Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  He frowned at me, suspecting irrelevance. “What do you mean, the timing? It came after the murder, naturally.”

  “It came,” I told him, “while Doctor Cameron was in the group therapy session with our entire list of present suspects.” I turned to Cameron, saying, “Did anybody leave the room at any time for any reason during the hour?”

  “No one,” he said.

  Fredericks said, “What are you suggesting? That Fike is hanging around, he’s slipped back into the building and left that note?”

  “No, and I’m not suggesting that O’Hara or Merrivale slipped out of jail either, or that Doris Brady is faking her catatonia.”

  Fredericks spread his hands. “That’s your entire suspect list,” he said.

  “I know it. It means we made a mistake somewhere very early on. It means the injurer never was on the suspect list at all. Because the only person who could have left that note and the saw was one of the seven residents not in this morning’s session. Because the session had already started when I left my room and was just over when I got back to my room, meaning nobody in the session would have had the opportunity to do it.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “But we’ve already eliminated everyone else.”

  “We were wrong,” I said. “We cleared somebody we shouldn’t have cleared.”

  Fredericks made a disgusted sound and said, “That’s fine. Three days later we find out we’re working with the wrong list.”

  “It happens,” I said. I saw no point wasting time trying to defend myself in Fredericks’ eyes.

  Doctor Cameron said, “Well, who are the people now? Seven, you say?”

  “Six, really,” I told him, “since Bob Gale was with me the whole time. We were never close enough to my room for him to have dashed away to a hiding place, gotten the note and saw, ducked them into my room and got back to me without my coming out of whatever room I was searching and finding him gone.”

  Doctor Cameron pulled notepaper and pencil toward himself and said, “Who are the six?”

  “Marilyn Nazarro. Beth Tracy. Rose Ackerson. Molly Schweitzler. Donald Walburn. And George Bartholomew.”

  He wrote the names down as I said them and then studied them, frowning. “Four of these we can eliminate right away,” he said. “They’re among the injured. That would only leave Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy.” He looked at me. “Why did we assume they were cleared?”

  “They were among the group in the ping-pong room when the staircase was rigged, the time I got this arm.”

  Fredericks said, “There were half a dozen people in that room. Bob said nobody left, but how could he be that sure? He was involved in the games, not counting heads.”

  Doctor Cameron said, “So it’s one of these two girls. Marilyn Nazarro or Beth Tracy.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It could still be one of the other four.”

  “But they were all victims.” He studied the list on his desk. “Weren’t they? Yes. Rose and Molly with the table in the dining room, George Bartholomew with the bed frame in the closet, Donald Walburn with the ladder.” He looked up at me. “You aren’t suggesting one of these people injured himself, are you? On purpose?”

  “Possibly,” I said.

  Fredericks said, “To divert attention from himself, you mean.”

  “That’s one reason. It isn’t the only possible reason. Look, we’ve been assuming all along that the motive for all this is an irrational one, and we can’t leave out the possibility that the injurer felt he himself should be one of the victims.”

  “That’s possible,” Fredericks said doubtfully. “It isn’t probable.”

  “Nothing that’s taken place here is probable,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have expected the probable here. But it is possible. And it’s possible that one of those accidents wasn’t rigged at all, that it’s a simple matter of biter bit.”

  “We know the ladder was,” Doctor Cameron said. “I saw the sawn-through rung myself.”

  “That leaves Walburn out to that extent,” I said. “But what about the others? George Bartholomew could be the injurer, and being hit with the bed frame was pure accident—and he could have been poking around in that closet for something to use in one of his booby traps. Or that table that collapsed in the dining room simply collapsed, without being rigged at all.”

  “You’re becoming more and more improbable,” Fredericks told me.

  I said, “I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. Physical laws of possibility have narrowed the list down to these six people. No one else could have put the note and the saw in my room. I don’t want to cut any of them at all off the list on the basis of guesses and suppositions, because all I have are the same guesses and suppositions that made me make the mistake in the first place. This time I’m sure I have the injurer on my list, and I don’t want to take the chance of letting him slip off it again.”

