“Why did you do that?”
He peered into various corners of the room. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“What’s the use? Nobody will believe me, anyway.”
“You haven’t given it much of a try.”
“I tell you I didn’t kill her.”
“Who killed her if you didn’t? Catherine Wycherly?”
He let out a kind of snuffling laugh. It was neither loud nor long, but it played hell with my nerves.
“What is it with you and Catherine Wycherly? A mother-image you couldn’t resist? Or is it more of a business relationship?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ll never understand.”
“Tell me what happened last November second.”
“I’ll go to the gas chamber first.”
His voice was high and cracking. He looked around the cabin walls as if he was in that final place and could smell cyanide. Outside, heavy feet shuffled on the path. There was a tentative knocking at the door:
“Is it all right?”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Spurting.” Everything was dandy. “We’ll be out of here shortly.”
“That’s good. The sooner the better.”
She went away. I said to the wretched boy:
“You have about one more minute. If you can’t come up with something sensible, we’ll shift the proceedings over to the Hall of Justice. Once I’ve delivered you there, with the evidence against you, you’re practically certain to be held for trial. This isn’t a threat, it’s one of the facts of life. You don’t seem to know too many of them.”
I could see the workings of his mind nickering in his eyes. “You don’t know everything you think you know, either. I didn’t kill Phoebe. She isn’t even dead.”
“Don’t give me that. We found her body.”
“I can prove she’s alive, I know where she is.” The words came out in a rush, ahead of the hand he raised to cover his mouth.
“If you know where she is, take me to her.”
“I will not. You’ll give her a going-over, and she can’t stand it. She’s been through enough. She’s not going through any more, not if I can help it.”
“You can’t help it,” I said. “There was a body in that car. You say it wasn’t Phoebe. Who was it?”
“Her mother. Phoebe killed her mother in November. I got rid of the body for her. I’m just as guilty as she is.”
He straightened, breathing deeply, as if he’d got rid of a weight he couldn’t hold any longer. I felt it settling on me.
“Where is she, Bobby?”
“I’m not going to tell you. Do what you want to with me. You’re not going to touch her.”
He had that knight-errant look in his eyes, that Galahad fluorescence compounded of idealism and hysteria and sublimated sex. Not so very sublimated, perhaps. I put my gun away and sat and tried to think of the right words.
“Listen to me, Bobby. You realize I have to have more than your word for all this. I have to see her in the flesh. I have to talk to her.”
“You just want to get your hooks on her.”
“What hooks?” I held out my hands. “I’m on her side, no matter what she’s done. Her father hired me, remember. I’ve been breaking my neck trying to find her for him. You can’t sit there and prevent it.”
“She’s in good hands,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t want her taken out of them.”
“What’s the doctor’s name?”
That startled him. “You’ll never get it from me.”
“I don’t need to get it from you. Knowing as much as I know, the police could locate her before dark. But let’s keep them out of it, for now.”
He sat with his head down. I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his young passionate skull. It came out in fragmentary sentences:
“It wouldn’t be fair, you can’t punish her, she’s not responsible. She didn’t plan it or anything.”
“Were you there?”
His head came up sharply. His face was the color of cooked veal. “I was there in a sense. I was waiting outside in her car. Phoebe didn’t want me to come into the house with her. She said she had to talk to her mother alone.”
“You’re talking about her mother’s house in Atherton?”
“Yes. I drove Phoebe down from San Francisco that evening. She didn’t feel like driving herself. She was awfully jittery.”
“When was this?”
“About eight o’clock at night. She met her mother on the ship that afternoon and promised to come and see her. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Phoebe said she wanted to be reconciled with her before we got married. But it didn’t work out. Nothing worked out.”
His voice broke. I waited.
“She was in the house for about twenty minutes, and I thought everything was fine. Then she came out with – she had the poker in her hand, dripping red. She said I had to get rid of it for her. I asked her what she’d done. She took me into the house and showed me. Her mother was lying in front of the fireplace with her head all bloody. Phoebe said we had to get rid of the body and cover the whole thing up.” His eyes were tormented. He closed them and spoke from a blind face: “I wanted to save her from punishment. You mustn’t punish her. She didn’t know what she was doing.”
“I’m not in the punishment business. I’ll do everything I can for her. You have my word.”
“You won’t tell the police where she is, if I tell you?”
“No. I’ll have to tell her father, of course. Sooner or later the police will have to be told.”
“Why?”
“Because a crime has been committed.”
“Will they put her in jail?”
“That depends on her condition, and the nature of the crime. It may have been murder, or manslaughter, or even justifiable homicide. Phoebe may be psychologically unable to stand trial.”
“She is,” he said. “I realized last night how badly disturbed she is. She talked strangely, and she kept laughing and crying.”
“What does the doctor say, Bobby?”
“He didn’t say much to me. He thought that I was the one who talked her into walking away from his sanitarium. It was the other way round. She phoned me after she left his place and asked me to meet her here at this motel.” He looked around the room as if it was an image of his future, dismal and disreputable and confined. “When I saw this place I wanted to take her out of it right away, but she was afraid to show herself in the open. I spent half the night trying to talk her into going back to the sanitarium. Then today the doctor tracked her down, and between the two of us we got her back there.”
“You haven’t told me where yet.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to.”
He looked at me with stubborn suspicion. Like so many other young people, including some of the best ones, he acted like a displaced person in the adult world.
“Come on, Bobby. We’re wasting valuable time.”
“What’s so valuable about time? I wish I could take a sleeping pill and wake up ten years from now.”
“I wish I could take one in reverse and wake up ten years ago. But maybe it’s just as well I can’t. With all that practice, I’d probably make the same mistakes all over again, in spades.”
That was the right thing to say, for some odd reason. Bobby responded:
“I’ve made some terrible mistakes.”
“Twenty-one is a good age to make them. You don’t have to go on compounding them.”
“But what is going to happen to us?”
“We’ll have to wait and see. A lot depends on you right now. Take me to her, Bobby.”
“Yeah,” he said with a final look around. “Let’s get out of this place.”
I locked my car and rode along with Bobby. The sanitarium wasn’t far, he told me over the noise of the exhaust. It was run by a Palo Alto psychiatrist named Sherrill, whom Phoebe had consulted in her last semester at Stanford.