Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I did nothing at all,” I said. I reached for the doorknob to let him out, but then stopped and said, “I wonder if you’ve thought about what you’ll do afterwards.”

  He frowned at me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Let’s say you find him,” I said. “Let’s say you narrow it down to one person, astrologically. You can’t take astrological charts to court, or to a police station. What if you become convinced it was one particular person, but you don’t have any proof to back up the stars?”

  “Then I’ll have to look for proof,” he said, as though it were as simple as that.

  I said, “The reason I’m asking, I wouldn’t want to have helped you if you were planning to take the law into your own hands.”

  “Revenge?” His smile was both astonished and bitter. “Me? Go out and beat somebody up, kill somebody? Oh, Mr. Tobin, you don’t have to worry about me, I won’t do anything effective at all.”

  That self-hatred of his could turn violent; I considered telling him so, warning him to be on guard before he did do something “effective,” but I knew he would neither understand nor believe me, so I said nothing about it, only, “In that case, I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you again,” he said, and I opened the door, and he left.

  The front door has a window in it. Looking through it, I watched Cornell go cautiously down the snowy stoop and out through the deep snow toward his car, a blue Corvette. His car, or Jamie Dearborn’s?

  He reminded me of somebody, going away through the snow, stepping high and cautious, wearing his boots and his long coat and his fur collar and that fur hat, a long slender dark figure surrounded by snow.

  And then I realized who it was: Greta Garbo, in Anna Karenina. I smiled to myself, wondering if Cornell would be pleased at the image. I thought he probably would.

  He got into the car, and a moment later it drove slowly away. I turned from the door and went back to the kitchen, where I changed again to the muddy sneakers and went back downstairs to the basement.

  Two days later, Friday, a package came for me in the mail. Kate was home, then, and watched me curiously as I opened it and took out a tan cashmere scarf. “That’s beautiful,” she said, and reached out to touch it.

  It was beautiful; soft, delicate, clearly expensive.

  She said, “Who is it from?”

  There was a small note: “Thank you. Ronald Cornell.”

  I hadn’t told Kate about Cornell, but now we sat together at the kitchen table and I described Wednesday’s meeting to her. When I finished, she said, “He didn’t want you to do anything else? Help him find the murderer?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t ask.”

  Kate has been strongly in favor of those few jobs I’ve done the last couple of years, not because they’ve eased our financial problems but because she believes that if I only remain active in the world I will sooner or later become my old self again. I won’t, that old self was buried with Jock, but nothing will destroy her hope.

  Now she said, “Maybe he’ll come back if the astrology doesn’t help.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I think I’ve heard the last of Ronald Cornell.”

  She reached out to touch the scarf again. “That was really very nice of him,” she said.

  “Yes, it was,” I said.

  2

  WE WERE EATING BREAKFAST together, when Kate said, “Wasn’t his name Cornell?” She was reading the Daily News at the time.

  This was Tuesday, six days after my only meeting with Ronald Cornell. I said, “Yes. Ronald Cornell. He’s in the paper?”

  “He tried to kill himself.”

  I frowned. “Let me see.”

  Kate handed the paper over to me, and I looked at the item. It was back with the A&S ads, under the headline

  B’KLYN HEIGHTS STORE OWNER SUICIDE TRY:

  In critical condition at Flatbush Crown Hospital is Ronald Cornell, 185 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, following a fall from a building roof termed by police “an obvious suicide attempt.”

  Cornell, part owner of Jammer, popular male boutique in the Brooklyn Heights area, made his leap from the roof of 1212 Hicks Streets, where the store is located. Friends say Cornell has been despondent since the unsolved slaying recently of his partner in the boutique enterprise, James Dearborn, with whom Cornell also shared his apartment.

  Police say the leap from the roof of the four-story building occurred at approximately nine P.M. Monday. Clotheslines, the wooden roof of a storage shed, and the bolts of cloth maintained within the shed all helped to cushion Cornell’s fall, according to police, who say that the promptness of a neighbor in phoning for assistance also contributed to saving Cornell’s life.

  No charges have as yet been preferred against Cornell, who remains in a coma and under guard at the hospital, where prognosis by doctors is fair.

  Yesterday evening. Yesterday morning he was to have called Eddie Schultz; I wondered if he had.

  Kate, seeing that I was done reading, said, “Isn’t that terrible?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, and handed the paper back to her.

  She looked at it again, and shook her head. “Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

  I knew why it might be done, might be thought of, but I said nothing.

  Kate looked at me. “He didn’t act suicidal when you saw him last week?”

  “That wasn’t suicide,” I said. “Somebody tried to kill him.”

  Startled, she glanced down again at the newspaper, and then back up at me. “Kill? Do you really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said.

  “Because his partner was killed? But he was despondent over that, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was. But if he was going to kill himself, he wouldn’t do it that way.”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “Two reasons. One psychological, one physical. Psychologically, Ronald Cornell would never kill himself in a way that would cause him pain or leave him ugly. He might take poison, he’d be more likely to turn on the gas. But he wouldn’t jump off a roof.”

