Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  Molly Schweitzler, a plump woman of forty-three who looked like a somewhat overly solemn earth mother, had never been married. She currently weighed less than at any time since the age of fourteen. Her family had had her under psychiatric care since she was nineteen, and so far she’d been inside mental hospitals eleven times, for a total of not quite fifteen years out of the last twenty-three. She had attained weights in excess of four hundred pounds, had often literally eaten herself sick, and her mother had reported more than once seeing Molly still trying to eat while in the middle of vomiting. She weighed about two-hundred-sixty now, had been institutionalized for the last sixteen months, and the prognosis of the doctors was poor. No one seriously expected her abused body to survive more than another ten years—the heart would probably give out first—and it was more than likely at least part of that time would be spent once again inside an institution.

  The other two women at the table had not as yet fallen foul of the injurer. One was Ethel Hall, thirty-seven years old and extremely tall and thin, who had also never been married. She’d been a professional librarian since graduation from college, and was thirty-five when she sexually attacked an eleven-year-old girl, who reported the incident to her parents. It turned out not to be the first child thus approached by Miss Hall, though it was the first time any child had told anyone about it. The girl’s father went to Miss Hall, full of angry threats, and after he left she slit her wrists. It was only because the father decided to go to the police that she was found before she could die.

  Why is it that tragic life stories so often seem to have a thread of comedy, almost of farce, running through them? I don’t know. I only know that faces, eyes, even hands are a more than sufficient antidote to the impulses of antic humor. Watching the small careful birdlike movements of Ethel Hall as she picked at her lunch, it was hard to find anything funny in the idea of the lesbian librarian.

  The last woman at the table was Marilyn Nazarro, a young woman now twenty-seven. She had married while still in high school, though apparently not out of the traditional necessity, since it was nearly two full years before her first child was born. A year later she had twins, and shortly after their birth a vague depression began to settle over her. It deepened quickly, and soon the three children were being cared for in the homes of their grandparents, since Marilyn had become incapable of caring for them. She was sleeping and eating poorly, rarely getting up and never getting dressed, she was weeping frequently, and ultimately she took to soiling the bed. At that point the family doctor decided it was time to call in a psychiatrist, and two weeks later Marilyn was committed to a sanitarium, where she stayed two years, then a year of freedom, then another three years in the sanitarium, ending two months ago. The doctors did not believe they had found and eliminated the cause of the depression, and they expected to see Marilyn Nazarro again.

  Looking at her, a chipper vivacious brunette, looking younger than twenty-seven, brightly made-up, the sparkling conversationalist of that table, it was hard to believe she wasn’t cured forever; but I knew that the majority of mental patients who have been hospitalized once will be hospitalized several more times, and the odds are good that the final commitment will be permanent. Marilyn Nazarro with her recurrent depressions, Molly Schweitzler with her recurrent bouts of eating, both were very much of the usual type of mental patient, who could be compared to a kind of wind-up doll. The sanitarium winds them up and sets them loose in society, where they gradually run down again, and have to be returned to be wound up once more, over and over while the spring gets weaker, until the time comes when they can’t be wound up any more at all, and they never again step outside the walls. That made me think of my own wall, and that I wouldn’t be able to work on it until my arm was healed. That gave me a sudden queasy feeling, as though I were on a bobbing boat which had just lost its anchor.

  5

  DOCTOR CAMERON READ THE note aloud: “‘Sorry it was you.’” He turned the paper over and looked at the blank side, then looked at me. “With a bottle of Scotch?”

  “A small bottle, yes,” I said. “The seal hadn’t been broken, so I doubt it’s been tampered with.” Bob Gale and I, fresh from lunch, were sitting in front of the desk in Doctor Cameron’s office. I would have liked to spend longer in the dining room, till I’d seen everyone, but there was too much else to be done, including reporting this note. I had handed it over upon arrival, as the first order of business.

  “Very strange,” he said. He put the note on his desk, face up, and frowned down at it. “Very very strange.”

  “I take it none of the other victims has received this kind of note,” I said.

  “None at all, this is the first time. I don’t understand it.” He looked at me. “You’re assuming it’s from whoever is doing these things.”

  “I think it most likely,” I said. “Not necessarily so, but likely. The note doesn’t claim to be from the one who rigged the staircase. In fact, it doesn’t even claim the staircase was rigged. You could read it to be simply an expression of good will from someone who was sorry to see me get hurt. Sorry to see anybody get hurt.”

  Doctor Cameron shook his head. “An anonymous expression of sympathy. No, it doesn’t seem likely.”

  “It’s bound to be from the guilty one,” Bob Gale said. He was sitting on the sofa along the right-hand wall. “There’s nobody else it could be.”

  I turned and looked at him. “It’s not a hundred per cent. It’s ninety per cent, it’s enough so we can take a chance on making the assumption. Particularly if there haven’t been any other expressions of sympathy like this after the other accidents.”

  “None,” said Doctor Cameron.

  I said, “I don’t mean necessarily a note. Maybe a gift, like the Scotch, left anonymously in the victim’s room.”

