The Wycherly Woman

by Ross Macdonald

  “Then he’s a liar.”

  “Somebody’s lying,” I said. “We both know it isn’t me. You offered me money to kill a man named Merriman. He was dead at the time. Were you aware of that?”

  She stared at me over her fist, stared and flared and glared, in fear, in anger, in doubt, in surmise, in bewilderment. I’d never seen such changeable eyes as she had.

  “I killed him.” She turned to the doctor. “Tell him about the people I’ve killed.”

  He shook his head slowly. I said:

  “I’d like to know how you did it. You didn’t do it through me.

  “No, that was just play-acting. I knew he was dead, naturally. I had already killed him. I did it with my own hands.”

  Her voice was calm, almost toneless. Sherrill caught my eye. He held out his hands and brought them close together. Cut it short. But I was convinced that the girl was lying, that she was one of that strange and devious tribe who improvised confessions to other people’s crimes. I did a little improvising of my own:

  “They found poison in Merriman’s stomach—enough arsenic to kill a horse. You poisoned him first and then beat him. Where did you get the arsenic?”

  Her head rocked back, but she answered smoothly, too smoothly: “I bought it in a drugstore on K Street in Sacramento.”

  “Where did you get the shotgun you used to blow Stanley Quillan’s head off?”

  “I bought it in a pawnshop.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Because it never happened. Quillan was shot with a small hand-gun. Merriman had no arsenic in his stomach that I know of. You’re confessing to crimes that never even occurred.”

  She looked at me as if I was trying to rob her of something precious. Her hand fumbled at her face, pushed back her dyed tinsel hair from her forehead. She said in a voice that sounded ventriloquial, piped in from another room where a child was reciting a lesson:

  “I did so kill them. I can’t remember the details, it all seems so long ago. But you’ve just got to believe me.”

  “Why do we have to believe you? Who are you covering for?”

  “No one. I did it all by myself. I want to be punished for it. I killed three people, including my own mother.”

  She was being punished now. Her forehead was a helmet of white pain pressing down on her eyes. She hid them with her hands.

  Sherrill took me by the elbow and drew me to the far side of the room. “I can’t let this go on,” he said in an earnest whisper. “There are limits to what you can get out of people by cross-questioning.”

  “But she’s been lying. I don’t believe she killed anyone.”

  “Neither do I now. I am her doctor, however, and I don’t like the quality of her lies. They’re very important to her. If we take away the whole structure at once, I can’t predict the consequences. She’s been living for weeks in a half-world where lies and truth are all mixed up. It’s dangerous to try and pull her out of it in one night.”

  “Why?”

  “Her lies are probably being used to mask an actual guilt which she can’t face.”

  “Or an actual person whose skin she wants to save?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m groping just as you are.”

  Phoebe was watching us between her fingers. She closed them like scissors when I looked directly at her. I turned back to Sherrill:

  “You think she’s really guilty of something?”

  “I think she thinks she is.” He was pale and sweating in his earnestness. “I’m more concerned with what she thinks than with the objective fact. That has to come to me refracted through her mind, otherwise I can’t reach her.”

  “You can guess at the objective fact.”

  “Yes. It may have to do with those letters her family received. They’ve been very much on her mind.”

  “I hear you talking about me,” Phoebe said across the room. “It isn’t good manners to whisper about a person in her presence.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

  “I don’t care, not really. If you want to talk about the letters, why don’t you say so out loud?”

  “All right. Did you write them, Phoebe?”

  “No, that’s one sin I haven’t got on my conscious—on my conscience. But I was the cause of it all.”

  Sherrill sat on the bed, suddenly and completely absorbed in his patient. “What were you the cause of?”

  “The whole awful mess. I told Aunt Helen about them, you see.” She added with a kind of hushed melodrama: “I lit the fuse that blew everything to pieces.”

  “Who is Aunt Helen?”

  “Father’s sister, Helen Trevor. She drove me home to Meadow Farms last Easter, and on the way I mentioned that I’d seen them. I didn’t realize what it meant—” She shook her head violently. “I’m lying again. I did know what it meant. I was jealous of them.”

  “Who were you jealous of?”

  “Mother and Uncle Carl. I saw them together late one night, when I was coming down from the city with a boy. We stopped for a red light in San Mateo, and this taxi stopped beside us. Mother and Uncle Carl were in it, with their arms around each other. They didn’t notice me. They were all wrapped up in each other.

  “I brooded about it for a week or two, and then when I had the chance I told Aunt Helen. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t say a word all the way to Meadow Farms. But when the letter came next day I knew who had written it. I could see it on her face at the breakfast table.”

  “But you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “I was afraid to. I’ve always been afraid of Aunt Helen. She’s so sure of herself, so pure, so righteous. Besides it was really my fault. I knew what I was doing when I told her about them, and what would happen.” She said in a rough, hoarse voice which didn’t sound like her own: “Divorce, and destruction, and death.”

  “Did Aunt Helen kill your mother?” Sherrill said.

  “No. It was partly her fault. But mostly mine.”

  “You didn’t do it yourself, did you?”

