Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You’re probably right,” I said, and the door opened behind me.

  I turned and it was the red-headed cop, the young one who’d been nervously on duty at the dining room door. He called, in a husky whisper, as though he was trying to slide the words past me without my hearing, “Captain? Could I see you a minute?”

  Yoncker frowned at him. “This important?”

  “Yes, sir.” He was worried, but standing his ground.

  Yoncker gave an exasperated sigh and heaved to his feet. “Wait one minute, Tobin,” he said, and marched across the room and outside, closing the door behind him.

  I spent this time-out in a hasty inspection of my defenses. He seemed to have accepted my story at face value, though I wouldn’t rely on that entirely with a man like Yoncker. If I could keep myself small enough and quiet enough I stood a pretty good chance of getting Yoncker to think of me as a member of his team, which under the circumstances was the safest place to be. Bringing up the business about O’Hara and Merrivale had been a bad move on my part, but I hoped I’d covered it sufficiently, and I wouldn’t be mentioning it again.

  What would Yoncker be talking about next? From the direction he’d been leading in, I had the idea what he wanted was suggestions from me as to who the murderer might be. I already knew I wasn’t going to mention my own list of suspects and non-suspects, mostly because that would reveal that I had known about the rigged accidents before the murder, but also partly because I disliked Yoncker intensely and had no desire to do any of his work for him.

  In fact, what would I tell him when he asked me for capsule commentaries on the various residents, which he was sure to do when he came back? Edited versions of the truth, I supposed, leaving out anything he might consider social workerish, and also leaving out anything that might prejudice him too heavily in the direction of anyone I already privately knew to be in the clear.

  I was thinking about this, and working out specific answers to some of the questions I expected to be asked, when the door opened again and Yoncker came back in with a huge happy smile on his face. “Now,” he said. “Now, that’s the way we like it.”

  I turned and looked at him. “What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened? We’ve got a confession, that’s what’s happened.” Yoncker rubbed his hands together in pleasure. “They can’t come too easy for me,” he said. “This is just the way I like them.”

  19

  I STOOD IN THE HALL DOORWAY, Debby Lattimore’s desk behind me, the door to Doctor Cameron’s office beyond that, and looked down to my right, where Yoncker and his troops were with great care and great pride marching their confessed murderer this way, toward the exit.

  It was Walter Stoddard. They had him in handcuffs and a uniformed cop stood on each side of him, clutching his arms above the elbow, and he walked with his head and eyes down, as though on his way to the electric chair instead of the local jail.

  Stoddard? Was it merely my instinctive dislike for Yoncker that made me want to believe it hadn’t really come this easy, or was there some true reason to think Stoddard was lying about himself? The faces around Stoddard were happy and self-congratulatory, hemming him in, making his face hard to see and hard to understand.

  They approached me like a mini-parade, Yoncker looking directly at me to smile his wide smile, his cops all looking either straight ahead or with possessive caution at their prisoner. I kept trying to read Stoddard’s down-turned face, and when they were four or five paces from me Stoddard suddenly raised his head and met my eyes, and I realized I’d had the image wrong before. It wasn’t the electric chair he saw himself marching toward, it was the crucifix. The expression on his face was exactly that look of noble and self-congratulatory martyrdom that stupid painters put on the face of Christ when showing him on the way to the cross. “’Tis a far far better thing I do,” his eyes said to me, and I knew exactly what he was doing, and why. More than he did, probably.

  And certainly more than Yoncker did. Yoncker passed me, and I almost spoke his name, I almost asked him to step into the privacy of the office behind me for just a minute. But then I saw myself trying to explain Walter Stoddard’s mind to that man, I saw myself trying to take away his easy victory, and I knew it couldn’t be done that way. Nothing I could say today would keep Yoncker from arresting Stoddard and booking him for murder.

  The procession passed me by, and now I watched their backs, and I saw that Stoddard’s head was down again but his shoulders were straight, squared off. He was not morose, he was far from morose.

