The Wycherly Woman (18 page)

“Her aunt hated her?”

“Thatsa what she said. I tried to find out her aunt’s name, but she wasn’t saying. She wouldn’t even tell me her own name. I tried to ask her, what about her mother. That was
when she broke down, sort of. She said she might as well go back to the apartment. So I took her where she said. It was only a short haul, a couple of miles.” He grinned wryly. “It didn’t buy the kids no shoes, but I was glad I did it.”

I gave him five of Wycherly’s dollars. “That’s for the short haul.”

Pleasure and embarrassment struggled for his face. Embarrassment won. “Hell, I wasn’t pressing for pay. I only did what any man would do.”

“Keep it. I’m not finished with you.”

The words were wrong: fear danced up in his eyes:

“You think I
did
something to her.”

“No, I mean I want the rest of your story, all of it.”

He said with the fear still bright and hard in his pupils: “That’s all there is. I drove her up to her door and she went in. She offered me the wrist watch again, but I couldn’t take her wrist watch away from her.” He added with a kind of compulsive candor: “Besides, it was one of those deals that maybe next day the cops would be around asking me for it. She was trouble, see. I hate to say it about a young girl, but she was a lot different from the first time I saw her. She’d went downhill in a handcar.”

“In a week or ten days?”

“It can happen overnight.”

“What sort of a place was she staying at?”

“Nothing special one way or the other. One of those old apartment houses on Camino, down San Mateo way.”

“Show it to me.”

It was a two-story stucco building with decorative tiling along the roof-edge like red icing on a slightly decaying cake. The once-white façade was dingy, streaked with rust from the iron balconies on the second floor. They gave the place a barred-up, uninviting look.

Gallorini had pulled into the curb across from the building. I parked behind him and leaned in his window:

“You’re sure this is the place?”

“Uh-huh. I took a special note of it.” He was looking at it as if its shabby attractions fascinated him.

“Why? Were you planning to come back?”

“Maybe. Just to collect for the haul, you know.”

“In cash or kind?”

“I don’t get you.” His whole personality backed away from me. It left his face where it was, close up to mine, but empty. “You trying to get me in trouble? I didn’t do nothing to her. Would I lead you all the way down here just to put my own neck in a noose?”

It was an interesting question. Some murderers and sexual psychopaths did precisely that. Their necks kept hankering for the rope: they broke their arms trying to lasso themselves. I offered Gallorini a little piece of string:

“Which apartment is she in?”

“Upstairs corn—” He closed his teeth on the middle of the word.

“Did you go in with her?”

He shook his head so hard that his cheeks wobbled.

“How do you know she has an upstairs corner apartment?”

His eyes were small and troubled, squinched close in to the base of his big nose as if for protection:

“Okay, so I went in with her. She
asked
me to. She said she was scared to go in by herself.”

“What was she scared of?”

“She didn’t say. She was soaking wet and shivering with the cold. I couldn’t just
leave
her that way. I helped her out of her wet clothes, and then she kind of passed out on me.”

“Was she drinking?”

“Not with me, she wasn’t. Maybe she took a pill. Anyway, she got woozy. I helped her into her bedroom and put her to bed.”

“You do this for all your customers?”

“It’s happened before. I dunno why you’re giving me a bad
time. I didn’t do anything out of line.” He bit on his thumbnail and regarded me over his fist. “I gotta daughter of my own, see. Anyway, I had no chance to do anything even if I wanted to which I didn’t. This character barged in, see.”

“Who was he?”

“Some blondie guy. I thought at the time he was prob’ly living with her. He acted like he owned her.”

“What did he do?”

“Gave me hell and told me to get out.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Yeah, he’s a blondie guy, about my size. He had a little chin beard, and kind of bulgy blue eyes. He was a nasty-talking son but what could I do? I got.”

I
LEFT
G
ALLORINI
sulking at the wheel and crossed the street. A verdigrised metal sign beside the entrance bore the title, “The Conquistador.” Depending from it on a piece of wire was a small sign made of weatherbeaten cardboard: “Apartment for Rent.”

