The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  “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 wi
th 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.”

  “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.”

  chapter 25

  THE 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 t
he 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?”