Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  Watching me carefully, he said, “What happened?”

  “He went to pick somebody up. Jock did. It should have been a simple easy pick-up, but it went wrong, and Jock got killed, and they found out I wasn’t with him.”

  “Who found out?”

  “The force.” But I heard at last what I was saying, and looked away from Fredericks’ eyes. “I’m getting a headache,” I said, though I wasn’t. “I’m not sure what I’m saying.” Though I was.

  “Tobin.”

  I looked at him, very reluctantly.

  “Tobin,” he said, leaning very close to me, staring into my eyes, “Tobin, who the hell are you?”

  I met his eyes, trying to find an answer, and there wasn’t any. I listened to the silence, and knew there wasn’t anybody around to fill it but me. I shook my head at last and said, “I think we better go talk to Doctor Cameron.”

  7

  DOCTOR CAMERON DID THE talking, and Doctor Fredericks sat there and listened. When we’d first walked in, I’d told Doctor Cameron just enough to let him know the time had come to break security with Fredericks, and then I’d sat back and let him take over. Fredericks was like a sponge with a knife-edge, if there can be such a thing. He absorbed it all, every nuance and implication.

  When Cameron was done, Fredericks said, in a controlled but shrill voice, “Why wasn’t I told before this?”

  “I thought it best to have the knowledge as narrowly confined as possible,” Cameron told him. It was interesting to see how much Cameron himself disliked Fredericks. “I thought it would be easier for you to go on as usual if you thought things were as usual.”

  “But don’t you see what this does?” Fredericks was enraged, but was keeping a tight lid on his fury. “It absolutely destroys the purity of what I’m trying to do. You should have been in that session today, Doctor, you could just feel that something was out of kilter. I knew it had to be Tobin, I knew there was a false note of some kind in him, but I never for a minute suspected he’d been inserted deliberately. It nullifies everything I’m trying to do if an uninvolved spectator takes part in group therapy. Even having him in the building—”

  Doctor Cameron began to soothe Fredericks’ ruffled feathers, assuring him that one wax apple wouldn’t spoil the bunch, while I sat back and watched in pure amazement. Of all the reasons Fredericks could have found for being angry now—and I could think of several—he had chosen one completely out of left field. He wasn’t upset to think he hadn’t been told what was going on. He wasn’t upset that the danger to the residents was still alive without their being warned of its existence. He was only upset because my presence altered the conditions of some obscure ongoing experiment he thought of himself as carrying out. The Midway was for him nothing but a laboratory, and if the inmates wanted to spend their time hurting one another that was merely interesting; if the man in charge wanted to keep secrets from his assistant that was merely irrelevant; but if someone not in accordance with the standard resident profile was surreptitiously inserted into the mix, it put him into an absolute pet.

  I sat and listened for quite a while, as Fredericks fumed and Cameron cajoled, until Fredericks flung out his arms and cried, “How can I judge their reactions to me when they are subconsciously reacting to him?” Pointing at me.

  I said, “Doctor Fredericks, excuse me.”

  He looked at me, angry and impatient and intense.

  I said, “Do you have the idea in your head that you’re offensive to the residents on purpose?”

  He made an angry brushing-away gesture, saying, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain my techniques to laymen.”

  “That isn’t a technique, Doctor Fredericks,” I said. “You’ve been just as offensive to me since finding out I’m not a resident as you were before. You know damn well Doctor Cameron isn’t a resident, but you’re steadily offensive to him.”

  Doctor Cameron patted air in a peacemaker’s gesture, saying, “That’s all right, Tobin. Doctor Fredericks and I understand one another. We’ll work this out.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and struggled to my feet, not easy one-handed. “I’ll be up in my room, resting. I’m still a little shaky from yesterday. Let me know if I should pack or not.”

  Doctor Cameron’s expression appealed to me for forbearance. “I’m sure everything will work itself out,” he said.

  I nodded, seeing in his face that I was only making it all more difficult for him. I wouldn’t have said anything at all except that Fredericks had managed so unerringly to rub me the wrong way, and I now restrained myself from saying any more.

  Too bad Fredericks couldn’t. As I started for the door he said, “Tobin.”

  I stopped and looked back at him.

  He said, “You don’t think my manner is a technique. How many people have you told on first meeting what you told me?”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t effective,” I said. “I simply said it wasn’t a technique. A technique is something you can put on and take off. A shark’s teeth are effective, but they’re hardly a technique. They’re simply something he has because he’s a shark.”

  Fredericks offered me a flinty smile. “Under other circumstances,” he said, “a long train ride, say, I would probably enjoy talking with you, Tobin. But not here. I don’t expect you to understand that, you aren’t a professional, but Doctor Cameron should certainly—”

  “Watch that,” I snapped. “Doctor Cameron is standing right there, if you want to talk to him face him and talk to him direct.” I looked at Doctor Cameron, standing behind his desk and looking pained. “I’ll be in my room,” I said, and left the office.