  They went out the main entrance at last, and I heard footsteps coming the other way. I turned to look, and Doctor Fredericks was hurrying toward me down the hall. He reached me, saying, “That was a lucky break, wasn’t it? Saved a lot of agony for everybody.”

  I stepped out of his way, and he came on into the office and sat at Debby Lattimore’s desk to reach for the phone. “The Brady girl is a gone goose,” he said. “Happily she came from a place about twelve miles from here, so they can send an ambulance over and take her right back.”

  “Another lucky break,” I said.

  He glanced at me in surprise, holding the phone with one hand, about to dial with the other. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Make your call first,” I said.

  He considered me, then shrugged and made his call. It took about five minutes, and judging from Fredericks’ half of the conversation an ambulance was expected within the hour. Ringing off, Fredericks turned around to face me and said, “Now, what is it?”

  “Stoddard,” I said.

  He frowned, looking past me, thinking about the man.

  “I’m sorry it was him,” he said. “In fact, I’m very surprised it was him.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said.

  He looked at me in surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “I saw his face when they were taking him out.”

  “But he confessed.”

  I said, “Stoddard’s problem, the way I understand it, the problem he’s been committed for in the past, is that he has overpowering feelings of guilt about having killed his daughter. He’s never been able to square that account.”

  Fredericks cocked his head, as if hearing an intriguing sound. “That’s possible,” he said. “For Stoddard, yes, very possible.”

  “More possible than adding more things to feel guilty about, like causing people accidents.”

  “I already said he doesn’t seem right for the part. Did you talk to the police about this? That Captain Yoncker?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “Would you have?”

  He started to answer me, then reconsidered, thought things over, frowned, and at last shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t. But we can’t very well let Stoddard take the rap like this, can we?”

  “We can,” I said, “unless we can think of something to do about it.”

  “Find the right person, of course,” he said. “That’s the most obvious.”

  “And the most difficult,” I pointed out. “But the injurer might keep it up, and then we’d have a strong enough indication of Stoddard’s innocence to try talking to Yoncker.”

  “What if he doesn’t? I mean the injurer, what if he’s been scared off by all this?”

  “They’ll let you and Doctor Cameron talk to Stoddard, if you push hard enough,” I said. “Try to get him to repudiate the confession.”

  He said, “What if we showed Yoncker that note you got? Stoddard doesn’t know about it, and we could prove he doesn’t know about it or know what it says.”

  I shook my head. “There’s two things wrong with that. In the first place, once we give that note to Yoncker we let him know we knew about the rigged accidents before today. Which doesn’t get Stoddard off the hook, but it puts us right back on.”

  “Why doesn’t it get Stoddard off the hook?”

  “Because we’re guessing that note came from the injurer, but we can’t prove it. We w
on’t be able to prove it to Yoncker, or a jury, or anybody. Yoncker won’t give Stoddard up without a fight, and he’ll bat that note right out of the park.”

  “We have to turn up the real injurer,” Fredericks said, “it’s as simple as that.”

  “I wish it were,” I said.

  20

  THE DAY CREPT ON. THERE was nothing to do, and in fact there was no real desire on anyone’s part to make any kind of movement. We should have been feeling some sense of urgency, those of us who believed Stoddard’s confession was a false one, but we behaved as though we’d been drugged. We were listless, without ideas and without plans and without even the nervous energy to be upset by our listlessness.

  The ambulance came for Doris Brady and she was carried out on a stretcher. The residents, having felt the need to herd together so strongly at lunchtime, now obviously felt just as strong a need to be by themselves, and most took alone to their rooms.

  Cameron and Fredericks and Bob Gale and I met in Cameron’s office again in the late afternoon, and told one another things we all already knew. None of us managed to make any worthwhile suggestions as to what we would do next. Doctor Cameron called Captain Yoncker at Police Headquarters to find out when it would be possible to visit Stoddard, and was told it would be at least a day or two. Stoddard had phoned his wife, who would be coming to Kendrick with the family lawyer, and it would be subsequent to their arrival that Stoddard would be permitted any other visitors. Captain Yoncker also volunteered the information that a search of the local bars had not turned up Nicholas Fike, but that a man who might have been Fike had been seen at the Greyhound terminal. No one knew what bus he had taken, if any.

