The Wycherly Woman (28 page)

“Something like that. When did they check in?”

“She came in last night around six, said her husband was joining her later. He got in around eleven or so.”

“What name did she give you?”

“Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

“Did they walk away from here?”

“No, this older man came asking for them—for her. He had a car—new blue Chewie.”

“What did he look like?”

“Older man with a moustache.” She fingered her upper lip. “More of an Adolph Menjou type moustache than a Charlie Chaplin. A nice-looking man, even
with
those great big glasses. He treated her nice enough, too, considering the provocation.”

“Provocation?”

She looked down at the twisted sheets, the mashed pillows.
She took one of the pillows into her lap and began to plump it up. “He’s her husband, isn’t he?”

“No. I’m trying to find out who he is.”

“So who got themselves killed?”

“Her daughter.”

The woman’s mouth drooped in sympathy. “No wonder she looks so sad. I know what sadness is. I lost a husband in the World War Two. That’s when I started eating. I went right on even after I married Spurling.”

She placed one hand on her breast. Her fingers were pale and speckled like breakfast sausages. All of her flesh was lard-like: if you poked it the hole would stay. Some of it had run like candle wax down her ankles and over her shoes.

“Getting back to the man with the moustache, Mrs. Spurling, what did he say when he came here asking for her?”

“Just was she here, and he described her—big blonde, platinum blonde, in a purple dress. I told him she was here. He knocked on this here door and they let him in and then they had a pow-wow. It went on for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“What was said?”

“I couldn’t hear—just their voices. But it was quite a powwow. I guess she didn’t want to go with him, she wanted to stay here with her little red-headed friend. I saw her hanging back when he marched her out to his car.”

“Did she resist him?”

“She didn’t
fight
him, if that’s what you mean. But she was putting up an argument. The three of them were still arguing when they drove away. Funny thing is, the redhead appeared to be arguing
against
her.”

“Was the man taking them into custody, do you think?”

“It didn’t look like that to me. Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“Yes. The boy should be coming back for his car. I’ll wait here for him, if it’s all right with you.”

“No fireworks.”

“I don’t expect any.”

She got up, and the bed groaned in relief. In her slow mind, two thoughts came together with an impact which made the flesh of her face quiver: “My God, you mean he killed the blondie’s little girl?”

“That’s what I want to ask him, Mrs. Spurling.”

“And she spent the night with him? What kind of a woman is
she?”

“That’s what I want to ask her.”

I closed the door behind her and turned off the light. After a while my eyes got used to the green twilight, and I could see the cockroaches coming out like a small guerrilla army.

They retreated, as if they had outlying scouts, when Bobby came back to the cabin. I heard his footsteps on the path, and was waiting at the door when he came in. He saw the gun in my hand and went still. He had blue rings under his eyes, as if the night and the morning had drained his youth.

“Sit down, Bobby. We’ll talk.”

His feet arranged themselves to run. He couldn’t decide where to run to.

“Come in and sit down and hurry up about it.”

“Yes sir,” he said to the gun.

I turned on the light and frisked him. He shuddered as if my touch was contagious. Almost in reflex, regardless of the gun, he threw a short right uppercut at my chin. I caught it in my left hand and pushed him backwards. He took two tanglefooted steps and fell sideways across the bed. He wasn’t hurt, but he made no attempt to get up. I said:

“Your mother has changed her story, Bobby. You have no alibi. We know you went to San Francisco with Phoebe.”

He was silent, his face half-hidden in the tangled sheets. From the corner of his head one wide green eye watched me.

“You don’t deny it, do you?”

“No. But Mother didn’t know I went with Phoebe. I let on I
was going to school early, and Phoebe picked me up at the edge of the campus.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s everybody’s business now,” I said.

“All right.” His voice rose defiantly. “We were going to get married. After she saw her father off, we were going to drive to Reno and get married. We were old enough, it’s no crime.”

“Getting married is no crime. But you never did get married.”

