The Wycherly Woman (8 page)

Her fingers were active at her throat. Her pearls broke, cascading down her body, rolling in all directions on the floor.

“Damn it!” she cried. “This is the day when everything happens to me.”

Kicking pearls out from under her feet, she moved to the doorway and jabbed a bell push with her thumb. The maid came running, got down on her knees at once and began to pick up the pearls.

A middle-aged man in a plaid smoking jacket leaned in the doorway and watched the scene with barely repressed amusement. His balding head was large for his body, and rested like a pale cannonball on his shoulders without much intervention from his neck. His voice was deep, and seemed to take a certain pleasure in its own depth:

“What goes on, Helen?”

“I’ve broken my pearls.” Her narrow look implied that in some obscure way he was responsible.

“It isn’t the end of the world.”

“No, but it’s exasperating. Everything seems to be happening at once.”

The kneeling maid gave her a quick glance, sideways and upward. She said nothing. Mrs. Trevor moved on her husband with a kind of furious maternality:

“You’re supposed to be lying down. We don’t want anything else to happen today.” It sounded like a move in a complex verbal game which nobody ever won.

“Nothing will,” he said. “I’m feeling much better.” He looked inquiringly at me. His eyes were blue and intelligent.

“I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Trevor.”

I started to tell him who I was, but Helen Trevor intervened:

“No, Mr. Archer. Please. I don’t want my husband troubled with these affairs. I’ll be glad to answer any other questions you—”

“Nonsense, Helen, let me talk to him. I’m perfectly all right now. Come with me, Mr.—Archer, is it?”

“Archer.”

Trevor turned his back on his wife’s protests and led me into a small study off the library. He closed the door with a small sigh of relief.

“Women,” he said under his breath. “Let me get you a drink, Mr. Archer. Scotch or Bourbon?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’m driving, and Bayshore is murder.”

“Is it not? I prefer to commute by Southern Pacific. Now sit down and tell me what all this is about Phoebe. The version I got came by way of my wife, and it’s probably garbled.”

He placed me in a leather armchair facing his and listened to what I had to tell him. There was a silence when I’d finished. Trevor sat immobile. He gave the impression of mental or physical pain stoically endured.

“I blame myself,” he said finally. “I should have looked out for her, if Homer wasn’t willing to. Why he had to choose this winter to forsake his responsibilities and become a white shadow in the South Seas—” He punctuated the unfinished sentence with his fist on his knee. “But the real question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“Find her.”

“If she’s alive.”

“They usually are,” I said with more assurance than I felt. “They turn up counting change in Vegas, or waiting table in the Tenderloin, or setting up light housekeeping in a beat pad, or bucking the modelling racket in Hollywood.”

Trevor’s thick eyebrows came together and tangled like hostile caterpillars. “Why would a well-nurtured girl like Phoebe do any of those things?”

“The standard motives are drink or drugs or a man. They all add up to the same idea, rebellion. It’s the fourth R they learn in school these days. Or someplace.”

“But Phoebe wasn’t particularly rebellious. Though Lord knows she had plenty of reason to be.”

“I’m interested in the reasons. I couldn’t get much out of Wycherly directly. As far as his daughter is concerned, he seems to be living in a dream. And he doesn’t want to wake up.”

“That’s natural enough, he’s one of the reasons.”

I waited for him to go on. He didn’t. I tried another tack: “I did learn that your niece went to see a psychiatrist last spring. Do you know anything about that?”

His eyebrows went up. “No. But I’m not surprised. She was an unhappy girl when she came back to Stanford after Easter. I know her studies were going downhill.”

“What was she unhappy about?”

“She didn’t confide in me. According to my wife, there was quite a family ruckus in Meadow Farms over the holiday. It had to do with some libellous letters.”

“Did you ever see those letters?”