  That made us discuss, in a desultory way, the possibility that the injurer really was Nicholas Fike after all, but none of us could see it that way. His history showed no links with that kind of anti-social activity, and as Fredericks pointed out, it was next to impossible that Fike could have done any of that trap-laying without settling his nerves with alcohol.

  What about Doris Brady? We rolled that idea around a while, trying to find some way to believe it. We suggested that she had been the injurer, and that she had gone into shock as a result of one of her booby traps resulting in death rather than merely injury. For motive we tried to build a case out of her desire to do to others on a physical level what had been done to her on a psychic level, the sudden pulling out of the rug from under all her values and assumptions. We made a case that was neither persuasive nor totally ludicrous, and were left at the end with a possibility, though remote. And as Bob Gale said, if Doris Brady really was the injurer, it would be very tough to prove, since Doris was totally unavailable for questioning.

  Who else was there? O’Hara and Merrivale, both now cooling their heels at the local jail, still had to be considered active suspects. Either one of them, feeling the panic of guilt, might have precipitated that fight in the dining room. The only thing wrong was, the fight only implied panic, not necessarily guilt.

  Which left only six people from the suspect list still present in The Midway, and five of them were women, the lone man being Jerry Kanter. The women were Debby Lattimore, Ethel Hall, Helen Dorsey, Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett. I myself found it impossible to believe it was Debby, and almost impossible to believe it was Ruth Ehrengart, the woman who’d had a nervous breakdown after the birth of her tenth child. Ethel Hall, the lesbian librarian, I also considered virtually guaranteed to be innocent. Helen Dorsey, the compulsive housekeeper, and Ivy Pollett, the victim of plots and stratagems and myriad attempted rapes, seemed to me a little more likely, but not very. Which left Jerry Kanter, whom I disliked for unworthy reasons and who was in an odd way too blithely healthy to be the guilty party.

  Which brought us back to those suspects no longer in the house: O’Hara and Merrivale, Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike.

  It was getting us nowhere going over and over that list of ten names. We could give opinions and prejudices, we could invent theories and potential motivations, but we couldn’t with one hundred per cent assurance cross out any one of those ten names. Nor could any of us think of anything constructive to do. Our conference ended at dinnertime with nothing having been accomplished and no plans having been made to accomplish anything at any later date.

  Bob and I had a mostly silent dinner together in a mostly empty dining room. Only a few hardy souls, like Edgar Jennings and Helen Dorsey and George Bartholomew, sat spaced around at the various tables, and most of them ate quickly and alone and soon left to return to their rooms.

  We saw a number of people come down and go directly through to the kitchen and return with trays or paper bags, planning to eat in the solitude and safety of their rooms, and these moved by us without meeting anyone’s eye. Ivy Pollett was one of them, and Donald Walburn, and Rose Ackerson. Rose came through three times while we ate, carrying the same tray back and forth every time, and after the third trip Bob said, “Suppose she’s bringing food to everybody upstairs?”

  “Just to Molly Schweitzler,” I said. “I think I ought to mention that to Doctor Cameron. Those two are both going directly back into their sick behavior patterns.”

  But everybody was, really. Ivy Pollett had come through with a hunted look on her face, the paranoid unable to trust anyone, beginning to suspect the plots and schemes again. Across the way, Helen Dorsey was behaving in small odd ways alone at her table, organizing dishes and silverware, scrubbing everything with her napkin, treating her food as something excremental that had to be removed from what she meant to be a department store place-setting. The entire population of The Midway could be felt slipping backward into the safety of compulsive behavior. The murder had started it, the presence and manner of the police had intensified it, and now it seemed to be rolling along on its own momentum. Finding the true killer might save Stoddard—who, of course, had also fallen backward into his particular kind of compulsion—but would it make any difference to these crumbling personalities all around me? It might be like bringing the antibiotic after the epidemic has already swept through.

