Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “But Cheshire—”

  “He’ll be watched, don’t worry. But the dope on last Thursday is now such a hopeless goulash that you realize I can’t move on the strength of what either Sherman or you say.”

  “So you’d call me a …”

  “Oh, come on. I think you’re probably doing the right thing from your point of view—giving the benefit of the doubt to the person who’s closest to you. But Sherman’s two cents in the case was such moonshine from the start that even this couldn’t bring it down to earth.”

  It was no use. He didn’t believe a word I said, now.

  “Earthen vessel, darling?” I bent to kiss my wife in the hallway, glad to be home from work early for a change. “You say someone left an earthen vessel for me?”

  “No, no—an urgent message. From a—” She handed me a slip from the telephone stand. “Mr. Cheshire. He phoned about ten minutes ago and said for you to call right back without fail. It’s important. Isn’t he that fellow you’ve been Brothering?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you fix us a drink and I’ll call him. Double whisky for me.”

  She did and I did. With the message, Pete had left the booth phone number of the Jolly Fisherman, the restaurant where he still worked as a waiter, in the split shift which let him loose at odd hours of the day. He came right to the point and it floored me. It was completely to be expected, yet I hadn’t anticipated a shadow of it.

  “Thought you were pretty smart, weren’t you? Well, it was a neat gismo, but it won’t work.”

  “Gismo? Won’t work? What are you talking about, Pete?”

  “Tipping that wisenheimer brother-in-law of yours off who the Smoothie is, and then letting him make with the Philco Vance.”

  “What? Oh, my God, I see what you mean.”

  “I’ll bet. He seemed familiar, and then finally I tumbled to the connection. Never mind how.”

  “But it’s not true, what you suspect. It wasn’t rigged.”

  “Then how could he get on to me?”

  “He’s that brilliant,” I said bitterly.

  “Cut the hoke. You thought you could kill two birds with one stone—get me in the clink and him a medal. He put on a good act with the deductions, but I’m still in circulation—and the price of the letters has gone up.”

  “Habit is a cable,” I began automatically. My mind skated helplessly like a square of butter on a hot saucer. Not so Pete’s.

  “I thought we were mutual friends, and I’ve tried to be sporting, but if this is the kind of pool you want to shoot, O.K. About five thou’ would just about salve my wounded spirit.”

  “Quit clowning. You know I haven’t got that kind of money around. You said so yourself.”

  “Dig it up. Put the bee on your relatives. You seem a close-knit group. But get it up in five days.”

  “Is this in addition to the alibi thing?”

  “Yar, as far as I know. I might relent. It depends on how soon I’ve got enough for my own establishment.”

  “Damn it, this is a crime.”

  “You got it, Daddyo.”

  “Why, you lunk—”

  I was served a stream of invective that had me alternately holding the phone away from my ear to keep it from splitting, and pressing it harder so Pete’s voice wouldn’t reach the rest of the house. “Pete—Pete,” I kept trying to cut in on him. “Pete, let me—let me just say this. You’re a very complicated person. Your societal drives are in dynamic conflict with your subliminal.”

  “Go bend a noodle.”

  “What you’re doing now is giving in to your id.”

  “Screw the big words.”

  “Right.” I heard footsteps approaching and hastily wound up the conversation with a dummy response on my end, and Pete adding that he craved the cabbage in fives and tens, on his.

  Crystal handed me the large whisky and said, “Trouble?”

  “Not to speak of.”

  After “eating” my dinner, I slipped out to a bar and put Mrs. Thicknesse abreast of developments by phone. “Could you loan me at least part of it?” I asked.

  Her mind went out from under her like a wobbly calf’s legs.

  “Oh, dearest God,” she moaned. “All the cash I can scare up is about a thousand dollars, it eventuates. Things are so tied up. Of course you’re welcome to that, and anything else I can get my hands on, but don’t be helpful. I mean hopeful. Oh, dear. And if we don’t. Will everything be told in Gath?”

