The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  “Recovering, I hope. He and I went to Medicine Stone to look into a report that a car had been found in the sea. It turned out to be your daughter’s car, and it had a body in it, a woman’s body. Trevor identified her. Then he keeled over.”

  “Was it Phoebe?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Wycherly.”

  He went to the window and stood there for quite a long time looking out at the empty morning. Something indescribable happened to his body. It seemed to me as I watched him that the knowledge of his grief entered his body. When he turned back into the room the foxy look had been wiped from his eyes and mouth. He said in a deeper voice than I’d heard from him:

  “So that’s your news. My daughter is dead.”

  “I’m afraid so. There is one element of doubt—a discrepancy among the facts I’ve collected. According to one set of facts, Phoebe went into the sea the night of November second: her car was seen around midnight going through Medicine Stone.”

  “Was she driving it?”

  “I’m not prepared to report on who was driving it. As I said, there’s a discrepancy. According to another set of facts, Phoebe was living in her mother’s apartment in San Mateo for a week after November second. I should say that a girl who called herself Smith and who fits Phoebe’s description was living there.”

  Hope flared up in his eyes. “Smith was my wife’s maiden name, Phoebe would naturally use it. It means she’s still alive.”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t, Mr. Wycherly. Your brother-in-law Trevor made a positive identification of her body. You might say it was confirmed by his heart attack.”

  “I see what you mean. Carl was very fond of her.” He paced up and down the room, a fat bear of a man caged by reality. “No fonder than I was,” he said, as if that helped. He turned to face me, his face slack and naked in the light. “Where is Phoebe now?”

  “In the morgue in Terranova. It might be a good idea for you to go up there, today. Please don’t get your hopes up. She isn’t pretty or easy to look at, and I’m very much afraid that you’ll recognize your daughter.”

  “But you said she was alive in San Mateo, long after she was supposed to be dead. It must be another girl you found in the water.”

  “No. It’s more likely that it was another girl who was seen in San Mateo.”

  chapter 24

  I DROVE BACK UP to the Peninsula. I was bone tired, in spite of my fifteen-dollar sleep. Still I was tugged along by a sense of people and places and meanings coming together, filled with that abstract kind of glee which a mathematician has when he’s just about to square the circle. He thinks.

  The assistant manager of the telephone company in Palo Alto admitted after some palaver that the number from which Bobby Doncaster had been called belonged to a public telephone in a booth on the grounds of a gas station at Bayshore and Cedar Lane.

  There were no cedars on Cedar Lane, no trees of any kind. Its asphalt roadway, pocked by traffic, ran through a housing tract that was already decaying into slum, and ended abruptly at the roaring highway. Harry’s Service Station (We Give Blue Chip Stamps) was on the corner. I noticed the metal and glass telephone booth standing by itself like a sentry box at the edge of Harry’s lot.

  I pulled in beside the pumps, and a quick gray man came running out of the office. He looked very eager and a little punchy, like a retired welterweight or a superannuated Navy mechanic. The name Harry was embroidered on the chest of his white coveralls.

  “Yessir,” he announced.

  “Fill her up. She ought to take about ten.”

  While the gas was running, I got out and looked at the number of the telephone in the booth. Davenport 93489. I returned to my car and Harry. He was wiping away at the windshield as if he had a cleanliness compulsion.

  “Need change to phone?”

  “No thanks. I’m a detective working on a murder case.”

  “What do you know.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic or naïve.

  “One of our suspects had a telephone call last night from that booth over there. That was shortly before six. Were you on duty?”

  “Yeah, and I think I know the one you mean. You ain’t the first one that’s been asking for her.”

  “A woman?”

  “You’re not kidding.” He made the hourglass gesture with his hands. His wiping-rag flapped in the air. “Big blondie in a purple dress. I made change for her.”

  “Change for what?”

  “So she could phone long-distance. She gimme a fifty-dollar bill out of her shoe.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Up the hike.” Harry pointed up Cedar Lane towards the central section of Palo Alto. “She ankled in here like her feet were hurting.”

  “Walking?”

  “Yeah. That struck me funny, too. She looked like class.”

  “Describe her.”

  He described her. It was the Wycherly woman.

  “You’re sure she was the one who made the phone call?”

  “I couldn’t be wrong about that. Right in the middle of it, while she was still talking, she hailed me over to the booth. She wanted to know the name of the nearest motel. That happens to be the Siesta. I told her she wouldn’t want to stay there. She said she would.”

  “And did she?”

  “I couldn’t say. She ankled off in that direction after she finished her phone call.”

  “Which direction?”

  “San Jose direction. The Siesta’s about a quarter mile that way, you can see the sign. It’s a crummy joint, like I tried to tell her. But she shut me up and went on talking into the phone.”

  “Did you hear what she said?”

  “Not a thing. I didn’t listen.”

  “How was she acting?”

  “Acting?”

  “I mean, was she drunk or sober—did she seem to know what she was doing?”

  “That’s what the other fellow wanted to know.” Harry scratched his head with black fingernails. “She walked straight, she talked straight. I guess you could say she was plenty nervous, though. Like I told the other fellow.”

