The Suspect

by L. R. Wright

  I’m glad Myra takes such good care of you, and Carol is so rational and even-tempered. They don’t need (and wouldn’t appreciate) the kind of anxiety you felt for our parents, and then for me. And I don’t need it any more. So it’s time you put it aside, George.

  I love you.

  Audrey

  He distinctly remembered getting this letter. When he had seen that the envelope was addressed only to him he was surprised, and filled with concern, too. He had read it privately, standing by the gate which led to the row of attached houses occupied by three army officers and their families, and George and his. He remembered that it was early September and the trees in the old German town down the hill were becoming red and gold.

  He tore the envelope open and scanned the pages quickly, bewildered by the awkwardness of her handwriting, looking for disaster, and then read it more slowly.

  He had thought a lot about that letter, during the next couple of weeks. He saw in it a strong implication that Audrey was deciding her marriage to Carlyle had been a mistake and that, if it was, she would get out of it, leave him.

  Maybe she was right, he thought. Maybe his sense of responsibility to her had grown unnaturally intense over the years, blinding him to her very real strength of character.

  He had been working on a reply, composing it in his mind, when the telegram came informing them of her death.

  George put the letters back in the big brown envelope and did up the string that secured the flap.

  He rested his head against the cracked leather of his chair.

  She had been wrong, after all. She hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Not in time. Carlyle hadn’t let her.

  It was the autopsy that convinced him. He had insisted on a complete autopsy. It was the accident which had killed her, he knew that, and he also knew that Carlyle wasn’t with her in the car. So he wasn’t directly responsible for her death. Not directly. But he was responsible, all right; George had been certain.

  The palm of her right hand bore fresh, barely healed scars. Her left wrist had been fractured; her right tibia also. The fractures had healed normally. None of these injuries had occurred before George left for Germany. There might have been others—he would never know that; the rest of her body had been too badly broken in the car accident.

  He confronted Carlyle at the funeral. Carlyle had wept ceaselessly, telling George that Audrey was accident prone, that she had stumbled and put her hand on a hot burner of the stove, and fallen from the apple tree while trying to prune it, and fallen again while getting out of the bath. Carlyle wept and sobbed, and George didn’t believe a word he said and told him he would live to see him burn in hell.

  Myra had to drag him away. He was making a spectacle of himself.

  George wiped his face with his hands and confronted himself with the same tired questions. Had he misread the letter? Maybe they just argued a lot. Maybe things weren’t working out in bed. Had Carlyle beaten her, sent her flying from the house in a frenzy of blind fear? Or had she simply suffered a series of inexplicable accidents, culminating in one which had caused her death?

  He closed his eyes and felt fresh tears spill down his cheeks and imagined he heard the search boat’s crafty gadgets probing the sea, and he saw Carlyle bleeding into his braided rug and would have given his life and his soul to have heard all of what Carlyle had meant to tell him.

  23

  ALBERG STRODE INTO THE DETACHMENT office late that Tuesday afternoon in a state of barely controlled rage. His faded jeans were thrust into bright yellow rubber boots, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. His face and arms were reddened by the cloud-shrouded sun.

  He stopped at the duty officer’s counter. “Is Corporal Sanducci on the premises, by any chance?” he said politely.

  “Yes, Staff,” said Ken Coomer. He stood up, nervous.

  “Send him into my office. On the double.”

  When the corporal stood before his desk, Alberg looked at him with disgust. “You were on duty at the Burke house last night, right?”

  “Right, Staff. Four to midnight.” Sanducci stood stiffly. He was insufferably good-looking, thought Alberg, far too popular with women, and much too cocky behind the wheel of a car. He was also intelligent, efficient, and courteous with civilians.

  “See anything interesting?”

  “No, Staff. Everything was pretty quiet.”

  “Everything was not pretty quiet, Sanducci,” said Alberg, softly. He stood up and yanked the venetian blinds to the top of the window. “Tell me, Corporal. Did you spend the whole eight hours planted on the front porch, for some reason?”

