Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

“Yoncker, the officer said,” I told him. “Captain Yoncker.”

  “If we turn the killer over to Captain Yoncker,” Bob said intently, “he won’t have any excuse to hang around here anymore.”

  “We don’t know who the killer is,” I pointed out. “And Bob, we can’t do any poking around with this house full of Yoncker’s police. He wouldn’t like it.”

  “We could try.”

  “No.”

  “You mean you won’t? I don’t see how you can be like that! Didn’t you see what they did to—”

  “I saw it,” I said. “I have more experience than you, Bob, so let me tell you something. The only sensible thing to do when men like that are around is be very small and very quiet and hope they don’t notice you. And if they do notice you, you get even smaller and quieter. You don’t annoy them, Bob, because they have all the power, all the authority and all the safety they need. There’s nothing you can do to them, and a lot they can do to you, and you’d better start acting as though you understood that.”

  We’d reached the rear stairs, and started up them. Bob looked mutinous and disappointed in me. “I’d thought you were a different kind of guy,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  We went on up the stairs, and he silently pointed that we were to turn right, away from my own room and the area

  I knew best. We had nothing more to say to one another, both correctly understanding that we had reached a point where true communication between us was impossible, until Bob stopped and pointed to a door on the right, saying, “This is Fike’s room.”

  I rapped on the door, and called Fike’s name, and nothing happened. I knocked again, and still nothing happened, so I turned the knob and pushed the door open and went in.

  The room was empty. It was a smaller room than mine, but very similar in furnishings and appearance. Two drawers of the metal bureau stood half-open, and when I went over to look they both contained personal items of Fike’s, but not very many. Both drawers were well under half-full.

  “Maybe he’s in the bathroom,” Bob said.

  “Go take a look,” I told him.

  He left, and I went over to the closet and opened the door. There were a few things hanging in there, a topcoat and a suit and a couple of shirts and two pairs of trousers, but they were to both sides, leaving the center of the rod empty except for some wire and wood hangers. There was nothing on the shelf except a gray hat tucked off to the side.

  I went over to the window, which faced the same side as my room. A green wall of leafy tree branches obscured the view. The window was open. I leaned out and looked down. There was an ornamental line of stone jutting out about four feet below the bottom of the window, a space too narrow to be a ledge. The ground ten-to-twelve feet below that was soft dark loam, shadowed by the trees.

  I heard a sound behind me, and brought my head in again. Turning, I saw Bob in the doorway. He said, “He wasn’t there.”

  “He’s run away,” I said. “Packed a suitcase and went out the window.”

  Bob looked around in surprise. “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “You mean, he’s the one?”

  “I doubt it. Pressure made him run, not guilt. Our injurer has had lots of time to get used to pressure, he’s injured people six other times before Dewey was killed.”

  Bob came over to the window and looked out, but there was nothing to see but leaves and branches. “Where’s he going to go? He’s got no place to go.”

  “I imagine,” I said, “he’ll be picked up in a bar somewhere in Kendrick.”

  He looked at me. “That’s really rotten,” he said. “He came here because he needed things quiet. We all did. This is really rotten, Mr. Tobin, it’s rotten rotten rotten!”

  He was getting too excited, and for the first time I was forcibly reminded of the dossier on him. Vietnam had been rotten too, and he’d come out of it so full of anguish it had taken three years in a VA hospital to undo one year of Vietnam. I didn’t want him breaking down now, mostly because I had the feeling he would tend to break in the direction of thrusting himself toward martyrdom. I had no doubt but that Captain Yoncker and his men were prepared to gobble up any martyrs they were given.

  I said, “Fike will be all right. As all right as he would have been anyway. Come on, let’s see Doris Brady.”

  He was reluctant to leave the room, though there was nothing either of us could do there. I had to go over to the door and stand there, and finally he came along.

  Doris Brady’s room was around one more corner, and once again I knocked and received no answer. Bob looked wonderingly at me and said, “Her, too?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “She’s a different type.” I knocked on her door again, and called her name, and at last pushed open the door.

  Empty. I walked into a room that seemed no more feminine than my own or the one Fike had occupied, except for the shoes under the bed. There were no drawers pulled open in the metal bureau here, and the window, which faced the road side of the house, was shut.

  “Would she use the same bathroom as Fike?” I asked.

  “Sure. It’s just down the hall. It was empty when I looked.”

  I went over to the closet and opened the door. On the shelf was a suitcase. The clothing was sparse hanging from the rod, but it was evenly spaced.

  I was about to shut the door again when I sensed the eyes. I looked down and to my right, and started despite myself.

  She was sitting on the floor, knees tucked-up under chin, arms wrapped around legs, back against the side wall of the closet. And she was staring at me, solemnly and un-blinkingly. I looked back at her, and somehow I had the feeling she wasn’t really seeing me at all, though when I moved my head her eyes tracked, following me. But they weren’t like living eyes at all, they were like the eyes in a painting that are looking at you wherever you stand in the room.

  I said, “Doris.” There was no change in her expression, no response at all. I heard Bob moving in this direction, and waved him away with a hand behind my back. “Doris,” I said again, and her eyes didn’t even flicker. I knew it was hopeless to try to reach her, but I said, “Will you come out now, Doris?” No response.

