A quick rip through didn’t turn up any
mention of the fire or the discovery of a body, which was
disturbing. Belmont was a small town by relative standards, where
disasters were rare enough to be reported with something almost
amounting to civic pride, and a good death by fire would normally
have been worth at least two columns on the front page of the local
news.
But the editor was very likely to be Creon’s
Rotary brother or something and, in any case, more dependent on the
good will of the fuzz than would be usual in Los Angeles or even
San Jose. The paper’s silence could only mean that the police were
sitting on the story.
It was easy to imagine why; they hadn’t quite
made up their minds and they wanted time. Time to decide how to
play it. It wouldn’t do to start shouting homicide until you were
absolutely positive, and perhaps not until you had someone to
collar for it.
If he worked it right, Creon could come out
of this case looking like a hero. And like something less if he
blew it.
Guinness closed the newspaper, refolding and
smoothing it down against his knee. He closed his eyes for several
seconds and tried to reestablish himself somewhere over the tumult
of thought and feeling, to slow things down and bring them into
some kind of order.
It didn’t seem fair somehow. It was too much
all at once, too many demands from too many different directions.
Out there somewhere was somebody who planned to kill him, who had
already killed Louise, and Guinness would have to stay on his toes
if he wanted to do that somebody full justice. Merely to keep on
breathing would require his undivided attention, and in the
meantime he would have to fence with the god damned police.
And just where was it written that there
should be no time to mourn? After all, his wife, who had not yet
been dead for twenty-four hours, had some small claim. As it was,
if he stopped to think too much about her he might end up dead
himself, and when finally there would be time—if ever there would
be time—well, probably by then he’d be used to it. The strangeness
would have worn off, and it would be too late. You do, in fact, get
used to it. You can get used to anything.
It wasn’t fair, to Louise or to himself.
Because he also needed time, time to say a decent goodbye. People
had a right to be human beings and to suffer in peace through their
sense of loss, but apparently it had been decided somewhere that
the Guinnesses should constitute a special case.
Poor Louise. He couldn’t say he had provided
her with much of a husband, but probably every fresh widower
thought something like that. Widower—funny sort of word, applying
with equal force to Bluebeard, Raymond M. Guinness, Henry VIII, and
Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin.
Still, he couldn’t expect to get off scot
free. Wasn’t feeling guilty, after all, a part of the pattern?
And there had been enough to merit a little
guilt; it wasn’t precisely as if he were martyring himself on the
cross of his own sensibility.
Just for instance, it wasn’t as if their
marriage had been founded upon the Rock of Truth.
Not that he had lied, precisely, but one can
easily lie by omission. There had been so much silence.
Of course, One couldn’t come right out with
an exhaustive history of one’s lurid past, and one didn’t choose to
lie. So One simply did not discuss some things. Not entirely honest
perhaps, but then how many successful marriages could be built on
that kind of honesty? What kinds of people would even want to
try?
What the hell, people didn’t have to ooze
through one another like rainwater through a plaster roof in order
to be content. Other kinds of unions were possible besides the
hideousness of the American happy marriage, and no one would suffer
if the two of them hadn’t contrived to be Ozzie and Harriet.
Live for the moment, that was the plan, and
try to create the impression that you did not have too many
specific memories. Why should the past have been different from the
present? Why indeed?
There had been, he remembered, a cigarette
machine in the coffee shop, just opposite the cashier’s desk, and
at that moment Guinness was dying for a cigarette. A cigarette—yes,
he decided, the very thing. He hadn’t had a cigarette in over four
years, not since Louise had wheedled him into giving them up.
“Come on,” she had whispered, her breath warm
against his ear as she put her arms around his neck, sliding into
his lap from the arm of his reading chair. “It won’t be so very
terrible. I won’t let you suffer. We’ll find other ways to gratify
your base animal nature.” And she had been as good as her word.
So he had stopped. Thus easily can one yield
to the preposterous notion that one might live long enough to make
lung cancer something to worry about. At any rate, events had cured
him of that illusion.
Guinness reached into his jacket pocket and
pulled out his change. Two quarters, three dimes, and a nickel plus
about seven pennies. Plenty.
Still, he didn’t get up from his chair, and
after a moment he returned the coins to his pocket. It could wait.
It would have been like a betrayal.
Louise, poor Louise. Louise and the domestic
virtues. Always so worried about his health, and then she had been
the one to end up dead. Poor baby. He wondered out of how many
years he had cheated her.
She had made it the business of her life to
see to it that his clothes were pressed and his health sound, that
he was comfortable and content and well loved. He had had
everything he could want from her, even friendship—and the touch of
her hand to lift the stray wisp of hair away from his brow when he
was unhappy and would not say why. She wouldn’t ask him. She would
be content to understand without understanding.
But had it been enough for her? It had
occurred to Guinness to wonder from time to time. It occurred to
him now, to wonder and to hope that somehow it had been. Louise was
dead and there would be no more time now, no more chances, so he
hoped she had been happy for their five years.
Perhaps not happy, perhaps not that. Because
who in this world gets to be happy? One mustn’t ask for the
moon.
But he hoped she had had whatever it was that
she had been after. There would be no more of anything now, so all
he could do was to hope.
Guinness glanced up at the wall clock over
the front desk and checked it against his own watch. They agreed on
nine twenty-eight.
He was to identify the body that morning and
make his statement. Why in that order? he wondered. Perhaps they
had some idea of shaking him up, of jolting him enough to start a
few cracks in his story.
What the hell for, didn’t they have any more
imagination than that? Aside from the policeman’s treasured axiom
that the husband is always your best suspect, nothing pointed to
him.
And it had been a long, long time since the
sight of anybody’s cadaver had managed to reduce him to quivering
helplessness. No, it was a little late in the day for that.