  “You can’t say that, though. Under emotional stress people always act differently.”

  “With more intensity,” I said, “but not out of character.”

  She looked dubious. “What’s the other reason?”

  “The physical details are wrong,” I said. “Read that news item again. He landed on a wooden shed full of bolts of cloth. It doesn’t say whether he jumped off the front of the building or the back, but a storage shed wouldn’t be in front, so it had to be the back.”

  “I assumed it was, yes.” She looked from the paper to me again.

  “I know that part of Brooklyn Heights,” I said. “There aren’t any front lawns there. There’s the street, the sidewalk and the building front. If he’d gone off the front, there would have been nothing to break his fall but the sidewalk.”

  “That could be just accident,” she said. “He went up on the roof, and he was distressed, and he just turned the nearest way.”

  “Except that his store’s in that building. That storage shed and those bolts of cloth have to have something to do with the store. It has to be his cloth.”

  Now her frown changed, and she said, “Oh, I see.”

  “A man wanting to kill himself,” I said, “doesn’t jump onto bolts of cloth. Not when there’s sidewalk on the other side of the building. And no matter how distressed he was, if he’d gone up on that roof planning to kill himself—and I still say he wouldn’t have done it that way—he would have remembered that in this direction is certain death on the sidewalk, but in that direction is only possible death because of his own storage shed full of his own stock of cloth.”

  She said, “Then what do you think happened?”

  “I think he was hit on the head,” I said. “While he was in the store, probably. Then he was carried up to the roof. The murderer didn’t take him to the front because he was afraid somebody in the street belo
w might see him. That’s the only explanation for Cornell’s body going off the back.”

  She said, “But couldn’t it be one of those cases where somebody tries to kill himself but doesn’t really want to? Doesn’t that happen?”

  “It happens more often than real suicide,” I said. “It’s a way of getting the world to pay attention to your problems. But that false-start kind of thing is done under completely different circumstances. You don’t really hurt yourself, for one thing, and you make sure there are people around to rescue you in time, for another. If Cornell had gone up on the roof and sat on the edge with his feet dangling over and shouted that he was going to jump, that would be a different thing. But to make a jump like that? No. Because you might get killed, jumping four stories onto the wooden roof of a storage shed, no matter if the shed is full of mattresses. And even if you don’t get killed, you could get very severely injured. You could break bones, you could lose an eye. The sidewalk would be a cleaner and surer death, if you really mean to die, and the storage shed is too dangerous if you just want to call attention to yourself.”

  “But the police think it was suicide,” she said.

  “They won’t for long. When Cornell comes to, he’ll tell them what happened. With any luck, he knows who did it to him.”

  “What if he doesn’t come to? What if he dies?”

  “There are too many things obviously wrong with a suicide verdict,” I said. “The fact that his partner was just killed a week and a half ago, in addition to everything else. They’ll come around to murder.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  I shook my head. “Then I don’t know,” I said. “It won’t be the first time anyone got away with murder in this city. But I don’t think it’ll happen.”

  “You won’t do anything?”

  “Me?” I frowned at her. “Why me?”

  “He came to you for help,” she said.

  “And I helped him.”

  “And he sent you that beautiful scarf.”

  “Kate, he didn’t buy me with that scarf. I didn’t ask for it, he sent it as a thank-you for what I’d already done. He hasn’t asked me to do anything else, and there’s no need for me to do anything else. He’s in a hospital now, the killer won’t be able to get at him again, the police are on the job. If he comes to, he’ll tell them what happened. If he doesn’t, they’ll investigate anyway.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “It isn’t my responsibility, Kate,” I said.

  She looked at me, and I could see her carefully not saying several different things. I am frequently amazed that she goes on putting up with me as I am now, and every time we come to a moment like this I feel a sudden pillar of cold in my chest, thinking, This is the time she leaves.

  But it wasn’t. She folded the paper, looking away from me, and in a neutral voice said, “Will you be working downstairs today?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ll be going shopping later on.”

  “All right.”

  She still hadn’t looked at me. She got to her feet and carried the breakfast dishes over to the sink.

  I wanted to say, We know who I am, Kate, why be disappointed in it? But I didn’t say anything, and a little later I went down to the basement and went to work.

  3

  THREE DAYS LATER, FRIDAY, they delivered the first load of building supplies for my sub-basement. Lengths of two-by-four, a bag of cement, two different sizes of concrete block; the bill was higher than I’d expected. It bothered me to write out the check, particularly when I was bringing no money into the house myself. This was Kate’s money I was spending, more than mine, and though I knew she wouldn’t grudge me, I didn’t feel right about it.

  The two men from the lumberyard weren’t happy about delivering everything to the basement, but I worked with them and it didn’t take that much time or effort. Then I paid them and they left, and I went back downstairs to go to work.