The wall inside the entrance was banked with brass mailboxes. Most of them showed the owners’ names on cards: nobody I knew. The card on number one was printed in green ink. Alec Girston, Manager. I pressed the bell push above it.

The front door buzzed ajar. The door of Apartment One was the first to my left. A stairway rose beyond it to the second floor. The air in the hallway was chilly and oppressive.

A woman’s voice said through the door: “What do you want?”

“You have an apartment for rent.”

That opened the door. A wispy-haired large-eyed woman looked out at me from the internal dimness:

“Mr. Girston isn’t here. Can you come back?”

“Not easily. I’m driving through. I noticed your sign and thought I’d see what you have.”

“But I’m not dressed.” She glanced down at the pink robe gathered carelessly at her bosom. She spread her hand on the dead white flesh above the robe. “I haven’t been too well this winter.”

She looked as though she’d been through a long illness. Her eyes were fogged by the basic doubts you get when your body lets go under you. The hollows of her temples and eyes were blue and sharply cut like shadows in snow. Though she wasn’t old, her mouth was beginning to seam.

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

The cheap words seemed to revive her spirits. “That’s all right. I’ll put something on and show you the flat myself. I think I can make the stairs all right.”

“The vacant one is upstairs?”

“Yessir. Were you wanting something down? Upstairs has many advantages. You get more light and air, especially when you’re on the corner.”

“This is an upstairs corner flat?”

“Yessir. It’s the most desirable one we have, when you consider the furnishings. They’re included in the rent.”

“How much is the rent?”

“We’re asking one-seventy-five on a year’s lease. The previous tenant had a year’s lease, it just ran out the end of the year. She left all her good furniture, which is what makes it such a steal.”

“Why did she leave it? Couldn’t she pay her rent?”

“Of course she could pay her rent.”

“I was only kidding. I believe I know her family, as a matter of fact.” We grew up together in the last twenty-four hours.

“You know Mrs. Smith’s family?”

“I think we’re talking about the same girl.”

“I wouldn’t call her a
girl
. She must be as old as I am.” The
woman touched her faded hair and looked expectantly into the mirror of my eyes. What she saw there made her insistent: “I swear she’s as old as I am, though she does her best to cover it up with her paints and her bleached hair.”

Illness had made her reactions self-centered and dull. I took the mild risk of showing her Phoebe’s picture. She stabbed at it with her forefinger:

“This
isn’t Mrs. Smith. It’s Mrs. Smith’s young daughter. She used the apartment for a while last fall.”

“I thought that’s what I said.”

Confusion puckered her eyes. It changed to concern, which wasn’t for herself.

“I hope she’s all right. I was worried about the girl.”

“What made you worried?”

“I don’t know. I never saw a young girl so sad and mournful. I would of tried to do something for her, but I was getting sick myself around about that time.”

“Around about what time?”

“The early part of November. She’s all right now, though, eh?”

“I haven’t seen her lately. When did she leave here?”

“She was only with us for a week or two—I don’t know how long exactly.”

“Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Not that I know of. Maybe my husband would know. I was in the hospital when she moved out. The flat’s been standing vacant ever since.”

“May I see it?”

“Yessir, I’ll put something on.” She plucked absently at her frilly breast. “You don’t have any dogs or children, do you? We don’t take dogs or children.”

“I live by myself,” I said. “Look, why don’t you give me the key and let me go up by myself?”

“I guess that would be all right.”

Her mules thumped softly away. I looked in through the
open door. Her living room, if living was the word, smelled of perfumes and medicine and chocolates. The outside light sliced fiercely at the cracks between the slots of the Venetian blinds. Thin slanting rays flaked with dust leaned across the tangled sheets of a studio bed in one corner. A table crowded with medicine bottles stood beside the bed.

The woman trudged back into the room with a key in her hand: “Number Fourteen, it’s the last one on the right.”

I went up the stairs and along the hallway to the end. While I was fumbling at the lock, a typewriter behind the door of the next apartment drummed a brief inscrutable message and fell silent. The door opened directly into a dark room. The switch in the wall beside it turned on no light. I crossed to the windows and pulled back the heavy drapes.

