The Suspect

by L. R. Wright

  Finally he just thanked him for the lemonade and left, hurrying along the walk to catch up with Cassandra, who waited for him on the shoulder of the road.

  16

  ALBERG WAS FEELING PRETTY GOOD when he went to work the next day. He’d been hungry when they left George’s house, so they went to a restaurant near Davis Bay. He had a meal and Cassandra had oysters on the half shell and they shared a bottle of wine and talked and found things to laugh about. By the time he took her home he knew he wanted to go to bed with her, but she didn’t want to do any more than kiss him, sitting in the car. Her face was hot next to his, and he felt her tremble (although this morning he hadn’t been totally certain about that). He was disappointed that she hadn’t let it go any further, but it was going to happen eventually, he was convinced of it, and he had decided to try to be patient.

  He liked her. That was the most important thing.

  It was another bright, cloudless day and he was filled with optimism. When he came into the office the parrot was shrieking and squawking.

  “I don’t know what to do about him,” said Isabella, worried. “He isn’t happy, poor thing.”

  Alberg got down on his haunches next to the cage. “Come on, bird,” he said, “what the hell’s the matter with you?” He spoke soothingly and stretched out his finger, thinking to stroke its feathers, show it some kindness.

  The parrot lunged forward, snapped up a morsel of his flesh, and hopped back onto its perch, letting out a piercing scream. Alberg in his astonishment sat down hard upon the floor, clutching his injured hand.

  Isabella quickly threw the red-and-white checked cloth over the cage, and the bird’s shrieks subsided to an ominous chatter. She whipped from her desk drawer a first-aid kit and knelt beside Alberg.

  “My, my, my, broke the skin and everything,” she said, dabbing iodine upon the wound, which was in the fleshy part of his hand. “Ignored the finger and went straight for the meaty stuff.” She slathered on another layer of iodine.

  “Jesus,” said Alberg, breathless, “haven’t you ever heard of Mercurochrome?”

  “We’d better call a vet,” said Isabella. “See if you can get rabies from a parrot.” Deftly she unwrapped a Band-Aid and smoothed it over his hand.

  “Rabies,” said Alberg, faintly.

  Sid Sokolowski came through the door, ushering before him an elderly woman who, when she saw Alberg and Isabella upon the floor, shrank back against the sergeant and then attempted quickly to turn around. Sokolowski grabbed her by the shoulders, gently, and propelled her inside, but he was looking disapprovingly at Alberg, who scrambled clumsily to his feet.

  “Thank you, Isabella, that’s fine. I appreciate it.”

  Isabella gathered up her supplies, packed them back into the first-aid box, and replaced it in her desk drawer. Alberg had disappeared down the hall.

  “That’s his bird under there, isn’t it?” said the elderly woman. “A thoroughly unpleasant beast, that. He likes a bit of cheese now and then. It seems to calm him.”

  “Would you have a seat for a minute, Mrs. Harris?” said Sokolowski. He pointed to a long wooden bench under the window. It was padded with green cushions. At either end was an ashtray on a stand. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He went to Alberg’s office door. “What the hell was all that about, you and Isabella rolling around on the floor?”

  “It’s that goddamn bird,” said Alberg, red-faced. “This is no place for a goddamn parrot. Force it on Wilcox. Give it to a zoo. Turn it loose. I don’t care what you do with it, but do something. Get rid of it.”

  “Bit you, did it?”

  “Yeah, it bit me. Get rid of it.”

  “What did you do, stick your finger in its cage? Okay,” he said hastily. “Okay. Listen.” He came into the office and sat down. “That woman out there; she was Burke’s cleaning lady.”

  “Make her take the parrot.”

  “She gave the place a going-over once a week, on Wednesdays. Come last Wednesday, the guy’s dead. When I interviewed her she said she couldn’t believe it, such a fine man and all that, it must have been robbery.

