Wax Apple (12 page)

As apparently he had. We’d come up floor by floor, room by room, every room except those bedrooms currently occupied by resident, and we’d never found so much as a trace of Dewey’s existence. We hadn’t found any cache of his clothing, though tonight he’d worn a different shirt and sweater than he’d had on last night, and in any case if he was a permanent resident here, however subterranean, he would have to have a permanent corner in which to keep his possessions. But we hadn’t found it.

Our method of search in the attic was typical of what we’d done on the floors below, but simpler. I stood in the hall, watching the doors and the staircase, while Fredericks entered each room in turn and thoroughly searched it. Down the other way, Doctor Cameron was the one on guard in the hall while Bob Gale did the searching.

We met at last in the middle. Bob was baffled and on the verge of becoming very angry, with the anger of someone who’s had a practical joke played on him, and Doctor Cameron was looking put upon, almost petulant. With the dirt smudges on his face, and his general weariness, he no longer looked either distinguished or competent, and in fact he was reminding me of somebody, somebody from the past. Who?

J. Roger Urbermann! That’s who it was, J. Roger Urbermann. About seven years ago that was. A hooker had offered to trade the location of a wanted man for her own freedom, and when we’d accepted the trade the name she’d come up with had been J. Roger Urbermann, of whom we’d never heard. Jock, my partner—how easy those words trip out—Jock was of the opinion she was making the whole thing up, having nothing to lose, but we checked the name anyway, and damned if it wasn’t a real person, an absconding banker from Youngstown, Ohio, a fiftyish bank president who’d been draining off funds for years and who—in circularese—took flight to avoid prosecution once the truth was discovered. He was living in a residence hotel on Broadway and doing clerical work at one of those store-front places that do your income tax for you, and he’d made the mistake of befriending his neighbor at the hotel, who was our hooker. In a postcoital glow of warmth, he’d told her the truth about who he was. We picked him up at work and he tried to run away from us, but Jock tackled him and he rolled a bit in the gutter, and when he arose he was a grubby and defeated portly little man with only an echo remaining of the distinguished and self-confident banker he’d once been.

And Doctor Fredric Cameron, sooty and exhausted and petulant in the attic of The Midway, was an almost dead ringer for J. Roger Urbermann. All at once he seemed to me frail and unsure of himself and not really competent. A vague man, who had responded to his first real emergency at the halfway house he’d founded by running to New York to find someone else to be the “expert.” Why wasn’t
he
the expert? Wasn’t the answer to this mess inside the brain of one of his residents? Wasn’t it his
job
to look for answers inside those brains?

I knew these were unworthy thoughts even as I was thinking them, that they were the result of my own exhaustion and petulance, my frustration at not having found Dewey, and my aggravation at having spent the last hour alone with Doctor Lorimer Fredericks. But I also knew there was some portion of truth in them, that Doctor Cameron was not the incisive and confident man he appeared to be, that he was both more complex and less strong than that, and that at some level of complexity in his makeup there was a way in which he and Doctor Fredericks needed and complemented one another.

Doctor Fredericks was the first to speak when we all came together: “We don’t seem to have him.”

Bob Gale said, defensively, “We
looked,
doggone it! He didn’t get through
us, we
were careful.”

“Everyone was careful,” I said. “I’m sure he didn’t get through anybody. He’s simply found somewhere to hide that we haven’t come across.”

Doctor Cameron said, “We’ve searched the entire building, I vouch for that.”

Bob said, “Not the bedrooms. I bet you somebody’s hiding him out. Maybe he’s shacked up with one of the women. What we ought to do is roust everybody out and search their rooms.”

“Dewey’s a loner,” I said. “He won’t be in anybody’s room, he’s got some hidden place of his own.”

“You know a lot about Dewey,” Fredericks said savagely. “Everything but where he is.”

“He’s somewhere inside this building,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Or inside your head,” Fredericks said.

Doctor Cameron raised a hand, vaguely. “Lorimer, please.”

Fredericks turned on him. “Has it ever occurred to you, Doctor,” he said, “that this man could be making fools of us? This, this Dewey could be an invention of his own, for whatever his reasons. You know as well as I do he may be the least stable individual under this roof.”

