Wax Apple (10 page)

Why George Bartholomew had been released after nine years in an institution I had no idea, unless it was a case of overcrowding and of releasing the least violent and dangerous patients. George Bartholomew was hardly cured, though he did limit his kleptomania to stores and never stole from people he knew. But it had been in fact his magpie or pack rat personality that had led him to open that rarely used closet in the first place. I looked at him now, and on his battered face was nothing more than a meek man’s helpless sympathy for someone who’d been hurt.

There was a brisk discussion taking place between Helen Dorsey and Doctor Cameron. She wanted Kay picked up and put on the bed, to make her more comfortable, but Doctor Cameron didn’t want her moved until the ambulance team arrived and could determine the extent of the girl’s injuries. While the talk went on, I continued to watch the faces, and then noticed that Doctor Fredericks was watching mine.

I met his eye, expecting him to look away, but he continued to study me, the skepticism in his expression deepening into a kind of angry and humorous challenge. He was clearly saying,
Here is another of your failures, what are you going to do about it?

Could it be him after all, could it possibly be him? I was like a poor poker player then, holding a hand that intelligence said should be folded, and yet studying it, studying it, trying to find some combination of cards and possibilities that would justify staying in the hand just a little longer. I wanted Doctor Fredericks to be guilty, he had the personality for it and it would soothe me tremendously if he were actually the one, but I knew it was stupid and fruitless to dwell on him, that my injurer was elsewhere.

In this room? What was the likelihood of the injurer coming to look at what he had done? Whatever satisfaction he found in causing pain and injury to his fellow residents, wouldn’t it be increased by actually looking upon the result of his labors? I looked again at the faces around me. Walter Stoddard, Helen Dorsey, Doris Brady, Robert O’Hara, Jerry Kanter, all from my active list. Some sort of unreasonable motive could be worked up for any one of them, which wasn’t much help, and there was nothing in any of their faces to offer me a hint or a suggestion. The only faces showing anything other than variants on sympathy, in fact, were those of Rose Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler, who weren’t even among my suspects, and whose preoccupation with the reaction to this accident was understandable, given the general reaction to their own.

Helen Dorsey, thwarted in her desire to move Kay Prendergast onto the bed, made up for it by moving the rest of us out of the room instead. “We’ve all seen enough,” she said briskly. “Let’s go on about our business now.” And herded us all out to the hall.

Groups almost always obey orders given in a loud confident voice, and this time was no exception. We all trailed outside. Most of the others were reluctant, but I was just as glad to be away from the unconscious girl and the skeptical eyes of Doctor Fredericks. While the rest stood around in chatting pairs and trios in the hall, I walked away from them and headed for my own room, moving with the reluctant watchfulness of a man threading his way through a minefield, which in many ways is exactly what I was.

I didn’t try to do any coherent thinking until I was in the safety of my own room, and then I found myself wondering about Dewey again. I’d been automatically rejecting him from my list of suspects, but that really wasn’t a sensible thing to do. He was at least a stowaway, and who knew what else he might be? And why was I so resisting the thought of him as a possible suspect?

I lay on my bed, frowning at the ceiling, and concentrated on Dewey, forcing myself to think past my conviction of him as a gentle and harmless little man, forcing myself to find out
why
I thought about him the way I did. And I finally decided there were two reasons for it. First, Doctor Fredericks had at once jumped to the assumption that Dewey was our man, and I would tend inevitably to take the other side in any dispute involving him. It was true that Fredericks had come off that initial assumption somewhat, claiming an open mind until we could find Dewey and question him, but the first impression was still there, and very strong. And secondly, Dewey was somehow a teammate of mine, a fellow tribe member or some such thing. Not only were the two of us the interlopers here, the ones who didn’t belong and who were keeping the truth from general awareness, but I had also felt in him some kinship with my own mental set, as though there were some connecting link between my desire to build my wall and his desire to stow away inside this building.