  “She called me up the next day to say it all again. I told her according to the victim’s lawyer nothing’s missing, and she said how could we be so sure, she knew the house and its contents better than anybody’s lawyer, there were a lot of valuable things around the place. I said they’re apparently all still there. Anyway, the long and the short of it—”

  “The short of it, please.”

  “—is that I took her over there this morning. She kept calling, you know? Kept bugging me. So I drove her over there to take a look around.” He hesitated. “She says she reads a lot of crime books.”

  Alberg groaned.

  “I figured what she really wanted was to have a gander at the scene of the crime, get a glimpse of the blood on the rug, that sort of thing. Something to tell her cronies about. Still, I said to myself, you never know.”

  “I don’t want civilians at a crime scene,” said Alberg furiously. “What is this, a circus? Jesus Christ, Sergeant.”

  “Would I bring her here if it wasn’t important?” said Sokolowski, calmly. “We just got back from the house. I want you to hear what she’s got to say.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Alberg sighed. “All right, bring her in.”

  He waited without moving, trying not to think, trying to concentrate on the pain in his hand; but it was almost gone. It would be too much to hope for, he thought, that she could have seen anything significant…

  “I thought I might be of some help,” said Mrs. Harris. She was about sixty-five, not much more than five feet tall, with curly gray hair. She wore glasses with extremely large, round lenses. The frames were studded with rhinestones. “He didn’t have many visitors,” she said, “as far as I could tell. I told your man that last week. Poor Mr. Burke, such an awful way to die. It isn’t natural, Inspector,” she said, rather dramatically. “It just isn’t natural. That’s what bothers me.”

  “Staff Sergeant, actually, Mrs. Harris,” said Alberg.

  She scrutinized him disapprovingly and glanced around his small office. Clearly, she would like to have asked to see his superior.

  “He’s the boss here, like I told you, Mrs. Harris,” said Sokolowski. “Go on. Tell him about when you went into the house. Sit down, why don’t you?”

  She sat in the black chair. She was wearing brown shoes with laces, and brown polyester slacks, and a brightly embroidered white short-sleeved sweater. “This gentleman accompanied me,” she said, indicating Sokolowski, “and a good thing, too. I’m not one of nervous spirit. But a man met death in there, death by misadventure. There’s no way you could have persuaded me to enter that house alone, even though the sun was shining and it looked as peaceful as ever.”

  She took a deep breath. “The parrot was gone. I noticed that. But then this gentleman informed me he’d been taken off to police headquarters.” She settled herself more comfortably in the chair, adjusting her large handbag in her lap.

  “Was anything missing, Mrs. Harris?” said Alberg.

  “At first everything looked exactly the same, except for the rug.” She shuddered.

  “I walked through the whole house,” she said, “concentrating, concentrating. Before I went into a room I’d stop outside the door and squeeze my eyes shut and picture it in my mind, all the furniture and the doodads and the drapes and what-have-you, then I’d march in there and have a look round and it all looked just the same as always.”

  Alberg glanced at Sokolowski, who was standing next to Mrs. Harris, impassive.

  “Finally,” said Mrs. Harris, “I went back into the living room. Where the rug is. I just ignored it this time. Got firm with myself. Steeled myself, you might say. I shut my eyes and thought hard and opened them again—and there it was. An empty space where there didn’t used to be one. It isn’t important, though, I suppose. It wasn’t anything valuable.”

  “Tell me about the empty
space,” said Alberg, studying his hands clasped on his desk.

  “There used to be two things there, exactly the same. Souvenirs, he said they were, from the war. He must have meant World War Two. He couldn’t have been in World War One. Well, I guess—he was eighty-five, born in 1899—I guess he could have got in on the last days of World War One. I would have thought he’d be too old for World War Two, starting as it did in 1939 and going on to 1945. That makes him forty when it started and forty-six when it ended. I would have thought that was too old. But anyway, they were souvenirs of the war, that’s what he said.”

  “What were they?” said Alberg.

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “What did they look like?” said Alberg, patiently.

