The Suspect

by L. R. Wright

  “What was it that you didn’t like about him?” said Alberg.

  “Didn’t trust him,” said George promptly. “Never trusted him. He came over all friendly to me the first day I got there. I took one look and said to myself, ‘I don’t trust that man.’”

  He went back to his chair and lowered himself into it. “When he married my sister I had to overlook all that. Never got to know him well; closely, I mean. Never wanted to. I had a big resistance to Carlyle, all the time I knew him.” Quite suddenly, he looked exhausted.

  “How long was he married to your sister?”

  “Two years.”

  “What happened?”

  “She died. In a car crash.” He rubbed his face, pale and strained. “We were out of the country when it happened, Myra and I and our daughter, Carol. I was teaching in Germany.” He straightened and rubbed the small of his back with both hands. “That’s what it must have been, you see. He never got married again, didn’t have any family except that sister in Winnipeg and they couldn’t stand each other. He must have figured I was the closest thing to kin he had.” His voice shook a little. “The crazy old bastard.”

  Alberg felt depression nudging him, gentle little pushes that made him feel slightly sick. He struggled against it, looking around the room for something to hook on to. “This place could use a good cleaning,” he said disapprovingly.

  George looked at him, startled, and grinned. “Myra was quite a one for the cleaning. I’ve barely touched the place since she took ill, last November thirteenth.” He glanced around the kitchen. “You’re right, though.”

  They sat quietly, and Alberg became aware of the sound of the sea’s incessant surging against George’s beach, and the occasional cry of a gull. He saw that the waters were calm; there was a tremble upon them, that was all. George’s garden, between his house and the beach, was an orderly riot, not a weed in sight, just lush growth and colors that were almost audible. He saw this through the streaked window of George’s kitchen, and had an urge to go out there and see it all clearly, watch the leaves breathe and smell the roses.

  “When did your wife die?”‘ he asked.

  “On the twentieth of March, this year,” said George.

  “Do you still miss her?”

  George looked at him with distaste and didn’t reply.

  Alberg didn’t know where to go from here. He felt almost stupefied, sitting in George’s kitchen, nestled into the worn leather chair, and thought if he stayed there much longer, his eyelids would grow heavy and his head would drop back.

  “So you met a man you disliked on sight,” he said, trying to organize his thoughts. He ought to get up, thank George Wilcox for his time, and leave, that’s what he ought to do. But he felt the interview had been sloppy. Maybe there wasn’t anything more to be learned here, but he was uncertain about exactly what he had learned. He wrenched his mind into action. “You instinctively distrusted him,” he said doggedly. “But you taught at the same school. I presume you were polite, never let him know how you felt. Is that right?”

  “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 couldn’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 1979. 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. “An
d 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.

  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 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. If 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.P., 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.

  He got up, and went back outside, and looked this time at the flowers that grew in the bed against his house. He’d put out his bedding plants more than three months ago, as if subconsciously pred
icting the unusual warmth and dryness of the spring. He had accepted the weather with pleasure and equanimity. Perhaps it was his last summer; perhaps it was nature’s final gift to him. Except that he didn’t deserve any gifts from nature. Not now.

  It occurred to him, however, as he bent over his marigolds, that a vengeful God might well give him a present for getting rid of Carlyle.

  George had to brace himself against the side of the house for a minute, to catch his breath and let some dizziness pass. And he closed his eyes, then, and thought of Audrey. A great surge of relief swept through him that he could still remember her, holding an armful of deep purple lilacs and laughing her pleasure. She had been the real gardener in the family. It was only after her death that he took it up, grimly at first, in deliberate homage and apology to her, then gradually finding in it his own personal joy.

  He remembered toiling in the vegetable garden in California, after she died. He had dug up far too much of the lawn. It was a gigantic garden. And of course he’d had no idea how quickly things grew down there. Myra would come out to him, bringing him iced tea or lemonade, never scolding him although she worried. She would wipe his dripping forehead with a cloth carried from the kitchen and put her arm around his shoulders and kiss him.

  He shivered, leaning against his house, as the sea breeze stroked the side of his face, and he thought how lucky he had been to have had Audrey in his life, and then Myra, who had never resented his devotion to his sister, even though he knew she had never quite understood it.

  George opened his eyes and shoved himself away from the house. Marigolds smoldered at his feet, and sweet peas draped themselves along his fence, and the rosebushes along the fence on the other side of the yard were laden with blooms.

  The only blight upon his entire life had been Carlyle. It may have been a desperate, bloody, brutal, and uncivilized thing to do, but at least he’d done something, finally, about Carlyle.

  He decided he would row out into the bay and dump the shell casings overboard. He would have to use Carlyle’s boat, since he had none of his own and didn’t want to call attention to himself by renting one; it was only fitting, he thought, that Carlyle’s boat, now his, should be the one he used.