Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  Five minutes later I was asleep.

  3

  I HAD FIRST MET DOCTOR FREDRIC Cameron five days before my arrival at The Midway, on Wednesday the eighteenth of June. It was a pleasantly sunny day, not too hot, not yet summer-muggy, and I had worked three leisurely hours on the wall in the morning. Kate first mentioned him during lunch, saying, “Mitch, there’s a man coming to see you this afternoon.”

  I looked at her with mistrust. She can’t help wanting to push me back among the living, and I have to be always on my guard against her. I said, “What man?”

  “He wants you to do a job for him. Mitch,” she said quickly, before I could make any comment of my own, “Marty Kengelberg sent him to you. It’s something you could do, and we could use the money.”

  Marty Kengelberg is an old friend of mine from the happy days. Twice in the two years since I’d been kicked off the force I’d reluctantly agreed to take on jobs suitable to an ex-cop—an ex-cop who’d been booted out not for dishonesty but for dereliction of duty—taking them mostly because the family needed the money and I don’t have a job these days, and since the second one Marty has come around two or three times to suggest that I put in an application downtown for a private detective’s license. He doesn’t understand that I have left more than the New York Police Department. Kate does, but wants to bring me back.

  So here they were together, Marty and Kate, urging some new job on me, Marty out of old friendship and the mistaken idea that I really did want to work, Kate in hopes that some job like this would so distract my mind that a magical cure would take place and all painful paralyzing memories would disappear forever from my brain. It won’t happen, of course, partly because that isn’t the way minds work, and partly because I really don’t feel I have the right not to feel guilty about what I did.

  But nevertheless the man was coming. “He’ll be here at two o’clock,” Kate said. “I promised you’d listen to him, but I told him you might say no.”

  “It’s a nice day,” I said. “I was going to work on my wall this afternoon.”

  “He won’t keep you long,” she promised. “And he told me something about the problem, Mitch, and it does sound interesting.” She said that so hopefully, looking at me with such open yearning for some sort of lively response from me, that it was impossible to refuse her.

  So I saw Doctor Fredric Cameron when he arrived at two o’clock, and when it turned out he was a psychiatrist I felt one instant of rage and betrayal, thinking that there was no real job after all, that Kate had just decided to sneak some psychiatric assistance up on my blind side.

  But she hadn’t. She wouldn’t, not Kate. Doctor Cameron did have a real problem, and any problems of mine didn’t interest him.

  He wasn’t my idea of what a psychiatrist should look like, he had more the look of a well-fed businessman. Gray suit, quiet tie, heavy face, thinning and graying hair, the total effect more that of a Kiwanis Club booster than the founder of a place like The Midway.

  “The Midway,” he told me, “is a halfway house for former mental patients. Do you know anything about the halfway house concept?” I didn’t, so he said, “Halfway houses are places for people returning to society but unable or unwilling to make the plunge all at once. There are halfway houses for ex-drug addicts, former convicts, I understand there’s even one in Florida for ex-priests. The concept is that the inhabitants of a halfway house are free to come and go as they please, but are still in a semi-protected environment, and living among other people with similar problems and a shared understanding.” He took a pipe from his side jacket pocket, but didn’t light it. He just sat there with his hand cupped around the bowl. “The idea does work,” he said.

  He went on to tell me further details about The Midway, economic and social and psychiatric. It turned out he was the founder and guiding spirit of the place. He was proud of his brainchild, as he probably had every right to be, and it showed. I could see he’d be willing to go on telling me about the place all afternoon, so I finally broke in to ask, “And what’s happening there to cause the trouble?”

  He frowned, not liking to be reminded of the snake in his Eden. “Someone,” he said heavily, “is injuring our residents.”

  I said, “They’re doing what?”

  “Causing accidents,” he said, and went on to tell me about the four accidents, the discovery of the sawn-through ladder rung and the corroboration of the tampered-with terrace.

  When he was done I asked him if he’d gotten in touch with the local police, and he shook his head, saying, “No, we did not. We would prefer not to have to, which is why I’ve come to you.”

  “The police would be better,” I said. At that time I still thought there might be a way to avoid this job.

  There wasn’t. “The Midway,” Doctor Cameron explained, “is not in New York. We’re in a small town upstate called Kendrick. The local people disapprove of us under the best of circumstances, and the local police are not the best-trained or most modern police officers in the world. Mr. Tobin, the people at The Midway are convalescents, they’re walking wounded. Many of them are still only tentatively on the road to health. To be given the rough treatment, the suspicion and open hostility they would be bound to receive at the hands of the local police if I were to report what’s going on would be detrimental to all of them, and perhaps critically so for some.”

  “As critical as a broken leg?”

  “Much more so,” he said. “Bones knit much more readily than minds.”

  There was no answer to that. I said, “Do they know what’s going on?”

  “The residents? No, only Bob Gale and myself.” Bob Gale was the young resident who’d discovered the ladder rung and brought it to Doctor Cameron’s attention. “The atmosphere of suspicion and fear I would create if I did tell them,” the doctor said, “would once again be much worse than the possibility of a broken bone.”

