The Wycherly Woman (29 page)

“When did she leave the sanitarium?”

“Some time yesterday afternoon. It doesn’t matter now. She’s safe now.”

He stopped for a red light, and made a right turn off Bayshore. I was thinking of Stanley Quillan listening to happy music in the back room of his shop, not many miles from where we were.

“Did Phoebe have a gun with her last night?”

“Of course not. She doesn’t have a gun.”

“Can you be sure?”

“She had nothing with her at all. Just the clothes that she was wearing, and they weren’t hers.”

“How do you know that?”

“They didn’t fit her. She’s put on a lot of weight, but even so her dress was too big for her. It didn’t suit her, either. It made her look
old
. It made her look like her mother when—”

The car swerved under the pressure of his hands. We were on a quiet, tree-lined street named after the poet Cowper. He pulled the car into the curb and braked abruptly. I left handprints on the windshield.

“I saw her mother when she was dead,” he went on in a hushed voice. “She had no clothes on. She was big and white. We wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the back of Phoebe’s car. I had to bend up her legs.” He bowed until his forehead touched the steering-wheel. Both of his hands were gripping the curved steel. His knuckles gleamed white. “It was a terrible thing to do.”

“Why did you do it?”

“They said—Phoebe said that it was the only way. We had to get rid of the body. I couldn’t leave her to do it by herself.”

“She wasn’t by herself.”

He turned his head, his cheek pressed hard against his straining knuckles. “I was with her. Is that what you mean?”

“Who else was?”

“Nobody. We were alone in the house.”

“You said ‘they.’ The dead woman didn’t tell you to put her in the water.”

“It was a slip of the tongue.”

“It was a slip, all right. Who else are you trying to cover up for, Bobby?”

“I’m not trying to cover up for him.”

“It was a man, then. Name him.”

The glaze of stubbornness came down over his face again.

“I think I can name him for you,” I said. “Did Ben Merriman walk in on the festivities?”

“He didn’t say who he was.”

From the magpie nest of my inner pocket, I produced the blotter with Merriman’s picture on it. It was getting dog-eared.

“Is this the man?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you mention him before?”

“Phoebe said last night I wasn’t to.”

“Did she give you a reason?”

“No.”

“But without a reason of any kind, you let a disturbed girl make your decision for you?”

“I had a reason, Mr. Archer. I saw his picture in yesterday’s paper. He was beaten to death in that same house. Now Phoebe will be blamed for that, too.”

T
HE SANITARIUM WAS
in a neighborhood of large old frame houses and new apartment buildings. A massive one-story structure that looked like an overgrown ranchhouse, it stood far back from the street behind a wire net fence masked with a cypress hedge. The driveway curved around a broad lawn where outdoor furniture was set out, chaises and gaily colored umbrellas. A solitary white-haired woman sat on one of the chaises in the middle of the intensely green grass. She was looking at the sky as if it had just been created.

A concrete ramp for wheel chairs sloped up from the driveway to the door. There was a judas window set into the door,
and a bell push in the bare wall beside it. I got out of the car. Bobby stayed where he was.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, but I better stay out here. Dr. Sherrill doesn’t like me.”

“I want you along.”

Reluctantly, he followed me up the ramp. I rang the bell and waited. The little window in the door snapped open. A nurse in a cap peered out at us:

“What is it, sir?”

“I have to see Dr. Sherrill.”

“Is it about a patient?”

“Yes. Her name is Phoebe Wycherly, I represent her father. My name is Archer.” I added, though the words felt strange on my tongue: “This is Mr. Doncaster, her fiancé.”

She left us standing in a drab green corridor which ran the length of the building. Twelve or fifteen doors opened on to it. At the far end a young man in a bathrobe was walking towards us very slowly like a diver with weights on his feet. We were there for several minutes, but he didn’t seem to get any nearer.

A man in a white smock opened one of the doors and said, “Come in here, gentlemen.”

He stood with careful formality beside the door as we entered. I wasn’t impressed by my first look at Sherrill. His thin moustache had a touch of vanity. Magnified by thick glasses, his dark brown eyes seemed womanish.

