Wax Apple (11 page)

Then I remembered the quick lie I’d invented last night, and I said, “Oh! No, no I didn’t find it. I don’t know what happened to it.”

We reached the foot of the stairs and he opened the door, saying, “Well, of course, it didn’t exist. That’s why it’s so hard to find.”

I stepped through and looked back at him. He came through and shut the door and smiled amiably at me and I said, “What do you mean?”

“I knew you were fibbing all along, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “When someone wears a ring all the time, there’s always some sort of mark on their finger, but you don’t have any marks at all. And if you did have a ring and you lost it, you would have looked at the bottom of the staircase instead of at the top. I know you’re on your way to Doctor Cameron’s office, but why not walk with me to the kitchen first? I’d like to talk with you, if you don’t mind.”

I was flabbergasted, and could think of nothing to do but go along with him. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll walk with you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

We started off, toward the kitchen, and I said, “You’re quite a detective, Dewey.”

“I think that’s what you are,” he said, and gave me his mild smile again. “I think you’re a detective in disguise.”

“Not a very good disguise,” I said.

“Oh, yes, it is,” he assured me. “I’m sure no one else guesses at all. I just had a special reason to be wary, that’s all.”

“So does the person I’m looking for.”

“That’s what I want to talk with you about,” he said, and held the kitchen door open for me. We went into the kitchen together and he said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’m making a pot anyway.”

“All right, then, thank you.”

I sat down at the table, and he began to get out the things he needed. It was exactly like last night, except that now we knew much more about one another. But the echo was strong, as though somehow lost innocence was represented by this repetition of a pleasant interlude under ambivalent circumstances, and I felt oppressed by the duplication.

As he made the coffee he talked. He said, “At first, I couldn’t think I was right about you, because why would a detective be here at The Midway in disguise? Then I thought it was perhaps because some District Attorney somewhere was afraid that psychiatry meant narcotics and free love, but you just weren’t the right sort of man to be looking for illicit pleasures in a place like this.” He smiled at me, sharing with me the idea of his joke, and went on: “Then I thought it perhaps was me you were after, but of course that was mere paranoia. In the first place, I was certain absolutely no one knew I was here. And in the second place, you didn’t behave last night as though you were looking for someone who isn’t legally here and who prowls mostly at night. You weren’t suspicious of me, and if you were looking for such a person you would have been.” He turned to me again, his smile self-deprecatory. “I’m not a true detective,” he said, “despite my lucky observation about your ring. I can only go by the way people feel to me.”

“That’s the best way to be a detective,” I said.

“Is it?” He sounded both pleased and interested. “I thought that might be your way,” he said. “I’m sorry to say I searched your room. I didn’t steal anything and it wasn’t to be malicious, it was just because I was curious about you. And you had no detective things at all. Nothing for fingerprints, no handcuffs, no cameras, nothing at all.”

“I’m not that kind of detective,” I said.

“I can see that.” He had the coffee on, and now he came over to sit across the table from me. “It’ll be ready in just a minute. Now. I didn’t believe you were looking for immorality, and I didn’t believe you were looking for me, and you didn’t have any detective apparatus, and for a while I thought I must be wrong. What were you looking for?”

I considered telling him, to see his reaction, but decided to wait and let him guide the conversation himself. He was obviously headed toward some particular point, and I was very interested in finding out what it was.

He said, “I couldn’t think of a thing until yesterday afternoon, when poor Miss Prendergast fell and hit the radiator. I was thinking what a coincidence that was, first you having an accident and breaking your arm and then Miss Prendergast falling and hitting her head against the radiator, and then I remembered there’d been
other
accidents, and I suddenly realized they weren’t accidents at all! Someone was doing them on
purpose!
”

He seemed honestly shocked, even offended, his usually mild eyes staring at me through his wire-framed glasses as though insisting that I too should be affected by this piece of news. I said, “That’s true, Dewey. Somebody is doing them on purpose.”

“But that’s
awful!
I don’t know if you, an outsider, can realize just how awful that really is.”

“I think I realize,” I said.

He either didn’t hear me or didn’t believe me. “This place is a haven,” he said. “It is safety, security, protection. Not like the outside world. For someone to be cruel in
here
—no, it can’t happen, we can’t let it happen!”

