Wax Apple (17 page)

“It’s a rotten idea,” Fredericks told him. “There’s only one terrified girl in that closet, not a tiger escaped from the zoo.”

Yoncker was reluctant to leave, but then his eye lit on me again and he said, “All right, Tobin, you and me can spend the time getting to know one another. Come on along.”

We all left the room except Doctor Cameron, who remained in the closet doorway, talking softly to the girl sitting in there on the floor. We other five—Yoncker and Fredericks and the two policemen and me—went to the front stairway and down to the first floor, where Fredericks said, “Do you need me right now?”

“Not for a few minutes,” Yoncker said. It was obvious he disliked Fredericks as much as Fredericks disliked him, but he hadn’t decided yet whether Fredericks was powerless or not. He said, “Where you going to be, in case I need you?”

“In the dining room.”

Yoncker wasn’t too happy about that. He didn’t want Fredericks messing around with his suspects, I could see that in Yoncker’s eyes and his stance and the way he moved his head. But there was no legitimate objection he could think of to make, so he gave a graceless shrug of the shoulders and said to me, “Come along, Tobin.”

He led me to Doctor Cameron’s office, where the two uniformed policemen waited outside. Yoncker and I went inside, and he pointed to the chair in front of Cameron’s desk, saying, “Sit there.” I did so, and he himself settled into the chair behind the desk. He rested his elbows on the blotter, leaned his head forward, and said, “Tell me about all this.”

I told him the story, and he listened without interruption. In some ways I was sure he was a fool, but in other ways I was just as sure he wasn’t, and I knew he was mentally testing every element of the story as I gave it to him, looking for weaknesses in the fabric, inconsistencies, any indication of falsehood.

I hated to be lying. My training and history and inclination were all opposed to it. I had been on the force too long to ever be really comfortable pitted against a policeman. So I had to keep reminding myself what sort of man this was, and what the result would be if I were to tell him the complete and open truth.

When I was done, he sat there and studied me a few seconds, and then said, “I’ll check all that, you know.”

“Of course,” I said.

“You want to tell me what you got bounced for, or would you rather I got it from New York?”

“I’d rather you got it from New York.”

He gave a little smile, as though we were fallen angels together, and said, “Bad stuff, huh? Shook you up.”

“Yes.”

“You figure this’d help?” He gestured with his head, a movement implying not merely the room we were in but the whole building. “Being locked up with a lot of loonies, that’s supposed to get you back on your feet?”

“They’re not loonies.”

“You been listening to that doctor. They’re loonies, all right.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “That arm of yours,” he said. “What happened to it?”

“I fell down a flight of stairs, the first day I was here.”

“Fell, or was pushed?”

“I fell, so far as I know, I was alone.”

“You know what we’ve got here is murder,” he said. “You know those boards on the fire escape were half sawn through.”

“I thought it might be something like that,” I said.

“There’ve been a lot of accidents around here,” he said. “Two of these loonies are up in Memorial Hospital.”

“I know. One of them was just hurt yesterday.”

“Hit her head.” He chuckled, and said, “You wouldn’t think that would bother these people, would you? A hit on the head.” He sat back and said, “You used to be a big-city cop, Tobin, how come you’re so stupid?”

I didn’t know what he meant, and that paralyzed me. I was vulnerable in so many directions at once that I didn’t know which way was a safe response, so all I could do was blink at him and say, “Stupid? Am I? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean,” he said, “what I mean is, there’s been all these accidents. You had one yourself. You’re an ex-cop, you’re from New York City, you’re supposed to be bright, you’re supposed to be a lot brighter than us country cops, Tobin, but it never occurred to you those accidents might not be accidents at all. Is that right, Tobin?”

“There’ve only been two since I got here,” I said. “Me and the Prendergast girl. If I’d been here for all of them, maybe I would have tipped. Probably I would have. But I wasn’t. Besides, how would you rig mine? I fell down a flight of stairs, an empty flight of stairs with nobody around. No stair gave way, nothing like that happened at all. How am I supposed to think somebody rigged that somehow?”

