Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  In this room? What was the likelihood of the injurer coming to look at what he had done? Whatever satisfaction he found in causing pain and injury to his fellow residents, wouldn’t it be increased by actually looking upon the result of his labors? I looked again at the faces around me. Walter Stoddard, Helen Dorsey, Doris Brady, Robert O’Hara, Jerry Kanter, all from my active list. Some sort of unreasonable motive could be worked up for any one of them, which wasn’t much help, and there was nothing in any of their faces to offer me a hint or a suggestion. The only faces showing anything other than variants on sympathy, in fact, were those of Rose Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler, who weren’t even among my suspects, and whose preoccupation with the reaction to this accident was understandable, given the general reaction to their own.

  Helen Dorsey, thwarted in her desire to move Kay Prendergast onto the bed, made up for it by moving the rest of us out of the room instead. “We’ve all seen enough,” she said briskly. “Let’s go on about our business now.” And herded us all out to the hall.

  Groups almost always obey orders given in a loud confident voice, and this time was no exception. We all trailed outside. Most of the others were reluctant, but I was just as glad to be away from the unconscious girl and the skeptical eyes of Doctor Fredericks. While the rest stood around in chatting pairs and trios in the hall, I walked away from them and headed for my own room, moving with the reluctant watchfulness of a man threading his way through a minefield, which in many ways is exactly what I was.

  I didn’t try to do any coherent thinking until I was in the safety of my own room, and then I found myself wondering about Dewey again. I’d been automatically rejecting him from my list of suspects, but that really wasn’t a sensible thing to do. He was at least a stowaway, and who knew what else he might be? And why was I so resisting the thought of him as a possible suspect?

  I lay on my bed, frowning at the ceiling, and concentrated on Dewey, forcing myself to think past my conviction of him as a gentle and harmless little man, forcing myself to find out why I thought about him the way I did. And I finally decided there were two reasons for it. First, Doctor Fredericks had at once jumped to the assumption that Dewey was our man, and I would tend inevitably to take the other side in any dispute involving him. It was true that Fredericks had come off that initial assumption somewhat, claiming an open mind until we could find Dewey and question him, but the first impression was still there, and very strong. And secondly, Dewey was somehow a teammate of mine, a fellow tribe member or some such thing. Not only were the two of us the interlopers here, the ones who didn’t belong and who were keeping the truth from general awareness, but I had also felt in him some kinship with my own mental set, as though there were some connecting link between my desire to build my wall and his desire to stow away inside this building.

  But neither reason was good enough. Someone was setting these traps, and if it was true that some sort of unreasonable motive could be worked up for any of the people on my suspect list, it was just as true that the same thing could be done with Dewey. Even more readily, in fact, since I knew so much less about him. I mean by that, I could give him any motive I wanted for living hidden away in this house, and it wouldn’t be hard to connect it with a motive for hurting the bona fide residents.

  Starting, of course, with the fact that they are bona fide residents, as he is not. Or with the idea that he wanted the building to himself and was jealous of anyone else living here.

  The point was, there were too many questions about Dewey to leave him off the suspect list. I’d done so out of emotional reasons, which was stupid and unprofessional, and it should at least be possible for me to remain professional.

  It was the place, somehow, the aura and atmosphere of The Midway itself. The feeling of sitting on a powder keg, of never knowing when the next accident would be rigged, or what form it would take, or who it would hit. Plus the people themselves, all of them still trailing hints and echoes of their past disturbances. And Doctor Fredericks, who for reasons best known to himself had turned rejection and disapproval into a high art.

  I got up from the bed and went over to the writing table and got out my lists, that I’d made earlier today. I was startled by them at first, having forgotten how different and how odd my writing was left-handed. It looked like the work of a child, or a disturbed adult.

  I had changes to make on the lists. Holding the paper steady with the cast on my right arm, I crossed Kay Prendergast’s name off on the suspect list and wrote it in on the bottom of the injured list. Then I paused, feeling great reluctance still, but finally went back to the suspect list and wrote at the bottom:

  DEWEY

  10

  SOMEONE WAS SITTING ON MY ARM. I was lying stretched out on a park bench, very late at night, and someone was sitting on my arm. It didn’t really hurt, but I couldn’t move the arm and it was annoying. And then a policeman came along and began to shake my shoulder, wanting me to get up and move along. He thought I was a bum, and I felt very embarrassed and ashamed, thinking how once I had been on the force and now this young rookie was looking down on me for sleeping on a park bench.

  I opened my eyes, and Bob Gale whispered, “It’s four o’clock.”

  “I was on the force once myself,” I said apologetically, “but there’s someone sitting on my arm.”

  “Mr. Tobin,” he whispered, and shook my shoulder again, staring into my eyes. “Wake up, it’s four o’clock.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m sorry, I was dreaming.” I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “I’ll be right along,” I said.

  “All right,” he whispered. “Be seeing you.” And he tiptoed out of the room, closing the door carefully behind himself.

