The Wycherly Woman (33 page)

“Homer and Helen aren’t the type. They’ll outlive us both.”

“I know. I almost wish you’d never come back to me, Cully. When I’m away from you, I want you all the time. And then when we do get together, you want to talk about money and problems and things.”

“I didn’t
make
this problem.”

“Who made it if you didn’t?”

“All right, we made it together. The fact that we’re both in it doesn’t help much. The overriding fact is the fact that Phoebe saw us tonight, in compromising circumstances.”

“So I’m compromised. Again.”

“You don’t seem to get the picture,” he said urgently. “Everything is on the point of blowing up in our faces.”

“Let it blow.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “We have to keep the situation as it is.”

“Why do we have to keep it as it is?”

“For the sake of everyone concerned. Not just you and me, but Phoebe too.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to her.”

“What can you say?”

“She might as well know the truth. If I tell her you’re her father, that ought to head her off.”

“Tell her that she’s a bastard?”

“Bastard is just a word. I think of her as a love-child. I’ve wanted to tell her that she was our love-child ever since she got old enough to understand. This seems like a good time to do it.”

“I absolutely forbid it,” Trevor said. “If Phoebe is told, if anyone is told, the whole thing’s bound to come out.”

“What if it does?”

“It’s not going to. I’ve lived a split-level life for twenty years, suppressing my real feelings, covering up. I’m not going to let you make nonsense of it now.”

“You want her to inherit the money, don’t you?” she said softly.

“It’s a reasonable wish for my daughter.”

“Always money. Haven’t you learned it isn’t that important?”

“You can say that because you’ve had it.”

“I haven’t always had it, any more than you. Anyway, she could inherit the money, whether or not I told her who she is.”

“You’re wrong. You don’t know Phoebe.”

“I ought to, she’s my daughter.”

“She’s my daughter, too,” he said, “and in some ways I
know her better than you. In the long run she’s incapable of lying–”

“So we go on doing her lying for her?”

“I’m certainly not going to let you tell her the truth about her parentage. The truth is supposed to make you free, but it doesn’t. The less people know of the truth, the better for them.” He spoke with a kind of dry and abstract anguish.

“Okay, Cully, don’t tie yourself in knots. I won’t tell her. We’ll let things lie. Let them lie.” She seemed to savor the doubleness of the words. “Now let’s think happy thoughts for a change. Shall we?” She waited. “Think about me?”

“I think about you every day of my life.”

“That’s better. And you really love me, don’t you?”

“I love you passionately,” he said without much passion.

“Show me, Cully.”

The bed creaked. Sally Merriman bent forward and switched off the recorder. Her eyes and mouth were bright.

“That’s all there is. Who are they, anyway?”

“Paola and Francesca in middle life.”

“Paola and Francesca? They don’t sound much like foreigners to me. They sound like you and I. Besides, she called him Cully.”

I made no comment.

“Did this Cully knock off Ben?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said the tape would clue you in on who did it.”

“Did I?”

“You’re trying to con me. You know who they are.”

“Maybe. I don’t intend to tell you. One of them is dead. The other might as well be.”

“Which of them is dead?”

“The woman.”

Her eyes went dark. “But she sounded so
alive!”

“She looks so dead.”

She took it as a personal threat. “Is everybody dying?”

I looked past her at our images in the glass. We were huddled together in a small lit space suspended in darkness over the long fall. “Sooner or later,” I said.

“How old was she?”

“Thirty-nine or forty.”

“What did she die of?”

“Life,” I said.

“Is that supposed to be a gag?”

“I’m feeling a little depleted.”

She sat in silence for a while, then rose and stretched, letting me see the weight of her breasts lifting under her muumuu. “So am I feeling depleted, if the truth be knownst. How about a little drinkie? I have some gin in the kitchen.”

The voices on the tape seemed to have excited her. Whatever her feelings were, they accentuated her beauty. Her eyes were like peepholes into starred purple darkness. I suspected that she could be had for the taking.

“Thanks. I have to be going.”

“But we need to talk about the money. I thought it would be nice if we talked about it over a drink like friends.”