“I didn’t, but Helen did. They were pretty vile, I gather. They set off the last of a long series of family explosions.” He leaned towards me earnestly. “I try to avoid gossip, but I’ll tell you this much. It wasn’t a happy marriage the Wycherlys had. They should have divorced twenty years ago, or never married in the first place. I used to spend a good deal of time at their house, when Helen and I were still living in Meadow Farms, and I can tell you it wasn’t a good place to raise a child. They fought continually.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Catherine detested the place, Homer wouldn’t leave it. They simply weren’t meant to live together. He was well on in his thirties when they married, and she was still in her teens. It wasn’t only a matter of age. They were as far apart as night and day, and Phoebe was caught in the middle until she finally got away to school. I don’t mean that Homer isn’t a gentle enough soul, but he has those generations of
money behind him. It makes a man soft in some ways, hard in others.” He smiled slightly. “I should know. He’s been my titular boss for twenty-five years.”

“What sort of a woman is Catherine? I’ve gotten some pretty fierce reports on her.”

“No doubt.” His half-smile changed to a half-grimace. “She’s gone to pieces since her divorce, as women often do. She used to be quite a forceful woman, and quite a handsome one, if you like the big blatant blonde type. I used to get along with Catherine fairly well. We understood each other to some extent. She came up the hard way, as I did. If marrying money at eighteen is coming up the hard way.”

“What did she do before that?”

“I really don’t know. Homer met her in the South and brought her to Meadow Farms to marry her. We put her up for a while before the wedding. She knew nothing about running a house; which is Helen’s métier. I think the girl was originally some sort of a secretary.”

“How old is she now?”

“She must be nearly forty.” Trevor paused, and gave me a long look from under his eyebrows. “You seem to be excessively interested in Catherine Wycherly. Why?”

“Phoebe was last seen in her mother’s company.”

“She was? When?”

“The day Wycherly sailed. They left the ship together, drove away in a taxi. I’m doing my best to trace the taxi.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to take it up with Catherine?”

“I’d like to, but I don’t know where she is. That’s one reason I came to you.”

“I haven’t seen her since November second. She put on an act that day aboard the ship which I’d just as soon forget. I presume she’s in the house she bought in Atherton.”

“She isn’t, though, and I don’t think she’s been there for the last two months. The house is up for sale.”

“I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”

“I was over there an hour or so ago. A sleazy character caught me trying to climb the wall and pulled a gun on me.” I described the man in the bow tie. “Do you know who he is? He claimed to be in charge of the property.”

Trevor shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know the man. And I haven’t the slightest idea where Catherine’s gone to.”

“Do you know people she knows?”

“Not on the Peninsula. I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Archer. We didn’t and don’t move in the same circles as Catherine Wycherly. It was a matter of choice, on our part.”

“What circles does she move in?”

“A downward spiral, I’m afraid. But I won’t repeat gossip.”

“I wish you would.”

“No. I owe that much to Catherine. Or to myself.” His broad cheeks colored faintly, and the brightness of his eyes intensified. He said with the irresistible smoothness of a steam roller: “We’re getting rather far afield from the subject of my niece, and it’s not getting any earlier. Tell me, what can I do to help?”

“You might talk to the local police. If I go to them cold I’ll get no action. Also, there’s the danger of publicity. Wycherly is dead set against publicity. But you could probably make a confidential inquiry, and get them rolling in a quiet way.”

“By all means. Tomorrow morning.”

“Tonight would be better.”

“All right.” Sick or not, Trevor showed the serviceability of a powerful man who didn’t have to prove anything to himself. “What precise form should this inquiry take?”

“I’ll leave that to you. The authorities in the entire San Francisco area should be on the lookout for her. Also they should check their backlog of unidentified bodies going back to early November.”

Trevor’s face lost its remaining color. “You said they usually turn up alive.”

“They usually do. But we have to rule out the other possibilities. Do you have any pictures of her?”

“I took some last summer when she was staying with us. I’ll get them.”

He rose vigorously. The movement showed no trace of effort unless you were watching his eyes. The brightness in them dimmed down like a lamp-flame for an instant.

Trevor came back five minutes later with a sheaf of colored pictures in his hand. He sat down and dealt them to me one at a time. Phoebe smiled brightly among camellias in a white summer dress. She swung a tennis racquet in yellow linen. She sat and stood and reclined on beige sand beside an indigo sea. Some of the pictures had sea cliffs in the background.

