“I’m sorry, sir, your party does not answer. Do you wish me to call again later?”
“I’ll call again later. Thank you.”
I made a note of the number and got up to go. Dolly appeared in the kitchen doorway. She had a steaming cup in her hand, and a white milk moustache on her upper hp.
“Good night,” I said. “No dreams. But don’t stop praying.”
She slumped into beat position, and made herself look like a maltreated idiot child. “What’s the use of praying?”
“It keeps the circuits open. Just in case there’s ever anybody on the other end of the line.”
Chapter 23
I lugged the old Royal out to my car and drove across town to the Boulder Beach Inn. At ten minutes to five in the morning the place was like a catacomb. The night clerk looked at me the way night clerks were always looking at me, with dubiety tinged by the suspicion that the customer might be right and I might be a customer:
“What can I do for you, Sir?”
“Is Homer Wycherly still here?”
He didn’t answer me directly. “Mr. Wycherly wouldn’t like to be disturbed at this hour. If you’d like to leave a message–”
“I work for Wycherly. What time did he ask to be called?”
He consulted his schedule. “Eight o’clock.”
“Call me at the same time, please. I’m checking in. How much for a room?”
He told me.
“I’m renting, not buying.”
He simpered delicately and handed me a pen. I registered. A Negro bell hop emerged from the shadows and led me to a room at the rear of the building where I stripped to my underwear, crawled dirty between clean sheets, and went out like a light.
I caught three hours of sleep at five dollars an hour. But the old movie projector I was using for a brain wouldn’t shut down. It kept on grinding out aquatic scenes in which I became immersed, sinking like a spent swimmer in coiling cold water, through deepening zones of chill where the dead thronged like memories, their lank hair drifting in the underwater currents. I saw her plainly, flayed flesh worn dowdily on her skeleton, little fish swimming in and out of the sockets of her eyes.
I woke up with Phoebe’s name in my dry mouth and a bell ringing inside my head or just outside my head. I opened my eyes to the full white horror of morning. The bedside telephone rang at me again. I picked up the heavy iron dumbbell which the management had substituted for the receiver.
“You asked to be called at eight, sir,” a girl’s voice said.
“I must have been insane.”
“Yessir.”
“Wait a minute. Have you called Mr. Homer Wycherly yet?”
“Yessir, just this minute.”
“Get him on the line for me, will you please?”
“Yessir.”
I propped myself up on the pillow. Something peculiar happened: I lost my sense of orientation in space. The facing wall slanted over me, the bed leaned backwards under me. I was stuck with my legs up in a corner of space, and space tipped over like a chair.
“Who is it?” the iron dumbbell said in a voice like Wycherly’s.
I answered doubtfully, upside down in the angular white horror: “This is Archer.”
Space jiggled a little. It started to right itself. I tried to lean forward and help it but I was stuck in its corner, immobilized by a stronger pull than gravity. I didn’t want Phoebe to be dead. I didn’t want to have to tell her father that she was.
“Archer? Where are you calling from?”
“I’m here in the hotel. I have news for you.”
“What news? Have you found her?”
“No. You haven’t heard then.”
“Heard what?”
“I’d rather tell you in person. May I come around to your bungalow in fifteen minutes?”
“Please do.”
I hung up. The walls of the room were vertical. Space was back where it belonged, up and down and across and from side to side. I took advantage of this circumstance by getting out of bed and having a quick shower and a shave. My eyes in the bathroom mirror looked scared as hell, or of it.
On the way to Wycherly’s bungalow I got the typewriter out of the trunk of my car.
“What on earth is that?” he said when he opened the door.
“A Royal typewriter, vintage about 1937. Do you recognize it?”
“Bring it in and let me see it properly.”
I followed him into the living room and set down the heavy machine on a coffee table near the windows. He looked it over with eyes like boiled blue onions.
“It could be Catherine’s old typewriter. At least she had one very like it. Where did you dredge it up?”
“Your daughter’s roommate had it. Phoebe lent it to her before she left.”
Wycherly nodded. “I remember now. Catherine left it behind in the house, and Phoebe took it off to college last fall.”
“Where was it last Easter?”
“In my house in Meadow Farms. Catherine used to keep it in her sitting room. She liked to have an office model handy.”
“Is she an expert typist?”
“She was at one time. She used to be a secretary before I married her. This machine dates from that period.”
“Did she ever do any typing for you in more recent times? Last spring, for instance?”
“She helped me out occasionally, yes.” An edge of old malice entered his voice: “When she was in a conciliatory mood, and available.”
“You wrote a letter to Willie Mackey last spring, about the threatening letters you received. Did Mrs. Wycherly type it for you?”
“I believe she did. On second thought, I remember that she did. I preferred to keep it in the family – the fact that I was hiring a detective.”
“Can you type yourself?”
“I never learned, no.”
“Not even with one finger?”
“No. I’ve never manipulated one of these things in my life.” He stroked his hair with a nervous hand. “What is the relevance of all this, if any?”
“I had a talk with Mackey yesterday. At my request, since I’m employed by you, he filled me in on those ‘Friend of the Family’ letters. It’s my opinion they were typed on this typewriter.”
“For God’s sake!” He slumped on the mohair sofa and pressed his hand to the side of his face as if it needed holding together. “You’re not suggesting that Catherine wrote them herself.”
“The facts suggest it.”
“But you don’t know what was said in them. It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible in this case. Who else had access to the typewriter?”
“Anyone in the house, anyone who came to the house. Servants, guests, anyone. Catherine’s rooms were in a wing by themselves, and she was seldom in them. There’s no lock on the sitting room, either. Understand me, I hold no brief for my ex-wife, but she simply couldn’t have written those letters. They slandered her.”
“People have been known to slander themselves.”
“But what purpose could she have had?”
“To make trouble, break up the marriage. She wouldn’t have needed to have a rational motive.”
“Are you implying that Catherine was irrational?”
“Is. I saw her the night before last, Mr. Wycherly. I don’t know what her emotional state was nine months ago. She’s in a bad way now.”
He lifted his hands and thrust them out away from him, fingers stiff. He might have been trying to fend off furies.
“Is this your great news? I thought you were going to tell me something – something hopeful about Phoebe.” His arms dropped to his sides, and his fingers plucked at the buttons on the sofa. “What good are these excursions into the wretched past? I know that Catherine is capable of anything. I even suspected that she wrote those letters.”