Wax Apple (14 page)

“Prison?” He stared around the room, as though it were disappearing. “But—what would happen to The Midway?”

“I don’t know. That isn’t the point now, anyway. The question is what’s going to happen to us.”

He blinked at me, frowning in heavy concentration. “But what else can we do? The police will be coming whether we call them in or not. Could we keep them from finding out it’s murder?”

“No. The injurer has been careless with saw marks before, and I’m sure he was this time, too. It will obviously be murder.”

“Could we pretend we didn’t know any of the other accidents had been done on purpose?”

“Not any longer,” I said. “My cover is blown now, no matter what we do at this point. Merrivale and the others who were with us upstairs know I’m not a regular resident now. They may not know who I am exactly, but they will know I’m a ringer. At least one of them will be bound to tell the police.”

“I see,” he said. “And then the police will want to know just what you were investigating here.”

“Which would make things even worse than telling the truth in the first place.”

“Yes, it would.” He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have no experience in this sort of thing, I don’t claim to be an expert in hiding things from the police—”

“Nobody’s an expert at a situation like this,” I told him. “Not you, and not me. We’ve got to work something out together.”

He looked at me. “Do
you
have any ideas?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking of a couple of things, but I don’t know if they’d work.”

“Such as what?”

“What if we didn’t report it at all?” I asked him. “What if we put the body in the garage until tomorrow? Then we could have a meeting of all the residents and explain what’s going on, and ask them to help us by keeping their own mouths shut until tomorrow. That would give us one more day to try to find the injurer. If we could turn the murderer over to the police at the same time we turn over the body, it might keep them from poking too deep into what’s going on here.”

He was shaking his head long before I finished, and when I was done talking he said, “I’m sorry, but that would never work. You have twenty individuals out there, each with his or her own problems. In the first place, it wouldn’t be fair to load this problem on top—”

“We really don’t have the leisure,” I said, “to think about what’s fair and what isn’t.”

“That isn’t the most important objection,” he said. “I can think of a good half-dozen of the residents who I guarantee you would not keep quiet if we asked them to. Merrivale, for one. Helen Dorsey. Molly Schweitzler. Phil Roche.”

“All right,” I said. “You’re right.”

“All we would succeed in doing—” he said, and the door opened and Fredericks came in. We both turned and looked at him.

His lip was no longer bleeding, but it looked puffy.

There were vertical frown lines creasing his forehead, and his eyes had lost that look of absolute certainty which had always been one of the most infuriating things about him. He looked bewildered now, which made him seem much more human and bearable, and he was even tentative about coming in, saying, “Am I intruding?”

Doctor Cameron looked at me to find out the answer, which I found embarrassing, and I hastily said, “Of course not. We could use your help.”

He came in, shutting the door behind him, and said, “Gale is standing over the body. Kanter and Debby Lattimore are watching the front door and the telephone. They seemed the most trustworthy for the job.”

Doctor Cameron said, “It seems we have more of a problem than I thought, Lorimer. Come sit down.”

Fredericks sat on the sofa beside Cameron, who then told him what I’d outlined about our situation, and why we neither wanted to tell the local police the truth nor could we think of any satisfactory way of lying. He told Fredericks my wild stab of an idea to have all the residents lie for us and gave his objections to it, finishing, “When you came in, I was just saying that all we would succeed in doing was getting those residents in trouble who did lie for us, and giving the others something extra to feel guilty about.”

“I can see it’s no good,” I said. “But I can’t think of anything else.”

Fredericks said, “We have to admit you aren’t a bona fide resident, there isn’t any choice in that any more. Merrivale and some of the others have already figured that much out for themselves.”

Cameron said, “There’s nothing to do but admit the truth and hope for the best.”

I said, “There is no best if we tell the truth. Believe me, there’s nothing but trouble for all three of us. We’ll be a lot simpler for the local police to think about than the murderer, because they’ll have us and they’ll have to look for the murderer, and I doubt they’ll be very good at it.”

