The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  “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.”

  He sighed. He was coming out of two months in the moral deep freeze, beginning to feel himself alive in the world once more. His face was painful to look at. I stood up at the window. The woman with the parasol hadn’t moved. She looked as though she hadn’t moved or changed her style since 1928. A flight of blackbirds blew across the green and yellow sky. The man with the hanging head lifted his head and shook his fist at the disappearing birds.

  The light was beginning to fade. Somebody called the bird-hater into the building. Dutifully, he plodded in out of sight. A nurse wearing a cardigan over her white uniform approached the woman with the parasol. The two of them walked towards the building in slow time. A door closed.

  Twilight sifted into the room and gradually filled it. Neither of us bothered to turn on a light. I felt as cold and still as a fish in a dark bowl.

  The chair-leather creaked under Bobby’s hand. All I could see of him was his white face and his hands gripping the chair arms.

  “I can’t explain why I did what I did. I couldn’t see any other way to handle it. Afterwards I just kept waiting and hoping. Waiting to hear from Phoebe, hoping that something possible would come of it. I might have known that nothing possible would.” He said in a despairing voice in which a man’s deep tones were somehow mingled: “This is going to kill my mother.”

  “I don’t think so. I talked to her last night.”

  “Last night she didn’t know.”

  “She was suspicious, from the first. She believed that you’d done something seriously wrong.”

  “Mother thought that?”

  “Yes. She believed she was protecting you for a murder you’d committed.”

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I felt as if I had committed a murder. I dreamed on the bus going home that I had murdered her.”

  I didn’t know if he meant Phoebe or her mother or his own mother. I didn’t ask him. It seemed almost irrelevant in this slow-motion underwater world.

  Dr. Sherrill irrupted into the room. He closed the door quickly behind him, as though pursuers were reaching for the tail of his smock. He switched on the desk-lamp.

  “Mr. Archer, can you tell me how to get in touch with Phoebe’s father? I promised her yesterday not to, but the situation has altered.”

  So had he. His face was deeply troubled in the upward light.

  “Homer Wycherly should be in Terranova. We can probably reach him through the sheriff there. That can wait until you tell me what she said.”

  “What she said
is confidential.” The steady force behind his words was running stronger than ever. His voice shook with it.

  “It will stay confidential with me.”

  “I’m sorry. As a doctor, I have the right of silence where my patients are concerned. You have no such privilege under the law.”

  “You’re assuming trial conditions.”

  “Am I?” Sherrill threw a distrustful look at Bobby. “We’ll continue this in private, Mr. Archer.”

  “You can trust me,” Bobby said. “I’d never repeat anything that would hurt Phoebe. Didn’t I prove that in the last two months?”

  “This isn’t a personal matter. Please wait outside, Mr. Doncaster. All the way outside, if you don’t mind.”

  Bobby got up and went out, looking rejected. When Sherrill had closed the office door, I said:

  “Did the girl confess those killings? You can at least give me a yes or no.”

  Sherrill’s lips were tight. They expelled the word, “Yes,” as if it tasted sour.

  “Did she go into her motives?”

  “She outlined the circumstances. They provide a motive, certainly. I don’t think we’d better discuss them.”

  “I think we should.”

  “I can’t and won’t break a patient’s confidence.” The doctor sat down behind his desk with a kind of magisterial formality.

  “You may not have to. I got it from Bobby Doncaster that Merriman walked into Mrs. Wycherly’s house in Atherton and caught the two of them with her body. He used the situation to set up a blackmail scheme—not his first. Merriman and his brother-in-law Quillan had been blackmailing Catherine Wycherly before they got their teeth into Phoebe. They simply transferred the bite from mother to daughter. They kept Phoebe on ice for a while in her mother’s San Mateo apartment, then hauled her off to Sacramento and forced her to impersonate her mother—made her put on weight, wear her mother’s clothes, and so on, so that she could pass for her. The point of all this was to go on collecting Catherine Wycherly’s alimony checks, and eventually the check for the sale of the house which Merriman was negotiating for the dead woman. Phoebe had to keep her alive, you might say, long enough to cash the check and turn the proceeds over to Merriman.”

  “I see you know all about it,” Sherrill said. “It was a horrible scheme, a cruel refinement of punishment. The most horrible aspect of it was that it fitted in with the girl’s need to punish herself for what she had done to her mother. She also had a very strong unconscious need—I noticed it last spring—to identify with her mother. Even the forced feeding to put on weight coincided with her unconscious urges, as well as the fact of her pregnancy.”

  “You’re going too fast for me.”

  “Deliberately putting on weight, as Phoebe has been doing, can be an expression of anxiety and self-hatred. The self feels itself as heavy and gross and tries to invest itself with a gross, heavy, body. I’m simplifying, of course, but the general idea is recognized in the literature—in Binswanger’s classic case-history of Ellen West, for example. Lindner’s more popularized study of bulimia in The Fifty-Minute Hour is an even closer parallel, since Ellen West was psychotic, and Phoebe almost certainly is not.”

  “What is she, doctor? The question is legally important, as you know.”

  “I can’t make a diagnosis. Not yet. I think she hasn’t decided herself which way she’s going to go—towards reality, or towards illness. She’s still the same essentially neurotic girl who came to me last year, but now she’s under really terrible pressures. As she keeps saying, she’s been living in hell.” Sherrill’s face drooped with sympathy.

  “Why did she come to you last year?”

