Wax Apple (13 page)

And it was empty. I stuck my head in farther, I looked all around, and there was nobody there.

There was something to my left, a break in the wall past the end of the closet partition. I craned my neck, but could see nothing, and finally went on through the opening, moving on hand and knees, my broken right arm in its cast cumbersomely in my way.

I could stand inside, with two-by-four framework all around me. I edged down to the break in the partition and looked around the corner, and there was Dewey’s home.

This space was much bigger, four feet wide and possibly a dozen feet long, with a rough stone wall at the far end, undoubtedly the new outer wall where the main entrance had originally been. Dim gray light seeped in from everywhere, cracks and chinks in walls and ceiling, and I could make out most of the details of Dewey’s hidden room. There was a mattress on the floor down at the far end, with blankets neatly tucked in all around and two pillows in white cases leaning against the wall. Nearer, there was a wooden kitchen chair beside a wide shelf that had been attached to the two-by-fours on the side wall. Clothing hung from nails and hooks, and just to my left a small mirror dangled from a loop of wire nailed to a two-by-four. Some of the horizontal pieces in the wall framework had been used for bookshelves and to hold small personal items. There were also several candles around in different kinds of holders, none of them at the moment lit.

And the place was empty. It had the aura and feel of a lived-in room, but right now the owner was elsewhere.

Then what had that scuttling been, the sound I’d heard when I’d first pulled the piece of Sheetrock away? Perhaps it really had been mice after all.

No. Dewey was too neat, too fastidious a man. There would be no mice in this room, it was a human habitation no matter how much it was a place inside the walls. The scuttling had not been mice.

Was there another way out? I moved slowly along, studying the walls, poking at places that looked the slightest suspicious, but there was nothing. The only entrance seemed to be the one through which I’d entered.

Up? I looked up, and above me were the stringers, the two-by-twelve beams on which the upstairs floor was laid. I went over and got one of the candles, lit it, and by its light I began to study the ceiling.

And there it was. In the far corner, out of Dewey’s living area entirely and down the opposite way from the closet entrance, the space between the last two stringers was empty, no flooring, nothing but a square of darkness. Far up through the hole the flickering candlelight hinted at more two-by-fours, the uncompleted inside of another wall. And down in front of me I could see the indentations and marks on the horizontal pieces of framework he used as his ladder.

“Mr. Tobin?”

Bob Gale’s voice. I turned and called, “Come in! Have you got a flashlight?”

His head appeared in the entrance at the other end of this long narrow space. He blinked at me open-mouthed, then said, “No. You want me to get one?”

“Never mind, you can use this candle. Come in, come in.”

I edged down to the break in the wall, the entrance to Dewey’s bedroom, and waited impatiently for Bob to crawl through, get to his feet, and come sideways down to me. He looked past my shoulder at Dewey’s room and said, “Son of a gun!”

“Yes, isn’t it? Did you bring Doctor Cameron with you?”

“Sure.”

Doctor Fredericks’ voice said, “Tobin?”

I looked over, and his disembodied head was jutting through the wall at knee-height, over there at the closet entrance. He looked foolish that way, and he was obviously aware of it, and I was delighted. I also felt savage joy at having been proved right, but I could wait to collect on that. I said, “Fredericks, you go upstairs. You and Doctor Cameron. He’ll be popping out up there somewhere.”

“What makes you think that?” He wanted to be argumentative again.

“Do what I say, you idiot,” I snapped at him. “Argue with me later on. Now get upstairs.” I turned away from him and said, more quietly, “Bob, there’s a hole in the ceiling down at the far end. I can’t get up there one-armed. Dewey went up there. Will you go up after him?”

“Sure!” He was happy as a boy allowed to play with the big kids.

“He won’t fight you,” I said. “At least, I don’t think he will. But he’ll try to run away.”

“I can hold him,” he said, full of confidence.

“All right. You go first, and I’ll hand the candle up to you.” I looked back the other way, and Fredericks was gone. I could only hope he was doing what I’d told him.