“It wasn’t my fault. I wanted to. It was Phoebe who changed her mind. She ran into a family situation. Don’t ask me what it was because I don’t know. I gave up and took a bus home.”

“From San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying. That same night, or early next morning, you were seen driving Phoebe’s car through a place on the coast named Medicine Stone. You know the place. The car was found yesterday, where you pushed it over the cliff. Her body was in it. And your feet are wet, boy, all the way up to your neck.”

He didn’t move or speak. He lay still as catatonia under the weight of my accusation.

“Why did you have to kill Phoebe? You were supposed to be in love with her.”

He raised himself on his arms and turned to face me, not quite squarely:

“You don’t understand anything about what happened.”

“Enlighten me.”

“A man doesn’t have to incriminate himself.”

“You’re a man?”

He stared up at the ceiling light, fingering his sad pink moustache. “I’m doing my best to be one.”

“You don’t prove manhood by killing girls.”

He brought his gaze down to my level. His eyes were bleak and dubious for twenty-one. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill anyone. But I’m willing to take the consequences for what I did do.”

“What did you do?”

“I drove the car down to Medicine Stone, like you said. I shoved it over the bluff and walked out to the highway and caught a bus.”

“Why did you do that?”

He peered into various corners of the room. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“What’s the use? Nobody will believe me, anyway.”

“You haven’t given it much of a try.”

“I tell you I didn’t kill her.”

“Who killed her if you didn’t? Catherine Wycherly?”

He let out a kind of snuffling laugh. It was neither loud nor long, but it played hell with my nerves.

“What is it with you and Catherine Wycherly? A mother-image you couldn’t resist? Or is it more of a business relationship?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ll never understand.”

“Tell me what happened last November second.”

“I’ll go to the gas chamber first.”

His voice was high and cracking. He looked around the cabin walls as if he was in that final place and could smell cyanide. Outside, heavy feet shuffled on the path. There was a tentative knocking at the door:

“Is it all right?”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Spurling.” Everything was dandy. “We’ll be out of here shortly.”

“That’s good. The sooner the better.”

She went away. I said to the wretched boy:

“You have about one more minute. If you can’t come up with something sensible, we’ll shift the proceedings over to the Hall of Justice. Once I’ve delivered you there, with the evidence
against you, you’re practically certain to be held for trial. This isn’t a threat, it’s one of the facts of life. You don’t seem to know too many of them.”

I could see the workings of his mind flickering in his eyes. “You don’t know everything you think you know, either. I didn’t kill Phoebe. She isn’t even dead.”

“Don’t give me that. We found her body.”

“I can prove she’s alive, I know where she is.” The words came out in a rush, ahead of the hand he raised to cover his mouth.

“If you know where she is, take me to her.”

“I will not. You’ll give her a going-over, and she can’t stand it. She’s been through enough. She’s not going through any more, not if I can help it.”

“You can’t help it,” I said. “There was a body in that car. You say it wasn’t Phoebe. Who was it?”

“Her mother. Phoebe killed her mother in November. I got rid of the body for her. I’m just as guilty as she is.”

He straightened, breathing deeply, as if he’d got rid of a weight he couldn’t hold any longer. I felt it settling on me.

“Where is she, Bobby?”

“I’m not going to tell you. Do what you want to with me. You’re not going to touch her.”

He had that knight-errant look in his eyes, that Galahad fluoresence compounded of idealism and hysteria and sublimated sex. Not so very sublimated, perhaps. I put my gun away and sat and tried to think of the right words.

“Listen to me, Bobby. You realize I have to have more than your word for all this. I have to see her in the flesh. I have to talk to her.”

“You just want to get your hooks on her.”

“What hooks?” I held out my hands. “I’m on her side, no matter what she’s done. Her father hired me, remember. I’ve been breaking my neck trying to find her for him. You can’t sit there and prevent it.”

“She’s in good hands,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t want her taken out of them.”

