The Summer Soldier (2 page)

Guinness took a handkerchief out of his
trousers pocket and used it to wipe his hand of the cream colored
paint dust from the garage door. When he had done the house,
shortly after he and Louise had moved in, they had told him at the
hardware store he would be smart to use an oil based paint; the
powdery film it left on the surface when it dried was supposed to
keep it from blistering. What it really did was come off on your
clothes every time you ventured near it.

He did not like the idea of the police poking
around in his house. All of this business was an exercise in
futility; they would never find out who had murdered Louise.
Settling that score would have to be his own private concern.

Murder. It had been murder all right; of
that, suspicion had hardened into certainty. The working axiom of
Guinness’s adult life had been that nobody dies until he’s
murdered.

No, the police would only muddy things up.
And, besides, there were things in the house it wouldn’t do for
them to chance across—the evidence of older crimes than this
one.

Of course they never would, would never think
to rip up the carpeting in his study and find where he had cut
through the width of three slats in the hardwood flooring. Why
should they?

The slats could be lifted away to uncover a
metal tray he had had to go under the house to screw into position
between two of the floor supports—his little hiding place. They
would never find it. In five years Louise had never found it, had
never even suspected that it was there to find.

But it was there, under the floor in his
office. A locked steel box containing a little over eight thousand
dollars in fifties and hundreds, a wad of bills wrapped tight in
multiple thicknesses of Saran Wrap to keep out the dampness. If it
worked for Bermuda onions, why not for money?

It wasn’t the money that mattered, though. It
was the notes. His working notes, carefully preserved from all the
little jobs he had done for MI-6, all the little problems he had
taken care of for them so that all the frightened little
undersecretaries in the Foreign Office could sleep at night. Among
his notes, and his memories, Guinness would find his answer, but it
wouldn’t be an answer that would be of any service to the
police.

The stupid cops, what the hell were they
doing here anyway? Why couldn’t they all just buzz off, like good
little tykes, and leave questions of retribution to the
grownups?

Well, that wasn’t likely to happen.

Across the lawn, with the broad tan back of
his suit jacket turned to Guinness, Sergeant Creon stood on the
walkway to the front door, smoking a cigarette. His nibs looked
perfectly at home. Finally, with proprietary calm, he took the
cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the cement, and ground it
out with his heel. Guinness watched him through narrowed eyes, and
the hand that held his handkerchief slowly tightened into a fist.
Just where did the son of a bitch think he got off? Police
investigation or no, the name on the mailbox was still Guinness. It
was still his house, his and Louise’s. It made him feel naked to
think of some clown like this boorish constable pawing over the
contents of his dresser drawers and constructing elaborate theories
about Louise’s sexual behavior. The law would pick its sordid way
through their private life, subjecting his wife to a personal
indignity only a very little less degrading than murder itself, and
then come up with nothing.

Well, not nothing. They would develop a
theory; she had startled an intruder perhaps, or been killed by a
faceless lover. (Did Louise have any lovers? It didn’t seem likely;
but that might just be his own vanity and, anyway, it was no one’s
business.)

They might even nail some poor innocent
schmuck, but what of it? These kinds of murders simply didn’t
happen in Guinness’s set—after all, he had been in the business
himself.

“Mr. Guinness, is there anywhere you would
like me to drive you? We’ll take your statement in the morning;
there’s nothing you can do here now. You must want to rest. I’m
sure this all must have been a terrible shock for you. Is there
anywhere at all you’d like to be taken?”

Guinness looked up from the driveway in
astonishment, having forgotten that the younger man was standing so
close beside him. He smiled as his fist unclenched and he refolded
his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

Curly seemed to be a nice kid, but he was
working awfully hard to get him the hell out of there. It made you
wonder why.

The hell with Curly. Curly could wait.

When this thing was over, he would have the
kitchen put back together—hell, it was insured—and then he would
sell the place. Get a couple of rooms somewhere near the school and
sell the place.