He frowned. “There’s something fishy about you, Tobin,” he said. “I’m going to check up on you, don’t you worry.”

“I know you will,” I said.

He’d been sitting back in the chair, and now he leaned forward again and put his elbows on the desk top, and frowned at me as though thinking about something else. That went on for a minute or two, his expression slightly pained, as though what he was thinking about was difficult and complicated, and it took me a while to understand what it was all about.

Then I got it. He’d just finished throwing his weight around with me a little bit, and now he wanted my cooperation on something. He wanted to make the transition from cop-witness to cop-cop, and he couldn’t figure out how to go about doing it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken him off the hook, but I preferred a peaceful life to meaningless minor victories, so when at last I understood what his problem was I said, “I know I don’t have any official standing here, Captain Yoncker, and I don’t want you to think I’m butting my nose into your business, but if there’s anything you want me to do, any way I can be of use to you, I’ll be glad to do whatever I can.”

He looked relieved, briefly, but then quickly covered that look with one of judicious consideration. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “you probably could help out. You’ve been here how long?”

“Two days,” I said. “Since Monday.”

“Then you’ve had a chance to look some of these people over,” he said. “The way I see it, I’m working at a disadvantage here, because I’m no psychiatrist, I don’t know number one about nut cases, and I tell you the truth I don’t trust either one of those so-called doctors. I think the both of them would try to cover up for the guilty party if they could. You know all this psychiatry stuff, it’s the same as we get from the social workers all the time, they don’t give a damn about the law, all they care about is how some bum is disadvantaged, that’s one of the words they like. Disadvantaged. You get one of these bums, mugs somebody in an alley, you tell me which one of those two is disadvantaged. You know what I’m talking about, Tobin, you’ve got the same thing down in New York, only a hundred times worse.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” I said. I also knew the problems he was touching on were a thousand times more complicated than either he or any of his social worker opponents would ever understand. I knew they were like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, and each describing the part he had hold of and being absolutely sure everybody else’s description was dead wrong. I knew that, but I didn’t know but that I was merely another blind man with another incomplete description. In any case, I was pretty sure Captain Yoncker preferred a monologue to a discussion, so I simply told him I knew what he was talking about and let it go at that.

“The way I see it,” he said, “it could be any one of these fruitcakes. Like those two that tried to kill each other in the dining room. That kind of stuff go on all the time around here?”

“That’s the first I ever heard of,” I said. “I think the murder made everybody nervous.”

“When they start trying to kill each other like that,” he said, “who knows what they’ll do next?”

“Actually,” I said, “those two boys didn’t manage to damage one another at all. They were just wrestling. All the injury was inflicted by your men.”

He bristled a little, our relationship losing some of its cop-cop nature and teetering back toward cop-witness again. “You sound awful damn sure of that,” he said.

“I am. I was at the next table.”

“I could have been sitting on top of those two boys,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have been able to swear who did what to who. I’d hate to have to go to court and take my oath on it, I know that much.”

“I don’t see that incident ever getting to court,” I said. “Do you?”

He looked at me. He really wasn’t sure of me, and basically he didn’t like what he wasn’t sure of, but until he found out for sure whether I was a comrade or an opponent he was keeping his dislike in check. “No, I don’t,” he said finally. “We took those two down to the station to cool off a while. I think by tomorrow all they’re going to want is out.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, and the door opened behind me.

I turned and it was the red-headed cop, the young one who’d been nervously on duty at the dining room door. He called, in a husky whisper, as though he was trying to slide the words past me without my hearing, “Captain? Could I see you a minute?”

Yoncker frowned at him. “This important?”

“Yes, sir.” He was worried, but standing his ground.

Yoncker gave an exasperated sigh and heaved to his feet. “Wait one minute, Tobin,” he said, and marched across the room and outside, closing the door behind him.

