The Wycherly Woman Read online

  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.

  chapter 2

  BOULDER BEACH COLLEGE 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.”

  “Was she a good tenant?”

  “As good as most, I guess. I’m not sure I ought to be talking to you. Why don’t you go over and talk to the college people?”

  “Mr. Wycherly is doing that. It will be nice if he can tell them that you co-operated with our investigation.”

  She considered this proposition, biting her upper lip and then remembering not to. A tuft of black hairs on her heavy chin quivered at me like displaced antennae.

  “Come in then.”

  Her living room smelled faintly of incense and widowhood. A square-faced man with an oblong moustache smiled from a black frame propped up on top of a dosed upright piano. The walls were hung with mottoes, one of which said: “The smoke ascends as lightly from the cottage hearth as from the haughty palace.” A radio murmured through the ceiling like a mild threat of modernity.

  “I’m Mrs. Doncaster,” my hostess said. “Sit down if you can find a place.”

  There was nothing on any of the chairs, nothing out of place in the small stuffy room. Except me. I took a platform rocker which creaked when I moved, so I sat rigidly still. Mrs. Doncaster sat down about eight feet away.

  “It’s a blow to me, losing a girl like this. I practically never have trouble with my girls. If they do get into trouble—I don’t mean serious trouble, we don’t have that—they come to me for help. I give them good advice, at least I try to make it good. Mr. Doncaster was a minister in the Church of Christ.”

  She bowed towards the picture on the piano. The movement seemed to dislodge her stuck feelings:

  “Poor Phoebe, I wonder what happened to her?”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “She didn’t like it here, that’s my opinion. She was used to a different style of living entirely. So she simply picked herself up and went away, to someplace she liked better. She had the money and the freedom to do it. Her parents gave her too much freedom, if you want to know what I think. And I don’t know what Mr. Wycherly thought he was doing—traipsing off around the globe and leaving his young daughter to fend for herself. It isn’t natural.”

  “Did Phoebe take her things with her when she left?”

  “No, but she had plenty of things, and she could always buy more. She took her car.”

  “Can you tell me the make and model?”

  “It was a little green car, one of these German imports. Volkswagen? Anyway, she bought it here in town, and you should be able to find out all about it. Most of my girls don’t have cars of their own, and they’re better off without them.”

  “I take it you disapproved of Phoebe Wycherly.”

  “I didn’t say that.” She gave me a hard defensive look, as if I’d accused her of wishing the girl into limbo. “I never really got a chance to know her. She was in and out, and back and forth in that little green car of hers. She had better things to do than talk to me.”

  “How was she doing in her studies?”

  “I don’t know. The college could tell you that. I never knew of her opening a book, but maybe she was so brilliant she didn’t have to.”

  “Was she—is she brilliant?”

  “The other girls seemed to think so. You can talk to her roommate Dolly Lang about that, and other things. Dolly’s a good girl, you can count on her to tell you the truth as far as she understands it.”

  “Is Dolly in the building?”

  “I think so. Would you like me to call her?” She started to get up.

  “In a minute, thanks. What does Dolly have to say about her?”

  Mrs. Doncaster hesitated. “I think I’ll let Dolly speak for herself. We don’t entirely agree.”

  “What’s the point of disagreement?”

  “Dolly thinks she meant to come back. I don’t. If she meant to come back, why didn’t she come back? Because she didn’t want to, that’s my opinion. This place wasn’t good enough for Miss Wycherly. She was constantly complaining about the facilities, objecting to perfectly sensible regulations. She wanted something fancier and freer.”

  “Did she say so?”

  “Not in so many words, perhaps. But I know the type. The first thing she did when she moved in was tear out all my good drapes, and put in her own. Without even asking permission.”

  “That sounds as if she meant to stay, and to come back.”

  “That isn’t what it means to me. It means that she was thoughtless—a spoiled rich brat who cared for nobody!”

