had been through something. She looked ten years older, Mr. Wycherly. She had been through an ordeal.”

  “Physical or mental?”

  “Physical or mental, who can tell. I don’t understand the mysteries of the human heart, particularly the female heart. I said farewell to all that some time ago.” His hand discovered the stubborn tuft of hair again and gave it a good hard wrench. “I’m a divorced man, too, you and I have something in common.”

  “Is there any chance that there was someone in the room with her.”

  “Someone?”

  “When she wouldn’t let the servants in. Could there have been another person with her?”

  “I don’t see how. We don’t permit doubling up in a single. It’s a matter of revenue as well as morals.”

  “I’m not thinking of a man, necessarily.” I produced Phoebe’s picture. “Have you ever seen this girl in the hotel?”

  “No. I never have. She’s your daughter, isn’t she? I can see the family likeness.”

  “Yes, she’s my daughter.”

  A repeated lie can do strange things to the mind. What you say often enough becomes a provisional truth. I caught myself half-believing that Phoebe was my daughter. If she was dead, I would share Wycherly’s loss. I already shared his feelings about his wife.

  chapter 13

  I WENT BACK to San Francisco. It
was a high clear January morning, one of those fogless winter days when the gods on Mount Diablo let the city tower in the sun, moated by wide blue water. I left the Skyway and drove down Market to Powell.

  I parked under Union Square and bought a soft hat to conceal my bandage and talked a second time to the old dispatcher in the yellow cap. The driver he called Garibaldi hadn’t shown up on his line yet. If he did, the old man promised to hold him for me. I gave him a five-dollar bill to nail it down.

  The St. Francis lobby was comparatively deserted. The clerk on duty at the desk had time to look up November’s records for me. Homer Wycherly had taken a two-room suite on November 1, and had paid in advance for a second day when he checked out on November 2. His daughter could have used the suite the night of November 2. The clerk had no way of knowing if she had.

  I went back to the telephone booths and made a couple of calls. Willie Mackey was busy with a client for the next hour, but he agreed to meet me for early lunch. Carl Trevor would see me right away.

  The offices of the Wycherly Land and Development Company were on the tenth floor of a ten-story stone-faced building south of Market Street. A girl who hadn’t quite made airline hostess took me up in an express elevator and let me out in a reception room decorated with hunting scenes.

  I passed through several echelons of secretaries into Trevor’s private office. It had a picture window with a segment of red bridge showing between two buildings in the upper lefthand corner. It contained a lot of brown leather furniture, a conference table surrounded by a dozen chairs, a contour model of the Central Valley studded like a golf course with red flags, a desk which dwarfed the man sitting behind it. He had a telephone perched like a black bird against his short neck. Between remarks about Consolidated something and Mutual something else, Trevor told me to sit down.

  I sat and looked him over carefully, trying to decide how far my client and I could trust him. Pretty far, I thought. Wycherly obviously trusted him. He seemed genuinely fond of Wycherly’s daughter, maybe too fond for his own comfort. His face showed blue puffiness under the eyes and other signs of a bad night.

  He hung up. “Sorry to make you wait, Mr. Archer. The market’s been acting like a yo-yo lately.” He gave me a stern bright look which pulled his face together. “Judging by your appearance, you had a rough night.”

  “I was just thinking the same about you.”

  “It wasn’t much fun, to be perfectly frank. I spent a part of the night studying the photographs of unidentified women and girls. Some of them had been dead for months.” He grimaced. “I don’t envy you your business.”

  “It has its compensations, when they turn up alive.”

  He hunched forward eagerly. “Have you found some trace of my niece?”

  “Just this.” I produced the copy of her name I had made from the hotel window and explained it to him. “It isn’t a perfect copy, but I tried to imitate the characteristics as well as I could. Would you say it’s Phoebe’s handwriting?”

  He frowned over the page. “I couldn’t say for certain. I’m not too familiar with her signature.”

  “Do you have any samples of it?”

  “Not here. Perhaps at home. You think Phoebe was in her mother’s hotel room?”

  “Possibly. Or else her mother wrote the name herself. Could this be Catherine Wycherly’s writing?”

  “It could be. I don’t really know her writing.” He pushed the sheet across the desk to me. His eyebrows were still knotted, and the eyes in the blue cavities under them were puzzled. “What on earth was Catherine doing in a cheap Sacramento hotel?”

  “Eating and drinking and crying.”

  “She’s always been a great eater and drinker,” he said, “at least in recent years. But the crying part doesn’t sound like Catherine. She’s more the gay-divorcee type.”