His office was small and unimposing. A bare oak desk with a swivel chair behind it, a leather armchair, a leather couch, took up most of the floor space. A wall of shelves spilled books onto the floor: everything from Gray’s
Anatomy
to
Mad
magazine.

Bobby started to sit on the couch, then flinched away. He balanced himself tentatively on one arm of the armchair. I sat on the couch. I had to resist an impulse to put my feet up. Sherrill watched us over the desk with eyes like mirrors:

“Well, gentlemen?”

Bobby leaned forward, hugging one high knee. “How is Phoebe?”

“You left her only two hours ago. I told you she should be sequestered for at least two days, possibly much longer. You certainly can’t see her again today, Mr. Doncaster.” Sherrill spoke without much emphasis, but there was a steady force behind his words.

“I brought him here,” I said. “He told me a story which has legal repercussions, to put it mildly. You may know parts of it.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“I’m a private detective. Homer Wycherly, the girl’s father, hired me several days ago to look for her. Until this afternoon, when I talked to Bobby here, I thought she was dead. Murdered. It turns out she was a fugitive from justice.”

“Justice,” the doctor repeated softly. “Do you represent justice, Mr. Archer?”

“No.” I did, in a sense. It would take too long to figure out what sense. “I simply want you to understand the situation.”

“It’s good of you to share your understanding with me.”

“I haven’t, doctor. That’s going to take some time.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t much time. As a matter of fact, I have a patient scheduled now. Perhaps we can arrange to discuss this later on tonight, if you feel we have to.”

“It won’t wait,” I said bluntly. “Have you had a chance to talk to Phoebe at all?”

“Not really. I plan to see her after dinner. You must realize I’m a busy man. I had an hour set aside for her last night, but that was washed out when she ran away. Fortunately she came back today, more or less of her own free will.”

“Did she come here of her own accord in the first place?”

“Yes. I’d seen her twice last year, and when she felt troubled again she had the good sense to come back. She seems considerably more troubled now than she was last year. But she did
come back on her own, and that’s an excellent sign. It means she recognizes the need for help.”

“How did she get here?”

“She flew over from Sacramento early yesterday morning and took a taxi from the airport.”

“Why did she run away again yesterday afternoon?”

“It’s hard to answer that. Evidently she’s more upset than I thought, and needed more security. She was given ground privileges, and I suppose she panicked. I shouldn’t have exposed her to so much freedom.”

“What time did she take off?”

“About this time. Speaking of time, the patient I’m supposed to be with sweats blood when I miss an appointment.” He rose, and looked at his watch. “It’s five-ten. If you’ll come back at eight, I’ll have had my hour with Phoebe, and we can go further into these matters.”

“Where is she now?”

“In her room, with a special nurse. After yesterday’s fiasco, I’m taking no further chances with her security.” He added, with a withering glance at Bobby: “I spent a good part of the night trying to trace her. She’s a valuable girl.”

Trevor had used the same words about his niece.

“How ill is she?”

The doctor spread his hands. “You’re asking impossible questions, at an impossible time. I’d say offhand she’s more upset than ill. She’s over four months pregnant, and that’s enough by itself to account for—ah—unconsidered behavior on the part of an unmarried young woman. She’s been doing a certain amount of acting-out.”

“What do you mean by acting-out?”

“Enacting her fantasies and fears instead of suffering them.” Sherrill’s long patience was fraying. “This is hardly the occasion for me to give you a short course in psychiatry.”

My patience had never been long: “When you get around
to talking to Phoebe, there are some specific questions you’d better ask—”

“You mistake my function. I don’t ask questions. I wait for answers. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

Sherrill reached for the doorknob. I said to his back:

“Ask her if she shot and killed Stanley Quillan yesterday afternoon. Ask her if she beat Ben Merriman to death the other night.”

Sherrill turned. His eyes were black and opaque as charcoal. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious. She killed her mother with a poker last November. Doncaster was a witness.”

His black glance shifted to Bobby, who nodded solemnly.

“Who were these other men?” Sherrill said to me.

