The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  “No. You are not being charged with anything at this time.”

  Guinness smiled pleasantly and crossed his arms loosely over his chest. “But I may presume, I suppose, that I am under suspicion?” The question was almost insolently polite.

  “Mr. Guinness, in a case of this kind—”

  “Yes, I quite understand,” he interrupted, for the second time, making a relaxed pass through the air with his hand, as if to dismiss those legions of things he quite understood. “Please go on.”

  For a few seconds the room was still enough to allow him to hear the sound of Creon breathing heavily through his nose.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Creon continued doggedly, as though refusing to notice what Guinness might or might not understand. “You have the right to have an attorney present. Do you wish to have an attorney present?” Guinness simply raised his shoulders and smiled.

  “May I take that as a negative, Mr. Guinness?”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  That was obviously not the reaction Creon had been looking for. He placed his hands, one folded over the other, on the desk and leaned forward solicitously.

  “Mr. Guinness, I think it only fair to advise you that we have a homicide here. This is no light matter. Your wife was murdered, are you aware of that?”

  When he didn’t get a response, he pushed himself back into his chair. His eyes narrowed, and he was angry. He didn’t like not being taken quite seriously—it offended his sense of decency. Guinness was guilty, that was obvious to him, and when he had himself a lousy little wife butchering son of a bitch of a “professor” on the pad, he wanted him to sweat some. He wanted him to quiver in his knickers.

  “How was it done?”

  The question seemed to catch him off balance. His eyes started open again, startled and blank.

  “How was it done?” Guinness repeated, spacing the words with elaborate care. “By what means was she killed?”

  “Oh,” Creon answered finally. “An ice pick, we think.”

  With the tip of his little finger, he touched the soft spot just behind the lobe of his left ear. “Here.”

  The gesture turned Guinness’s intestines into ice water, which he assumed must have been the whole idea. Poor Louise, poor baby.

  “At least we’re pretty certain that was the cause,” Creon went on casually. “We have a puncture wound that probes to a depth of two and a half inches, which is certainly deep enough to kill. We won’t know for sure, of course, until after the autopsy is completed.”

  “Are you sure it was an ice pick?”

  There was a wary narrowing of Creon’s eyes, suppressed almost instantly in his elaborate calm. He was working very hard to convey the impression of being on top of everything, of being in perfect control.

  “We assume that was what it was.”

  “But you don’t have it?” Absurdly, Guinness couldn’t help thinking that some kind of victory. Absurdly, because the weapon, had they had it, might have cleared him.

  “No, we don’t have the weapon.” Creon riffled a stack of papers on his desk, perhaps unconsciously providing himself with an excuse to glance down. “It’ll probably turn up, though—and, in any case, it isn’t material.”

  Creon quickly switched subjects, and Guinness let him.

  But still, it didn’t make much sense. It had always been Rule Number One: leave the playthings behind when you’re done with them. Why take a chance on getting caught carrying an ice pick, still hot and smoking with your victim’s blood. Taking it away like that just wasn’t very good tradecraft.

  Unless Whoever He Was had some special use for it. But like what, for instance?

  “Also, we know she wasn’t killed in the kitchen. We found a sizable bloodstain upstairs, on the bedroom carpet, and traces on the stairway itself. We assume, therefore, that the kitchen fire was set after the murder, probably in order to cover it up. If that was the idea, it didn’t work very well. The fire was started by pouring cooking grease over the stove burners and then turning them on, but the stuff smokes a lot and the neighbors saw the fire and phoned for help before it had had a chance to really take hold.”

  Creon smiled faintly, as if he had just scored one off. Guinness, it was obvious, was really a very incompetent murderer.

  Well, let Supercop think whatever he liked.

  Guinness couldn’t remember Louise ever keeping anything that could be described as cooking grease—not Louise, not the original low carbohydrate kid. Therefore. . .