But neither reason was good enough. Someone was setting these traps, and if it was true that some sort of unreasonable motive could be worked up for any of the people on my suspect list, it was just as true that the same thing could be done with Dewey. Even more readily, in fact, since I knew so much less about him. I mean by that, I could give him any motive I wanted for living hidden away in this house, and it wouldn’t be hard to connect it with a motive for hurting the bona fide residents.

Starting, of course, with the fact that they
are
bona fide residents, as he is not. Or with the idea that he wanted the building to himself and was jealous of anyone else living here.

The point was, there were too many questions about Dewey to leave him off the suspect list. I’d done so out of emotional reasons, which was stupid and unprofessional, and it should at least be possible for me to remain professional.

It was the place, somehow, the aura and atmosphere of The Midway itself. The feeling of sitting on a powder keg, of never knowing when the next accident would be rigged, or what form it would take, or who it would hit. Plus the people themselves, all of them still trailing hints and echoes of their past disturbances. And Doctor Fredericks, who for reasons best known to himself had turned rejection and disapproval into a high art.

I got up from the bed and went over to the writing table and got out my lists, that I’d made earlier today. I was startled by them at first, having forgotten how different and how odd my writing was left-handed. It looked like the work of a child, or a disturbed adult.

I had changes to make on the lists. Holding the paper steady with the cast on my right arm, I crossed Kay Prendergast’s name off on the suspect list and wrote it in on the bottom of the injured list. Then I paused, feeling great reluctance still, but finally went back to the suspect list and wrote at the bottom:

DEWEY

S
OMEONE WAS SITTING ON MY ARM
. I was lying stretched out on a park bench, very late at night, and someone was sitting on my arm. It didn’t really hurt, but I couldn’t move the arm and it was annoying. And then a policeman came along and began to shake my shoulder, wanting me to get up and move along. He thought I was a bum, and I felt very embarrassed and ashamed, thinking how once I had been on the force and now this young rookie was looking down on me for sleeping on a park bench.

I opened my eyes, and Bob Gale whispered, “It’s four o’clock.”

“I was on the force once myself,” I said apologetically, “but there’s someone sitting on my arm.”

“Mr. Tobin,” he whispered, and shook my shoulder again, staring into my eyes. “Wake up, it’s four o’clock.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m sorry, I was dreaming.” I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “I’ll be right along,” I said.

“All right,” he whispered. “Be seeing you.” And he tiptoed out of the room, closing the door carefully behind himself.

I felt so old. I pushed the covers off with my good hand and put my legs over the side and got heavily to my feet, and every movement was accompanied by the creaking and aching of my joints. Bob had turned on an overhead light and I stood squinting beneath it, wanting not to be called upon.

But there was no choice. It turns out there never is a choice, only the occasional illusion to keep us interested. Life is ten per cent carrot and ninety per cent stick.

I dressed, in my clumsy awkward way, and went down the hall to the bathroom to wash my face one-handed, an unsatisfactory experience. The frustration woke me more than the water did, and by the time I shuffled back to the room to fill my pockets and switch loafers for slippers I was awake again and capable of a limited interest in what was going on around me.

Kay Prendergast had been taken away to the hospital with a skull fracture. I had napped for a while in the afternoon, and had Jerry Kanter and William Merrivale and Bob Gale for dinner companions. The room was full, almost all the residents tending to take dinner at the same time, but it seemed to me unusually quiet for so many people. This final accident, the sixth in less than a month, had apparently been the critical one, pushing a kind of awareness suddenly into everybody’s mind at once. I had noticed many of the residents glancing at my injured arm, thoughtfully. None of them had any definite suspicions yet, but a feeling of trouble was in the air. They were like a herd of deer suddenly smelling something in a stray breeze.

Jerry Kanter, in fact, had been one of the few people in the room oblivious to the general aura, and I found myself wondering if this blithe insensitivity of his was a form of padding given him in the process of his cure or if it was a natural element of his personality, perhaps the element that had made it possible for him to take that rifle downtown that day. The murder of people you know requires emotion, but the murder of perfect strangers requires a dull insensibility.