  “No, Staff,” said Sanducci, flushing. “I made regular circuits of the house and grounds.”

  “And how often did you make these circuits, Corporal? Once? Twice? How many times did you walk around back?” His voice was level but cold.

  “Hourly, Staff Sergeant. Once an hour. Or so.”

  Alberg let the venetian blinds fall closed. “While you were parked on the front porch, Corporal, a whole lot was going on. You seem to have missed it.” He sat down and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “Would you like to hear about it? Do you want to know what happened there, that managed to escape your attention?”

  “Yes, Staff,” said the corporal, uneasily.

  “Well, while you were out in front, dreaming your dreams or whatever it is young corporals do while on a boring assignment like the one you had last night, a tottery old guy came ambling down the beach. Now we’re talking about a really old person, here, Sanducci, someone you wouldn’t think would have the strength to change a tire. What he did, this declining specimen of humanity, this eighty-year-old ancient, what he did was haul the victim’s rowboat off its blocks, drag it down to the water, and row his elderly self out to sea.” He looked at the corporal with an icy calm. “And then, Sanducci—then he heaved the murder weapon into the drink.” The corporal’s face paled. “And where were you when all this was going on?” said Alberg with interest. “Taking a cigarette break? Peeing in the bushes?”

  Sanducci stood even more stiffly. He looked at a point on the wall above Alberg’s head.

  “Get out of here,” said Alberg quietly.

  A little later, Sokolowski came in.

  “I’m going to break that bastard down to constable,” said Alberg, slouched behind his desk. “Third class.”

  “They didn’t find anything out there, I guess.”

  “They’ll never find the goddamn things. We’re talking about four hundred square yards of ocean, rocks all over the goddamn bottom, some of them as big as a truck.” He shook his head.“The divers never had a chance. The old guy’s too smart to dump them that close in. After four hours the sea search team gave up on the sonar. Now they’re trying the underwater camera. I told them to keep at it until ten tonight. At three thousand bucks a day or whatever the hell they’re charging us, half a day is all the budget can take.”

  “Okay if I sit down?”

  Alberg waved impatiently, and Sokolowski sat.

  “We got that accident report,” said the sergeant, “the one from 1956 that killed Burke’s wife. It was a single-vehicle accident. She wasn’t speeding or anything. Ran off the road into an abutment. Killed instantly.”

  “Anything on the autopsy?”

  “Yeah. They gave her the works. Wilcox—her brother—he insisted on it. Called the Vancouver city police from where he was living in Germany. Death due to injuries sustained in the accident. Nothing suspicious. Vancouver never thought there was, but the guy called, all the way from Europe, and the husband didn’t object, so…” He shrugged.

  “We’re really batting a thousand on this one.” Alberg got up to open the blinds again.

  Sokolowski tried a grin. “Looks like you got some sun out on that boat. It’s always worse, when there’s some cloud.”

  “My face feels like it’s been fried.”

  “Listen, Staff,” said the sergeant. “Could be the old f
ellow was doing just what he said, taking a little row. People do funny things, sometimes.”

  Alberg opened a drawer in his filing cabinet and immediately clanged it closed. “He was dumping those shell casings. He did it, the crafty old son-of-a-bitch. He smashed that guy’s head. I know it. And he knows I know it.”

  “But why? Where’s the motive? Unless he really did know he was in the will. But even if he did, there just isn’t enough there to make it worth his while to waste the guy.” Sokolowski was getting exasperated. “Jesus, Staff, you’ve got no motive, no physical evidence, not even anything circumstantial, to tie him to the thing.”

  “I’ve got that Erlandson, who saw him going into the victim’s house during the period the coroner says he died.”

  “Come on, Staff. With his sister there contradicting him every time he opens his mouth?”

