“I’m a moral weakling, I guess. I couldn’t take it. I spilled out everything to him that last time. I’m always spilling out everything I know and then there’s death and destruction and it’s always my fault.”
Her voice had taken on a hysterical rhythm. Sherrill leaned forward and touched her anguished face:
“Don’t blame yourself, Phoebe. You can’t assume all the sins of the world. You’ve had a dreadful two months and nobody blames you for anything you did.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was dreadful. I almost decided to kill myself more than once. But I couldn’t do that to my unborn baby. I took up drinking instead, drinking and eating. I had to do something to take my mind from the way I was forced to live. The crumminess of it.” She grimaced. “It was the crumminess I couldn’t stand – that awful apartment where Mother used to stay, and Merriman and his brother-in-law watching me all the time. They kept me there like a prisoner and made me practice Mother’s signature.
“Then in Sacramento they told me to get my hair dyed and wear Mother’s clothes.”
“So that you could cash her checks?” I said.
“The checks were part of it. Merriman also said if I assumed her identity that no one would know she’d been killed. He wanted to keep the whole thing quiet until we got the big check at the end, the one for the house. Until he got it,” she said bitterly. “He promised me if I co-operated and signed the check over to him, that he would give me money so I could go away somewhere and have my baby in peace. But he didn’t do it. He paid my hotel bill and gave me a few dollars for food and that was that, he said. Why should he finance a murderer? he said. And I broke down and told him I wasn’t a murderer.” She looked at us with the agonized purity of an addled saint. “I wanted to make sense out of all the suffering, but I couldn’t.”
“You are making sense of it,” the doctor said. “You’ll be making more sense of it day by day.”
“But look what I’ve done to Father.”
“He did it to himself, Phoebe. It’s a fact you’re going to have to learn to live with. You can’t incorporate yourself with your father – with either of your parents. This isn’t entirely your tragedy. You tried to make it yours, but your part in it was really peripheral.” He shifted his weight forward, ready to get up. “Don’t you think we’ve talked enough for tonight now?”
“Let her finish,” I said. “I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Yes. Let me finish.”
She held out her hand in an imploring way. It was the first outward gesture I’d seen her make. Sherrill stayed where he was on the edge of the bed. He nodded slowly, and her voice rushed on like jangled music trying to follow the metronome of his head:
“After Merriman went away, I sat up most of the night. Father’s ship had come in that day – I saw the notice in the Sacramento newspaper – and I told myself that I should go and warn him. But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t face him. I started to think of all the terrible things, from the time I was three or four years old listening in bed at night. Listening to the two of them cutting each other. I was sitting there by the window of my room and it was three o’clock in the morning or so, it doesn’t matter, Scott Fitzgerald says in the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning. And I could actually hear them quarrelling through the walls and through the window. My poor dead mother and my poor live father.
“They never stopped quarrelling. They were still quarrelling the day she died. I could see them in the dirty window mixed up with my reflection. I could hardly tell if they were in my head or in the night outside, or if I was just a reflection in the window, and only those jabbering words were real, whore and crazy and I’ll-kill-you. I started to say my name out loud, Phoebe, over and over. It’s a name they gave to the goddess Diana in Greek mythology. And the voices went away.”
“You wrote your name on the window,” I said.
“Yes. To keep them away.” She produced a wan half-smile, which faded as she turned to look at Sherrill. “That’s magical thinking, isn’t it? Does it mean I’m really insane?”
“No. We all do it from time to time.”
“I’ve been so afraid that I was going insane.”
Sherrill smiled at her. “You’re not.”
“But I’ve done so many terrible things.” She said to me: “The worst thing I did was when I tried to get you to shoot that Merriman.”
“He was already dead. It did no harm.”
“I must have been crazy. There was such a darkness on my mind.” She touched her temple with her fingertips. The memory of the darkness moved like clouds behind her eyes.
“It’s lifting,” Sherrill said. “The proof of it is that you’re here, and of your own accord.”
She flushed slightly and looked away. “I have a confession to make. Another confession. I didn’t really come back here from Sacramento of my own accord. I didn’t want to come. I wanted to go far away and never see anyone I know again. But Uncle Carl said that would be really crazy. He made me come back here with him. He drove me right up to the door yesterday morning.”
“It’s not important how you got here. The point is that you came.”
“It may be very important, doctor.” I turned to Phoebe: “How did Carl Trevor get in touch with you?”
“He made me promise not to tell anyone. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? He came to the Champion Hotel the other night.”
“Which night?”
“The night before last, I think it was. I’ve been losing track of the days and nights, but it must have been the night before last, because he made me move to the Hacienda. He said I couldn’t go on living in a place like the Champion. Actually, I lived in worse places than that while I was in Sacramento.”
“How did he know you were there?”
“He didn’t. He thought I was Mother. He threw his arms around me and kissed me and called me by her name.” She flushed more deeply. “When he saw that I wasn’t Mother, he broke down and cried.” She added grudgingly: “He must have loved her very much.”
“Did you tell him she was dead?”
“Yes.”
“And that your father had killed her?”
“Yes. He said I mustn’t tell anyone else, ever.” Clefts of pain like knife-cuts appeared before her eyes. “But now I have.”
“You’ve done the right thing.”
“No. There was no right thing for me to do. All my choices were wrong. When all I wanted was a chance to go away and have my baby in peace.”
“You’ll have your baby,” Sherrill said. “In peace.”
She seized on the words with hungry eyes and mouth. “Will it be all right to have my baby? In spite of the heredity and everything?”
“It would be all wrong not to.”
“And Bobby? Can I see Bobby?”
“Tomorrow if you like. It’s getting late, and you need rest.”
“Yes. I’m very tired.”
Chapter 27
I passed on some of my new information to Bobby Doncaster. He was hardly able to believe that Phoebe was innocent of her mother’s death. I left him at the Siesta stunned with joy, I think.
I still wasn’t wholly satisfied with Phoebe’s story. Unanswered questions nagged at my mind. One of them, the question of Homer Wycherly’s availability on the night of the crime, could possibly be answered by the steward Sammy Green.
The case was coming to a focus, in space as well as meaning. Green’s house in East Palo Alto was only a five-minute drive from the motor court. He was even at home, according to his wife.
Green came into his living room through the kitchen, a quick-moving young Negro wearing an apron emblazoned with the legend “Master Chef.” His smile was slightly defensive, as if I’d caught him performing a doubtful rituaclass="underline"