by L. R. Wright
She sighed. “I can’t help you,” she said wearily. “I have no idea who could have killed him. You’ll probably find it was one of those senseless acts of—of random violence. There’s a lot of that, these days, isn’t there?”
When he’d hung up the phone, he sat back with his feet up on the desk and his hands behind his head.
His office was small, containing in addition to his desk and swivel chair a filing cabinet, a large bulletin board, some bookshelves, a deep black leather chair with an aluminum frame, and next to it a small, scarred coffee table.
Maybe he’d try to get back out to Toronto later in the summer, to see his parents, he thought. Maybe he could pry his daughters loose from Calgary and take them with him.
He swung around in his chair to look at the photograph. He found himself studying it intently.
They were young women in their late teens, standing in front of a tall, smooth-trunked tree. Unsmiling, grave, they seemed to bend slightly toward each other, like dancers. The girl with shorter hair and larger eyes was deeply tanned; she stood behind her younger sister, her right shoulder pressing lightly against Diana’s left. Diana, hair long and sleek, the color of taffy, faced the camera almost straight on. Her head and neck and shoulders were aware of her sister; she had an air of guarded protectiveness. They were bare-armed, wearing dresses, and Janey’s tan was very dark against Diana’s ivory skin. They looked straight out from the photograph, straight into his eyes, and they weren’t smiling. He had taken the picture the summer before he left Kamloops. Had they broken into laughter when the picture-taking was over? He couldn’t remember. Or had they turned their backs on him and walked away down a tree-arched road into their own futures, abandoning him as he was about to abandon them?…
He became aware of an unfamiliar scent and sniffed suspiciously, his eyes darting around the office. In the middle of his small coffee table stood a pot of white flowers. He got up quickly, picked up the flowers, and strode out into the reception area, where he set the pot down hard in the middle of Isabella’s desk. She looked up at him, annoyed. From the cage on the card table next to her desk, Carlyle Burke’s parrot shrieked at him.
“You startled him,” said Isabella disapprovingly.
“Keep your damn plants out of my office,” said Alberg. “And keep that damn bird quiet.” He turned to leave and then came back. “What are they, anyway?”
“Stock,” said Isabella. “Nice smell, eh?”
Alberg put his hands flat on her desk and gazed into her eyes. “Every week, Isabella, you clean my venetian blinds with vinegar,” he said. “Nobody asked you to do that. It’s not part of your job to do that. And I appreciate it. It’s very nice to have clean venetian blinds. Only, Isabella, my office smells like a pickle jar. And when you add the smell from these flowers—they combine in the air, and the result is nauseating.” He removed his hands from her desk and stood up.
“I never thought of that,” said Isabella. “The question is, do you want clean blinds or nice fragrant flowers that bring a whiff of summer into this joint?” She frowned, pondering.
Isabella Harbud was a tall, lumpy woman married to a chiropractor. She had long thick hair, once brown, now becoming unapologetically gray, and she wore it down, which Alberg thought inappropriate in a woman of late middle age. Her front teeth protruded, and she didn’t care much about the way she dressed. She was usually cold, even in summer, and had a selection of thick sweaters which she grabbed from her closet without any apparent consideration as to what she planned to wear underneath. Today the sweater was turquoise, and partly obscured a red and black striped dress. She had the most beautiful eyes Alberg had ever seen: gold, flecked with brown; they were what he imagined a tiger’s eyes must look like.
“You want clean blinds,” said Isabella, decisively.
“Right,” said Alberg, with gratitude.
“I’ll bring you in one that doesn’t have a smell.”
“I don’t have any room in my office for any plant. No room.”
“Sure you do,” said Isabella comfortingly, going back to her typing.
“When you go home,” Alberg yelled as he went down the hall, “make sure you cover up that damn cage.”
Sokolowski appeared from somewhere and followed him into his office. Alberg swung his feet back up onto the desk and linked his hands behind his head. “What’ve we got, Sergeant? Fill me in. Bring me up to date.” He tossed him the file. “Let’s go over the whole damn thing, one more time.”