“A pair of blackmailers.”

“You say she killed them?”

“I want you to ask her whether she did. If you won’t ask her, let me. There are some answers we can’t just sit around waiting for, and some problems that aren’t just in the mind.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Sherrill said. “I’ll talk to her now. Wait here.”

He went out with his smock flapping around his legs. Bobby subsided into the armchair. He looked at me as if he was sick of me, sick of the world and everybody in it. In twenty-one years he hadn’t had time to get ready for so much trouble. You had to start training for it very young these days.

“You didn’t tell me she was pregnant.”

“That’s why we were going to get married.”

“You’re the father?”

“Yes. It happened last summer at Medicine Stone.”

“Everything happens at Medicine Stone. You’ve put it on the map, boy.”

He hung his head. I went to the window and looked out between the slats of the Venetian blind. The window overlooked a large enclosure paved with flagstones and surrounded by
a ten-foot wire fence. A brightly frocked woman holding a raised parasol stood like a mannequin in one corner of the fence. Her face was so heavily powdered that she looked as though she’d stuck it into a flour barrel. A middle-aged man with his chin on his chest was shuffling back and forth across the flagstones, taking one step on each.

“You really think she killed Merriman?” Bobby said in a weak voice.

“It was your idea.”

“I was afraid—” He tried to complete the thought but didn’t know how to.

“For a boy who’s afraid you’ve got yourself into deep trouble.”

“I’m not a boy.” He clutched the arms of the big chair and tried to fill it, to become old and large.

“Boy or man, you’re up against it.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me if Phoebe—if she’s really finished. I never expected much out of life anyway.”

I sat on the couch near him. “Still, life has to go on.”

“My life doesn’t.”

“It will. Why fight it? You don’t want to be a dead loss to the world. You have certain qualities it can use. Courage is one of them. Loyalty is another.”

“Those are just abstract words. They don’t mean anything. I’ve studied semantics.”

“They do, though. I learned that studying life. It’s a course that goes on and on. You never graduate or get a diploma. The best you can do is put off the time when you flunk out.”

“I’ve already flunked,” he said. “They’ll never let me finish college or anything. They’ll lock me up, probably for the rest of my life.”

“That I doubt. What sort of a record do you have?”

“With the police? I have no record. None at all.”

“How did you get involved with Phoebe Wycherly?”

“I didn’t get involved with her. I fell in love with her.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Yes. From the first time I met her on the beach, I knew that she was for me.”

“Have you ever been in love before?”

“No, and there won’t be anybody else, ever. This is it. I don’t care what she’s done.”

He had courage, as I’d said. Or stubbornness raised to the nth power, which is almost as good as courage.

“We still don’t know for certain,” I said. “Tell me about Merriman. How did he get into the picture?”

Bobby ran his tongue along the lower edge of his moustache. “He just walked in. He had an appointment with Mrs. Wycherly, and the front door was standing open. He must have heard us in the living room. Phoebe was crying and I was doing my best to comfort her. Merriman walked in and caught us red-handed. He was going to call the police. Phoebe begged him not to, and he relented. He said he would co-operate with her—with us—if we would co-operate with him.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“It was something to do with selling the house, Mrs. Wycherly was going to sell the house through him, that’s what their appointment was about. He was angry because the—because her death interfered with the sale.”

“Did Merriman suggest hiding the body?”

“Yes. We were going to bury her at first, in the garden behind the house. But he said sooner or later it would be found there. I was the one who thought of throwing it in the sea. He helped me carry her out to Phoebe’s car.”

“You said she had no clothes on, is that right?”

“Yes. We wrapped her in a blanket.” A shadow of that image crossed his eyes.

“What happened to her clothes?”

“They were lying on the chesterfield.”

“Did Phoebe undress her?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t understand what happened, Mr. Archer. I took off right after that.”

“And left Phoebe with Merriman?”

“I had to.” His forehead was wet. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stayed with his head leaning sideways on his fist. “He told me to get out and not come back. I had to cooperate with him. The one thing I had on my mind was keeping her out of jail. I know now there are worse things than jail.”