Росс Макдональд - The Wycherly Woman

“I thought you already had.”

“I mean in a full-scale way – divorce and remarriage and all the trimmings. I couldn’t face all that, and I told her so. She got more and more desperate, and more threatening. She was going to ruin me if I didn’t bail her out. The whole thing came to a head on that last day. Homer was leaving the country, rich and free; she was being swindled out of what money she had; she was under bad pressures. During the famous leavetaking in Homer’s stateroom, she was on the verge of blurting everything out.

“I went to see her that night, to try and make her understand what she was doing to me, to all of us. She wouldn’t listen to reason. Phoebe was coming to visit her, she said, and she intended to tell the girl the whole story. I tried to convince her that it was too late for that. When I couldn’t, I took the poker and silenced her, as you said. It was an ugly way for it to end.” He might have been criticizing a scene in a play.

“When did you undress her, and why?”

“She undressed herself. It was one of her means of persuasion which had worked on me in the past. But I felt no desire for her. For some time now the only real desire I’ve had is a desire for death. Darkness and silence.”

He sighed. “Everything was very silent for two months. I had no idea what had happened to Kitty’s body. I wasn’t even aware that Phoebe was missing. Normally I kept in some sort of touch with her, but I was afraid to do that now. I was afraid to do anything that might stir up the situation.

“Then Merriman called my office the other afternoon. He insisted I keep an appointment with him in Kitty’s empty house. You know the outcome of that. I searched Merriman’s clothes and car in the hope that he might have the tape with him. He hadn’t, but I found his gun, and the money.

“I had no intention of keeping the money for myself. If the other fellow – Quillan – tried to carry on the blackmail game, I thought I would use it to pay him off. I liked the irony of that.” He was making a desperate effort to hold his style.

“Why didn’t you do it if you liked it so much?”

“I tried to. I went to Quillan’s shop and tried to go through with the payoff. But he recognized the source of the money. He said things I couldn’t endure. I shot him with Merriman’s gun, as you guessed. It was a senseless crime, and I admit it. After I talked to Phoebe in Sacramento, I no longer had any real hope of pulling it out. I could have taken the money, I suppose, and left the country. But I had no heart for it.”

He heard the double meaning in the word, and touched his rib-cage in a gingerly way, as if it held a sick animal which might bite him.

“How did you reach Phoebe?”

“I found a bill in Merriman’s pocket, a paid bill from the Champion Hotel, made out in Kitty’s name. I conceived the wild idea that she had survived somehow, that Merriman’s accusation was only a bluff. I flew to Sacramento that night after I talked to Royal, rented a car at the airport and drove to the Champion. When Phoebe came to the door of her room I still believed she was Kitty. There was very little light, and I was very willing to believe it. I thought some miracle had saved her, and saved me.

“I took her in my arms. Then she spoke to me. She told me who she was and what she was doing there.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. There was nothing I could tell her, then or ever. I did do my best for her, though. I gave her money and got her out of that wretched room into a decent place. The Hacienda was only a temporary expedient, of course. I saw as I talked to her that she needed medical care. I was in need of it myself. I was so completely exhausted by this time that I had to lie down in the other room of her bungalow. I wasn’t up to so much stress and activity.”

“Like hitting people on the head with a tire-iron?”

“I’m sorry about that, Archer. I heard the two of you in her room. I had to stop you in some way. I was afraid she’d talk herself into a murder trial.”

“Or talk you into one.”

“There was that possibility, of course.”

“Your tense is wrong, and it’s more than a possibility.”

My words hung between us on the air. “Have you been to the police?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re planning to go to them, of course.”

“I couldn’t keep them out of this even if I wanted to, and I don’t.”

“It won’t do Phoebe any good to put me on trial for murder. She’s had her fill of disasters. She deserves a chance at life, as you yourself said. You don’t want to saddle her with the knowledge that she’s the bastard child of a murderer.”

“She doesn’t know you’re her father. She doesn’t have to.”

“It’s bound to come out if there’s a trial.”

“Who will bring it out? You and I are the only ones who know.”

“But what about Catherine’s dying words?”

“Phoebe can be persuaded that she misheard them.”

“Yes. She actually did mishear them, in a sense, didn’t she?”

Trevor sat and studied me. His eyes closed and opened from time to time, so slowly that he seemed to be alternating between death and life.

“Phoebe is my chief concern,” he said. “I care nothing for myself. I’m thinking of her solely.”

“You should have been thinking of her when you killed her mother.”

“I was thinking of her. I wanted to protect her from the ugly reality. It’s uglier now, and I still want to protect her. I believe I proved something when I brought her back to Dr. Sherrill. I knew the chance I was taking.”

“You proved something.”

“Will you do something for me, and incidentally for her? My clothes are in the closet there.” He gestured towards a door on the far side of the room beside the bureau. “I have some digitalis capsules in the pocket of my coat – more than enough to kill me. I tried to get to them before you came, but I collapsed and had to be lifted back into bed.” He took a breath which whistled in his nostrils. “Will you bring me my coat?”

I was still on my feet, facing him. Nothing had changed about Trevor except his eyes. They were glittering and sharp-edged like the broken blue edges of reality.

I didn’t know what I was going to say until I said: “In return for a written confession. It doesn’t have to be long. Do you have writing paper?”

“There’s some in the bedside drawer, I think. But what can I possibly write?”

“I’ll tell you what to say if you like.”

I got a tablet of stationery out of the drawer and handed him my pen. He wrote on his knee to my dictation:

“ ‘I confess the murder of Catherine Wycherly last November second. She resisted my advances.’ ”

Trevor looked up. “That’s rather corny.”

“What do you suggest?”

“No explanation at all.”

“There has to be one,” I said. “ ‘She resisted my advances. I also killed Stanley Quillan and Ben Merriman, who were blackmailing me for her murder.’ Sign it.”

He wrote slowly and painfully, frowning over his penmanship. I lifted the tablet from his blue-nailed hands. He had added after his signature:

“May God have mercy on my soul.”

And on mine, I thought. I tore out the page and laid it on the bureau, out of Trevor’s reach. Shadows lay tike sleeping dogs behind the closet door. Darkness and silence. We didn’t speak again.

The End