“Intellectual slumming bores me.”
He missed it, or let it pass. “I’ll get your principal for you. Say the word.” He picked up one of the telephones on his desk.
“I’ll talk to Carl Trevor in Woodside.”
Thorne and Royal looked at each other. Then they both looked at me, with dawning approval. The atmosphere in the room began to warm up, as if Trevor’s name had jiggled a thermostat.
“Mr. Trevor was in this office just last night,” Royal said. “You’re working for Mr. Trevor?”
“I’m working for his boss.”
“You’re on the Wycherly disappearance?”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I don’t like being squeezed.”
“You got to admit you were asking for it,” Royal said. “Here. Sit at my desk.”
The atmosphere was getting so warm it made me a little sick. Royal dismissed Deputy Thorne, placed me in his own chair, gave Carl Trevor’s home number to the switchboard. He didn’t have to look it up.
He exchanged a few cordial words with Trevor and handed me the receiver. Trevor sounded old and spent:
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, Archer. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be in Redwood City?”
“I didn’t know it. I walked in on a killing.”
“Another killing?” he said wearily.
“Man named Quillan, ran a hole-in-the-wall record shop in San Carlos.”
“Who killed him?”
“Captain Royal thinks I did.”
Royal began to smile and wag his head.
“Is everybody going crazy?”
“Yes,” I said with my eye on Royal. “Everybody is going crazy. Do you feel like coming over here and straightening the Captain out?”
Royal made a pooh-pooh mouth and pantomimed with his hands a smooth unbroken flow of good fellowship and tolerant understanding.
“I’ll talk to him on the phone, that will be quicker.” Trevor’s voice faltered as though it had come up against an obstruction. “Archer. I want you to make a journey with me. Tonight.”
“Where to?”
“Medicine Stone. I have a summer place there, as I think I told you. The local sheriff knows I’m Phoebe’s uncle, and he called me a little while ago. He thinks they may have found her car.”
“At your place?”
“A few miles from there. Underwater, in the sea. A fisherman spotted it the other day, but Sheriff Herman isn’t on the ball and he didn’t think anything of it until he got the teletype on Phoebe’s disappearance. I urged him to try and dredge it up tonight.”
“Is it a Volkswagen?”
“Apparently it is.”
He took a shuddering breath, as if he was coming up from underwater. I said I would pick him up in a few minutes. Royal followed me downstairs to give me back my gun.
Chapter 20
The floodlights were on at Leafy Acres. Helen Trevor came out when I mounted the front steps. She shut the door softly behind her:
“May I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Archer?”
“Go ahead.”
“Please don’t tell my husband I intervened. I’m worried about Carl, deeply concerned for his health. I’m convinced he shouldn’t make this – this nocturnal excursion with you.”
“It’s his idea.”
“I realize that.” She sighed, and rubbed her gray throat. The glare of the floodlight made her eyes seem huge and frantic. “Carl has always taken on more than his strength can bear. I know he appears to be a powerful man. He isn’t, really. He had a coronary less than two years ago.”
“How bad a coronary?”
“He barely survived it. Only my prayers brought him through, I do believe. The doctor told me another attack would – might possibly kill him. And I can’t live without him, Mr. Archer. Please don’t let him go with you.”
“I can hardly stop him. Don’t worry, I’ll do the driving.”
“It’s not just the driving I’m worried about. It’s the emotional shock he may meet at the other end. He’s had a night and a day of terrible strain already. The only thing that’s kept him going is the hope that she is alive. If he should discover that Phoebe is dead–”
Her voice lost itself in dry shallows. She turned her face away from the light, perhaps for fear of what I’d see in it. Her hatchet profile was caricatured by her shadow on the door. She was an unattractive woman who knew she was unattractive, had probably known it the day she lifted her bridal veil for her husband’s kiss. Such knowledge could make a wife possessive as hell.
“You’d better take it up with your husband directly, Mrs. Trevor.”
“I tried to. He wouldn’t listen. He treats me as an enemy, when all I’m trying to do is save his life. He insists on rushing around like a madman – it’s part of his illness.”
“I doubt that. Phoebe is important to him.”
“Too important,” she said bitterly. “He puts her ahead of me – ahead of his own welfare. I wasn’t able to give him a child, you see. He’s been fixated on my brother’s child ever since she was born.” She added on a deep breaking wave of feeling: “God chose to make me barren.”
Her fingers crept down from her throat to her meager breast. Her face was fierce and haggard. I was beginning to feel some of the angry strain that knotted Trevor’s arteries.
“Will you please tell your husband I’m here? I promise to look after him as well as I can. If his heart kicks up I’ll take him to a doctor. But I think you’re borrowing trouble, Mrs. Trevor.”
“I assure you I’m not. He looked like death itself when he came down from the city. He didn’t even take his nap, and he was up all last night.”
“He can sleep in the car.”
“You don’t care about him.”
“I care in a different way. A man has to do what he has to do.”
“You men!”
It was a declaration of war. She turned abruptly and went into the house, not inviting me to go along. I leaned on the wall and looked across the weirdly shadowed lawn. A fuller moon than last night’s was rising behind the trees. It gleamed through their branches like a woman’s breast pressing against wrought iron.
Trevor came out quickly, slamming the door. He nodded to me and glanced up at the moon as if its rising was an augury. His features had sharpened in the course of the day. His eyes were bright and dry.
“I’m not so sure you should make this trip,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. I feel fine. Has Helen been putting bees in your bonnet, by any chance?”
“She brought up the fact of your coronary.”
“Nonsense. It’s completely healed.” He doubled his fist and struck out at the air, to demonstrate his fitness. “I ride, I swim. But she goes on trying to make a bloody invalid out of me. Let’s go, eh?”
He practically raced me to the car. Inside, I could hear him breathing hard and trying to conceal it. His wife called from the veranda:
“Carl? Have you got your digitalis?”
He growled something inarticulate. Her voice rose to a bird’s scream:
“Carl? Your digitalis?”
“I have the damn stuff,” he muttered, and I amplified his answer: “He has it, Mrs. Trevor.”
She watched us go, rigid and gray-faced. Following Trevor’s directions, I turned right out of the driveway onto a blacktop road that rose between black trees towards the moon.
“It’s good of you to do this for me, Archer. I wouldn’t admit it to Helen but frankly I didn’t feel like driving to Medicine Stone by myself.”
“I’m not doing it for you. I’m just as interested in the outcome as you are.”