The Suspect - L R Wright (5 page)

"
Very good, Mr. Wilcox," he said calmly.
"And how did you spend the rest of your morning?"

George turned away restlessly, as though suddenly
tired of the game. "I worked out in my garden, that's what I
did. I weeded and dead-headed, planted some more annuals. Used to
grow my own annuals, when I had a greenhouse. Anyway, I planted some,
mostly in the back, and—oh, I sprayed, too. Got some aphids on the
goddamn roses, and the broccoli. Came inside at noontime, washed up,
changed my clothes, got me some lunch—you want to know what I ate?"
he said, aggressively.

Alberg, who didn't, said that he did.

"
Vegetable soup, four soda crackers, three
pieces of cheese, and a glass of milk," said George Wilcox,
angry. "And I took my vitamins then, too, in case you're
interested. Did my dishes. It'd be about one o'clock now, I guess.
Then I lay down for an hour. I usually lie down for an hour, most
afternoons." He looked at Freddie Gainer. "It'll happen to
you too, one day, sonny. Then I got up," he said to Alberg, "and
decided to go to the library. Thought to myself that I'd stop in on
old Carlyle, seeing it's on the way. There,” he said defiantly.
"You got it. An ordinary day in the ordinary life of an ordinary
old person. Until I banged on his front door." He rubbed at his
face. "Should have minded my own business. Should have kept
right on going. Shouldn't ever have gone in there, not ever.”

Alberg nodded, sympathetically. "You live alone,
do you, Mr. Wilcox?"

"I do."

"Did you notice anyone passing by while you were
out in your garden or having your lunch? Somebody selling fish, for
instance?"

George looked at him with interest. "That salmon
in the sink. The one you thought I brought. Good lord, you've got
yourselves a suspect already, and old Carlyle's not even stone cold
yet. " He grinned and shook his head. "Nobody came by
trying to sell me fish. I was in the back, mostly. The kitchen's in
the back, too. Didn't see anybody. Nobody came banging l on my door,
peddling fish.”
 
"Did anyone
at all visit you during the day? Or phone? Did you see anyone, any of
your neighbors maybe, while you were working in your garden?"

George looked at him, then at Gainer, then back at
Alberg.

"It's just routine, Mr. Wilcox,” said Alberg.
"We'll be asking everyone who knew him. You just happen to be
first, because you found him."

George was expressionless. "Nobody visited me,
and nobody phoned. I don't remember seeing anybody while I was in my
garden. My fences are high. What about my library books?"

"I'm afraid they'll have to stay where they are
for now," said Alberg. "We'll make sure you get them back
as soon as possible. One more question, if you don't mind. Do you
know anyone who might have wanted Mr. Burke dead?"

George shifted his weight heavily from one foot to
the other, and Alberg saw how weary he was. "I didn't know him
all that well.”

The staff sergeant considered him for a moment. "But
what you knew, you didn't like much, did you?"

George looked up, and Alberg gave him his sweetest,
most compassionate smile.

"No," said George Wilcox quietly. "I
didn't." He looked extremely worn. "But us old-timers, you
know! how it is. We usually don't like to see each other get bashed
on the head."

"
And that's another thing that bothers me,"
said Alberg.

"
It bothers me too," said George, wiping at
his forehead.

"Why were you so sure he'd been bashed on the
head?"

George looked at him. "Well, he sure as hell
didn't have a heart attack."

"It could have been an accident though, couldn't
it?" Alberg was watching George curiously. "He could have
stumbled, fallen, hit his head. Homicide," he said gently,
"isn't usually the first thing that comes to mind, when
someone's found dead."

George shook his head stubbornly. "There wasn't
anything near enough for him to have landed on. There wasn't anything
knocked over, as though he'd fallen on it. And there wasn't any
blood, anywhere, except on him, and that rug." He was pale and
agitated.

"You're very observant, Mr. Wilcox," said
Alberg.

"
A thing like that, finding a thing like that. .
. it gets burned into your brain," said George to the gravel on
the path. "I'd like to go home now.”

"Sure," said Alberg. "Thanks for your
cooperation. Constable Gainer will give you a lift. We'll want to
talk to you again, though.”

George squinted up at him. "I don't know any
more than I already told you."

"We'll be asking you about Mr. Burke. Who his
other friends were—things like that."

George looked at him for a moment, then turned
without a. word and plodded up the path.

Gainer followed him, shoving his notebook and pen
back in his pocket, freeing his hands so he could move the ribbon
from across the gate and let the old man out.
 

CHAPTER 6

The following day, Cassandra Mitchell sat in her car
outside the
Pacific Press
building in Vancouver. There was a bundle of letters in her lap. She
dug her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on; then she picked
up the topmost envelope. Box 294, THE VANCOUVER SUN, it said, in
block letters written with a blue ballpoint pen. She couldn't tell
much from that. She ripped it open and pulled out a small folded
piece of notepaper, and as she did so, something else fell out of the
envelope. She picked it up and saw that it was a photograph. She
stared at it. It was a waist-up picture of a hairy, muscly man in his
early thirties, apparently wearing nothing but his self-satisfied
grin. Cassandra felt herself flush. She put down the photograph with
care on the seat next to her, wondering if she really wanted to read
the accompanying message. "Be brave, " she mumbled to
herself.

Dear Box 294. I have never answered an
add in the paper before, but I knew as soon as I read yours that your
the one pr me. I'm younger than you said but not much and believe me
it wont matter. Let me know your number and I'll phone you so we can
meet and get together and get to know each other. You wont regret it
and I know I wont either. Love, Brett.

"'
Love, Brett,'" said Cassandra. She
scrunched up the letter, tossed the rest of the pile on top of the
photograph, and started up the car with a roar.