  I backed away from the closet, leaving its door open, and when I was out of her range of vision I turned and said to Bob, “Go get Doctor Cameron.”

  “What is she—? Is she—?”

  “Go get Doctor Cameron!”

  He left.

  18

  THE FIRST MAN THROUGH the door was Yoncker, and I felt a tightening in my chest, because I knew that no matter how practical I had been with Bob Gale, I would not now be able to stop myself from trying to protect Doris Brady from this man. I stood there braced for the worst, and then Doctor Cameron came into the room behind Yoncker, and I suddenly realized I’d been holding my breath. I exhaled, and Doctor Fredericks came in, and then the two policemen who’d beaten up O’Hara and Merrivale.

  Yoncker said to me, brusquely, “Where is she?”

  I treated the question as though it had come from Doctor Cameron, and looked at him as I made my answer. “She’s in the closet, Doctor. Sitting on the floor, on the right.”

  Yoncker started for the closet, but Doctor Cameron got there first, and I heard Cameron’s voice start, soft and reassuring. Yoncker, standing behind him and trying to see past him, said, “We can get her out of there, Doctor, and then you’ll be able to talk to her.”

  Fredericks said, “That won’t be necessary.” His tone was even colder than usual, and I looked at him in some surprise, to see him considering Captain Yoncker with undisguised repugnance. “Doctor Cameron knows what is best in this situation,” he added, and turned to me to say, “Did you talk with her at all?”

  “I spoke her name two or three times,” I said. “And asked her if she’d like to come out now. I didn’t get any response at all.”

  Yoncker, frustrated with the girl in the closet, shouldered between Frederic
ks and me to say, “What about the other one?”

  “Gone,” I said, and described what I’d found.

  Yoncker was pleased, given a situation he recognized. “Flew the coop, eh? Admission of guilt, do you suppose?”

  Fredericks answered him, saying, “Not at all. Fike has a history of alcoholism; emotional upset tends to drive him back to the bottle. You’ll find him in the nearest bar.”

  “But it could still be guilt,” Yoncker insisted.

  “Nicholas Fike,” Fredericks said with really blatant contempt, “doesn’t have the nerves to set a mousetrap. He’s not the man you want, if it’s the guilty party you’re looking for.”

  “Of course it is,” Yoncker said. He was honestly baffled. “What else would I be here for?” He actually hadn’t understood Fredericks’ half-accusation that he would be willing to railroad the first handy suspect he found, and I wondered if Fredericks would repeat it in even more obvious terms.

  But he didn’t. He merely shrugged, and turned away, going over to Doctor Cameron. The two of them murmured together in the closet doorway, and then Fredericks turned back to Yoncker and said, “It would be best to leave Doctor Cameron alone with the young lady.”

  “I could leave somebody here on guard,” Yoncker offered, “if you think it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s a rotten idea,” Fredericks told him. “There’s only one terrified girl in that closet, not a tiger escaped from the zoo.”

  Yoncker was reluctant to leave, but then his eye lit on me again and he said, “All right, Tobin, you and me can spend the time getting to know one another. Come on along.”

  We all left the room except Doctor Cameron, who remained in the closet doorway, talking softly to the girl sitting in there on the floor. We other five—Yoncker and Fredericks and the two policemen and me—went to the front stairway and down to the first floor, where Fredericks said, “Do you need me right now?”

  “Not for a few minutes,” Yoncker said. It was obvious he disliked Fredericks as much as Fredericks disliked him, but he hadn’t decided yet whether Fredericks was powerless or not. He said, “Where you going to be, in case I need you?”

  “In the dining room.”

  Yoncker wasn’t too happy about that. He didn’t want Fredericks messing around with his suspects, I could see that in Yoncker’s eyes and his stance and the way he moved his head. But there was no legitimate objection he could think of to make, so he gave a graceless shrug of the shoulders and said to me, “Come along, Tobin.”

  He led me to Doctor Cameron’s office, where the two uniformed policemen waited outside. Yoncker and I went inside, and he pointed to the chair in front of Cameron’s desk, saying, “Sit there.” I did so, and he himself settled into the chair behind the desk. He rested his elbows on the blotter, leaned his head forward, and said, “Tell me about all this.”

  I told him the story, and he listened without interruption. In some ways I was sure he was a fool, but in other ways I was just as sure he wasn’t, and I knew he was mentally testing every element of the story as I gave it to him, looking for weaknesses in the fabric, inconsistencies, any indication of falsehood.

  I hated to be lying. My training and history and inclination were all opposed to it. I had been on the force too long to ever be really comfortable pitted against a policeman. So I had to keep reminding myself what sort of man this was, and what the result would be if I were to tell him the complete and open truth.

  When I was done, he sat there and studied me a few seconds, and then said, “I’ll check all that, you know.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You want to tell me what you got bounced for, or would you rather I got it from New York?”

  “I’d rather you got it from New York.”

  He gave a little smile, as though we were fallen angels together, and said, “Bad stuff, huh? Shook you up.”

  “Yes.”