  So that was how it had happened. Someone had surprised Louise in the bedroom, killed her, and then dragged her body down the stairs for the little scene in the kitchen. Just the sort of dumb move everyone would expect from the amateur who is looking for a way to get rid of his wife. That someone, whoever he was, had set him up beautifully. Nothing like a murder that looks like a murder.

  And then Creon wanted his statement. “I would appreciate it if you would describe all your movements, in detail, on the day of the murder. I want to know everything, no matter how small, and please remember that everything you say will be checked.”

  The statement took about five minutes. Creon didn’t make any notes, thus confirming the existence of the tape recorder, and he asked no questions until Guinness was finished. Then the questions never stopped, not for two and a quarter hours—Guinness kept track. Over and over, the same questions. The same details, checked and rechecked. Finally even Creon got bored and said they were through for the day, but that Guinness should keep himself available. They would talk again.

  “Would you like me to call you a cab?”

  “No. Thanks,” Guinness answered brightly. “I’ll walk it.”

  What the hell, the campus was only about two and a half miles from city hall—perhaps a little less if, once you got past Crystal Springs, the local madhouse, you got off Ralston and took the shortcut over the hills. But he didn’t think so today; he wasn’t up to hills.

  Even so, he could use the exercise. Also the chance to think.

  It was a nice day. The sky was blue and cloudless and on every block, it seemed, someone was in servitude behind a lawn mower. Tomorrow would be Saturday, and on Saturdays it was his turn to cut the grass.

  On Saturdays, in the summer, he would get an early start so he could have it all finished while the morning was still cool, and then he would set out the sprinkler—a half hour on either side—so the lawn wouldn’t dry up and turn brown and ruin their standing in the neighborhood.

  And Louise would put on her jeans and her canvas gloves and a kerchief over her hair and spend the better part of the day on her knees, locked in mortal combat with the honeysuckle vines or the broad leaf weeds.

  “Oh the damned borders; I’ll never get them completely cleaned out. Next summer I’m just going to let the place go to the devil. Who the hell cares anyway?” But she said that every year.

  For the past two seasons he had been trying to persuade her to use mulch in the borders, but she wouldn’t. She thought it was ugly, she said.

  And the next morning they would sleep in. And about eleven-thirty, without having bothered to shave, he would go out and get the Sunday paper while she cooked French toast, and they would read the funny pages over breakfast.

  Well, not anymore.

  In another five weeks the spring term would be over and summer, with its pale sunlight and its odor of ocean salt and beer, would officially begin. They had planned to sneak away for a week or two and camp out up in the Sierras, and they wouldn’t be doing that either.

  Guinness was scheduled to teach three courses in the summer term: Freshman English, Survey of British Literature to 1780, and a graduate seminar on the Metaphysicals. God, Freshman English in the summer—what could possibly be worse? Full of mindless little twits, every one of whom would be guaranteed to have failed the same course at least once during the regular school year. He was bored in advance.

  And the other two courses wouldn’t be much better.
>
  There was something about the summer; nobody was really awake to anything except his own biological cycle. The students would all be padding down to the edge of the sea to spawn. There would be a general husbanding of strength, an expectant preparation, as it were, for the decreed series of ritual fornications. Waiting for night, or perhaps merely for the temporary privacy of a sheltered reach of shoreline, they would throw their Frisbees, play structureless games of grab ass, and burn their bodies to a creamy, enticing brown.

  The girls, often as not, would sunbathe on the campus lawns, coming to class in their bikinis. It happened every year. You didn’t say anything—you couldn’t, really, without creating an odd impression—and they would sprawl in the front seats of the lecture halls, all bosoms and bare, open legs. And when your eyes touched them, as they had to if you were human, they would smile luscious and alluring smiles.

