The Wycherly Woman by Ross MacDonald Page B

painting of somebody’s father, portly in a Prince Albert.
    Mrs. Wycherly, or some other modern, had added a few touches of her own. The brash new multicolored drapes clashed like cymbals with the rest of the room. A blonde mahogany hi-fi console stood beside the fireplace. It was open,and it had a record on it: “Slow Boat to China.” On the inside of the door a cork dartboard hung, surrounded by the scars which the darts had made in the white panelling.
    I closed the door, pulled one of the darts out of the cork, walked back across the room to the fireplace, and threw the dart at the board, which it hit. I went through the other downstairs rooms humming “Slow Boat to China” to myself and thinking about a story I read in high school. It was called “The Vision of Mirza” and it had been cropping up in my memory for years.
    Mirza had a vision of a bridge which a lot of people were crossing on foot: all the living people in the world. From time to time one of them would step on a kind of trap door and drop out of sight. The other pedestrians hardly noticed. Each of them went on walking across the bridge until he hit a trap door of his own, and fell through.
    I hit mine, or something like it, at the top of the graceful stairs. It wasn’t a trap door, exactly, and it wasn’t exactly mine. It was a body, and it sighed when I stumbled over it. It sighed as if it had fallen the whole distance and lived.
    I found the upturned face with my flashlight. It wasn’t worth finding: a mask of blood behind which no life bubbled. The spattered striped bow tie and the sharp charcoal suit looked hickish and pathetic on a man so beaten and dead.
    His jacket pockets were empty. I had to move him to get at his back pockets. He was heavy, as hard to lift as a cross made out of flesh. I found four one-dollar bills in his wallet, and a driver’s license made out to Ben Merriman. His little gun was missing.
    I put the wallet in the breast pocket of his jacket, so that I wouldn’t have to move him again. Then I took it out and wiped it with my handerkerchief and put it back. The flashlight on the floor watched me like a yellow suspicious eye. I picked it up and got out of there.
    On my way back to Merriman’s office I passed the SouthernPacific station. It was closed for the night, but there was a pay telephone on the outside platform. I used it to call the police.
    Mrs. Merriman was still sitting at the desk in the front of the office. She looked up with her muzzy smile when I came in:
    “I’m sorry, Ben didn’t come back yet. I’m holding the fort all by my lonesome. Join me?” Then she saw the look on my face, and imitated it: “What’s the matter?”
    “I want Mrs. Wycherly’s address.”
    “I don’t have it.”
    “You must have, if you sold the house for her.”
    “Ben handled it. I told you I don’t work for him, not on a regular basis. He does most of his business out of his hat.”
    “Let me see the listing.”
    “What for? You trying to work out a deal behind our backs or something?”
    “Nothing like that. I want to know where Mrs. Wycherly is.”
    “The listing won’t tell you. Look, I’ll show you.”
    She rose unsteadily. I followed her into the little back room. A half-full bottle of Gordon’s gin stood on a pile of papers on the desk. She riffled through the papers and came up with a mimeographed sheet. She was trying to read it with slightly blurred eyes when the telephone rang.
    She picked it up and said yes and listened to it. Her face turned pearly young. Her eyes expanded. She thanked the telephone and put it down.
    “Ben is dead. Somebody killed him, and I thought he stood me up.”
    She started out past me, walking like a woman in a trance. She collided heavily with the doorframe, leaned on the wall-board partition. The mimeographed sheet was crumpled in her hand. She dropped it and reached for the bottle.
    I salvaged the piece of paper from the floor. The house on Whiteoaks Avenue had been