He was getting agitated, eyes staring, pale hand closed into a fist and shaking above the table. I said, “I think the coffee’s perking.”

He looked around at once. “Yes.” He got to his feet and went over to the stove. “A minute or two more,” he said, and went to get our cups.

As he set the table I told him, “I agree with you, Dewey, this place should be safe from that kind of wanton cruelty. And you’re right, that’s what I’m here for, to find out who’s doing it and make him stop.”

He was bringing milk over from the refrigerator. He put it on the table and said, “I knew you would suspect me. That’s only natural, I’m here in an unusual way. I knew you’d want to know everything about everybody, and it wouldn’t take you long to discover the man you’d met last night wasn’t any of the regular residents. So that’s why I wanted to talk with you now, before you could do anything about it.”

He went over to the stove and got the coffee and brought it to the table. He poured two cups, put the pot on a trivet, and sat down again. “I want you to know it isn’t me,” he said. He was speaking very softly and earnestly, watching his hands as he added milk and sugar to his coffee. “I want you to find the person right away,” he said, “so I don’t want you to spend all your time thinking about me.” He looked up, met my eyes. “It isn’t me,” he said.

I believed him, but I didn’t say so. I said, “But you’re a stowaway.”

“Stowaway?” He smiled, surprised and pleased by the word. “Stowaway,” he said again. “That’s nice.”

“Naturally,” I said, “that makes you very much of a suspect.”

“Oh, I know that.” He was earnest again, looking directly at me. “I can’t go anywhere else,” he said. “Please don’t expose me, they’ll make me go away and I don’t have anywhere else to go. And I’m not the one, I swear I’m not. I’ll help you look for him, if you want me to. I know this house, I can keep an eye out now that I know what’s going on. But please, please don’t expose me. It won’t do any good; I’m not the one doing all these things. Please.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes, they were too full of pleading and helplessness. Using the excuse of sipping at my coffee, I looked away from him and said, “You can’t go on like this anyway, you know. Doctor Cameron knows you’re here, I’ve already told him.”

“If you don’t look for me,” he said, “they’ll forget. If you find the person doing the bad things, and then you go away, everyone will forget. I’ll keep right out of sight, and they won’t even think about me.”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “Besides, what do you want to live this way for? Wouldn’t it be better to be in the open?”

The thought terrified him, and he made no effort to hide the fact. He didn’t say anything, he merely stared at me and shook his head.

I said, “I’m sorry, Dewey, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You’ll hunt me down?”

“Why do we have to? Come along with me now to Doctor Cameron’s office. You know Doctor Cameron, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You know he’s a fair man, you know he’ll do whatever he can for you.”

“The only thing to do for me,” he said passionately, “is leave me alone. I’m not hurting anyone, I’m not in anyone’s way. I just want to be left alone. Can’t you believe I’m not the one you want?”

“I do believe it,” I said. “But I believe it because I’ve talked to you. Talk to Doctor Cameron and he’ll believe you, too. But if he doesn’t have the chance to talk to you, he’s got to be suspicious.”

“You could convince him.”

“I’m sorry.”

He studied my face, trying to find something in it that would tell him he had a chance with me, but he had no chance and my face must have shown it, because at last he looked away, his face drawn, mournful, seeming ten years older now. “I don’t know,” he said, softly, more to himself than me. “I don’t know where I’ll go now.”

“Come with me to see Doctor Cameron,” I said, knowing that wasn’t what he’d meant but using the opportunity anyway.

He shook his head sadly, not looking at me. “I’ll have to think about things,” he said, still mostly to himself. “I’ll have to decide what to do.”

“I wish I could help you,” I said.

He lifted his eyes to mine. “I want to be alone now,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t like to be rude, but I want to be alone to think about things.”

I considered. There was no way I could physically force him to come with me, and I was convinced I wasn’t going to be able to talk him into giving himself up. But it might be best to leave him alone. There was no way out for him, and sooner or later he’d have to see it for himself. Since I was reasonably sure he wasn’t a violent type, I thought it most likely that when he did see the situation was hopeless he’d quietly give himself up.

