Edward Lee - Ghouls

The words seemed to deepen the lines in Willard’s face, though his eyes remained calm and aloof. He perched his chin on his fingertips, and asked, “What time did she call you?”

“Around six, I think.”

“Then it must’ve been just before she left.”

“Right, but do you have any idea what it was she wanted to tell me?”

“I’d think it would be obvious,” Willard declared, opening his hands as though he held something invisible. “There are many wonderful things about Nancy, she has many attributes. But character was one thing she never had much of—no guts at all. She didn’t have it in her to confront me with the truth; therefore, she meant for you to do it for her.”

“Do what?”

“Be her messenger of doom, of course. She wanted you to tell me she was abandoning our marriage, since she didn’t have the nerve to do so herself.”

He’s got a point, Kurt thought. Or hadn’t there been something more to Nancy’s implications over the phone, something more severe? “Maybe,” he said then. “Assuming that she is going to leave you, and that’s still a shaky assumption at this point.”

Willard eased back in his chair, running his fingers through the ring his glass had left. “I should take a lesson from your optimism, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m viewing all this through too dark a light.” He rose abruptly to his feet, but still seemed small within his cove of bookshelves. “Whatever the case, I thank you for your concern.”

“Give her till tonight,” Kurt said, following Willard to the foyer. “Once she’s gone a full twenty-four hours, then give us a call. We’ll take it from there. In the meantime, I’ll try to get hold of Glen and see what I can dig up.”

Willard halted midway through the foyer, seemingly stopped in his tracks by the portrait of his father, which Kurt remembered from his first visit.

Willard tilted his head, stared reflectively at the canvas. “Look at him, the old fuck. I’m surprised I can’t hear him laughing this very minute, all the way from hell.”

“Why would he be laughing?”

“To put it kindly, my father was the nastiest, ugliest, most narrow-minded son of a bitch to ever walk the surface of this earth,” Willard said, his face a mystery of contempt and amusement. “You see, he was always quite sure that I would not succeed in any undertaking of my life—in fact, I daresay he hoped I would fail. He was convinced that if I did not conform to his designs, then I most certainly would never amount to anything. He bull-dogged me from the very second of my birth, treated me more as a puppet than a son. He had no conception of free will; for a son, he expected a duplicate of himself, and when I made it known to him that I would not follow his footsteps, he became infuriated. It was his ultimate wish that I become a businessman, as he himself had been. But I wanted to be a doctor. I had to bus tables to get through college, and when I graduated, of course, my father refused to loan me money for medical school.”

“Then how did you do it?” Kurt asked.

Willard shrugged, lighting a short filterless cigarette. “I had no choice but to enter the military. It was a fair deal; they paid for my medical schooling in return for time in service as a doctor. I figured I’d do my four years, then return and set up my own private practice, but believe it or not, I found I rather liked the military. It gave me a chance to see the world that my father had blinded me to, and this fascinated me. And I did quite well as a medical officer. Eventually my medical specialties became secondary, and I got into medical field administration, which isn’t uncommon for medical officers once they’ve gained some years. To my father, though, this success was the ultimate insult, the knowledge that for all that time, I was right, and he was wrong. He scarcely spoke to me the few times I took leave. He never apologized, never once shared my enthusiasm. I’m told that when he learned of my most significant promotion, he had a heart attack which eventually led to his death.” Willard paused to eye the painting, his lips tightened to a checked smile as he sucked the cigarette down. “My father left me everything when he died, not for the love of his only son, but simply to keep the property in the family name. He’d garnered quite a fortune, I’ll give him that. So there was no need for me to finish my military career through to proper retirement. I returned to civilian life as soon as I could, after seventeen years in the medical corps, and my father in the grave.”

Kurt viewed the painting through something close to a wince. The portrait grimaced back at them both, as if to test all of Willard’s derision. Kurt thought, Anyone that ugly’s got a right to grimace.

“So it looks like the old cockrobin has the last laugh after all,” Willard said.

“How?”

“At least his wife didn’t run out on him.”

“Well, don’t forget, we’re not absolutely sure your wife has gone anywhere,” Kurt reminded. He cast a final glance at the picture, then opened the door. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Officer Morris.”

Kurt trotted down the porch steps, rushing to be free of the foyer’s locked-in scents. The dark, silent abode had tried his nerves. But was it the house itself, or Willard, that disturbed him? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was both.

Before he got back into the Ford, something glossy caught his eye. He stopped, turned very slowly. A fine shaft of sunlight projected diagonally into the garage through one of the shoulder-high window panels. When Kurt looked in, he saw that the sun was reflecting off the hood of Nancy Willard’s black Porsche.

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Bad subject, huh?”

“That’s right. That’s what they said. They said I was a bad subject.”

“All it means,” Kurt explained, “is that your polygraph results are inconclusive. Lots of people who take lie detector tests get labeled as bad subjects, only because certain physiological conditions prevent the operator from reading their responses right. I don’t care what Bard’s asshole right-wing surveys say; polygraphs and stress evaluators don’t work on a given percentage of those tested, and since the county’s tagged you a bad subject, that means you fall into that percentage. It’s rare, sure, but it happens. Some people can tell the truth over and over, and the poly will say they’re lying. Others can lie like rugs, but the machine will never know the difference. Goddamn things should be outlawed, just a bunch of strongarm fascist bullshit.”

Glen still didn’t seem to understand. “So do the cops think I’m lying?”

“No, they just think you’re a bad subject, which means you’ve got nothing to worry about. They can’t even legally consider you a suspect now. It was smart that you volunteered for it.”

“For all the good it did,” Glen said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “I was hoping the damn thing would clear me.”

Kurt watched the road, and swore at himself for not owning a pair of sunglasses. Glen looked like something washed up by the tide, his face thin and blanched, his hair a mess. Even his familiar straight-leg jeans and poplin jacket looked wrong on him, as though they belonged to someone else, someone larger. Higgins had brought Glen back from CID at midafternoon, and Kurt had offered to drive him home, more a maneuver than a gesture of a friend. How to begin? Kurt asked himself. There was so much he wanted to ask, but he felt a wave of doubt now that the opportunity had been made. He wanted to light a cigarette, to kill more time, though whenever he reached for his left shirt pocket, he thought of Dr. Greene’s bucket. He doubted he would ever smoke again.