Fredericks said, “What if we claimed we hired you for some other reason? We didn’t know the accidents were planned, it was something else entirely that we wanted you for.”

Cameron, who was being totally fatalistic and defeatist now, said, “What else could there be? All we have is the accidents.”

“We have Dewey,” Fredericks said. “We could say we’d become aware that there was someone hiding in the building, living here who wasn’t supposed to be, but we couldn’t find him. That’s what we hired you for.”

Cameron was delighted. “That’s brilliant, Lorimer! That would answer all the questions in a nutshell. Mr. Tobin, wouldn’t that work?”

“Well,” I said, “it gets you two off the hook, but it leaves me on, because it still has me performing as a private investigator without a license.”

Fredericks said, “How serious is that?”

“They could jail me for it. It would be extreme, but they could if they wanted to. With my background, they might want to.”

“Would your background have to come out?”

“I imagine,” I said, “they’ll check into everybody’s background, and particularly into mine, once they know I’m a plant.”

Cameron had the grace to say, “That doesn’t seem right. You shouldn’t be left to face the music alone.”

Fredericks said, “Psychic research? What about that? Ghosts and poltergeists, that sort of thing. You came up here to do some poltergeist research, and the poltergeist turned out to be Dewey. You don’t have to be a licensed investigator to do psychic research, do you?”

“No, you don’t,” I said, “but I don’t think we could make the story stand up. We three would be the only ones in the building to even mention poltergeists or anything like that. None of the residents would know of any manifestations, and it wouldn’t take a very bright cop to begin to wonder why not.”

Fredericks grimaced. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” he said.

Cameron said, “What if you weren’t taking money?”

I looked at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, you have to have a license to practice as a private detective, but doesn’t that mean to be
employed
as a private detective?”

“I suppose so,” I said. I was dubious about where he was going with this idea.

He said, “Then, if we weren’t going to pay you, you wouldn’t be breaking the law, would you?”

“Probably not. But why am I doing it for free?”

He spread his hands, glossing over the difficulty. “You wanted to donate your time,” he said. “We struck you as a worthy cause.”

“I don’t think I’d be believed,” I said.

Fredericks said, “What about barter?”

I said, “A trade? What for what?”

“Your skill for ours,” he said. “You say your background will come out in any case, so why not take advantage of it? Since your dismissal from the New York police force you’ve been despondent, can’t work, so on and so on. We had this Dewey problem. You didn’t feel that you wanted to commit yourself to an actual institution, and you couldn’t afford private psychoanalysis, so when you heard about our stowaway problem you offered to come spend a month here and help us look for Dewey in return for our giving you what therapeutic help we could.”

I said, “How did we find out about each other?”

Fredericks said, “The same way you did in real life, through Detective Kengelberg.”

Cameron told me, “A classmate of mine is Detective Kengelberg’s cousin, and sent me on to him. Then he in turn sent me on to you. That’s truly the way it happened.”

Fredericks said, “Anything wrong with that?”

“I don’t think so,” I admitted. “It should have a plausible sound to it.”

“That’s all we can hope for,” he said.

“It’s more than I expected,” I told him. “Doctor Fredericks, you have my respect. You’re a clutch-hitter.”

He made a tight smile. “I have my uses,” he said.

“And I apologize again for hitting you. I did it without thinking.”

“Naturally. If you’d thought you wouldn’t have done it, I realize that.”

“I am sorry for it.”

He smiled again, more broadly, and touched a fingertip to his puffy lip. “I found it very interesting,” he said.

I bet he did, at that.

V
IOLENT DEATH BRINGS THINGS
to a head. The echo inside The Midway had become a vibration, a tension, a hum. Faces looked paler and thinner, eyes were more prominent, bodies moved with a new awkwardness. Voices were more hushed.

And no one wanted to be alone. No general announcement had been made to the effect that the death of Dewey was classifiable as murder, but an aura of danger was nevertheless in the air, and people tended to flock together. It was lunchtime, so it was to the dining room that everybody gravitated, and no one wanted to be the first to leave.