Sokolowski settled himself in the black chair and opened the file. His big thighs strained the fabric of his dark blue uniform trousers, his legs were stolidly apart, feet planted heavy on the floor. “Victim died between eleven A.M. and two P.M. on Tuesday, June fifth, from a blow to the head. Death was probably instantaneous. The coroner says the weapon was a metal object, rounded, with some kind of rim. Very little spattering. Probably some blood got on the perpetrator’s clothes, but not much. No forced entry into the house.” He droned on, shifting his feet a little. “Nothing missing as far as anybody can tell.”
“I know all this,” said Alberg, staring at the ceiling.
“Several neighbors saw the fish guy’s truck, four of them saw the fish guy.” Sokolowski looked up. “You want their names and addresses?” Alberg shook his head, slowly. “Vehicle described as an old VW van, couldn’t pinpoint the year, just old, painted silver, paint flaking off, orange paint underneath, they think, but they aren’t sure; van’s got a big rainbow painted on each side and some birds; rainbow’s all colors, birds are blue. No sign of the vehicle yet. I got on to the mainland, just in case it got by the ferry types, which wouldn’t be hard in my experience.”
“Sid, Sid,” Alberg chided, still staring at the ceiling.
“The fish seller,” the sergeant went on, “he’s a guy about thirty-eight, forty, got a beard, wore a pair of jeans and a light shirt and smelled like fish, which isn’t surprising. Soft-spoken kind of guy, say the citizens. One of them bought a salmon from him, why not.” Sokolowski shrugged. “He’s not a licensed peddler, so what else is new.” He looked up at Alberg, exasperated. “The woods are full of them. Guys selling salmon, crab, oysters, fruits, vegetables, you name it, not a license between them.”
“I know all this too,” said Alberg. He sighed and sat up. “Go on, Sid.”
“The fish seller’s our best lead. We’re combing the bush for him. Checked the town first, got on to Gibsons, but he’s probably camped up on Crown land someplace; we’ll find him when one of the lumber companies moves in someplace new with chain saws.”
Sid Sokolowski was a few years older than Alberg, a ponderous, suspicious man, but thoughtful. He was comfortable only with other police officers and with his family, which was large. He and his wife had five children, all girls. The gender of his progeny was a source of hurt and bewilderment to Sokolowski, who understood perfectly well that it was his sperm or chromosomes or something which were responsible for his situation. It gave him, he thought, something in common with Alberg. He and his wife had decided not to have any more children, but Sokolowski waffled about this confidentially to Alberg every now and then, saying he’d like to try once more. Surely the odds would be much more in his favor, he argued. But Alberg on these occasions would reply that they had been more in his favor the last time, too, and even the time before that. “You were a man meant to have daughters, Sid,” he would tell him. “Stop trying to argue with fate.”
Alberg had a great fondness for the sergeant, but he wasn’t someone Alberg could confide in about personal things. Not that he’d ever done much confiding anyway, he thought now, looking at Sid bent over the Burke file; not even with his wife. And maybe that was a more serious problem than he’d realized. He had wanted to have things all figured out before talking about them with Maura. As a result, he was always presenting her with faits accomplis. He had thought he was saving her worry. But maybe he’d been wrong.
“Did the neighbors see anybody on the r
oad that day,” he asked the sergeant, “besides the fish guy and George Wilcox?”
Sokolowski shook his head. “Nobody we haven’t accounted for. The fish seller we haven’t found yet—he was there at just about the right time, between eleven thirty and twelve thirty. And Wilcox…well, actually we’ve got some disagreement there.”
“What kind of disagreement?”
“Two witnesses, including the woman who lives across the street from the victim, say they saw Wilcox go through the hedge into Burke’s front yard at about two fifteen, two thirty, somewhere in there. And this checks with his call to us at two thirty-seven. But one old fellow—Frank Erlandson, his name is—he says he saw the same thing, only two hours earlier, at about twelve thirty.” He shrugged. “He seemed kind of confused. He’s probably just misremembering.” He tossed the file folder onto Alberg’s desk.
“What about the seaward side of things?”