  Debby Lattimore was bent over her paperwork in the outer office, as usual. Had she heard anything of the argument? I stood near the closed door for a few seconds, but could hear no conversation through it, so Debby was probably still unaware of the problem or my real identity. Which was good, since she was technically still on the active list of suspects, though I found it incredible to think it might be her.

  She looked up and gave me a distracted smile as I went by; I returned it and went out to the hall.

  Traveling through The Midway was a constantly unnerving experience, only partly because of the maze-like confusions of the place. The main point, though, was the danger of booby traps. Who knew what unsprung traps were lying around waiting for a victim? I tried to move normally, not to seem odd to the people I passed, but I tended to shuffle and stick close to the walls, like a blind man.

  It took a while once again to find my way to my room, and the problems and dangers of the search worked wonders in getting me off my irritation. When I finally walked safely into the room I no longer had any particularly urgent desire to hit Doctor Fredericks in the mouth. I still thought of him as offensive, a naturally offensive man who had found a way within his occupation to turn a personality defect to advantage.

  The strange thing was that I didn’t resent his having gotten me to talk about myself. In that regard, I trusted him. I had no doubt he would never use against me what I’d told him. Unless I was in the position of patient, of course, when he would surely hit me over the head with it from time to time just to see what my reactions were. He struck me, all in all, as being one of those medicines worse than the disease it cures.

  I was physically weary, but mentally alert, which meant I was soon bored inside my room. Aside from having promised to be here when the doctors had finally straightened things out between them, I really didn’t feel up to wandering around at all, seeking out someone to talk to or anything like that. Within the room there was virtually nothing to occupy my mind, no radio or television set, nothing to read.

  Finally, for something to do more than out of any belief I would learn anything, I decided to make a list of the residents, dividing them into those still suspect and those already cleared. I sat at the writing desk with my notebook and pen, and when I was done I had three lists. After the names of those I’d already met I put down
some fact about the person to help remind me which one was which. I could have done so with the others, but I was afraid of reducing them too much to an adjective before actually seeing them.

  The first list was of the five people other than me who’d so far been injured:

  Edith Wooster (terrace)

  Rose Ackerson kidnapper widow (table)

  Molly Schweitzler

  overeater (table)

  Donald Walburn (ladder)

  George Bartholomew

  (closet)

  The second list was also five names long, and was those residents accounted for during the time the stair booby trap had been laid:

  Bob Gale shell shock

  Edgar Jennings

  Phil Roche

  Marilyn Nazarro depression

  Beth Tracy

  And the third list, those residents still suspect, ran to twelve names:

  Jerry Kanter multi-murderer

  Debby Lattimore suicide/catatonic

  Robert O’Hara child-molester

  William Merrivale father-beater

  Kay Prendergast nymphomaniac

  Walter Stoddard killer of retarded daughter

  Ethel Hall lesbian librarian

  Doris Brady culture shock

  Nicholas Fike alcoholic

  Helen Dorsey compulsive housekeeper

  Ruth Ehrengart

  Ivy Pollett

  Of these twenty-two people, I had so far met fourteen, but most of the eight I was yet to see in person were already eliminated for one reason or another. Edith Wooster, for instance, was still in the hospital following the collapsed terrace. Donald Walburn and George Bartholomew, neither of whom I’d yet run across, had both been involved in accidents. I hadn’t seen Edgar Jennings or Phil Roche or Beth Tracy, but they were among those eliminated by placement when the stairs were rigged. That only left Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett among the active suspects still to be seen in the flesh.

  I did already know both women, of course, to some extent, from the dossiers Doctor Cameron had loaned me. I no longer had them, since they would be difficult to explain in my room if someone else stumbled across them, but in my eighteen years on the force I had trained myself to have a good memory for material like that, and I remembered the general outlines of the histories of both Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett.

  Ruth Ehrengart was thirty-seven now. Between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one she’d had ten children, all still living. She had begun to be treated medically for extreme nervousness at twenty-seven—merciless comedy wants to edge in here, but I’m sure one look at Ruth Ehrengart’s face will cure that—but the nervousness increased, aggravated by frequent, almost incessant colds. In her thirtieth year a manic-depressive cycle started, its swings at first too long and gentle to be noticed, but then growing more severe, the happy periods verging on hysteria, with insomnia and boundless energy, the downs getting ever lower, with the nervousness giving way to violent irritability or a deadening depression. Shortly after her thirty-second birthday, she took the family car after Mass one Sunday, drove to a highway, and traveled at excess speeds till a state trooper spotted her. She didn’t stop for his siren, but simply went faster than before, the chase at times exceeding one hundred miles an hour and ending at a roadblock set up ahead of her. Her manner with the police and court officials led to her being held over for psychiatric examination, which ultimately led to her voluntary commitment to an institution. Five years later, the institution considered her stable enough to be returned to society, a judgment she obviously wasn’t sure she agreed with or she wouldn’t be here at The Midway.

