Wax Apple (8 page)

Traveling through The Midway was a constantly unnerving experience, only partly because of the maze-like confusions of the place. The main point, though, was the danger of booby traps. Who knew what unsprung traps were lying around waiting for a victim? I tried to move normally, not to seem odd to the people I passed, but I tended to shuffle and stick close to the walls, like a blind man.

It took a while once again to find my way to my room, and the problems and dangers of the search worked wonders in getting me off my irritation. When I finally walked safely into the room I no longer had any particularly urgent desire to hit Doctor Fredericks in the mouth. I still thought of him as offensive, a naturally offensive man who had found a way within his occupation to turn a personality defect to advantage.

The strange thing was that I didn’t resent his having gotten me to talk about myself. In that regard, I trusted him. I had no doubt he would never use against me what I’d told him. Unless I was in the position of patient, of course, when he would surely hit me over the head with it from time to time just to see what my reactions were. He struck me, all in all, as being one of those medicines worse than the disease it cures.

I was physically weary, but mentally alert, which meant I was soon bored inside my room. Aside from having promised to be here when the doctors had finally straightened things out between them, I really didn’t feel up to wandering around at all, seeking out someone to talk to or anything like that. Within the room there was virtually nothing to occupy my mind, no radio or television set, nothing to read.

Finally, for something to do more than out of any belief I would learn anything, I decided to make a list of the residents, dividing them into those still suspect and those already cleared. I sat at the writing desk with my notebook and pen, and when I was done I had three lists. After the names of those I’d already met I put down some fact about the person to help remind me which one was which. I could have done so with the others, but I was afraid of reducing them too much to an adjective before actually seeing them.

The first list was of the five people other than me who’d so far been injured:

The second list was also five names long, and was those residents accounted for during the time the stair booby trap had been laid:

And the third list, those residents still suspect, ran to twelve names:

Of these twenty-two people, I had so far met fourteen, but most of the eight I was yet to see in person were already eliminated for one reason or another. Edith Wooster, for instance, was still in the hospital following the collapsed terrace. Donald Walburn and George Bartholomew, neither of whom I’d yet run across, had both been involved in accidents. I hadn’t seen Edgar Jennings or Phil Roche or Beth Tracy, but they were among those eliminated by placement when the stairs were rigged. That only left Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett among the active suspects still to be seen in the flesh.

I did already know both women, of course, to some extent, from the dossiers Doctor Cameron had loaned me. I no longer had them, since they would be difficult to explain in my room if someone else stumbled across them, but in my eighteen years on the force I had trained myself to have a good memory for material like that, and I remembered the general outlines of the histories of both Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett.

Ruth Ehrengart was thirty-seven now. Between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one she’d had ten children, all still living. She had begun to be treated medically for extreme nervousness at twenty-seven—merciless comedy wants to edge in here, but I’m sure one look at Ruth Ehrengart’s face will cure that—but the nervousness increased, aggravated by frequent, almost incessant colds. In her thirtieth year a manic-depressive cycle started, its swings at first too long and gentle to be noticed, but then growing more severe, the happy periods verging on hysteria, with insomnia and boundless energy, the downs getting ever lower, with the nervousness giving way to violent irritability or a deadening depression. Shortly after her thirty-second birthday, she took the family car after Mass one Sunday, drove to a highway, and traveled at excess speeds till a state trooper spotted her. She didn’t stop for his siren, but simply went faster than before, the chase at times exceeding one hundred miles an hour and ending at a roadblock set up ahead of her. Her manner with the police and court officials led to her being held over for psychiatric examination, which ultimately led to her voluntary commitment to an institution. Five years later, the institution considered her stable enough to be returned to society, a judgment she obviously wasn’t sure she agreed with or she wouldn’t be here at The Midway.

Ivy Pollett’s problems were almost the exact opposite. A spinster now forty-two, Ivy Pollett had lived with her chronically ill mother all her life, until four years ago she went to the police to declare that a grocery delivery boy had raped her. The boy, when picked up, denied the charge but wasn’t believed until several days later when Miss Pollett went back to the police station to report that her mailman was a Communist spy. When questioned further, it turned out that virtually all the people Miss Pollett came in contact with were spies or rapists or escaped convicts or white slavers. She was aware of a plot being hatched among these people to do away with her because she’d found them out, and when she realized the detectives questioning her were also part of the plot she became hysterical. It had taken four years in a state institution, during which time the chronically ill mother had died, before Ivy Pollett became convinced that she was not at the hub of an intricate plot.

Thinking of these two women and looking at my lists, it occurred to me I’d already met all my male suspects, which meant Dewey from last night had to be on one of the cleared lists. Which was good; he’d seemed harmless enough, and it was pleasant to have him not a suspect.

Well, which one was he? There were only four men on those two lists I hadn’t yet seen, so it was one of those four he had to be. Donald Walburn, George Bartholomew, Edgar Jennings, Phil Roche. I considered the names and dossiers, trying to guess which one would turn out to be Dewey.

Well, it wouldn’t be Donald Walburn, who’d broken his leg with the rigged ladder, because Walburn was still going around on crutches. And George Bartholomew, who had been hit in the face by the metal bed frame, still bore the marks of that accident, so it couldn’t have been him either.