I said, “Don’t you get tired of covering the same ground? Debby remembers meeting him, too, did you forget that?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Debby remembers meeting him in March, over three months ago.
You’re
the only one who claims to have seen him in the last two days. You can’t go out of your room without meeting Dewey, but no one else has seen him at all.”

Doctor Cameron said, “Lorimer, you’re upset because we didn’t find the man, but you can’t seriously believe he doesn’t exist. If he existed in March, surely he exists now.”

“Then why didn’t we find him?”

Doctor Cameron shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I said, “He has a hiding place we haven’t found.”

Fredericks rounded on me. “Where, goddamn it? You keep saying that, but where
is
this hiding place? In the fourth dimension? Is he a poltergeist? A familiar spirit? Do you see Dewey everywhere, Tobin, or just at The Midway?”

Bob Gale said, “Doctor Fredericks, Mr. Tobin wouldn’t lie about Dewey. I just bet you’re going to find him in one of the residents’ rooms.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Your disbelief,” Fredericks told me, “is the strongest argument in the theory’s favor.” He turned to Cameron. “I suppose we’ll have to look.”

Cameron was worried and vague. “That would mean telling the residents what’s going on,” he said. “Just what I’ve been trying to avoid.”

Bob said, “Tell them we saw a burglar, we’re not sure whether he’s still in the house or not.”

Fredericks nodded his approval. “Very good,” he said.

I said, “Bob and I shouldn’t search with you, it would look odd.”

“We’ll do better on our own,” Fredericks said.

I said, “Doctor Cameron, when you’re done with the search I’d like to speak to you in your office.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Alone.”

He frowned, and glanced at Fredericks, but then nodded and said, “If you want.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “I’ll be in my room.”

I felt them watching me as I walked heavily down the corridor to the stairs.

I
HAD FALLEN ASLEEP AGAIN,
and once more it was Bob Gale who woke me, shaking my shoulder and calling my name. I had been sleeping without dreams this time, and merely said, “Thank you, Bob,” and sat up.

He said, “Doctor Cameron says he’s ready for you.” He seemed more subdued than before, and in some obscure way more guarded.

“Thank you,” I said. “The search of the residents’ rooms is done?”

“Yes.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“No.”

I got up from the bed. I was already dressed, except for my shoes, which I now stepped into. “I didn’t think he would be,” I said.

Bob watched me in silence for thirty seconds or so, and then blurted, “Doctor Fredericks thinks you’re lying on purpose.”

I looked at him. “Does he? Has he given me a motive?”

“To cover your failure, he says. He says you have a need for failure, ever since your partner got killed because you weren’t with him, and you tend to invent complications to confuse people and distract them from your failures.”

“He told you about my partner, did he?”

Bob looked embarrassed. He nodded.

I said, “What’s his explanation for Debby having seen him?”

“He says you picked somebody who used to be here but left a few months ago, so there’d be people like Debby who’d remember him and seem to back up your story.”

“He invents some nice complications himself, Doctor Fredericks does,” I said. When Bob didn’t respond to that, I looked at him and saw a deep frown creasing his forehead. I said, “You believe him, Bob?”

“Nooo,” he said, as though the sentence should be longer than that.

I said, “But what?”

“Nothing,” he said, and looked away from me.

“But what, Bob?”

He turned abruptly back. “Doggone it, Mr. Tobin, we
searched!
We looked everywhere, you know we did. Where the heck is he?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did know, I’d like to have Doctor Fredericks off my back for a while.”

“That’s why you want to see Doctor Cameron now, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

We left the room and started down the hall toward the front staircase. Bob said, “What are you going to tell him? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask that.”

“I don’t mind. I’m going to tell him he has to make a choice. Either Doctor Fredericks is kept completely away from me, either I’m allowed to do this job my own way without badgering and interference, or I’m leaving.”

“That’s what they think you’re going to say,” he said.

“I suppose it’s fairly obvious.”

“Doctor Fredericks wants Doctor Cameron to let you go.”

“That was fairly obvious, too.”