  “You didn’t see her last night.”

  His head came up. “You mean to say you did?”

  “I had quite a long conversation with her at the Hacienda Inn. It ended kind of suddenly. Some goon she’s travelling with hit me with a tire-iron.” I touched my bandage.

  “What sort of people is she involved with?”

  “Not the best.”

  “This thing is getting complicated, Archer. Complicated and nasty. While I was in the sheriff’s office in Redwood City last night, a call came in from Atherton. A body had been found in Catherine’s empty house. It was the real-estate man that she’d been dealing with—a chap by the name of Merriman.”

  “I know. I found his body.”

  “You found it?”

  “I phoned in an anonymous tip because I didn’t want to spend the night answering questions. I’d just as soon you didn’t mention that to your friends in Redwood City. What’s their theory on Merriman’s death, by the way?”

  “They think he ran into a pack of vandals. There’s been an unconscionable lot of vandalism in unoccupied houses on the Peninsula. You know, Archer, whole strata of society seem to be breaking loose and running wild in this civilization—if civilization is the right word. It’s Ortega’s ‘revolt of the masses,’ with a vengeance.”

  “Is that all part of the police theory? You must have some highly educated police.”

  “Oh, we do. Of course they’re not confining their efforts to the wolf-pack line. I happen to know they want to talk to Catherine.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. Her dealings with Merriman went further than the sale of her house. He beat her up in her room the night before last. It may have been a lover’s quarrel, but I doubt it. More likely it was thieves falling out.”

  “I don’t understand you. Are you accusing my sister-in-law of being a thief?”

  “She’s been running with thieves, or worse. Tell me this, Mr. Trevor. Assuming for the sake of argument that Phoebe is dead—”

  “That’s a pretty stark assumption, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t change the facts, whatever they are. Assuming she’s dead, who stands to benefit from her death?”

  “Nobody would benefit,” he said with angry force. “It would be an unalloyed tragedy and waste.”

  “I wonder. There’s money in the family.”

  His forehead puckered. Under its overhang his eyes changed color, like blue water freezing into blue ice. “I see what you’re getting at. But you’re on the wrong track. Phoebe has no money of her own.”

  “No trust fund that might revert to a relative?”

  “No, I’m quite sure there’s nothing like that. If there was, my wife and I would know of it.”

  “Does she carry any life insurance?”

  Trevor sat in dubious silence. “There is a policy Homer took out when he—when Phoebe was born.”

  “How much is the principal?”

  “A hundred thousand or so.”

  “Who’s the beneficiary?”

  “Her parents. That’s usual.” He shook himself irritably. “You’re doing some pretty rough assuming.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Let me get this straight. You can’t be suggesting that Catherine did away with her own daughter in order to get her hands on her insurance. That’s insane.”

  “So is Catherine, I think. Not being a head-shrinker, I don’t know how far gone she is. She was flying last night, on broken wings.”

  Trevor took a mottled green cigar out of a glass tube and lit it. He said through swirling blue smoke: “I’m not surprised, she’s been on the verge for some time. It doesn’t mean she’s capable of murder.”

  “She’s capable of wanting murder done.”

  “Is that another of your assumptions?”

  “It’s a statement of fact.”

  “You’d better explain yourself.”

  “Let me ask you a question first—a personal question. How good a friend are you to the Wycherlys?”

  “I’m trying to be a real friend,” he said in a real way. “I owe a good deal to Homer, and more to his father before him. And as you know, I marrie
d into the family. What is this all about?”

  I took a breath, and a plunge on his integrity: “Catherine Wycherly tried to hire me to kill Ben Merriman last night.”

  “Seriously?”

  “She was serious. I wasn’t. I was simply letting her talk.”

  “What time did this conversation take place?”

  “Around two A.M.”

  “But Merriman was already dead. The police think he died around dinnertime.”

  “She didn’t know that, or she’d forgotten it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She may have killed him, or hired someone else to kill him, then blanked out on it. She’d been drinking heavily.”

  “This is incredible,” Trevor said. “You mean she actually approached you and offered you money to murder the fellow?”

  “I approached her, in the Hacienda bar. She noticed that I was carrying a gun. It brought out the worst in her, and her worst is no picnic.”

  “I know that. She raised a hell of a fuss the day Homer sailed. But that’s still a long way from murder. What possible motive could she have for wanting Merriman dead?”

  “He was asking for it. He beat her up the other night. I think he did more than that to her.”

  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.”