Wax Apple (25 page)

“Let me make the phone call,” I said, “and then we’ll talk.”

“All right,” he said, reluctantly, and stood frowning at me as I called the Missing Persons Bureau.

Eddie Schultz didn’t answer, but he was on duty now and they switched the call to his desk. “Mitch Tobin here,” I said, and he said, “Hey, Mitch, how you doing?”

“Fine,” I said. I haven’t seen Eddie for nearly three years, but we’d been friends for fifteen years or so before that, and he was one of the ones who didn’t turn against me after Jock was killed.

Now he said, “What can I do for you, Mitch?”

I said, “I have six names, and places of birth. What I want is date and time of birth on each of them. Could you do it for me?”

“Date and
time?
”

“Yes.”

“Local?”

“Four local, one Los Angeles, one Canada.”

“So you want birth certificates.”

“I don’t need the actual certificates, just the information.”

“Mitch, are you working again?” Once before I’d called him, in connection with one of the jobs I’d taken.

“Not really,” I said.

“You don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

“I’m careful,” I said. “And this is just to be passed on to a friend.”

“Okay. Give me the stuff.”

I read him the six names and the six places. When I was done, he said, “Some of these I could have tomorrow. The LA and Toronto will take a little longer. You want them all together?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a call Monday.”

“Is it okay if my friend calls you direct? Cut out the middleman.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Thanks, Eddie. His name is Ronald Cornell.”

He repeated the name, and said, “Tell him to call before eleven. In the morning.”

“I will. Thanks a lot, Eddie.”

“Any time. Mitch?”

“Yes?”

“Otherwise, how are you?”

“Pretty good,” I said.

“You come out of the house at all?”

“Not very much.”

“Give me a social call sometime, will you?”

“I will,” I promised. “Thanks again.”

“Sure thing, Mitch.”

We hung up, and I wrote Eddie’s name and phone number in Cornell’s notebook. Giving it to him, I said, “Call him Monday, before eleven in the morning. He’s expecting you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate this, I really do.”

I got to my feet. “But you saw how easy it was. I’d be embarrassed to take money for it.”

“You must come to the shop,” he said. “I insist on that.”

“I will,” I said.

He thanked me some more, and then he got ready to leave. And now I saw why he’d arrived with no sign of snowstorm on him; he’d removed his outerwear just inside the front door, before finding me in the basement. If the house had been empty, obviously, he’d intended to wait.

The buckled shoes disappeared first, inside knee-high brown leather boots that zipped up the side, enclosing both the shoes and the flared bottoms of his trousers. He then put on an ankle-length dark brown coat in a trench-coat style, but with a fur collar and brass buttons, and topped it all with a hat that looked like an outsized baseball cap, brim and all, made entirely of dark brown fur. After all that, the gloves he took from his coat pocket and pulled on were almost disappointing in their ordinariness.

“Well,” he said, “ready to brave the elements. Thank you again, Mr. Tobin, you were really very kind.”

“I did nothing at all,” I said. I reached for the doorknob to let him out, but then stopped and said, “I wonder if you’ve thought about what you’ll do afterwards.”

He frowned at me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Let’s say you find him,” I said. “Let’s say you narrow it down to one person, astrologically. You can’t take astrological charts to court, or to a police station. What if you become convinced it was one particular person, but you don’t have any proof to back up the stars?”

“Then I’ll have to look for proof,” he said, as though it were as simple as that.

I said, “The reason I’m asking, I wouldn’t want to have helped you if you were planning to take the law into your own hands.”

“Revenge?” His smile was both astonished and bitter. “Me? Go out and beat somebody up,
kill
somebody? Oh, Mr. Tobin, you don’t have to worry about
me,
I won’t do anything
effective
at all.”

That self-hatred of his could turn violent; I considered telling him so, warning him to be on guard before he
did
do something “effective,” but I knew he would neither understand nor believe me, so I said nothing about it, only, “In that case, I wish you luck.”

“Thank you again,” he said, and I opened the door, and he left.

