by L. R. Wright
They went into the living room, where a crystal pitcher filled with sweet peas sat on the glass coffee table. Cassandra noticed that he looked at this for a long time. He would recognize the pitcher, she knew.
“He’s very fond of you,” he said.
“Yes,” said Cassandra. “And I’m very fond of him.” Her eyes were filling with tears. She clenched her fists.
“He did it, you know,” said Alberg, still looking at the flowers in the crystal pitcher.
“Did what?” said Cassandra.
He turned slowly to look at her. She watched his face as the thought first skittered across his mind, then skittered back, grew still, and took root there.
“You knew,” he said.
“Knew what?” said Cassandra, desperately.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cassandra, stop playing games with me. He did it. He killed him. How long have you known?” They were still standing, and he seemed to tower above her, his eyes icy and his face pale. “When did he tell you? Did he run to you that same afternoon, weeping on your shoulder, because you remind him so much of his sister? How long have you known?”
“Stop shouting at me,” said Cassandra, suddenly strong. “If you want to speak to me in my own house you will sit down and speak to me like a civilized human being, not a frustrated damn cop.”
He opened his mouth, closed it. “Tell me,” he said grimly, and he didn’t sit down.
“Tell you what? I have nothing to tell you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Cassandra—” With an effort, he lowered his voice. “We’re talking about a homicide.”
“I know what we’re talking about,” said Cassandra. “You don’t have any evidence, do you? And he hasn’t told you anything, has he?”
“He told you,” said Alberg bitterly. “I know he did.”
Her anger drained away. She was regretful and heavy-hearted, looking at him. She wanted to embrace him, as she had embraced George, and try to comfort him, as she had tried to comfort George.
“Karl. Listen to me.” He turned hostile eyes on her. “I can’t help you. Even if he had told me he did it, and I reported this to you, it wouldn’t help you much. If,” she said carefully, “if he had told me he committed a crime, I would have rummaged around in my library. And I would have found out that a confession like that isn’t admissible evidence, it’s hearsay.” She looked away from him. “You’d have to get corroboration even if he confessed to you directly. Which he hasn’t.” She looked up at him. “And which he won’t.”
He moved toward the door.
“No, please.”
He waited, not looking at her.
“He’s a miserably unhappy old man,” said Cassandra. “He’s giving up everything he loves—his garden, his life here. He is not in any way a danger to anyone. And he’s my friend.”
Alberg looked at her with contempt. He went to the door.
“Is your job so simple, Karl? Is your job really so damned cut and dried?”
She had to raise her voice and speak very quickly to get the last words out before the door slammed behind him.
31
THE NEXT DAY SID SOKOLOWSKI was standing by the counter making conversation with the duty constable when he heard the front door open. He turned, casually, and saw George Wilcox.
“Who’s in charge around here?” said George. He was dressed in a brown suit, Sokolowski figured must be almost as old as he was, and a brown tie, and was wearing a brown hat with a narrow brim from which sprang a small green and red feather.
“Staff Sergeant Alberg is in charge, sir,” said Isabella, looking him over. “What’s the nature of your business?”
“That parrot is the nature of my business, madam,” said George, waving toward the bird. “It’s my property, and I’ve come to claim it.”
Sokolowski had disappeared down the hall. He now hurried back into the reception area, followed by Alberg.
“Good morning, Mr. Alberg,” said George.
“Good morning, Mr. Wilcox,” said Alberg.
“May I have a word with you in private?”
“Sure. Come to my office.”
George didn’t sit down, when offered a chair. He wandered curiously about, looking out the window, sticking a finger in the soil of the ivy that still sat on top of the filing cabinet, finally coming to rest behind Alberg’s desk, facing the wall on which hung the photograph of the staff sergeant’s daughters.
He studied the photograph absorbedly for several seconds while Alberg, moored awkwardly in the center of his office, watched him and grew increasingly irritable.
“Well?” he said finally. “What is it that you want, Mr. Wilcox? Have you changed your mind? Want to sign a statement?”
The bitterness in his voice startled him, and it seemed to startle George Wilcox, too. He turned from the photograph and looked at Alberg.
“They’re beautiful young women, Mr. Alberg,” he said. “I envy you. I understand you’re divorced. Divorce won’t hurt them. At least, not for long.”
He walked around to sit in the black chair, allowing Alberg access to his own swivel chair and the comforting paraphernalia that cluttered the surface of his desk.
“I came to tell you something,” said George. He took off his hat and held it in his lap, stroking its feather. “There’s life,” he said, “and there’s conscience, and there’s fate, and then there’s law, Mr. Alberg. I’ve struggled with three of them, and I’ve decided to avoid a struggle with the fourth.”
Alberg felt unutterably depressed.
“And it’s not as though the struggling’s over with,” said George, so softly that Alberg had to strain to hear him. “I don’t even know if I had reasons for some of the wrong things I’ve done. I don’t even know if things are really as complicated as they seem to be or if—if it’s just that I was plain wrong.” He put on his hat, adjusting it with fumbling fingers. “I thought it might give you some satisfaction, if I told you that.”