  All I had done so far was dig. I had first used a sledge to break through the concrete floor in an area against the rear wall that extended ten feet along the wall and three feet out into the room. The broken pieces of concrete I had piled in a corner, after straightening the edges of the opened area as much as possible with a chisel and a smaller hammer. Then I’d started to dig, shoveling the dirt into empty cement bags, of which I had six. Whenever all six bags were full, I left off digging long enough to carry the bags one at a time upstairs and empty them in the back yard along the wall, the dark mounds looking odd surrounded by snow. All of this made for slow going, but that was, after all, the object.

  I was digging a hole ten feet long and three feet wide, and I was digging steps in as I went, making the first step a long one because I would later cover these steps with the smaller concrete blocks. I had now dug to a depth of about four feet, and had four steps. I could begin at once to use some of the building supplies I’d bought.

  From the beginning, I’d been digging wider than the opening I’d cleared in the floor, removing dirt from under both the exterior wall on the one side and the floor on the other. Now I began by building walls on both sides of my steps, one under the existing exterior wall and the other under the basement floor. I used concrete blocks, the larger ones, filled in crannies with smaller pieces of broken concrete from the pile in the corner, and used plenty of cement for mortar. I didn’t want to finish with a wet cellar, nor did I want to weaken the structure of the house.

  I did the walls as far as my fourth step, and was about to start laying the smaller concrete blocks on the steps and cementing them in place when Kate came down the stairs, slowly, looking thoughtful.

  It was unusual for Kate to watch me at work, either down here or out in the yard when I was working on my wall. I glanced over at her and saw her sit down on the bottom step, watching me, her expression still distracted. I said, “Something?” and she shook her head, not as though there was nothing on her mind but as though she hadn’t as yet worked out how to talk about it. I went on with my work.

  I could feel her there, even though I didn’t look directly at her, and it was a relief when, after about five minutes, she finally spoke, saying, “I went to the hospital today.”

  I straightened, a concrete block in my hands. Visions of incurable illnesses flashed through my head. More sharply than I’d intended, I said, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  She smiled with sudden tenderness—I know she loves me, or why would she imprison herself here, but neither of us very often show our feelings—and said, “No, not about me. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  I felt stupid, standing there holding that heavy block. I half-turned to toss it onto the dirt bottom of the hole I was standing in, and said, “What, then?”

  “I went to see Ronald Cornell,” she said. “I called yesterday, and they said he was conscious and off the critical list. There wasn’t anything in the paper about him today, so I went to see him.”

  There was going to be something in this I wouldn’t like, or it wouldn’t have taken her so long to get started. I said, “What did he have to say?”

  “What you said. He didn’t try to commit suicide. He was knocked out in the store, and didn’t come to again until the hospital, day before yesterday.”

  “Did he see who did it?”

  “No. He was in the back room of the store, sitting at his desk. He said he was doing some things with astrological charts. Whoever it was, they came up behind him. He didn’t know anybody was in the store at all.”

  “It shouldn’t take the police long to work it out,” I said.

  “That’s the problem,” she said. “The police aren’t trying.”

  So here it was. I said, “What do you mean, they aren’t trying?”

  “They insist it was a suicide attempt,” he said. “They’re accusing Ronald of lying.” Ronald. He had found a partisan, obviously.

  I said, “That doesn’t make any sense. They have to see he wouldn’t do it that
way.”

  “It seems mostly to be a detective named Manzoni. Did you know him at all?”

  “No. Cornell mentioned him when he was here. It was Manzoni that declared the Dearborn murder unsolvable.”

  “Well, he’s the one saying Ronald tried to kill himself. Ronald says he’s well known in the Brooklyn Heights area for hating homosexuals. He’s been accused of beating them up two or three times.”

  That also did happen. A cop who hates a specific class or group of people—blacks, homosexuals, Jews, college students, union members, what-have-you—is in a better position than the average bigot to work out his hatred on individuals within that group. Generally, the force tries to avoid that kind of trouble by assigning men away from temptation—keeping the Negro-haters out of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the fag-haters out of Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights—but that kind of approach can’t be one hundred percent effective. If Detective Manzoni actually did have a violent antipathy for homosexuals, he had been assigned to just the wrong part of the city; Brooklyn Heights has been a homosexual enclave for years.

  I said, “In other words, Manzoni is blocking any real investigation.”

  “Yes. And there’s nothing Ronald can do about it.”

  “He can go over Manzoni’s head.”

  “Manzoni is trying to get Ronald committed to a mental institution. Because he tried to commit suicide, of course, and also because he’s an admitted homosexual. Mitch, you know Manzoni won’t have trouble finding some old-line judge to go along with him. And how can a certified lunatic complain to anybody and be listened to?”

  “All right,” I said. “He can’t. But if you want me to go talk to Manzoni’s superiors, believe me, I could only do more harm than good. I’m not the right kind of advocate for Cornell, what he needs is a good lawyer.”

  “Of course he needs a lawyer,” she said. “But you know the kind of person he has for a lawyer. He’s using the same lawyer he’s always used in the past, for the store and whatever.”

  “You mean another homosexual.”

  “Yes. A man named Stewart Remington.”