The front door has a window in it. Looking through it, I watched Cornell go cautiously down the snowy stoop and out through the deep snow toward his car, a blue Corvette. His car, or Jamie Dearborn’s?

He reminded me of somebody, going away through the snow, stepping high and cautious, wearing his boots and his long coat and his fur collar and that fur hat, a long slender dark figure surrounded by snow.

And then I realized who it was: Greta Garbo, in
Anna Karenina.
I smiled to myself, wondering if Cornell would be pleased at the image. I thought he probably would.

He got into the car, and a moment later it drove slowly away. I turned from the door and went back to the kitchen, where I changed again to the muddy sneakers and went back downstairs to the basement.

Two days later, Friday, a package came for me in the mail. Kate was home, then, and watched me curiously as I opened it and took out a tan cashmere scarf. “That’s beautiful,” she said, and reached out to touch it.

It was beautiful; soft, delicate, clearly expensive.

She said, “Who is it from?”

There was a small note: “Thank you. Ronald Cornell.”

I hadn’t told Kate about Cornell, but now we sat together at the kitchen table and I described Wednesday’s meeting to her. When I finished, she said, “He didn’t want you to do anything else? Help him find the murderer?”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t ask.”

Kate has been strongly in favor of those few jobs I’ve done the last couple of years, not because they’ve eased our financial problems but because she believes that if I only remain active in the world I will sooner or later become my old self again. I won’t, that old self was buried with Jock, but nothing will destroy her hope.

Now she said, “Maybe he’ll come back if the astrology doesn’t help.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think I’ve heard the last of Ronald Cornell.”

She reached out to touch the scarf again. “That was really very nice of him,” she said.

“Yes, it was,” I said.

W
E WERE EATING BREAKFAST
together, when Kate said, “Wasn’t his name Cornell?” She was reading the
Daily News
at the time.

This was Tuesday, six days after my only meeting with Ronald Cornell. I said, “Yes. Ronald Cornell. He’s in the paper?”

“He tried to kill himself.”

I frowned. “Let me see.”

Kate handed the paper over to me, and I looked at the item. It was back with the A&S ads, under the headline

B’KLYN HEIGHTS STORE OWNER SUICIDE TRY:

In critical condition at Flatbush Crown Hospital is Ronald Cornell, 185 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, following a fall from a building roof termed by police “an obvious suicide attempt.”

Cornell, part owner of Jammer, popular male boutique in the Brooklyn Heights area, made his leap from the roof of 1212 Hicks Streets, where the store is located. Friends say Cornell has been despondent since the unsolved slaying recently of his partner in the boutique enterprise, James Dearborn, with whom Cornell also shared his apartment.

Police say the leap from the roof of the four-story building occurred at approximately nine
P.M.
Monday. Clotheslines, the wooden roof of a storage shed, and the bolts of cloth maintained within the shed all helped to cushion Cornell’s fall, according to police, who say that the promptness of a neighbor in phoning for assistance also contributed to saving Cornell’s life.

No charges have as yet been preferred against Cornell, who remains in a coma and under guard at the hospital, where prognosis by doctors is fair.

Yesterday evening. Yesterday morning he was to have called Eddie Schultz; I wondered if he had.

Kate, seeing that I was done reading, said, “Isn’t that terrible?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, and handed the paper back to her.

She looked at it again, and shook her head. “Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

I knew why it might be done, might be thought of, but I said nothing.

Kate looked at me. “He didn’t act suicidal when you saw him last week?”

“That wasn’t suicide,” I said. “Somebody tried to kill him.”

Startled, she glanced down again at the newspaper, and then back up at me. “Kill? Do you really think so?”

“I’m sure of it,” I said.

“Because his partner was killed? But he
was
despondent over that, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. But if he was going to kill himself, he wouldn’t do it that way.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

“Two reasons. One psychological, one physical. Psychologically, Ronald Cornell would never kill himself in a way that would cause him pain or leave him ugly. He might take poison, he’d be more likely to turn on the gas. But he wouldn’t jump off a roof.”

