The Summer Soldier (9 page)

As it always did, the thought of his daughter
left him feeling faintly depressed. His hand crept up until it
rested lightly over his right inside breast pocket, within which he
could feel the slight bulge of his wallet. There he kept, almost as
a secret from himself, the only photograph of her he owned: a
snapshot taken when she was three months old. It was how he
remembered her; he hadn’t seen her since. He couldn’t even be sure
she was still alive.

Guinness had known a few bad moments on that
score since all this with Louise had started. But no, whoever was
zeroing in on him would have had to have done one hell of a lot of
homework to have tracked down his ex¬-wife and daughter. Kathleen
had probably remarried, human nature being what it was, and might
be living anywhere.

He brought his hand back down on his lap and
pushed the idea out of his mind. At the moment it was his own
safety he should be thinking about. It was his own damn neck that
was stretched out so gracefully over the chopping block.

But first there was this idiot cop to shake
off. Guinness hoped he would hurry his ass up. He was tired of
waiting for Creon to decide that Anxious Anticipation Time was
over. Being sweated like this was such a bore; it almost made you
nostalgic for the white lights and the rubber truncheons.

Finally it was over, and Creon came in to
settle himself behind his desk. Somehow he looked taller sitting
down; anyway, he looked solid enough. There were deep furrows
tapering down from his cheekbones almost to the line of his jaw;
they made his face appear hard and immovable, as if it had belonged
to some Polynesian idol carved in wood. It could have been a dead
face except for the eyes. They were small and angrily blue and all
the more startling for the fact that the eyebrows and lashes were
blond to the point of invisibility.

“Before we begin,” he said quietly, as if he
were reading something prepared in advance, “you should know that
this conversation is being tape recorded and that anything you say
may eventually be introduced in evidence against you.”

“Am I being charged with anything?” Guinness
asked, more to throw Creon off his pace than anything else. He was
gratified when the blond eyebrows pressed together in a slight
frown.

“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.