  “Where?” I was absolutely going to cauliflower an ear, squeezing receivers against it.

  “Gath.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Ancient Palestine,” Mrs. Thicknesse said, regaining some of her composure in the tutorial role. “You know. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the something of Ashkelon. Streets.”

  “It’s beginning to look to me that whether we can stop it all depends on one thing.” I got a firm grip on my bones. “Where is your husband?”

  “In Arequipa.”

  That might as well have been in ancient Palestine too, for all the good he could do us from it in five days’ time. She went on to explain that all one’s convertible securities were in one’s husband’s name, and he would be in South America indefinitely.

  There was only one thing for me to do. So after fishing in the return cup to see if my dime had come back after hanging up—every little bit would help—I finished a drink I’d had standing on the bar, pinned up my hair and went home to do it.

  My mother was upstairs in her quarters, disposed on the chaise longue with a magazine. I paced her sitting room trying to make preliminary conversation. She said abruptly, “You’re in trouble.” She spoke with a certain eagerness, almost hopefulness, for the chance to play mother again. She was bored lately, too. “What is it?”

  I flattened myself against a far wall and said with shut eyes, “Mother, I’ve gotten mixed up with another woman. Someone is trying to blackmail me.”.

  “Come and sit by me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we had reckoned up that we could raise forty-five hundred cash between us, including the thousand from Mrs. Thicknesse (not mentioned by name), short of going to the trouble of mortgaging something. That left five hundred to go, and I was racking my brain about that when I suddenly remembered something Pete Cheshire had said, about our being a close-knit family.

  “Damn it, why shouldn’t Nickie do his share?” I said, rising from my mother’s lap.

  It was to get him out of the soup that I had risked getting in deeper myself. If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place, because it all dated back to the time I scooted out of the bookstore to placate Mrs. Thicknesse.

  “He’s not mature, Moms,” I said. “And we’ve got to make him mature by making him face up to his responsibilities.”

  “There, there,” she said, reaching out for me again, but I eluded her.

  Taking refuge behind a large fern, I said: “He has a steady job, gotten through me. He must have a little put by, thanks to Lila. If not, there’s his crazy aunt,” I added shrilly.

  My mother extended a handkerchief at me through the foliage. “Here,” she said. “Cry. Let it out.” She had shed a few tears herself in the course of the preceding scene, but what she wanted was some real precipitation, together. It was her belief that since the McKinley Administration the springs of sentiment had been drying up, to the race’s loss. She often talked about the old days, mixing them all up.

  “I can remember when you were a little shaver, why, on hot days you’d point to a thermometer we had nailed up on a tree outside the dining room window and say, ‘What fever is it out?’ So let go—cry. Tears are good for everybody, man, woman or beast. Go ahead. Cry.”

  “Later. I want to try this other idea first,” I said, edging from behind the fernery and toward the door. “There’s not a moment to lose.”

  “First promise me something. Promise me you’ll never, never get mixed up with another woman again.
”

  “I promise.”

  “Because they always blame the parents when the children do wrong. So keep your vessels clean. It always pays.”

  “Oh, I will. One woman is enough for any man,” I said, turning the doorknob behind my back.

  “One more thing. When you were a little tyke you used to talk in those what-do-you-call-thems.”

  “Aphorisms, Mom?”

  “Yes, those. It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said them, that worried me. You’d lie around weak as a cat, as though it was all you could do to barely talk. Once you said something about letting your senses come to you instead of you coming to your senses. Have you come to them now, my son?” She clutched a pad of my hair and kneaded it reminiscently. “All these neurotic women. The world is full of them.”

  “I’ll give them a wide berth from now on,” I said. I was espaliered against the door, standing on tiptoe.

  “Who would have dreamt it then? Never any energy. I was always trying to get a tonic down you.”

  A tonic was what I needed now, laced with plenty of gin; I promised myself as much the minute I could get away.

