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“I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Mr. Wycherly. I have no evidence that your daughter is dead, but she’s still very much missing. So is your ex-wife. And I think Mrs. Wycherly may know more than she told me. You’re defeating your own ends if you don’t let me have her looked for.”

“By William Mackey? Is that what you’re trying to sell me?”

“He’s competent, and he has the connections. This case is getting bigger than we expected. I can use some help, both private and public. I want your authorization to work with Mackey and the local police.”

“You can’t have it! I don’t trust Mackey, and I don’t want the police butting into my private affairs. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do. I don’t know whether I have. A disappearance, a possible murder, isn’t a private affair. The police are already involved, anyway. Didn’t Mr. Trevor tell you about the killing of Ben Merriman?”

Trevor half-rose out of his chair, shaking his head at me.

“Ben who?” Wycherly said.

“Merriman. He’s a realtor on the Peninsula who had some business dealings with your wife. He was found murdered last night in her house in Atherton.”

“That has nothing to do with me. And nothing to do with Phoebe.”

“We can’t be certain of that.”

“I’m certain.” Uncertainty whispered and slithered through his voice.

I said: “It would be a good idea for you to come up here. You’d get a better feeling of what’s been going on.”

“I can’t. I’m to see the college chancellor this afternoon. Tonight I have a meeting scheduled with the entire board of trustees.”

“What can they do for you?”

“They’re going to admit that they’re at fault,” Wycherly said grimly. “I’m going to force them to admit official negligence. They claim they cabled me some time after Phoebe left, and notified Missing Persons as well. But I never received any cable. Such a thing could never have happened at Stanford!”

“That’s sort of a side issue, isn’t it?”

“You may think so. I don’t. They’re going to know who they’re dealing with before I’m through with them.”

I suspected they knew already: a foolish man full of passions he couldn’t handle.

“If you won’t come up here,” I said, “please give me the authority to co-opt Mackey. It won’t cost more than you can afford.”

“It isn’t a matter of money. It’s a matter of principle. I won’t touch Mackey, do you understand. If you can’t find my daughter without chasing red herrings up blind alleys – by God, I’ll get someone who can.”

His receiver crashed down, and there was nothing on the line but angry silence. I gave Trevor the dead telephone:

“He hung up on me. Is the whole family nuts?”

“Homer’s naturally upset. He’s very fond of Phoebe, and he never could handle situations well. You can be just as glad he isn’t here.”

“Maybe. But what in hell does he think he’s doing, calling meetings with the college trustees?”

“I suppose he’s doing the best he can with his problems. He’s always been a great one for official meetings.” Trevor’s tone was mildly satirical. “Incidentally, you were a bit rough on him. I didn’t like that remark about where the body was buried.”

“I’m a detective,” I said, “not a wet nurse. Anyway, I was doing him a favor. He doesn’t know what’s hitting him. I think it would be better if he knew.”

“Do you know, Archer?” A trace of satire lingered in his voice.

“I have a feeling. It isn’t a nice feeling.”

He sat down heavily. “I think you’re dead wrong, about Catherine and Phoebe. For that matter, Catherine and Merriman. It doesn’t fit in with what I know of Catherine. She isn’t a bad woman, really, underneath her rugged exterior.”

“People change, under pressure. She’s been under some kind of intense pressure.”

“No doubt. I’m beginning to feel the pressure myself.” He produced a small brown bottle from a desk drawer and took a capsule from it.

“Digitalis,” he said. “Excuse me.”

His mouth had turned grey. He leaned forward in his chair and rested his head on the desk-top. It lay there like a big pinkish brown egg half fledged with hair. He groaned, and said to the polished wood:

“Poor Phoebe.”

“You love her, don’t you?”

He lifted his heavy head, and gave me an upward slanting look, like a man spying up out of a hole. There were bitter lines of grief around his mouth:

“That’s a God damn silly question. I don’t mess with young girls.”

“You can love them without messing with them.”

“Yes. I know.” His mouth softened, and the color was returning to his lips. “I do love her.”

“It would be possible for you to authorize Mackey, you know. It doesn’t have to be Wycherly.”

“You want me to lose my job?”

“I don’t think you’re in any danger of losing your job.”

“You don’t, eh?” He looked around his handsome office. “Homer’s in a chancy mood, and he’s never liked me, not really. In-laws never really like each other. If you want the truth, he’s been looking for an excuse to push me out of the business. Not that he’s capable of running it himself.”

“You could get another job. There’s only the one girl.”

Trevor showed his teeth, not at me. He was biting into the decision he had to make. He made it:

“Go ahead and use Mackey. I’ll pay for him, if Homer won’t. And if there’s any beef, I’ll take the responsibility.”

Chapter 14

He was waiting for me in the English room on the ground floor of the St. Francis. A busty brunette hostess pointed him out, sitting at a table in a panelled niche. She had the air of a cathedral guide pointing out the statue of some well-known local saint.

Willie was a flat-faced man in his late forties with black eyes that had never been surprised. He wore a narrow black moustache, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his Brooks Brothers suit; and managed to look a little like a headwaiter. Women adored him, if you could believe his personal decameron.

I liked him pretty well myself. Willie was no saint, but he was an honest man according to his lights, even if the lights were neon. He gave me a grip-teasing handshake:

“Nice to see you, Lew. I thought the Los Angeles jungle had swallowed you up for good.”

“I like to visit the provinces from time to time.”

He leered at me smugly with his moustache. Willie believed that there was an earthly paradise, and that San Francisco was it. We ordered Gibsons and steaks from a hovering waitress. She called Willie by name and looked at him as if she wanted to smell his carnation. He looked at her as if his carnation had a squirt gun concealed in it. When she was out of hearing, I said:

“I’m here on a case, as you know.”

“Yeah.” He rested his sharp dark elbows on the white tablecloth and pushed his flat face towards me. “You mentioned the magic name Wycherly on the phone. What goes on in the Wycherly family now?”

I told him.

“Daughter’s run out, eh?”

“Run out or been run out with.”

“Snatch, you think?”

“Not likely. They don’t wait two months to make a contact.”

“Two months, she’s been gone?”

I nodded. “Wycherly’s been out of the country, on a cruise. The girl had been going to school in Boulder Beach, living more or less on her own. She came up here to see her father off, was last seen herself leaving the docks in a taxi with her mother, Wycherly’s ex-wife.”

“Yeah, I saw in the papers she got her divorce. What’s she doing?”

“Right now she’s wandering around with a bad case of postmarital neurosis, babbling about death and murder. Wycherly’s going to pieces, too – I just talked to him on the phone. And I’m supposed to put it together and make it all come right in the end.”