  Guinness resented it. It was one of the thousands of tiny grudges every teacher—probably everyone in daily and promiscuous contact with the young—harbored up over the years. He didn’t like being practiced upon; he didn’t like being reminded that at thirty-eight they already thought of him as an old man and therefore too far out of the running to be dangerous. One day he would like to rape one of the little yumyums, just stop right in the middle of droning on about some tedious patch of nonsense like the Medieval Lyrics and jump on her bones, just drape some foxy peroxide blonde over one of the front pews and rape the hell out of her, right in front of the assembled multitudes. It would serve her right.

  And the fact that he knew he never would, would never even lift a hand to one, made him resent their unthinking displays of flesh all the more.

  And finally, he knew he didn’t so much resent them as envy them. He envied them their youth, their blindness to consequence, their capacity to journey down to the sea, to lie on the sand and close their eyes. In that sense, he had never been young.

  Unpleasantly, he recollected that he was thirty-eight and therefore no longer even chronologically young. In two or three years he would be emphatically middle aged. And then after that, should he be spared, old. It wasn’t the first time the idea had occurred to him—hell, everyone over thirteen is aware of advancing age—but somehow, while he had had Louise, it hadn’t seemed so imminent. She had had that trick; she had made him feel that the two of them would go on together, more or less unchanged, forever.

  Oh Louise, my solace and rest. Never more will I touch your face with my tired hands.

  She had been dead only the one day. Guinness pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. Not even one whole day. It was twenty-seven minutes after two, and she couldn’t have been killed much before four in the afternoon. Not even one whole day yet.

  He couldn’t accept the fact that she was dead. He had seen her dead, and he still couldn’t accept it.

  Yes, he could, and he couldn’t. He was conscious of living in a kind of fantasy, one part of his mind still conforming to reflex—wondering if Louise would worry that he hadn’t come home for lunch, wondering if he should phone—with another part whispering that that was all nonsense, that Louise was dead and under a sheet in the basement of County Hospital.

  He knew when he went home tonight he would expect to find her in the kitchen, making dinner. But he wasn’t even going home tonight. His home was under police seal, and his kitchen was burnt out.

  His wife was dead, and his life was a shambles, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe any of it. What the hell was going on? Who was doing this to him?

  The faculty garage was on three levels. That was all there was to it, the three levels and the cement pillars that held them up. There was only one entrance for cars, but the thing was open on all four sides; anyone could walk right in from any direction without attracting attention. It was something worth worrying about.

  There was a little booth at the entrance, where a student would sit all during the day and keep the other students out. For this minor treachery the administration paid him one dollar and seventy-five cents an hour.

  Today the booth was occupied by Jerry Freytag, a large amiable redheaded boy whom Guinness had nursed through English 100 and finally, on the basis of his conviction that the poor bastard had really tried, had awarded one of his conditional Ds: I give you this grade on the understanding that you will never become an English major. Jerry had been properly grateful and always smiled and waved greetings whenever they came within fifty feet of one another. He seemed a nice kid and probably meant it.

  “Hi, Dr. Guinness,” Jerry bawled enthusiastically as he saw Guinness approaching. He was wearing the summer uniform, a colored tee shirt and a pair of khaki Bermuda shorts; his feet were stuck into rundown blue sneakers, and a green baseball cap was perched backward on his wiry red hair. He was sitting—if you could call such a posture sitting—on a bar stool, with his legs and back propped against opposite walls of the tiny booth. Resting between his thighs was a paperback edition of Jaws. “Read this one yet?” he said, picking up the book and displaying the cover with an enthusiasm he had never manifested for Pride and Prejudice.

  “Jerry,” Guinness began, ignoring the question, “you know what my car looks like, don’t you? Has anyone been near it today?”

  “Sure. A couple of cops showed up a little before lunchtime. They musta been pokin’ around over there for close to an hour.” Jerry’s thumb was tapping unconsciously against the spine of his book; you could tell he was dying to inquire why the fuzz would bother to shake down his old English prof’s wheels.

  “Thanks, Jerry.”

