The Suspect - L R Wright

by L. R. Wright

  "Eat some soup,” said Cassandra.

  George picked up his spoon. "You and that Mountie, coming up from my beach like that; it gave me quite a turn."

  "I should have called and asked if it would be all right. It was thoughtless of me. I'm sorry.”

  "I like showing off my garden, though. It's just that . . .” He put his hand over his eyes.

  Cassandra gripped his other hand, which lay on the table.

  "Mr. Wilcox," she said. "What is it? Please, what is it? What can I do for you?” She heard laughter from the counter, and the waitress taking orders from the table nearest theirs, a few feet away.

  George lowered his hand and put down the soupspoon. "I remembered on my way here,” he said thickly. "I was trying and trying to remember when I'd seen it before, his fear. And on my way here, I remembered.” He looked at Cassandra intently. "Did I ever tell you about my sister?"

  The waitress approached with a coffeepot. Cassandra waved her away. "No, you didn't," she said to George.

  He was straighter in his chair, now, and he'd stopped touching his chest. His hands were in his lap. Cassandra wondered if he had any grandchildren, and if he'd ever told them stories.

  "Her name was Audrey," he said. "I won't tell you about her. It would take too long. Maybe another day. But she got married to Carlyle, do you see, that's the thing, and I was there, at the wedding. But I couldn't remember it, couldn't remember anything about it, whether she got married in a church or a registry office or somebody's house or what." He leaned toward Cassandra. "I gave her away, for Christ's sake, and I couldn't remember anything about it." He slumped back in his chair and looked away from her, over her shoulder, unfocused. "It's because we were angry with each other about it, I think. And we stayed angry." He looked again at Cassandra. "I still don't remember where it happened or what her dress looked like, or Myra's, or whether there were flowers all around, or what. But just today, on my way here. . . I remember this, now. When the time came I got up from where I was sitting and went to stand beside her, to give her away, and . . . Carlyle was on the other side of her. I turned my head, very slowly—it was as if the whole thing was happening in slow motion—and out of the corner of my eye I saw Carlyle's head turning, too. I wanted to look straight ahead, then, at the minister or whatever the hell he was, but I couldn't; my head went right on turning and then we were staring at each other, Carlyle and I, over the top of Audrey's head; I looked right at his eyes, couldn't help myself, and I don't know what I expected to see; I probably expected he'd grin at me or maybe even wink, the son-of-a-bitch—but he didn't. His face was white as marble and his eyes were full of fear. Terror. The man was terrified." He looked out toward the window. "I should have stopped it, do you see," he said dully. "Right then and there. I should have stopped it regardless."

  "Is the soup all right?" said the waitress, standing over them.

  "It's tine," said Cassandra. "He's just letting it cool." The waitress left, and Cassandra turned back to George. "I think everybody gets nervous when they get married. That's what I've heard, anyway." She was prattling, and told herself to stop it. "I know my mother was. And my father."

  "I couldn't remember when I'd seen it before," he said, nodding at his soup. "It bothered me a lot, because it was the only thing that really shook me up, when the other thing happened. I shouldn't say it, but it's true, that fear in his eyes, it was the only thing that shook me up about that whole business the other day. And I knew I'd seen it before, but I couldn't remember. But I've got it now. That's when it was, all right. At first when I was thinking about it I thought maybe it was at the funeral. That would make sense, I thought. But it wasn't the funeral, Christ, no, it wasn't the funeral." He grasped the table, as if he were about to overturn it. "Christ, no, nothing but tears at the funeral, all the tears you'd care to see, all that I Christly weeping and grieving, the great big soppy lying tears of a crocodile." He held on to the table, breathing heavily.

  Cassandra sat tense, ready to restrain him, or comfort him. After a while she saw his hands relax. He fumbled a paper napkin from the container on the table and wiped his face. Then he looked up at her, and she was greatly relieved to see that he was calm.

  "I don't deserve your attention, Cassandra. But I appreciate it more than I can say."

  He'd gotten his dignity back, she didn't know how.

  She smiled unsteadily. "You're my friend, Mr. Wilcox.”

  She insisted on driving him home.

  Back at the library, she sat by the rest of the books awaiting reserve labels but did no more work.

  She was trying to determine where her duty lay.

  She heard it clearly: "that fear in his eyes, it was the only thing that shook me up about that whole business the other day. "

  What whole business?

  She was sure, convinced, that she had misunderstood him.

  Yet her hands, clutched in the lap of her full-skirted yellow dress, were cold.