The Hornet churned across the Granville Street
bridge, and the breeze from the open window blew Cassandra's dark
hair around her head. A total of fifteen letters she'd had, counting
today's four, from two advertisements. It had cost her a packet and
she hadn't even wanted to meet most of the men who had written to
her.

She inched her way through the rush-hour traffic
wondering why on earth she had done such a thing: advertised in the
paper, for God's sake, for a man.

Yet she had. She had delivered the advertisement to
the newspaper in person, as was required. She had slunk in and out of
the building, hidden behind her sunglasses and a guilty slouch. In
due course she returned, to pick up the replies. While waiting for
her turn at the counter she watched a man walk away with a pile of
letters almost high enough to make him stagger. Eagerly she gave her
box number to the woman behind the counter, who disappeared briefly
and returned with six envelopes. Cassandra looked at them
incredulously, then at the middle-aged woman with ferociously yellow
hair who had given them to her. "I know, dearie," the woman
had said, "it's the men get all the answers." The next
time, there were only five letters; and this time, four.

Phyllis Dempter, small, blond, and restless, married
to a preoccupied Gibsons dentist, had encouraged her in this madness.
In fact, Cassandra reminded herself, amid bumper-to-bumper traffic on
the Lions Gate bridge, the whole thing had been her friend's idea.

"
Y0u're giving up too soon," Phyllis had
said calmly when Cassandra flapped before her eyes the dispiriting
replies to the first ad. "These things take time. You've got to
go through a lot of chaff before you get to the wheat."

"Chaff,” muttered Cassandra, turning off the
bridge onto Marine Drive, the road still bottlenecked. "Wheat."

She had made several self-conscious forays into
Vancouver for encounters set up in awkward telephone conversations
during which she strained (with notable lack of success) to put
appropriate faces to unfamiliar male voices. So far she had met and
conversed reasonably politely with a chartered accountant who had
never been out of British Columbia, a fact he stated with bewildering
pride; a sixty-five-year-old businessman who had felt it fitting not
to have previously revealed the disparity in their ages because he
was "young at heart"; and a teacher who told her
immediately that he was married but enjoyed a "nonthreatening”
relationship with his wife.

None of them had stirred her blood.

She had seen none of them twice.

She was on the Upper Levels highway now, heading
through much lighter traffic for Horseshoe Bay and the ferry that
would take her across the sound. Far below to her left lay the
blue-silver sea.

Her ad had made it clear that she lived,
inconveniently, on the Sunshine Coast. Three of her replies had been
from men who also lived there, which for some reason she hadn't
expected. Cassandra had responded to only one of these, a man whose
letter had piqued her curiosity because it revealed nothing about him
but his first name. I enjoyed your ad and would like to meet you, he
had written, and he'd put his telephone number below his signature.
She had eventually called him and they arranged to meet in Sechelt
for lunch, but he had canceled their appointment twice, and if he
didn't show up the next time, on Friday, she was going to tell him to
forget it. It was probably a lousy idea anyway, she thought. Too
close to home. Every time a male person of the right age came into
the library she blanched a little, wondering if he was the one and
hoping he was not.

She remembered the three unopened letters on the seat
beside her and permitted herself a small surge of hope. She waited
patiently in line for the ferry and, when she had driven aboard, sat
in the car until everybody else had scurried off to find the
cafeteria or the sun deck, and then she opened the rest of the
letters.

There was one from an X-ray technician who enjoyed
walking in the woods and listening to hard rock; one from an
insurance salesman who liked women and cats but expressed
disapproval, entirely unsolicited, of children and dogs; and one from
a tuna fisherman whose wife had left him and who was too shy to try
to find a prostitute. Cassandra, disheartened, tore them up, decided
not to show Phyllis the picture of the naked hairy man after all, and
tore that up too.

She passed up the cafeteria and stood out on the sun
deck, wrapped in a sweater against the wind, during the half-hour
trip to Langdale. She watched a tugboat hauling an enormous log boom,
and sailboats dipping in the wind, and the mountainous coastline
pressing at the sea.

It would soon be nine years since she'd moved to
Sechelt. Although she enjoyed the village, she didn't want to spend
the rest of her life there. This had proved enormously complicating
to her sex life. Nine years ago she was thirty-two and considered
still of marriageable age by the few men there over thirty and
unattached. They were surprised—even shocked—to discover that she
had no interest in marrying one of them and settling down for good in
a small town on the Sunshine Coast. It was impossible to explain why.
"I'm just waiting for my mother to die," she could have
said, cheerfully, "and then I'll be off. " Impossible.
Eventually all the men had drifted away and gotten married to women
younger and less disconcerting than she.

Cassandra turned her back on the water and stretched
her arms along the railing of the sun deck, surveying the other
people there, checking them out from behind her sunglasses. A few she
recognized: an elderly couple who lived in the same senior citizens'
complex as her mother; a lanky, black-haired woman who lived alone
above the Sechelt hardware store and whose balcony was crammed with
potted flowers from March until November; the cheerful, overweight,
perpetually perspiring man who operated the service station across
from the hospital. There were some children running up and down the
deck, too—it was a wonder dozens of them didn't catapult themselves
overboard every year, especially in the tourist season.

Cassandra sighed and faced the sea again, letting the
wind whip her hair back, instead of forward around her face. She 
began to think about the men she had loved, even merely enjoyed the
company of, during the course of her life; but I soon gave this up,
because she believed in looking firmly ahead, preferably with an
optimistic heart.

They were passing Keats Island, now. Only a few more
minutes.

Traveling down the three escalators that led to the
car deck, Cassandra decided that it might be worth one more try. She
would get Phyllis to help her rewrite the ad. Maybe she had made too
modest a self-presentation. God knew, she didn't mind admitting it,
she would dearly love to meet an agreeable male person. It had been
far, far too long.