  “Oh, about this tall,” she said, measuring the air with her hands. “They stood about so tall, a foot, maybe. Not too heavy, I remember. I had to lift them up to dust under them. They were hollow.”

  “How big across, would you say?” said Alberg.

  She measured again. “About like that. Maybe—what, three inches? About like that.”

  “Would you recognize them if you saw them again?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly,” she said. “They had a peculiar design on them: a big flower, something like that. Ugly things they were, that’s my opinion. It’s funny they’re gone, isn’t it?” She leaned forward. “Could they be valuable, do you think?”

  “I doubt it, Mrs. Harris,” said Alberg. “They sound like shell casings. They were a dime a dozen around here, after the war. Lots of people have them.”

  “I’ve got a couple,” said Sokolowski. “My father got them. Had them made into bookends.”

  Mrs. Harris sat back, disappointed. “Oh. Still, it’s odd they’re gone, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe he got rid of them himself,” said Sokolowski. “Just got sick of looking at them and pitched them out.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Harris. “Well. Anyway, that’s all that’s missing, as far as I can tell, and who could tell better. And I went through that house so concentrated I was shaking when I came out.”

  Sokolowski saw her out and came back to Alberg’s office.

  “I think there’s some Greek blood in her someplace,” he said. He sat down. “So what did I tell you. He used something he found in the house, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Alberg. “It looks like it.”

  “He bashes him, then takes the weapon away with him.”

  “And its mate, too,” said Alberg. After a minute he said, “How are we doing on that guy?”

  “We’ve found lots of people up and down the coast know him by sight, or his truck. People tell us he lives in the bush, all right—he’s an old hippie, they think. Name of Derek something. You know these people, Karl. They hop from one thing to another. They’re always selling something, everything from handmade pots to Okanagan apples to honey to fish. And they don’t work according to any schedule. Just whenever they’ve got something to peddle. But we’ll get him. No word from the mainland, so he’s got to be around here somewhere.”

  Isabella appeared in the doorway. “Have you called the vet?”

  Alberg rubbed the Band-Aid on his right hand. “No, I have not called the vet. I am not going to call the vet.”

  “I’ll call him,” said Isabella, and retreated.

  “Jesus,” said Alberg. “I’m going out for lunch.”

  He drove down the hill into the village, his arm out the open window, preoccupied. He was trying to imagine Carlyle Burke sitting in his rocking chair, looking out at the sea, while somebody sneaked up behind him to bonk him on the head with one of his own shell casings.

  He tried to imagine the conversation that might have preceded the attack.

  He tried to imagine the attacker, to put a face on him, to find his shape, his substance, and the nature of his fury.

  17

  GEORGE WILCOX SAT OUTSIDE in his canvas chair until it got dark.

  He sat quietly, with his hands in his lap, and watched the sun lower itself behind Vancouver Island. The sun was much larger than the inch-high mountains on the horizon. For a while it appeared that it was going to sit all night on the ground behind them, letting most of itself continue to light up the sky. But then it began to settle lower, and lower, and finally it was gone. George looked straight above him and saw faint stars.

  He continued to sit, wrapped in his gray cardigan, watching the western sky fade. The bees had gone back to their hives for the night and most of the birds, too, were still. Lights went on in the houses next to George’s. Quite early they went out, in the house of one of his neighbors, but continued to burn in the other house. George began to feel cool and went inside to put on his pea jacket; he was already wearing his gardening shoes, which had thick rubber soles and were old and comfortable.

  Finally his other neighbors put their lights out, too.

  He hadn’t gone to the hospital today, he realized. It was the first Monday in six months that he hadn’t gone to the hospital.

  George got up from the canvas chair and went to his toolshed for a spade and two burlap bags. He spread one of them on the lawn next to his vegetable garden, carefully dug up the zucchini and moved it with its root ball of heavy moist earth onto the burlap. He dug deeper and unearthed the shell casings. He shook dirt from them and wiped more away with his hands. He wrapped them in the second burlap bag, making sure there was burlap between them so they wouldn’t clank around. Next he scooped some earth into the hole in his garden, and carefully replanted the zucchini, brushing dirt from its leaves as he did so. The light from his kitchen window shone upon him as he worked. He shook the dirt from the first burlap bag into the garden, then put the burlap-wrapped shell casings inside it and pulled taut the strings. He went inside and filled a watering can and watered the zucchini. Then he washed his hands and turned off the kitchen light and went back outside, closed the door, and locked it.

