The Wycherly Woman (13 page)

“Sit down.” She patted the bed beside her. “Sit down and tell me about yourself, Lew. That’s your name, isn’t it—Lew?”

“Lew.” I sat beside her, keeping a space between us. “I’d rather hear about you. Do you live alone?”

“I have been.” She looked sideways at an inside door which led to another part of the bungalow.

“Divorced?”

“Divorced from reality.” She grimaced. “True confession title: Mother went to Reno to get a divorce from reality.”

“Do you have a family?”

“We won’t go into that. Or anything else about me. You don’t want to hear about me. I live in hell.”

The words were melodramatic, but there was a throb of horror in her voice. She tilted up her damaged face. Behind the dark glasses under the inert and swollen flesh, I could see the fine bone structure. She had once been a handsome girl, as handsome as Phoebe. She seemed to read my thought, and the pity in it verging on contempt:

“Do we have to have that light? It
kills
me.”

I turned on the bedlight and turned off the overhead light. When I came back to her, she had upended the bottle again like a crazy astronomer holding a telescope to her blind mouth. Her white throat shimmered as the whisky went down.

“Drink up,” she said in a thickening voice. “You’re making me drink alone, and that’s not cricket.”

“I have to drive. You’ll be passing out if you keep drinking at this rate.”

“Will I?” She raised herself and held the bottle upright between her knees. “It isn’t as easy as you think. Passing out. Or even if you do make it, you wake up in the middle of the night with the boogies. The boogies are fun.”

“You have a lot of fun.”

“I’m a fun girl from way back. Drink up your drink, then I want to ask you something.”

I took a swallow. “About killing people?”

“We’ll come back to that. I want to know if you have underworld connections.”

“Would I tell you if I had?”

“I mean it seriously. Alcohol doesn’t work too well for me, I find. I’ve been thinking I ought to try drugs. They say it’s the best way out there is.”

“Way out of where?”

“Living in hell,” she said quite casually. “I could use a little relief from all the thinking. And I’ve got some money, if that’s
what’s bothering you. All I need is the right connections.”

“You won’t get it through me. Stick to whisky.”

“But I don’t
like
to drink. I really don’t. I only use it to shut off the thinking at night.”

“Thinking about what?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She looked down at her body, discovered her bare knees, covered them with her skirt. “I’m so ugly since I put on all this weight. Aren’t I ugly?”

I didn’t answer her.

“It’s my ugly soul, it shows in my face. I’m an outlaw, just like you. I bet your soul is ugly, too.”

“No doubt.”

“Is that why you carry a gun?”

“I carry it for protection.”

“Protection against who? Whom?” Her lips had trouble forming the word.

“People like you,” I said with the best smile I could muster.

She wasn’t fazed in the least. She nodded solemnly, as if we were coming to an understanding. A cold quick frisson went up my back.

“Have you ever really killed anybody, Lew?”

“Yes,” I said, in the hope of unsticking the stuck record. “Eleven or twelve years ago, I killed a man named Puddler who tried to kill me.”

She leaned towards me confidentially. Her head gravitated towards my shoulder. She raised it, grasping the bottle as if it presented her only handhold in space:

“I’m being killed, too.”

“How?”

“Little by little, a piece at a time. First he ruined my soul, then he ruined my body, then he ruined my face.” She set the bottle down on the bedside table and removed her dark glasses. “Look what he did to my face.”

Both of her eyes were blacked. The bruises had been ineptly
touched up with liquid make-up. She put on the glasses again.

“Who did that to you?”

“I’ll tell you his name when the time comes.”

Her head subsided on my shoulder like a frowzy bird coming home to roost. She reached across my chest and touched the shape of the gun. Her fingers caressed it through the cloth of my jacket.

“I want you to kill him for me,” she said dreamily. “I can’t go on like this. Hell push me over the edge.”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll tell you that when you promise to do it. I’ll pay you well.”

“Show me the money.”

She got up with difficulty and started across the room towards the chest of drawers. She stopped in the middle of the floor, turned and went in a shambling run to the bathroom. I heard her retching through the open door.

