Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  As he set the table I told him, “I agree with you, Dewey, this place should be safe from that kind of wanton cruelty. And you’re right, that’s what I’m here for, to find out who’s doing it and make him stop.”

  He was bringing milk over from the refrigerator. He put it on the table and said, “I knew you would suspect me. That’s only natural, I’m here in an unusual way. I knew you’d want to know everything about everybody, and it wouldn’t take you long to discover the man you’d met last night wasn’t any of the regular residents. So that’s why I wanted to talk with you now, before you could do anything about it.”

  He went over to the stove and got the coffee and brought it to the table. He poured two cups, put the pot on a trivet, and sat down again. “I want you to know it isn’t me,” he said. He was speaking very softly and earnestly, watching his hands as he added milk and sugar to his coffee. “I want you to find the person right away,” he said, “so I don’t want you to spend all your time thinking about me.” He looked up, met my eyes. “It isn’t me,” he said.

  I believed him, but I didn’t say so. I said, “But you’re a stowaway.”

  “Stowaway?” He smiled, surprised and pleased by the word. “Stowaway,” he said again. “That’s nice.”

  “Naturally,” I said, “that makes you very much of a suspect.”

  “Oh, I know that.” He was earnest again, looking directly at me. “I can’t go anywhere else,” he said. “Please don’t expose me, they’ll make me go away and I don’t have anywhere else to go. And I’m not the one, I swear I’m not. I’ll help you look for him, if you want me to. I know this house, I can keep an eye out now that I know what’s going on. But please, please don’t expose me. It won’t do any good; I’m not the one doing all these things. Please.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes, they were too full of pleading and helplessness. Using the excuse of sipping at my coffee, I looked away from him and said, “You can’t go on like this anyway, you know. Doctor Cameron knows you’re here, I’ve already told him.”

  “If you don’t look for me,” he said, “they’ll forget. If you find the person doing the bad things, and then you go away, everyone will forget. I’ll keep right out of sight, and they won’t even think about me.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “Besides, what do you want to live this way for? Wouldn’t it be better to be in the open?”

  The thought terrified him, and he made no effort to hide the fact. He didn’t say anything, he merely stared at me and shook his head.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Dewey, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You’ll hunt me down?”

  “Why do we have to? Come along with me now to Doctor Cameron’s office. You know Doctor Cameron, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know he’s a fair man, you know he’ll do whatever he can for you.”

  “The only thing to do for me,” he said passionately, “is leave me alone. I’m not hurting anyone, I’m not in anyone’s way. I just want to be left alone. Can’t you believe I’m not the one you want?”

  “I do believe it,” I said. “But I believe it because I’ve talked to you. Talk to Doctor Cameron and he’ll believe you, too. But if he doesn’t have the chance to talk to you, he’s got to be suspicious.”

  “You could convince him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He studied my face, trying to find something in it that would tell him he had a chance with me, but he had no chance and my face must have shown it, because at last he looked away, his face drawn, mournful, seeming ten years older now. “I don’t know,” he said, softly, more to himself than me. “I don’t know where I’ll go now.”

  “Come with me to see Doctor Cameron,” I said, knowing that wasn’t what he’d meant but using the opportunity anyway.

  He shook his head sadly, not looking at me. “I’ll have to think about things,” he said, still mostly to himself. “I’ll have to decide what to do.”

  “I wish I could help you,” I said.

  He lifted his eyes to mine. “I want to be alone now,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t like to be rude, but I want to be alone to think about things.”

  I considered. There was no way I could physically force him to come with me, and I was convinced I wasn’t going to be able to talk him into giving himself up. But it might be best to leave him alone. There was no way out for him, and sooner or later he’d have to see it for himself. Since I was reasonably sure he wasn’t a violent type, I thought it most likely that when he did see the situation was hopeless he’d quietly give himself up.

  The thought touched my mind that he might also kill himself, if things seemed hopeless enough, but that I thought unlikely. He was a resourceful man, and though retiring he wasn’t despairing, or at least he didn’t seem despairing. In any case, I had no real choice.

  So I said, “All right, Dewey. I’ll be in Doctor Cameron’s office for five or ten minutes. Then I’m afraid we’ll have to come looking for you.”

  He nodded, his face mournful.

  I got to my feet. “I am sorry,” I said. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

  “I know.”

  “Thank you for the coffee,” I said.

  He nodded, but he was distracted by the thoughts inside his own head.

  I hesitated an instant longer, and then I left.

  11

  DOCTOR FREDERICKS SAID, “YOU left him there?”

  “What else was I going to do?” I asked him. “Grab him one-handed by the scruff of the neck and carry him here?”

  Doctor Cameron said, “Lorimer didn’t mean anything, Mr. Tobin. There was nothing else you could have done.”

  “The point is,” Doctor Fredericks said, “you’ve got it into your head this man is innocent and you really don’t want the hypothesis tested. If we had this Dewey character here in this room, it just might turn out he wasn’t so one hundred per cent guiltless after all, and you don’t want to take the chance of risking your professional pride.”

