The Suspect - L R Wright (22 page)

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.”

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

Alberg opened a drawer in his tiling 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 flower: 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.
 

CHAPTER 24

Cassandra Mitchell lived in a small house set back
from a narrow gravel road above the highway. In her from yard was a
prickly, crazily configurated 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 book shelves, a
small desk and chair, and a chaise lounge 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.