“What money?”

“The money you’re going to pay me for the tape.”

“Oh. That.”

I stood up and took out my wallet and counted the money in it: two hundred and ninety-eight dollars. I separated out five fifties and handed them to her:

“Here’s two-fifty. That leaves me forty-eight bucks to get back to L.A.”

She crumpled the bills in her fist. “What are you trying to pull on me? Two hundred and fifty measly dollars! You’ll sell the tape for a hundred times that much.”

“I’m not planning to sell it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Hang somebody.”

“You’re not going to try and hang me?” Her free hand embraced her not quite classic throat. “I thought you liked me.”

“I like you, and this is the proof. If I wanted to hang you, I could do it with a quick call to the Hall of Justice. Or I could simply take the damn thing away from you. Instead, I’m giving you all the ready cash I can spare.”

While she stood and watched me, I rewound the tape and took it off the machine and slipped it into my jacket pocket.

“What can I do with a measly two-fifty?” she said, hugging the crumpled bills to her chest.

“You can make a down payment on two funerals. Or you can buy a ticket out of here.”

“Going where?”

“I’m not a travel agent,” I said from the neighborhood of the door.

She followed me to it. “You’re a hard man, aren’t you? But I like you, I really do. Are you married?”

“No.”

“I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know where to go.” She leaned towards me with a lost expression, hoping to be found. “Where can I go?”

Her body tempted my hands, in spite of the drowned one floating behind my eyes; in spite of all the old numb burn-marks which bodies like hers had left on my nerve-ends.

Try Ephesus. I was in a bad mood, but I didn’t say it out loud.

I
GOT TO
T
REVOR
in the morning. He was sitting propped up in bed in his blinded room. His hands lay quiet on the covers.

He raised one of them in a weak salute. “Archer. How are you?”

“How are you, Trevor?”

“Surviving, it appears. I have to apologize for falling by the wayside the other night. I suppose I should apologize, too, for giving you a mistaken identification. Though it was natural enough under the circumstances. Even Homer had trouble ascertaining that the dead woman was his wife.”

He was watching me with the ragged awareness of a poker player after an all-night game. I stood at the foot of the bed and matched his look. It was a high hospital bed, so that our eyes were almost on a level.

“You made a false and deliberately misleading identification, and I know why.”

He lifted his hands like twin burdens and dropped them on his shrouded thighs. “So it’s like that. You’ve been doing some fairly deep digging, have you?”

“Digging your grave. Do you want to talk about the mess you’ve made?”

“Nothing would give me greater pain.”

“Then I’ll do the talking. The doctor didn’t allow me much time with you, and we have a lot of ground to get over. In the evening of last November second you picked up a poker in Catherine Wycherly’s house in Atherton and beat her fatally. I expect she was desperate and on the point of blowing the whistle on you: your motive was to silence her. But she didn’t die right away. She lived long enough to tell Phoebe that her father was responsible for the crime.

“Phoebe naturally assumed that she meant Homer. She’s very fond of Homer, and in the shock of the event she decided to take the blame on her own shoulders. Her obvious purpose was to protect her father. Dr. Sherrill would probably have a more complicated explanation.”

“You’ve talked to Sherrill?”

“Yes, and I’ve talked to Phoebe. I also have a tape recording
of a conversation in which you and Catherine Wycherly discussed the fact that Phoebe was your child. The tape was made the night Phoebe saw you and her mother together in a taxi in San Mateo. You may recall the occasion.”

“I should. It was the beginning of all this. It’s appropriate to have it recorded for posterity.” He looked at me from eyes like rotting ice. “Does Phoebe know I’m her father?”

“No. She never will if I can help it. She has a chance for happiness, or at least a little peace, and you’re not going to louse it up again. She’s been living in the hell you and her mother fixed for her—two months in the hands of blackmailers, taking your rap for you. She finally broke down a few days ago and told Ben Merriman what her mother had said before she died: that her father was the guilty one.