  “I am on Dewey’s side,” I admitted. “The life he’s worked out for himself is unorthodox, I grant you that, but it obviously works for him and it doesn’t harm anybody else and I hate to be the one to spoil it all for him. Particularly when I am absolutely convinced he isn’t the injurer. But I know there’s no choice, you can’t leave a stowaway at large once you’ve learned of his existence, you have to track him down and take a look at him and ask him questions, whether you believe he’s done anything wrong or not. If there’d been any way for me to bring Dewey here from the kitchen, believe me I would have done it, if only to save myself the time and effort we’re going to have to put into looking for him.”

  Bob Gale said, “Why don’t we go back to the kitchen right now? Maybe he’s still there.”

  “Not a chance of it,” I said. “Dewey is far from unintelligent. I guarantee you he left that kitchen thirty seconds after I did. At this very moment, I’m sure he’s in whatever he considers his best hiding place, and he’s sitting there praying we don’t find him.”

  “We will, of course,” Doctor Cameron said. “The Midway is a finite structure, so we’re bound to turn him up eventually.”

  “We should start,” Doctor Fredericks said. “The longer we stand around, the better chance he has to find a good hiding place.”

  “He’ll already know where he’s going,” I said, “and I imagine he’s already there. But I agree we should get started, if only to end the suspense for Dewey as quickly as we can.”

  Doctor Cameron said to me, “The one problem, it seems to me, is searching occupied bedrooms.”

  “He won’t be in any,” I said. “If we were to flush him, and he got away from us and was on the run, he might hide briefly in someone’s room, but for now he’ll be in some hiding place familiar to him.”

  “I agree,” Doctor Fredericks said, and I looked at him in surprise. Whenever Fredericks agreed with anybody I was surprised. He said, “From wha
t Tobin has said of Dewey, now he’ll want to be in a place he thinks of as home. His burrow, you might say.”

  I said, “Let’s get going. I want to get this over with, too.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “Of course. The only question left is, who goes with who? Bob and Lorimer are the two most able-bodied among us, so one of us should be with each of them.”

  Fredericks said, “There should be a doctor with each team, so that would put Gale with you, Doctor, and Tobin with me.”

  “Very good,” said Cameron, an opinion I didn’t share, and we all got to our feet.

  12

  THERE WAS A CENTRAL CORRIDOR running the length of the attic, with storage rooms on both sides of it, making it the simplest floor to search. Fredericks and I had come up the rear staircase and Doctor Cameron and Bob had come up the front—there being two staircases even up to this level—and we nodded and waved to one another down the length of the corridor, outlined for one another by the blue-gray light of dawn outside the windows at each end of the building.

  It was well after five o’clock. We had started in the basement, keeping staircases always in sight, keeping each other almost always in sight, searching slowly and with care. We were all smudged and sooty by now, and none of us was in a good humor. Fredericks had become more and more savage in his needling of me, and I had turned mulish and sullen, to the point sometimes of hoping our quarry would evade us.

  As apparently he had. We’d come up floor by floor, room by room, every room except those bedrooms currently occupied by resident, and we’d never found so much as a trace of Dewey’s existence. We hadn’t found any cache of his clothing, though tonight he’d worn a different shirt and sweater than he’d had on last night, and in any case if he was a permanent resident here, however subterranean, he would have to have a permanent corner in which to keep his possessions. But we hadn’t found it.

  Our method of search in the attic was typical of what we’d done on the floors below, but simpler. I stood in the hall, watching the doors and the staircase, while Fredericks entered each room in turn and thoroughly searched it. Down the other way, Doctor Cameron was the one on guard in the hall while Bob Gale did the searching.

  We met at last in the middle. Bob was baffled and on the verge of becoming very angry, with the anger of someone who’s had a practical joke played on him, and Doctor Cameron was looking put upon, almost petulant. With the dirt smudges on his face, and his general weariness, he no longer looked either distinguished or competent, and in fact he was reminding me of somebody, somebody from the past. Who?

  J. Roger Urbermann! That’s who it was, J. Roger Urbermann. About seven years ago that was. A hooker had offered to trade the location of a wanted man for her own freedom, and when we’d accepted the trade the name she’d come up with had been J. Roger Urbermann, of whom we’d never heard. Jock, my partner—how easy those words trip out—Jock was of the opinion she was making the whole thing up, having nothing to lose, but we checked the name anyway, and damned if it wasn’t a real person, an absconding banker from Youngstown, Ohio, a fiftyish bank president who’d been draining off funds for years and who—in circularese—took flight to avoid prosecution once the truth was discovered. He was living in a residence hotel on Broadway and doing clerical work at one of those store-front places that do your income tax for you, and he’d made the mistake of befriending his neighbor at the hotel, who was our hooker. In a postcoital glow of warmth, he’d told her the truth about who he was. We picked him up at work and he tried to run away from us, but Jock tackled him and he rolled a bit in the gutter, and when he arose he was a grubby and defeated portly little man with only an echo remaining of the distinguished and self-confident banker he’d once been.