  Fredericks said, “All right, I see the point. So what do you want to do? Search rooms again?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “yes. But this time it’s simpler, I’m simply looking for paper to match the two notes I was sent. I should be able to go through the six rooms in a quarter of an hour. Whether I find the paper or not, I’ll come down to the therapy session when I’m done. We’ll know we have the injurer somewhere at that table with us. With or without the paper, we’ll do what we can.”

  “Do what we can? Meaning what?”

  “Meaning,” I said, “it will be a lot simpler to deal with Yoncker if we can hand him another confession.”

  23

  THE DINING ROOM WAS almost empty when I went into it for lunch. Only one table was occupied, by George Bartholomew and Donald Walburn. I went over and said, “Mind if I join you?”

  It was Bartholomew who looked up, showing me again the healing but still angry scars on his cheek and around his mouth. Deliberately self-inflicted? It was hard to believe. “Well, sure,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Donald Walburn didn’t say anything at all, and didn’t even look up from his plate. He was eating noodle soup, slowly, steadily, mechanically, but a kind of hyper-awareness flowed out from him. He was braced against my presence, and I could feel it like a physical wall between us.

  This was the closest I’d been to Walburn, though I’d seen him a few times before, moving slowly along on the crutches now leaning against the wall behind him. A slight, hawk-nosed man in his late forties, Donald Walburn had spent most of his latter teens and twenties in various prisons on various charges of burglary or petty larceny, but since his last prison term ended sixteen years ago he’d apparently trod the straight and narrow. He had never married, and lived off-and-on with a married brother and his family. He did factory work, mostly, occasionally drove a cab, and the trouble apparently started about six years ago when he got into an argument with a foreman on one job he held, who used his old prison record to have him fired. He began to mistrust everybody after that, to believe that the foreman was following him from job to job, trying to make trouble for him. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that the foreman was simply the agent for a group of toughs who had dominated one of the prisons he’d been in fifteen years before, and he believed that this group had decided for the fun of it to harass and prey upon him the rest of his life. He blamed the group for his never having married, for the increasing bitterness that was growing between himself and his brother’s family, for the increasing trouble he was having holding down a job, for everything that was going wrong and had gone wrong in his entire life. He ultimately attacked a perfect stranger in a bar, slashing him with a broken bottle, because he thought him to be one of the group; his manner after his arrest led to a psychiatric examination and finally to a commitment of four years in a state mental hospital. His dossier did not claim he was cured, but only that he had learned to deal with and control his problems, which meant he still harbored the same suspicions about the prison group but would probably no longer take any overt action against them. It wa
s very likely he blamed the group for the ladder rung that gave way beneath him, breaking his leg, and looking at him across the table now I found it very difficult to believe he had done it to himself.

  Though not impossible. It seemed as though nothing was impossible in The Midway. And the dossier on Donald Walburn could be inaccurate in its prognosis. Walburn might simply have learned to make his counterattacks more subtle than an attack with a broken bottle. Rigged accidents, perhaps.

  The waitress today was Debby Lattimore, who brought my soup and gave me a tense smile, then took away Walburn and Bartholomew’s empty soup plates and went back to the kitchen. I started to eat, and George Bartholomew said, “I didn’t think you’d still be here.”

  I looked at him. “Why not?”

  “Everything’s cleared up, isn’t it?” He was the nervous fortyish kleptomaniac and string-saver who had been released from the institution not because he was cured but because he was harmless. But was he? He said, “You’ve found that fellow who was hiding, and Walter admitted causing all these accidents,” his hand strayed to his injured face, “so I thought you’d be leaving now.”

  Donald Walburn threw me a quick hard glance and looked back down at his empty place. Debby was coming back, bringing two plates of that kind of outsize hamburger usually called Salisbury steak and frequently served in places where large numbers of people are being fed without a choice of menu.

