The Wycherly Woman (30 page)

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.”

“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.”

S
HE 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.”

“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.”