  She shook her bright unkempt head. Her eyes were changing again. She looked like a girl with a secret she wanted to lose:

  “Mother was already dying when I got there. The door was open, and I heard her moaning.” Phoebe moaned. “I don’t want to talk about it.” But she went on, as though a barrier had broken in her mind: “I found her in the drawing room lying in her blood. I held her poor head in my arms. She knew me. She couldn’t see, but she knew me by my voice. She said my name before she died.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “I asked her who hurt her. She said it was my father. And then she died. I sat there on the floor with her head in my lap. I was afraid to move for a long time. I’d never seen a dead person, except for Grandfather a long time ago. But after a while I wasn’t scared any more. All I felt was pity for her. Pity for both of them.” She raised her face. It was bright with candor. “They had such a rotten life together. It was such a rotten way for it to end.”

  I said: “Did your father ever threaten to kill your mother?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “That day on the ship?”

  “Yes.” She was breathing quickly through widened nostrils. “She said he was going away and leaving her practically penniless. He said she threw her money away and would never get another cent from him. She said if he didn’t help her, she’d ruin his name in California. That’s when he threatened to kill her. Then he got some ship’s officers to take her away.

  “I felt sorry for her. I invited her to ride along in my taxi and I tried to cheer her up a little bit. She wanted me to come to Atherton with her. I couldn’t, because Bobby was waiting at the hotel. I promised to come and visit her that evening. But Father got there first.”

  “Did you see him in Atherton?” I asked her.

  “No. All I have to go on is what she said. I remember her exact words. I think I do. ‘Your father did this
to me,’ she said, and then she died. I told Bobby I did it so that he would help me. It was a dirty trick to play on Bobby, but Father came first. I had to protect Father. When the Merriman fellow came in, I told him the same thing, and he believed me.”

  Phoebe had slumped forward with her elbows on her knees. She pressed her head between her hands as if she hoped to squeeze it empty of pain. Sherrill and I exchanged a long look across her. She said:

  “I still don’t understand how Father got there. He was already supposed to be at sea. Did he use a helicopter or something?”

  “He didn’t have to. The sailing was delayed by engine trouble.”

  “What will they do to him? Will he be executed?”

  “There’s no danger of that,” I said. Men with money never saw the inside of the gas chamber.

  “They’ll put him in jail, though, won’t they? Father is so sensitive. He won’t be able to stand that.”

  “He may not be so very sensitive. Remember that three people have died violent deaths.”

  “Father didn’t kill those horrible men. I’ll never believe that he did.”

  “You’ve been acting on the belief,” I said. “Isn’t that why you tried to take the blame for all three killings?”

  She answered my question with another: “But why would he do such a thing? He didn’t even know them. Father had nothing to do with people of that sort.”

  “He probably made their acquaintance very quickly in the last few days. My guess is they approached him and tried to blackmail him, just as they’d been blackmailing you, and your mother before you.”

  “I see. So that’s my fault, too.”

  “Do you want to explain that, Phoebe?” Sherrill asked her.

  “No. There are things that can’t be said.”

  “There’s nothing that can’t be said.”

  She gave him a slanting sidewise look. “You don’t know what I did, what I really did.”

  “I’ll know if you tell me. It can’t be so very terrible.”

  “You think not?” She was full of guilt again. She seemed to have an inexhaustible reservoir of guilt.

  I said: “Did you finally break down and tell Merriman that your father had killed your mother?”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “When did you tell him, Phoebe?”

  “The last time I saw him. Was it three days ago? Anyway, I betrayed my father. I made the whole thing in vain. The whole horrible two months were all in vain. I told that man my mother’s dying words. I should have cut out my tongue first.”

  “Did he use force to get it out of you?”

  “No. I don’t even have that excuse. It was afterwards that he hit me, when he wanted to make love to me, and I wouldn’t let him, I never let him.”

  “Why did you tell him that your father was guilty?”

  “I’m a moral weakling, I guess. I couldn’t take it. I spilled out everything to him that last time. I’m always spilling out everything I know and then there’s death and destruction and it’s always all my fault.”

  Her voice had taken on a hysterical rhythm. Sherrill leaned forward and touched her anguished face:

  “Don’t blame yourself, Phoebe. You can’t assume all the sins of the world. You’ve had a dreadful two months and nobody blames you for anything you did.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was dreadful. I almost decided to kill myself more than once. But I couldn’t do that to my unborn baby. I took up drinking instead, drinking and eating. I had to do something to take my mind from the way I was forced to live. The crumminess of it.” She grimaced. “It was the crumminess I couldn’t stand—that awful apartment where Mother used to stay, and Merriman and his brother-in-law watching me all the time. They kept me there like a prisoner and made me practice Mother’s signature.

  “Then in Sacramento they told me to get my hair dyed and wear Mother’s clothes.”

  “So that you could cash her checks?” I said.

