The Suspect - L R Wright (11 page)

"Oh I think he must have known how I felt, all
right," said George. "He kept asking me out for a drink,
and I'd hardly ever go, and sometimes he'd call me at home and invite
Myra and me to dinner, and I don't think we ever went." He
looked at Alberg, not seeing him, remembering something. "That's
how he met Audrey," he said dully. "How could I forget
that? Every year we had a staff party, on the last day of school
before Christmas. We always invited him because we always invited
everybody, but usually he couln't come, because he went away for
Christmas and had to catch a train or a plane for somewhere. But one
year he didn't go away, so he came to our party. And Audrey was
there, of course. That's how he met her. In my house. Christ.”

"When you did have a drink with him," said
Alberg, "what did you talk about?”

"
Women. He liked to talk about women. They liked
him, women did. He was a good-looking man,” he said grudgingly,
"and he played the piano, I told you that. Talked a lot, made
jokes, flattered, smiled. I didn't trust him."

"
Did you tell your sister that you didn't trust
him?”

"What the hell do you think?" said George,
agitated. He got up and rubbed his sweatered arm vigorously back and
forth across the window, smearing the dust and accumulated grime
which until then had been almost invisible, obscured by the dried
streaks made by the rain on the outside of the glass. "Of course
I told her. But she was a grown woman. She was thirty-five years old,
for Christ's sake. I told her she was making a terrible mistake; the
man was twenty years older than she was, into the bargain. And she
just laughed and sparkled, all excited she was." He slumped back
on the chair. "Myra gave me a talking to. She liked him,"
he said, glaring at Alberg. "She actually liked him, Myra did.”

"Were they happy? Carlyle and your sister?”

"
Almost as soon as they got married, we left.
Didn't plan it that way. Got the job in Germany—I'd been trying for
it for a couple of years. A few months before we were supposed to
come home, she was killed ....

"
I'll tell you, Staff Sergeant, I'm feeling kind
of pooped. Could you come back some other time?" He looked small
and fragile, slumped in the straight-backed chair, and his face was
gray in the sunlight.

"
Just a couple more questions. Did you ever talk
to anybody else who felt the same way about him that you did?”

George appeared to give this serious consideration.
"Women liked him. I told you that." He thought some more.
"Except for his sister.”

"What about the other men on the staff? How did
they feel about him?"

"
I don't know,” said George wearily. "I
don't remember. It was a long time ago. I don't want to talk about
him any more.”

"When you got back from Germany,” said Alberg,
ignoring his exhaustion, "did you return to the same school?"

George slowly shook his head. "We went to
California for a year. Then I got a job in a school in a different
part of Vancouver.”

"
Did you do that deliberately? To avoid teaching
on the same staff as Carlyle?”

"
I didn't ever want to lay eyes on the man
again. And I didn't, not until l979. Myra and I had been here in
Sechelt ten years by then. One day I'm walking along the road heading
for town and who comes popping out of those laurel bushes down the
way but Carlyle." He shook his head disbelievingly."He
retired to Arizona or someplace, then suddenly got homesick, came
back to B.C. and bought himself that house not half a mile from mine.
I scooted straight home to tell Myra."

He looked up at Alberg and grinned, wryly. "She
didn't mind. Only I minded."
 
"
It
must have been hard to avoid him, here in Sechelt.”

"Damn near impossible," George agreed.
"Everywhere we went, there he was, playing some piano, cracking
his awful jokes." He shivered. "I made the best of it,"
he said grimly.

"
Had he changed much?"

"Hard to say. I told you, I never knew him well
to begin with. No better than I had to.” George got up, restless,
and threw open the door to the back yard. The sound of the waves on
the beach was immediately louder. The fragrance of the garden wafted
into the kitchen.

"You tell me you never trusted him," said
Alberg, exasperated, "and at the same time you tell me you never
got to know him. Then maybe you were all wrong about him."

George nodded. "That could be," he said
seriously. "That could well be.”

Alberg got up. There was a tingling in his thighs; he
felt like he'd been sitting for hours. He towered over George. The
kitchen ceiling seemed to lower itself as he stood.

He clomped through the house, following George,
feeling enormous and clumsy. At the door he stopped and looked slowly
around the living room. "What are you going to do with all your
loot?" he said.

George looked at him with disgust. "Loot,"
he muttered. "Loot. What the hell would I do with a white
piano?"

"
There's the house," said Alberg. "And
some money, too.”

George flushed. "I don't want it, policeman.
I'll sell it all and give the money away, or something. Maybe I'll
give the house to his sister. He sure as hell wouldn't like that
much.”

In his car Alberg opened the window wide and sat for
a while without turning on the motor.

He'd been wasting his time, he thought. He ought to
be out on the back roads himself, bumping into cool clearings circled
by towering fir, and cedar, and spruce, looking for a decrepit old
van with bluebirds and rainbows painted on its sides, looking for a
middle-aged, quiet-spoken seller of fish whose fingerprints would
match those on a plastic bag in Carlyle Burke's kitchen sink.

But he had delegated that responsibility and kept
Wilcox as his own, and he had to finish up with George before he
pointed himself in another direction.
 
He
started his car, threw it into gear, and pulled off the shoulder of
the road onto the pavement. He saw George motionless on his porch,
watching him pass. Neither of them  waved.
 

CHAPTER 12

On Saturday morning when George awakened, he thought
at first that the hot dry spell had ended and the clouds had come,
and then he realized that he'd closed his bedroom curtains. He didn't
usually do that on clear nights. He liked to see the starlight and
the moonlight, if there was any, before A he went to sleep.