  “Someone would have mentioned it,” the doctor said. “No, there’s been nothing like this before.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then that leads us to the question, why this time? If it is from the injurer, why didn’t he want me in particular to be caught by his booby trap?”

  “Maybe because you just got here,” Bob Gale said. “You weren’t really one of us yet, or something like that.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” I said. “But it’s more likely he or she knows who I am and why I’m here.”

  “I don’t see how,” Doctor Cameron said.

  I said, “Either you or Bob must have mentioned it to somebody else. Somebody you could trust, not necessarily the injurer, but some innocent third party who then went and passed the story on in confidence to somebody else, who told somebody else, and by now maybe half the residents know about it.”

  Gale said, “Mr. Tobin, I swear to you I haven’t said a word to anybody, not a word. I know I acted silly in the dining room just now, but that was because I was excited that you were here, and I promise you that’s the only time I’ve slipped. And I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t. I promised Doctor Cameron I wouldn’t, and he’ll tell you if I give him a promise I stick to it.” He was so serious and open it was impossible not to believe him.

  Doctor Cameron said, “No, Mr. Tobin, that isn’t the answer. I’m sure Bob didn’t say anything to anyone, and I know for certain I didn’t. I haven’t even told Doctor Fredericks, and I certainly don’t suspect my own assistant. But I knew that just what you said was likely to happen. I would tell one person, who would tell one person, and so on. Doctor Fredericks might have one specific individual here he felt needed to be warned against the danger, and he would tell that person, and the chain would be well on its way. That’s why I didn’t even let it get started. And I impressed just that very point on Bob. No, your secret is still a secret.”

  Doctor Cameron’s reasons for keeping his assistant in the dark sounded strained to me, and had from the beginning, but there was no point trying to decide what his real reasons were until I’d met the assistant, Doctor Lorimer Fredericks. So I said nothing about that, but stuck to the issue a
t hand. “Why me?” I asked. “Why apologize for snaring me, and not apologize for snaring anybody else? Look at the note again, it makes the point crystal clear. It doesn’t merely say the sender is sorry, he’s sorry it was me. If it isn’t because he knows the truth about me, why is it?”

  Doctor Cameron spread his hands. “Mr. Tobin, why is he causing these accidents in the first place? His motivations are obviously irrational, so how can I guess for you what his reasons are for regretting having hurt you? Perhaps Bob is right, this person feels you’re too much of a newcomer, and you aren’t part of the family or tribal group, however he thinks of it, and he’s sorry that an outsider got hurt in the course of family trouble.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It may be something like that, I can’t be sure. That doesn’t sound exactly right, though.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “I don’t mean to tell you your business, Mr. Tobin, but I doubt this is a case where you’ll be able to deduce motive first, and then find the perpetrator. I think this time we’ll have to find the perpetrator first, and once we have him we’ll be able to ask his motive.”

  Bob Gale said, “What about fingerprints, Mr. Tobin? Do you think there might be some on the note?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Paper doesn’t take prints well, and in any case they’d most likely be mine. Amateurs have known enough to wear gloves for at least twenty years now. And even if we did find a legible print on there that was neither mine nor Doctor Cameron’s, I doubt it would be a good idea to line up all the residents and take their fingerprints.”

  “For some of them,” Doctor Cameron said, “it would be a very bad experience indeed.”

  “And at the end of it,” I said, “it might turn out the print belonged to a clerk in a stationery store downtown.”

  Bob blinked and grinned. “I’m sorry I asked,” he said.

  I said to him, “There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you. Were you by any lucky chance in the ping-pong room when Debby Lattimore came and got Jerry Kanter to show me to my room?”

  “Sure,” he said. He grinned again, saying, “I would have shown you up myself, only I was in the middle of a game and it would have looked funny to quit.”

  “I’m glad you realized that,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m not always as dumb as I was at lunch.”

  “I’m sure you’re not. Who was your opponent yesterday?”

  “Well, there were three of us playing. You know, the man out this game would play the winner next game. It was me and Edgar Jennings and Phil Roche.” Naming two of the residents I hadn’t as yet seen.

  I said, “Were the three of you still playing up to the time I had my accident?”

  “Oh, sure. We were set for the afternoon.”

  “Good,” I said. “Did either of the other two leave the room at all from the time Jerry Kanter left till I had my accident?”

  He frowned, thinking back. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, and turned to Doctor Cameron to say, “We’ve just started the process of elimination. Neither Jennings nor Roche set the trap I stumbled into.”

  He didn’t understand. He said, “How can you be sure?”

  I told him about the small nail hole I’d found in the baseboard last night, and of my feeling my ankle had caught on something just as I started to fall down the stairs. “Whoever set it,” I said, “had to be nearby to remove the evidence right after the trap was sprung. Also, it wasn’t there when Jerry Kanter and I came up those stairs, so it had to be set at some time while Bob here was playing ping-pong with Jennings and Roche. Bob was already eliminated, so now we can eliminate Jennings and Roche.”

  “And two more,” Bob said. “Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy were in there watching the game, and neither of them left.” Marilyn Nazarro was the young lady who’d looked so vivacious at lunch but whose history was of crippling depression. Beth Tracy I hadn’t yet seen.