I tried the other inner door. It was locked. I went to the chest of drawers and opened her lizardskin purse. It contained a clutter of make-up materials, lipstick, eye-shadow, liquid powder, tissues, a bottle of patent sleeping medicine, and a woman’s wallet made of red leather and decorated with rhinestones. The wallet was thick with bills. It also held a driver’s license issued the previous year to Mrs. Homer Wycherly, Rural Route Two, Meadow Farms; and a number of business cards. One of them was Ben Merriman’s.

I put everything back in the purse and snapped the silver clasp shut before she came out of the bathroom. She was staggering, and clutching her heavy stomach. Her face had a greenish tinge under the paint.

“I guesh I dunno how to drink,” she said, and collapsed on the bed.

I bent over her blind, deaf head. “Who is he?”

“Whoosh who?”

“The man you want me to kill.”

Her head rolled back and forth among the crumpled clothes. “Funny. I can’t remember ’shname. He shells real ’shtate on the Peninshula. He ruined me—ruined everything. I had to shpill everything.”

“Ben Merriman?”

“Thash the man. Did I tell you ’shname before?”

“What did you spill to him, Mrs. Wycherly?”

“Wunyou like to know?”

Her eyes closed. She went out like a light. Her mouth was burned dry by neat whisky, and her breath came harshly through it. I felt more deeply than ever that blend of pity and shame which kept me at my trade among the lost, battered souls who lived in hell, as she did.

I couldn’t rouse her again by ordinary means, talking or shaking her. I took the whisky bottle into the bathroom, emptied it in the sink and filled it with ice water; some of which I poured over her face. She woke and struggled up on her arms like Lazarus, looking at me out of underground eyes. Water dripped from her chin.

“What is this?” she said distinctly.

“You passed out. I was worried about you. I decided to bring you to.”

“You had no right,” she complained. “I’ve been trying all day to get to sleep. And all last night.”

She dabbed at her wet face with a corner of the bedspread. Her eye-shadow ran like the paint on sad clowns’ faces. I brought her a towel from the bathroom. She snatched it out of my hand, scrubbed her face and neck with it. With most of the make-up off she looked naked and younger. The bruises around her eyes stood out.

She blinked up at me. “What was I saying? What did I say before?”

“You hired me to kill a man.”

“Who?” she said like a child listening to a story.

“Don’t you remember?”

“I was awful drunk.”

She still was, in spite of the cold douche. The whisky would be coming back on her soon.

“Ben Merriman?” she said. “Is that the one?”

“That’s the one. Why do you want him killed, Mrs. Wycherly?”

She gave me a sly dull look. “You know my name.”

“I’ve known your name for some time. Why do you want Ben Merriman killed?”

“I don’t. I’ve changed my mind. Forget it.” She wagged her disordered bright head slowly from side to side. “Forget the whole thing.”

“That won’t be easy. Merriman is already dead. He was beaten to death tonight in your house in Atherton.”

“I don’t believe you.” But the horror that was in her like a chronic disease seeped into her eyes.

“You believe me.”

She wagged her head some more; it swung loosely on her neck. “Why should I? You’re just another liar. Why should I take the word of a cheap crook?”

“You’ll be reading it in the papers, if they let you have the papers in your cell.”

She got up unsteadily, looking at me with fear and loathing. “Nobody’sh gonna put me away. You get out of here.”

“You invited me in.”

“That wash the mistake of the week. Get out.”

She pushed her hands against my chest. I caught her wrists and held her:

“Did you have something to do with Merriman’s death?”

“I didn’t know he was dead. Let me go.”

“In a minute. I want you to tell me where Phoebe is.”

“Phoebe?” The sly dull look came back into her eyes. “What about Phoebe?”

“Your husband Homer employed me to look for her. Your daughter’s been missing for over two months. You probably know all this. I’m telling you anyway.”

“Who are you?”

“A private detective. That’s why I carry a gun.”

I let go of her wrists. She slumped onto the bed, digging her fingers into her hair as if she could hold her thoughts steady:

“Why do you come sneaking around me? I never see Phoebe. I haven’t seen her since the divorce.”

“You’re lying. Don’t you care what’s happened to her?”

“I don’t even care what’s happened to me.”