The white waves of his hair swept out beneath the brim of his hat, echoing its curve. As he got unsteadily to his feet, it struck Alberg for the first time that an eighty-year-old man probably didn’t have much longer to live.
“I meant it about the parrot,” said George, as they went slowly down the hall. “I have to take it with me.” He stopped out of hearing range of Isabella. “The other stuff. If it turns out that it has to come to me, like the will says, I’ve made arrangements to have it all sold.”
“Planning another trip on the proceeds?” said Alberg.
George looked up at him. Defeated, he shrugged. “I’ve got to take the damn bird, though,” he said obstinately.
Back in the reception area, Alberg grasped the handle of the cage, through the cloth, picked it up, and handed it to him. “Be my guest,” he said.
The parrot shrieked.
“We’ll miss him,” said Isabella.
“I’m sure he’ll miss you, too,” said George.
“Give him some cheese now and then,” said Isabella. “It seems to keep him calm.”
“Does it, now,” said George.
“How are you going to get him home? Have you got a car? Where do you live?” said Isabella.
“I have my own personal taxi, madam,” said George, “which is right now waiting to deliver me to the bus station.” He went out the door without another glance around him.
Alberg, through the window above the green-cushioned bench, saw Cassandra’s yellow Hornet waiting at the curb. Before he turned away he saw her reach across the front seat to open the passenger door for George.
Twenty minutes later, George and Cassandra were sitting side by side in the waiting room of the small bus station. They were surrounded by three large suitcases, a cardboard carton tied with heavy string, and the parrot’s cage, cloaked in its red-and-white checked cloth.
Alberg came through the door and walked directly over to George. He didn’t acknowledge Cassandra’s presence.
“I have something for you,”
he said, handing George a brown paper bag. “Don’t open it until you’re on the bus.”
He turned and walked away before George could say a word.
Cassandra reminded herself that he was just a cop, a stubborn, coldhearted cop whom she’d known for precisely six days.
When the bus came, the driver loaded George’s three suitcases and the cardboard carton into the bottom of the bus. He expressed dismay about the parrot but was finally persuaded to let George carry it on his lap.
Cassandra tried to embrace him but it was difficult because he wouldn’t let go of the cage, from which issued a series of ever more piercing cries, or the brown paper bag. She contented herself with kissing his cheek and patting his shoulder and making him promise to write to her.
George, as the bus left, waved until Cassandra was out of sight.
He had managed to get a seat by a window and the bus wasn’t full so he stashed the parrot on the seat next to him, where it gradually quieted.
He wiped his eyes and pushed his handkerchief back in the pocket of his suit jacket and undid the jacket buttons and sat for some time, looking out the window, with the brown paper bag in his lap. He had felt the outlines of its contents through the paper and thought he knew what it was.
Eventually he took it out, and as soon as he saw it he was stabbed with love, and grief, and a terrible sense of things having gone wrong. AMW—Audrey Marion Wilcox. He and Myra had given it to her, on her twenty-first birthday, which had fallen two days before the birth of Carol.
He held it tightly for a while, before he lifted the lid and saw the jewelry, all of it familiar, all off it gifts from him: the bracelet, for her eighteenth birthday; the necklace, for Christmas the year after he and Myra were married; the ring, for her thirtieth birthday, shortly after they had moved from Saskatchewan to Vancouver; and the cameo, sent to her from Germany after he and Myra and Carol had taken a trip to Italy in the spring of 1956, just a few months before her death.
He had seen the letters beneath the pile of jewelry, of course, as soon as he’d opened the box.
But he closed the lid and contented himself with caressing the initials, embossed in gold, until the bus had reached Langdale and been loaded onto the ferry and disgorged the driver and most of the passengers to seek refreshment in the cafeteria or the sea wind on the sun deck or the spectacular views from the glass-enclosed lounges.
Then he opened the box again, and took out the letters, and unfolded the top one.
You bring it on yourself, Audrey, you know you do…
32
JULY 29, 1984
Dear Mr. Alberg:
I think I’m dying. I say this with some astonishment but with little dismay. I’ve been very lucky. No awful disease has claimed the last months of my life, as it did Myra’s. I don’t even feel any real symptoms, just a gradual seeping away of something important.
If you get this letter—when you get this letter—you’ll know I’m right. I’ll be dead. It’s a peculiar feeling, I’ll tell you, writing this, imagining you in my head and not knowing when you’ll get to read it. It could be you’ll be all gray-haired and stooped over by then, though I doubt it. Could be you’ll be dead yourself before it ever gets sent, though I doubt that even more.
I wonder if Cassandra has told you by now about my talk to her. My “confession.” She asked me to write to her from Vancouver but I couldn’t. She’s written to me (those librarians, they’re worse than policemen or reporters, the things they know about getting information), but I haven’t answered her. I couldn’t. It didn’t seem right, somehow.
Anyway, if she hasn’t told you I’m telling you now. I don’t think I would have bothered, except that you gave me those letters. I think you did it because you wanted to help me a little. It was a compassionate gesture, and for that I thank you.
