by L. R. Wright
“What plans?” His eyes went automatically to the place on the windowsill where the shell casings had stood, and he felt a welcome rush of anger. Nice old guy or not, the man had killed someone.
It was hard to believe, all right, he thought, watching George shuffle slowly toward the kitchen.
“What plans?” he said again, following the old man into the den, where a large suitcase, half filled with clothing, lay open on the desk.
“I’m moving,” said George. “To Vancouver. I’m going to live with my daughter.”
Alberg leaned against the doorway. He told himself to remain calm. He told himself to be patient. He reminded himself that George Wilcox was no fool.
“What brought this on?” he said, watching the old man stuff a couple of books into the suitcase. There was a pile of them on the desk, next to a framed photograph, face down.
“People dying brought it on,” said George. He got two more books from the pile and fitted them in. “I figure I’ll be better off living with somebody who’s still a long way from crapping out.”
“What about your garden?”
“What about it? There’s gardens in Stanley Park. Stanley Park’s practically across the street from Carol’s place.” He glanced up at Alberg. “Sit yourself down in the chair, here.” He pushed it toward him. “I don’t like you looming in the door like that. You’re blocking some of my light.”
Alberg sat. For a while they didn’t speak. George continued to pack, stuffing books in among pajamas and pants and socks and underwear. Finally he picked up the photograph. He studied it for several seconds, then abruptly held it out to Alberg. “This is my sister,” he said. “Audrey.”
Alberg, accepting the photograph, saw something in George’s eyes: whether irony or amusement, he couldn’t tell.
He looked at George’s sister.
His shock was almost physical. The hair was shorter, and done in a pageboy style now out of fashion, the nose was slightly longer, the mouth was slightly smaller, but the resemblance to Cassandra was striking.
Alberg looked from the photo to George; he knew his astonishment was obvious. But George was busily packing more books, looking, Alberg thought, like a squirrel creating his winter’s cache.
“I thought you might like to have a look at her,” said George, “seeing you’ve expressed such a curiosity.” He took the photograph back and packed it carefully between two flannel shirts. “I’d show you the one of Myra and Carol, too,” he said, “but it’s already packed away.” He straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “Time to take a break. Bring that chair into the kitchen. We’ll sit in there for a while.”
He looked at Alberg, waiting for him to stand and pick up the chair, and Alberg realized that there was to be no discussion of the resemblance between his sister and Cassandra Mitchell.
He got up and moved the chair and sat in it quickly, before George had a chance to make him take the leather one.
“Now,” said George, arranging his hands in his lap, “since you didn’t know I’m leaving, you haven’t come to say goodbye. And since you didn’t find anything out there in the ocean that’s got to do with me, you haven’t come to arrest me for anything. So tell me, policeman. Why are you here?”
He would miss coming to this house, Alberg realized. He would miss the flowers in the garden, and the sound of the sea on the beach, and sitting like a benevolent hunter in George Wilcox’s kitchen, reluctantly enjoying his company.
“I’ve come to tell you a story,” he said, and smiled, and stretched out his long legs.
“I’m a busy man,” said George shortly. “Got no time for stories. Not today.”
“It won’t take long,” said Alberg. “I might get some of it wrong, but if I do, you can correct me.”
“It’s your story,” said George. “Why should I correct you?”
“It’s your story,” said Alberg. “I’m only telling it.” He pulled cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket and reached for the ashtray on the tobacco stand next to George’s chair. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he said politely.
George didn’t answer, just stared at him, stubbornly.
“Last Tuesday morning, Carlyle Burke phoned you,” said Alberg. He lit a cigarette and put the package and the lighter back in his jacket pocket. “He asked you to have lunch with him. Now we both know how you felt about old Carlyle, so I won’t even speculate about how he persuaded you to go, but he did, and you went.” He leaned toward George. “You didn’t intend to kill him. I’m sure of that. You’re not a killer, George.” He sat back. “At least you weren’t, until last Tuesday.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” George was pulling at the tufts of stuffing that protruded from a break in the seam of the leather chair. Alberg remembered sitting in that chair and doing the same thing.
“No, you don’t,” he said quietly.
George said nothing.
“You went into the house and Carlyle, for whatever reason, maybe just because he was a spiteful old bastard, talked to you about things you’d just as soon never have heard. And finally you couldn’t stand it any more, and you hit him on the head.” He looked at the old man closely. “Is it too hot for you, George, sitting in the sun?”
George said nothing. His face was crumpled and still.
“You probably didn’t mean to kill him, even when you hit him,” said Alberg. “Sometimes it’s harder than you’d believe, to kill a man. Sometimes you have to stab and bash away at him until you’re both soaked in his blood and the other guy’s still yelling, still crying out, maybe praying, or calling for his mother and yet he won’t die, he just won’t die.”
“You speaking from personal experience?” said George. “Is that your police brutality kind of thing you’re talking about?”
“And other times,” said Alberg, unruffled, “one little smack seems to do it, and the guy stands there bewildered, looking down at this dead person and wondering how the hell he got that way.”
He took a final drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. “That’s the way I figure it happened with you. One little smack, probably didn’t feel like much to you, just enough to shut him up, that’s probably what you thought. And then there’s the man lying there dead.”
