Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  “No. I used to be on the force in New York City, but I haven’t been for the last three years.”

  Walter Stoddard said, “Now you’re a private detective?”

  “No. In a way, I’m not really a ringer at all. I’m a kind of a mental patient, in fact. I don’t want to go into that part of it.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to go into that part of it,” Stoddard said. “All I asked you is what you’re doing here.”

  I was glad for the opportunity to try out the story on an audience that would be at least as wary, and probably more knowing, than the local police. Bob Gale, sitting now at my right, had been filled in by Doctor Cameron before lunch, and knew that officially he no longer had any part in anything that had taken place. I hoped he could remember that, and wouldn’t try to add imaginative details while I was answering Stoddard.

  But he was good. He maybe overplayed the “isn’t-that-interesting?” expression on his face, but neither Stoddard nor Jerry Kanter was likely to notice. They were devoting their full attention to me.

  I said, “I’m here on a kind of swap basis. Doctor Cameron suspected there was someone unauthorized living here, a kind of stowaway, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t want to call in the police to make a search, because he thought that might have a bad effect on some of the residents. His own searches hadn’t come up with anything at all. He told the problem to a friend of his, a classmate from his college days, and the classmate sent him on to a cousin of his named Marty Kengelberg, a detective on the New York force. Marty knew me, and knew about my personal problems, and knew I’d been wanting some sort of psychiatric counseling, but I couldn’t afford a regular psychiatrist, and I was damned if I was going to commit myself to an institution, so it looked as though I wasn’t going to get helped. Marty brought Doctor Cameron and me together, and we offered to try to help each other out. I’d come here as a regular resident and try to find the stowaway, and he would give me personal sessions to see if he could help me in any way.” I spread my hands. “So that’s what I’m doing here. Looking for psychiatric help, and looking for Dewey.”

  Stoddard had been watching me closely all the while I talked, and I wasn’t at all sure he was going along with it, but it was Jerry Kanter who raised the first question, saying, “How come you poked Doctor Fredericks in the eye?”

  “I poked him in the mouth,” I said. “And the reason I did it was because I was mad at him.”

  “I figured that much,” Kanter said. “The question is, why were you mad at him?”

  “He made Dewey run,” I said. “I knew Dewey would be scared, and I wanted us to come at him carefully. Fredericks was always against that, he just wanted to shout Dewey out of the house.”

  Kanter grinned sidelong and said, “That sounds like Fredericks, all right. He isn’t happy if he isn’t giving somebody a bad time.”

  “I blamed Fredericks for Dewey going into a panic and falling,” I said. “I think now it was unfair to blame him, but at the time I did.”

  Stoddard said, “Have they identified this Dewey?”

  “Yes. Doctor Cameron went out and looked at the body and recognized him right away. His name was DeWitt, Frank DeWitt. He was one of the first residents ever to stay here, when The Midway opened six or seven years ago. Doctor Cameron says he remembers Dewey—DeWitt, I mean—he remembers DeWitt made a lot of fuss about leaving, said he wasn’t ready for the outside world, but he didn’t think much of it. A lot of residents feel that way, that’s why there’s the automatic six-month cutoff period, to keep people from getting too emotionally involved with this place. But Dewey wouldn’t wean.”

  Stoddard said, “You mean he’s been living here for six years? And nobody knew it?”

  “That’s right. There’s little odd corners and false walls here and there in this building, and that’s where he lived. Doctor Cameron tells me this house is over eighty years old, and it’s been redesigned inside at least three times that he knows of. Nobody ever did any secret compartments or hidden passageways on purpose, they just naturally developed. Dewey found them, and fixed them up as living quarters.”

  Bob, who hadn’t been present for my conversation with Cameron, said, “How come he called himself Dewey? So nobody’d know who he really was?”

  “Probably it was partly that. Doctor Cameron looked into the old records, and it turns out DeWitt was brought up in an orphanage in New England, and his nickname there was Dewey. From the similarity of his own name and something to do with either the Admiral or the Governor, I suppose.”

  Bob said, “Or the decimal system, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  Kanter leaned closer and said, “I’ve heard it doesn’t look like an accident, you know.”

  I said, “Where did you hear that?”

  “Around,” he said. “Everybody knows it.”

  Stoddard said, “Do you mean there’s nothing to it, Mr. Tobin?”

  I looked at him, and I knew his belief in my story hinged on what I said right now. If I plumped for the accident theory, he’d never believe any of the rest of what I’d told him. If I said something that sounded like the truth, he might go along with the rest.

  Bob Gale almost spoiled it all by saying, “How could there be anything to it? He went out on the fire escape and fell, that’s all.”

  Jerry Kanter said, “The platform broke, Bob, don’t tell me. I was there.”

  I said, “There’s a good chance it was tampered with. The police will check that out, that isn’t up to me.”

  Stoddard said, wearily, “Then someone here must have done the tampering, is that it?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “And the other accidents? Your arm, and Kay Prendergast hitting her head, and all the others?”

  “If the platform was tampered with,” I said, “then probably some or all of the other accidents were the result of tampering, too.”