He had bought the house a week before their
wedding. Paid cash for it, twenty-eight thousand. Louise had asked
him where he had gotten the money; after all, twenty-eight grand
was a lot for an assistant professor of English to have just tucked
away in an old sock.

“I’ve been rolling a lot of drunks
lately.”

And she had laughed and not asked again. It
was one of the things he liked about her, that she knew when not to
ask again.

So that was where the money had gone, most of
it. An inauspicious beginning for the House of Guinness, to be paid
for with the money the British had paid him for services rendered.
There was even some left, under the floorboards in his office.

As if it were something in which he had not
the remotest personal interest, he wondered how much the place
would bring today.

They had done a lot with it in five years. A
whole new inside just two years ago, with wallpaper in the dining
room and new carpeting everywhere on the ground floor. He was still
paying for it—that much, at least, had come from legitimate
sources.

And Louise’s kitchen was almost new. That had
been their first priority, to get rid of all that antique junk the
place had come with and to put in all new appliances. A side by
side refrigerator and a self cleaning oven, even a fancy blender
with the motor built right into the counter top. Louise had loved
that kitchen with a passion that might have moved another man to
jealousy.

He wondered how it happened that it was there
they had found her body. It would have to have been Louise, but why
just in the kitchen?

Yes, of course. The fire. He was being
stupid. The fire was supposed to cover everything. A stupid
business.

Did he have any stupid enemies? No, at least
not ones who would have thought to murder his wife. All of those
were dead.

But it had to be an enemy of his—who would
want to murder Louise? It was all aimed at him somehow, and Louise
had merely gotten into the line of fire.

What was the matter with him? It used to be
he could smell trouble, could feel it coming the way some people
can feel bad weather. This had caught him totally off his
guard.

Aware that he was in danger of losing
control, Guinness took a deep breath, sucking air into his lungs
until they ached and then letting it out as slowly as he could. He
repeated the process, three, and then four times, until his
perceptions narrowed down to the patterns of the water drops on the
garage door and the noise of the blood pounding in his ears. It
made him feel faintly ill, faintly giddy, the way one did sometimes
after coming up out of a chair too fast; but that was better than
breaking into angry, hysterical weeping in front of a lawn full of
homicide detectives. To hell with them too, his emotions were his
own business.

The sun had dipped low enough to turn the sky
a grimy orangeish color above the ragged edging made by the
darkened buildings of his neighborhood. With a kind of visual pop
the street lamps came on, creating long smears of shadow that ran
across the lawn from the feet of the few huddled detectives who
remained, like slicks of blackened water.

“I think I want to get out of here.”

Peterson was only too eager. He sprang the
rear door of his unmarked police car, waving Guinness into the back
seat. Settling in, Guinness noticed with distaste that he was
behind a cagework grating bolted into place over the driver’s
backrest. The back doors didn’t even open from the inside.

The car pulled out, and he glanced back
through the rear window to watch his house recede and darken as
they left it behind.

2

Guinness’s waitress was much practiced in
that art they have of avoiding your eye when you want to ask for
something, so he gave up and returned to a close study of his eggs.
He had requested them scrambled hard, but what did that mean? At
the moment they were hemorrhaging all over his plate. As it cooled,
the pale yellowish mass seemed to sweat forth tiny droplets of what
was probably cooking oil, giving the impression that it was dying
in unspeakable agony.

What he wanted now was to order another cup
of tea, but perhaps it was just as well. With about a third of one
of their little containers of ersatz half and half stirred in, his
last cup had still the approximate color of dead grass.

Anyway, for the day ahead he really didn’t
want very much on his stomach.

The physical texture of life without Louise.
He had awakened several times during the night, each time feeling
cold and peculiarly desolate, as if his bed had been quietly
transferred to some moonscape.

Nothing more than the disruption of
established habit. It was just that he wasn’t used to sleeping
alone anymore. There was no point in getting melodramatic about
trifles; he would have the hang of it again before long.