  And Doctor Fredric Cameron, sooty and exhausted and petulant in the attic of The Midway, was an almost dead ringer for J. Roger Urbermann. All at once he seemed to me frail and unsure of himself and not really competent. A vague man, who had responded to his first real emergency at the halfway house he’d founded by running to New York to find someone else to be the “expert.” Why wasn’t he the expert? Wasn’t the answer to this mess inside the brain of one of his residents? Wasn’t it his job to look for answers inside those brains?

  I knew these were unworthy thoughts even as I was thinking them, that they were the result of my own exhaustion and petulance, my frustration at not having found Dewey, and my aggravation at having spent the last hour alone with Doctor Lorimer Fredericks. But I also knew there was some portion of truth in them, that Doctor Cameron was not the incisive and confident man he appeared to be, that he was both more complex and less strong than that, and that at some level of complexity in his makeup there was a way in which he and Doctor Fredericks needed and complemented one another.

  Doctor Fredericks was the first to speak when we all came together: “We don’t seem to have him.”

  Bob Gale said, defensively, “We looked, doggone it! He didn’t get through us, we were careful.”

  “Everyone was careful,” I said. “I’m sure he didn’t get through anybody. He’s simply found somewhere to hide that we haven’t come across.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “We’ve searched the entire building, I vouch for that.”

  Bob said, “Not the bedrooms. I bet you somebody’s hiding him out. Maybe he’s shacked up with one of the women. What we ought to do is roust everybody out and search their rooms.”

  “Dewey’s a loner,” I said. “He won’t be in anybody’s room, he’s got some hidden place of his own.”

  “You know a lot about Dewey,” Fredericks said savagely. “Everything but where he is.”

  “He’s somewhere inside this building,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Or inside your head,” Fredericks said.

  Doctor Cameron raised a hand, vaguely. “Lorimer, please.”

  Fredericks turned on him. “Has it ever occurred to you, Doctor,” he said, “that this man could be making fools of us? This, this Dewey could be an invention of his own, for whatever his reasons. You know as well as I do he may be the least stable individual under this roof.”

  I said, “Don’t you get tired of covering the same ground? Debby remembers meeting him, too, did you forget that?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Debby remembers meeting him in March, over three months ago. You’re the only one who claims to have seen him in the last two days. You can’t go out of your room without meeting Dewey, but no one else has seen him at all.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “Lorimer, you’re upset because we didn’t find the man, but you can’t seriously believe he doesn’t exist. If he existed in March, surely he exists now.”

  “Then why didn’t we find him?”

  Doctor Cameron shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  I said, “He has a hiding place we haven’t found.”

  Fredericks rounded on me. “Where, goddamn it? You keep saying that, but where is this hiding place? In the fourth dimension? Is he a poltergeist? A familiar spirit? Do you see Dewey everywhere, Tobin, or just at The Midway?”

  Bob Gale said, “Doctor Fredericks, Mr. Tobin wouldn’t lie about Dewey. I just bet you’re going to find him in one of the residents’ rooms.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Your disbelief,” Fredericks told me, “is the strongest argument in the theory’s favor.” He turned to Cameron. “I suppose we’ll have to look.”

  Cameron was worried and vague. “That would mean telling the residents what’s going on,” he said. “Just what I’ve been trying to avoid.”

  Bob said, “Tell them we saw a burglar, we’re not sure whether he’s still in the house or not.”

  Fredericks nodded his approval. “Very good,” he said.

  I said, “Bob and I shouldn’t search with you, it would look odd.”

  “We’ll do better on our own,” Fredericks said.

  I said, “Doctor Cameron, when you’re done with the search I’d like to speak to you in your o
ffice.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Alone.”

  He frowned, and glanced at Fredericks, but then nodded and said, “If you want.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “I’ll be in my room.”

  I felt them watching me as I walked heavily down the corridor to the stairs.

  13

  I HAD FALLEN ASLEEP AGAIN, and once more it was Bob Gale who woke me, shaking my shoulder and calling my name. I had been sleeping without dreams this time, and merely said, “Thank you, Bob,” and sat up.

  He said, “Doctor Cameron says he’s ready for you.” He seemed more subdued than before, and in some obscure way more guarded.

  “Thank you,” I said. “The search of the residents’ rooms is done?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “No.”

  I got up from the bed. I was already dressed, except for my shoes, which I now stepped into. “I didn’t think he would be,” I said.

  Bob watched me in silence for thirty seconds or so, and then blurted, “Doctor Fredericks thinks you’re lying on purpose.”

  I looked at him. “Does he? Has he given me a motive?”

  “To cover your failure, he says. He says you have a need for failure, ever since your partner got killed because you weren’t with him, and you tend to invent complications to confuse people and distract them from your failures.”

  “He told you about my partner, did he?”

  Bob looked embarrassed. He nodded.

  I said, “What’s his explanation for Debby having seen him?”

  “He says you picked somebody who used to be here but left a few months ago, so there’d be people like Debby who’d remember him and seem to back up your story.”

  “He invents some nice complications himself, Doctor Fredericks does,” I said. When Bob didn’t respond to that, I looked at him and saw a deep frown creasing his forehead. I said, “You believe him, Bob?”

  “Nooo,” he said, as though the sentence should be longer than that.

  I said, “But what?”