Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “What are you doing?”

  “Working on the Jellico case.” He rose and rapped out a cold briar. “There are no clues—at least none that I can use at this stage—nothing that ties in. I got a look at Cheshire’s car in front of his house and the tires don’t match any of the tracks in back of the store. Meaning he probably changed them. Here is somebody worthy of a man’s mettle.’’

  “I don’t know how that follows, seeing he’s already been caught. Or what amounts to caught.”

  “The facts,” Nickie said, ignoring this, “are as follows. The criminal is a left-handed man in his twenties, five feet six inches tall, walks with a sort of pigeon-toed gait.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been tailing him all day.”

  “Is that why your hat is pulled all out of shape? I noticed it in the closet.”

  “Do you remember Pete Cheshire’s being left-handed?”

  “Oh, I see. Your problem is to scrounge up something at the scene of the crime that points to that. No, I don’t remember anything about that, or the pigeon-toed walk either. Maybe he’s put that on the way he took the tires off. Maybe he knows you’re following him.…”

  It was at this point that Lila began to lose her stomach for the tour de force. When, subsequently, he told her he had spent the day going over the premises, she said, “Premises! Why the hell weren’t you on your beat where you belonged?” He laughed through his nose with obscure gratification. “The logical premises,” he said, “not Jellico’s.”

  When the fifth day passed and he still hadn’t cracked the case, she said, “Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe you should have told you saw Cheshire right off. That way you might have made Carmichael feel a little good about you, for what it’s worth. Anyhow, I don’t see where all this futsing around is getting you.”

  “I’m not futsing around,” said Nickie, wheeling about on the piano stool where he had been running off some rambling melodies to relax the tensions of thought and give the subconscious a chance to work. “And I’ll tell you another thing.”

  Deduction, he pointed out on the basis of the dictionary definition which he had taken the trouble to acquaint himself with since embarking on this intellectual étude, deduction was reasoning from generalities to particulars, induction from particulars to generalities. In the light of which facts mystery writers, going on about the “deductive feats” of their protagonists, were misusing the word on a scale unparalleled in the history of poor English: what they meant was induction. “This is probably the only case of pure deduction in the history of crime detection,” he said. “In case you think it hasn’t got any dig—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I never said it didn’t! And please don’t play that underwater thing of Debussy’s again. I’ve heard it so much I’m getting the bends.”

  “And is it so different from the problem police often face, of knowing somebody’s guilty but not having the evidence to prove it?”

  “No! And don’t fill up that stinking pipe again, I can’t stand it.”

  “That’s easily remedied,” Nickie said, and clapping on his hat, went out for a walk.

  Then and in the hours that followed, Nickie gave the case his best, never doubting the eventual triumph of his efforts nor the respectability of his enterprise: for was its challenge any less than that put to the assembled Parisian chefs who were given a dish to eat and then asked to name its ingredients? It was while lying in bed that night that he hit on the ingredient that would point to left-handedness. It could be inferred from the direction in which the particles of glass must have flown when the window was smashed from the outside. Of course! How one overlooks the obvious in the quest for the obscure. Well, he needed something more than that—and he got it the next day.

  Tailing Pete at some odd hour, he saw him walk from the Jolly Fisherman to Jellico’s hardware store, and cash his pay check there. Nickie had Carmichael on the phone inside of twenty minutes.

  “Captain? I thought you might like a little present of the Smoothie. On the basis of the direction the particles of glass flew when smashed—and this is important as the glass is that wire-mesh you really have to hit—he was left-handed. Secondly, your criminal is someone familiar enough with the place not to have had to muss it up to find the cash box. Now, suppose you were contemplating this theft. How would you find out where the proprietor kept his money? You might take him a check to cash, or save up two checks if they were pay checks, so the amount would be too big for him to handle from the till—and watch where he went for the money. I called on old man Jellico today and asked him about people who’ve been in to cash checks. He gave me a few, including a fellow who, oddly enough, had just been in for that very reason. Fellow called Pete Cheshire. Name mean anything to you?”

