by L. R. Wright
The Suspect
L. R. WRIGHT
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There is a Sunshine Coast, and its towns and villages are called by the names used in this book. But all the rest is fiction. The events and the characters are products of the author’s imagination, and geographical and other liberties have been taken in the depiction of the town of Sechelt.
1
HE WAS A VERY OLD MAN.
When he was struck he fell over promptly, without a sound. His chair made a sound—a twisted squeak of a noise—but it let him go, made no move that George could see to clasp its wooden arms around him, hold him close to its padded back, keep him firmly upright upon its padded seat. It just gave a small squeak as its rockers skewed frantically on the polished hardwood floor; then it righted itself, gently rocked back into serenity and was finally motionless and silent.
Everything was silent, then—silent in the silent sunshine. Yet George had an impression of uproar and consternation. There was a thundering in his eighty-year-old heart, a feebleness in his antiquated knees. His body had become a horrified, garrulous commentator on calamity.
He did a slow, backward shuffle, his eyes still fixed on the empty rocking chair, and lowered himself carefully onto the chesterfield, his right hand wrapped around a cylindrical piece of brass that had once been a shell casing.
He pushed himself back on the chesterfield and let his head rest against its flowered slipcover. Then he sat up to take a large white handkerchief from his pocket and spread it on the maple coffee table, next to a vase of peonies, robustly pink. He set the shell casing carefully on top of the white fabric square. He saw that there was blood on the sleeve of his V-necked navy cardigan.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was surprised that his mind was so calm. He decided that his heart must be the font of whatever wisdom he possessed. It was still a place of bedlam, racketing in revulsion at Carlyle lying still and dead, half his face buried in the braided rug, bleeding neatly, discreetly, there instead of onto the hardwood floor.
But after a while even his heart became serene.
George realized that he was going to survive this astonishing thing.
He reached out and picked up the shell casing. It had a pattern of quarter-inch dots all over it, and up one side was embossed a voluptuous urn holding a single large flower. He couldn’t identify what kind of flower it was supposed to be. It had thirteen petals—he counted them—and two large leaves protruded from its stem. He wondered if Carlyle had had this peculiar decoration imposed upon the shell casing, or if it had come like that from wherever he got it.
George studied this object, his weapon, wonderingly. It was a foot high and hollow, about seven inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a little less than five inches at the top. A kind of rim was formed at the base by an indentation etched all the way around, about an eighth of an inch from the bottom. He thought it remarkable that it wasn’t even dented. Maybe skulls got frailer as bodies aged, he thought, and brought his left hand up to touch, cautiously, the top of his head. There was blood on the base, and bits of tissue or something. Maybe it was brain, thought George, detached, as he set the shell casing back on top of his handkerchief.
He didn’t like feeling so emotionless. Yet it was a relief, too. Just as Carlyle’s silence was a relief.
They’d probably have to lock him up immediately, thought George. He was sure there wasn’t any bail for murderers. And he didn’t plan to explain himself, either, which wouldn’t help.
He was curious about prison. They might put him in one of those new-fashioned places, where you had a room, instead of a cell, and got to read and eat half-decent meals. He nodded to himself, thinking, becoming more and more certain that they wouldn’t put a person of his advanced age into a maximum security facility. It might be quite an interesting experience, jail. No gardens there, though.
There was some blood on the front of his sweater, too, he noticed. It ought to make him feel sick, or panicky, but it didn’t. He was quite tranquil.
He remembered his daughter, Carol, asking when she was very young if he had ever been in jail. He had assured her vehemently that he had not, but her question had shaken him badly. He remembered that she’d been surprised and disappointed by his reply; she’d gotten the idea from somewhere that all men went to jail now and then. George had worried about their brief conversation for a long time. He tried to imagine, now, her adult reaction to his arrest and incarceration, and flinched. He deserved it, no question about that. But he saw the irony in it, and Carol, of course, would not.
Carlyle’s living room was drenched in sunshine. His body lay in it. The hardwood floor gleamed in it. There was a disquieting permanence in these moments, George thought. He was sure the sun would continue to shine steadily through the big window at precisely this angle. He was sure the earth had ceased its perambulations at last and come to rest forever at this specific point in its axis.
George continued to rest on the chesterfield, hands on his knees, and felt himself blinking stupidly at the sunshine, at the rocking chair, at the tall cabinet across the room which held a collection of china. There was no horror in the room, no disapproval. There was only the benign sunshine and the radiance of polished wood. The act of murder had apparently been swiftly absorbed, dispensed with; even George’s own body had adjusted to what it had done. This didn’t seem proper. Something judgmental ought to be happening. But the soporific sun shone in, illuminating Carlyle lying there dead with no more emphasis than it shed upon the rocking chair, or the brass-based lamp on the end table, or George’s hands, resting on his knees.
The man was dead. There was no doubt about it. There was an incontrovertible sense of absence in his stillness.
