“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.
chapter 15
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.”
“Her aunt hated her?”
“Thatsa what she said. I tried to find out her aunt’s name, but she wasn’t saying. She wouldn’t even tell me her own name. I tried to ask her, what about her mother. That was when she broke down, sort of. She said she might as well go back to the apartment. So I took her where she said. It was only a short haul, a couple of miles.” He grinned wryly. “It didn’t buy the kids no shoes, but I was glad I did it.”
I gave him five of Wycherly’s dollars. “That’s for the short haul.”
Pleasure and embarrassment struggled for his face. Embarrassment won. “Hell, I wasn’t pressing for pay. I only did what any man would do.”
“Keep it. I’m not finished with you.”
The words were wrong: fear danced up in his eyes:
“You think I did something to her.”
“No, I mean I want the rest of your story, all of it.”
He said with the fear still bright and hard in his pupils: “That’s all there is. I drove her up to her door and she went in. She offered me the wrist watch again, but I couldn’t take her wrist watch away from her.” He added with a kind of compulsive candor: “Besides, it was one of those deals that maybe next day the cops would be around asking me for it. She was trouble, see. I hate to say it about a young girl, but she was a lot different from the first time I saw her. She’d went downhill in a handcar.”
“In a week or ten days?”
“It can happen overnight.”
“What sort of a place was she staying at?”
“Nothing special one way or the other. One of those old apartment houses on Camino, down San Mateo way.”
“Show it to me.”
It was a two-story stucco building with decorative tiling along the roof-edge like red icing on a slightly decaying cake. The once-white façade was dingy, streaked with rust from the iron balconies on the second floor. They gave the place a barred-up, uninviting look.
Gallorini had pulled into the curb across from the building. I parked behind him and leaned in his window:
“You’re sure this is the place?”
“Uh-huh. I took a special note of it.” He was looking at it as if its shabby attractions fascinated him.
“Why? Were you planning to come back?”
“Maybe. Just to collect for the haul, you know.”
“In cash or kind?”
“I don’t get you.” His whole personality backed away from me. It left his face where it was, close up to mine, but empty. “You trying to get me in trouble? I didn’t do nothing to her. Would I lead you all the way down here just to put my own neck in a noose?”
It was an interesting question. Some murderers and sexual psychopaths did precisely that. Their necks kept hankering for the rope: they broke their arms trying to lasso themselves. I offered Gallorini a little piece of string:
“Which apartment is she in?”
“Upstairs corn—” He closed his teeth on the middle of the word.
“Did you go in with her?”
He shook his head so hard that his cheeks wobbled.
“How do you know she has an upstairs corner apartment?”
His eyes were small and troubled, squinched close in to the base of his big nose as if for protection:
“Okay, so I went in with her. She asked me to. She said she was scared to go in by herself.”
“What was she scared of?”
“She didn’t say. She was soaking wet and shivering with the cold. I couldn’t just leave her that way. I helped her out of her wet clothes, and then she kind of passed out on me.”
“Was she drinking?”
“Not with me, she wasn’t. Maybe she took a pill. Anyway, she got woozy. I helped her into her bedroom and put her to bed.”
“You do this for all your customers?”
“It’s happened before. I dunno why you’re giving me a bad time. I didn’t do anything out of line.” He bit on his thumbnail and regarded me over his fist. “I gotta daughter of my own, see. Anyway, I had no chance to do anything even if I wanted to which I didn’t. This character barged in, see.”
“Who was he?”
“Some blondie guy. I thought at the time he was prob’ly living with her. He acted like he owned her.”
“What did he do?”
“Gave me hell and told me to get out.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Yeah, he’s a blondie guy, about my size. He had a little chin beard, and kind of bulgy blue eyes. He was a nasty-talking son but what could I do? I got.”
chapter 16
I LEFT GALLORINI sulking at the wheel and crossed the street. A verdigrised metal sign beside the entrance bore the title, “The Conquistador.” Depending from it on a piece of wire was a small sign made of weatherbeaten cardboard: “Apartment for Rent.”
The wall inside the entrance was banked with brass mailboxes. Most of them showed the owners’ names on cards: nobody I knew. The card on number one was printed in green ink. Alec Girston, Manager. I pressed the bell push above it.
The front door buzzed ajar. The door of Apartment One was the first to my left. A stairway rose beyond it to the second floor. The air in the hallway was chilly and oppressive.
A woman’s voice said through the door: “What do you want?”
“You have an apartment for rent.”
That opened the door. A wispy-haired large-eyed woman looked out at me from the internal dimness:
“Mr. Girston isn’t here. Can you come back?”
“Not easily. I’m driving through. I noticed your sign and thought I’d see what you have.”
“But I’m not dressed.” She glanced down at the pink robe gathered carelessly at her bosom. She spread he
r hand on the dead white flesh above the robe. “I haven’t been too well this winter.”
She looked as though she’d been through a long illness. Her eyes were fogged by the basic doubts you get when your body lets go under you. The hollows of her temples and eyes were blue and sharply cut like shadows in snow. Though she wasn’t old, her mouth was beginning to seam.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
The cheap words seemed to revive her spirits. “That’s all right. I’ll put something on and show you the flat myself. I think I can make the stairs all right.”
“The vacant one is upstairs?”
“Yessir. Were you wanting something down? Upstairs has many advantages. You get more light and air, especially when you’re on the corner.”
“This is an upstairs corner flat?”
“Yessir. It’s the most desirable one we have, when you consider the furnishings. They’re included in the rent.”
“How much is the rent?”
“We’re asking one-seventy-five on a year’s lease. The previous tenant had a year’s lease, it just ran out the end of the year. She left all her good furniture, which is what makes it such a steal.”
“Why did she leave it? Couldn’t she pay her rent?”
“Of course she could pay her rent.”
“I was only kidding. I believe I know her family, as a matter of fact.” We grew up together in the last twenty-four hours.
“You know Mrs. Smith’s family?”
“I think we’re talking about the same girl.”
“I wouldn’t call her a girl. She must be as old as I am.” The woman touched her faded hair and looked expectantly into the mirror of my eyes. What she saw there made her insistent: “I swear she’s as old as I am, though she does her best to cover it up with her paints and her bleached hair.”
Illness had made her reactions self-centered and dull. I took the mild risk of showing her Phoebe’s picture. She stabbed at it with her forefinger:
“This isn’t Mrs. Smith. It’s Mrs. Smith’s young daughter. She used the apartment for a while last fall.”
“I thought that’s what I said.”
Confusion puckered her eyes. It changed to concern, which wasn’t for herself.
The Wycherly Woman Page 14