At any rate, Jerry had chattered happily throughout dinner, while the rest of us at the table, feeling the general tension, sat mostly silent. William Merrivale, the father-beater, had sat sullen and rebellious most of the time, head down, throwing occasional mulish glances at Jerry as though he’d like to shut him up by direct means. Bob Gale had been kept silent not only by the atmosphere in the dining room but also by his all-too-apparent fear of inadvertently exposing our conspiracy, a fear that communicated itself to me and made me even more nervous than I was already. All in all, I was just as pleased when dinner was finished and I could get out of there.

I had spent the evening in various public rooms, watching ping-pong or reading magazines or whatever, getting into brief conversations with other residents whenever I could do so without seeming to push too hard. I was trying for nothing more than to get to know my suspects a little better, and had ended the evening with no further enlightenment.

About ten o’clock the two doctors and Bob Gale and I had met in Doctor Cameron’s office. Doctor Cameron told me Kay Prendergast’s chair showed the marks of having been tampered with, and Bob Gale said it had to have been done recently as there was still sawdust on the carpet under where the chair had stood. Doctor Fredericks moved that we call in the local police at once, as no one present seemed capable of doing anything constructive about what was an extremely dangerous situation, but he wasn’t serious about it, merely turning the knife, and when we ignored him he didn’t pursue the question.

We had discussed Dewey, and the fact that he had to be considered a prime suspect, and that the first order of the day was to get hold of him and question him, either to remove him if he turned out to be the menace in our midst, or remove him from the top of the suspect list if he should turn out to be innocent. I had suggested that the best time to go in search of him would be very early in the morning, before anyone else was up, when I had seen him the last time, and Bob Gale volunteered to get himself up and the rest of us awake by four o’clock. We would then meet in Doctor Cameron’s office and start our search from there, traveling in pairs.

So now it was four o’clock, and after five hours of uncomfortable and restless sleep I didn’t at all want to go downstairs to Doctor Cameron’s trusting patience or Doctor Fredericks’ needling or Bob Gale’s boyish eagerness. Once again I was thinking of home, and more particularly of my wall, and I regretted the fact that there hadn’t been a train back to New York right away when I’d arrived in Kendrick. I would have no broken arm now, and no complicated relationships with other people, and no troubled mind to concern myself with but my own. The house would be empty for a month, I could have it all to myself, and wouldn’t that right away lighten the burden? However sincere was Kate’s forgiveness, however much she truly cared for me and truly wanted to help me, there was no way she could avoid being a reminder of what I’d done and what had happened to me as a result.

Maybe I’d been too hasty in my estimation of Walter Stoddard’s wife. But then again, all estimations of human beings are too hasty, no final judgment can ever be made, there’s always more to learn, more colors to alter the portrait.

What would the portrait of Dewey be, once I found him again? Wondering that, I left the room and went down the hall and at the first turn there was Dewey, standing there with a small patient smile on his face, obviously waiting for me. “Hello, Mr. Tobin,” he said.

“Hello,” I said, trying to show nothing. We had intended to search in pairs exactly to avoid this sort of situation. I was not, one-armed, going to be able to capture Dewey. Nor did I want to frighten him into hiding. “Off to get another midnight snack,” I said.

“May I walk with you?”

“Delighted,” I said.

He fell in beside me and we walked toward the rear stairs. He was subtly different from what I remembered, like a second signature from the same person, almost identical but not quite. He seemed somehow less harmless, more mysterious and unknown, his smile less honest, his body less weak. Of course, on that first meeting I didn’t know he was a stowaway, and this time I did. Knowing there was in fact something very strange about him made him seem more strange. Whether this was the full explanation, or if in fact he was more menacing tonight, I had no way to tell for sure.

We walked to the stairs in silence and started down them, and he said, “Did you find your ring?”

I drew a blank. “I beg your pardon?”

“The ring you lost when you hurt your arm,” he reminded me. “You were looking for it when we met.”