Edgar Jennings. One of the ping-pong players with Bob Gale. Also, before his commitment, a self-exposure on New York City subways. His routine had been to wear a raincoat and a pair of cut-off trouser legs that only reached up to the knee, where they were held by rubber bands. When the raincoat was closed, he seemed to be fully dressed. His habit was to open the raincoat and expose himself to the people in a subway car just before the doors were shut, then jump out onto the platform while the witnesses were all whisked away to the next station.

But Edgar Jennings was thirty-two years old. Dewey was older than that.

Which left Phil Roche. But Phil Roche was a man who’d suffered most of his life from an inferiority complex, in part created and very much aggravated by a defect he had as a result of an illness in infancy. A shriveled left arm, with a useless tiny hand dangling from it higher than his waist.

Dewey hadn’t had a shriveled left arm.

There had to be something wrong somewhere. I frowned at my lists, I made check marks after all the male names, I counted the lists of names, and it always came out the same. I hadn’t left anyone out, I had every one of the twenty-two names written down there, of the twenty-two there were only four men I hadn’t yet met, and it was absolutely physically impossible for Dewey to be any one of them.

So who the hell was Dewey?

T
HEY WERE STILL AT IT
, Cameron and Fredericks, when I walked in without knocking, and they both looked at me in irritation. But I didn’t care. If it had been going on for half an hour since I’d left, and they could both still have those expressions on their faces, there was no point my being polite and waiting till they were done before I spoke to them.

Cameron said, very testily for him, “Tobin, we’re still in the middle of—”

“You two can work that out later,” I said. “But I think I’m onto something important.”

Fredericks said coldly, “Tobin, when you left here you offered to wait in your room until we decided what would be best—”

“I’m really tired of you, Fredericks,” I said. “You aren’t going to shut me up, but unless you’re very careful I
will
shut you up. So just sit down and be quiet for a minute.” In Fredericks’ stunned silence, I turned to Cameron and said, “Do you remember I mentioned to you a resident named Dewey that I met last night? This morning, really.”

Fredericks was looking at me in bewilderment, still trying to think of something applicable to say, so Cameron had an opportunity to answer the question, which he did ungraciously. “I remember the conversation,” he said. “And I remember telling you I had no idea which of the residents he was. I still have no idea. If you want to know who he is—”

“He isn’t anybody,” I said. I understood that Cameron was in a foul mood because of Fredericks, and I didn’t take offense.

Cameron closed his mouth and frowned at me. Fredericks acted as though he was just about deciding to become superior and bored and walk out on the scene. I said, “You have ten male residents here now, and Dewey isn’t any one of them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” Cameron said, and Fredericks, smiling slightly, said, “Tobin, you wouldn’t be in the process of inventing an extra little mystery here, would you, to keep your employment alive?”

I continued to look at Cameron. “He’s a fool,” I said, “but you’re not. You know how little I wanted this job in the first place. Besides, I already mentioned Dewey earlier today, before any question about my job came up. Whether I pack or not, the fact remains that at five o’clock this morning I met a man in the second floor hall of this building who was neither of you two and who was none of the male residents, but who knew the building intimately, who led me to the kitchen and actually made my breakfast for me, who told me he likes to meet the new arrivals and chat with them, who told me most of the history of The Midway, and who said I should call him Dewey. If he wasn’t either of you and he wasn’t any of the male residents, then who in the name of God was he?”

Cameron had been standing, leaning forward slightly with his fists pressed down on his desk top, but now he settled slowly backward into his chair while Fredericks stared at the two of us, trying to decide whether I was to be believed or not.

Cameron said, wonderingly, “I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who he could possibly have been.”

Fredericks said, “Are you trying to tell us somebody came into this building last night and wandered around the halls, pretending to be a resident?”

“Not at all,” I said. “He didn’t come in last night, he lives here.”

Fredericks turned to Cameron with a gesture of exasperation. “He isn’t making any sense,” he complained.

Cameron said to me, “You just said he wasn’t any of the residents. Now you say he lives here.”

“Both are true,” I said. “You have the landlocked equivalent of a stowaway somewhere in this building. I don’t know who he is, I don’t know whether or not he’s responsible for the accidents, but I do know he’s unofficially living here.”

“That’s impossible,” Fredericks said, and Cameron said, “That’s fantastic, Tobin. Are you sure it isn’t just someone who wandered in off the street?”

“He was dressed in cardigan, work pants and scuffed old sneakers, very much an at-home kind of clothing. But more important than that, he knows this building. He knows it physically, he’s the one who led me to the kitchen, and did it directly, no mistakes or detours. He’s prepared a lot of meals in that kitchen, because he made our breakfast in obvious comfort with his surroundings. He didn’t open any wrong cabinets to find plates or coffee or whatever. And he chatted about the place, its history and the people here, he knows The Midway as well as either of you two. And he told me he likes to meet new people shortly after their arrival and chat with them about the place.”

“Then why didn’t anybody ever notice him before?” Fredericks asked.

“I’m sure other people have noticed him. But you have a constant changeover of residents here. If I were a normal resident, I wouldn’t think anything was strange about my having met Dewey, and I wouldn’t have any reason to think it was strange if I never happened to run into him again. I’ve been actively moving around trying to meet people, and there are still eight residents I haven’t met. Under normal circumstances, by the time I would meet everyone here a couple of people would be leaving and one or two new ones would have arrived. My one encounter with Dewey would quickly fade from my mind, and if I did ever think of him again I’d just take it for granted he’d finished out his six months and left.”