I’ve done a lot of not good things in my life. I’ve done some terrible things in my life. But you know, Mr. Alberg, what the worst one of them all might have been? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.
I stopped writing, there, for a minute, just to think it over again, it’s such a peculiar idea. Yet I think I’m right. I think the worst thing I ever did was not to let Carlyle be my friend.
Isn’t that odd? Isn’t that peculiar?
But I think that’s what it was, all right.
I liked you, Mr. Alberg, despite it all. I know it was a hard time for you. Mounties like to get their man, and all that crap.
But just think how much harder it would have been—might have been—if I’d planned the whole thing. I’m a pretty good planner. You might never have figured it out at all. And wouldn’t that have been a whole lot worse for you?
George Wilcox
33
ALBERG FOLDED THE LETTER and put it back in the envelope.
It had been sent to him at home. He had read it sitting at the dining table in his living room, on a day in mid-August. The old man hadn’t outlived Carlyle Burke by much, he thought. A little over two months.
He got up, now, and went to the big window that looked out onto the road and his hydrangea bushes, smothered in huge blue blossoms. It was five o’clock on a hot, sunny afternoon.
He went to the telephone in his kitchen and put through a call to his daughters in Calgary.
“Hi,” he said, when Janey answered.
“Daddy!” she said. He tried to listen dispassionately, objectively, but he couldn’t help it; he heard joy in her voice whether it was there or not, and put his head in his hand and let the tears come.
“Where are you?” she said excitedly.
“Gibsons,” he said, and cleared his throat.
“Oh. I thought you might be here. In Calgary.” Surely he couldn’t have mistaken her tone; surely there was real disappointment there.
“No, I’m here. At home. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
There was a short pause. “Daddy?” she said. “Are you all right?”
He started to say sure, fine, put on his hearty reassuring-father act but it wouldn’t come, it just wouldn’t come.
“Not really, sweetie,” he said. “A friend of mine died. I’m a bit sad.” He lifted his head from his hand in amazement. A friend?
“Oh Daddy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Another pause. “I wish I were there. I’d give you a hug and try to make you feel better. Like you used to do with us.”
“Did I?” he said, astonished.
“Of course you did.” He waited, holding his breath, but she didn’t even add, in that dry, detached tone that struck him to the bone, “Whenever you were available, that is.”
“I love you, Janey,” he said.
“And I love you, Daddy.”
“When are you coming out here?” He tried a fatherly chuckle, meant to reassure her.
She put her hand over the receiver and mumbled something to someone in the room with her. Oh, Christ, he thought, she’s got her boyfriend in for the night. He tried to blank it from his mind.
“Just a minute, Dad,” she said, and then Diana was on the phone.
“Labor Day weekend,” said Diana.
“Labor Day weekend what?”
“We’re coming out there,” she said.
“Out here? We? You mean you and Janey?”
“Of course I mean me and Janey. Who else? You want to see Mom, you’ve got to make your own arrangements. I take that back,” she said quickly. “Yeah, we’d like to come out for the long weekend. Okay with you?”
“Okay with me,” he said, smiling.
When he’d hung up the phone he leaned heavily against the kitchen counter. What was he: father, friend, cop, what? He slumped there for a long time, trying to figure it out.
Eventually he became aware of an unfamiliar sound. He cocked his head, trying to identify it, then sprang away from the counter and hurried through the door into the sun porch. He peered through the screen, and there she was. Gently, slowly, he opened the door, and the cat undulated through the opening. She stood lo
oking up at him, meowing.
“It’s over there,” he said, pointing.
She followed his gaze and ambled over to the blue bowl, and he watched her, and became horrified. He went to her and crouched down, examining her without touching her. She was bloated around the middle.
As she lapped contentedly from the blue bowl, lifting her head every now and then to glance at him, unafraid, even friendly, he looked her over more carefully.
When she finished eating she looked around, spotted the cardboard box full of clean rags and stepped delicately inside, turned around several times and arranged herself contentedly.
He thought he heard her purr.
It occurred to him that she was there for the duration.
He went into the kitchen and, without letting himself think about it, called the library.
“Cassandra?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Karl. Karl Alberg.”
“You’re the only Karl I know.”
He tried to think, looking into his porcelain sink, rust-marked.
“I got a letter from George Wilcox,” he said. “He’s dead.”
“I know,” said Cassandra after a minute. “I got one too. And a package.”
“A package? Not the bloody parrot.”
“No. Some jewelry.”
He remembered a wide gold bracelet, and a large ring, and thought of the crystal pitcher.
“My daughters are coming out here,” he said. “For the Labor Day weekend.”
“That’s nice,” she said politely.
“One more thing.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got a cat here. Did I ever tell you about this cat?”
“No, you didn’t. We didn’t know each other very long,” she said.
“Yeah, well, it’s a stray. It goes away for a while, comes back for a while, goes away for a while.”
“Are you at work?”
“Work? No. I’m on a day off.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“Well, it’s come back. The cat.”
“Is that bad or good?”