George looked vaguely around the room and continued to sit quietly, waiting for some feeling to claim him. But nothing claimed him. Nothing choked his chest, not remorse or self-satisfaction. He was empty of all things important.
He thought back to the moments of the murder. He could remember each second clearly, but the seconds didn’t accumulate neatly in his mind to form a definable experience.
He shouldn’t have come here. He hadn’t been in this house for months, and he certainly shouldn’t have come today.
He couldn’t remember what Carlyle had said to persuade him. He couldn’t remember walking here. But he remembered arriving. The front door was ajar. On either side of the concrete steps, wide and shallow, was a pot of lemon-scented geranium. They were terra-cotta pots.
The door was ajar. Carlyle had a habit of doing things like that, leaving his doors and windows open for any bright-eyed burglar to get through. When he drove a car, he had never locked it and had often left his keys in the ignition. He was never robbed, and announced this often. “Never been robbed,” he would say proudly. “Never. Trust people; that’s my motto.” His left eye would close, then. He probably thought he looked droll, winking like that, but to George he only looked like he had a left eye that wasn’t reliable any more.
Never been robbed, thoug
ht George, sitting on the flowered chesterfield. And now he’s been murdered.
Carlyle had droned on and on from his rocking chair, looking out the window at the sea. When George finally realized what he was leading up to he tried to stop him, he tried very hard to stop him, but Carlyle put up his hand and shook his head and went right on talking.
At some point George started to leave, but Carlyle said, “I’m talking about your sister, George. Your family.” He turned around to smile at him. “Pay some respect, George. Pay some attention.”
It was the smile, that mocking, knowing smile, which held George planted to the floor, his feet apart, a horrible prickling sensation moving from the middle of his back right up his spine.
Carlyle had turned back to the window, and commenced again to talk. George, behind him, told him loudly to shut up, but still Carlyle went on, his voice flat and deadly. He admitted nothing, nothing, he said such awful, dreadful things, he was going on and on…And then George looked wildly about him and saw the shell casings, two of them, identical, side by side on a bookcase shelf.
His body propelled him relentlessly toward them, his right hand grabbed one of them, he turned around and lurched toward Carlyle, who was still looking out the window, still talking, and then as if suddenly alerted Carlyle began to turn, his left hand grasping the wooden arm of the rocking chair. But the shell casing had already begun its descent. In the split second before George shut his eyes tight and the weapon crashed down upon Carlyle’s skull he saw fear in Carlyle’s eyes and knew he had seen it there before and tried to remember when, and where, and why he’d seen Carlyle terrified in the past, and it even occurred to him to ask Carlyle, but then of course it was too late.
The sound was unlike anything George had heard before. Once while he was unloading groceries from the back seat of his car a cantaloupe had hurled itself upon the concrete driveway. It was something like that.
George sighed, and rubbed his head, and wished he could weep.
He wanted to go home. He wasn’t ready yet for the hustle and bustle of being arrested. He was too tired to answer people’s questions, to explain to his lawyer, who had never handled anything more complicated than a will or a real estate transaction, that he now had a murderer for a client. He had to have time to rest, to prepare himself.
Gradually, as he sat thinking, it occurred to George that to give himself up was pointless. Even stupid. When they caught up with him, fine. He’d go to trial and to prison without complaining, with dignity, even, if he could manage it. But to spend any more time locked up than was absolutely necessary—it made no sense.
Besides, he thought, it had been self-defense, in a way. The man had been babbling wickedly about things he didn’t understand and had no right to know, trying to hurt him with them, as though George hadn’t been hurting always, throughout his adult life, since long before he met Carlyle. And George knew Carlyle had been going to confess, too, to things George had struggled for years to put from his mind.
It was lucky he’d worn his dark blue sweater, he thought, struggling up out of the soft-cushioned chesterfield. The spots and splotches on it could be anything at all.
He hobbled on prickly half-asleep legs into the kitchen, where a fish in a plastic bag lay in the sink. Even this, the sight of Carlyle’s never-to-be-eaten lunch, couldn’t move him. He rummaged around in drawers until he found some big paper grocery bags. Into one of them he loaded the shell casings; he wasn’t sure why he took them both, but he did. He stuffed his handkerchief, marked now with Carlyle’s blood, into his back pocket. Then he shuffled cautiously over to where the body lay. He didn’t get too close to it, because he didn’t want to look at any more of the head than he had to.
Carlyle’s eyes were open. George’s heart twisted in a sudden, painful spasm. For a moment he thought Carlyle was alive after all, and he felt an awesome relief. I’ll leave this time, he told himself; this time I’ll leave, quickly, before he can do any more talking, any more harm. But Carlyle wasn’t alive. His eyes were open, but he was dead. He seemed to be gazing across the floor at the heat register in the wall behind the chesterfield.
George went slowly down the hall, slightly stooped from the burden of the shell casings in the paper bag, lodged under one arm. He opened the front door, which he had closed when he entered the house.
Nothing had changed. The sea still slurped from behind the house, the bees still buzzed around the marguerites and marigolds filling the flower beds beneath the windows on either side of Carlyle’s front door. He wondered how long he’d been in there and decided it wasn’t nearly as long as it felt.