  “The checks were part of it. Merriman also said if I assumed her identity that no one would know she’d been killed. He wanted to keep the whole thing quiet until we got the big check at the end, the one for the house. Until he got it,” she said bitterly. “He promised me if I co-operated and signed the check over to him, that he would give me money so I could go away somewhere and have my baby in peace. But he didn’t do it. He paid my hotel bill and gave me a few dollars for food and that was that, he said. Why should he finance a murderer? he said. And I broke down and told him I wasn’t a murderer.” She looked at us with the agonized purity of an addled saint. “I wanted to make sense out of all the suffering, but I couldn’t.”

  “You are making sense of it,” the doctor said. “You’ll be making more sense of it day by day.”

  “But look what I’ve done to Father.”

  “He did it to himself, Phoebe. It’s a fact you’re going to have to learn to live with. You can’t incorporate yourself with your father—with either of your parents. This isn’t entirely your tragedy. You tried to make it yours, but your part in it was really peripheral.” He shifted his weight forward, ready to get up. “Don’t you think we’ve talked enough for tonight now?”

  “Let her finish,” I said. “I won’t be here tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Let me finish.”

  She held out her hand in an imploring way. It was the first outward gesture I’d seen her make. Sherrill stayed where he was on the edge of the bed. He nodded slowly, and her voice rushed on like jangled music trying to follow the metronome of his head:

  “After Merriman went away, I sat up most of the night. Father’s ship had come in that day—I saw the notice in the Sacramento newspaper—and I told myself that I should go and warn him. But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t face him. I started to think all the terrible things, from the time I was three or four years old listening in bed at night. Listening to the two of them cutting each other. I was sitting there by the window of my room and it was three o’clock in the morning or so, it doesn’t matter, Scott Fitzgerald says in the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning. And I could actually hear them quarrelling through the walls and through the window. My poor dead mother and my poor live father.

  “They never stopped quarrelling. They were still quarrelling the day she died. I could see them in the dirty window mixed up with my reflection. I could hardly tell if they were in my head or in the night outside, or if I was just a reflection in the window, and only those jabbering words were real, whore and crazy and I’ll-kill-you. I started to say my name out loud, Phoebe, over and over. It’s a name they gave to the goddess Diana in Greek mythology. And the voices went away.”

  “You wrote your name on the window,” I said.

  “Yes. To keep them away.” She produced a wan half-smile, which faded as she turned to look at Sherrill. “That’s magical thinking, isn’t it? Does it mean I’m really insane?”

  “No. We all do it from time to time.”

  “I’ve been so afraid that I was going insane.”

  Sherrill smiled at her. “You’re not.”

  “But I’ve done so many terrible things.” She said to me: “The worst thing I did was when I tried to get you to shoot that Merriman.”

  “He was already dead. It did no harm.”

  “I must have been crazy. There was such a darkness on my mind.” She touched her temple with her fingertips. The memory of the darkness moved like clouds behind her eyes.

  “It’s lifting,” Sherrill said. “The proof of it is that you’re here, and of your own accord.”

  She flushed slightly and looked away. “I have a confession to make. Another confession. I didn’t really come back here from Sacramento of my own accord. I didn’t want to come. I wanted to go far away and never see anyone I know again. But Uncle Carl said that would be really crazy. He made me come back here with him. He drove me right up to the door yesterday morning.”

  “It’s not important how you got here. The point
is that you came.”

  “It may be very important, doctor.” I turned to Phoebe: “How did Carl Trevor get in touch with you?”

  “He made me promise not to tell anyone. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? He came to the Champion Hotel the other night.”

  “Which night?”

  “The night before last, I think it was. I’ve been losing track of the days and nights, but it must have been the night before last, because he made me move to the Hacienda. He said I couldn’t go on living in a place like the Champion. Actually, I lived in worse places than that while I was in Sacramento.”

  “How did he know you were there?”

  “He didn’t. He thought I was Mother. He threw his arms around me and kissed me and called me by her name.” She flushed more deeply. “When he saw that I wasn’t Mother, he broke down and cried.” She added grudgingly: “He must have loved her very much.”

  “Did you tell him she was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that your father had killed her?”

  “Yes. He said I mustn’t tell anyone else, ever.” Clefts of pain like knife-cuts appeared between her eyes. “But now I have.”

  “You’ve done the right thing.”

  “No. There was no right thing for me to do. All my choices were wrong. When all I wanted was a chance to go away and have my baby in peace.”

  “You’ll have your baby,” Sherrill said. “In peace.”

  She seized on the words with hungry eyes and mouth. “Will it be all right to have my baby? In spite of the heredity and everything?”

  “It would be all wrong not to.”

  “And Bobby? Can I see Bobby?”

  “Tomorrow if you like. It’s getting late, and you need rest.”

  “Yes. I’m very tired.”

  chapter 27

  I PASSED ON SOME OF MY new information to Bobby Doncaster. He was hardly able to believe that Phoebe was innocent of her mother’s death. I left him at the Siesta stunned with joy, I think.

  I still wasn’t wholly satisfied with Phoebe’s story. Unanswered questions nagged at my mind. One of them, the question of Homer Wycherly’s availability on the night of the crime, could possibly be answered by the steward Sammy Green.