  Stoddard said, “The police will want to question everybody, won’t they? They’ll suspect everybody here.”

  “They’ll have to.”

  He looked around, frowning and worried. “That won’t be good for these people,” he said. “That won’t be good for any of them.”

  “It’s out of our hands now,” I said. “When it’s a question of murder, it’s up to the police to do what they have to do.”

  “But the murder,” Stoddard said. “That really was an accident, wasn’t it? Whoever has been doing this, they haven’t been trying to kill anybody, have they? Just hurt them somehow.”

  “I don’t think the injurer particularly cares,” I said. “If my accident was arranged, it was a very dangerous one. People have died before after falling down a full flight of stairs. And Kay Prendergast could easily have been killed by her head hitting that radiator. It’s true, if Dewey hadn’t been in a panic he probably wouldn’t have been killed when that platform gave way, but the point is, a fire escape is something that you would normally use in a panicky situation anyway. And in any case, it isn’t all that easy to find the right line between doing someone serious injury and actually killing him. The injurer has been lucky up till now, that’s all.”

  “We’re twenty-some people here,” Stoddard said. “Only one is a murderer.”

  I said, “If that one were to stand up and confess, it would make things a lot easier for everybody. But that isn’t likely, and failing that, the police will have to treat this like any other murder investigation.”

  Stoddard leaned closer to me. “Do you have any influence with the local police?”

  “None. In fact, I’ll be very lucky if I’m not in serious trouble with them. What I’ve been doing comes very close to operating as a private detective without a license.”

  “Not if you haven’t taken any money for your work,” Bob Gale said. It was said a little too promptly, and with a little too blatant a look of ingenuousness, but neither Stoddard nor Kanter seemed to notice.

  In answer to it, I said, “I hope you’re rig
ht, Bob. We’ll just have to wait and see what the police have to say.”

  Kanter said, “What are they doing, anyway? The last I saw, there was one young cop out back by the body, and that was it.”

  Bob said, “There was a truck came in just before I came in here for lunch. It said something about State Police Mobile Lab on the side.”

  Stoddard said, “State Police? Won’t the Municipal Police be investigating this?”

  I told him, “Smaller communities tend to use the state’s technical equipment, rather than try to buy a lot of expensive stuff themselves that they won’t be using more than once or twice a year.”

  “But the local police,” he said, “will do the actual investigation. Or will we all be questioned by people from the State Police?”

  “Municipal,” I said.

  “It might be better for everybody if the State Police did take over,” he said. “They might be more understanding of the situation here.”

  “The local yokels,” Kanter said, with a touch of defiance in his voice, “can’t stand the whole idea of us.”

  “It’s awful,” Stoddard said. “It’s awful to think of these people being questioned by policemen who don’t understand them and who even hate them. It’s going to drive some of these people right back inside.”

  “Not me,” Kanter said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to let things get to me. That’s something you still need to work on, Walter.”

  Stoddard closed his eyes, and slowly shook his head.

  Bob, trying to rush us all past an awkward moment, said, “Maybe the person who did it will confess. He didn’t really want to kill anybody, he just wanted to hurt people. Maybe this will shake him up, and he’ll confess.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Kanter said, and something crashed to our right.

  It was O’Hara and Merrivale. The tension had cracked between them and one or both had made the final move, and all at once they were half on their feet, half falling over the table, wrestling one another in grim silent fury, both red-faced and murderous, but too evenly matched for either to do much damage right away.

  They’d knocked a chair over in lunging at one another, attracting everybody’s eye, and now two or three of the women in the room screamed, giving in to their own method of relieving tension; when O’Hara and Merrivale toppled over and crashed onto the table, which gave way and tumbled them to the floor, the screams redoubled.

  O’Hara and Merrivale rolled and struggled on the floor. Bob Gale and Jerry Kanter both made movements in their direction, as though to try to stop them, but I grabbed their arms to hold them back. “Leave them alone,” I said, and had to shout it over the screams, which just kept getting louder.

  Then the dining room door was flung open, crashing into the wall, and three men came running into the room. The two in the lead were both in police uniform, and were both from the same mold as O’Hara and Merrivale, young beefy blond all-American types with permanently sullen expressions. Behind them came an older man, about forty-five, medium height, stocky, somewhat jowly about the face but not really fat. He was wearing a wrinkled brown suit, a thin white shirt and a narrow tan tie, and he was frowning with outrage.

  It was the man in the brown suit who spoke, his voice cutting across the screaming and the scuffling and everything else: “Stop those two!”

  The two in uniform stopped them. They ran to the two boys rolling and struggling on the floor and bent over them to whale away with nightsticks, all done quickly but methodically, the arms and the dark wooden sticks rising and falling almost in unison, the two policemen’s faces showing nothing but absorption in the physical fact of what they were doing.

  “Good God!” Stoddard cried, and before I could stop him he was on his feet and running over to try to clutch at the nightsticks and keep them from falling anymore.

  He was shoved away with more distraction than irritation, and fell backwards into the table where Rose Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler were huddled together. All the screaming had stopped now, and everyone merely watched in stupefaction. Rose and Molly made frightened squeaks when Stoddard fell against their table, the sounds surprisingly loud in the new silence.