  I felt so old. I pushed the covers off with my good hand and put my legs over the side and got heavily to my feet, and every movement was accompanied by the creaking and aching of my joints. Bob had turned on an overhead light and I stood squinting beneath it, wanting not to be called upon.

  But there was no choice. It turns out there never is a choice, only the occasional illusion to keep us interested. Life is ten per cent carrot and ninety per cent stick.

  I dressed, in my clumsy awkward way, and went down the hall to the bathroom to wash my face one-handed, an unsatisfactory experience. The frustration woke me more than the water did, and by the time I shuffled back to the room to fill my pockets and switch loafers for slippers I was awake again and capable of a limited interest in what was going on around me.

  Kay Prendergast had been taken away to the hospital with a skull fracture. I had napped for a while in the afternoon, and had Jerry Kanter and William Merrivale and Bob Gale for dinner companions. The room was full, almost all the residents tending to take dinner at the same time, but it seemed to me unusually quiet for so many people. This final accident, the sixth in less than a month, had apparently been the critical one, pushing a kind of awareness suddenly into everybody’s mind at once. I had noticed many of the residents glancing at my injured arm, thoughtfully. None of them had any definite suspicions yet, but a feeling of trouble was in the air. They were like a herd of deer suddenly smelling something in a stray breeze.

  Jerry Kanter, in fact, had been one of the few people in the room oblivious to the general aura, and I found myself wondering if this blithe insensitivity of his was a form of padding given him in the process of his cure or if it was a natural element of his personality, perhaps the element that had made it possible for him to take that rifle downtown that day. The murder of people you know requires emotion, but the murder of perfect strangers requires a dull insensibility.

  At any rate, Jerry had chattered happily throughout dinner, while the rest of us at the table, feeling the general tension, sat mostly silent. William Merrivale, the father-beater, had sat sullen and rebellious most of the time, head down, throwing occasional mulish glances at Jerry as though he’d like to shut him up by direct means. Bob Gale had been kept silent not only by the atmosphere in
the dining room but also by his all-too-apparent fear of inadvertently exposing our conspiracy, a fear that communicated itself to me and made me even more nervous than I was already. All in all, I was just as pleased when dinner was finished and I could get out of there.

  I had spent the evening in various public rooms, watching ping-pong or reading magazines or whatever, getting into brief conversations with other residents whenever I could do so without seeming to push too hard. I was trying for nothing more than to get to know my suspects a little better, and had ended the evening with no further enlightenment.

  About ten o’clock the two doctors and Bob Gale and I had met in Doctor Cameron’s office. Doctor Cameron told me Kay Prendergast’s chair showed the marks of having been tampered with, and Bob Gale said it had to have been done recently as there was still sawdust on the carpet under where the chair had stood. Doctor Fredericks moved that we call in the local police at once, as no one present seemed capable of doing anything constructive about what was an extremely dangerous situation, but he wasn’t serious about it, merely turning the knife, and when we ignored him he didn’t pursue the question.

  We had discussed Dewey, and the fact that he had to be considered a prime suspect, and that the first order of the day was to get hold of him and question him, either to remove him if he turned out to be the menace in our midst, or remove him from the top of the suspect list if he should turn out to be innocent. I had suggested that the best time to go in search of him would be very early in the morning, before anyone else was up, when I had seen him the last time, and Bob Gale volunteered to get himself up and the rest of us awake by four o’clock. We would then meet in Doctor Cameron’s office and start our search from there, traveling in pairs.

  So now it was four o’clock, and after five hours of uncomfortable and restless sleep I didn’t at all want to go downstairs to Doctor Cameron’s trusting patience or Doctor Fredericks’ needling or Bob Gale’s boyish eagerness. Once again I was thinking of home, and more particularly of my wall, and I regretted the fact that there hadn’t been a train back to New York right away when I’d arrived in Kendrick. I would have no broken arm now, and no complicated relationships with other people, and no troubled mind to concern myself with but my own. The house would be empty for a month, I could have it all to myself, and wouldn’t that right away lighten the burden? However sincere was Kate’s forgiveness, however much she truly cared for me and truly wanted to help me, there was no way she could avoid being a reminder of what I’d done and what had happened to me as a result.

  Maybe I’d been too hasty in my estimation of Walter Stoddard’s wife. But then again, all estimations of human beings are too hasty, no final judgment can ever be made, there’s always more to learn, more colors to alter the portrait.

  What would the portrait of Dewey be, once I found him again? Wondering that, I left the room and went down the hall and at the first turn there was Dewey, standing there with a small patient smile on his face, obviously waiting for me. “Hello, Mr. Tobin,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to show nothing. We had intended to search in pairs exactly to avoid this sort of situation. I was not, one-armed, going to be able to capture Dewey. Nor did I want to frighten him into hiding. “Off to get another midnight snack,” I said.

  “May I walk with you?”

  “Delighted,” I said.