  But the question was academic, since at the moment we had no antibiotic and no idea how to get hold of it, and the epidemic was running its course unchecked.

  After dinner I met with Doctor Cameron again, to tell him some of the problem behavior I’d been noticing, particularly Rose Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler, but he already knew about most of it and felt just as powerless as I did. “We’ll have to let them shake this out for a while,” he said. “And hope when it’s all over we’ll be able to repair the damage.”

  He had a fairly extensive library of books on psychiatry in a small room off his office, and I borrowed several that looked from the titles as though they might be useful. I took them up to my room and spent the evening dipping into book after book, following chapter titles and then footnotes and ultimately wild guesses. I found several things disturbing to me personally, which I hurried past the way we hurry past vomit on the sidewalk, but there was nothing in particular to help me in my job of winnowing ten names down to one, and at last I went to bed and had confused and mournful dreams and awoke at seven-thirty in the morning with a vague but simple idea in my head.

  21

  THE FOUR OF US SAT AROUND in Doctor Cameron’s office, and the general atmosphere was really not much different from yesterday. It was nine-thirty in the morning now and sunlight poured in through the windows behind the desk, making the room brighter than it had been yesterday afternoon. But the three faces around me looked just as dim and lethargic, and I found their listlessness bringing back my own, so that instead of suggesting my idea at once, I held it back. I listened to the others chew the same old sentences over again while I picked my idea to pieces and started finding things wrong with it. You can always find things wrong with every idea, if you really want to.

  But that was foolish, and in one of the lulls in the conversation—the conversation being half lulls—I finally forced myself to say, “I have an idea.” Though
I couldn’t let it go at that, but had to add, “A small idea, I don’t know if it will do any good.”

  Any idea was a sign of life, of course, and they all looked at me with interest. Fredericks said, “It has to do more good than our just sitting around here moaning at one another.”

  I said, “What I was thinking was that we do have some physical hints about the injurer. Not what he looks like, but things he’s used. Like a saw, for instance. And the paper when he wrote me that note. And he had at least one little bottle of Scotch. It seems to me if I could search the rooms of the people on my suspect list there just might be something useful to be found. Not even real proof necessarily, just an indication of who we should lean on.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “But if he knows you’re searching, he’ll get rid of anything that might incriminate him.”

  I said, “That’s why I thought it might be a good idea to make this morning’s group therapy session compulsory. In fact, both sessions today could be compulsory. The way people are breaking down it would be a good idea anyway, but we could arrange our lists so all the suspects are in the morning session. There’s only six of them still in the house.”

  Everybody thought that was a fine idea. At least, everybody thought it was an idea, and it gave us something to do, something to think about, and that was fine.

  We immediately made up our two lists for the two compulsory group therapy sessions, putting the six suspects—Jerry Kanter, Debby Lattimore, Ethel Hall, Helen Dorsey, Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett—in the morning session with Edgar Jennings and Phil Roche, two of the cleared ping-pong players. There were only fifteen people in the house now, out of the original twenty-two, so that left seven for the afternoon session.

  The session would be at ten-thirty, so Bob left at once with the list to let all the residents know about it, and Fredericks and Cameron and I sat around the office a while longer, talking about what would happen if we didn’t manage to come up with a replacement for Stoddard. Captain Yoncker had taken the names and home addresses of all the residents, and at least some of them would eventually be called upon to testify, at least at the coroner’s inquest if not at the actual murder trial. We three could be sure of having to testify at both. There hadn’t been any activity from the news media yet, mostly because Kendrick was serviced only by a weekly newspaper that considered its job adequately completed if it kept on top of the church socials. But there had to be at least one local wire-service stringer and we could expect reporters to start sniffing around sooner or later. Murder in a loony bin.