Wax Apple Page 10

  “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.

  14

  “DEWEY.”

  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.

  And it was empty. I stuck my head in farther, I looked all around, and there was nobody there.

  There was something to my left, a break in the wall past the end of the closet partition. I craned my neck, but could see nothing, and finally went on through the opening, moving on hand and knees, my broken right arm in its cast cumbersomely in my way.

  I could stand inside, with two-by-four framework all around me. I edged down to the break in the partition and looked around the corner, and there was Dewey’s home.

  This space was much bigger, four feet wide and possibly a dozen feet long, with a rough stone wall at the far end, undoubtedly the new outer wall where the main entrance had originally been. Dim gray light seeped in from everywhere, cracks and chinks in walls and ceiling, and I could make out most of the details of Dewey’s hidden room. There was a mattress on the floor down at the far end, with blankets neatly tucked in all around and two pillows in white cases leaning against the wall. Nearer, there was a wooden kitchen chair beside a wide shelf that had been attached to the two-by-fours on the side wall. Clothing hung from nails and hooks, and just to my left a small mirror dangled from a loop of wire nailed to a two-by-four. Some of the horizontal pieces in the wall framework had been used for bookshelves and to hold small personal items. There were also several candles around in different kinds of holders, none of them at the moment lit.

  And the place was empty. It had the aura and feel of a lived-in room, but right now the owner was elsewhere.

  Then what had that scuttling been, the sound I’d heard when I’d first pulled the piece of Sheetrock away? Perhaps it really had been mice after all.

  No. Dewey was too neat, too fastidious a man. There would be no mice in this room, it was a human habitation no matter how much it was a place inside the walls. The scuttling had not been mice.

  Was there another way out? I moved slowly along, studying the walls, poking at places that looked the slightest suspicious, but there was nothing. The only entrance seemed to be the one through which I’d entered.

  Up? I looked up, and above me were the stringer
s, the two-by-twelve beams on which the upstairs floor was laid. I went over and got one of the candles, lit it, and by its light I began to study the ceiling.

  And there it was. In the far corner, out of Dewey’s living area entirely and down the opposite way from the closet entrance, the space between the last two stringers was empty, no flooring, nothing but a square of darkness. Far up through the hole the flickering candlelight hinted at more two-by-fours, the uncompleted inside of another wall. And down in front of me I could see the indentations and marks on the horizontal pieces of framework he used as his ladder.

  “Mr. Tobin?”

  Bob Gale’s voice. I turned and called, “Come in! Have you got a flashlight?”

  His head appeared in the entrance at the other end of this long narrow space. He blinked at me open-mouthed, then said, “No. You want me to get one?”

  “Never mind, you can use this candle. Come in, come in.”

  I edged down to the break in the wall, the entrance to Dewey’s bedroom, and waited impatiently for Bob to crawl through, get to his feet, and come sideways down to me. He looked past my shoulder at Dewey’s room and said, “Son of a gun!”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Did you bring Doctor Cameron with you?”

  “Sure.”

  Doctor Fredericks’ voice said, “Tobin?”

  I looked over, and his disembodied head was jutting through the wall at knee-height, over there at the closet entrance. He looked foolish that way, and he was obviously aware of it, and I was delighted. I also felt savage joy at having been proved right, but I could wait to collect on that. I said, “Fredericks, you go upstairs. You and Doctor Cameron. He’ll be popping out up there somewhere.”

  “What makes you think that?” He wanted to be argumentative again.

  “Do what I say, you idiot,” I snapped at him. “Argue with me later on. Now get upstairs.” I turned away from him and said, more quietly, “Bob, there’s a hole in the ceiling down at the far end. I can’t get up there one-armed. Dewey went up there. Will you go up after him?”

  “Sure!” He was happy as a boy allowed to play with the big kids.

  “He won’t fight you,” I said. “At least, I don’t think he will. But he’ll try to run away.”

  “I can hold him,” he said, full of confidence.

  “All right. You go first, and I’ll hand the candle up to you.” I looked back the other way, and Fredericks was gone. I could only hope he was doing what I’d told him.

  Bob edged down to the far end of the narrow passage, and I followed him. He climbed up the framework quickly, and into the hole above, pausing at the last stage to reach down and take the candle from my upstretched hand. Then he went on up.

  I called, “See anything?”

  “Narrow up here. Same as down there. It turns, down at the other end, I’ll go take a look.”

  “I’ll go around and come up the stairs,” I called. “Be gentle with him, if you can.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned away, hurrying sideways back to the closet entrance, crawling through, and stumbling to my feet inside. I left the closet and went through the storage room and out to the hall, where a couple of passing residents looked at me oddly. I knew I was probably sooty and sweaty again from crawling around between the walls, so not only were we out to capture the wrong person, but I was also more than likely in the process of blowing my cover here. How would we operate after this, to get the injurer? I had no idea.

  I went up the front stairs, moving as quickly as I could, but before I was halfway I heard shouting up there, several people shouting, and Bob Gale’s voice above them all, yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

  I lunged up the stairs, panting and gasping, and turned in the direction of all the noise, which abruptly stopped. Did they have him? I ran on, and ahead of me the corridor turned left. I trotted around the corner, and at the far end of the hall people were clustered at an open window, looking out, leaning forward and looking over one another’s shoulders.