“With his eyes open,” said George, involuntarily. He pulled himself upright, flinched from a twinge somewhere, and let himself sink back into the chair. “I know that,” he said carefully, “because I found the body. His eyes were open. I remember that.”
“Then,” said Alberg, “you realized what you’d done. Not much you could do about it. You could have called us, of course. Maybe that didn’t occur to you. Maybe you thought you’d do it later, after you’d watered your roses. Or maybe you decided you could get away with it. Anyway, you found something that would hold the shell casings—probably in the kitchen, since that’s the only place you left any prints—and you dumped them into it and lugged them home.” He shook his head admiringly. “It was clever to take them both. We wouldn’t ever have known they were missing, if it hadn’t been for his cleaning woman.”
The color had seeped from George’s face. He wasn’t moving at all.
“Now what I do not understand,” said Alberg, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, studying George intently, “what I simply cannot comprehend, George, is why, when you got those things home, you didn’t get rid of them right away. You could have buried them in your garden or put them out with the trash. But what do you do? You put them up on your windowsill, bold as brass, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
George looked back at him, silent and gray.
“Of course you were lucky, too,” said Alberg. “Damn lucky. You were seen going into Carlyle’s gate by three people. Two of them saw you at two thirty, when you found the body. One of them—unfortunately, he’s what we call an unreliable witness—one man says he saw you a lot earlier. That fits with the time of death. It also fits the story of the man who sold Carlyle the salmon. Oh, yes, we found him, Geo
rge; or, rather, he found us. He says Carlyle was expecting a guest for lunch. And I figure that guest must have been you.”
He lit another cigarette and crossed an ankle over his knee. He wondered why he wasn’t enjoying himself.
“So here’s the other thing I don’t understand, George,” he said. “Why the hell did you go back there? Did you start wondering if he was really dead, and decide you’d better hie yourself back on up to the house and finish the job?”
“Watch yourself, policeman,” said George, struggling with exhaustion.
“Or did you just want to sneak another peek at him lying there, dead as a doornail, eyes staring at nothing, his head resting in a pool of his own brains and blood? Was that it, George?” said Alberg, with contempt. “Did you really hate him that much?
“You stupid miserable cop,” said George. He looked completely drained. He had barely enough strength to push himself out of his chair. On his feet he glared down at Alberg, almost swaying. Slowly he bent close to him. “Okay, policeman,” he said. He jabbed him in his chest. “Now you just sit there and keep your goddamn mouth shut and let me tell you a story.”
Painfully, awkwardly, he paced the small room. “He went into the war,” he said. “I was ten years old. Up to then it wasn’t so bad. He had a barbershop. Drank some, got into a temper now and then, threw things around sometimes. Scared the piss out of me, but he never hurt anyone. Then he went into the war. Gone four years, he was. When he came back…
“God help us, I don’t know what happened to him over there. Maybe nothing. Maybe he’d have worked himself into it anyway. He was no saint before, that’s for sure. It turned me into a pacifist, him coming back from the war like that, but maybe it wasn’t the war’s fault, who knows?”
He went to the window and stood, still and stooped, looking out. He seemed calmer, now.
“I was fourteen when he came home. He went back to the barbershop. Drank more. A lot more. Threw things around more. Then he started to hit her.” He looked over his shoulder at Alberg. He looked extremely old. “They’ve got a name for it now,” he said. “Battered wives, they call them. There are places they can run to. But not then.”
He turned back to the window. “Not then. No relatives, either. We lived up in Yale, right where the Fraser Canyon begins. You think Yale’s a small town now, you should have seen it back then. Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks.”
He stopped talking. Alberg heard no birds, no wind, no sea.
“And no help,” said George, despairingly. “There was no help.” He stopped again, then went on. “I couldn’t believe it, at first. The first couple of times I saw it happen, it was like my eyes were bugging out of my head and my tongue was frozen in my mouth and my feet were permanently attached to the floor. She’d scream at me to get out, go, run, and the first couple of times I did.”
He turned slowly to Alberg. “And then one day I stopped running. He came at her and I yelled at him. ‘Don’t touch her,’ I said. ‘Hit me,’ I said.” He shrugged. “So he did. Knocked me flying. And then he went at her. It was pretty bad,” he said, nodding at the floor. “Pretty bad. Then I got to be sixteen, and Audrey was born.”
He sat down again, slowly, stiffly, his knees together, his hands clenched in his lap. “I’d been thinking before about my dilemma. I just wanted to get the hell out of there, just get the hell right out, as soon as I finished high school. Make my way down to Vancouver, live a life of my own, and forget all about him.” He looked up at Alberg. “Trouble was, of course, how could I leave my mother? He was going to kill her one day, I knew it. And then Audrey was born…
“I hated them both,” he said, striking the arm of the chair with his fist. “How could they do it, sleep together, have another child, for Christ’s sake!” He wiped his eyes with his hands.