  “And,” Alberg went on stubbornly, “I saw the shell casings on his windowsill, Sid, and they aren’t there now, and meanwhile the stupid old bugger’s practically killed himself rowing out into the bay. If that’s not circumstantial evidence, I don’t know what is.”

  “Karl,” said Sokolowski, “you’re the only one who saw them on his windowsill.”

  “So what?” snapped Alberg.

  “And you don’t know they were the victim’s. You’re just speculating.”

  “I am not speculating, Sergeant,” said Alberg furiously.

  “Maybe they were his own,” Sokolowski protested gently. “Like you said before, those things are a dime a dozen.”

  “Not with flowers or some damn thing all over them. If we could find them, the cleaning woman would identify them.”

  The sergeant sighed. “Okay. Say we find them. And one of them turns out to be the murder weapon. You’re still not a whole lot further ahead. You can’t use Erlandson’s testimony, you know that; it just won’t stand up. We haven’t found anybody who saw the old guy out on the bay last night. And why would he wait almost a week before getting rid of the damn things, if he used one of them to kill somebody with? I’m not saying he didn’t do it, Staff. But I’m not convinced. Not without a motive.”

  Alberg’s weariness was catching up with him. His face and arms were burning. “It’s got something to do with his sister,” he said, and sank back into his chair. “Car accident or no car accident, he blamed Burke for her death.”

  “That was a long time ago, Staff,” said Sokolowski. He hesitated. “He seems like a nice old guy. I kind of like him.”

  “So do I,” said Alberg. “What the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Hard to believe he’d have the strength for it,” said the sergeant. “Knocking the guy on the head, hauling the shell casings home, then rowing far enough out to dump them where they’re never going to be found.”

  “It’s the gardening,” said Alberg grimly. “Keeps him in shape.” He shuffled listlessly through a pile of phone messages Isabella had placed on his desk and pushed them aside. “I want the house searched again.” He looked at Sokolowski. “First thing tomorrow. I’ll do it, but I need one man to help me.”

  There was a pause. Then, “How about Sanducci?” said the sergeant.

  Alberg gave him a cold stare. “All right. Sanducci. But first I want to know what Corporal Sanducci was up to last night.”

  Sokolowski got up to leave. “Oh,” he said at the door. “I checked the victim out on the computer, like you said. Nothing.”

  After he’d left, Alberg sat brooding. Then he pulled the phone closer to him and called Cassandra.

  24

  CASSANDRA MITCHELL LIVED IN a small house set back from a narrow gravel road above the highway. In her front yard was a prickly, crazily configured growth called a monkey puzzle tree.

  Her living room and kitchen windows looked out across the gravel road and the highway to the brush that bordered the Indian cemetery. In leafless seasons rows of white crosses were visible, and a tall white statue which stood in the middle of the graveyard, and the white fence that surrounded it. Behind the cemetery, the forested land sloped steeply down to the sea. On clear days she could see beyond the tops of the trees and across the Strait of Georgia to a faraway point on Vancouver Island slightly north of the city of Nanaimo.

  Her house had two bedrooms. She kept the smaller one as a spare room for friends who often visited from Vancouver, especially in summer. Her own room was so filled with bookshelves, a small desk and chair, and a chaise longue that there was hardly room for her double bed. The chaise sat by a window that looked out over her neighbors’ garden. She spent a lot of time in it, reading and watching her neighbors’ flowers grow.

  The living room had a fireplace and a large glass-and-chrome coffee table and a white leather sofa that was Cassandra’s pride and joy. There were prints on the walls—some Emily Carr, and a Paul Klee, and two Matisses. At the end of the living room was a dining area with patio doors leading outside.

  The phone was ringing as she came into the house after work on Tuesday. It was Alberg, asking if they might have dinner together.

  Cassandra didn’t want to see him. He was a policeman. It took enormous effort, as she listened to him, to think of him as anything but a policeman. And she had absolutely no desire to have dinner with a cop: not today. Not after George.

  Gradually she became aware that he sounded hoarse and dispirited.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, despite herself.