  “You figure this’d help?” He gestured with his head, a movement implying not merely the room we were in but the whole building. “Being locked up with a lot of loonies, that’s supposed to get you back on your feet?”

  “They’re not loonies.”

  “You been listening to that doctor. They’re loonies, all right.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “That arm of yours,” he said. “What happened to it?”

  “I fell down a flight of stairs, the first day I was here.”

  “Fell, or was pushed?”

  “I fell, so far as I know, I was alone.”

  “You know what we’ve got here is murder,” he said. “You know those boards on the fire escape were half sawn through.”

  “I thought it might be something like that,” I said.

  “There’ve been a lot of accidents around here,” he said. “Two of these loonies are up in Memorial Hospital.”

  “I know. One of them was just hurt yesterday.”

  “Hit her head.” He chuckled, and said, “You wouldn’t think that would bother these people, would you? A hit on the head.” He sat back and said, “You used to be a big-city cop, Tobin, how come you’re so stupid?”

  I didn’t know what he meant, and that paralyzed me. I was vulnerable in so many directions at once that I didn’t know which way was a safe response, so all I could do was blink at him and say, “Stupid? Am I? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean,” he said, “what I mean is, there’s been all these accidents. You had one yourself. You’re an ex-cop, you’re from New York City, you’re supposed to be bright, you’re supposed to be a lot brighter than us country cops, Tobin, but it never occurred to you those accidents might not be accidents at all. Is that right, Tobin?”

  “There’ve only been two since I got here,” I said. “Me and the Prendergast girl. If I’d been here for all of them, maybe I would have tipped. Probably I would have. But I wasn’t. Besides, how would you rig mine? I fell down a flight of stairs, an empty flight of stairs with nobody around. No stair gave way, nothing like that happened at all. How am I supposed to think somebody rigged that somehow?”

  He frowned. “There’s something fishy about you, Tobin,” he said. “I’m going to check up on you, don’t you worry.”

  “I know you will,” I said.

  He’d been sitting back in the chair, and now he leaned forward again and put his elbows on the desk top, and frowned at me as though thinking about something else. That went on for a minute or two, his expression slightly pained, as though what he was thinking about was difficult and complicated, and it took me a while to understand what it was all about.

  Then I got it. He’d just finished throwing his weight around with me a little bit, and now he wanted my cooperation on something. He wanted to make the transition from cop-witness to cop-cop, and he couldn’t figure out how to go about doing it.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have taken him off the hook, but I preferred a peaceful life to meaningless minor victories, so when at last I understood what his problem was I said, “I know I don’t have any official standing here, Captain Yoncker, and I don’t want you to think I’m butting my nose into your business, but if there’s anything you want me to do, any way I can be of use to you, I’ll be glad to do whatever I can.”

  He looked relieved, briefly, but then quickly covered that look with one of judicious consideration. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “you probably could help out. You’ve been here how long?”

  “Two days,” I said. “Since Monday.”

  “Then you’ve had a chance to look some of these people over,” he said. “The way I see it, I’m working at a disadvantage here, because I’m no psychiatrist, I don’t know number one about nut cases, and I tell you the truth I don’t trust either one of those so-called doctors. I think the both of them would try to cover up for the guilty party if they could. You know all this psychiatry stuff, it’s the same as we get from the social workers all the time, they don’t give a damn about the law, all they care about is how some bum is disadvantaged, that’s one of the
words they like. Disadvantaged. You get one of these bums, mugs somebody in an alley, you tell me which one of those two is disadvantaged. You know what I’m talking about, Tobin, you’ve got the same thing down in New York, only a hundred times worse.”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” I said. I also knew the problems he was touching on were a thousand times more complicated than either he or any of his social worker opponents would ever understand. I knew they were like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, and each describing the part he had hold of and being absolutely sure everybody else’s description was dead wrong. I knew that, but I didn’t know but that I was merely another blind man with another incomplete description. In any case, I was pretty sure Captain Yoncker preferred a monologue to a discussion, so I simply told him I knew what he was talking about and let it go at that.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “it could be any one of these fruitcakes. Like those two that tried to kill each other in the dining room. That kind of stuff go on all the time around here?”

  “That’s the first I ever heard of,” I said. “I think the murder made everybody nervous.”

  “When they start trying to kill each other like that,” he said, “who knows what they’ll do next?”

  “Actually,” I said, “those two boys didn’t manage to damage one another at all. They were just wrestling. All the injury was inflicted by your men.”

  He bristled a little, our relationship losing some of its cop-cop nature and teetering back toward cop-witness again. “You sound awful damn sure of that,” he said.

  “I am. I was at the next table.”

  “I could have been sitting on top of those two boys,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have been able to swear who did what to who. I’d hate to have to go to court and take my oath on it, I know that much.”

  “I don’t see that incident ever getting to court,” I said. “Do you?”

  He looked at me. He really wasn’t sure of me, and basically he didn’t like what he wasn’t sure of, but until he found out for sure whether I was a comrade or an opponent he was keeping his dislike in check. “No, I don’t,” he said finally. “We took those two down to the station to cool off a while. I think by tomorrow all they’re going to want is out.”