  I came up to them, seeing Bob Gale and Doctor Fredericks in the front rank, both leaning out the window and looking down, with Doctor Cameron and Jerry Kanter and Robert O’Hara behind them, and William Merrivale and Marilyn Nazarro and Walter Stoddard making up a third row.

  I stopped behind them, gasping for breath, and said, “What happened?”

  They didn’t answer. They were immobile, like a piece of sculpture, or like worshippers at some strange shrine. Marilyn Nazarro, too short to see past the others’ shoulders, was bobbing up and down, the only one of them in any kind of motion.

  I said, “Bob. What’s the matter?”

  Bob turned, his movement dislodging everyone else, breaking the spell that had been holding them all. He looked back, saw me, and drew his head in from the window. “He’s out here, Mr. Tobin,” he said, his voice and manner much more muted than usual.

  Now the others turned to look at me, and moved back to give me room. Doctor Cameron said, “We saw him go. He went out on the fire escape. We have wooden fire escapes, you know.”

  I went into the space they’d cleared, and leaned to look out the window. At my elbow, Bob Gale said, “It gave way.” I looked out.

  There had been a wooden platform outside the window, constructed of wide planks, with two sets of steps leading from it, one up and the other down. Three of the planks now hung straight down against the rear wall of the house, leaving a hole in the platform nearly three feet wide.

  Behind me, Doctor Cameron said, “He was in a panic, of course, or he wouldn’t have gone all the way through, he would have grabbed hold of the rail or some such thing. But he was too frightened and in too much of a hurry to think.”

  I looked down through the hole, and down below there was blacktop between here and the garage. Lying face down on the blacktop, his arms and legs twisted in a shape vaguely reminiscent of a swastika, was Dewey, his head at an angle to his neck that is impossible in life.

  Behind me, Bob Gale said, “I kept shouting to him to stop, but he wouldn’t.”

  I drew back in and turned around, and they were all looking at me.

  Doctor Fredericks said, “So it seems you were right after all.”

  I hit him in the mouth.

  15

  I HAD TAKEN EVERYBODY completely by surprise, including myself. The swing had been awkward, since I’d only had the one hand to work with, but it had a lot of pent-up anger and frustration behind it, and all the weight of my rather stocky body, and it caught Fredericks flush on the mouth. He staggered backwards, eyes round with astonishment, arms pinwheeling, and I stumbled after him, not trying to hit him any more but just to regain my balance.

  Bystanders kept us both from falling, and once I had myself both physically and emotionally under control again I turned to Doctor Cameron and said, “We have to talk. In private.”

  He was as shocked as Fredericks. “After what you—”

  I didn’t have time for that. “We have to talk,” I insisted. “Before the police get here.”

  The word police got through to him. He blinked and said, “My God. Yes, you’re right. In my office.”

  “Good.” I turned to Bob Gale, saying, “You go down and stand beside that body. Nobody is to move it, nobody is to come near it.”

  “All right,” he said. He seemed stunned, whether by Dewey’s death or my hitting Fredericks I didn’t know.

  I turned to Fredericks, whose upper lip was cut and bleeding. He was dabbing at it with a handkerchief and looking at me as though he still couldn’t believe it had happened. I said, “I’m sorry I did that. It was a momentary loss of emotional control.”

  He nodded, continuing to watch me.

  I told him, “I want you to see to it that nobody leaves here and nobody makes any phone calls until the police arrive.”

  He nodded again. “I understand,” he said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief.

  William Merrivale, the father-beater, said to me, “Just who made you boss?” He was glowering at
me, a look his father had probably gotten to know rather well.

  I said, “You’ll find out what’s going on as soon as everybody else does. Doctor Cameron, let’s—”

  Merrivale reached out and pushed my shoulder. “I was talking to you.”

  Doctor Cameron said to him, “William, it’s all right. We’ll explain a little later.”

  “Where does this guy get off socking people?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” I told Cameron.

  “I know,” he said. “William, be patient for just a little while. Mr. Tobin, shall we go?”

  We went. Bob had already trotted away down the hall to take up his post beside the body, and now the rest of them followed Doctor Cameron and me toward the stairs. I could hear Merrivale back there, asking Fredericks insistent questions, and Fredericks answering in informationless monosyllables.

  Neither of us said anything more until we were alone, and we weren’t alone until we were actually inside his office. Then Doctor Cameron said, “This is a terrible situation now.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, and sat down in the chair facing his desk.

  He stayed on his feet, pacing around the office in aimless ovals. “I suppose we have no choice,” he said gloomily. “We have to call in the police now.”

  “It’s simpler than that,” I told him. “In an accidental death under suspicious circumstances, which is what this is, the police come in whether we want them or not.”

  “Now it’s murder, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly. In a court of law, it would be manslaughter. Of course if intent could be proved, then it would be murder. Among other things.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “What other things?”

  “You and I are guilty of several crimes,” I told him. “I don’t know if you realize that.”

  “No, I don’t.” He wasn’t sure whether to be offended or on the defensive, so he was a little of both.

  I said, “We have a number of rigged accidents, and we both know they’re rigged accidents, and we don’t report them to the authorities. Causing severe bodily damage, deliberately and maliciously, is a felony. In concealing our knowledge of a felony we have become accessories to the felony and equally guilty with the perpetrator.”