  Through the window, she saw the cloud-covered sky and wondered when the rain would begin to fall.

  CHAPTER 22

  He had had no food today, except for a cracker and half a glass of milk, and he knew food was important to a body his age. But he didn't want to eat. Even the peas on his kitchen counter, fresh picked that morning, didn't appeal to him. He shuffled into his bedroom and got a large manila envelope from the bottom of a drawer. In the kitchen he closed the curtains so as not to see the search vessel doggedly combing the bottom of the bay, putting all its gizmos to work in its relentless search for CarlyIe's shell casings. He figured the staff sergeant was probably out there on that boat. Maybe he'd fall overboard and drown.

  George sat in his old leather chair and unwound the red string that secured the flap of the big brown envelope. He turned it upside down and shook it and the letters tumbled onto his lap, letters written in a small neat hand on onionskin which the years had tinged with ocher and caused to become slightly brittle. He arranged them chronologically, and as he handled them was faintly surprised that they produced in him no immediate turbulence.

  From the day of her marriage in May until August, when George and his family left for Germany, he spoke not a word to Carlyle and saw his sister only three times. This upset Myra and Carol greatly, and he knew they were extremely disapproving of him, but he couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear to see Audrey and Carlyle together. It wasn't a great deal easier to see her alone, either, knowing when they said goodbye she would return to that man. Besides, on the few occasions they did get together, usually arranged by Myra, they invariably quarreled.

  So it wasn't surprising that in the thirteen months she lived after George's departure, she wrote them only eight letters. He looked at them now, such a pitifully small pile, sitting in his lap, and wondered why he was doing this to himself, torturing himself in a useless search for affirmation of something he had believed with all his heart until the moment he had hit Carlyle on the head, cutting off his vicious ramblings forever.

  Her letters were at first filled with bright chatter about her piano students, her garden, learning to run Carlyle's house the way he liked it run. She didn't speak about her private thoughts; for all they knew, she didn't have any. It was frustrating to read these letters, which to George described a cardboard-cutout world, a stage set occupied by marionettes. Yet he couldn't blame her for not stretching her hand across the rift that separated them; it was up to him to try to repair the damage he had inflicted upon their relationship.

  Eventually, he did so. He wrote to her at Christmas, when he and Myra and Carol had been away four months, and tried in his clumsy way to make things right. "Just tell her you love her,” Myra had said. "That's the most important thing.” And so he had done that.

  She wrote back to him immediately. His letter of conciliation had obviously made her happy, and he clung to that thought desperately ten months later, when she was dead. She continued to avoid mentioning Carlyle, but he understood that. She talked a great deal abou
t plants, and about books she had read. Her letters were brief and infrequent, but at least now they were warm and confidently affectionate. He read them all, now, pored over them with the greatest possible concentration, and he asked himself the same questions he asked every time he read them. Why had she stopped talking about the piano lessons she taught, which had for years given her so much pleasure? Why did she never mention seeing any movies, or going to parties, or having people to dinner?

  Was it because then she would have had to refer to "we” and "us"? Did she really believe George would be enraged by even an oblique reference to the fact that she was sharing a house, a life, a bed, with Carlyle?

  He sat back and closed his eyes. He should have let Carlyle talk. It wouldn't have done him irreparable damage to hear Carlyle speak of those things which Audrey had apparently told him. And if only he'd let him finish, he might finally have had answers to his questions, answers which, as hard as he looked, he could never find, incontrovertible, in the letters.

  He turned to Audrey's shortest letter. It hurt him even to look at it, because it was the last one, and because he had learned later that it must have caused her physical pain to set down even these few paragraphs. Her handwriting was a clumsy, childish scrawl. The letter made no reference to this.

  Dear George, she had written.

  I'm addressing this only to you, because I know there are things you still haven't told Myra.

  I've been doing a lot of thinking, these past few weeks. Carlyle has been away. He's coming back tomorrow.

  I know you love me and have tried to protect me, and I've trusted you all my life. You've been my rock, for as long as I can remember, and before that, too, I know.

  I know you think Carlyle is wrong for me. But I can do something about it, George, if I've made a mistake. It hurts me to think you don't believe I can do something about it, on my own. But times have changed, George, and I can, truly I can.

  We went through so much together, you and I. I think about it often, these days.

  None of it was your fault. NONE of it. I've never been able to see how much good you did. You've always only blamed yourself for the way it ended. And now you're all set to blame yourself for whatever happens to me, without giving me credit for having sense enough to get out of it myself if I have to.

  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.

  CHAPTER 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. WiIcox—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.”