Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  At a quarter after ten Doctor Cameron went away to take charge of the morning group therapy session and I went upstairs to my room to wait till the coast was clear. Bob Gale came up about fifteen minutes later and said, “The morning session’s in there now.”

  I’d been lying on the bed, resting and thinking about my arm, which had started itching madly today under the cast. I sat up and tried to ease the itching by turning my wrist back and forth, but there was hardly any leeway inside the cast and when I forced it I got a sharp pain up my arm to my shoulder for my troubles. I said, “Shouldn’t I be seeing a doctor about this thing?”

  Bob said, “Your arm? I heard him tell Doctor Cameron after he put the cast on that you should go to see him over at the hospital next Monday.”

  “Next Monday,” I repeated. Would I still be here next Monday? Today was Thursday, my fourth day at The Midway, next Monday would be the start of my second week here. Would I really be here that long? And if so, what good would I have done by then? All I’d done so far was root out a harmless little stowaway and hound him to his death. Not an accomplishment I felt particularly proud of.

  Bob said, “We ought to start, Mr. Tobin. They’ll only be in there for an hour.”

  “You’re right,” I said, and got to my feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Who do you want to start with?”

  “Jerry Kanter.”

  Bob led me to Jerry’s room, and stood guard outside while I went on in. There were no locks on any of the doors at The Midway, a lack for which there was some sort of psychological theory I never understood, mostly because I never particularly cared.

  The rooms in The Midway were all different, and yet all the same. The shapes were different, each to each, partly because that had been the original plan of the house and partly as a result of the renovations the place had suffered over the years. But the furnishings were essentially the same, and when we look at a room we tend first to look at the furniture in it and only later, if ever, do we look at the shape and design and impression of the room itself.

  Jerry Kanter’s room, therefore, at first reminded me strongly of my own room, and Doris Brady’s room, and Nicholas Fike’s room; but this time I was interested in the differences, not the similarities. It was smaller than mine, and had only the one window, which overlooked the roof of the nineteenth-century carport outside the main entrance at the side of the house. There was a Playboy centerfold over the bed, which in the surroundings I found bizarre and somehow disturbing. The bed was neatly made, in a way that made me think of Army barracks. The closet, when I opened it, was also neat, every shirt and coat and jacket lined up and facing the same way, leftward, which would most likely make Kanter right-handed.

  There was a small framed picture on the metal bureau, which when I looked at it closely turned out to be a shot of Kapp’s Car Wash, showing three cars on line in front of the entrance. There were no human beings visible in the picture.

  The bottom drawer of the bureau contained several paperback books. The 1969 Buying Guide Issue of Consumer Reports. All About Tipping. Practical Business Mathematics. Goldfinger. Thunderball. Six Weeks to Words of Power. Man Hungry. Passion Doll. The Power of Positive Thinking.

  There was nothing hidden behind or under any bureau drawer. Nothing hidden anywhere in the closet or behind any furniture or anywhere in the bed. I could find no loose floorboards, no wall panels, no break in the ceiling. There was nothing else to remark on in the room.

  I went out and Bob gave me a questioning look and I shook my head. He shrugged and said, “Who next?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Anybody that’s handy, among those in the session downstairs. People like O’Hara and Merrivale, who aren’t in the building at all, we can let go till later.”

  “Ethel Hall’s room is right across the hall here.”

  So I did that one next, and it too reminded me of my own room, but most forcibly reminded me of it as it was when

  I’d first walked into it. Ethel Hall had made practically no impression at all on this place. I had to open the closet door and the bureau drawers to find anything actually owned by her. She had no pictures, no books, virtually no possessions other than clothing, except that in the bottom drawer of the bureau were seven pairs of glasses, neatly packed away under a gray cardigan sweater. She wore glasses, rectangle wire-frame, and these seven pair were all exactly the same style. I looked through them, and they all seemed to be the same prescription, though I couldn’t be absolutely sure about that. They didn’t seem to be all that strong, though, and I was surprised at the force of her fear of being without eyeglasses, that would lead her to have seven spares.

  This room too was empty of hiding places that I could find, and Bob led me next to Debby Lattimore’s room, which was reminiscent of nothing but Debby. She had added curtains of her own to the room’s two windows, had put her own pink and white bedspread on the bed, and her bureau top was crowded with small and large photos in various kinds of frames. About half were of boys her age, some in uniform but most not, and the rest were apparently family members. All were smiling, and some had small statements or signatures written on the lower right corners. The whole room had a faint scent which I recognized immediately as Debby’s even though I’d never consciously noticed before that Debby wore any scent.

  A bureau drawer produced two stacks of letters held by loose red rubber bands. The first was from her mother, and the general tone throughout all the letters, which had apparently been written almost daily since she’d arrived here at The Midway, was a terrible nervousness ineffectively trying to conceal itself behind chatter. The letters frequently mentioned the enclosure of a check, and far too frequently reassured Debby that Dad was anxiously and eagerly waiting for her to come home. “Everything will be fine now.” That sentence rang again and again and again, until it came to mean exactly the opposite of what the words said. I imagined Debby was a smart enough girl to see that for herself.