  “Big boy with red hair?”

  “Naw, he wasn’t red-haired, and he was no boy. I think he was some kind of a doctor. He had the emblem on his car.”

  “What kind of a car?”

  “1959 light blue Impala two-door.”

  “Did he give you his name?”

  “Maybe he did. I don’t remember. I was pretty busy at the time.”

  “What time?”

  “Couple hours ago. I told him everything I told you. He went off in the direction of the Siesta.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “I dunno. He looked like a doctor. You know how they give you the once-over like you was a patient. He had thick glasses, I noticed that, and he was well-dressed. He had on a brown tweed topcoat that must of set him back plenty.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty-five—fifty maybe. He had grey in his moustache. Older than me. And heavier.”

  A road-grimed station wagon with an Oregon license came off the highway and stopped on the other side of the pumps. Three children in the back seat peered around with travel-drugged eyes, wondering if this was Disneyland. Jets went over. The driver of the station wagon gave Harry a Barney-Oldfield look across his wife. This was a pit-stop.

  Harry said to me: “That will be five-oh-nine. You want the stamps?”

  I paid him. “Skip the stamps. Keep the change. Thanks for the information.”

  “Thank you.”

  He ran around the pumps flapping his rag.

  The Siesta Motor Court stood on scorched earth near a truck-stop diner. Its sign advertised Modern Housekeeping Facilities. Its cabins had cracks in the stucco as if they’d been leaned on by a giant hand, not lovingly. The place was a couple of levels below the Champion Hotel, which was not the Ritz.

  I stopped beside the hutch marked Office, and climbed out onto crunching cinders. A cutdown A-model Ford
was parked in front of a cabin at the rear. I went and looked at the steering-post. Bobby Doncaster’s name and his address in Boulder Beach were on the registration slip. I wrenched at the door of his present address. It was locked. The window beside it was covered with a cracked green blind.

  A door opened somewhere behind me. A fat woman wearing a man’s sweater-coat over a flowered print dress came out of the office and undulated ponderously towards me. Earrings the size and color of brass curtain rings swung from her ears. She had soot-black hair with a single slash of white running back from her widow’s-peak like a lightning scar.

  “Roust out of it, you,” she said in a deep raw voice. “I know how to use this.”

  She showed me a little nickel-plated revolver. It looked tiny as a toy in her large dimpled hand. She was breathing hard.

  “I’m not a burglar, ma’am.”

  “I don’t care who you are. Roust out of it.”

  “I’m a detective. Put the gun up.”

  I displayed an old special-deputy badge that the L.A. sheriff had given me for not particularly good conduct. She was impressed. She pushed the gun down her dress, where the bivalve of her bosom swallowed it.

  “So what you want with us? We run a clean place. All that trouble last year was under a different management.”

  I was keeping one eye on the door of the cabin. “Is the redheaded boy in there?”

  “You want him?”

  “I’m not the only one.”

  She made a mournful face. “We’re not responsible for the people—”

  “That’s not the point. Is he in there?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see him come back.”

  I said to the cabin door: “Come out, Bobby, or I’m coming in.

  There was no response from inside. I leaned my shoulder against the flimsy door.

  “What you think you’re doing?” the woman cried. “You don’t want to bust the door. Wait a minute now.”

  She went away and came back jingling a key-ring. While she unlocked the door I took my gun out. It was gun day. I stepped into the dim blinded interior. It smelled of breaths and bodies. The furniture in the greenish gloom resembled underwater wreckage at a depth where nothing stirred.

  The fat woman pulled a chain that turned on the ceiling light. It shone through a white glass globe like a fly-specked moon on a peeling veneer chest of drawers, a rug the color of packed earth, a double bed that had been slept in. Its sheets looked as if a pair of cell-mates had passed the night twisting them into ineffectual ropes for some frustrated escape. On the floor beside the bed a canvas overnight bag lay unzipped. It was stencilled with the initials R.D. and contained a change of underwear, some shirts and handkerchiefs, toothbrush and toothpaste and razor, and a checkbook whose last stub showed a balance of two-hundred-odd dollars in a Boulder Beach bank.

  I glanced into the kitchenette. On the sinkboard a half-eaten hamburger with pink insides reposed on a paper plate. The dusty bland eyes of a cockroach regarded me from behind the remains of the hamburger. He was almost big enough to have eaten the other half. I didn’t shoot him.

  Back in the main room, the fat woman was lowering herself onto the bed. The springs groaned under her. Her voice was like a continuation of their sound:

  “I didn’t know if he came back or not, or if he was coming back. He must be, though. He left his bag and his car, and they didn’t check out.”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “His wife.” She couldn’t say it without a peculiar look. “Anyway, they registered as man and wife. I wondered if there was something funny at the time. But what can you do when you’re in the cabin business? Ask to see their marriage license and the results of their Wassermann test?” Her smile was rough and wry, like her wit. “What is he wanted for?”

  “Suspicion of murder.”

  “Too bad,” she said without turning a hair. “He looks like a decent boy. Maybe with her he was stepping out of his weight class. What did he do, kill her husband or something like that?”

  “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 pus
hed 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.”