“Quillan, Stanley Quillan. Did she name the killer?”
“She says she never knew his name. According to her account – and frankly I’m dubious about its accuracy – she ran into this thug in the bar of the hotel where she was staying, the Hacienda on the outskirts of Sacramento. She’d been drinking, and she was in a dark and vengeful mood. This fellow picked her up, they got into conversation, she happened to notice that he was carrying a gun. She invited him to her room and after some further conversation she paid him money on the spot to kill the man who had been tormenting her. That’s her story.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“I have to believe that something of the sort happened. Her story is pretty circumstantial, but it can’t have occurred as casually as she says. You don’t just walk into a bar and pick up a gunman to do your killing for you.”
“It has happened. Did she describe the gunman?”
“Yes, in some detail, and it wasn’t the kind of detail you get in hallucination or delusion. There’s no doubt in my mind that he exists. He’s a man in his early forties, quite good-looking in a raffish way, she says, with dark hair, blue-grey eyes; about six feet one or two, heavily built and muscular, with the air of an athlete. She took him at first for a professional athlete.” Sherrill puffed more smoke and peered at me through it. “She might very well have been describing you.”
“She was.”
He yanked his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t understand. You can’t mean she hired you to murder those men?”
“She tried to hire me to liquidate Merriman. That was two nights ago: Merriman was already dead. I went along with the gag, up to a point, because I believed she was Catherine Wycherly and I was trying to find out what she knew about Merriman’s death. She didn’t know about it at all, unless she’s a very good liar. She simply wished him dead, ex post facto.”
“She’s certainly been lying to me.” Sherrill’s eyes held a hurt expression. It changed to a more hopeful one: “Isn’t it possible, in the light of this, that her entire confession is a tissue of lies? She may be trying to attach to herself all the guilt that’s floating around loose.”
“Or she may have made a false confession to avoid making a true one.” I stood up. “Why don’t we ask her?”
“Both of us?”
“Why not? I’m walking evidence that she lied. The issue has to be settled one way or the other.”
“But she’s in a very chancy condition.”
“The whole world is,” I said. “If she can survive Merriman and Quillan, she can survive me. Anyway, you said yourself she didn’t know which way to jump, in the direction of illness or reality. Let’s give her another jump at reality.”
Chapter 26
She was with a white-uniformed nurse in a softly lighted room. It was furnished almost as barely as a nun’s cell with a bed, a wardrobe, two chairs, in one of which she was sitting. Her face was turned towards the wall, and she didn’t move when we entered, except that the cords in her neck stood out more starkly. Under her plain hospital robe her large body was still as a beast in ambush.
The doctor said: “I have to ask you to leave again, Mrs. Watkins. Stay within call, please.”
The nurse got up and went out. The set of her back expressed her disapproval.
“What is it now,” the girl said without looking at Sherrill. “Have they come to take me away?”
“You’re staying here tonight, I told you that. I hope you can stay indefinitely, until you’re perfectly well.”
“I’m perfectly well now. I feel perfectly well.”
“That’s good, because I want you to do something for me. I want you to have a look at this gentleman here and tell me whether or not you recognize him.”
He closed the door and turned on the overhead light. I stepped forward under it. Slowly, on a tense reluctant neck, her head turned towards me. Her face was clean and gleaming pale. With the heavy make-up gone from around her eyes and mouth, she had dropped about ten false years. But she still seemed old and harried for twenty-one. Her bruised flesh-padded features were like a thick mask through which her eyes looked out at me fearfully.
We recognized each other, of course. I said with the best smile I could muster: “Hello, Phoebe.”
She didn’t respond. She set the knuckles of one fist against her open mouth, as though to cut off any chance of speech.
“Do you know this man?” Sherrill asked her. “His name is Mr. Archer, and he’s a private detective employed by your father.”
“I never saw him before.”
“He says you have – that you met at the Hacienda Inn in Sacramento the night before last,”
“Then he’s a liar.”
“Somebody’s lying,” I said. “We both know it isn’t me. You offered me money to kill a man named Merriman. He was dead at the time. Were you aware of that?”
She stared at me over her fist, stared and flared and glared, in fear, in anger, in doubt, in surmise, in bewilderment. I’d never seen such changeable eyes as she had.
“I killed him.” She turned to the doctor. “Tell him about the people I’ve killed.”
He shook his head slowly. I said:
“I’d like to know how you did it. You didn’t do it through me.”
“No, that was just play-acting. I knew he was dead, naturally. I had already killed him. I did it with my own hands.”
Her voice was calm, almost toneless. Sherrill caught my eye. He held out his hands and brought them close together. Cut it short. But I was convinced that the girl was lying, that she was one of that strange and devious tribe who improvised confessions to other people’s crimes. I did a little improvising of my own:
“They found poison in Merriman’s mouth – enough arsenic to kill a horse. You poisoned him first and then beat him. Where did you get the arsenic?”
Her head rocked back, but she answered smoothly, too smoothly: “I bought it in a drugstore on K Street in Sacramento.”
“Where did you get the shotgun you used to blow Stanley Quillan’s head off?”
“I bought it in a pawnshop.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Because it never happened. Quillan was shot with a small hand-gun. Merriman had no arsenic in his stomach that I know of. You’re confessing to crimes that never even occurred.”
She looked at me as if I was trying to rob her of something precious. Her hand fumbled at her face, pushed back her dyed tinsel hair from her forehead. She said in a voice that sounded ventriloquial, piped in from another room where a child was reciting a lesson:
“I did so kill them. I can’t remember the details, it all seems so long ago. But you’ve just got to believe me.”
“Why do we have to believe you? Who are you covering for?”
“No one. I did it all by myself. I want to be punished for it. I killed three people, including my own mother.”
She was being punished now. Her forehead was a helmet of white pain pressing down on her eyes. She hid them with her hands.
Sherrill took me by the elbow and drew me to the far side of the room. “I can’t let this go on,” he said in an earnest whisper. “There are limits to what you can get out of people by cross-questioning.”
“But she’s been lying. I don’t believe she killed anyone.”
“Neither do I now. I am her doctor, however, and I don’t like the quality of her lies. They’re very important to her. If we take away the whole structure at once, I can’t predict the consequences. She’s been living for weeks in a half-world where lies and truth are all mixed up. It’s dangerous to try and pull her out of it in one night.”