  “Everything was too much for you, you said, and nothing enough. What was your Belgrade status? What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. Loitering among the European capitals, an international polish … You’re hurting me.”

  I got the door open and was able to take my leave, after a restatement of my pledges and brushing away an imaginary tear to make her happy.

  I had the drink downstairs with Crystal. I sipped it with spurious leisure. Suddenly I remarked, “Oh, that’s right, I promised Mother I’d pick her up a few things from the drugstore.” I sauntered out the front door, but on reaching the porch, shot down the steps, into my car and off to the Shermans’.

  Lila let me in.

  “Is Nickie home?”

  Was he home! She rolled her eyes to heaven as she jerked her head toward the living room, as if to say I could have him. I found him in his favorite deep chair where, wreathed in tobacco smoke, he was the picture of a genius caucusing with himself.

  “I hate to interrupt you when you’re working, especially on the Smoothie case,” I said after clearing my throat. Lila flopped onto a sofa, from where she watched with slow burns and wit’s-end sighs. “But it’s what I’ve come about. Cheshire. There’s been a new development which I think you ought to know about.”

  “I’ll leave the room,” Lila said, but I caught her arm, I could tell from her expression Nickie had told her everything—it’s hard to fake that kind of thing—and I made no bones about my visit. “You probably know what’s cooking so I won’t lie, hedge, or mince matters. The Captain wouldn’t believe a word I said. That’s that, so let’s not waste our time talking about acts of sacrifice, unusual in human relations, which had to be made and were made,” I said, looking from one to the other of them. They said nothing and I went on: “I don’t want to hear about it.” I shook a cigarette from a package on a table, and they watched me light it. “About how honor has come home, the wasted rectitude perhaps the more ennobling because wasted—”

  “Don’t throw your match in there, Chick. That’s a false fireplace,” Lila said.

  “Sorry. Because there I stood, I could do no other. But the upshot of the whole thing is, Cheshire now thinks I put Nickie wise to who the Smoothie is so he could make hay at headquarters. Naturally he’d get that idea if he knew we were related, which obviously he does. Now he’s hopping mad and putting the screws to me for real about those letters. He wants five thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, good God!” Lila turned to Nickie, about to blurt something, but he cut her off.

  “Let’s don’t get panicky,” he said, wetting his lips. “I feel I’m closing in on him. Something I’m thinking through that escaped me. Just one more link in the chain of evidence and I think we can close our trap on him.”

  “If you’d opened your own when you were supposed to we wouldn’t all be in this mess,” Lila snapped. I looked blankly from her to Nickie, whom I caught in a vehement shushing motion, and said, “What the hell is this all about? How did Nickie get on to Cheshire anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you. I can’t keep quiet about this any longer,” Lila shot at Nickie. “He’s my brother and I owe him as much loyalty as I do you, and the way I figure it you’re both probably going to need it.”

  Here she told me the whole story of Nickie’s connection with the case, and if that didn’t beat the dogs a-fightin’!

  Twelve

  Nickie and Lila were on their way to an adult British movie on the evening in question. They were making the second show. The evening was warm but fresh, after a spell of thundershowers, and they walked. Nickie was perhaps drawing on one of the panatelas to which he was intermittently partial.

  As they were about to cross an alley, a car pulled out of it with a speed that caused them to step back on the sidewalk, slowed at the street, turned and made off in a splatter of mud. It happened quickly but not so quickly that they didn’t get a look at the driver, thanks to the light afforded by a nearby street lamp. His face was dimly familiar to Nickie but Lila recognized it with no hesitation as that of an old student at Shively grade school.

  “That was Pete Cheshire,” she said. “Do you remember him? I guess he was after your time. He was sort of no good, always getting into trouble, and the last time I heard of him he was a juvenile delinquent.” The circumstances prompted Nickie to make a mental note of the license number.