  The other stack of letters was from a boy who loved her but who was afraid to involve himself with someone who’d been committed to an asylum. He couldn’t bring himself to give her up altogether, and yet he couldn’t take the chance and commit himself all the way. His letters were far less frequent than the letters from “Mother,” as she signed herself, but his were much longer. He didn’t try to hide the ambivalence of his feelings, but tortured himself—and her, I was sure—by endless monologues on the subject, trying to talk himself around to one conclusion or the other. His references to her letters led me to believe that she for her part was involved in the same sort of self-torture, not sure whether to renounce the boy or take the chance of guaranteeing her future self to him. The most recent letters in both stacks were very nearly carbon copies of the oldest, nothing having progressed or changed in either place.

  Ruth Ehrengart’s room was next, and here one entire wall was full of snapshots, thumbtacked to the wall in endless monotonous rows. The ten children, over and over, singly and in every possible combination. Smiling, crying, frowning, playing, fighting. Squinting in sunlight in the summer, gloating under a Christmas tree in the winter. Was Ruth Ehrengart trying to become familiar with her devil in hopes of overcoming it that way? Then why were there so few photos of the man who must be her husband, a large and burly man, always smiling, frequently in his undershirt, most often sitting down. He looked like an honest, amiable workman, about whom the sea of children eddied and flowed unnoticed.

  Debby had had much more than the usual amount of clothing, overflowing both closet and bureau, and now Ruth Ehrengart restored the balance by having much less. And the clothing she did have was mostly drab. New-looking for the most part, but with a cheap washed-out quality they must already have possessed when she’d picked them out in the store. I poked through this meager supply, and found nothing.

  Helen Dorsey’s room matched Helen Dorsey’s character to a T. It was spotless, but it went beyond spotlessness to actual discomfort. The two windows weren’t merely clean,
they had a sort of sparkling film over them that made them glint painfully in my eyes as I walked around the room. The air had a distasteful stink of ammonia to it, and when I touched the metal bureau it made a squeaking sound that rippled my backbone.

  Her bed and closet were military perfection, even more so than Jerry Kanter’s, and in the back of the closet were mop, broom, bucket, basket of cleaning cloths, various cans and bottles of soaps and cleansers, all lined up for inspection. The closet smelled strongly of them all.

  I searched Helen Dorsey’s room as thoroughly as the others, but it too had nothing of actual incrimination to offer. In police parlance, it was clean.

  Ivy Pollett had a radio hidden in a bureau drawer. Not a ham outfit, a sending set, nothing like that. An ordinary AM radio, a small compact model hidden under a folded skirt. I took it out and plugged it in, without changing the setting of the dial, and a local station came on, playing Paul Weston music. It had been quite a while since I’d heard Paul Weston music. I left the radio on while I searched the room, finding nothing but that Ivy Pollett was secretly sloppy—dirty clothes made a mound on the floor just inside the closet door—and when the Paul Weston music ended an announcer came on to remind us that this station offered news every half-hour, twenty-four hours a day. Then Hugo Winterhalter music started, and I unplugged the radio again and put it back where I’d found it. There was nothing else of interest in the room.

  I came back out to the hall again, and once more shook my head, and Bob said, “That’s all of them.”

  “The six downstairs in the group therapy session.”

  “Right.”

  “We have four others,” I said. “Fike. He took off with a suitcase, so I doubt there’s any point checking his room. Doris Brady. Doctor Cameron can do that one himself later on, without anybody wondering why.”

  Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy came walking down the hall, and Bob and I talked about ping-pong until they’d gone by and out of sight around the next corner. There were still half a dozen residents wandering around at the moment, which was why Bob had been standing guard in front of each door as I’d worked.

  When we were alone again, Bob said, “That leaves O’Hara and Merrivale.”

  I looked at my watch, and it was eleven twenty-five. The group therapy session would last another five minutes. “Let’s get to them,” I said.

  It was easy shorthand to think of O’Hara and Merrivale together, partly because they looked so much alike and partly because they almost always were together, but once inside their rooms the differences glared. Merrivale, the father-beater, had a room so laden with working-man-masculine symbols you could almost smell the sweat. Two photos on the bureau showed Merrivale respectively in a black leather jacket while sitting astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, one of the big ones, and the other wearing hunting clothes, rifle in hands, foot on the neck of a dead deer in a forest setting. Copies of Playboy and its imitators formed one stack on the closet floor, and copies of the gamier imitators of True formed another. Half a dozen paperback sex novels, similar to the two I’d found in Jerry Kanter’s bureau, were stacked on the closet shelf, beside a visored cap of the sort worn by military men and bus drivers. The clothing all tended toward the tough, and under the mattress of his unmade bed I found two long one-by-twelve planks, apparently put in there to keep William Merrivale from succumbing to the lewd luxury of a too-soft mattress. Seeing all this, I was amazed he’d contented himself with mouthing off at me after I’d hit Fredericks, instead of immediately lunging at me with ringing cries.