  Stoddard fell heavily to the floor, and started at once to get up again, but the beating abruptly stopped and the two policemen rose from their bent-over positions, each now clutching one of the two young men by the forearm, dragging them to their feet.

  They looked dreadful. Both were cut in various places on their heads, with thin straggly lines of blood running down over their foreheads and past their ears. O’Hara’s mouth looked mashed and bloody, and so did Merrivale’s nose. Both were dazed and only half-conscious, and neither put up any struggle as they were led shambling from the room.

  We watched them go. Stoddard got himself clumsily to his feet and stood leaning against Rose and Molly’s table, watching, his expression combining unbelief with the grimmest kind of fatalism.

  When the two policemen had left the room, taking O’Hara and Merrivale with them, the man in the brown suit looked around at us, glaring at us as though to say he knew we were all in a plot together but that he would ferret it out, and then he called, “Which one is Tobin?”

  I got to my feet, feeling suddenly very nervous, very frightened. My stomach was getting small cramps, and a hard ball of nervousness had formed just up under the front of my rib cage. I said, “I’m”—but it came out falsetto, a stupidly comical note. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m Tobin.”

  He looked at me. “They all here, Tobin?”

  “All but two,” I said.

  “Go get them,” he told me. “I want everybody to stay right here until they’re called. Go get them and tell them that, Tobin, and when you’ve got them here come down to Cameron’s office. I want to talk to you first.”

  “I don’t know which rooms they have,” I said.

  “Then take somebody with you who does.”

  Bob Gale popped up at once, saying, “I’ll come with you.”

  I glanced at him, wishing he’d had sense enough not to draw attention to himself, but there was nothing to do but nod and say, “All right.”

  “Make it fast,” the man in brown said, and left the dining room, slamming the door behind him.

  17

  WALTER STODDARD CAME SHAKILY over to the table and leaned with both hands on the back of his chair. “So that’s what they’re going to be like,” he said.

  “We shouldn’t judge too quickly,” I said, but I could hear the lack of enthusiasm in my voice. What we had just seen was as shoddy a piece of police procedure as I’d ever heard of. There was no mark on either O’Hara or Merrivale that they’d given to one another. The police work in that instance had not only served to create injuries where there had been none, but in one stroke it had prejudiced every potential witness in the larger matter, the investigation of a murder.

  And somehow I could feel the prejudice extending to me. I had not chosen to be the man in the brown suit’s emissary to get Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike, but I was his emissary, and everyone knew by now that I was in some obscure way a near-policeman myself, and all at once I was a representative of the enemy camp.

  But I was in neither camp, really. The man in the brown suit would no more accept me as a policeman than these people would accept me as a resident. I was a wax apple in both bowls.

  Bob Gale said, “We ought to get going, Mitch.” He still didn’t have sense enough to put a clearly defined distance between us, which could eventually cost him dearly.

  I nodded to him, and said to Stoddard, “We can only hope for the best.” He gave me a bleak look without answering, and I reluctantly turned away from the table.

  Bob and I walked to the door, and I could feel the eyes on us. You could almost smell the fear in the room now. There would be more than one case of hysterics in here before the day was over.

  A uniformed policeman was on guard just outside the door. He was neither of the two who’d
been in the dining room, but was a big rangy boy with red hair showing beneath his uniform cap. His face was rural, open, amiable, perhaps gullible. He was the one who had stood guard over Dewey’s body until his superiors and the State Mobile Lab showed up. He looked at us and his eyes were odd, white-rimmed, and it took me a second to realize that he too was frightened and was showing his fear with his eyes, the way horses do.

  Of course. This was The Midway, and we were the residents, and to the local people the residents of The Midway were all lunatics. A whole house full of crazy people, that’s what it seemed like to them. And here was this boy, no more than twenty-five, standing guard over a door, an unlocked door, with twenty crazy people just on the other side.

  I said to him, softly, to reassure him, “I’m Tobin. I’ve been sent to get the other two residents.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and relaxed a little bit, but not much. “Captain Yoncker told me,” he said. He was not looking at Bob Gale at all, preferring to concentrate his attention on someone—me—who was supposed to be reasonably sane.

  Bob and I walked on past him, and after that I let Bob lead the way. We headed in a direction that I knew was toward the rear staircase, and after we rounded the first turn Bob said, in an excited whisper, “What are we going to do, Mitch?”

  “We’re going to get Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike,” I told him.

  “I don’t mean that. We’ve got to do something about these cops! They aren’t going to find the killer, you know that. All they’re going to do is give everybody a bad time.”

  “It isn’t up to us to try to stop them,” I said, “and I imagine we’d both get ourselves in a lot of trouble if we tried. I’ll speak to Doctor Cameron about what happened to O’Hara and Merrivale, but after that it’s up to him. It really is, Bob. You and I could only make things worse.”

  “What if we found the killer ourselves?” he asked me. He was excited and intent, and he thought he was making perfect sense. “Turn the killer over to that Captain Whatsisname—”