The girl was almost beautiful in a poignant way of her own. Not beautiful enough, though; they never are. In the beach shots particularly, her smile was incandescent with self-consciousness. She thrust her sharp small breasts towards the voyeur eye of the color camera, agonized by the effort to be really beautiful for it.

Trevor was studying my face when I looked up.

“She’s a valuable girl,” he said. “A fine deep girl who has had a hard growing up. She deserved better parents than she got.”

“She seems to be personally valuable to you.”

“I love her like a daughter. We have no children of our own, and I should have kept in closer touch with her. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk.”

“These pictures were taken last summer?”

“Yes. I have earlier ones, of course, going all the way back to infancy. I tried to pick out the ones that look most like her present self. Phoebe’s slimmed down since her teens.”

“Did she spend the summer with you?”

“Just a few days of it, actually, a few days in August. We have a beach cottage near Medicine Stone, and she was supposed to stay longer. But she and my wife were tense with
each other for some reason. She left by unspoken mutual agreement. Which didn’t include me.”

“Do you recall a boy she met in Medicine Stone? Good-looking college boy with reddish hair?”

“I saw him at a distance, I believe. In the surf. I’m forbidden the surf myself. Phoebe and he were cavorting with some other young people.” There was a trace of envious sadness in his voice.

“But you never met him?”

“Phoebe didn’t choose to introduce him to us. I think that was one of the sources of friction with Helen. Phoebe was seeing quite a lot of the young man while she was with us.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“No. He seemed like a healthy young animal. And Phoebe was pleased and flattered by his attentions. But as I said, I never had the privilege of meeting him. Do
you
know anything about him?”

“I talked to him this morning in Boulder Beach. He’s a student there.”

“Are—is he still interested in Phoebe?”

“He was, until she disappeared.”

“Do you suspect him of having something to do with it?”

“No.”

His eyes were penetrating. “You do, though.”

“I suspect everybody. It’s my occupational neurosis. But he has no motive, and an alibi.”

“You’re thorough. What’s the boy’s name? Bobby something, isn’t it?”

“Bobby Doncaster.” I changed the subject. “Which of these pictures is the closest likeness?”

He shuffled them with a poker-player’s deftness, and picked out the one in the white dress. The one in tennis clothes was almost as good, he said. I asked for it, and got it.

“Now, is there anything else I can do, for you or Phoebe?”

“You might have some copies of her picture made. Fifty, or
a hundred, just in case Wycherly decides to make a major effort.”

“What form would a major effort take?”

“Use of a national detective agency, mass media publicity, all-out police dragnet, with FBI co-operation if possible. Wycherly’s a wealthy man, he could swing a lot of weight.”

Trevor clapped his hands together. “I can swing it for him if necessary. Do you recommend it, Archer?”

“Wait till tomorrow. If I can put a finger on Catherine Wycherly, she may give me some answers. Do you know a real-estate man named Ben Merriman, by the way?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.” His eyebrows came together in concentration. “I may have seen his sign on Camino Real. Why?”

“He’s selling Mrs. Wycherly’s house. Maybe he can give me her new address. I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow. In the meantime, you’ll talk to the local police tonight?”

“As soon as you leave,” he said, rising.

It was an invitation to go. On my way out through the library, I stepped on a pearl.

B
EN
M
ERRIMAN’S NAME
was written in red neon across the cornice of a narrow pink stucco building. It was in a gap-toothed section of rundown houses and vacant lots and struggling businesses. A dog hospital stood next to Merriman’s office. Diagonally across the street, a drive-in swarmed with cutdown cars and their owners.

I locked the door of my car: I had a seventy-five-dollar revolver in a brief case on the back seat and a contact microphone in the dash compartment. Dogs barked. I could smell pesticide.

A light outlined a closed door in a partition at the back of
Merriman’s place. The glass front door was locked. I tapped on the glass with my car keys, and the door in the partition opened. Spilled light made a faceless silhouette of the woman who came uncertainly towards me. She fumbled at the self-lock and got it open.