“Nothing. Nobody seen prowling the beaches, nobody out on the water at the right time except for a couple of kids nine and ten in a dinghy, and a guy fishing from a rowboat. We checked them out.”
“The old fellow who says he saw Wilcox at twelve thirty,” said Alberg. “Let’s talk to him again. Try to get that straightened out.”
The sergeant was nodding. “Yeah, I think so too. Problem is he’s been in the hospital since Wednesday afternoon for some kind of tests. He’s supposed to be home Saturday. Tomorrow.”
“Okay. I’ll do it myself, since I’ll be seeing Wilcox later on today.” He got up and stretched. “Sid. I just talked to Burke’s sister, Mrs. Morris. She tells me Burke was once married to George Wilcox’s sister. She’s dead now. Do you find that interesting?”
“Kind of a remote connection, Staff,” said Sokolowski reluctantly. “Can’t see anything in it, myself. Despite the will.” He retrieved the file. “I looked into him,” he said, shuffling through the pages in the folder. “Here he is. Wilcox. Not rich, but he’s got money in the bank. House paid for. And he gets a pretty good pension. Well spoken of by neighbors and friends. According to them, he wasn’t a special friend of the victim.” He closed the file. “It’s a toughie. My money’s on the salmon seller.” He looked up at Alberg. “Christ, it’s been three days. It’s gotta be the salmon seller.”
“Yeah, Sid, but why? He didn’t take anything from the house. What was the motive?”
“He went berserk,” said Sokolowski promptly. He spread his hands. “It happens, Karl. You know it happens.”
“Okay, but if he went berserk it must have been as soon as he walked in the door,” said Alberg dryly. “He’d been to—what?—three houses before Burke’s. And he wasn’t berserk then. He wasn’t armed, either. What did he hit him with?”
“Maybe he found something in the house,” said Sokolowski, after a moment’s thought. “And then took it away with him. And Karl, it’s kind of peculiar, isn’t it, that he didn’t stop at anybody’s place after Burke’s? People up the road saw his van drive by, but he didn’t stop.”
“Maybe he ran out of fish.” Alberg sighed. “Yeah, okay, I agree, he’s our best bet. For the moment.” He got his suit jacket from the rack in the corner.
“Who’d you have lunch with?” said the sergeant, grinning.
Alberg looked at him coldly.
“It’s a small town,” said Sokolowski. “So who was it?”
“A librarian,” said Alberg, with dignity. He threw his jacket over his shoulder. From the reception area, the parrot squawked. “Jesus,” said the staff sergeant.
9
“IS IT ALWAYS THIS BUSY in here?” There was nobody in the library except Cassandra, and now him.
She turned quickly from the cart filled with books ready for reshelving. “Oh, heavens, yes. We’re a regular beehive of activity.” She smiled, automatically. He wasn’t at all sure she was glad to see him.
“It’s a very nice library,” said Alberg.
“I get the feeling you haven’t been in many.”
“Of course I have,” he said, irritated. “It’s not where I spend most of my time, maybe, but I use the library, just like anybody else.” He wondered why he hadn’t thought to go there for a book about pruning.
She went back to putting books away. “This is the slowest part of the day. The old people come in the morning, usually. The kids come in after school. And working people come in the evenings, or on Saturdays. I’m surprised to see you again so soon. I thought you had a funeral to go to.”
He watched her shelve a biography of Churchill. “I did. I went. It’s over. Doesn’t anybody else work here?”
“I’ve got a couple of volunteers. That’s all. But from two until four every day, I’m usually on my own. Whose funeral was it?”
“Carlyle Burke’s. Did he come here in the mornings?”
She looked puzzled.
“You said the old people usually come to the library in the mornings.” He took from the shelf a book entitled The Life of Catherine the Great and hefted it in his hand as if trying to determine its weight.
“Oh. Yes.” She reached down to get two more books from the cart. “But not him. I don’t remember ever seeing him in here.”
“You didn’t know him, then.” He noticed that as she shelved the books she pulled some slightly farther out and pushed some farther in, to even them out, and then, unthinking, ran her fingers along the spines as if playing a harp.