“You can’t say that, though. Under emotional stress people always act differently.”

“With more intensity,” I said, “but not out of character.”

She looked dubious. “What’s the other reason?”

“The physical details are wrong,” I said. “Read that news item again. He landed on a wooden shed full of bolts of cloth. It doesn’t say whether he jumped off the front of the building or the back, but a storage shed wouldn’t be in front, so it had to be the back.”

“I assumed it was, yes.” She looked from the paper to me again.

“I know that part of Brooklyn Heights,” I said. “There aren’t any front lawns there. There’s the street, the sidewalk and the building front. If he’d gone off the front, there would have been nothing to break his fall but the sidewalk.”

“That could be just accident,” she said. “He went up on the roof, and he was distressed, and he just turned the nearest way.”

“Except that his store’s in that building. That storage shed and those bolts of cloth have to have something to do with the store. It has to be
his
cloth.”

Now her frown changed, and she said, “Oh, I see.”

“A man wanting to kill himself,” I said, “doesn’t jump onto bolts of cloth. Not when there’s sidewalk on the other side of the building. And no matter how distressed he was, if he’d gone up on that roof planning to kill himself—and I still say he wouldn’t have done it that way—he would have remembered that in
this
direction is certain death on the sidewalk, but in
that
direction is only possible death because of his own storage shed full of his own stock of cloth.”

She said, “Then what do you think happened?”

“I think he was hit on the head,” I said. “While he was in the store, probably. Then he was carried up to the roof. The murderer didn’t take him to the front because he was afraid somebody in the street below might see him. That’s the only explanation for Cornell’s body going off the back.”

She said, “But couldn’t it be one of those cases where somebody tries to kill himself but doesn’t really want to? Doesn’t that happen?”

“It happens more often than real suicide,” I said. “It’s a way of getting the world to pay attention to your problems. But that false-start kind of thing is done under completely different circumstances. You don’t really hurt yourself, for one thing, and you make sure there are people around to rescue you in time, for another. If Cornell had gone up on the roof and sat on the edge with his feet dangling over and shouted that he was going to jump, that would be a different thing. But to make a jump like that? No. Because you
might
get killed, jumping four stories onto the wooden roof of a storage shed, no matter if the shed is full of mattresses. And even if you don’t get killed, you could get very severely injured. You could break bones, you could lose an eye. The sidewalk would be a cleaner and surer death, if you really mean to die, and the storage shed is too dangerous if you just want to call attention to yourself.”

“But the police think it was suicide,” she said.

“They won’t for long. When Cornell comes to, he’ll tell them what happened. With any luck, he knows who did it to him.”

“What if he doesn’t come to? What if he dies?”

“There are too many things obviously wrong with a suicide verdict,” I said. “The fact that his partner was just killed a week and a half ago, in addition to everything else. They’ll come around to murder.”

“What if they don’t?”

I shook my head. “Then I don’t know,” I said. “It won’t be the first time anyone got away with murder in this city. But I don’t think it’ll happen.”

“You won’t do anything?”

“Me?” I frowned at her. “Why me?”

“He came to you for help,” she said.

“And I helped him.”

“And he sent you that beautiful scarf.”

“Kate, he didn’t buy me with that scarf. I didn’t ask for it, he sent it as a thank-you for what I’d already done. He hasn’t asked me to do anything else, and there’s no need for me to do anything else. He’s in a hospital now, the killer won’t be able to get at him again, the police are on the job. If he comes to, he’ll tell them what happened. If he doesn’t, they’ll investigate anyway.”

“What if they don’t?”

“It isn’t my responsibility, Kate,” I said.

She looked at me, and I could see her carefully not saying several different things. I am frequently amazed that she goes on putting up with me as I am now, and every time we come to a moment like this I feel a sudden pillar of cold in my chest, thinking, This is the time she leaves.

But it wasn’t. She folded the paper, looking away from me, and in a neutral voice said, “Will you be working downstairs today?”

“Yes,” I said.