  “Just tired. Not a good day. That’s all.”

  She had a quick mind; she could have thought up all sorts of excuses. But in the end she didn’t. She invited him to have dinner at her house.

  She set the table with candles and a low bowl of flowers. For dinner they would have a stew from her small freezer. It was already in the oven and she was tearing romaine into a bowl when Alberg drove up.

  She went to the door to greet him. “What did you do,” she said, as he appeared in his jeans and rubber boots, “take the day off and go fishing?”

  He came onto her porch carrying a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag. “Sort of,” he said. He glanced at the monkey tree. “I hate those things. They look like they’ve been put together by somebody who’s deranged. “

  “Don’t be rude,” said Cassandra. “I presume this is for me,” she said, taking the bag from his hands. “I might be very fond of that tree, for all you know.”

  Inside, he pulled off his boots and left them on the mat. “I hope I’m not making myself too much at home, but they’d leave marks all over your floor.”

  She looked uneasily at his sock feet. “A shoeless policeman in my house.” She took the wine into the kitchen. “Does this have to breathe or anything?”

  “Yeah. Let me know when it’s half an hour before dinner. I’ll open it then.” He went restlessly into the living room and looked at the prints on the walls.

  “I have to finish the salad,” said Cassandra from the kitchen. “Why don’t you go out back and have a look around?” She heard the patio doors open and relaxed a bit. She hadn’t realized she was nervous. Maybe I’m even frightened, she thought, chopping tomatoes and throwing them into the bowl. She would have to be very careful what she said to him, and she wasn’t a practiced equivocator.

  The door to the patio closed and he joined her in the kitchen. “No garden out there. Only grass. How come?”

  “I don’t like digging around in the dirt much. I get to look at my neighbors’ garden. Sometimes they give me flowers.”

  He went over to the kitchen door and looked through its window.

  The garden next door was terraced up the incline all the way to the woods, which also backed onto Cassandra’s property and extended around it to meet the gravel road. Next door there were bushes covered with blossoms, and vegetables growing in neat rows, and banks of flowers near the house.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” said Alberg. “Nice.” He wandered over to the counter and ate a slice of cucumber. “Not too good living back-to-back with a forest, tho
ugh.”

  “Why on earth not?” said Cassandra, the paring knife poised over an avocado.

  “Hard to keep the place secure.”

  “Good God,” said Cassandra. “Secure from what? The deer? They’re the only things that come down from those woods. They ate my neighbors’ scarlet runners last year. Well, not the beans. They ate every leaf on every stalk, and left all the beans. I guess deer don’t like beans.” She had peeled the avocado and was now slicing it into the bowl. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, God,” said Alberg gratefully. “I would.”

  “Help yourself. There’s a cabinet in the living room.”

  “Can I fix one for you?”

  “A small scotch, please, lots of water. There’s ice in the top of the fridge.”

  “I’m serious, you know, Cassandra,” he called from the living room.

  “About what?” she said, slicing. She wasn’t nervous any more. There was no earthly reason why the topic of George Wilcox should even come up. It was herself she had to watch, she thought—not Karl. She was the one who couldn’t get George out of her mind, and part of her wanted very badly to talk about him, to someone. But this man was absolutely the wrong person.

  He came into the kitchen and rummaged around for ice. “You don’t even lock your door when you go out, do you? I noticed that when I brought you home on Sunday.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll lock my door if it’s so important to you. But there’s nothing you can do about the woods. I’ll never be safe from the deer.” She washed her hands, dried them, and took her drink from him.

  In the living room he sat on the white sofa and she sat in a chair by the window.

  “Your face,” said Cassandra, “is as red as a lobster.”

  “It’s painful as hell,” he said modestly.

  She got some ointment from the bathroom and tried to give it to him. He wouldn’t take it, protesting feebly. Cassandra took the top off the tube and began applying it gently to his sunburn. He closed his eyes and moaned. She jerked her hand away. “Am I hurting you?”