  So Cheshire was run in, and he gave his alibi, also incidentally lighting a cigarette with his right hand to add to the confusion, and that was that. Nickie was back in the doghouse with Lila, to remain there even after she learned it was I who had queered his diagnosis. I never quite understood why she was as tolerant of me as she proved to be; probably because none of my part in this could make Nickie’s pickle the less exasperating to her as a wife.

  “You know what this whole thing reminds me of?” she said, speaking from behind his deep chair. “It reminds me of a vaudeville act I once saw where the fellow played a violin by tucking the bow under his chin and scraping the fiddle across it. That’s you, you couldn’t do a thing the normal way. You have to do it bass ackwards.”

  His eyes retained their glaze through this and later strictures, and through some of Lila’s story the night I came canvassing for funds, but not much. A third of the way, along about where I began to understand what she’d meant about opening his literal trap instead of trying to close his logical one, he rose and went to the kitchen for some much-needed (by him) beer.

  When she finished I looked at him, installed in his deep chair and already halfway back to Nirvana, putting pipe and beer alternately to lip, and thought you sonofabitch. Knowing all this while I sweat blood, all the while I sat at the Greek’s showing sterling qualities. Then almost immediately I relented. The worse people are, the easier it is to be objective with them. We fuss at what irritates us, but try to understand real breaches of behavior. And wasn’t the very absurdity of his mare’s-nest a measure of his need to get into mufti, of the depth of his problem? I remembered that he had once called me “the intellectual’s Mortimer Snerd.” How could you feel anything but affection for a man able to go so wide of the mark?

  “This is all water under the bridge,” I said as the practical one who must take hold. “What we need first is to get the money lined up. I need another five hundred bucks? Can you help me?”

  Nickie said quietly, “I’ll give you more than that.”

  I thought he meant I could have the money, and after thanking him I spoke a little of Pete Cheshire. I thought it needed saying that Pete deserved a little understanding along with the rest of us.

  “He was an unwanted child,” I told them.

  “He’ll be wanted when I get through with him.”

  Nickie’s path was vague in distant spheres again, and I took his rejoinder to be a professional promise, like MacArthur’s “I shall return.” In short, a boast that he would in time close the ratiocinative trap on our rogue. What he meant was precisely the contrary.

  Lila phoned me at my office the next afternoon and said, “Nickie’s made a clean breast of everything to Carmichael. Including his monkeyshines. He wanted to get Cheshire behind bars where he could never trouble you any more.”

  So it was Nickie who now had taken off corruptible and put on incorruptible, who had doffed the cavalier’s plume for the martyr’s hood. A change not unnoticed in his lady’s heart, judging by the snuffle on the other end of the line.

  “Gosh,” I said, my own eyes misting. “And is Cheshire behind bars?”

  “Well, Carmichael’s promised to pick him up for questioning a
gain, but he’s not very hopeful that the testimony of a cop that he was seen in the vicinity will be enough now, especially in view of all the discrepancies Nickie has dug up meanwhile. The left-handed business and the tiretracks and all. So I don’t know … Cheshire might be sorer than ever, Chick. But there’s one positive result. Nickie’s going to be in plain clothes at last.”

  “That’s all that matters,” I answered from my heart of hearts. “Nickie’s been promoted.”

  “That’s not what I mean. He got the sack. Chick, could we move back in with you for a while? I mean till he gets something else?”

  Thirteen

  There was no Pete Cheshire in the Jolly Fisherman, to which I immediately sped. It was early for the dinner trade to begin, so perhaps he was still off on his afternoon break. Two or three other waiters stood about, though, flicking napkins at their tables and muttering taunts at one another.

  Kitchen doors flapped open and I was borne down on by the owner in a manner consonant with his belief that he should embody the name of the establishment. Except that what he wore was faultless yachting duds, including a white cap which he swept in an arc ending at his stomach at the approach of each guest or party thereof.