  I said, “I will be leaving in a day or two, I suppose. But I’ve had some personal problems I wanted to talk over with Doctor Cameron and Doctor Fredericks. I haven’t had much time up till now.”

  He nodded, satisfied. Debby put down the two plates, and that ended conversation for a while. I went on eating my soup.

  Rose Ackerson entered the room, carrying an empty tray. Looking at no one, she walked the length of the room and went into the kitchen. A minute later Helen Dorsey and Ruth Ehrengart came in and took a table across the room from us. Debby came out with soup for them, by which time I was finished with mine and she came over to take the plate away. As she went into the kitchen, Rose Ackerson came out again, the tray now piled high with food, tending heavily to sugars and starches. She ignored everyone again on her way through the room.

  Salisbury steak is another main course that can be cut with a fork, which saved me the embarrassment of asking Bartholomew to cut up my food for me. I was getting more used to working left-handed now, and I ate at a good pace.

  Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy came in and sat at another table, and I glanced over at them but didn’t stare. They were now both suddenly on the revised suspect list, and I was going to have to give them more attention than I had up till now.

  Marilyn Nazarro was the twenty-seven-year-old woman who’d married while still in high school, had twins and another child in the first three years of marriage, and gradually developed severe symptoms of a manic-depressive cycle. She’d been in mental hospitals twice, for two years and then for three years, and though she seemed cheerful and normal enough now, the prognosis was poor, primarily because no matter what was done for her in the hospital, every time she came out she had no choice but to return to the same life as before.

  Beth Tracy, a pretty if vague-looking blonde of twenty-three, was simply a sex-hysteric. Her marriage had been annulled by her husband for non-consummation, she’d tried three times to kill herself, and she was frank that the whole idea of sexual intercourse was the most disgusting and terrifying thing she could think of. The doctors believed the problem was rooted in some incident in the past, but had been unable to find it. Beth Tracy was another ex-patient released not because she was cured but because she had learned to some extent to live with her insufficiencies. She knew better now than to establish any romantic liaison with anybody.

  Was either of these the injurer? Manic-depressives and sex-hysterics tend to hurt no one but themselves, at least not physically, whatever the psychological damage they may do to the people around them.

  But what about the two right here at my table? A kleptomaniac and a man with a persecution complex. George Bartholomew, the kleptomaniac, had always been as harmless as a rabbit and it was hard to see him any other way. Donald Walburn, the persecuted, had been violent in the past, but openly so and with a specific target. The scattergun effect of the injurer’s booby traps made it hard to fit any motive at all, including a Donald Walburn’s misguided attempts to get even with a nonexistent conspiracy.

  My other two possibles were not in the room, and wouldn’t be. Rose Ackerson was obviously feeding both herself and Molly Schweitzler with those trays of food she kept coming down for. The one a lonely woman who had kidnapped a child in an attempt to have a child of her own again, the other a lonely woman who had reacted to real or imagined rejections by compulsive overeating. They had found one another, they obviously filled needs for one another, but from the amount of food going upstairs I thought they were filling those needs in an unhealthy way. Rose and Molly had not merely become mother and child, they had become indulgent mother and spoiled child, which wasn’t good for either of them.

  But where in their self-contained universe would there be a need for causing pain and accidents to other people? Why would either of them have caused an accident to both the other one and to herself?

  I didn’t like my list of six suspects, not at all. But it was the only list I had.

  There was ice cream for dessert. Donald Walburn had rushed through his meal and gone, but George Bartholomew had taken his time, so that he and I started our dessert simultaneously. I saw him glancing at me out of the corner of his eye, and understood he had another question he wanted to ask me. There was nothing to do but brace myself and wait till he was ready.

  He wasn’t ready till his ice cream was all finished and he’d started on his coffee. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  I looked at him. “Oh?”