Through the ornamental iron balcony, I could see Gallorini at the wheel of his cab. His head was cocked up sideways towards me as if he suspected snipers. He saw me, and withdrew his head into the cab’s yellow shell. Behind me, behind walls, the typewriter rattled again.

The room was expensively and badly furnished in a stuffy “modern” style that had been fashionable two or three years ago and was already old-fashioned. Bulky square-cut armchairs and a divan covered with
bouclé
were grouped around a heavy free-form coffee-table. It reminded me of the three-walled rooms you sometimes see through the windows of furniture stores.

The bedroom contained a king-sized bed with a bare mattress which remembered the press of bodies. It was decorated in pink, with flouncy curtains and lampshades and wall-to-wall carpeting like pink quicksand. This room was so overpoweringly feminine that it made me feel enwombed.

I raised a blind and let in more light. A picture on the wall above the bed jumped out at me like a bright square chunk of chaos. It was very much like the Rorschach picture over Wycherly’s mantel in Meadow Farms. I took it off the wall to
examine it: blobs and swirls and jagged lightning strokes of oil paint, in a bleached wood frame, signed with the initials C.W.

I reached up to hang it back on its hook. Two or three inches below the hook, a hole in the pink plaster had been roughly plugged with white plaster. The hole had been about as big as the tip of my little finger, or a .45-caliber bullet. I took out my penknife to dig out the plaster plug, and then thought better of it as the typewriter behind the wall started up again like a lackadaisical woodpecker.

I formed a powerful desire to know if the hole had been made by a bullet and went clear through the wall. I made a rough estimate of its height from the floor, about six feet, re-hung Catherine Wycherly’s painting on it, and went and knocked on the door of Number Twelve.

A startling young woman answered. She had on a fuzzy orange sweater over a black leotard, no shoes. Her brilliant red hair was pulled up tight in a topknot and held in place by an elastic band. The topknot had a pencil skewered through it. Her eyes were the color of slightly adulterated sagebrush honey.

“I thought you were Stanley,” she whispered, but she didn’t sound particularly disappointed. Her honey-colored gaze poured down my frame. She adjusted hers to take advantage of the light behind her.

“I’m Lew. I’m thinking of moving in next door.”

“Oh. Good.”

“I heard you typing. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m working at the story of my life. I call it ‘Deep in the Heart of Darkness.’ You like that title?”

“I do like it.”

“I’m glad. Outside of Stanley, you’re the first person I tried it on. I thought
you
were Stanley. But Stanley doesn’t usually leave the shop until six.”

“Stanley’s your husband?”

“Not exactly,” she said, adjusting her posture a few inches here and there. “He’s letting me live with him while I finish my whatchamacallit—autobiography.” She was one of those whispering girls who said loud things.

“You’re young to be writing an autobiography.”

“I’m older than I look,” she said. “Twenty-four. I’ve had a very full life, and people kept telling me I should write it up. I mean, look how Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg cleaned up, writing up their youthful experiences. I’ve had many varied experiences.”

“I bet you have.”

“You may have heard of me. Jezebel Drake?”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“It’s just my professional name, my real name’s Jessie. Who wants to be a Jessie? So I called myself Jezebel after the song, and Drake after the hotel. I stayed there once, when I was in the chips. Which I am going to be again. I’ve got the looks. I’ve got the talent.”

She was talking more to herself than she was to me. I’d run into other young women like her: they believed the dream they lived in was their own dream because they had featured roles in it. She remembered me:

“Can I do anything
for
you?”

“I can think of several things. At the moment I’m trying to find out about the construction of this building.”

“The
building?”

“The building. I work nights and sleep days. I want to be sure the walls are fairly soundproof.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Confidential work.”

She gave me another long slow look, estimating my value as material for autobiography. “Secret scientific stuff, like?”

“If I told you it wouldn’t be secret, would it? Do you mind if I check the walls on your side? I’ve already checked on my side.”