I sat at a table with Bob Gale and Walter Stoddard and Jerry Kanter, we four being among the first arrivals, and I watched the room gradually fill up until everyone was present except Doris Brady, the culture-shock Peace Corps girl, and Nicholas Fike, the frail alcoholic. Neither of those two ever did come in for lunch that day.

But everyone else did. Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, our two blond young football player types, were at the table to my right. George Bartholomew and Donald Walburn, two of those already injured, were to my left at a table with Phil Roche and Edgar Jennings, two of the ping-pong players eliminated as suspects.

The room, in fact, had become sexually segregated, with three tables of men on one side of the room and three tables of women on the other side. Across from the table containing Bartholomew and Roche and Walburn and Jennings sat Debby Lattimore, with Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy, Beth being another of the non-suspects from the ping-pong room. Across from my table was one seating Helen Dorsey, the compulsive housekeeper, along with Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett, my last two suspects, both of whom I was seeing for the first time. All I could say was that they both looked appropriate to their dossiers, Ruth Ehrengart a thin and washed-out woman who looked like someone who’d had a nervous breakdown after the birth of her tenth child, and Ivy Pollett also thin, but dryer, chalkier, the right appearance for a fortyish spinster who’d devoted her life to an ailing mother and, after the mother’s death, gradually built up a many-faceted persecution complex involving attempted rapes and counterspies and all sorts of obscure plots. Was either of those two guilty of murder? Had Ivy Pollett, for instance, started to believe in the plots and the persecution again and had she started laying traps for her enemies?

But that kind of theorizing was no good. As I’d already seen in the past, a workable irrational motive could be developed out of the dossier of anyone in this room. That wasn’t the way I was going to find the murderer. If I ever did find him.

Jerry Kanter rapped his knuckles softly on the table to get my attention, and gave a meaningful nod of his head. “Look at that.”

He had meant the last table, across the way and to the right, where Rose Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler, whose accident had been the first round in this war, were sitting by themselves. I looked over there, and Rose was spoon-feeding Molly her lunch. Rose wore an expression of pleasurable concern, and Molly looked like a mournful child. Since Rose’s mental problems had started when she had kidnapped a baby in her desperation for a substitute for her own grown-up and departed children, and since Molly was a woman with a record of gross and compulsive overeating when emotionally upset, it was not the healthiest sight in the dining room. But it was only the most blatant sign of what was going on at all the tables. There wasn’t a person in this room, except for me, who hadn’t emerged from a mental hospital at some time within the last four or five months. The aura that had overtaken The Midway, the new feel of the place rather than any specific threat or danger, was unsettling these people in disturbing ways. Hard-won victories were being recontested inside every brain in the room.

Jerry Kanter himself was another example. He watched Rose Ackerson feeding Molly Schweitzler her lunch, and he thought it was funny. A kind of savage pleasure had taken hold of him, and he couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to. “Isn’t that the damnedest thing you ever saw?” he said. “Just look at those two.”

“I see them,” I said, and looked away. I was more interested in watching those still on my suspect list.

Ethel Hall, for instance. She was serving as waitress at this meal, and her nervousness was so intense it was a miracle she hadn’t yet dropped any of the plates she was carrying. She would talk to no one, meet no one’s eye. She was the figure of fun, the lesbian librarian, and there was a certain amount of high-strung nervousness in her background. Was it the atmosphere in here today that was making her so jittery, or was she the injurer and was it the knowledge she was now a murderess that had unstrung her?

Or the two young men at the table to my right, Merrivale and O’Hara. They both had chips on their shoulders now, they were silent with one another; it was perfectly obvious that if either of them said a word, the other one would be at his throat. It wasn’t that they were angry at one another—they were like nervous lions in a cage, who take out their upset by attacking one another. Both from time to time spent a few seconds glaring at me, Merrivale in particular, and I doubted I would manage to leave The Midway without Merrivale making at least one attempt to settle scores with me.