Finally the waitress flew by of her own
accord, stopping only long enough to slap his check down on the
table. She was an enormous, energetic blonde of about forty-five,
and as she charged away her buttocks pounded jerkily, like steam
pistons under her black rayon skirt.

An English muffin, orange juice, two
scrambled eggs, and a single cup of tea. Two forty-five, plus
fifteen cents tax. Guinness slid a precise 15 percent under the rim
of his plate, picking up the tiny paper receipt form between his
first and middle fingers as he rose from the table.

Passing from the coffee shop, past a busboy’s
cart burdened down with clotted breakfast dishes, he took a few
steps down a corridor that led in one direction outdoors to the
swimming pool and in the other to the main lobby, and pushed open
the door to the men’s room. As it usually did when he ate away from
home, breakfast left him feeling slightly sticky.

There was a balance scale in the men’s
room—“your true weight, no springs”—so Guinness climbed up on the
little platform, dropped in his nickel, and watched the numbered
band spin around until it came to rest at just a shade over one
hundred and eighty-six and a half pounds.

Well hell, he was fully dressed and it was
right directly after breakfast, so at six-one it wasn’t a
calamity.

He washed his hands with the tiny rectangular
wafer of soap that he found half dissolved on the edge of the sink
and splashed a little cold water in his face, and, as he was
patting it dry with a paper towel, he looked up at his reflection
in the mirror and frowned.

Bluish gray eyes, hair that over the years
had darkened from red to brown, a few dim freckles dusted over the
bridge of a rather blunt nose—at thirty-eight still the face of a
slightly seedy Eagle Scout.

Useful when you wanted to play the harmless
bucolic from America’s heartland—possibly having such a face had
once or twice saved his life—but not a face that reflected much
about its owner. It always gave Guinness the uncomfortable feeling
that he was conducting his life from behind a mask.

Which, of course he was, and had been for as
long as he could remember. How else could he have gotten by?

But you can’t fool everyone. In the back yard
behind their house was a small, hypochondriacal maple tree that was
always threatening to come down with some exotic new deficiency
disease if you weren’t out there every minute pounding spikes of
plant food down among its roots, and during the winter, when all
the leaves were gone, there were almost always a few tacky looking
birds sitting disconsolately in its naked branches. It didn’t take
very long before Louise decided that they had to be starving to
death, although how a bird would contrive to starve in the San
Francisco Bay Area Guinness couldn’t begin to imagine. Anyway, she
went right out to buy a five pound bag of birdseed.

By turns they would each go out in the
morning and sprinkle handfuls of birdseed around the base of the
maple tree. At first, the instant either of them came out, all the
birds would flutter up into the telephone wires to wait until the
coast was clear. But eventually, with Louise, they would be
satisfied with the next branch up, just out of reach, and finally
they would come down to the ground while she was still outside. Had
she survived another season they would probably have been fighting
each other to eat the stuff out of her hand.

But toward Guinness their feelings never
changed. The second he opened the back door, it was into the
telephone wires. You don’t ever really get to reform, and birds
know a predator when they see one.

In the lobby there was a cutesy clock over
the front desk, with the numbers replaced by the letters of the
hotel’s name and two dots to separate the two words they made. The
minute hand was between the D and the A, and the hour rested firmly
over the H, making it about seven minutes after nine.

The police, in the person of their
sympathetic Detective Peterson, had arranged to pick him up at
10:00 A.M.; thus there wouldn’t really be time enough to take a cab
back across town to the campus, where his car was still waiting for
him in the faculty parking lot. Still, he felt the need of
something to keep his mind occupied, so he lifted a copy of the San
Mateo Times from the top of a stack of them on the front desk,
dropped a quarter in its place, and sat down in one of the two
rather moth eaten light gray wing chairs that stood on either side
of the main entrance, facing into the lobby like genteel,
disapproving sentinels.