Росс Макдональд - The Wycherly Woman

“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 co-operation 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.

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 population 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.