“And this one was a girl,” he said dully. “Right from the start, he couldn’t stand her. He wasn’t so fond of knocking me around, any more. I was as big as he was, by then, and he knew I wasn’t afraid of him any more. He used to wait until I was out before he’d beat up my mother. But when that little girl arrived…” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Ah, I just knew that was it. I couldn’t leave. I could never leave the two of them. He’d kill them both.”
Alberg waited.
Finally George sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I’m not going to go on and on about it. I stayed there for ten more years. He drank more and more. I loathed him and lost all respect for my mother. But I loved my sister, and I was goddamned if I was going to leave her with him.
“I thought about sneaking away with her. I should have done it. If we’d been able to get to Vancouver, nobody would have found us.
“But I didn’t do it. I just got crummy wretched jobs around town and lived at home and kept her with me all the time she wasn’t at school. I even dragged her bed into my room, eventually, because he’d go in there at night, and I’d hear her scream and my mother and I would get to him at the same time and she’d be screaming too and I’d pound at him with whatever was handy and he’d try to fight me back but he was too old by then, too old and too drunk.”
He stopped. “It’s a lovely tale, isn’t it, Mr. Alberg? I’m sure you’ve heard it before, a man of your experience, a man who knows how long it takes some people to die.”
He looked away, out at his garden.
“One day,” he said, “I don’t know why, but I was out, for some reason, and Audrey wasn’t with me. She was ten. I came home and I could hear it from outside the house: her screaming, my father roaring, my mother screaming.” He gave Alberg a distorted smile. “Lucky we didn’t have neighbors living close by, huh? Do you think that’s why he got the place? Because nobody could hear what was going on inside?”
He got up again and went to the window. “I practically broke the door down, getting in,” he said bleakly. “He was beating her with a stick. Her face was bleeding, her hair was matted with blood. Her hands and arms were bleeding, too, because she’d stretched them out, see, to ward him off. My mother was clawing at his back. She was a small woman. I don’t even think he felt her.
“I ran right through the house to the mudroom in the back and got the shotgun and loaded it and ran back into the room where they were and shot out all the windows. That stopped him, all right.”
He looked around the kitchen, but Alberg didn’t think he saw it.
“I pointed the shotgun right at him,” said George, detached. “I told him to get the hell out and never come back or I’d blow his goddamn head off. He stood there, lurching around the room, waving his hands and swearing at me. He wouldn’t come close—I think he knew how badly I wanted to do it, blow his head to kingdom come.”
He turned to look at Alberg. “But he wouldn’t go, either. I think he was so drunk he couldn’t quite figure out what I was yelling at him. Meanwhile there’s Audrey on the floor, bleeding and crying, and my mother looking wildly around, not knowing what to do.”
George shuffled around behind the leather chair and hung onto its high back. “I dropped the shotgun and shoved him out of the house. The car was sitting out there. An old Model T. I pushed him into it—he stank of booze and he could hardly stand up, but I shoved him into the driver’s seat and got the car going. ‘Drive,’ I said to him. ‘Drive, you son-of-a-bitch. Get the hell out of here.’ Then I ran back into the house, to see to Audrey.”
He pushed a hand through his hair and looked almost bewildered, for a moment. Then he let himself lean heavily upon the back of the chair. “My mother was with her, by then. I’ll give her that. She was crooning at her, looking over the injuries. I came charging in and I said, ‘The bastard’s in the car, it’s pointed up the canyon road, if there’s a Christ in heaven he’ll drive himself over the cliff.’ I was shouting and shaking all over.”
He looked directly at Alberg. “But then my mother heard the car rev up and start to move away, all jerky-sounding. Her head came up and she scrambled to her feet and she ran out after him. She was screami
ng at him, telling him she was sorry.”
He leaned forward a little, looking at the staff sergeant intently. “Did you get that, Mr. Alberg? She was telling him she was sorry.”
“I got it, Mr. Wilcox,” said Alberg quietly.
George gave a shuddery sigh. He had aged, shockingly, since Alberg had come into the house. “I went outside,” he said. “I saw her running after the car. It wasn’t going very fast. I watched her, didn’t even yell at her, and I saw her get herself onto the running board, and open the door, and climb into the car.”
Alberg watched him carefully.
“I fixed up Audrey as best I could. Had to take her to the doctor, though, for stitches.”
Alberg waited.
“It was such a long time ago,” said George. He was ancient, now, his skin the color of parchment. “Sometime that night, or maybe it was early in the morning, I can’t remember, they came to tell us the car had gone over the cliff.”
He looked up. “It was a minister and a Mountie, as a matter of fact,” he said, “who came to tell us that.”
He came around the chair, holding on to it, and sat down. “That’s it, Mr. Alberg,” he said. “I killed my parents. I killed them both. That’s what it comes down to. And I’ve got absolutely nothing more to say to you.”
After a while, Alberg got up and left.
30
“YOU MIGHT WANT TO look in on your friend George,” said Alberg when she opened the door. He looked haggard and depressed.
“Where is he?” said Cassandra, who was in her nightclothes.
“At home.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
Alberg looked beyond her, into her house. “He’s very tired.” He leaned against the doorframe. “Why didn’t you tell me he was moving?”
“Why should I have told you?”
Alberg sighed. “May I come in? Just for a minute? I won’t stay long. I’ve got to get home…”
