Wax Apple by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page A

Bob was already eliminated, so now we can eliminate Jennings and Roche.”
    “And two more,” Bob said. “Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy were in there watching the game, and neither of them left.” Marilyn Nazarro was the young lady who’d looked so vivacious at lunch but whose history was of crippling depression. Beth Tracy I hadn’t yet seen.
    “That’s even better,” I said. “That’s five eliminated, plus the people who’ve been injured, which would be Mrs. Ackerson and Molly Schweitzler with the table that collapsed, Donald Walburn with the ladder, Miss Wooster with the terrace, and George Bartholomew with the bed frame in the closet. For a total of ten, out of twenty-one.”
    “Twenty-two,” Doctor Cameron said. “If you’re counting Miss Wooster. She’s in the hospital now, and there are twenty-one people here without her.”
    “Very well,” I said. “Ten from twenty-two. Leaving twelve residents, plus Mrs. Garson the cook and Doctor Fredericks your assistant.”
    “You aren’t counting those two as suspects, I hope.”
    Until I saw them—particularly until I saw Doctor Fredericks—I wasn’t counting them out, but I didn’t say that. I said, “Probably not. By the way, which of the residents has the nickname Dewey?”
    They both looked blank, and Doctor Cameron said, “None that I know of. Why?”
    “I met him last night. He told me his nickname was Dewey.”
    Doctor Cameron shrugged a little and said, “Every once in a while, a resident will regress a little. Particularly at night. I would guess offhand it’s someone who was nicknamed Dewey at some other period in his life, and that former time was prominent in his mind last night. But I wouldn’t know which one it was.”
    I said, “I like to be able to put the faces and the dossiers together, so if I’m ever with either of you and I say, ‘Dewey,’ please look where I’m looking and tell me what name he goes by in this period of his life.”
    They both assured me they would, and then Doctor Cameron said, “Now that you have your list of suspects down to twelve, what are you going to do next?”
    “Wander around,” I said. “Meet more people. You have group therapy sessions every day, don’t you?”
    “Twice a day,” he said, “morning and afternoon. It’s voluntary, and very lightly attended, but some of the residents are reassured by the idea that it’s there if they ever need it. I take the morning sessions, usually, and Doctor Fredericks takes the afternoons.”
    Bob Gale said to me, “You’re going this afternoon, aren’t you?”
    “Of course,” I said. I lifted my right arm, in its cast. “After my experience yesterday,” I said, “it’s only natural I’d want some reassurance.”

6
    T HREE P.M., GROUP THERAPY in a large square room with bookcase-lined walls. A large oval table dominated the room, flanked by armless wooden chairs with padded leather seats and backs. By two minutes before the hour there were seven of us seated at the table, well-spaced, no two people sitting directly side by side. Doctor Fredericks had not yet arrived, and both ends of the oval table were unoccupied, so I didn’t yet know which end was considered the head.
    The six others included some faces I already knew, plus some new ones. The ones I knew were Molly Schweitzler, the fat lady eliminated as a suspect because she’d been one of the first two victims, plus Jerry Kanter, who’d shown me to my room, and either Robert O’Hara or William Merrivale, one of the two young men I’d first seen washing the station wagon. The new faces were two women and a man, all more or less middle-aged.
    There was very little conversation. Jerry Kanter was in low-voiced but animated discussion with O’Hara/Merrivale—I was looking forward to learning which of those two was which—but the rest of us simply sat in silence, glancing at our watches and waiting. It reminded me for some reason of a Roman Catholic church I’d once been in on a