The Suspect

by L. R. Wright

  “You’re going to roast yourself,” he said.

  She turned, a cloth in her hand, and he was happy when she smiled at him. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead.

  “What are you doing, anyway?” said Alberg.

  She gestured to a pail of water on the floor. “I’m sponging their leaves.”

  “Do you have to do it when the sun’s pouring right through the windows at you?”

  “I have to do it while there’s somebody else here to take care of the customers,” she said. He’d noticed when he came in that a teenage girl was busy behind the counter, checking books in and out. There were a dozen or so people in the library. This gave Alberg an illogical pleasure.

  “Can you have dinner today?” he said. “Or tomorrow?”

  “Good heavens. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we had lunch?” He ignored this, waiting. “Not today,” she said. “Tomorrow I spend the afternoon with my mother. I have dinner there, too. Every Sunday.”

  His disappointment was intense. He hadn’t thought beyond tomorrow. What was she doing tonight, to make her unavailable? He didn’t know what to say next.

  She hesitated, the cloth in her hand. There was a trickle of sweat on her left temple. He reached over and flicked it away.

  “God, I must look a mess,” said Cassandra cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what. How about you pick me up at Golden Arms—say, about six thirty—and we’ll go for a walk on the beach.”

  “Okay,” said Alberg, slightly cheered. “Golden Arms. Christ.”

  “How’s the—uh, the investigation going?” she asked, as she walked with him to the door.

  “Which one?” said Alberg. “The log thefts? The vandalism? The stolen four-by-four? The tourist yacht that got crunched by a fishing boat?”

  “Actually,” said Cassandra, “I was thinking of the murder. Remember the murder? Or have you handed that over to someone else?”

  He stopped and leaned against the end of one of the shelves in the biographies section. “Your friend George is Carlyle Burke’s heir,” he said. “That’s the news from that particular investigation.”

  She was astonished, of course, but he was surprised to see that she was also uneasy. She stared at him for several seconds.

  “Does that make him a suspect?” she said finally.

  Alberg pretended to think this over. “Not really,” he said. He moved out of the way of a young man in jeans and a David Bowie T-shirt. “It seemed to come as a big shock to him, as a matter of fact.”

  Cassandra pushed her hair away from her face and then realized she’d done this with the cloth she had been using on the plants. She stared at it uncomprehendingly. Alberg began to laugh. She looked at him, blank-faced, and seemed to become agitated.

  He put his hand on her bare arm. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  Cassandra tried to laugh. “No, nothing. It’s just the heat.” She gently dislodged his hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He watched her go through the hinged section in the counter, speak to the volunteer, and disappear into an office behind the shelves of reserved books.

  “Okay,” he said finally, out loud. He looked around him. “Okay,” he said again, and wandered out of the library into the heat of the late afternoon, and decided he might as well go home.

  14

  ALBERG LIVED IN GIBSONS, at the southern end of the Sunshine Coast, about fourteen miles down the narrow winding highway from Sechelt. He preferred to have a little distance between himself and the detachment office.

  His house was known as the directors’ house because for several years it had been rented by the C.B.C., for use by television directors in town briefly to shoot episodes in a series called The Beachcombers.

  The place had about it an air of preoccupation, of distraction. Alberg had marveled when he moved in at the things abandoned there by harassed people to whom the house had been mere shelter, less than a hotel. They had spent very little time there, and yet some had managed to leave things behind.

  There was a single serving size box of Rice Krispies in the kitchen cupboard, open but empty, the knocked-over box surrounded by mouse turds. On the floor of the bedroom closet in furry gray globs of dust, Alberg found a gold Cross ballpoint pen. Under the bed huddled a threadbare pair of white jockey shorts. In the bathroom medicine chest sat a lonely, sticky bottle of cough medicine and a half-used roll of antacid tablets. On the small table next to the lumpy bed someone had left a paperback copy of Worlds in Collision.

  Alberg had been in a hurry to move in and told the owner not to bother having the place cleaned, he would see to it himself. It took him several evenings but he was glad, later, that he hadn’t hired someone else to do the job.

  He found nothing in the house that would identify its former occupants as practitioners of the art of television, yet the things he found caused him to create people in his mind as he swept and polished. There wasn’t enough evidence for legitimate deduction, so he just made them up, and he became fond of these people, so that in the end he didn’t throw away anything but the cereal box. He put the cough medicine and the antacid tablets and the jockey shorts and the Cross ballpoint pen and Worlds in Collision into a small cardboard box, which he then kept on the shelf in his bedroom closet.

  It comforted him to keep nearby these reminders of some of the other temporary occupants of the house. It was almost as though he expected one winter evening to hear a knock at the door and, when he opened it, holding an open book in one hand (he would have been sitting in front of the fire, reading, for once), there would stand one of the directors, who would apologize for intruding and begin a stammering inquiry about an object he had only recently discovered was missing. (It would be the pen, probably; hardly the jockey shorts.) Alberg would invite him in, return the object to his delighted visitor, and they would sit together in front of the fire and have a drink and talk about television until the director had to leave to catch the last ferry back to the mainland.