  “Cheshire?” he repeated in answer to a query clearly held to have vitiated the flourish in this case. “Follow me.”

  He led the way through an areaway choked with encumbrances, mostly vegetables on their way in and refuse on its way out, clean out of the restaurant. By now he recognized me as the one who had got Pete his job here. He made his revenge on me by breathing stertorously. Forging along behind him through odors of varying felicity, I found myself at last in a small courtyard. He pointed up to a scaffold where some painting was theoretically in progress. “Cheshire!”

  Pete rose smartly into view from a sitting position and began slapping clapboard with a whitened brush.

  “Hello, Pete,” I said, shielding my eyes against the sun. “It’s me.” I thanked my usher, who nodded and, after telling Pete to hurry the job along, sidled his way back through the vegetables and ex-vegetables. “Got you wielding the brush, have they?”

  “Yar.” His glance at the retreating owner said “demoted.” He was not waiter timber—not for the Jolly Fisherman at any rate. “Have you got the dough?” he inquired down.

  I took a few steps up one of the two ladders between which the scaffold stretched, and rested on a rung. There I sketched in the new developments, including everything Nickie had told Carmichael. “So you see I didn’t have anything to do with that part of it. Sherman’s been canned, see for yourself. If that doesn’t prove I’m on the up and up with you, then I just don’t know.”

  Pete assessed me hesitatingly but not hostilely. I went up a few more rungs to repair the disadvantage of being nether to him, till we were at eye level—for Pete had sat down again. I sensed that the target of his anger had shifted from me to L’Hommedieu, which was his absurd employer’s name. I pressed my advantage.

  “Don’t you remember a couple at the alley as you came out? Think.”

  “Yar, I guess.”

  He morosely trimmed a dipped brush against the rim of the paint bucket. His heart wasn’t in much of anything. He had been wounded in spirit by the transfer to chores which argued him not debonair enough for waiting on tables; and if not that, then how debonair enough to be proprietor in the lyric nights? I took in his garb. He had on a T-shirt and a cap which bore the names of rival lacquers, and overalls so caked with dabs of different-colored paint as to resemble a canvas by the Pointillist school. I took a cautious sounding of my improvement.

  “What gives here, Pete? Who put you in this Schiklgruber outfit and made you work in the hot sun?”

  “Goddam daisy. There’s a guy I thoroughly don’t think much of.”

  “I didn’t cotton to him myself. Will he let you go back to waiting on tables when you’re through painting the place?”

  “Probably let me go period.”

  I drank in the side of the building which was being decorated. It was visible down a busy shore road which, having reached here, jogged around the courtyard we were in and along the front of the restaurant, so the name on its white expanse was a valuable advertisement. “The Jolly Fisherman” was painted in red letters over a heroic red lobster, but the paint had begun to flake and it was Pete’s job to restore all this.

  “Let me give you a hand,” I said stepping out onto the scaffold. “I used to do a little sketching myself in my time. Your lobster is blurred around the edges, maybe I can sharpen it up for you. Sort of like Tom Sawyer, eh, Pete?” I said, taking the brush from him.

  He watched me paint for a while. At last I said:

  “Am I going to get the letters back now?”

  Pete wiped his fingers moodily on a wad of waste.

  “The thing I’ll never forget most was the liquor license deal. If it hadn’t been for that I might be squared away on my own by this time.”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” I said, meticulously redefining a claw. “Give me the letters back and I’ll help set you up in a dogwagon. Now wait! We all have to settle for reality. I’ll loan you—now be reasonable—fifteen hundred bucks. At five per cent, because I know you’ll want it that way. You have your pride. Diners are the coming thing, the new Americana, like the ice-cream parlor was twenty-five years ago. Done and done. But on one condition: you go straight.”

  Pete directed my attention to a nearby cinder parking lot.

  “See that heap? It’s a ’41 Chewy, which’s fenders are dented, which’s rings need replacing, which’s upholstery is beyond salvation. Compare it with the cars you see coming up that drive, and my house with those.”

