Wax Apple
Authors: Donald E Westlake
A Mitchell Tobin Mystery
Donald E. Westlake
For the mother
Of the purple
First baseman’s mitt
1
T
HE CONDUCTOR CAME THROUGH,
calling, “Kendrick! Kendrick!” I glanced at him, then back out at neat white clapboard houses on quiet streets muffled by heavy trees. In the back yards stood small white clapboard garages with doors that opened out instead of lifting. In one back yard not far from the tracks a group of children had tied a child to a tree and were pretending to set fire to him. He was crying, and they were laughing, and over all was the barking of an excited dog—part German shepherd, he looked—prancing and bouncing around them.
The houses grew a little seedier, older, not so well cared for, and gave way to a row of stores, and then the station slid into the foreground and blocked the view. I got to my feet and took down my suitcase and walked through the nearly empty car to the front as the train rolled interminably to a stop. I was two hours from New York and a hundred million miles from home. I stepped down onto the wooden platform, the only passenger from my car getting off here, and went through the old push-door into the station building.
The ticket window was to my left, and on impulse I went over and asked the man when was the next train back to New York. Without checking anything, he said, “Four-ten.” It was not yet eleven-thirty.
Would I have gone back if there’d been a train right away? Possibly, I don’t know. The house would have been empty, Kate and Bill already gone to Long Island. I would have had a month to myself, Kate wouldn’t have had to know I’d stayed home until she herself returned. And of course by then it would have been too late to make me go back to The Midway.
Would that have been better, as things turned out? But that’s a meaningless question, really. In a life in which nothing matters nothing can be either better or worse.
On the other side of the station four identical taxis in orange and gray stood at the curb. A girl laden with suitcases, tennis racket, hat box, shopping bag and raincoat—probably coming home from college for summer vacation—was serially entering the first cab, so I took the second. There was no meter and no notice about fares.
The driver, a stocky man with a bushy red moustache, said, “Where to?”
I said, “What are the rates?”
“Depends where you’re going.”
The address was on a slip of paper in my shirt pocket, but I didn’t need to look at it. “Twenty-seven North Laurel Avenue.”
He pursed his lips under the moustache, studying me in the rearview mirror, trying to figure out exactly how much the market would bear, and finally said, “Two dollars.”
“I think that’s too much,” I said.
He shrugged elaborately. “That’s standard,” he said.
“It’s too much.”
“You could try another cab,” he said.
No one else from the train had wanted a taxi, and the other two were still at the curb behind me. “All right,” I said, and prepared to struggle myself and my suitcase out onto the sidewalk again.
He barely let me get the door open before saying, peevishly, “Well, what do
you
think it’s worth?”
I had no idea, never having been in Kendrick before in my life, but I couldn’t go too far wrong if I halved his price, so I said, “One dollar.”
He twisted around in the seat to look at me without benefit of mirror. “I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll split the difference with you.”
“A dollar and a half,” I said.
“Right.”
“That will include tip,” I said.
“Tip?” He raised an eyebrow, and grinned under his moustache. “This ain’t New York,” he said. “Shut the door, I’m yours for a buck and a half.”
Our route took us through the narrow congested downtown street, angle parking on both sides, one lane of creeping traffic in each direction. On both sides were the stores, the women’s clothing shops trying to look modern in nineteenth-century brick buildings, the appliance stores with their dusty windows full of washing machines, the five-and-tens that could have been switched with those of any other city in the country without anybody noticing a thing.
After downtown, we went through the Negro section, old duplexes with sagging porches and only a dim memory of paint, skinny dusty-looking children running in bunches, even the skinny-trunked trees half stripped of their bark. Among the decayed automobiles rusting in front yards I swear I saw a dark blue Fraser.
This strip was followed by the strip of white-clapboard-white-owner houses I’d already seen another part of from the train, and then we came to a much older and once richer section, large turreted and gabled houses on extremely large plots, tall thin windows facing in all directions. But few of the houses were private homes any longer. A mortician was in this one, seven doctors in that one, a convent in a third.
Twenty-seven North Laurel was one of these mastodons, a huge irregular pile of gray stone, three stories high, full of tall narrow windows and architectural cadenzas, with a wrought iron fence separating the cracked sidewalk from the neat lawn.
There was no sign indicating this building’s present status, but the driver obviously knew what it was, because he gave a surprised grunt and said, “Oh. I didn’t know you meant
that
place.”
“Would the price have gone up?”