“It meant something different to Merriman from what it meant to Phoebe. Merriman had the tape, and knew who her father was. When he got back from Sacramento he phoned your office and made an appointment with you. He was loaded with the money that he’d extorted from Phoebe, but he saw the possibility of more—an annuity for the rest of his life, or at least the rest of yours. He told you to meet him in the house where you had killed Catherine. No doubt that was part of his plan to screw up the pressure on you.

“He screwed it up too tight, and you repeated your crime. You rode a commuter’s train down from the City, got off at the Atherton station, walked to the house and kept your appointment with Merriman, walked back to the Atherton station, boarded the next train and got off a few minutes later to meet your wife in Palo Alto. No wonder you were looking sick when she drove you home. You’re looking sicker now.”

Trevor winced against his pillows, and covered his face with his hands. He didn’t seem to be overcome with emotion. He simply didn’t want me looking at his naked face.

“That left Stanley Quillan. Stanley wasn’t as tough as Merriman, he wasn’t as smart, and he didn’t know as much. He
must have known your name, though, and been aware of the contents of the tape. He made it, after all. When he needed getaway money, he called you. You gave him a bullet in the head. Was it Merriman’s gun you used?”

Trevor sat hidden-faced and still. He wasn’t even breathing.

“Is that the way it happened, Trevor?”

He took his hands away from his face. It cost him an effort that made him gasp.

“More or less. It’s strange to hear it from the outside. You make it sound so crude and senseless.”

“It was really sensible and civilized?”

“Hardly. But let me ask
you
a question. What would you do if a pair of shakedown artists threatened the entire structure of your life, and you saw no way out?”

“Perhaps the same as you,” I said. “Then I would have to pay for it. Better to keep your nose clean in the first place.”

“You don’t understand.” I was hearing that from all sides. “You don’t understand how a man’s life can go sour. You start out with an innocent roll in the hay, and you end up having to kill people.”

“Twenty-odd years is a long time to be innocently rolling in the hay.”

“I see there’s no use trying to explain.” But he went on explaining: “I’m scarcely the bold seducer. Kitty was the only other woman in my life. I had no designs on her when she came into our house, though she was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. So fresh, so young. She was only eighteen. I kept my hands off her.”

“And that’s why you’re not here with her death on your hands.”

He hardly seemed to hear me. “She was the one who took pity on me. Sex is a dirty word to my wife: she lost a child in the first year of our marriage: after that I never slept in her room. I was still a young man when Kitty came to stay with us.
She saw my need for her, and she took pity on me. She came to my room one night and offered herself to me.

“It wasn’t entirely a deed of charity. She was due to be married to Homer in a few weeks, and she was a virgin. She elected me to break her in. It doesn’t sound romantic, I know, but we caught fire from each other. I learned what it is to treasure a woman’s body. For a week or two of nights, I was back in Eden with the dew on the grass.

“Then Kitty missed a period, and got scared. I couldn’t catch her. I wanted to, of course. But I had a way to make, and a wife. Helen would have stripped me, with Homer’s willing assistance. I’d worked my way up from a twenty-dollar-a-week job in the Meadow Farms bank, and I couldn’t see myself starting all over again at thirty-two. We did the best we could with the situation. Kitty let Homer have her before their wedding and convinced him when the baby came that it was slightly premature.

“The next few years were rugged ones for me. It grew on me like a disease—the realization that I’d had the one thing worth having. A little warmth and companionship in the void. I’d had it and given it up, in favor of security, I suppose you’d call it. Security. The great American substitute for love.”

“But you went on seeing her.”

“No, I did not, except of course in the most casual way. She wanted to give her marriage a chance, she said. I found out years later that she was deeply offended with me for not divorcing Helen and marrying her.

“She was in love with me,” he said with mournful pride. “Naturally her marriage didn’t work out. I doubt it would have worked out if I had never existed. She and Homer lived like enemies, fighting over the child. My child. You know what Bacon has to say about your children: that they’re your hostages to fortune. It’s a grinding thing to know that and feel
it, as I have, and be unable to do anything much about it. I sat on the sidelines watching them make a hash of Phoebe’s life as well as their own. The not so innocent bystander.