  The ugly phrase hung in the room. A vaguely appalled expression crept over Mrs. Doncaster’s face, changing the hard mouth and transforming the eyes. They went to the pictured face on the piano with something approaching shame, or even fear. She said to the smiling oblong moustache, not to me:

  “I’m sorry. I’m all upset, I’m not fit to talk to man nor beast.” She got up and moved to the door. “I’ll call Dolly down for you.”

  “I’d just as soon go up. I want to see the apartment, anyway. What number is it?”

  “Seven, on the second floor.”

  I faced her in the narrow doorway. “Is there anything important you haven’t told me about Phoebe? About her relations with men, for example?”

  “I hardly knew the girl. She didn’t confide in me.”

  Her mouth closed like a mousetrap, not the kind that would ever cause the world to beat a path to her door.

  I went up the outside stairs to the second floor. Behind the door of number seven, a typewriter was stuttering. I knocked, and a girl’s voice answered wearily:

  “Come in.”

  She was sitting at a desk by the window, with the heavy drapes closed and the reading-lamp on. A small rabbit-shaped girl in a bulky white Orion sweater and blue slacks. Her eyes were blurred with what was probably thought, and her legs were twisted around the legs of her chair. She didn’t bother to disentangle them.

  “Miss Lang? I’d like to speak to you. Are you busy?”

  “I’m horribly busy.” She tugged at her short dark bangs, miming advanced despair, and gave me a quick little ghastly smile. “I have this Socio paper due at three o’clock this afternoon and my semester grade depends on it and I can’t concentrate my quote mind unquote. Do you know anything about the causes of juvenile delinquency?”

  “Enough to write a book, I think.”

  She brightened. “Really? Are you a sociologist?”

  “A kind of poor-man’s sociologist. I’m a detective.”

  “Isn’t that fabulous? Maybe you can tell me. Is it the parents or the children who are responsible for j.d.? I can’t make up my quote mind unquote.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that about your quote mind unquote.”

  “Is it boring? My apologies. Do you blame the parents or the children?”

  “I don’t blame anybody, if you want an honest answer. I think blame is one of the things we have to get rid of. When children blame their parents for what’s happened to them, or parents blame their children for what they’ve done, it’s part of the problem, and it makes the problem worse. People should take a
close look at themselves. Blaming is the opposite of doing that.”

  “That’s good,” she said enthusiastically. “If I can only get it into the right language.” She twisted her mouth around. “ ‘The punitive attitudes of the familial group’—how does that sound?”

  “Lousy. I hate sociological jargon. But I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, Miss Lang. Mr. Wycherly asked me to come and see you.”

  Her mouth formed a round O, and then pronounced it. A grey clayey color showed itself under her skin. It made her look years older.

  “It’s no wonder I can’t concentrate my mind,” she said. “When you think of that silly girl going off by herself. I haven’t thought of anything else, really, for two months. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, imagining what’s happened.”

  “What do you imagine happened?”

  “Terrible things. The things you think about in the middle of the night. Like in that Eliot play about Sweeney Agonistes.” She grimaced. “I had to read it for English 31. ‘Everybody’s got to do a girl in.’ ”

  She looked up at me as if I was Sweeney himself, about to do her in. Disentangling her legs from the chair she trotted across the room, a small bouncing white and blue blob. She flung herself on a studio couch where she ended up immobile, back against the wall, knees up, chin on her knees, watching me over them. Her eyes reflected the lamplight like new dimes.

  I turned the chair around and sat down with my back to the lamp: “Do you have any reason to think she was done in?”

  “No,” she said in a squeaky voice. “It’s just what I’m afraid of. Mrs. Doncaster and everybody else thinks Phoebe went away deliberately. I thought so too for a while. But now I think she meant to come back. I’m practically sure of it.”

  “What makes you sure?”

  “A lot of things. She only took her overnight bag, with enough clothes for the weekend.”

  “Did she plan to stay in San Francisco for the weekend?”

  “I think so. She told me she’d see me Monday, anyway. She had a nine o’clock class on Monday morning, and she was planning to be there. She mentioned it.”