I spent this time-out in a hasty inspection of my defenses. He seemed to have accepted my story at face value, though I wouldn’t rely on that entirely with a man like Yoncker. If I could keep myself small enough and quiet enough I stood a pretty good chance of getting Yoncker to think of me as a member of his team, which under the circumstances was the safest place to be. Bringing up the business about O’Hara and Merrivale had been a bad move on my part, but I hoped I’d covered it sufficiently, and I wouldn’t be mentioning it again.

What would Yoncker be talking about next? From the direction he’d been leading in, I had the idea what he wanted was suggestions from me as to who the murderer might be. I already knew I wasn’t going to mention my own list of suspects and non-suspects, mostly because that would reveal that I
had
known about the rigged accidents before the murder, but also partly because I disliked Yoncker intensely and had no desire to do any of his work for him.

In fact, what would I tell him when he asked me for capsule commentaries on the various residents, which he was sure to do when he came back? Edited versions of the truth, I supposed, leaving out anything he might consider social workerish, and also leaving out anything that might prejudice him too heavily in the direction of anyone I already privately knew to be in the clear.

I was thinking about this, and working out specific answers to some of the questions I expected to be asked, when the door opened again and Yoncker came back in with a huge happy smile on his face. “Now,” he said. “Now, that’s the way we like it.”

I turned and looked at him. “What’s happened?”

“What’s happened? We’ve got a confession, that’s what’s happened.” Yoncker rubbed his hands together in pleasure. “They can’t come too easy for me,” he said. “This is just the way I like them.”

I
STOOD IN THE HALL DOORWAY
, Debby Lattimore’s desk behind me, the door to Doctor Cameron’s office beyond that, and looked down to my right, where Yoncker and his troops were with great care and great pride marching their confessed murderer this way, toward the exit.

It was Walter Stoddard. They had him in handcuffs and a uniformed cop stood on each side of him, clutching his arms above the elbow, and he walked with his head and eyes down, as though on his way to the electric chair instead of the local jail.

Stoddard? Was it merely my instinctive dislike for Yoncker that made me want to believe it hadn’t really come this easy, or was there some true reason to think Stoddard was lying about himself? The faces around Stoddard were happy and self-congratulatory, hemming him in, making his face hard to see and hard to understand.

They approached me like a mini-parade, Yoncker looking directly at me to smile his wide smile, his cops all looking either straight ahead or with possessive caution at their prisoner. I kept trying to read Stoddard’s down-turned face, and when they were four or five paces from me Stoddard suddenly raised his head and met my eyes, and I realized I’d had the image wrong before. It wasn’t the electric chair he saw himself marching toward, it was the crucifix. The expression on his face was exactly that look of noble and self-congratulatory martyrdom that stupid painters put on the face of Christ when showing him on the way to the cross. “’Tis a far far better thing I do,” his eyes said to me, and I knew exactly what he was doing, and why. More than he did, probably.

And certainly more than Yoncker did. Yoncker passed me, and I almost spoke his name, I almost asked him to step into the privacy of the office behind me for just a minute. But then I saw myself trying to explain Walter Stoddard’s mind to that man, I saw myself trying to take away his easy victory, and I knew it couldn’t be done that way. Nothing I could say today would keep Yoncker from arresting Stoddard and booking him for murder.

The procession passed me by, and now I watched their backs, and I saw that Stoddard’s head was down again but his shoulders were straight, squared off. He was not morose, he was far from morose.

They went out the main entrance at last, and I heard footsteps coming the other way. I turned to look, and Doctor Fredericks was hurrying toward me down the hall. He reached me, saying, “That was a lucky break, wasn’t it? Saved a lot of agony for everybody.”

I stepped out of his way, and he came on into the office and sat at Debby Lattimore’s desk to reach for the phone. “The Brady girl is a gone goose,” he said. “Happily she came from a place about twelve miles from here, so they can send an ambulance over and take her right back.”

“Another lucky break,” I said.

He glanced at me in surprise, holding the phone with one hand, about to dial with the other. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Make your call first,” I said.

He considered me, then shrugged and made his call. It took about five minutes, and judging from Fredericks’ half of the conversation an ambulance was expected within the hour. Ringing off, Fredericks turned around to face me and said, “Now, what is it?”