“I think you care. You wrote her name on the window of your room.”

She looked up in dull surprise. “What room?”

“In the Champion Hotel.”

“Did I do that? I must have been crazy.”

“I think you were lonely for your daughter. Where is she, Mrs. Wycherly? Is she dead?”

“How do I know? We haven’t seen each other since the divorce.”

“You have, though. On November second, the day your husband sailed, you left the ship with Phoebe—”

“Don’t call him my husband. He ishn’t—isn’t my husband.”

“Your ex-husband, then. The day he sailed, you drove away in a taxi with your daughter. Where did you go?”

She was a long time answering. Her face changed as she thought about the question. Her mouth moved, trying out words.

“I want the truth,” I said. “If you ever cared for your daughter, or care for her now, you’ll give it to me.”

“I went to the station. I took the train home.”

“To Atherton?” She nodded.

“Did Phoebe go along with you?”

“No. I dropped her off at the St. Francis on the way to the
Station. She never came anywhere near the Atherton house.”

“Why did you sell that house and hide out here in Sacramento?”

“That’s my own business.”

“Business with Ben Merriman?”

She kept her head down and her eyes hidden. “I’ll take the Fifth on that.” More than the cold water, the strain of the interview was sobering her.

“On grounds of self-incrimination?”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It isn’t. I want Phoebe.”

“I can’t give her to you. I haven’t seen her since that day in Union Square.” She couldn’t keep the feeling out of her voice, the sense of loss.

“You knew she was missing, didn’t you?”

There was another long silence. At last she said:

“I knew she planned to go away somewhere. She told me in the taxi that she didn’t want to return to Boulder Beach. She had a boy friend there, she wanted to get away from him. And other things,” she concluded vaguely.

“What other things?”

“I don’t remember. She wasn’t happy at college. She wanted to go away somewhere and live by herself and work out her own salvation.” She spoke in a steady monotone like a sleep-talker or a liar, yet there seemed to be truth in what she was saying, the truth of feeling. “That’s what Phoebe said.”

“What did you say?”

“Go ahead, I told her. People have a right to live their lives.” She raised her eyes to mine. “So why don’t you get out and leave me alone?”

“In a minute.”

“That’s what you said before. It’s a long minute, and my head hurts.”

“Too bad. Did she say where she was going?”

“No. Maybe she didn’t know.”

“She must have given you some indication.”

“She didn’t. She was going a long way, that’s all I know.” She might have been talking about her own long journey down. Grief pulled like wires at the corners of her mouth.

“All the way out of life?”

She shuddered. “Don’t say that.”

“I have to. She’s long gone, and people are dying.”

“You really believe Phoebe is dead?”

“It’s possible. It’s also possible that you know who killed her. I think you do, if she’s dead.”

“Think away, sonny boy. You’re away off orbiting by yourself, in an
eccentric
orbit. Why don’t you go away now, and be the first man in space?”

Her broken wit, her rapid shifts in mood and temper, disturbed me and made me angry. I said:

“You’re a strange mother, Mrs. Wycherly. You don’t seem to give a damn if your girl is dead or alive.”

She laughed in my face. I almost hit her. The horror in her was infecting me. I turned on my heel and crossed the room to the door, followed by girlish laughter.

A man was waiting for me on the other side of the door. His face was like a shiny, lumpy sausage, bulbous and queer under a silk-stocking mask. He swung a tire-iron in his hand. It came over in a looping arc and reached the side of my head before my fingers touched my gun butt. I fell backwards into the room and darkness.

B
EN MERRIMAN’S HEAD
hung like a ruined planet in the darkness. I crawled away from it and woke up scrabbling at the door of the room. The room was empty. It
was after three by my wrist watch, which I saw double. I had been out for some time.

My gun was still in its holster. I fingered the side of my head. It was wet and numb. My fingers got blood on them, dark as axle grease. I tried standing up. It worked.

The room was clean. The woman and her protector, if that is what he was, had left nothing but the empty bottle and my half-finished drink. I finished it.

I washed my cut head in the bathroom sink and improvised a bandage out of a clean towel. In the bathroom mirror, I looked like an Indian holy man who had run out of holiness and just about everything else.