“Ben is dead. Somebody killed him, and I thought he stood me up.”
She started out past me, walking like a woman in a trance. She collided heavily with the doorframe, leaned on the wallboard partition. The mimeographed sheet was crumpled in her hand. She dropped it and reached for the bottle.
I salvaged the piece of paper from the floor. The house on Whiteoaks Avenue had been listed at eighty thousand. The eighty thousand was crossed out and sixty thousand penciled in. There were other pencilings, faint and half-erased, which I couldn’t decipher. Mrs. Wycherly’s address was given as 507 Whiteoaks Avenue.
The woman set the bottle down three-eighths full. Leaning on the desk, she lowered herself into the swivel chair that stood beside it. She twisted her hair in her fingers. It was dark at the roots, as if darkness had seeped up in capillary action from her mind.
“The crazy old bastard,” she said. “I bet he did it to him. He came to our house last week and said he was going to do it. Unless Ben paid him off.”
“Who?”
“Mandeville. Captain Mandeville. He walked right up to our front door with a forty-five revolver in his hand. Ben had to slip out through the patio and let me handle him. The old guy is as nutty as a fruitcake.”
“What did Mandeville want?”
“What does everybody want? Money.” She looked at me levelly. The quick one-two of grief and gin had stunned her into sobriety. “He claimed that Ben cheated him out of the money for his lousy house.”
“Is that true?”
“How do I know? I lived five years with Ben, from pillar to post and back again. I never did find out what went on in his head, or where all the money went. I never even got a house of my own, and him in real estate. Call it real estate.”
“What do you call it?”
“I gave up calling it anything. He’d work harder to turn a crooked buck–” She glanced up at me again, her mouth still open. She had lipstick on her teeth. “Why are you so interested in Ben? You don’t even know him.”
“No, I wish I had.”
“What is this? What are you trying to pull on me?”
“Nothing on you, Mrs. Merriman. I’m sorry about what happened. By the way, who was the blond lad with the chin-beard?”
The fresh gin was rising in her eyes, disturbing their focus and dissolving their meaning. She used it as a kind of mask, letting her eyes go entirely dead:
“I dunno who you mean.”
“You know who I mean. He came in here looking for your husband.”
“Oh, him,” she said with bleary cunning. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not. Anyway, who are you to call me a liar? You said you were a prospect. You’re no prospect.”
“I’m a prospector. Who was he, Mrs. Merriman?”
“I dunno. Some jerk Ben bums around with – used to, I mean.” The two tenses coming together cut her like scissors. Tears or gin exuded between her eyelids. “Go away and let me be. You were nice before. You’re not nice any more.” She added as if she was completing a syllogism: “I bet you’re just a lousy cop.”
“No.”
For once I wished I was. The cops, the lousy cops, would be arriving any time now. I was far from home base and suitable for framing. I said good night to her and went out through the front office. On the way I picked up a blotter with Merriman’s picture on it.
A sheriff’s car with a dying siren drifted out of the traffic stream and took my place at the curb as I pulled away. Young heads at the drive-in across the road became aware of it, wondering if it had come for them. Some dogs in the kennels next door had begun to howl.
Chapter 9
I found Captain Theodore Mandeville’s address in the telephone directory at the Atherton station. He lived in a large residential hotel on the main street of Palo Alto. It had a grandiose pillared portico, and a chintzy little lobby in which the smells of lavender and cigars waged a quiet battle of the sexes.
The woman behind the desk, who looked like the probable source of the lavender, told me that Captain Mandeville was in. She called him on a house phone and got permission from him to send me up.
He was waiting for me when I stepped out of the elevator – a lean brown old man with white hair and moustache and eyebrows like small auxiliary moustaches. He had on a grey flannel bathrobe over a boiled shirt and a black tie. His eyes were crackling black.
“I’m Captain Mandeville. What can I do for you, sir?”
I told him I was a private detective looking for a girl. “You may be able to give me some information about her family. The girl’s name is Phoebe Wycherly.”
“Mrs. Catherine Wycherly’s daughter?”
“Yes. I understand you’ve had some business dealings with Mrs. Wycherly.”
“I have, to my sorrow. But I don’t know her personally, and I never met the daughter. Just what do you mean when you say that she is missing?”
“She left school over two months ago. The last word I have on her, she was leaving the San Francisco docks on the afternoon of November second. She was getting into a taxi with her mother. Any information that you can give me about the mother–”
He broke in: “You’re not suggesting that she abducted her own daughter?”
“Hardly. But she may know where the girl is.”
“I know where the mother is, at any rate. Is that any help to you?”
“It would be a lot of help.”
“She’s staying in a hotel in Sacramento – rather shabby quarters for a woman of her status. The name of the place seems to have slipped my mind for the moment. I believe I have it written down somewhere. Come in and I’ll look it up.”
He led me down the hallway to his apartment and left me in the living room. Its narrow walls were hung with photographs. In one, a beautiful woman smiled dreamily from under a cloud of black hair. Most of the others were pictures of naval vessels, ranging from a World War One destroyer to a World War Two battleship. The battleship had been photographed from the air, and lay like a dark spearhead on crinkled metal sea.
Captain Mandeville came back into the room while I was looking at the battleship. “My last command,” he said. “My son Lieutenant Mandeville took that picture a few days before he was shot down at Okinawa. Rather good, isn’t it?”
“Very good. I was at Okinawa, on the ground.”
“Were you now? How interesting.” He didn’t pursue the subject. He handed me a ruled page torn from a memo pad on which “Champion Hotel” was written in pencil. “I seem to have misplaced the street address but you should be able to find it, easily. I had no trouble finding it, and I’m no detective.”
“You’ve seen Mrs. Wycherly recently?”
“No. I tried to, but she wouldn’t see me. She’s a stubborn woman, and I suspect a foolish one.” His mouth quivered. His eyes sparkled like pieces of coal under his white eyebrows.
“Would you mind expanding on that? I don’t want to pry, but I don’t understand what Mrs. Wycherly has been up to. Or what’s been going on about the sale of your property.”
“It’s a long story, and I’m afraid a sordid one. I don’t pretend to understand it thoroughly myself, which is why I’ve hired a lawyer. I should have gone to a lawyer six months ago.”
“When Mrs. Wycherly bought your house from you?”
“She didn’t buy it from me. There’s the rub. The fact that she didn’t cost me twenty-five-thousand dollars. Which I could ill afford, let me assure you. A real-estate sharper named Merriman cheated me out of twenty-five-thousand dollars.”
“Did Mrs. Wycherly have a hand in it?”
“No, I don’t accuse the lady of that. No doubt she was just as much a victim as I. On the other hand, she hasn’t been much help. I went to the trouble of getting her address from the escrow company, and I made a special trip to Sacramento to try to enlist her co-operation. She flatly refused to see me, as I said.” His voice shook with controlled rage. “But look. You don’t want to go into all this. I have no wish to go into it, certainly. I made a bloody fool of myself, and at my age that can be painful.”