  I said, “You’re taking an awful chance, Doctor Cameron.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “That’s why I want this situation cleared up just as quickly as possible. Bob Gale brought me the ladder rung the day before yesterday. I’ve been trying to decide how best to handle the problem, and it seems to me what I need is a professional. Someone who can come to The Midway, move in as though he were simply a new resident, and try to find out who is doing all this.”

  “Move in,” I repeated. “You want me to come live there.”

  “For a while, yes,” he said. He didn’t seem to be hiding any secondary motives. He said, “If we’re to keep the situation a secret from the residents, there’s no other way I can think of to handle it.”

  I asked him a few more questions after that, nothing significant, and then told him I would think it over and let him know. He said something about there being some urgency in hearing my answer, and I promised not to think it over too long, and he left.

  Kate wanted me to do it, of course, and we both knew her reasons, but she also knew she had to have some different reason if she were going to persuade me, and she was ready. “Bill and I could go out to Hal’s on the Island,” she said. “You know Bill’s been hoping he could get away to the ocean for a while during summer vacation, and I would like it, too. We don’t mind staying here, we understand that you don’t want to leave the wall, but if you took the job you’d be going up to that place to live for a while and that would give Bill and me a chance for a real summer vacation.”

  Sometimes I wish I had the courage to leave entirely. Kate would be a thousand times better off without me, and God knows so would Bill. What does a fifteen-year-old boy need with a father who just broods in the house all the time? It would lighten both their lives if I were simply to pull up stakes and go away, and there are times when I wish I could do it, but I just can’t. I’m afraid to go, and that’s the truth. If I didn’t have Kate, and Bill, and the house, and my wall, if I didn’t have these threads of my cocoon to enclose me, I doubt I would long allow me to go on living.

>   So Kate had chosen the perfect argument. I would be out of their lives for a month, at least.

  Doctor Cameron was staying at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. I called him that evening and accepted the job, and we met in his hotel room the next day to begin the groundwork for my impersonation. We decided on a background for me that paralleled my own life without revealing me to be an ex-cop, and Doctor Cameron dictated a letter of application which I wrote and sent off to The Midway. Because the clerical staff there was composed entirely of residents—a cook, Doctor Cameron and one other psychiatrist were the only employees—I had to put in an actual letter of application. The return address was Revo Hill, not only because no one now at The Midway had ever been there, but also because an old friend of Doctor Cameron’s was on the staff there and would intercept the reply.

  Doctor Cameron also gave me dossiers on the twenty-one people now living at The Midway, plus verbal descriptions of the cook, a local widow named Mrs. Garson, and the other psychiatrist, a younger man named Lorimer Fredericks.

  On Saturday, Doctor Cameron returned to Kendrick, and on Monday Kate and Bill went happily off to Long Island while I boarded the train with my suitcase and came up to The Midway, where I promptly became the fifth victim of the man—or woman—I was supposed to catch.

  After my induced accident and my nocturnal breakfast with Dewey and subsequent stroll around the first floor, I slept another five hours, waking up just before noon to find that someone had removed my shoes and socks and covered me with a blanket while I slept. And when I got out of bed—being much stronger this time—I found on the bureau a miniature bottle of Ballantine Scotch and a note in printed capital letters, ballpoint pen on ordinary white notepaper, saying:

  I’M SORRY IT WAS YOU

  4

  THE DINING ROOM WAS LARGE AND green, with a row of small-paned French windows overlooking trees and green shrubbery at the front corner of the house opposite the driveway. There were half a dozen small tables widely spaced, each neatly set for four people. When I walked in, at about quarter past twelve, two tables were fully occupied and the others were all empty, leaving me no choice but to sit down alone.

  At one of the other tables Debby Lattimore, the girl from the office, was sitting with Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, the two young men who’d been washing the station wagon yesterday. Another young girl completed the foursome and I knew she had to be Kay Prendergast, the only other very young female among the residents. To look at her, painfully slender, mousy in both appearance and manner, her dull brown hair in a puffy style at least fifteen years out of date, it was hard to equate her with the facts in her dossier. Three illegitimate children before her seventeenth birthday, two extended runaway attempts, a long record of shoplifting; her adolescence had been a violent extended scream culminating in her commitment by a court to a state mental institution three months before she was to have graduated from high school. She was now twenty-two, and the five years in the institution had apparently dampened her entirely from what she had once been.

  Neither Jerry Kanter nor Dewey, the other two residents I’d already met, were in the room, the other occupied table containing four female faces entirely new to me. The temptation to try to guess which face went with which history was nearly overpowering, but I managed to avoid the bad manners of staring. As did they; no one paid any obvious attention to the fact that the dining room now contained someone eating lunch while wearing a pajama top.

  The meal system at The Midway was fairly simple. Breakfast was served between seven and eight-thirty, lunch from twelve to one-thirty, dinner between five-thirty and seven. Mrs. Garson, the cook, prepared one menu, no choices, and a different resident each meal had the job of waiter and kitchen assistant. The waiter for lunch today was a thin fiftyish man with a mournful face and large ears, who reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting. Fat people in Norman Rockwell paintings look as though they’ve always been fat and enjoy it, but thin people have extra rolls of flesh, as though they’ve just recently lost a great deal of weight. They also tend not to look happy about it. This waiter, in a gray business suit and conservative tie under a full-length white apron, with his lined mournful Norman Rockwell face, was a very comical figure until he came close enough to see his eyes. Deep-set and shadowed, they weren’t merely mournful, they were despairing. I met his look, and knew at once that he, like me, was impaled forever on one unchangeable instant in the past.