“What’s the doctor’s name?”

That startled him. “You’ll never get it from me.”

“I don’t need to get it from you. Knowing as much as I know, the police could locate her before dark. But let’s keep them out of it, for now.”

He sat with his head down. I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his young passionate skull. It came out in fragmentary sentences;

“It wouldn’t be fair, you can’t punish her, she’s not responsible. She didn’t plan it or anything.”

“Were you there?”

His head came up sharply. His face was the color of cooked veal. “I was there in a sense. I was waiting outside in her car. Phoebe didn’t want me to come into the house with her. She said she had to talk to her mother alone.”

“You’re talking about her mother’s house in Atherton?”

“Yes. I drove Phoebe down from San Francisco that evening. She didn’t feel like driving herself. She was awfully jittery.”

“When was this?”

“About eight o’clock at night. She met her mother on the ship that afternoon and promised to come and see her. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Phoebe said she wanted to be reconciled with her before we got married. But it didn’t work out. Nothing worked out.”

His voice broke. I waited.

“She was in the house for about twenty minutes, and I thought everything was fine. Then she came out with—she had the poker in her hand, dripping red. She said I had to get rid of it for her. I asked her what she’d done. She took me into the house and showed me. Her mother was lying in front of the fireplace with her head all bloody. Phoebe said we had to get rid of the body and cover the whole thing up.” His eyes
were tormented. He closed them and spoke from a blind face: “I wanted to save her from punishment. You mustn’t punish her. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

“I’m not in the punishment business. I’ll do everything I can for her. You have my word.”

“You won’t tell the police where she is, if I tell you?”

“No. I’ll have to tell her father, of course. Sooner or later the police will have to be told.”

“Why?”

“Because a crime has been committed.”

“Will they put her in jail?”

“That depends on her condition, and the nature of the crime. It may have been murder, or manslaughter, or even justifiable homicide. Phoebe may be psychologically unable to stand trial.”

“She is,” he said. “I realized last night how badly disturbed she is. She talked strangely, and she kept laughing and crying.”

“What does the doctor say, Bobby?”

“He didn’t say much to me. He thought that I was the one who talked her into walking away from his sanitarium. It was the other way round. She phoned me after she left his place and asked me to meet her here at this motel.” He looked around the room as if it was an image of his future, dismal and disreputable and confined. “When I saw this place I wanted to take her out of it right away, but she was afraid to show herself in the open. I spent half the night trying to talk her into going back to the sanitarium. Then today the doctor tracked her down, and between the two of us we got her back there.”

“You haven’t told me where yet.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to.”

He looked at me with stubborn suspicion. Like so many other young people, including some of the best ones, he acted like a displaced person in the adult world.

“Come on, Bobby. We’re wasting valuable time.”

“What’s so valuable about time? I wish I could take a sleeping pill and wake up ten years from now.”

“I wish I could take one in reverse and wake up ten years ago. But maybe it’s just as well I can’t. With all that practice, I’d probably make the same mistakes all over again, in spades.”

That was the right thing to say, for some odd reason. Bobby responded:

“I’ve made some terrible mistakes.”

“Twenty-one is a good age to make them. You don’t have to go on compounding them.”

“But what is going to happen to us?”

“We’ll have to wait and see. A lot depends on you right now. Take me to her, Bobby.”

“Yeah,” he said with a final look around. “Let’s get out of this place.”

I locked my car and rode along with Bobby. The sanitarium wasn’t far, he told me over the noise of the exhaust. It was run by a Palo Alto psychiatrist named Sherrill, whom Phoebe had consulted in her last semester at Stanford.

“Did she come back to him on her own?”

“She must have. There wasn’t anybody with her.”

“How did she get here from Sacramento?”

“I didn’t know she was in Sacramento. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the last two months.”

“When did she come back to the Peninsula?”

“Yesterday morning. Dr. Sherrill said she turned up at his place about eight o’clock.”