  “That’s even better,” I said. “That’s five eliminated, plus the people who’ve been injured, which would be Mrs. Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler with the table that collapsed, Donald Walburn with the ladder, Miss Wooster with the terrace, and George Bartholomew with the bed frame in the closet. For a total of ten, out of twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-two,” Doctor Cameron said. “If you’re counting Miss Wooster. She’s in the hospital now, and there are twenty-one people here without her.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Ten from twenty-two. Leaving twelve residents, plus Mrs. Garson the cook and Doctor Fredericks your assistant.”

  “You aren’t counting those two as suspects, I hope.”

  Until I saw them—particularly until I saw Doctor Fredericks—I wasn’t counting them out, but I didn’t say that. I said, “Probably not. By the way, which of the residents has the nickname Dewey?”

  They both looked blank, and Doctor Cameron said, “None that I know of. Why?”

  “I met him last night. He told me his nickname was Dewey.”

  Doctor Cameron shrugged a little and said, “Every once in a while, a resident will regress a little. Particularly at night. I would guess offhand it’s someone who was nicknamed Dewey at some other period in his life, and that former time was prominent in his mind last night. But I wouldn’t know which one it was.”

  I said, “I like to be able to put the faces and the dossiers together, so if I’m ever with either of you and I say, ‘Dewey,’ please look where I’m looking and tell me what name he goes by in this period of his life.”

  They both assured me they would, and then Doctor Cameron said, “Now that you have your list of suspects down to twelve, what are you going to do next?”

  “Wander around,” I said. “Meet more people. You have group therapy sessions every day, don’t you?”

  “Twice a day,” he said, “morning and afternoon. It’s voluntary, and very lightly attended, but some of the residents are reassured by the idea that it’s there if they ever need it. I take the morning sessions, usually, and Doctor Fredericks takes the afternoons.”

  Bob Gale said to me, “You’re going this afternoon, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. I lifted my right arm, in its cast. “After my experience yesterday,” I said, “it’s only natural I’d want some reassurance.”

  6

  THREE P.M., GROUP THERAPY in a large square room with bookcase-lined walls. A large oval table dominated the room, flanked by armless wooden chairs with padded leather seats and backs. By two minutes before the hour there were seven of us seated at the table, well-spaced, no two people sitting directly side by side. Doctor Fredericks had not yet arrived, and both ends of the oval table were unoccupied, so I didn’t yet know which end was considered the head.

  The six others included some faces I already knew, plus some new ones. The ones I knew were Molly Schweitzler, the fat lady eliminated as a suspect because she’d been one of the first two victims, plus Jerry Kanter, who’d shown me to my room, and either Robert O’Hara or William Merrivale, one of the two young men I’d first seen washing the station wagon. The new faces were two women and a man, all more or less middle-aged.

  There was very little conversation. Jerry Kanter was in low-voiced but animated discussion with O’Hara/Merrivale—I was looking forward to learning which of those two was which—but the rest of us simply sat in silence, glancing at our watches and waiting. It reminded me for some reason of a Roman Catholic church I’d once been in on a Saturday afternoon. The people sitting in the pews next to the confessionals, waiting their turn to tell their sins to the priest, had worn much this same look of vaguely worried introspection.

  Which in turn reminded me of Linda Campbell, because it had been with her that I’d gone into the church. I’d sat in the rear pew, alone, and waited while she went to confession, and I’d wondered what she would have to say to the priest about me. “Father, I am a married woman having an affair with a married man.” Or, worse: “Father, I am having an adulterous affai
r with the policeman who arrested my husband and is responsible for him now being in jail.”

  Not that Dink Campbell had been railroaded by me in the role of some sideshow Solomon, not at all. Daniel “Dink” Campbell was a professional burglar, and he was guilty of the crime I arrested him for and a judge sent him over for. But I, after Dink’s arrest and imprisonment, became guilty of sleeping with his wife.

  I tried not to think of Linda Campbell these days—or Jock Sheehan either—but somehow the atmosphere in this room was conducive to poking at aching teeth, opening old sores, relighting the purgatories of the past. I was deep in the chain of events that had led to my dismissal from the force and my present life of limbo when the door opened once again and Doctor Lorimer Fredericks walked in.

  He could have been no one else. He was a youngish man, about thirty, and he carried himself with a prim confidence and self-assurance that no recent mental patient could possibly bring off. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, dark trousers, brown walking shoes and a green shirt open at the throat. His head was small and fine-boned, with black hair slicked straight back. He sported a thin pencil moustache and a look of such complete self-satisfaction that I detested him on the spot, and began at once to try to find some motive for Doctor Cameron’s assistant to be guilty of causing the accidents. Trying somehow to squeeze the doctor out and take his place? Running some sort of psychiatric experiment of his own? The ideas that popped into my head were nonsensical and I knew it, but that was the effect the man had on me.

  He took a seat at one end of the table, thereby making that the head, and we all watched him carefully take a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket, clean them with a handkerchief held between thumb and first finger, and then use two hands to precisely fit the glasses to his face. He then flashed a brisk professional meaningless smile around at us all and said, “Not a bad turnout today.” He looked at me. “You’re the new man, aren’t you? Tobin.”