  He fell in beside me and we walked toward the rear stairs. He was subtly different from what I remembered, like a second signature from the same person, almost identical but not quite. He seemed somehow less harmless, more mysterious and unknown, his smile less honest, his body less weak. Of course, on that first meeting I didn’t know he was a stowaway, and this time I did. Knowing there was in fact something very strange about him made him seem more strange. Whether this was the full explanation, or if in fact he was more menacing tonight, I had no way to tell for sure.

  We walked to the stairs in silence and started down them, and he said, “Did you find your ring?”

  I drew a blank. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The ring you lost when you hurt your arm,” he reminded me. “You were looking for it when we met.”

  Then I remembered the quick lie I’d invented last night, and I said, “Oh! No, no I didn’t find it. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  We reached the foot of the stairs and he opened the door, saying, “Well, of course, it didn’t exist. That’s why it’s so hard to find.”

  I stepped through and looked back at him. He came through and shut the door and smiled amiably at me and I said, “What do you mean?”

  “I knew you were fibbing all along, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “When someone wears a ring all the time, there’s always some sort of mark on their finger, but you don’t have any marks at all. And if you did have a ring and you lost it, you would have looked at the bottom of the staircase instead of at the top. I know you’re on your way to Doctor Cameron’s office, but why not walk with me to the kitchen first? I’d like to talk with you, if you don’t mind.”

  I was flabbergasted, and could think of nothing to do but go along with him. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll walk with you.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  We started off, toward the kitchen, and I said, “You’re quite a detective, Dewey.”

  “I think that’s what you are,” he said, and gave me his mild smile again. “I think you’re a detective in disguise.”

  “Not a very good disguise,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” he assured me. “I’m sure no one else guesses at all. I just had a special reason to be wary, that’s all.”

  “So does the person I’m looking for.”

  “That’s what I want to talk with you about,” he said, and held the kitchen door open for me. We went into the kitchen together and he said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’m making a pot anyway.”

  “All right, then, thank you.”

  I sat down at the table, and he began to get out the things he needed. It was exactly like last night, except that now we knew much more about one another. But the echo was strong, as though somehow lost innocence was represented by this repetition of a pleasant interlude under ambivalent circumstances, and I felt oppressed by the duplication.

  As he made the coffee he talked. He said, “At first, I couldn’t think I was right about you, because why would a detective be here at The Midway in disguise? Then I thought it was perhaps because some District Attorney somewhere was afraid that psychiatry meant narcotics and free love, but you just weren’t the right sort of man to be looking for illicit pleasures in a place like this.” He smiled at me, sharing with me the idea of his joke, and went on: “Then I thought it perhaps was me you were after, but of course that was mere paranoia. In the first place, I was certain absolutely no one knew I was here. And in the second place, you didn’t behave last night as though you were looking for someone who isn’t legally here and who prowls mostly at night. You weren’t suspicious of me, and if you were looking for such a person you would have been.” He turned to me again, his smile self-deprecatory. “I’m not a true detective,” he said, “despite my lucky observation about your ring. I can only go by the way people feel to me.”

  “That’s the best way to be a detective,” I said.

  “Is it?” He sounded both pleased and interested. “I thought that might be your way,” he said. “I’m sorry to say I searched your room. I didn’t steal anything and it wasn’t to be malicious, it was just because I was curious about you. And you had no detective things at all. Nothing for fingerprints, no handcuffs, no cameras, nothing at all.”

  “I’m not that kind of detective,” I said.

  “I can see that.” He had the coffee on, and now he came over to sit across the table from me. “It’ll be ready in just a minute. Now. I didn’t believe you were looking for immorality, and I didn’t believe you were looking for me, and you didn’t have any dete
ctive apparatus, and for a while I thought I must be wrong. What were you looking for?”

  I considered telling him, to see his reaction, but decided to wait and let him guide the conversation himself. He was obviously headed toward some particular point, and I was very interested in finding out what it was.

  He said, “I couldn’t think of a thing until yesterday afternoon, when poor Miss Prendergast fell and hit the radiator. I was thinking what a coincidence that was, first you having an accident and breaking your arm and then Miss Prendergast falling and hitting her head against the radiator, and then I remembered there’d been other accidents, and I suddenly realized they weren’t accidents at all! Someone was doing them on purpose!”

  He seemed honestly shocked, even offended, his usually mild eyes staring at me through his wire-framed glasses as though insisting that I too should be affected by this piece of news. I said, “That’s true, Dewey. Somebody is doing them on purpose.”

  “But that’s awful! I don’t know if you, an outsider, can realize just how awful that really is.”

  “I think I realize,” I said.

  He either didn’t hear me or didn’t believe me. “This place is a haven,” he said. “It is safety, security, protection. Not like the outside world. For someone to be cruel in here—no, it can’t happen, we can’t let it happen!”

  He was getting agitated, eyes staring, pale hand closed into a fist and shaking above the table. I said, “I think the coffee’s perking.”

  He looked around at once. “Yes.” He got to his feet and went over to the stove. “A minute or two more,” he said, and went to get our cups.