  At breakfast the next morning (Lila’s narrative ran) they heard on the local news broadcast to which they regularly listened that Jellico’s, a hardware store abutting on the alley out of which Cheshire had shot, had been broken into from the rear and robbed of a cashbox containing three hundred and some dollars. The thief had left the Smoothie’s trade mark on the scene, the calling card with the familiar sobriquet scribbled in red ink. The Shermans looked at one another with wide eyes across the breakfast table.

  “I guess we know who did that,” Lila said. “Well! Quite a break for you, seeing the getaway. Better get down and tell Carmichael.”

  “Yes, quite a break,” said Nickie, who seemed, however, in no hurry to transmit his information. I am reconstructing the details from my. imagination, but here I clearly see our prince dressing a fresh panatela as he adds thoughtfully: “One a man would be a fool not to take advantage of.”

  She takes him in, inconclusively, over the last of a cup of coffee. Which at length she drains at a gulp. “So why don’t you get a move on? Or don’t you think you’ve got time to go to the station before your beat? Or will phoning Carmichael be O.K.—What’s the matter with you?”

  “Suppose—” Nickie drops the hull of the cigar into an ashtray. “Suppose this were to be cleared up without anyone knowing the getaway was seen?”

  “Cleared up by who?”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, I see.” A second cup of coffee for this; she reaches for the percolator and pours them each one. “Make it look like a what-do-you-call-it. Deduction.” She sets the pot back on the range from her chair. “Well, it’d be something new in crime detection all right. Working backwards from a solution to a clue. Is that what you had in mind?”

  “There’s no reason to think it’ll be any easier than the other way around, and it may be harder,” says he, regarding her evenly over the breakfast rubble. “In case you think this is shooting fish in a barrel.”

  We see Lila immersed in separate, more pragmatic reflections of her own. Holding her coffee to her lips in both hands, characteristically, her elbows cocked on the table, she looks around the kitchen as though already spending the raise his brilliant feat of unravelment will net them. Not to speak of savoring prophetically the elevation in prestige among their set. “I guess you wouldn’t get much credit at that, just being a witness to a crime. And God knows we need the money, in case this is your chance to impress that damn promotion out of them.”
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  “You don’t seem to be listening. The logical problem will be there just the same, and besides, there’s such a thing as a sporting satisfaction,” says he, his voice gaining a degree in volume in the effort to penetrate her utilitarian rind. “If you think this hasn’t any dignity.”

  “I never said that.”

  “All right. This way, it’ll be a play of wits.”

  “Of course.” She sets her cup down and glances at a clock on a shelf over the sink. “Well, you’d better get over to Jellico’s and dig up something that points to him.”

  Nickie had time for only the merest look at the scene of the burglary before getting on to his beat, but his eyes in those few minutes drank voraciously of data, and what they missed he snared with a small camera snatched up on his way out of the house. On his way home from the beat that afternoon, he dropped in at headquarters to see Carmichael. He sauntered in and (this part I later got from Carmichael) hoisted a thickening thigh onto a corner of the Captain’s desk.

  “I think I can promise you something on the Jellico case, Captain,” said that barefaced bastard, revolving in his fingers a virgin cigar no doubt. “I had a look at it this morning.”

  “What’s up? What can you give me? I’d sure like to get these heists out of my hair.”

  “Now, now, everything in its time, Captain. As Kafka has said, impatience is a form of laziness.”

  “Kafka the high-school principal?”

  “No, Kafka the noted novelist.” Nickie slid down off the desk and strolled to the door. “I’ll try to have something for you in a few days. As soon as I’ve been able to correlate my thinking. I have some theories.”

  Carmichael studied him narrowly.

  “I see your game. Taking a crack at the plain-clothes in your spare time, to show what you’ve got on the ball. Well, more power to you. But if you get anything, never mind the tutti-frutti—just lay it on the line.”

  The evening of the following Monday, Nickie’s day off, Lila came home from shopping to find Nickie sunk in an armchair in the living room, staring at a wall through clouds of tobacco smoke, both cigar and pipe.