He got slowly, stiffly, out of bed. It took a while
to get the circulation going—a little longer every day, he thought.
He reached up to pull back the curtains and there was the morning
sun, and another clear sky above the top of his neighbor's house. He
would put on his bathrobe and stand outside for a few minutes,
letting the sun oil his hinges. He shuffled back to the bed and
picked up his robe, sprawled at the bottom, and noticed that he had
hardly disturbed the covers in the night.

And then he remembered.

He sat heavily on the bed and looked at the worn
carpet, and at his splayed and lumpy feet with their thick horny
nails. He thought for a while it was a dream he was trying to get out
of. But he got to his feet and forced himself into the living room
and there he saw them, on the windowsill: Carlyle's shell casings.

It was as though he'd slept, dreamed, these past four
days—Carlyle, and the funeral, and the interrogations of that
smooth-faced, unyielding, disconcerting staff sergeant.

He blamed the sleeping pill, one of four left over
from a prescription forced upon him at the time of Myra's death.

George leaned heavily against the doorjamb, staring
at the shell casings, and wondered how he'd gotten through these
days. And whatever had possessed him to put the shell casings on his
windowsill, like an obscene trophy?

He pushed himself back into the bedroom and got
dressed. His fingers were numb as he worked buttons into buttonholes
and pulled up the zipper in his pants and thrust his feet into socks
and slippers; he didn't want to fumble helplessly with the laces in
his shoes.

He went straight outside to his garden and sat in his
canvas chair.

It would be nice to have a greenhouse again, he
thought, but there was no room for one, not even a small one. Maybe
he should sell this house and get another one, smaller inside but
with a bigger yard, away from the sea. His proximity to the sea
limited what he could grow in his garden. And it was almost blinding
sometimes, the sunlight on blue rippled water.

He would miss the sounds the ocean made, though, and
the smell of it, and the things it left on his beach: nice pieces of
wood and interesting shells.

A four-foot-high stone wall protected his garden from
the strong breezes that sometimes blew in from the water. George got
up to inspect the things that grew behind the wall. The peas were
five feet tall and covered with swelling pods, their stalks twining
around thick white cord strung tepee fashion from the top of a long
pole. The beans were up high, too, and his single zucchini was
thriving. His vegetable garden was much smaller than last year's.
There was no point in growing a lot of stuff he'd never eat. And it
was hard to give vegetables away. Almost everyone had a garden. He
could keep up with the zucchini, though; he'd eat it every day and be
sorry when it was gone. He liked peas, too. The beans he grew only
because they had been Myra's favorite.

He looked out to sea, bewildered. He seemed to recall
having talked to that Mountie about his garden. He seemed to recall
telling him he had broccoli in his garden. He was astounded at
himself; he hated broccoli. Why on earth had he told such a stupid
lie?

George brushed his hand over his thick white hair and
realized that he hadn't even combed it, yet, or brushed his teeth,
either, or even gone to the bathroom, though his bladder had been
full from the minute he'd awakened. He went slowly into the house to
take care of these things. Later, he sat in his leather chair sipping
coffee and trying to get his mind working right. It's that damn pill,
he thought; it's made me logy.

He had to get rid of the shell casings. They were
shriveling up the whole house, sitting there. Which one of them had
he hit Carlyle with? he wondered. He tried to remember bringing them
home and putting them up there but he couldn't quite do it, couldn't
quite remember. He knew he'd done it; put them in a paper bag he'd
found in Carlyle's kitchen and lugged them home and set them up on
the windowsill. He could see himself doing it. But he couldn't
remember what it had felt like, or what he had thought while he did
it.

He drank his coffee and tried to take stock. He had
struck Carlyle on the head, and Carlyle had died. Then Carlyle was
buried. Then the policeman came and told him that Carlyle had left
him all his belongings—and some money too, he thought, but he
wasn't sure.

George felt cold sweat under his arms. He must have
been in shock. Doing a thing like that—it would be enough to put
anybody in a state of shock. But for four days?

What he ought to do was get up right now and find the
telephone and call that Mountie and confess to his crime. That was
the right and proper thing to do.

He looked out the window and blinked at the sunlight
and didn't move. How would he explain keeping his mouth shut for four
whole days? The man's going to think I'm a nutter, he thought. But
that wasn't what bothered him, not really, not if he was going to be
absolutely honest with himself. What bothered him was the humiliation
he would feel, capitulating to a remorse which he still didn't fully
accept, four days after the fact.

He tried to work out what he'd say. "I'm your
man, Staff Sergeant. Can't stand the guilt any longer ” Lord, there
was no dignity in that. It he'd confessed promptly, as soon as he'd
done the deed, that would have been different; that would have been
all right.

The point is, though, he told himself, you killed
somebody, and you can't remain unpunished.

He sat very still, thinking about it. It was
perfectly true. But it wasn't all there was to say about the
situation. It wasn't as though he was a danger to anybody, sitting
here free. He probably wouldn't live long enough to get to trial
anyway, the way they dragged those things out.

Yet he knew he was rationalizing. The plain truth was
that he didn't want to make a public spectacle of himself, and he
didn't want to go to jail. They'd catch him eventually; that
pale-haired Mountie would catch him for sure, somehow. There was no
need to force upon himself today something that was going to happen
anyway, in the impartial fullness of time. And he knew already that
he didn't need the R.C.M.R, or the Canadian justice system, to ensure
his punishment. George put down his coffee mug and rubbed his head.
His arm felt heavy as iron.

He deeply regretted having committed murder. He
didn't believe in it, and he never would have believed himself
capable of it. But it didn't surprise him that Carlyle had been
murdered. Carlyle had deserved it. He straightened a little in his
chair and looked calmly out through the window at his garden. It was
true. Carlyle had deserved it.