He went out onto the concrete step and turned to shut the door. As he turned, he brushed against the geranium in one of the terra-cotta pots, which released from its leaves the scent of lemon. It seemed to accompany him up the gravel path, through the laurel hedge, along the road, and into his own house, half a mile from Carlyle’s.
It wasn’t until he had washed off the shell casing and put it on his living room windowsill with its mate, changed his clothes, and put the kettle on for tea that he suddenly remembered Carlyle’s goddamn parrot.
2
JUST NORTH OF VANCOUVER, there is a wide blue crack in the continent called Howe Sound, 10 miles wide. Across it, the province of British Columbia juts abruptly west and then extends northward for almost a thousand miles. Its intricate coastline is fissured by innumerable inlets and channels, cluttered by countless small islands, and is at first sheltered from the open Pacific by Vancouver Island, 285 miles long.
Highway 1, the Trans-Canada, comes to a halt on the shores of Howe Sound, at Horseshoe Bay. Ferries leaving from here provide the only access to the Sechelt Peninsula, otherwise known as the Sunshine Coast.
This is the southernmost forty-five miles of that long, long coastline. Along its seaside are towns and villages called Langdale, Granthams Landing, Gibsons, Roberts Creek, Wilson Creek, Selma Park, Sechelt, Halfmoon Bay, Secret Cove, Madeira Park, Garden Bay, Irvines Landing, Earls Cove.
Gibsons, at the southern end, has a population of 3,000 and was named for the first white settler there. Only about 1,000 people live in the village of Sechelt, which is a native Indian word that some people say means “a place of shelter from the sea.” But Sechelt is in the middle of the Sunshine Coast and is a service center for several thousand more people who live and work nearby.
This part of British Columbia gets more hours of sunshine every year than most places in Canada—five hundred more hours, on the average, than Vancouver. Because its winters are also very mild, things grow here that will not grow anywhere else in the country—apricot and fig trees, even palm trees, it is said.
There is only one major road, a two-lane highway that follows the coastline for eighty miles and then ends.
In the summer the area is clogged with tourists, even though it is not a quickly accessible place. Getting there depends upon ferry schedules, and once you’ve arrived, traversing the coastline takes time because the narrow highway is winding and hilly.
The tempo of life on the Sunshine Coast is markedly slower than that of Vancouver, and its people, for the most part strung out along the shoreline, have a more direct and personal interest in the sea.
The coastal forests are tall and thick with undergrowth, but they come gently down to the water and are sometimes met there by wide, curving beaches. The land cleared for gardens is fertile, and the things growing there tempt wild creatures from the woods. In the sea there are salmon, and oysters, and clams; there are also otters, and thousands of gulls, and cormorants. There are Indian legends, and tales of smugglers, and the stories of the pioneers.
The resident police force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with detachments in Gibsons and Sechelt. There are traffic accidents to deal with, and occasional vandalism, and petty theft, and some drunkenness now and then.
There is very seldom a murder.
3
GEORGE WAITED FOR HIS TEA to steep, and as he waite
d he struggled with an image which thrust itself at him again and again: Carlyle’s corpse, rotting, little by little, while somewhere nearby a raucous green bird slowly starved to death in its cage.
It was ridiculous, he knew that. Nobody could rot, undisturbed, in his own house; not in Sechelt. People paid too much attention to one another, in Sechelt.
But what if, just this once, they didn’t? He couldn’t dislodge this possibility from his mind.
George contemplated his situation with profound reluctance. It was early June, and the Sunshine Coast was dry and warm. It didn’t seem unreasonable to wait until the sky clouded over before going off to jail. This was probably the last dry sunny spell he’d know as a free man. He had no delusions on that score. He knew they’d catch up with him sooner or later. He had begun to hope, though, that he might first enjoy another season in his garden.
He poured his tea and lowered himself into his leather chair and addressed himself to the problem of Carlyle’s pet.
He had seen very little of Carlyle in the last while and as little as possible before that. But Sechelt was a small place and he hadn’t been able to avoid him entirely. Therefore he knew all about the bird. Its name was Tom, and Carlyle had doted on it. Since it had made no sound, neither word nor squawk, during George’s time inside the house, its cage must have been covered; this, he had been told, was the only way to shut the bird up. And since George hadn’t noticed a cloth-covered cage while he was there, Carlyle must have had the creature stashed away in another room. But the damn bird would be there somewhere, all right, and although George disliked parrots, that seemed a poor reason for letting it die for lack of food.
It wouldn’t die, he told himself firmly, sipping his tea. Someone was bound to find Carlyle soon. Maybe he had an appointment with somebody that very afternoon. When he didn’t show up, he’d be checked on, all right. Somebody was always checking on you, once you got into your eighties. And you often couldn’t tell from their voices or their faces whether they were relieved or disappointed to find you still alive. He knew this from his visits to the old folks in the hospital.