“No, I never met him,” said Cassandra. “I think my mother knew him, though. She knows everybody.”
“How about George Wilcox? Does he come in the mornings?”
She pushed the cart across an open space furnished with easy chairs and low tables to a row marked sociology. “Mostly in the mornings,” she said, “but evenings, too, and sometimes afternoons. It depends on the weather. He spends a lot of time in his garden.”
Alberg walked aimlessly to the window. A tall plant stood there, in a big white pot. Its huge wide leaves looked glossy, almost wet; he touched one of them curiously.
“I can’t imagine,” said Cassandra, “finding a body. Well, I can imagine it…”
He rejoined her just as she was ready to move the cart again. He got out of the way and followed her to the fiction section.
“I can’t understand why anybody would kill an old man,” said Cassandra, looking up at him from her crouched position on the floor by a lower shelf. “What reason could anybody possibly have for doing a thing like that?”
“Same reasons people have for killing anyone.”
“It wasn’t robbery, was it,” she said, and added quickly, “that’s what I heard, anyway.” She was standing, shelving books rapidly, confidently. The cart was almost emptied.
“Might have been attempted robbery,” said Alberg. “All we know is nothing seems to be missing.”
“That means somebody might have gone to his house meaning to do it, doesn’t it?”
“Could be. Right now,” said Alberg grimly, “anything’s possible.”
She reached for the last two books on the cart and put them away. Then she pushed the empty cart back to the front desk. Again Alberg followed, feeling inexplicably exasperated.
“He used to be a teacher,” said Cassandra, lifting the hinged section in the U-shaped counter and pushing the cart through. “So did George Wilcox. He’s the one who told me. They’d known each other for years. Since long before they came here. But I assume you know all that.”
“No,” said Alberg. “I didn’t know they’d known each other for years. Not until today.”
She adjusted some tall purple flowers that stood in a vase on the counter. “They taught in the same school in Vancouver for a while. A long time ago. That’s how they met. Then they must have lost touch, because I don’t think they’d seen each other for years when Mr. Burke came here to live.”
“Did they become friends again, then?” Alberg wondered if she knew they had been brothers-in-law. If so, she wasn’t telling him. He found this mildly depressing, even though he ha
dn’t convinced himself yet that the old relationship between the two men had anything to do with Burke’s death.
Cassandra looked at the irises. Some of them were beginning to wilt. She heard it again: He got exactly what was coming to him. She had never before heard George Wilcox say anything so unfeeling. It must have been the shock, she thought. The poor man, he was probably still in shock.
“Well?” said Alberg. “Were they friends, here in Sechelt?”
She smiled at him. “Are you poking around for information? Is this an interrogation?” She clasped her hands on the countertop and put an eager look on her face. “Anything I can do, Officer, to assist you in your inquiries—anything at all.”
Alberg was slightly flustered. “I’m just curious, that’s all. And I’m trying to find out who’s committed a homicide around here. Yeah, I’m poking around for information, of course I am. That’s not why I came in here, but—” He shrugged.
“To answer your question,” said Cassandra carefully, “no, I don’t think they became friends again. George didn’t mention Mr. Burke often. At least, not to me.”
She touched an iris, and the light stroke of her finger against the petal of the flower suggested to Alberg his own gesture to brush closed Carlyle Burke’s eyelid; there was great gentleness in it.
“He brought me these flowers,” said Cassandra. “George Wilcox did.” She turned to Alberg. “He’s a very interesting man. He taught history. He’s still curious and impatient. Until his wife died a couple of months ago, they traveled a lot.” She smiled suddenly. “Only in winter, though. He doesn’t like to be away from his garden.” She looked at Alberg curiously. “If you didn’t come here to ask me questions, why did you come?” Safe behind the counter, she seemed amused.
He had passed the library on his way to Wilcox’s house. He was driving slowly, not wanting to arrive early, and when he saw the empty parking spaces, he drove in. He sat there for a few minutes admiring the building. It had lots of windows, and greenery, and he could see the low shelves filled with books, and this pleased him. He didn’t go to church, either, he told himself, but he liked the fact that there were a few of them around.