The Wycherly Woman (2 page)

He produced an alligator wallet and flipped it open. Phoebe looked up at me through transparent plastic. She was attractive, but not in any ordinary fashion. Careless light-brown hair swirled around her head. She had great blue lamps of eyes. Her mouth was wide and straight, passionate in a kind of ingrown way. She looked like one of those sensitive girls who could grow up into beauty or into hard-faced spinsterhood. If she grew up at all.

“May I have this picture?”

“No,” her father said flatly. “It’s the best I have of her. I can let you have some others if you like.”

“I’ll probably need them.”

“I might as well look them up now, while we think of it.”

He left the room abruptly. I heard him going up the stairs two at a time, then banging around on the second floor. Something crashed and shook the ceiling.

Wycherly bothered me. He was a gentleman of the old school, as such things went in the sixties, but there was a violence in him that kept breaking out. He pounded down the stairs and flung the door open so that it rebounded against the wall. His face was an uneven crimson:

“Damn the woman, she’s taken all my pictures. She hasn’t left me a single one of Phoebe.”

“Who?”

“My wife. My ex-wife.”

“She must be quite fond of the girl after all.”

“Don’t you believe it. Catherine was never what you’d call a devoted mother. She took the pictures because she knew I valued them.”

“When did she take them?”

“I presume when she went to Reno. That was last April. I haven’t seen her but once since then. She shook the dust of Meadow Farms from her feet—”

“Is she still in Reno?”

“No. She simply went there for her precious divorce. I believe she’s living somewhere in the Bay area, I have no idea where.”

“You must have some idea. Aren’t you supporting her?”

“That’s handled by the lawyers.”

“Okay, give me the name of a lawyer who knows her address.”

“I will not.” He breathed at me like a bull, or at least a good fat steer. “I don’t want you making any attempt to contact Mrs. Wycherly. She’d simply confuse the issue, give you a completely false impression of Phoebe. Of both of us, for that
matter. Catherine has a vile tongue.” His elastic lips bulged over a mouthful of words. To judge by his expression, they tasted bitter. “She said the most dreadful things.”

“When was this?”

“She came aboard the ship the day I sailed—forced her way into my cabin and attacked me. I had to have her removed.”

“Attacked you?”

“Verbally, she attacked me. And most unfairly. She accused me of leaving her penniless. Actually I was most generous with her—a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement, and ample alimony.”

“You say the divorce was in April?”

“It became final at the end of May.”

“Has Phoebe been seeing her mother since the divorce?”

“Absolutely not. Phoebe considered that Catherine had done us both a great wrong.”

“The divorce was Catherine’s idea, then?”

“Entirely. She hated me. She hated Meadow Farms. She had no regard for her own daughter, even. I know for a fact that after Catherine left here the two of them never met, except for that ugly moment in my cabin.”

“Phoebe was on the ship at the same time as her mother?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“Why ‘unfortunately’?”

“Phoebe was naturally shocked and horrified by the things my wife said. She did her best to calm her down, of course. She was really very good to her, I thought. Better than she deserved,” he added prissily.

“Did they leave the ship together?”

“Certainly not. I didn’t see them leave—frankly I was feeling under the weather after Catherine’s attack, and I didn’t venture out of the cabin again. But it’s unthinkable that Phoebe should have gone off with her mother. Quite unthinkable.”

“Did Phoebe have funds of her own? Could she have taken a plane or a train?”

“She could have, yes. As a matter of fact, I gave her quite a large amount that very day.” He went on in a self-justifying tone: “Her expenses at school had been running higher than she’d expected. She’d had to buy a car, and that put quite a dent in her allowance. I gave her an extra thousand to tide her over.”

“In cash, or by check?”

“Cash. I happened to be carrying a good deal of cash.”

“Where was she planning to go when she left the ship?”

“Back to the hotel. I had a suite at the St. Francis. I left it paid up a night in advance for her.”

“Was she driving her own car?”

“No. Her car was in the Union Square garage. She wanted to drive me to the dock herself, but I was afraid of getting caught in a traffic jam. I insisted we take a taxi.”