  Robert O’Hara’s room possibly showed an earlier stage of the same road, but possibly not. There was no way to be sure. He had baseball cards in his bureau drawer, comic books on the closet shelf, and he’d built himself a simple bookcase out of pine boards, in which there was nothing but boy’s books. Tom Swift, Junior. Christopher Cool, Teen Agent. Dave Dawson. The Boy Allies.

  But what childhood did he want? The Boy Allies were from the First World War, long before both his time and mine. The Boy Allies at Jutland was one of the titles he had, and did he even know the significance of the place Jutland? I myself vaguely remembered there’d been some sort of Naval battle there in World War One, but that was all.

  Dave Dawson was my childhood, not his. World War Two, Dave Dawson and his English friend, Freddy Farmer. I had those books myself at one time, but they were long gone. Dave Dawson at Libya, he had. Dave Dawson on the Russian Front. I remembered those titles, remembered the pictures on the bedraggled dust jackets. I stood there holding Dave Dawson on the Russian Front and found myself remembering my room when I was a boy. The rug on the floor, the small bookcase in which I kept not only Dave Dawson, but also The Lone Ranger, Tom Swift (outdated already then, but not yet overtaken by Junior) and half a dozen others. Books about Indians, frequently the Iroquois. Books about Robin Hood and various knights, their opponents usually Black, but not in any modern sense. I stood there quite a long time, remembering, thinking back to a time when just about all my mistakes were still in front of me, and I found myself getting angry at Robert O’Hara, as though in some obscure way he was stealing my childhood from me.

  But where was his childhood? Tom Swift, Junior, and Christopher Cool, Teen Agent, were both too recent. That was my suspicion, and a look at the copyright dates inside the books confirmed it. It was every childhood but his own that Robert O’Hara, the incorrigible child-molester, was trying to amass. Why?

  Of all the rooms, this one held me the longest. I felt a confusion about this boy, a melancholy that linked some sort of chain between us. I couldn’t understand why, and I wanted to.

  A knock at the door roused me at last. I went over and opened it, and Bob said urgently, “You better hurry, Mr. Tobin. I hear them coming upstairs.”

  “I’m done,” I said, leaving O’Hara’s room at once because I didn’t want to leave it at all.

  “Wasn’t there anything there either?”

  I shook my head. We’d done all the rooms, my idea had worked itself out, nothing had come of it. I felt very discouraged, and very tired. “I’m going to my room,” I said. “Would you tell Doctor Cameron I didn’t find anything, and I’ll be down to talk to him later.”

  “Sure.” He looked at me, worried about me, and I knew he was trying to think of something encouraging to say, but of course there was nothing. And then people began arriving on the second floor, and there was nothing more to say at all. He turned one way and I the other.

  The group was behind me, individuals dropping off at their own rooms. I reached mine, and went inside, and a small handsaw was lying on the bed.

  A handsaw? I shut the door and went over to it, and a piece of notepaper was lying on it, the same sort of note-paper as the first time. And written on in the same way, all capital letters, ballpoint pen. Saying:

  WALTER STODDARD DIDN’T DO IT. I DID IT. WITH THIS.

  22

  DOCTOR CAMERON READ THE note and then handed it across the desk to Doctor Fredericks, who frowned at it quickly and then said to me, “Where’s the saw?”

  “In my closet,” I said. “I doubt there’s any prints on it, everybody in the world knows about fingerprints by now, but just to be on the safe side I handled it carefully, wrapped it in an undershirt and put it on the shelf in my closet.”

  It was just the three of us in Cameron’s office now, Bob Gale not having been here when I’d walked in, though he’d been by to deliver my discouraging message. Now, of course, things were different.

  Doctor Cameron said, “I don’t understand why the note. Why the saw. Why any of it.”

  “Our injurer is feeling guilty at last,” I said. “He doesn’t want somebody else punished for his crime. He passed the word on to me because he had the idea, from the incident in the dining room probably, that I was some sort of liaison to the local police.”

  “But why give you the saw?”

  “Proof of some sort, I suppose. Maybe he thought there’d be some way to match it to th
e cuts he made. Or it could be demonstrated that Walter Stoddard couldn’t describe the saw that did the cutting.”

  Fredericks said, “I think mainly it was a symbol. Not only symbolic proof that the note really was from the injurer, but also proof that he doesn’t intend to do any more of it. He’s sorry, and he’s quitting.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “Do we take this note and saw to Captain Yoncker?”

  “Of course,” Fredericks said.

  I said, “No.” They both looked at me, about to argue, and I said, “This isn’t any more proof than the first note was. And neither is the saw. Any saw could have been used, not necessarily that one. Captain Yoncker isn’t going to give up a confessed murderer without a struggle. If we bring him that note and the saw, we’re liable to get put behind bars ourselves for manufacturing evidence.”

  Fredericks said, angrily, “Damn it, man, why is nothing ever good enough? Why is nothing ever a reason to take action?”

  “We have a reason to take action,” I said. “But the right action, not the wrong action.”

  “What’s the right action?”

  “You haven’t noticed something,” I said, and when Fredericks looked down at the note he was still holding I said, “Not in the wording of the note. In the timing of its delivery.”