  Guinness passed on into the gloom of the first level and opened the door to the central staircase. What could he have told the kid, that the police were curious to know where he’d hidden the ice pick he had used to poke holes in his wife?

  It was reassuring, though, in a way. If the cops had done a halfway decent job, they would have uncovered any little surprises left behind by the real murderer. Probably there wouldn’t be any cobras in the seat cushions or sticks of dynamite wired to the starter.

  The car was a metallic gray Fiat. Guinness had his key in his hand before he was out of the stairwell, and as he settled in behind the wheel he slipped it into the ignition.

  Instantly his hand and half his forearm were engulfed in flame.

  And then nothing. The fire disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, having barely singed the hair on Guinness’s knuckles. Except for the black smudge on the metal ignition disk and the heavy odor in the air of something like burnt gunpowder, he might have thought he had imagined the whole thing.

  Nitrogen triiodide. In his college days it had been the staple of one of the favored parlor tricks among the chem majors. The substance was so volatile that you had to keep it stored underwater. While it was still wet you packed it into the lock of your best friend’s dorm door, where it would dry in a few hours. Then, when your best friend came home, probably a little the worse for half a dozen beers, and put his key in the lock—BAM! The Fourth of July. Lots of smoke, lots of fire, lots of fun, and nobody gets hurt. The friction of the key over the tumblers will set it off, and there isn’t enough to do any damage.

  Of course you scare hell out of the poor son of a bitch. Guinness fell back against his seat, sweating and listening to his heart pound. It took him perhaps as long as fifteen seconds to fully convince himself that he hadn’t been spattered all over the rear window. Jesus.

  It was a little demonstration, obviously. Somebody was making his little point—proving, lest any should doubt, that Louise’s murder hadn’t been the work of any junkie burglar caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Somebody wanted Ray Guinness to know that he had an enemy in the world, and that Ray Guinness had better start being afraid.

  Message received and understood.

  6

  So what had we got? A crazy, that much it seemed safe to hazard. Who else but a crazy would go to all the trouble of setting your wife on fire and then booby trapping your car just
to let you know he doesn’t love you?

  What’s to stop him from simply sending a letter?—that would have been a hell of a lot safer. Or what about the phone—whatever happened to that old standby, the whispered menace that wakes you from a profound and beautiful sleep at four in the morning?

  Ray, old lad, I was planning to bump you off sometime in the next several weeks and decided it would be ever so much more sporting as the grand prize in a guessing game, so I thought I’d call. Good luck, and keep on your toes.

  Or why go through all the elaborate preliminaries? Potential victims get very dangerous when they begin to realize that that is what they are; a sensible man would just walk up behind the mark of his choice and put a blade in his liver. Either that or, having gone to the trouble of tampering with his wheels, how much extra was involved in wiring a few sticks of dynamite to the ignition and thus producing a bang worthy of your efforts?

  Guinness had seen a couple of people go up like that one time, and it still gave him bad dreams.

  Well, what the hell; one mustn’t complain. It was that kind of a world, and if attempts were going to be made against his life, Guinness would, on the whole, prefer them to be made by crazies. Crazies always want to talk, to explain everything and impress you with how devilishly clever they’ve been. This guy, whoever he might ultimately turn out to be, was going to a lot of bother, and before he pulled the trigger he would be sure to want Guinness to understand just what had made him worthy of so much attention. You could stake your stick on it.

  And a crazy is almost always playing some sort of a game, and games, unlike real life, have rules.

  That had been the other part of the message conveyed via the nitrogen triiodide in his ignition switch: Don’t worry, pal. I’m not going to kill you while you’re not looking.

  A necessary precondition, because what else would prevent Guinness from simply taking off again? He was good at hide and seek; it wouldn’t take him very long to dust a tail, no matter if it was Sherlock Holmes following him around, to bury every trace of himself and pick up anew as a toaster salesman in Paraguay. Whoever He Was would have the devil’s own time ever finding him again, and he would know it.