Bob edged down to the far end of the narrow passage, and I followed him. He climbed up the framework quickly, and into the hole above, pausing at the last stage to reach down and take the candle from my upstretched hand. Then he went on up.

I called, “See anything?”

“Narrow up here. Same as down there. It turns, down at the other end, I’ll go take a look.”

“I’ll go around and come up the stairs,” I called. “Be gentle with him, if you can.”

“Okay.”

I turned away, hurrying sideways back to the closet entrance, crawling through, and stumbling to my feet inside. I left the closet and went through the storage room and out to the hall, where a couple of passing residents looked at me oddly. I knew I was probably sooty and sweaty again from crawling around between the walls, so not only were we out to capture the wrong person, but I was also more than likely in the process of blowing my cover here. How would we operate after this, to get the injurer? I had no idea.

I went up the front stairs, moving as quickly as I could, but before I was halfway I heard shouting up there, several people shouting, and Bob Gale’s voice above them all, yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

I lunged up the stairs, panting and gasping, and turned in the direction of all the noise, which abruptly stopped. Did they have him? I ran on, and ahead of me the corridor turned left. I trotted around the corner, and at the far end of the hall people were clustered at an open window, looking out, leaning forward and looking over one another’s shoulders.

I came up to them, seeing Bob Gale and Doctor Fredericks in the front rank, both leaning out the window and looking down, with Doctor Cameron and Jerry Kanter and Robert O’Hara behind them, and William Merrivale and Marilyn Nazarro and Walter Stoddard making up a third row.

I stopped behind them, gasping for breath, and said, “What happened?”

They didn’t answer. They were immobile, like a piece of sculpture, or like worshippers at some strange shrine. Marilyn Nazarro, too short to see past the others’ shoulders, was bobbing up and down, the only one of them in any kind of motion.

I said, “Bob. What’s the matter?”

Bob turned, his movement dislodging everyone else, breaking the spell that had been holding them all. He looked back, saw me, and drew his head in from the window. “He’s out here, Mr. Tobin,” he said, his voice and manner much more muted than usual.

Now the others turned to look at me, and moved back to give me room. Doctor Cameron said, “We saw him go. He went out on the fire escape. We have wooden fire escapes, you know.”

I went into the space they’d cleared, and leaned to look out the window. At my elbow, Bob Gale said, “It gave way.” I looked out.

There had been a wooden platform outside the window, constructed of wide planks, with two sets of steps leading from it, one up and the other down. Three of the planks now hung straight down against the rear wall of the house, leaving a hole in the platform nearly three feet wide.

Behind me, Doctor Cameron said, “He was in a panic, of course, or he wouldn’t have gone all the way through, he would have grabbed hold of the rail or some such thing. But he was too frightened and in too much of a hurry to think.”

I looked down through the hole, and down below there was blacktop between here and the garage. Lying face down on the blacktop, his arms and legs twisted in a shape vaguely reminiscent of a swastika, was Dewey, his head at an angle to his neck that is impossible in life.

Behind me, Bob Gale said, “I kept shouting to him to stop, but he wouldn’t.”

I drew back in and turned around, and they were all looking at me.

Doctor Fredericks said, “So it seems you were right after all.”

I hit him in the mouth.

I
HAD TAKEN EVERYBODY
completely by surprise, including myself. The swing had been awkward, since I’d only had the one hand to work with, but it had a lot of pent-up anger and frustration behind it, and all the weight of my rather stocky body, and it caught Fredericks flush on the mouth. He staggered backwards, eyes round with astonishment, arms pinwheeling, and I stumbled after him, not trying to hit him any more but just to regain my balance.

Bystanders kept us both from falling, and once I had myself both physically and emotionally under control again I turned to Doctor Cameron and said, “We have to talk. In private.”

He was as shocked as Fredericks. “After what you—”

I didn’t have time for that. “We have to talk,” I insisted. “Before the police get here.”

The word
police
got through to him. He blinked and said, “My God. Yes, you’re right. In my office.”

“Good.” I turned to Bob Gale, saying, “You go down and stand beside that body. Nobody is to move it, nobody is to come near it.”