  He was bringing me a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and as he put it down he said, “Well, you’re the new fellow, ain’t you? Tobin.” His voice was deep and resonant, like that of a radio announcer.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Mitch Tobin.”

  “Walter Stoddard,” he said. He nodded at my right arm, encased in the pajama top, the sleeve hanging empty. “Sorry about your accident.”

  “I suppose I’ll live,” I said. “If I can eat one-handed.”

  “We’re having swordfish today,” he said, “one of Mrs. Garson’s specialties. No cutting required.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, and he managed a brief mournful smile and went away. I watched him go, knowing the details of what was impaling him, wondering on what scale we could compare—to mix the metaphors—his albatross with mine. Walter Stoddard had murdered his seven-year-old retarded daughter and had then tried to take his own life. He had broken down completely afterward and had just completed his third stay in an asylum. His wife, like my Kate, had never turned away from him. She was waiting now for him to complete his voluntary exile at The Midway and come home to her. It was impossible to be sure why his earlier attempts to rebuild his life had failed, just as it was impossible to be sure why he was so reluctant to go home to his wife this time, but it was possible to make guesses. I had the feeling there might be differences among kinds of forgiving wives, and that I was much more fortunate in Kate than Walter Stoddard was in the woman who had elected to stand by him.

  I was nearly done with my soup—it was quite good, but I couldn’t get over the oddity of eating it left-handed—when a young man sat down at the place to my right. “Hello, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “I’m Bob Gale.”

  “How do you do?” He was the one who’d discovered that the ladder had been tampered with. Looking at him, I saw an open-faced young man of about thirty, with nothing in his expression or manner to show that his experiences in Vietnam had driven him to the psychiatric wing of a VA hospital for three years. He seemed now to be simply an open, cheerful, amiable young man, in fact younger than the thirty I knew him to be.

  “The question is,” he said, leaning closer to me and talking softly, “how are you doing?”

  “We probably shouldn’t look furtive,” I suggested, “since we’re supposed to have just met.”

  “Oh.” He sat back, looking confused and guilty, which was no better.

  “Here comes your soup,” I said. “I was hoping to have a talk with you and Doctor Cameron after lunch anyway.”

  “Oh, good.” He sat back to let Walter Stoddard put down his soup. “Chicken noodle? Great.”

  “And swordfish,” Stoddard told him. He looked at me. “Are you ready for yours?”

  “I’ll wait for Mr. Gale,” I said.

  “Bob,” he said. “Call me Bob.”

  Stoddard went away, and I said to Gale, “I have the uncomfortable feeling you’re treating this like some sort of counterspy adventure.”

  He recoiled as though I’d slapped his face, which was approximately the reaction I’d been hoping for. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tobin, I didn’t—”

  “I know you didn’t,” I said, willing to take him off the hook now that he’d learned the lesson. “You just have to be more careful not to act quite so elaborately innocent and conspiratorial. Unless you’re already known as an outgoing and extroverted personality, sitting at this table was itself a mistake. Trying to talk to me about what I’m doing here was a second mistake in such a public place, and being so obviously furtiv
e about it was a third. We’re just having a conversation, you and I, the sort of chat two people might have who have just met. There’s nothing to look secretive about.”

  “You’re right,” he said, but of course he couldn’t avoid looking crestfallen, another out of place expression. Happily, no one seemed to be paying much attention to us. “I am sorry,” he said.

  “And if I’m going to call you Bob,” I said, trying to relax him, “you’ll have to call me Mitch. All right?”

  A happy smile spread over his features. At last, a non-suspect expression. “Sure it’s all right,” he said. “Mitch.” And insisted on shaking hands, which I resigned myself to putting up with, extending my left hand across my body for him to grasp awkwardly and pump with his right.

  Stoddard brought us our swordfish a minute later, and it too was very good. The fork was even more confusing left-handed than the spoon had been, but I managed.

  While we ate, I asked Gale to fill me in on the quartet I didn’t know, the four women at the table across the way. I had to warn him against sneaking sly glances in that direction, but after that he settled down and gave me their names.

  And it turned out I was at last in the presence of two of the injurer’s victims. The woman facing me was Rose Ackerson, and the one on the left was Molly Schweitzler, they being the two women who’d been bruised and burned when a table in this room had collapsed on them during a meal, the first of the faked accidents.

  Though I already knew the histories of both women, and they were hardly among the suspects anyway, I allowed Bob Gale to tell me the blend of fact and fancy he knew about their backgrounds. Rose Ackerson, a woman in her late fifties, had been three years a widow when suddenly she’d kidnapped an infant from a baby carriage outside a drugstore. She had cared for it well, had made no attempt to get any ransom, and when caught she had tried to claim it as her own child. She’d spent the last four years in a state mental institution.