Wax Apple (16 page)

When the two policemen had left the room, taking O’Hara and Merrivale with them, the man in the brown suit looked around at us, glaring at us as though to say he knew we were all in a plot together but that he would ferret it out, and then he called, “Which one is Tobin?”

I got to my feet, feeling suddenly very nervous, very frightened. My stomach was getting small cramps, and a hard ball of nervousness had formed just up under the front of my rib cage. I said, “I’m”—but it came out falsetto, a stupidly comical note. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m Tobin.”

He looked at me. “They all here, Tobin?”

“All but two,” I said.

“Go get them,” he told me. “I want everybody to stay right here until they’re called. Go get them and tell them that, Tobin, and when you’ve got them here come down to Cameron’s office. I want to talk to you first.”

“I don’t know which rooms they have,” I said.

“Then take somebody with you who does.”

Bob Gale popped up at once, saying, “I’ll come with you.”

I glanced at him, wishing he’d had sense enough not to draw attention to himself, but there was nothing to do but nod and say, “All right.”

“Make it fast,” the man in brown said, and left the dining room, slamming the door behind him.

W
ALTER STODDARD CAME SHAKILY
over to the table and leaned with both hands on the back of his chair. “So that’s what they’re going to be like,” he said.

“We shouldn’t judge too quickly,” I said, but I could hear the lack of enthusiasm in my voice. What we had just seen was as shoddy a piece of police procedure as I’d ever heard of. There was no mark on either O’Hara or Merrivale that they’d given to one another. The police work in that instance had not only served to create injuries where there had been none, but in one stroke it had prejudiced every potential witness in the larger matter, the investigation of a murder.

And somehow I could feel the prejudice extending to me. I had not chosen to be the man in the brown suit’s emissary to get Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike, but I was his emissary, and everyone knew by now that I was in some obscure way a near-policeman myself, and all at once I was a representative of the enemy camp.

But I was in neither camp, really. The man in the brown suit would no more accept me as a policeman than these people would accept me as a resident. I was a wax apple in both bowls.

Bob Gale said, “We ought to get going, Mitch.” He still didn’t have sense enough to put a clearly defined distance between us, which could eventually cost him dearly.

I nodded to him, and said to Stoddard, “We can only hope for the best.” He gave me a bleak look without answering, and I reluctantly turned away from the table.

Bob and I walked to the door, and I could feel the eyes on us. You could almost smell the fear in the room now. There would be more than one case of hysterics in here before the day was over.

A uniformed policeman was on guard just outside the door. He was neither of the two who’d been in the dining room, but was a big rangy boy with red hair showing beneath his uniform cap. His face was rural, open, amiable, perhaps gullible. He was the one who had stood guard over Dewey’s body until his superiors and the State Mobile Lab showed up. He looked at us and his eyes were odd, white-rimmed, and it took me a second to realize that he too was frightened and was showing his fear with his eyes, the way horses do.

Of course. This was The Midway, and we were the residents, and to the local people the residents of The Midway were all lunatics. A whole house full of crazy people, that’s what it seemed like to them. And here was this boy, no more than twenty-five, standing guard over a door, an unlocked door, with twenty crazy people just on the other side.

I said to him, softly, to reassure him, “I’m Tobin. I’ve been sent to get the other two residents.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and relaxed a little bit, but not much. “Captain Yoncker told me,” he said. He was not looking at Bob Gale at all, preferring to concentrate his attention on someone—me—who was supposed to be reasonably sane.

Bob and I walked on past him, and after that I let Bob lead the way. We headed in a direction that I knew was toward the rear staircase, and after we rounded the first turn Bob said, in an excited whisper, “What are we going to do, Mitch?”

“We’re going to get Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike,” I told him.

“I don’t mean that. We’ve got to do something about these cops! They aren’t going to find the killer, you know that. All they’re going to do is give everybody a bad time.”

“It isn’t up to us to try to stop them,” I said, “and I imagine we’d both get ourselves in a lot of trouble if we tried. I’ll speak to Doctor Cameron about what happened to O’Hara and Merrivale, but after that it’s up to him. It really is, Bob. You and I could only make things worse.”