  But nobody at all knocked on his door, that first winter. It had been a very lonely time. Work had kept him busy during the days, but the evenings were bad.

  It seemed to rain incessantly. Sometimes there were winter storms, and that was all right, a fire in the fireplace and candles to eat by and the excitement of wondering whether the huge Douglas fir across the road was tall enough to crash into his house, if uprooted by the raging winds. But mostly it just rained, straight down, no breeze to angle it, bathing his house and trickling down his windowpanes and pattering on the foliage with a sound like eternal grieving, and it was this, the rain, with which he struggled as he wrote upbeat affectionate letters to his daughters and occasional notes to his wife which he hoped were graceful as well as businesslike. He would look up from the paper, after signing his name to these missives, and there was always a moment of shock as he looked blankly around him, and this was followed by a jolt of pain so severe that the first few times he had seriously considered seeing a doctor.

  One day in February he had noticed on his way out to his car an unfamiliar fragrance in the air. He looked carefully about him but couldn’t see anything unusual except a few small green shoots. Their presence in the earth of his front yard surprised him until he realized that the Sunshine Coast had had only a few nights of frost, and that was back in December.

  On a Saturday in early April he glanced from his kitchen window and found that growing things had thrust themselves high enough to almost block his windows.

  That was the start of his battle with the greenery which last year had threatened to swallow up his house. He was determined it wasn’t going to happen again.

  The house was on the side of a hill that reared up out of Gibsons. It looked down upon a disorganized tumble of small houses, and below them the town’s main street, and beyond that the government wharf and a wood-piling breakwater that protected several finger floats. The back yard wasn’t large, and most of it was lawn. A lopsided wooden fence surrounding the yard s
upported the climbing roses, which, when untended, went mad. Until Alberg’s attack with the hedge clippers on Tuesday, some of the canes had stretched twelve feet into the air, clawing wildly at nothing when the breezes blew in from the ocean.

  He pulled up late this Saturday afternoon in front of the house, which faced Schoolhouse Road sidelong, thrusting a suspicious shoulder at the traffic. A fence in dilapidation similar to that in the back yard offered yet another line of defense, and hydrangea bushes grew in glorious disarray along the fence and across the front of the house, encroaching upon the somewhat rickety front porch.

  It was a small house, but he liked it. He was now even thinking about buying it. He toyed with the idea each time he thought of requesting a permanent posting to Sechelt, which had first occurred to him about a month ago.

  There was a sun porch at the back, on the southwest side, and through its wide windows he got his best view of the town, the wharf, and across Shoal Channel to Keats Island. He had noticed during his preliminary inspection of the house that there was a hole in one wall of the sun porch, where it met the floor. He also noticed a large battered cardboard carton in which lay some rags, and a scratched blue bowl next to it.

  The first evening after he moved in he was standing in the sun porch looking down at the town and at the black sea, on which floated the running lights of a few invisible boats, and listening to the rain, when he heard a scrabbling sound. He got a flashlight and found in the box of rags a thin gray cat who remained for a moment pinioned by the beam of light and then leaped from the box and disappeared through the hole in the wall. Before he went to bed that night he filled the blue bowl with milk. In the morning the box was still empty, but so was the bowl. The cat hung around for a few days, then disappeared. Alberg left the box of rags, and filled the blue bowl with fresh milk each night, but months passed and he didn’t see the animal again. Finally he repaired the hole in the wall.

  But late in the summer the cat returned. He heard meowing, and scratching, and went outside to see her (if it was, in fact, a she) trying to claw her way into the sun porch where the hole had been. He left the screen door propped open, put out some milk, and went to bed.

  This continued until fall, when once more the cat vanished. Alberg thought she must have discovered in her feline wisdom a way to escape the wet British Columbia coast winters for a dryer, warmer place. So far she hadn’t come back again, but he left the box and the rags out there, just in case, and had begun in April to call her softly before he went to bed.

  Now in the kitchen he boiled water for instant coffee and looked in the fridge for a while, but he didn’t see anything that interested him. He shouldn’t eat anything anyway, he thought; not with an expanding waistline.

  He took his mug of coffee into the living room and settled down at the heavy round dining room table he’d put at one end of the room. He brought with him his notebook and a pen, intending to make notes about the Burke homicide.

  He had lived through that first awful winter with a minimum of furniture, only what the house itself provided. But when spring came and the sun emerged he began buying things. At first he felt uncomfortable, going shopping alone, with only himself to please. But eventually he began taking pleasure in surrounding himself with things that satisfied his own tastes. These tastes sometimes astonished him, as if they were new ones, as perhaps they were.

  Restless, the page in his notebook still blank, he moved to a wingback chair near the window and put his feet up on a hassock.

  It would be extremely convenient, he thought, if a satisfactory relationship should develop between him and Cassandra. He’d started answering ads only a couple of months ago. When he first arrived in Sechelt he was too busy with his job and too unhappy and bewildered in his personal life to seek female companionship. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to do that, anyway. Eventually he began spending an occasional weekend in Vancouver, frequenting the singles bars. He felt excessively middle-aged in those places. He ignored this for a while, because he did manage to meet women there, all right. But it soon became depressing. The sexual experiences were more reassuring than anything else, and while he had badly needed that reassurance, he also needed somebody female to talk to and laugh with. He probably shouldn’t have given up on those bars so soon. He thought it must have been the music in those places that finally sent him fleeing.