The thought touched my mind that he might also kill himself, if things seemed hopeless enough, but that I thought unlikely. He was a resourceful man, and though retiring he wasn’t despairing, or at least he didn’t seem despairing. In any case, I had no real choice.

So I said, “All right, Dewey. I’ll be in Doctor Cameron’s office for five or ten minutes. Then I’m afraid we’ll have to come looking for you.”

He nodded, his face mournful.

I got to my feet. “I am sorry,” I said. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

“I know.”

“Thank you for the coffee,” I said.

He nodded, but he was distracted by the thoughts inside his own head.

I hesitated an instant longer, and then I left.

D
OCTOR FREDERICKS SAID, “YOU
left him there?”

“What else was I going to do?” I asked him. “Grab him one-handed by the scruff of the neck and carry him here?”

Doctor Cameron said, “Lorimer didn’t mean anything, Mr. Tobin. There was nothing else you could have done.”

“The point is,” Doctor Fredericks said, “you’ve got it into your head this man is innocent and you really don’t want the hypothesis tested. If we had this Dewey character here in this room, it just might turn out he wasn’t so one hundred per cent guiltless after all, and you don’t want to take the chance of risking your professional pride.”

“I am on Dewey’s side,” I admitted. “The life he’s worked out for himself is unorthodox, I grant you that, but it obviously works for him and it doesn’t harm anybody else and I hate to be the one to spoil it all for him. Particularly when I am absolutely convinced he isn’t the injurer. But I know there’s no choice, you can’t leave a stowaway at large once you’ve learned of his existence, you have to track him down and take a look at him and ask him questions, whether you believe he’s done anything wrong or not. If there’d been any way for me to bring Dewey here from the kitchen, believe me I would have done it, if only to save myself the time and effort we’re going to have to put into looking for him.”

Bob Gale said, “Why don’t we go back to the kitchen right now? Maybe he’s still there.”

“Not a chance of it,” I said. “Dewey is far from unintelligent. I guarantee you he left that kitchen thirty seconds after I did. At this very moment, I’m sure he’s in whatever he considers his best hiding place, and he’s sitting there praying we don’t find him.”

“We will, of course,” Doctor Cameron said. “The Midway is a finite structure, so we’re bound to turn him up eventually.”

“We should start,” Doctor Fredericks said. “The longer we stand around, the better chance he has to find a good hiding place.”

“He’ll already know where he’s going,” I said, “and I imagine he’s already there. But I agree we should get started, if only to end the suspense for Dewey as quickly as we can.”

Doctor Cameron said to me, “The one problem, it seems to me, is searching occupied bedrooms.”

“He won’t be in any,” I said. “If we were to flush him, and he got away from us and was on the run, he might hide briefly in someone’s room, but for now he’ll be in some hiding place familiar to him.”

“I agree,” Doctor Fredericks said, and I looked at him in surprise. Whenever Fredericks agreed with anybody I was surprised. He said, “From what Tobin has said of Dewey, now he’ll want to be in a place he thinks of as home. His burrow, you might say.”

I said, “Let’s get going. I want to get this over with, too.”

Doctor Cameron said, “Of course. The only question left is, who goes with who? Bob and Lorimer are the two most able-bodied among us, so one of us should be with each of them.”

Fredericks said, “There should be a doctor with each team, so that would put Gale with you, Doctor, and Tobin with me.”

“Very good,” said Cameron, an opinion I didn’t share, and we all got to our feet.

T
HERE WAS A CENTRAL CORRIDOR
running the length of the attic, with storage rooms on both sides of it, making it the simplest floor to search. Fredericks and I had come up the rear staircase and Doctor Cameron and Bob had come up the front—there being two staircases even up to this level—and we nodded and waved to one another down the length of the corridor, outlined for one another by the blue-gray light of dawn outside the windows at each end of the building.

It was well after five o’clock. We had started in the basement, keeping staircases always in sight, keeping each other almost always in sight, searching slowly and with care. We were all smudged and sooty by now, and none of us was in a good humor. Fredericks had become more and more savage in his needling of me, and I had turned mulish and sullen, to the point sometimes of hoping our quarry
would
evade us.