Authors: Donald E Westlake
Wax Apple (26 page)
“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.
T
HREE 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.”
Stewart Remington? The name surprised me; it was one of the six I’d read to Eddie Schultz over the phone last week. So Cornell’s lawyer was one of his suspects.
I said, “He should get another lawyer.”
“I suppose he should. But he doesn’t know how to tell Remington he wants somebody else, and he doesn’t know any other lawyers.”
“He’s helpless, in other words.”
Kate frowned at me. “You say that as though you think he’s being a weakling or something. He really
is
helpless. He’s in the hospital with half a dozen broken bones, there’s a police guard on him, there’s a detective with a vendetta against him, and he doesn’t know what to do next. He
is
helpless.”
“There’s nothing for me to do,” I said, because I knew that was the question behind all this:
Will you do something, Mitch?
“With my background,” I said, “if I went to Manzoni’s captain, it would just put the icing on the cake. Cornell would
really
be in the soup.”
“He’s really in the soup now.”
“Well, what do you
want
from me?” I was getting exasperated. She clearly wanted something, she had it in mind there was something I could do, but she wouldn’t come out and ask me. She just kept on describing Cornell’s predicament. It was true that he was in deep trouble, but it was also true there was no sensible way I could help him.
So she said, “I want you to find the killer.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what someone like Manzoni would do to me if he found me poking around, trying to open a case that he wants shut?”
“I hadn’t expected an answer like that from you, Mitch. I expected you to say no at first, but not for that reason.”
“I have my moments of bravery,” I said, “like any other man. But I also have my moments of prudence. I don’t see where this affair is any of my business. I want to stay away from it.”
“It’s a terrible miscarriage of justice,” she said.
“Kate, there are terrible miscarriages of justice every day, in every city under the sun. There are three billion people on earth, and most of them will be treated shabbily and cruelly and even violently at least once in their lives. That isn’t a
reason,
Kate, for me to stick my neck out.”
“He needs your help, Mitch. He asked for your help. He has nobody else to turn to.”
I could feel it closing in on me. “Kate, what on earth could I do? Even if I tried, what could I do? I can make some phone calls and find him a good lawyer, that would be the best thing.”
“A lawyer won’t beat Manzoni,” she said, “not if Manzoni is determined. You know that, Mitch.”
“Eventually—”
“Eventually? After a year, two years? Even six months, Mitch. Put someone like Ronald Cornell in an asylum for six months? What do you think it would do to him?”
I said, “There’s no reason to believe I’d succeed, even if I did try.”
“That’s the worst excuse of all,” she said.
I looked down at the hole I was digging, the concrete blocks I was putting in place. I didn’t want to leave all this. I didn’t want to expose myself to anybody like Detective Manzoni, I didn’t want to pry into the unhappy world that Ronald Cornell lived in, I didn’t want to go out of this house at all.
Kate said, “I talked to him about money.”
I looked up at her in surprise. “Money?”
“He wouldn’t want you to do it for nothing,” she said. “And we could use more money.”
Neither of us looked directly at the new stacks of supplies that had just been delivered, but all at once I was almost painfully conscious of them; in the corner of my vision.
I said, “What kind of money were you talking about?”
“He told me his store has been averaging a profit of about twenty thousand dollars a year, but they’ve been putting a lot of it back into the business, for a wider stock and redecorating the store and advertising and so on. So they don’t have a lot of money in cash. But now that his partner is dead, Ronald owns the whole business outright, so he offered us a part ownership. Fifteen percent.”
“Fifteen percent of the store? For how long?”
“Forever. For as long as the store stays open. If the profit keeps on the same as before, that’s three thousand dollars a year, every year. We could use something like that, Mitch.”
Of course we could. Who couldn’t use extra income every year, with no work done for it?
Except at the beginning, of course. Work would have to be done for it at the beginning.
I said, “To be paid to us if I find the killer?”
“No. Regardless of what happens, just if you’ll agree to try.”
I shook my head. “I won’t do it that way. If I don’t succeed, I don’t want any payment.”
“Well, that would be up to you,” she said, and from the sudden lightening of her expression I saw that she had taken my last statement to mean that I was agreeing to take on the job.
And what else could I do? I remembered Ronald Cornell in this basement, timid and weak and ineffective, but pushing himself to be more, because his friend had been killed. Taking his coat and boots off before finding out if there was anyone at home or not, because he was determined to wait if the house was empty. It had to have been a strain for him to come to me, to come out of himself, to act. Just as it would be a strain for me.
Kate was saying, “I told the police I was his aunt, that’s how they let me in. And I said his uncle might be coming to visit him, too.”
“Did you see Manzoni at all?”
“No, and I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Does he have special visiting hours?”
“Yes. You could see him tonight, if you wanted, between seven-thirty and nine.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go see him tonight.”
“Thank you, Mitch,” she said.
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Copyright © 1970 by Tucker Coe
Cover design by Alexander Doolan
978-1-4804-2895-9
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