“Did she take the same taxi back to the hotel?”

“I presume so. She asked the driver to wait. Whether he did or not I can’t say.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He was a darkish fellow. That’s all I can remember. A small darkish fellow.”

“Negro?”

“No. More Mediterranean in type.”

“What kind of a taxi was it?”

Wycherly uncrossed and recrossed his thick tweeded thighs. “I’m afraid I don’t remember. I’m not a noticer.”

“Can you describe Phoebe’s car, or give me the license number?”

“I never actually saw her car. It’s some sort of a small imported model, I believe. She bought it secondhand in Boulder Beach.”

“I’ll find out there. Now what was Phoebe wearing?”

His gaze went up over my head, focusing on the plaster cornice just below the high ceiling. “A skirt and a sweater, both brown. A tan coat, kind of a polo coat. High-heeled brown shoes. Brown leather bag. Phoebe always dresses simply. No hat.”

I took out my pen and a little black leather notebook, turned to the first clean page, wrote ‘Phoebe Wycherly’ at the top of it, and under the name, ‘mother-Catherine,’ and ‘boy friend-Bobby,’ with a question mark. I listed her clothes.

“What are you writing?” Wycherly leaned towards me suspiciously. “Why have you written down Catherine’s name?”

“I’m practicing penmanship.”

The words slipped out. He was getting on my nerves.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“How dare you speak to me like that?”

“Sorry, but you’ve been crowding me, Mr. Wycherly. I can’t very well take on a case where whole lines of investigation are blocked off by the whim of my principal. I have to be free to follow the facts where they lead me.”

“But you’re working for me.”

“I haven’t taken your money yet.”

“Here.” He reached inside his coat, grinning at me fiercely, as if he felt a twinge of angina there. He slapped his hand with the alligator wallet. “How much?”

“It depends on how much of an effort you want. I usually work alone, but there are other people I can call in—men and organizations all over the country.”

“No. We’ll wait and see if that is indicated.”

“It’s your money. And your daughter. Have you considered using the police?”

“I talked it over last night with our local Sheriff. Hooper’s an old personal friend, he used to work for Father. It’s his opinion that we wouldn’t get much cooperation by simply filing a missing report. You have to have a crime, it appears, before
you can stir up the animals.” His voice was bleak, and it didn’t change perceptibly when he added: “Sheriff Hooper recommended you.”

“That was nice of him.”

“He said you had a reputation for discretion. I hope it’s justified. I don’t want any publicity in this thing, and I’ve had a bad experience with private detectives so-called.”

“What happened?”

“We won’t go into it. It has nothing to do with the present matter.” He was holding his wallet like a poultice against his stomach. “How much do you want for a start?”

“Five hundred,” I said, doubling the usual amount.

Without any argument, he dealt ten fifties into my hand.

“This doesn’t buy me, you know. I consider myself free to follow the facts.”

He managed to smile in a lopsided way. “Within the bounds of discretion, certainly. I simply don’t want Catherine spreading poisonous lies about—well, about me, and Phoebe.”

“What sort of lies does she tell?”

“Please.” He raised his hand. “Catherine has taken up enough of our time. It’s Phoebe we’re interested in, after all.”

“All right, you say she came to the boat to see you off, and that’s the last you know of her whereabouts. What was the date?”

“The President Jackson sailed November the second. It brought me back to San Francisco yesterday. I tried to telephone Phoebe as soon as we docked. I’d been concerned at having no mail from her, though not so deeply concerned as I should have been. She’s always been a poor correspondent. You can imagine the shock I experienced when her roommate told me on the phone that she hadn’t been there for two months.”

“Wasn’t the roommate alarmed?”

“I believe she was. But she’d managed to convince herself, or been convinced, that Phoebe was with me. She thought,
or said she thought, that Phoebe had decided at the last minute to go along on the cruise.”

“Had you discussed that possibility with Phoebe?”

“Yes, I had. I wanted her to come along. But she was just beginning her senior year at a new school, and she was eager to stay with it. Phoebe is a very serious girl.”

“And there was the boy friend.”

“Yes. I’m sure he entered into the picture.”