It would be amusing to see how they would try
breaking him down. He could imagine the scenario: being played off
between Good Cop and Bad Cop, between his very own oh so
sympathetic young Detective Peterson and Creon the Unkind. After a
few hours of the sergeant’s rough tongue he would be expected to
come all unglued and open up to his “friend,” who of course would
see everything entirely from his point of view. You could watch it
five nights a week on reruns of Dragnet.
Perhaps not really very amusing, but at least
he would know how to behave, having already been through it once
before. Not in Belmont of course, or even in the United States. In
Yugoslavia, in the summer of 1965.
An apparently insignificant party official
had suddenly fallen down dead, pitched right over onto the sidewalk
on his way to lunch, the way a puppet will when suddenly you let go
of the strings. It was small wonder, actually, because a 9 mm slug
had just entered his brain about an inch above and behind his right
ear. When they dug it out, it was resting against the back of his
left eye, and it had done quite a lot of damage on its way
across.
Suddenly the whole district was alive with
police in olive uniforms, sweeping the area for anybody who didn’t
look as if he had been born on the spot. They picked Guinness up as
he stepped out of an elevator in a building across the street from
where the body had collapsed on the pavement. In the same building
they found a 9 mm rifle, with a shooting stand and a pair of neatly
folded black leather gloves resting on the ledge of a second story
window. It looked pretty bad.
They measured his hands and found that the
gloves were a size and a half too small, but they grilled him for
two days straight anyway. Who was he? What was he doing in that
building? What was he doing in Belgrade? Who was he really? On and
on. Finally they decided that there wasn’t any evidence, that
probably he didn’t have anything to do with their precious
assassination, and that they didn’t dare hold him any longer unless
they were prepared to go the whole distance and notify his embassy
that he was being officially detained in connection with the murder
of Janik Shevliskin. So they let him go. The gloves had saved him,
and the fact that his story hadn’t melted under pressure.
The gloves had been a last minute
inspiration. He always liked to leave a red herring of some kind
against just such an emergency, and he had picked them up in a
Parisian department store an hour and ten minutes before his train
was due to leave. The label on the inside indicated that the gloves
had been made in Poland, which was a nice touch.
The gloves he had actually worn to shoot with
were cheapie plastic jobs, the kind that come on rolls of a
hundred, and had been flushed, one at a time, down the handiest
john.
When he got back to London, he told the
British that if they wanted anybody else axed in Yugoslavia they
could find themselves another boy. This time had been a trifle
close, thank you, and he couldn’t risk being arrested twice.
The paper was still over his knee when
Peterson came through the lobby doors. He walked about a quarter of
the way into the room before he stopped and began looking around,
turning back toward the entrance as Guinness cleared his throat
significantly.
“Good morning, Detective Peterson. You’re
early.”
Peterson smiled suddenly, as if caught in
some vague indiscretion, which perhaps he had been, and put out his
hand to shake as Guinness rose from his chair. Probably there was
no tactful way to greet a man whom you are taking to see his
freshly dead wife.
Guinness, his lips compressed in a mirthless,
ironic smile, took the offered hand and held it just a moment
longer and in a grip just a shade tighter than the acquaintance
warranted. His eyes searched the other man’s face, as if he were
considering something unpleasant.
The policeman was almost as tall, and
probably had the advantage in weight, but he didn’t attempt to
disengage himself. Perhaps he was simply being polite—he certainly
was a very polite lad. Perhaps he was thinking about Dion O’Banion.
Perhaps his education didn’t extend that far.
When Guinness’s hold relaxed, and the
handshake ended, he had the definite impression that he had lost
his friend at court, which was okay. Perhaps that way they wouldn’t
waste a lot of each other’s time on the psychological niceties.
Instead of the police station, as he had
expected, Guinness was driven to the county hospital. It hadn’t
occurred to him before, but the local police wouldn’t have the
facilities for a forensic autopsy. They probably didn’t even have a
morgue.
He and Peterson had little to say during the
drive, and they exchanged only whispered monosyllables in the
hospital itself. Peterson guided him into the basement, where he
swung open a heavy, pale green door, bidding Guinness enter with a
gesture of his open hand.
The room was perhaps twenty feet square, with
a ceiling high enough to be lost in shadow and massive doors at
either end. Linoleum tile of some indistinct pale shade covered the
floor, and the walls, like the doors, were a pale frosted green,
giving one the impression of standing in the center of an enormous
ice cube. It took several seconds before Guinness located with his
eyes the camouflaged fixtures that made the light seem to seep in
from every direction.
There was a heavy smell of antiseptic, and
the room was perfectly empty except for a gurney table in its
precise center. The table was covered with a sheet, and under the
sheet were visible the outlines of something that had once been
human and female.
Peterson seemed to hesitate, as if
embarrassed, so Guinness took the few short steps to the head of
the gurney and lifted back the sheet just enough to reveal the head
and shoulders of all that was mortal of Louise Harrison
Guinness.
It wasn’t as bad as he had imagined it might
be. There was the faintest odor of burnt flesh, and he could see
where the hair had been singed along the back of the skull, but her
face was unmarked.
Death was always an undignified business; her
jaw was slack and her eyes half open. In life her eyes had been
almost black, but now they were too glazed over to make it possible
to pick out their precise color. Seeing her like this seemed a
hideous intrusion.
He reached down and gently closed her eyes
with thumb and first finger, and an emotion like nothing he could
have expected or prepared for flooded through him. He brought the
sheet back up to cover her.
“Can you identify these as the remains of
your wife?”
Peterson’s ritual question, whispered though
it was, sounded in the hushed room like a pistol shot. Guinness
nodded and allowed himself to be led away.