The Wycherly Woman (17 page)

“Why?”

“Ask him. He’s your baby.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Sure. I was getting too close to home. There were indications that those letters were an inside job. Indications, hell. I had the proof. I made the mistake of taking Wycherly seriously and going to him with it. I should have gone to the Post Office Inspectors. Maybe I could have headed this whole thing off.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You weren’t intended to. The point is I want no part of Homer Wycherly or his affairs.”

Our steaks arrived. I postponed further argument until we had eaten. But even with T-bone in his belly, Willie was adamant:

“No sir. I’m loaded with work as it is. If I was unemployed,
I wouldn’t go back to work for Wycherly. Tell you what I’ll do, though, simply as a favor to a friend. I’ll put out the word to my informers to be on the lookout for the girl. Dead or alive.”

“That’s something.”

“You want something else?”

“Copies of those letters, if you have them.”

“It wouldn’t be ethical.” He was baiting me. “But then, neither is Wycherly. Come over to the office, I’ll see what I have in the files.”

We walked to his office, a four-or-five room suite on the second floor of an old building on Geary Street. His inner sanctum was a large front room furnished with a Persian carpet, old mahogany furniture, a couch. Wanted circulars and mug shots were Scotch-taped to the walls. A glass showcase containing hand-guns, knives, saps and brass knuckles stood in a corner between a water cooler and a set of steel filing cabinets which took up one whole wall.

He unlocked a W drawer, rummaged in it and came up with a folder whose paper contents he spread out on his desk:

“Here’s the letter Wycherly sent me in the first place.”

I picked it up and read it. It was cleanly typewritten under the letterhead of the Wycherly Land and Development Company, Meadow Farms; and it was brief and to the point:

It was one of those Laocoön signatures, half-choked in its own serpentines and curlicues.

“He gave me the letters when I got there,” Willie said. “I Thermofaxed ’em. I’d just as soon you don’t tell Wycherly I kept copies. I always keep copies.”

He handed me two limp heavy yellowish sheets on which the anonymous letters had been reproduced. They had no dates, no headings. I sat at his desk and read one:

“Lovely stuff,” I said. “What did Wycherly have to say about the cuckold angle?”

“I didn’t ask him. He didn’t encourage me to ask personal
questions. He simply wanted me to track down the poison-penner and stop him. So he said. But when I started to get warm, he stopped me.”

“Warm in what way?”

“That seems to have slipped my mind.”

“You’re a liar, nothing ever does. You said something about an inside job.”

“Did I?” He half-sat on the edge of his desk and kicked a pointed toe at me sadistically. “I wouldn’t want to throw you into conflict.”

“Give.” I said.

“You asked for it. Take a second look at those letters, the one from Wycherly and the others. You read em for content. Now read ’em for physical characteristics, comparatively.”

I compared the three documents. Wycherly’s letter to Mackey was evenly and neatly typed, with business-school spacing and paragraphing. The letters from “A Friend of the Family” were sloppily done, by amateurish fingers. But all three looked as if they had been typed on the same typewriter.

“Similar typewriter characteristics,” I said. “Same type, same degree of wear, same idiosyncrasies. The V is out of alignment, for example. I’d like to see what a typewriter expert has to say about them.”

“I did, Lew. Wycherly’s original letter to me and the poison-pen letters were done on the same machine—a prewar Royal.”

“Whose?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when the slob yanked me. Clearly it’s a machine he has access to. I asked his permission to inspect all his typewriters, in his home and in his office. He wouldn’t let me. No doubt he had his reasons.”

“You think he wrote those letters himself?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out. His letter to me could have been typed by a secretary—it’s a professional piece of work—and the letters to the family by Wycherly himself. Note that they were addressed to ‘The Wycherly Family,’ instead of any particular
member of it. He could have been trying to stir up trouble in his own family, force his wife into an open confession. I’ve seen crazier things done, for crazier reasons.”

“You take those accusations seriously?”

“I don’t know. Catherine Wycherly is a fairly hot dish for a woman her age. And whoever was trying to stir up the animals succeeded. She did divorce him.”

I looked the letters over again. “You don’t seem to take them seriously as threatening letters. I do. That combination of paranoia and righteousness bothers me. I’ve seen it in homicidal maniacs.”

“So have I. Also in ministers of the gospel,” Willie added sardonically.

“In either case, it doesn’t go with what I know about Wycherly.”

“I agree. But he could have been pretending to be a crackpot. I think whoever wrote them was putting it on. They’re pretty exaggerated.”

“Wycherly isn’t that smart.”

“Maybe not.” Willie looked at his watch. “I don’t want to rush you, Lew.”

I got up to go. “Let me take this letter and these copies?”

“You’re welcome to them. I have no use for them. You’re welcome to the whole damn Wycherly caboodle.”

I walked uphill back to Union Square, kicking at pigeons. And got my break, if you could call it that.

A
SHORT WIDE MAN
in a horsehide wind-breaker and a peaked cap was standing with the dispatcher on the sidewalk outside the hotel. He came towards me smiling.
His scar made an extra fold along his jaw.

“You the man that wantsa talk to me?”

“If you’re Garibaldi.”

“That’s what they call me since grade school. Giuseppe Garibaldi, he’s my personal hero.” He laughed, and made an exultant gesture which wrote his personality large on the air. “My real name is Gallorini. Nick Gallorini.”

“Mine’s Lew Archer.”

“Glad to meet you, Lew,” he said expansively, and took off his driving glove to shake my hand. He was big-nosed, flap-eared, hammered-down; his dark eyes were wild and gentle like the eyes of certain animals and birds. “You got a problem?”

