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

Saturday afternoon. The people sitting in the pews next to the confessionals, waiting their turn to tell their sins to the priest, had worn much this same look of vaguely worried introspection.
    Which in turn reminded me of Linda Campbell, because it had been with her that I’d gone into the church. I’d sat in the rear pew, alone, and waited while she went to confession, and I’d wondered what she would have to say to the priest about me. “Father, I am a married woman having an affair with a married man.” Or, worse: “Father, I am having an adulterous affair with the policeman who arrested my husband and is responsible for him now being in jail.”
    Not that Dink Campbell had been railroaded by me in the role of some sideshow Solomon, not at all. Daniel “Dink” Campbell was a professional burglar, and he was guilty of the crime I arrested him for and a judge sent him over for. But I, after Dink’s arrest and imprisonment, became guilty of sleeping with his wife.
    I tried not to think of Linda Campbell these days—or Jock Sheehan either—but somehow the atmosphere in this room was conducive to poking at aching teeth, opening old sores, relighting the purgatories of the past. I was deep in the chain of events that had led to my dismissal from the force and my present life of limbo when the door opened once again and Doctor Lorimer Fredericks walked in.
    He could have been no one else. He was a youngish man, about thirty, and he carried himself with a prim confidence and self-assurance that no recent mental patient could possibly bring off. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, dark trousers, brown walking shoes and a green shirt open at the throat. His head was small and fine-boned, with black hair slicked straight back. He sported a thin pencil moustache and a look of such complete self-satisfaction that I detested him on the spot, and began at once to try to find some motive for Doctor Cameron’s assistant to be guilty of causing the accidents. Trying somehow to squeeze the doctor out and take his place? Running some sort of psychiatric experiment of his own? The ideas that popped into my head were nonsensical and I knew it, but that was the effect the man had on me.
    He took a seat at one end of the table, thereby making that the head, and we all watched him carefully take a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket, clean them with a handkerchief held between thumb and first finger, and then use two hands to precisely fit the glasses to his face. He then flashed a brisk professional meaningless smile around at us all and said, “Not a bad turnout today.” He looked at me. “You’re the new man, aren’t you? Tobin.”
    “That’s right,” I said.
    “I understand you’ve had an accident.”
    I was sitting there wearing a pajama top, with my cast-enclosed arm sticking out the bottom at my side, which made the fact of the accident fairly obvious, but I understood he had merely used a polite form of statement. Still, just about anything the man said could immediately get my back up. I quelled an impulse to be sarcastic, saying only, “Yes. I fell and broke my arm.”
    “Is this the first time you’ve ever broken a bone?”
    It was. I’d been shot in the leg once, seven or eight years ago when I was still on the force, and had spent five weeks in the hospital, but no bone had been broken. “Yes, it is,” I said.
    He studied me with impersonal interest through his horn-rims. “Do you recall what you were thinking as you were falling down the stairs?”
    Here was an unexpected problem. Doctor Fredericks not being privy to the truth about me, he was unconsciously skirting close to areas of questioning I might have trouble finding the right answers for. Hoping he’d switch to someone else soon—after all, this was supposed to be group therapy—I said, “I guess I was just frightened.”
    “That’s all?” The eyes seemed to glint behind the glasses. “No feelings of guilt?