03 Wax Apple by Tucker Coe

Author:Tucker Coe [Coe, Tucker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

16

VIOLENT DEATH BRINGS THINGS to a head. The echo inside The Midway had become a vibration, a tension, a hum. Faces looked paler and thinner, eyes were more prominent, bodies moved with a new awkwardness. Voices were more hushed.

And no one wanted to be alone. No general announcement had been made to the effect that the death of Dewey was classifiable as murder, but an aura of danger was nevertheless in the air, and people tended to flock together. It was lunchtime, so it was to the dining room that everybody gravitated, and no one wanted to be the first to leave.

I sat at a table with Bob Gale and Walter Stoddard and Jerry Kanter, we four being among the first arrivals, and I watched the room gradually fill up until everyone was present except Doris Brady, the culture-shock Peace Corps girl, and Nicholas Fike, the frail alcoholic. Neither of those two ever did come in for lunch that day.

But everyone else did. Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, our two blond young football player types, were at the table to my right. George Bartholomew and Donald Walburn, two of those already injured, were to my left at a table with Phil Roche and Edgar Jennings, two of the ping-pong players eliminated as suspects.

The room, in fact, had become sexually segregated, with three tables of men on one side of the room and three tables of women on the other side. Across from the table containing Bartholomew and Roche and Walburn and Jennings sat Debby Lattimore, with Marilyn Nazarro and Beth Tracy, Beth being another of the non-suspects from the ping-pong room. Across from my table was one seating Helen Dorsey, the compulsive housekeeper, along with Ruth Ehrengart and Ivy Pollett, my last two suspects, both of whom I was seeing for the first time. All I could say was that they both looked appropriate to their dossiers, Ruth Ehrengart a thin and washed-out woman who looked like someone who’d had a nervous breakdown after the birth of her tenth child, and Ivy Pollett also thin, but dryer, chalkier, the right appearance for a fortyish spinster who’d devoted her life to an ailing mother and, after the mother’s death, gradually built up a many-faceted persecution complex involving attempted rapes and counterspies and all sorts of obscure plots. Was either of those two guilty of murder? Had Ivy Pollett, for instance, started to believe in the plots and the persecution again and had she started laying traps for her enemies?

But that kind of theorizing was no good. As I’d already seen in the past, a workable irrational motive could be developed out of the dossier of anyone in this room. That wasn’t the way I was going to find the murderer. If I ever did find him.

Jerry Kanter rapped his knuckles softly on the table to get my attention, and gave a meaningful nod of his head. “Look at that.”

He had meant the last table, across the way and to the right,

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