“Could be,” he said, looking at me in his mirror again.
I paid him, and he said, “You’re gonna work there, huh?”
That was the wrong image. I said, “Why do you say that?”
“A loony wouldn’t have argued the price.”
“They aren’t loonies,” I said. Then I corrected myself: “We aren’t loonies.”
“Maybe
you
aren’t,” he said, and faced front, ending the conversation.
I struggled out of the cab, and it drove away. There was a break in the wrought iron fence at the driveway. I walked up the new-looking blacktop, seeing that it continued on past the side of the house, under the nineteenth-century equivalent of a carport, and on to the rear, where I caught a glimpse of a dark wood multi-car garage of more recent vintage than the house. Past the carport two muscular young men in khakis and T-shirts were washing a green Ford station wagon. They glanced at me, and back at their work. They would be Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, though I had no way of telling which was which. The dossiers hadn’t included photographs.
The entrance was under the carport. I went up three steps to an elaborate wooden door, and rang the bell. I stood there for a minute, and then one of the young men called over from the station wagon, “Go on in. Office to your right.”
“Thank you,” I said, and pushed open the door, and went in.
The house echoed. That was my first impression, and it never subsequently went away. Everywhere in that building, there was the sense of an echo reverberating just around the next corner, down some nearby corridor, up in the angle of some other ceiling. However muffled one’s own movements might be, whether by carpet or design, an echo existed, independently and without reference to any cause.
The office was to my right, as the young man had said. I went in and found a girl there, making entries with a ballpoint pen on three-by-five cards. She had long straight brown hair, folk singer style, and wore a white shift and white sandals. I knew her name, too, and many of the details of the breakdown which had made her first suicidal and later catatonic and ultimately had led her here to this building, halfway back to a home that no longer really existed. It was embarrassing somehow to know so much about her without her being aware of my knowledge, as though unknown to her her clothing were gaping open in some disgraceful way. I found it difficult to meet her eye.
She had no trouble meeting mine. She looked at me, her eyes still full of whatever she was entering on the three-by-five cards, and said, “Yes? May I help you?”
“Mitchell Tobin,” I said. We’d decided it would be easier and just as safe to use my own name. “I’m the new resident,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I have your forms here someplace.” Her desk was very messy, and she ruffled through it with the expertise of someone who always keeps her desk very messy, quickly coming up with a large manila folder. She opened this, withdrew a sheaf of papers held together with a paper clip, and passed three of the papers over to me. “Would you fill these out, please? You can sit at that desk there. You’ll find a pen in the drawer.”
I filled out the forms, putting down the lies and half-truths Doctor Cameron and I had agreed upon, and gave them back to the girl, who glanced at them briefly, had me sign two other pieces of paper, and then got to her feet, saying, “Let’s find somebody to show you to your room.”
“Couldn’t I find it for myself?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “It takes a few days to get your bearings around here. We’ve talked about making a map and giving everybody a copy, but nobody knows the place well enough to make the map.”
She led the way out of the office and down the hall, which turned and forked with no apparent logic. Ahead of us I could hear a ping-pong ball tap-tapping. The girl stopped at a closed door, opened it, and the tapping suddenly increased in volume. She stuck her head in and called, “Jerry, you doing anything?”
A muffled response.
“Would you show a new man to his room, please?”
Another muffled response, and the girl turned toward me, smiling, leaving the door ajar. A few seconds later, out came a man I thought at first to be young, but then saw to be quite old. He was short and wiry, dressed in khakis and T-shirt like the boys outside, plus scuffed white sneakers, and his gray hair was cropped so close to his head it would almost pass for blond. He had a pinched face, a sharp nose, and a wide mouth open now in a broad smile, showing teeth so clean and so studiedly natural that they had to be artificial.
The girl said, “Jerry, this is Mitchell Tobin. Mr. Tobin, Jerry Kanter.”
I acknowledged the greeting, telling Jerry Kanter to call me by my first name, and at the same time thinking how very different he was from the mental image I’d picked up from his dossier. Somehow, multiple murderers should be large and somber men, not short narrow-headed men with cheery smiles.
The girl said to me, “And I’m Debby Lattimore.”
I was distracted by Jerry Kanter, and nearly said
I know,
which would have been disastrous. I caught myself, and said, “How do you do?”
Jerry said, “Where’s Mitch go?”
“In Marty’s room,” she said. She told me, “Marty left a few weeks ago.”
“Nice place,” Jerry commented, about the room. “You ready for a hike?”