  So next he tried answering ads. He met a lot of the same kind of person he’d met in the bars—bright, well-dressed, much too young—and he also met a great many women whose ages and personalities suited him better but whose loneliness had made them desperate. Their desperation caused him great discomfort, knowing how close he was to desperation himself, and he saw few of them more than once.

  All he wanted was friendship and sex combined in women who were content in their singleness. He hadn’t expected this to be so difficult to find.

  He couldn’t figure what the hell it was that kept an attractive, intelligent woman like Cassandra Mitchell buried alive on the Sunshine Coast. Still, he told himself, she must have her reasons. Just as he had his.

  He hoped her friend George was no longer even a remote contender as Sechelt’s felon of the year.

  But he made a note—finally—in his book. He’d have to check out that business of the color of Wilcox’s sweater. He was pretty sure Frank Erlandson had gotten his times mixed up, all right. Yet if he and his sister both took naps after lunch, it was just possible that he’d sat out on his porch twice that day and had seen George the first time.

  But that didn’t make sense, Alberg thought impatiently, closing the notebook. If Wilcox had killed the old man, why the hell would he come trotting down the road two hours later to find the body?

  Alberg stood up and stared out through the window. It’s got to be the fishmonger, he thought. And we’ll find him. It’s only a matter of time.

  He noticed the sunlight slanting into his front yard, shining almost amber upon his hydrangeas. He felt a sudden inexplicable exhilaration. The flowers were larger than they had been four days earlier, and beginning to show their blueness. He was very happy that he hadn’t gotten around to chopping them down.

  15

  THE WEATHER WAS HOLDING. Sunday was again hot and dry, with not even a sea breeze to temper it. Nothing but total immersion in the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean, thought Alberg, baking in his back yard, could bring his body temperature down. Yet he wasn’t complaining. This kind of heat was unusual in Sechelt at any time of year, rare indeed in June, and unusual weather heightened his awareness of things and increased his interest in them.

  Besides, the waitress at the diner where he’d had a late breakfast had told him it wouldn’t last.

  “Watch the sunset,” she’d said, lifting his coffee cup to wipe up the liquid she’d sloshed into the saucer. “It’ll be clear as a bell, not a cloud in sight. But it’ll be the last one like that for a while.” She tossed the cloth into the sink behind her, put her hands on her wide hips, and inspected the street outside the window; Alberg could almost see the heat shimmering there. “Tomorrow’ll start out just like today, get even hotter, probably, but by evening the clouds’ll start coming and you’ll see, we’ll have rain by Tuesday.”

  “And how long will the rain last?” said Alberg.

  She calculated, her hennaed finger waves shining in the sun. “A week,” she said firmly. “Maybe longer.”

  He ate a sandwich and drank a can of beer for dinner and tried calling the cat again. He had a tin of tuna for her if she showed up. But there was still no sign of her.

  He dressed carefully before going to meet Cassandra in tan chinos and a green shirt and, because they were going to walk on the beach, sneakers. He looked at himself, dissatisfied. Finally he rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to just below his elbows and undid the first two buttons, revealing some of the blond hair on his chest. He combed his hair, wishing it were thicker, and checked under the clump that fell over his forehead, but decided, probing cautio
usly, that it hadn’t receded any more under there since the last time he’d looked. He studied himself somberly in the mirror for another minute, thinking about Freddie Gainer’s hair, which certainly looked a lot thicker since he’d had that damn permanent.

  Alberg was suddenly embarrassed by his absorption in his physical self. He actually glanced around him, as if someone might be watching and finding great amusement in his performance. Then he shook his head to unsmooth his hair, did up the second button on his shirt, and left the house.

  Golden Arms was a place created by one of the local service clubs for elderly people still self-sufficient but aware that they were losing the confidence necessary to live alone. It was a single-story complex, U-shaped, with a large lawn in the middle. The units at the end had small patios with sliding doors and were occupied by couples.

  Alberg hadn’t given much thought—until he found himself walking down one side of the U, looking at the numbers on the doors—to the intimacy his picking up Cassandra there might imply. He felt there were people peeking at him from behind their curtains, up and down the rows on either side of the large lawn, and called himself paranoid.

  When he had found the right door, and knocked, and been admitted by Cassandra, he completely filled the dining area of Mrs. Mitchell’s kitchen. She was sitting in a chair by the window in the living room, to his right, fanning herself with a magazine.

  “I won’t get up,” she said. “If I did, one of us would have to move outside.” She was a small, rotund woman with gray hair cut like Prince Valiant’s. She wore glasses and smiled at him with an air of cool speculation that made him uneasy.

  Cassandra introduced them, leaned down to kiss her mother’s cheek, and reached around Alberg for a straw handbag sitting on the kitchen table. She seemed anxious to leave.

  In the car, he made a polite remark about her mother.