  “I never really got to the bottom of it. I only saw her twice, and then she terminated. Her resistance was very high: I couldn’t get her to talk about herself. Ostensibly she came to me because she was concerned about her family. Her mother was suing her father for divorce at the time. Phoebe blamed herself for the family breakup.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “It had to do with some scurrilous letters the family had received. Apparently they were the proximate cause of the blowup between her parents. I don’t pretend to understand the situation.”

  “Did Phoebe write those letters?”

  “It’s possible that she did. While she didn’t come right out with it, she seemed to feel responsible for them. You have to remember, on the other hand, that she’s a self-blamer, as many neurotics are. She tends to blame herself for everything that happens. This Merriman was lucky in his choice of a blackmail victim.”

  “Lucky is hardly the word. He ended up as the victim.”

  Sherrill looked at me as though he intended to speak. Instead he busied himself packing a pipe from a leather pouch. He lit it with a match whose leaping flame was reflected in his glasses. The circle of light from his desk-lamp filled up with shifting layers of blue-grey smoke. He narrowed his eyes, as if he was trying to descry a permanent shape or meaning in the smoke.

  “We’re all victims, Archer, until we stop victimizing each other. Not that I’m crying over Merriman. He deserved to die, if any man does.”

  “We all die, anyway, sooner or later. Too bad a sick girl had to be his executioner.”

  “She didn’t actually carry it out herself,” the doctor said. “At least she claims not. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you know so much already it seems pointless to hold back. She employed a professional killer to do the job, on both Merriman and—what was the other blackmailer’s name?”

  “Quillan, Stanley Quillan. Did she name the killer?”

  “She says she never knew his name. According to her account—and frankly I’m dubious about its accuracy—she ran into this thug in the bar of the hotel where she was staying, the Hacienda on the outskirts of Sacramento. She’d been drinking, and she was in a dark and vengeful mood. This fellow picked her up, they got into conversation, she happened to notice that he was carrying a gun. She invited him to her room and after some further conversation she paid him money on the spot to kill the man who had been tormenting her. That’s her story.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  “I have to believe that something of the sort happened. Her story is pretty circumstantial, but it can’t have occurred as casually as she says. You don’t just walk into a bar and pick up a gunman to do your killing for you.”

  “It has happened. Did she describe the gunman?”

  “Yes, in some detail, and it wasn’t the kind of detail you get in hallucination or delusion. There’s no doubt in my mind that he exists. He’s a man in his early forties, quite good-looking in a raffish way, she says, with dark hair, blue-grey eyes; about six feet one or two, heavily built and muscular, with the air of an athlete. She took him at first for a professional athlete.” Sherrill puffed more smoke and peered at me through it. “She might very well have been describing you.”

  “She was.”

  He yanked his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t understand. You can’t mean she hired you to murder those men?”

  “She tried to hire me to liquidate Merriman. That was two nights ago: Merriman was already dead. I went along with the gag, up to a point, because I believed she was Catherine Wycherly and I was trying to find out what she knew about Merriman’s death. She didn’t know about it at all, unless she’s a very good liar. She simply wished him dead, ex post facto.”

  “She’s certainly been lying to me.” Sherrill’s eyes held a hurt expression. It changed to a more hopeful one: “Isn’t it possible, in the light of this, that her entire confession is a tissue of lies? She may be trying to attach to herself all the guilt that’s floating around loose.”

  “Or she may have made a false confession to avoid making a true one.” I stood up. “Why don’t we ask her?”

  “Both of us?”

  “Why not? I’m walking evidence that she lied. The issue has to be settled one way or the other.”

  “But she’s in a very chancy condition.”r />
  “The whole world is,” I said. “If she can survive Merriman and Quillan, she can survive me. Anyway, you said yourself she didn’t know which way to jump, in the direction of illness or reality. Let’s give her another jump at reality.”

  chapter 26

  SHE WAS WITH a white-uniformed nurse in a softly lighted room. It was furnished almost as barely as a nun’s cell with a bed, a wardrobe, two chairs, in one of which she was sitting. Her face was turned towards the wall, and she didn’t move when we entered, except that the cords in her neck stood out more starkly. Under her plain hospital robe her large body was still as a beast in ambush.

  The doctor said: “I have to ask you to leave again, Mrs. Watkins. Stay within call, please.”

  The nurse got up and went out. The set of her back expressed her disapproval.

  “What is it now,” the girl said without looking at Sherrill. “Have they come to take me away.”

  “You’re staying here tonight, I told you that. I hope you can stay indefinitely, until you’re perfectly well.”

  “I’m perfectly well now. I feel perfectly well.”

  “That’s good, because I want you to do something for me. I want you to have a look at this gentleman here and tell me whether or not you recognize him.”

  He closed the door and turned on the overhead light. I stepped forward under it. Slowly, on a tense reluctant neck, her head turned towards me. Her face was clean and gleaming pale. With the heavy make-up gone from around her eyes and mouth, she had dropped about ten false years. But she still seemed old and harried for twenty-one. Her bruised flesh-padded features were like a thick mask through which her eyes looked out at me fearfully.

  We recognized each other, of course. I said with the best smile I could muster:

  “Hello, Phoebe.”

  She didn’t respond. She set the knuckles of one fist against her open mouth, as though to cut off any chance of speech.

  “Do you know this man?” Sherrill asked her. “His name is Mr. Archer, and he’s a private detective employed by your father.”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “He says you have—that you met at the Hacienda Inn in Sacramento the night before last.”