“Doctor Cameron isn’t sure whether he’s going to ask you to stay or not.”

I glanced at Bob, saw his serious face, and nodded.

J. Roger Urbermann. “That wasn’t quite as obvious,” I said, “but it was a possibility.”

“I wish things could have gone better for you here,” he said. He was waving good-by to me already.

And it was all over a side-issue, that was the frustrating part of it. Dewey wasn’t the injurer, I was convinced of that, but it was the existence of Dewey—the alleged existence of Dewey, Doctor Fredericks would say—that was fouling everything up, making it impossible for me to get on with the task I came up here to do.

Where was he? Where could he be? Somewhere in the house, I was certain of that, somewhere in the house. But where? We
had
searched everywhere, that was the devil of it. Fredericks had the evidence on his side.

We went down the broad front staircase to the truncated hall at the foot and turned toward Doctor Cameron’s office. Ahead of me was the side entrance, the main entrance since whatever distant remodeling had removed the original main entrance at the foot of the front stairs. I had come in through that door down there less than forty-eight hours ago, and in that time I had done nothing—

Wait!

I stopped in my tracks, and Bob went on another step without me before he realized I was no longer moving. He looked back at me, saying, “Mr. Tobin?” but I had no interest in explanations. I turned and hurried back the way we’d come.

Ahead of me was the staircase we’d come down, on the left. There was no door in the wall opposite it, the nearest one being seven or eight feet to this side. I came to that door, opened it, and stepped into a smallish parlor or waiting room, with a few old sofas and lamps about. This was one of the two rooms set aside for residents to entertain visitors in, if any. Visitors at The Midway were rare.

Bob had trailed along behind me, and stood in the doorway watching me prowl around the room. “What is it, Mr. Tobin?”

“Nothing here,” I said, but not to him. I was mumbling to myself, absorbed in the thought that had occurred to me. I brushed past Bob, back out to the hall again, and hurried on down past the staircase to the next door on the right wall, which led me into a narrow room full of metal shelving. Paper and envelopes and other clerical supplies were stacked up here, and an ancient mimeograph machine stood inkily under the window opposite the door.

There was a door in the right-hand wall, which was the wall I was interested in. I opened it and found a closet with more supplies on the shelf, two old push-brooms leaning against the rear wall, and one black-and-red-check jacket hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I went into the closet, studying the walls in there, and Bob stood behind me, asking foolish questions.

It was Sheetrock, large square pieces of Sheetrock nailed to two-by-four framing, and no one had ever bothered to tape the lines where the pieces met. It was, after all, merely a closet in an obscure storeroom.

The center piece in the right wall. I tugged at it and it came tilting toward me, and in the darkness on the other side I heard a scuttling that could have been mice. “Dewey!” I called, but there wasn’t any answer.

I pulled the loose piece of Sheetrock away, and someone had fastened a rough handle to the other side, making it easier to fit into place from that side. I said over my shoulder, “Bob, go get Doctor Cameron. Tell him I’ve found Dewey.”

“Yes!” he shouted, and dashed away.

“D
EWEY.”

There was no answer. And no more scuttling.

I wished I had a flashlight. It seemed impenetrably dark in there. I looked in, and I also wished I still had the same conviction in Dewey’s essentially nonviolent nature.

Any animal will attack when cornered.

“Dewey.”

Not a sound.

“Dewey, why make us come in and get you? There’ll just be scuffling, and everybody will feel embarrassed. Come on out, now. Doctor Cameron is coming, he wants to talk to you. He wants to help you figure out some better way to live. But a way you’ll agree to, Dewey. I promise you, it’ll be a way that you’ll like, too. Dewey?”

Still nothing. Did he think at this point I could still be convinced he wasn’t there?

Curiosity finally got the better of caution. I went down on my knees and warily leaned forward, putting my head through the opening just far enough so I could see inside.

It was about as I’d expected, a dead space left over at the time of the remodeling. It had looked like a fairly sloppy job, probably done by a do-it-yourself home handyman, and when people like that do major projects they never use plans, and the result is frequently odd leftover corners hidden away behind hasty walls. This one was about a foot and a half wide, and extended away to my left about ten feet.