“All right,” he said. He seemed stunned, whether by Dewey’s death or my hitting Fredericks I didn’t know.

I turned to Fredericks, whose upper lip was cut and bleeding. He was dabbing at it with a handkerchief and looking at me as though he still couldn’t believe it had happened. I said, “I’m sorry I did that. It was a momentary loss of emotional control.”

He nodded, continuing to watch me.

I told him, “I want you to see to it that nobody leaves here and nobody makes any phone calls until the police arrive.”

He nodded again. “I understand,” he said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief.

William Merrivale, the father-beater, said to me, “Just who made you boss?” He was glowering at me, a look his father had probably gotten to know rather well.

I said, “You’ll find out what’s going on as soon as everybody else does. Doctor Cameron, let’s—”

Merrivale reached out and pushed my shoulder. “I was talking to you.”

Doctor Cameron said to him, “William, it’s all right. We’ll explain a little later.”

“Where does this guy get off socking people?”

“We don’t have time for this,” I told Cameron.

“I know,” he said. “William, be patient for just a little while. Mr. Tobin, shall we go?”

We went. Bob had already trotted away down the hall to take up his post beside the body, and now the rest of them followed Doctor Cameron and me toward the stairs. I could hear Merrivale back there, asking Fredericks insistent questions, and Fredericks answering in informationless monosyllables.

Neither of us said anything more until we were alone, and we weren’t alone until we were actually inside his office. Then Doctor Cameron said, “This is a terrible situation now.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, and sat down in the chair facing his desk.

He stayed on his feet, pacing around the office in aimless ovals. “I suppose we have no choice,” he said gloomily. “We have to call in the police now.”

“It’s simpler than that,” I told him. “In an accidental death under suspicious circumstances, which is what this is, the police come in whether we want them or not.”

“Now it’s murder, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly. In a court of law, it would be manslaughter. Of course if intent could be proved, then it would be murder. Among other things.”

He stopped and looked at me. “What other things?”

“You and I are guilty of several crimes,” I told him. “I don’t know if you realize that.”

“No, I don’t.” He wasn’t sure whether to be offended or on the defensive, so he was a little of both.

I said, “We have a number of rigged accidents, and we both know they’re rigged accidents, and we don’t report them to the authorities. Causing severe bodily damage, deliberately and maliciously, is a felony. In concealing our knowledge of a felony we have become accessories to the felony and equally guilty with the perpetrator.”

“But there were reasons—”

“I know the reasons. I doubt the local law will care about them. Particularly since this is potentially murder now, as you just pointed out. Because if this last accident is murder, an ambitious small-town D.A. might just try to turn the other accidents into attempted murders, and now we are not only accessories to attempted murder, but you and I, Doctor Cameron, are accessories before the fact to the actual murder of Dewey.”

He backed up to the sofa and sat down hard. “My God,” he said. “You take things that happen in life and reduce them to formulas of words and they completely change their character.”

“That’s what the law is all about,” I told him. “Getting the infinite variety of which human beings are capable broken down into a finite number of lowest common denominators. No defendant in the history of man ever recognized himself in court.”

Doctor Cameron said, dazedly, “This is much much worse than I thought.”

“And there’s another charge against me,” I said. “I’m not licensed to act as a private investigator in this state, or in any state, but that’s exactly what I was acting as here. You’d be an accessory to that, too, but I doubt anybody would concern themselves with you on that score—they’d already have you on a few more important matters. But me, with my past history, they’d gobble me up.”

Doctor Cameron shook his head, like a bull weary of the matador. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He spread his hands, and then looked at them, as though they should contain something helpful. “Try to explain, I suppose,” he said.

“Throw ourselves on the mercy of the local authorities, in other words.”

“I don’t see what else we can do.”

“After what you’ve told me about the local authorities,” I said, “I can see only one result if we do that.”

He looked at me. “What result?”

“Prison sentences for the both of us,” I told him. “And for Doctor Fredericks as well. We could probably keep Bob Gale out of it, unless he insisted on dragging himself in, which he just might do.”