  He met my look, his eyes level but troubled. “About Walter,” he said. “Do you suppose there’s any chance he didn’t do it?”

  I weighed my answer, and finally said, “I don’t know. That would be up to the police to decide.”

  He nodded somberly. “I suppose so,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem like Walter, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, and left it there, and went upstairs to rest up for the afternoon.

  24

  THE SESSION HAD BEEN going on for twenty minutes when I walked in, and everyone was there who was supposed to be there. Donald Walburn was talking as I entered, and he promptly clapped his mouth shut and turned to give me a suspicious glare.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, ostensibly to Doctor Fredericks.

  “That’s all right, Tobin,” he said. “Sit down.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and as I sat down I met Fredericks’ eye again and shook my head slightly. I had not found the matching notepaper. My search, necessarily fast and superficial, had not turned up anything useful.

  Fredericks pursed his lips slightly in irritation, then let the expression fade as he turned back to Walburn. “Nobody’s questioning the fact that the ladder was cut, Donald,” he said, “no more than anybody’s questioning the fact that Frank DeWitt is dead. But the person who arranged all these accidents wasn’t trying to hurt you in particular any more than he was trying to kill Frank DeWitt. Don’t you see that?”

  “All I see,” Walburn said, his voice harsh and low, as though he was unused to using it, “is that I got a broken leg, and somebody did it on purpose. How do I know all them things weren’t aimed at hurting me?”

  Marilyn Nazarro, across the table from me, said,

  “Why, Mr. Walburn, that’s just the sort of thing you said you weren’t going to believe any more.”

  “Well, maybe I was just right to begin with,” Walburn told her.

  “We’ve gone through this before, Donald,” Fredericks said, and proceeded to go through it again. While he did, I looked around at the others sitting at the long ov
al table in the group therapy room. I was midway along the right side, with Beth Tracy to my right and Doctor Fredericks past her at the head of the table. To my left was George Bartholomew, and then an empty chair, and then Donald Walburn, sitting apart from the rest of us but not quite all the way around to the foot of the table.

  Across the way, Bob Gale sat on Fredericks’ other side. Bob wasn’t a suspect, but in order not to raise any questions in the others’ minds he had to be present, since he’d been scheduled all along for the afternoon session.

  To Bob’s right sat Marilyn Nazarro, looking at Donald Walburn with friendly concern. Past her was an empty space, not quite wide enough for someone else to sit there, and then Rose Ackerson, watching each speaker in turn with a guarded expression on her face. Beyond Rose, and in a sense hidden by her, shielded by her, was Molly Schweitzler, and when I got my first look at her I blinked in astonishment. Was it possible for a person to noticeably gain weight overnight? Or was that apparent new heaviness simply a new laxity in the way Molly held her head and her body? She looked fatter, and as I watched her hand came up from her lap and put something in her mouth. She was looking at no one in particular, she seemed absorbed in idle daydreamy interior thoughts of her own, and she slowly chewed and swallowed what she’d put in her mouth. Then her hand came up again, and fed her some more.

  What did she have in her lap? A bag of candy, maybe, or a piece of cake. Something that she could just keep nibbling at throughout the session, the taste in her mouth distracting her from all outside pressures, from all thought.

  Sometimes there’s a fascination in repugnant things, and that was true at that moment of Molly Schweitzler. I watched her until I felt Rose Ackerson glaring at me, and then I reluctantly turned my eyes and my attention away and tried to concentrate on what I was here for.

  Walburn was still talking, arguing with whomever would answer back. His point remained the same; that the accident that had broken his leg had been specifically aimed at him, and that all the others had probably been aimed at him. He spoke with a gloomy sort of satisfaction, as though having finally learned to live with the worst, he thought he could maybe go on from here. I looked past George Bartholomew at Walburn’s pinched face, and I found it impossible to believe he was acting. He really did suspect himself to be the intended victim of a scattergun plot with who knew how many plotters. And if that were true, how could he have been the one to set the traps?