“What if we found the killer ourselves?” he asked me. He was excited and intent, and he thought he was making perfect sense. “Turn the killer over to that Captain Whatsisname—”

“Yoncker, the officer said,” I told him. “Captain Yoncker.”

“If we turn the killer over to Captain Yoncker,” Bob said intently, “he won’t have any excuse to hang around here anymore.”

“We don’t know who the killer is,” I pointed out. “And Bob, we can’t do any poking around with this house full of Yoncker’s police. He wouldn’t like it.”

“We could
try.
”

“No.”

“You mean you won’t? I don’t see how you can be like that! Didn’t you see what they did to—”

“I saw it,” I said. “I have more experience than you, Bob, so let me tell you something. The only sensible thing to do when men like that are around is be very small and very quiet and hope they don’t notice you. And if they do notice you, you get even smaller and quieter. You don’t annoy them, Bob, because they have all the power, all the authority and all the safety they need. There’s nothing you can do to them, and a lot they can do to you, and you’d better start acting as though you understood that.”

We’d reached the rear stairs, and started up them. Bob looked mutinous and disappointed in me. “I’d thought you were a different kind of guy,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

We went on up the stairs, and he silently pointed that we were to turn right, away from my own room and the area

I knew best. We had nothing more to say to one another, both correctly understanding that we had reached a point where true communication between us was impossible, until Bob stopped and pointed to a door on the right, saying, “This is Fike’s room.”

I rapped on the door, and called Fike’s name, and nothing happened. I knocked again, and still nothing happened, so I turned the knob and pushed the door open and went in.

The room was empty. It was a smaller room than mine, but very similar in furnishings and appearance. Two drawers of the metal bureau stood half-open, and when I went over to look they both contained personal items of Fike’s, but not very many. Both drawers were well under half-full.

“Maybe he’s in the bathroom,” Bob said.

“Go take a look,” I told him.

He left, and I went over to the closet and opened the door. There were a few things hanging in there, a topcoat and a suit and a couple of shirts and two pairs of trousers, but they were to both sides, leaving the center of the rod empty except for some wire and wood hangers. There was nothing on the shelf except a gray hat tucked off to the side.

I went over to the window, which faced the same side as my room. A green wall of leafy tree branches obscured the view. The window was open. I leaned out and looked down. There was an ornamental line of stone jutting out about four feet below the bottom of the window, a space too narrow to be a ledge. The ground ten-to-twelve feet below that was soft dark loam, shadowed by the trees.

I heard a sound behind me, and brought my head in again. Turning, I saw Bob in the doorway. He said, “He wasn’t there.”

“He’s run away,” I said. “Packed a suitcase and went out the window.”

Bob looked around in surprise. “You sure?”

“Positive.”

“You mean, he’s the one?”

“I doubt it. Pressure made him run, not guilt. Our injurer has had lots of time to get used to pressure, he’s injured people six other times before Dewey was killed.”

Bob came over to the window and looked out, but there was nothing to see but leaves and branches. “Where’s he going to go? He’s got no place to go.”

“I imagine,” I said, “he’ll be picked up in a bar somewhere in Kendrick.”

He looked at me. “That’s really rotten,” he said. “He came here because he needed things quiet. We all did. This is really rotten, Mr. Tobin, it’s rotten rotten rotten!”

He was getting too excited, and for the first time I was forcibly reminded of the dossier on him. Vietnam had been rotten too, and he’d come out of it so full of anguish it had taken three years in a VA hospital to undo one year of Vietnam. I didn’t want him breaking down now, mostly because I had the feeling he would tend to break in the direction of thrusting himself toward martyrdom. I had no doubt but that Captain Yoncker and his men were prepared to gobble up any martyrs they were given.

I said, “Fike will be all right. As all right as he would have been anyway. Come on, let’s see Doris Brady.”

He was reluctant to leave the room, though there was nothing either of us could do there. I had to go over to the door and stand there, and finally he came along.