  George put his keys in his pocket, picked up the burlap bag, and adjusted it over his right shoulder. He walked down the lawn to the beach and turned toward Carlyle’s house.

  The moon was full, and it caused the rocks on the beach to cast large shadows, which George sometimes mistook for more rocks. He went slowly, frequently stopping to shift the bag to his other shoulder. He didn’t bother to look up at the houses he passed, in some of which lights still burned. If somebody opened a door and called out to him, “Hey, who are you? What are you doing out there?” he wouldn’t stop but he’d say loudly, “It’s George Wilcox, and I’m going to throw Carlyle Burke’s shell casings into the drink.” He didn’t care. Christ. He just couldn’t have them contaminating his garden. Enough was enough.

  Alberg was in his living room. He had called the cat, and gotten no response, but had automatically put fresh milk in its bowl anyway. Now, restless and irritable, he was staring into the fireplace, in which there was no fire.

  He was thinking about the unknown assailant who had killed Carlyle Burke, and about Cassandra, and about his daughters. He wondered whether Cassandra was in the habit of opening her door to strangers. He thought she probably was. She never locked her car, and he had noticed when he drove her home last night that she’d just opened her front door and walked right in. He couldn’t believe it. Surely what happened to Burke should have taught her that even in Sechelt caution ought to be a way of life.

  He got up to refill his glass. He’d been reading lately about attacks on young women at the University of British Columbia. There were special campus buses to take female students from the library to brightly lit city bus stops. But even that wasn’t enough. Some “jerk shitrat,” to quote Sokolowski, was attacking women in the library now, right in the stacks.

  Alberg sat down heavily, worrying about his daughters. The campus at the University of Calgary was smaller; did that make it safer? He had drilled it into them for years: Keep your doors locked, always secure your car, carry your key ring with the keys sticking out from between your fingers, walk in ligh
t, lock all doors as soon as you’re in your vehicle, run, scream…

  Maybe they’d like to get jobs in Vancouver for the summer. He would suggest this. If they liked the idea, maybe he could help them find work. Maybe they could spend weekends with him, and he could teach them how to sail.

  He wondered if they had boyfriends, serious ones, who might screw up his plans. Should he write the girls directly? Or should be contact their mother first, sound her out about their situations?

  He pulled from his pocket a letter he’d received that day from his younger daughter, Diana, the one with long straight hair and a grin like a meteor. His daughters were taking intersessional courses; it worried him that they were trying to do too much, right after completing a full winter session.

  Dear Pop, he read.

  Life is frantic these days; frantic, but I’ve only got one more exam and then it’ll be all over until September. Geology. The worst of them all. I was really glad when I got my schedule that it came last. I’d have more time to study for it, right? But now here I am, I’ve got to write the damn thing tomorrow and of course I’ve put it off and tonight’s the only time I’ve got left. It’s not as important to me as the other two so I studied like mad for them and now I’m not ready for geology. It’s not important to me but I’ve got to have it, and I’ll just die if I fail it, I’ll be so furious if I have to take the damn stuff again next year. And now here I am writing to you instead of using the last hours remaining to me. Sigh.

  I wish I could talk to you face to face, Pop. This letter-writing stuff is the shits. When are you coming out here??? Don’t you have some perpetrator to chase across the Rockies? Seriously, I hope you’re happy and not bored in that place. I’m sure it’s very pretty, though, it looks like it from the pictures you sent, and you must have friends by now, right?

  I love you and miss you. Wish me luck in geology. I know you would, if you were here, and you’d give me a pep talk, too. I probably never told you, but I used to like your pep talks.