  Ivy Pollett’s problems were almost the exact opposite. A spinster now forty-two, Ivy Pollett had lived with her chronically ill mother all her life, until four years ago she went to the police to declare that a grocery delivery boy had raped her. The boy, when picked up, denied the charge but wasn’t believed until several days later when Miss Pollett went back to the police station to report that her mailman was a Communist spy. When questioned further, it turned out that virtually all the people Miss Pollett came in contact with were spies or rapists or escaped convicts or white slavers. She was aware of a plot being hatched among these people to do away with her because she’d found them out, and when she realized the detectives questioning her were also part of the plot she became hysterical. It had taken four years in a state institution, during which time the chronically ill mother had died, before Ivy Pollett became convinced that she was not at the hub of an intricate plot.

  Thinking of these two women and looking at my lists, it occurred to me I’d already met all my male suspects, which meant Dewey from last night had to be on one of the cleared lists. Which was good; he’d seemed harmless enough, and it was pleasant to have him not a suspect.

  Well, which one was he? There were only four men on those two lists I hadn’t yet seen, so it was one of those four he had to be. Donald Walburn, George Bartholomew, Edgar Jennings, Phil Roche. I considered the names and dossiers, trying to guess which one would turn out to be Dewey.

  Well, it wouldn’t be Donald Walburn, who’d broken his leg with the rigged ladder, because Walburn was still going around on crutches. And George Bartholomew, who had been hit in the face by the metal bed frame, still bore the marks of that accident, so it couldn’t have been him either.

  Edgar Jennings. One of the ping-pong players with Bob Gale. Also, before his commitment, a self-exposure on New York City subways. His routine had been to wear a raincoat and a pair of cut-off trouser legs that only reached up to the knee, where they were held by rubber bands. When the raincoat was closed, he seemed to be fully dressed. His habit was to open the raincoat and expose himself to the people in a subway car just before the doors were shut, then jump out onto the platform while the witnesses were all whisked away to the next station.

  But Edgar Jennings was thirty-two years old. Dewey was older than that.

  Which left Phil Roche. But Phil Roche was a man who’d suffered most of his life from an inferiority complex, in part created and very much aggravated by a defect he had as a result of an illness in infancy. A shriveled left arm, with a useless tiny hand dangling from it higher than his waist.

  Dewey hadn’t had a shriveled left arm.

  There had to be something wrong somewhere. I frowned at my lists, I made check marks after all the male names, I counted the lists of names, and it always came out the same. I hadn’t left anyone out, I had every one of the twenty-two names written down there, of the twenty-two there were only four men I hadn’t yet met, and it was absolutely physically impossible for Dewey to be any one of them.

  So who the hell was Dewey?

  8

  THEY WERE STILL AT IT, Cameron and Fredericks, when I walked in without knocking, and they both looked at me in irritation. But I didn’t care. If it had been going on for half an hour since I’d left, and they could both still have those expressions on their faces, there was no point my being polite and waiting till they were done before I spoke to them.

  Cameron said, very testily for him, “Tobin, we’re still in the middle of—”

  “You two can work that out later,” I said. “But I think I’m onto something important.”

  Fredericks said coldly, “Tobin, when you left here you offered to wait in your room until we decided what would be best—”

  “I’m really tired of you, Fredericks,” I said. “You aren’t going to shut me up, but unless you’re very careful I will shut you up. So just sit down and be quiet for a minute.” In Fredericks’ stunned silence, I turned to Cameron and said, “Do you remember I mentioned to you a resident named Dewey that I met last night? This morning, really.”

  Fredericks was looking at me in bewilderment, still trying to think of something applicable to say, so Cameron had an opportunity to answer the question, which he did ungraciously. “I remember the conversation,” he said. “And I remember telling you I had no idea which of the residents he was. I still have no idea. If you want t
o know who he is—”

  “He isn’t anybody,” I said. I understood that Cameron was in a foul mood because of Fredericks, and I didn’t take offense.

  Cameron closed his mouth and frowned at me. Fredericks acted as though he was just about deciding to become superior and bored and walk out on the scene. I said, “You have ten male residents here now, and Dewey isn’t any one of them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No,” Cameron said, and Fredericks, smiling slightly, said, “Tobin, you wouldn’t be in the process of inventing an extra little mystery here, would you, to keep your employment alive?”

  I continued to look at Cameron. “He’s a fool,” I said, “but you’re not. You know how little I wanted this job in the first place. Besides, I already mentioned Dewey earlier today, before any question about my job came up. Whether I pack or not, the fact remains that at five o’clock this morning I met a man in the second floor hall of this building who was neither of you two and who was none of the male residents, but who knew the building intimately, who led me to the kitchen and actually made my breakfast for me, who told me he likes to meet the new arrivals and chat with them, who told me most of the history of The Midway, and who said I should call him Dewey. If he wasn’t either of you and he wasn’t any of the male residents, then who in the name of God was he?”

  Cameron had been standing, leaning forward slightly with his fists pressed down on his desk top, but now he settled slowly backward into his chair while Fredericks stared at the two of us, trying to decide whether I was to be believed or not.

  Cameron said, wonderingly, “I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who he could possibly have been.”

  Fredericks said, “Are you trying to tell us somebody came into this building last night and wandered around the halls, pretending to be a resident?”