“Missing girl.”

“Too bad. You want to sit in the cab and tell me about it?”

His cab was the last in line. We sat in the back of it and lit cigarettes.

“Your daughter, maybe?” he said. “Or a friend?”

“Daugher of a friend. You drove her and her father to the docks about two months ago. He was sailing on the
President Jackson
. She went aboard the
Jackson
with him, asked you to wait.” I got out Phoebe’s picture and showed it to him.

“I remember her.” There was gloom in his voice.

“Good for you. What happened after that?”

“Nothing
happened
, not that day. I wait like she said, must have been nearly an hour. She finally comes off the ship with one of the officers and this lady with her. Turns out to be her mother, she called her mother.”

“How were the two of them getting along?”

“All right.” He nodded judicially. “They had a little argument on the way back, but it didn’t amount to nothing. The girl had a car stashed someplace, and the mother wanted her to drive her down the Peninsula to her home. I caught that, because I live down that way myself—got a nice three-bedroom in Sharpe Park—bought it when North Beach went to the
dogs, the wife says move, we moved.” He smiled triumphantly, and pointed a downward thumb at a passing cable car.

“What did the girl say?”

“She said she couldn’t drive her mother home, she had a date with a man. The mother wanted to know what man. The girl wouldn’t tell her. That was what the fuss was about.”

“The mother made a fuss?”

“Yeah, she was under the weather, like. She said her loved ones were cutting her out. The girl said that wasn’t true. She said
she
loved her. She was a nice girl to hear her talk—lotta good feeling in her.” The gloom in his voice was deepening, and staining his susceptible eyes. “I got a daughter of my own almost as old as her, thatsa why we had to move out of North Beach.”

I prompted him: “Where did you drive them?”

“Dropped the girl right here at the St. Francis. The mother I took down to the SP station.”

“Did the girl go into the hotel?”

“I guess so. I didn’t notice.”

“Did she say anything at all about the man she had the date with?”

He considered the question. “No. She clammed up about him. That was what the mother didn’t like. She didn’t calm down until the girl promised to drive down and see her later.”

“Did she say when?”

“I
think
she said that same evening,” Gallorini looked at me sideways through smoke. “Listen, I got a good memory but I’m no electronic brain. Why don’t you take it up with her old lady?”

“She isn’t talking.”

“She won’t help find her own daughter? Holy Mother. I knew there was trouble there, that more was going on than they were saying. That’s one reason I remember the conversation.”

“What are the other reasons you remember?”

Gallorini was silent for a time. He butted his cigarette and dropped the butt into the breast pocket of his windbreaker. Suddenly he gripped my knee:

“Listen, are you a cop?”

“I have been. I’m in private work now.”

“You picking her up as a runaway or what?”

“I hope that’s all that’s happened to her. Her father hired me to find her dead or alive. She hasn’t been seen since the day he sailed.”

“Thatsa where you’re wrong about that.” An emotion I didn’t understand added faint feminine endings to some of his words. “I saw the little girl myself, week or ten days later. More like ten days, it was.”

I sat up straight. “Where?”

“On the road at night—I was filling in nights that week. I had this fare to the airport, eleven o’clock plane, and I was deadheading back. I saw her standing there on the Broadway overpass. It was raining, coming down cats and dogs, and she was standing there in the rain beside the parapet. My headlights caught her face, and I sort of reckanized her, or I probably would of gone right on. Also I got a funny idea that maybe she was getting ready to jump down onto Bayshore.”

The St. Francis doorman signalled for a cab. The line moved forward ahead of us. Gallorini made a move to get out and climb into the front seat.

“Hold it,” I said. “You’re on my time. This is important, if you’re sure it was the same girl.” I showed him Phoebe’s picture again. “This girl.”

He barely glanced at the picture. “I’m sure. I talked to her, see. I picked her up.” Pushing suspicion away with his hands, he added: “I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I thought she was somebody I knew, see, maybe a friend of my daughter from the high school. So I U-turned and went back. She was still standing there, no raincoat, with her dress all wet and her hair striped down her face. I didn’t know who she was
until she said something. I got a good ear for people’s voices.” He pointed to his ear with a dirty fingernail.

“What did she say?”

“She said she wanted no cab, she had no money. So I said I’d give her a free ride if it wasn’t too far. It ain’t legal but what the hell, I couldn’t just leave her standing there in the rain, in her condition.”

“What was her condition?”

“It wasn’t so hot,” he said compunctiously. “She didn’t make too good sense, and I thought what will happen to her if a gang of wolves come along and grab her up. Even if she didn’t jump.”

“How do you mean, she wasn’t making sense?”

“The way she talked, the way she acted. I finally got her into the cab, I pradically had to lift her in.” He enacted the scene as he sat, one arm curled around imaginary shoulders. “I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said out of this world. Those were her words. Out of this world.”

Gallorini shook his head angrily.

“I said I didn’t have rocket propulsion. She didn’t think that was funny. I told her she should be home in bed, not running around in the wet. She thought
that
was funny. ‘Where’s home?’ she said, and she let out a laugh. I didn’t like the sound of it. I finally got it out of her that she had relatives in Woodside. A long haul, but I said I’d take her there. She offered me her wrist watch—she had on this little gold wrist watch, and she offered to give it to me for the fare. I said to hell with that, I didn’t want no wrist watch.

“Then she said she didn’t want to go to Woodside anyway. She couldn’t face her aunt, something like that, she hated her already.”