Doris Brady’s room was around one more corner, and once again I knocked and received no answer. Bob looked wonderingly at me and said, “Her, too?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “She’s a different type.” I knocked on her door again, and called her name, and at last pushed open the door.

Empty. I walked into a room that seemed no more feminine than my own or the one Fike had occupied, except for the shoes under the bed. There were no drawers pulled open in the metal bureau here, and the window, which faced the road side of the house, was shut.

“Would she use the same bathroom as Fike?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s just down the hall. It was empty when I looked.”

I went over to the closet and opened the door. On the shelf was a suitcase. The clothing was sparse hanging from the rod, but it was evenly spaced.

I was about to shut the door again when I sensed the eyes. I looked down and to my right, and started despite myself.

She was sitting on the floor, knees tucked-up under chin, arms wrapped around legs, back against the side wall of the closet. And she was staring at me, solemnly and un-blinkingly. I looked back at her, and somehow I had the feeling she wasn’t really seeing me at all, though when I moved my head her eyes tracked, following me. But they weren’t like living eyes at all, they were like the eyes in a painting that are looking at you wherever you stand in the room.

I said, “Doris.” There was no change in her expression, no response at all. I heard Bob moving in this direction, and waved him away with a hand behind my back. “Doris,” I said again, and her eyes didn’t even flicker. I knew it was hopeless to try to reach her, but I said, “Will you come out now, Doris?” No response.

I backed away from the closet, leaving its door open, and when I was out of her range of vision I turned and said to Bob, “Go get Doctor Cameron.”

“What is she—? Is she—?”

“Go get Doctor Cameron!”

He left.

T
HE FIRST MAN THROUGH
the door was Yoncker, and I felt a tightening in my chest, because I knew that no matter how practical I had been with Bob Gale, I would not now be able to stop myself from trying to protect Doris Brady from this man. I stood there braced for the worst, and then Doctor Cameron came into the room behind Yoncker, and I suddenly realized I’d been holding my breath. I exhaled, and Doctor Fredericks came in, and then the two policemen who’d beaten up O’Hara and Merrivale.

Yoncker said to me, brusquely, “Where is she?”

I treated the question as though it had come from Doctor Cameron, and looked at him as I made my answer. “She’s in the closet, Doctor. Sitting on the floor, on the right.”

Yoncker started for the closet, but Doctor Cameron got there first, and I heard Cameron’s voice start, soft and reassuring. Yoncker, standing behind him and trying to see past him, said, “We can get her out of there, Doctor, and then you’ll be able to talk to her.”

Fredericks said, “That won’t be necessary.” His tone was even colder than usual, and I looked at him in some surprise, to see him considering Captain Yoncker with undisguised repugnance. “Doctor Cameron knows what is best in this situation,” he added, and turned to me to say, “Did you talk with her at all?”

“I spoke her name two or three times,” I said. “And asked her if she’d like to come out now. I didn’t get any response at all.”

Yoncker, frustrated with the girl in the closet, shouldered between Fredericks and me to say, “What about the other one?”

“Gone,” I said, and described what I’d found.

Yoncker was pleased, given a situation he recognized. “Flew the coop, eh? Admission of guilt, do you suppose?”

Fredericks answered him, saying, “Not at all. Fike has a history of alcoholism; emotional upset tends to drive him back to the bottle. You’ll find him in the nearest bar.”

“But it could still be guilt,” Yoncker insisted.

“Nicholas Fike,” Fredericks said with really blatant contempt, “doesn’t have the nerves to set a mousetrap. He’s not the man you want, if it’s the guilty party you’re looking for.”

“Of course it is,” Yoncker said. He was honestly baffled. “What else would I be here for?” He actually hadn’t understood Fredericks’ half-accusation that he would be willing to railroad the first handy suspect he found, and I wondered if Fredericks would repeat it in even more obvious terms.

But he didn’t. He merely shrugged, and turned away, going over to Doctor Cameron. The two of them murmured together in the closet doorway, and then Fredericks turned back to Yoncker and said, “It would be best to leave Doctor Cameron alone with the young lady.”

“I could leave somebody here on guard,” Yoncker offered, “if you think it’s a good idea.”