“What did Phoebe have to say about him?”

“Not very much. Presumably she’d known him less than two months. She only started at Boulder Beach in September.”

“I should be able to find out who he is from the roommate. Can you give me her name?”

“It’s Dolly Lang. I talked on the phone to both her and the landlady. They’re a pair of typical addlepated females who couldn’t seem to grasp the realities—”

“Landlady’s name?”

“I never did get it. No doubt you’ll find her on the premises. The address in Boulder Beach is 221 Oceano Avenue. I understand it’s near the campus. And while you’re out that way, you’ll probably want to talk to some of the people on campus who knew Phoebe—her teachers and advisers. I presume you’ll be going over to Boulder Beach today, there’s a good road through the mountains …”

He went on talking in a slightly frantic rhythm. I waited for him to run down. He was one of the managing sort who are better at telling other people what to do than doing anything for themselves.

I said when he had finished: “Why don’t you talk to the college people yourself? You’d probably get further with them than I could.”

“But I wasn’t planning to go over there today.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t drive. I detest driving. I simply don’t trust myself to do all the right things.”

“I don’t trust anybody else to do them.”

There was a silence between us, with a kind of stuffy intimacy involved in it. I realized dimly that we might just have exchanged our outlooks on life.

“Ride along with me if you like,” I said.

B
OULDER
B
EACH
C
OLLEGE
stood on the edge of the resort town that gave it its name, in a green belt between some housing tracts and the intractable sea. It was one of those sudden institutions of learning that had been springing up all over California to handle the products of the wartime copulation explosion. Its buildings were stone and glass, so geometric and so spanking new that they hadn’t begun to merge with the landscape. The palms and other plantings around them appeared artificial; they fluttered like ladies’ fans in the fresh breeze from the sea.

Even the young people sitting around on the grass or sauntering with their books from building to building, didn’t look indigenous to me. They looked like extras assembled on a set for a college musical with a peasant subplot.

A very young man who resembled Robinson Crusoe directed us to the administration building. I left Homer Wycherly standing on the steps in front of it, goggling around with a lost expression on his face.

I’d have laid odds that he was a lost man in almost any environment. On our way over from the valley, he’d told me something about himself and his family. He and his sister Helen were the third generation of the old valley family which had founded Meadow Farms: the town stood on his grandfather’s original homestead. The old man’s pioneer energies had dwindled in his descendants, though Wycherly didn’t
put it that way to me. His grandfather had made a farm out of semi-desert; his father had struck oil and incorporated; Homer was nominal head of the corporation, but most of its business was done in the San Francisco office, which was managed by Helen’s husband, Carl Trevor. When I stopped the car in front of Phoebe’s apartment, I made a note of Trevor’s name and address for future reference. He lived on the Peninsula in Woodside.

Oceano Avenue was a realtor’s dream or a city-planner’s nightmare. Apartment houses were stacked like upended boxes along its slope; new buildings were going up in the vacant lots. The street had a heady air of profits and slums in the making.

221 had a discreet sign painted on a board: Oceano Palms. It was a three-storied stucco building girdled by tiers of balconies on which the individual apartments opened. I knocked on the door of number one.

It opened slightly. A woman with iron-gray hair looked out at me as if she was expecting bill-collectors.

“Are you the landlady, ma’am?”

“I’m the manager of these apartments,” she said in a tone of correction. “We’re all filled up for the spring semester.”

“I’m not looking for living space. Mr. Wycherly sent me.”

She said after a pause: “The young lady’s father?”

“Yes. We were hoping you could tell me something more about her. May I come in?”

She looked me up and down with eyes that had seen them all and found most of them wanting.

“I very seldom have trouble with my girls. Practically never, you might say. Are you a policeman?”

“A private investigator. My name is Archer. I’m sure you don’t object to telling me what you know about Phoebe Wycherly.”

“I hardly knew her.
My
conscience is clear.” But her thick figure blocked the doorway. “I think you should take it up
with the college authorities. When a girl drops out of school like that, it’s their headache, not mine. Wandering off heaven knows where with heaven knows who. Whom. She only lived here for less than two months.”