  He swept his arm toward a vista stretching away as far as we could see. It was a prospect of shuttered mansions on opulent widths of lawn, of water breaking on private beaches, of glittering, dream-imbued Long Island Sound. On its bright sands expensive girls toasted their young limbs through the careless summer; on its whitecapped waters speedboats darted and white sails bobbed in a world of wealth at play. It all gave off a special, fabulous hum, like a hive where the honeycombs of leisure forever brimmed. A chauffeured car drew up at the curb below and two couples alighted and entered the restaurant. “That first guy is Carl Bolton, of the mayor’s commission,” Pete said. “He just recommended a 34 percent reduction in crime. The other guy is a famous sportsman. He favors the return of the spitball. They’re the first of the summer-theater diners.” Presently their table talk drifted up to us in murmurs through an open window. I dropped my brush and sat down beside Pete on the scaffold, our legs dangling.

  “I don’t belong to that world any more than you do, Pete,” I said. “I’m a looker-inner from the outside too. And I think you ought to stop this trick-or-treat with me, as though I’m one of your persecutors. Now how about those letters?”

  Pete got to his feet and smartly resumed slapping the boards with the brush.

  “I haven’t got them. I gave them to Lammermoor.”

  “Who?” Then I remembered the grifter whose protégé Pete was, from the dossier gathering dust in my files. “You mean the Agony? Is he out of jail?”

  Pete nodded. “I gave him the property to mind for me.”

  “You mean you’ve gone halves with him the way you always planned—is that it? What do you mean by minding them for you?”

  “Minding them for me while the heat was on me, appraising them and one thing and another. He’s interested in that type of operation is all.”

  “You can get them back of course?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What do you mean you hope so?”

  “He’s a clever fellow, with a certain strain of sardonic mercy.”

  Not pausing to argue with him (any more than I did to explore this habit of studding his speech with fine phrases picked up from God knew where) I said, “Let’s lay this on the line. How do I go about meeting him?”

  “You said you’d like to have lunch with him som
e time. Make it dinner and you’ll impress him more. He likes to operate on the social level—like the Yellow Kid. This is just a tip on how to handle him. I’ll do my best to make him listen to reason. He’ll be back from Chi two weeks from Saturday. I got a letter from him here. Would you like to read it?”

  I improved the interval till I was to meet Lammermoor by shoring up other corners of my crumbling world.

  First I went to Carmichael and pleaded with him to give Nickie another chance. “Hell, you appreciated cunning in Cheshire, why not in him? Just because the fast one is on you. And he did put duty above personal gain. Besides, that same cunning may benefit you in some way later on.”

  Carmichael finally agreed to take him back on probation (!) but Nickie was shunted off to an outlying precinct. It was the punitive switch to the sticks, not to make any bones about it. I drove out one morning to see how Nickie might be taking it.

  I scouted the neighborhood cautiously in my car, and finally made out his figure up ahead, on a street which was a tramline but where there were almost no houses or stores. It was a few blocks from the end of the trolley tracks. I drew to the curb about a block behind, and sat watching him, with the motor running. He ambled along in the old way, swinging his salami, as he called the truncheon. His uniform certainly didn’t fit him any better than it ever had. He had wired Brooks Brothers in New York to ask if they could run something up for him, but no soap. A streetcar rocketed by and wobbled away to its terminal. Silence again. Suddenly he stopped, raised the nightstick over his head and slammed it down on the sidewalk with such force that it bounced over the curb and clattered into the street. The pique of his career? I waited till he had retrieved it, then put the car in gear and shot past, looking the other way so he wouldn’t see me.

  Next to the Greek’s to see how he was doing.

  That one sat equally like a succubus on my conscience, but it was more than I could do to pay the regular visits I knew I owed him. The only time I could face up to him was when I was so low anyhow nothing else would make any dent. This was one of those days. It was also the day when the Lamplighter hit on the specific for the Grecian’s woes.