Denial

18

Early the next morning, I parked in the Seaside lot next to a small white van with the words MICRON LABS written on its side in red letters. I was halfway toward the nursing station when Amos Trent, the hefty director of Seaside into whose office Ames and I had broken, stepped out of a doorway and blocked my path.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mr. Fonesca,” he said.

“I’ve come to see Dorothy,” I lied.

“I’m afraid she’s resting now,” he said. “We can’t disturb her.”

“I’ll wait till she wakes up.”

I tried to walk around him but he took a sidestep and was in front of me again.

“I think it would be better if you don’t come here again. In fact, if you do return, I’ll have our lawyer seek a restraining order.”

His voice was low. His breath was minty.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because residents and their families are now asking questions about the murder Dorothy dreamed up,” he said. “People don’t like to send their family members to an assisted living facility where someone may have been murdered.”

“And if you found out that someone had been murdered?”

“It didn’t happen.”

“It did,” I said.

He inched closer to me.

“If our residents and their families believed that,” he said, “they would start an exodus from which it would be very difficult to recover. We’re running a good facility here, but our profit margin is very low. So, if you are trying to blackmail us, not only is there no money to pay you, but I would be forced to report it to the police.”

“Emmie is on duty,” I said.

He looked puzzled.

“Emmie Jefferson?”

“You’ve got more than one Emmie?”

“What are you doing, Fonesca?”

A man in janitor blue denim jogged past us, they keys attached to his belt jangling.

“Whirlpool’s down again,” the man in blue said to Trent as he hurried by.

“See?” Trent said, turning back to me. “You know what it costs for parts for a whirlpool?”

“No,” I said. “Emmie Jefferson.”

“You want to talk to Miss Jefferson?”

“Yes. To her or a policeman named Viviase if I have to,” I said.

“She’s a night nurse,” Trent said.

“But she’s on this morning. I called.”

The corridor was cool, but Trent was perspiring, not much but enough to dapple his upper lip.

“Let’s say we put you on a retainer for a while,” said Trent. “Two hundred a month for a year, to provide security. That’s all we can afford. Might that be incentive to give up your delusion that someone was murdered here?”

“It’s not a delusion,” I said. “I talk to Emmie Jefferson or I talk to the police.”

“You go public with this madness and I’ll sue you,” he said, his voice rippling with anger, his face pink.

“No, you won’t,” I said. “I don’t own anything and you’d have to pay your lawyer.”

He leaned very close now and whispered, “And what if I just beat the fucking shit out of you?”

“It’s an option,” I said. “But it wouldn’t stop me.”

Defeated, he took a step back and said, “Okay, five minutes with Emmie and then you are out of here. Let’s go.”

He turned his back on me and headed for the nursing station.

“Alone,” I said.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder at me.

“I could just wait till she gets off of work and talk to her outside,” I said.

“Five minutes,” Trent said, facing me again, holding up the fingers of his right hand. “You talk to her, you leave and I never see you here again.”

I knew that wasn’t to be. He knew it too, but if it helped him save face in the hallway, it didn’t cost me to keep my mouth closed.

“Thanks,” I said and walked past him to the nursing station. Emmie Jefferson was standing behind it talking to an old woman whose eyes barely reached the top of the counter. The old woman was wearing a black sweater with baggy sleeves.

“Mrs. Engleman,” the nurse was saying, “there isn’t any mail for you. I’m sorry.”

“He told me he would write every day,” the little woman said, reaching up to slap her palm on the counter.

“If a letter comes for you, I’ll bring it to your room personally.”

“You won’t look inside and read it?” the little woman asked with suspicion.

“Cross my heart,” Emmie Jefferson said, crossing her heart.

“A Bible promise would be better,” the woman said.

“Swear on a Bible,” the nurse said, holding back a sigh.

“Better if we had a real Bible you could put your hand right down on,” Mrs. Engleman said.

“There’s one in the library if you want to go get it.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” the old woman said, stepping back. “Maybe I’ll just do that. I won’t tolerate censorship.”

“I understand,” said Emmie Jefferson as Mrs. Engleman shuffled slowly away.

She hadn’t seen me yet, but now she looked up, let out a massive sigh and put her right hand to her forehead.

“Mrs. Cgnozic is sleeping,” she said.

“Really?”

“No, but that’s what I’ve been told to say if you or that old cowboy show up. Trent sees you here and he’ll throw a fit and probably call the cops.”

“I just talked to Trent. He said he had no objection to my talking to you,” I said. “Call his office.”

She folded her arms and looked at me, waiting for me to ask whatever it was I was going to ask.

“The night Dorothy told you she saw someone murdered, your first night on the job, Vivian Pastor checked out.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Her daughter-in-law checked her out. I asked her to wait till the morning. I don’t know the paperwork, but she insisted, said her mother-in-law wanted out right then. I called Marie, the head nurse, woke her up. She said we’ve got no legal right to keep anyone here who doesn’t want to be here. Marie told me where the forms were.”

“You saw Vivian Pastor leave with her daughter-in-law?”

“Technically? No,” she said. “I was down the hall in Mrs. Denton’s room. She needed help getting to the bathroom. I saw Mrs. Pastor, the daughter-in-law, waiting for me at the desk. Told me she was checking her mother-in-law out for good.”

“So you never saw Vivian Pastor?”

“Didn’t say that,” said Emmie Jefferson. “Daughter-in-law asked me to help her carry some of the woman’s things out to the car. I thought she was plenty big enough to carry it out herself, but she pushed hard and offered me five dollars. So I helped, carried a lamp and a suitcase. Old woman was in the car. Just sitting there smiling. Skinny bag of bones, hands shaking.”

“You’d never seen Vivian Pastor before?”

“That was my first time on the job. No, I hadn’t seen her before. I told you. She wasn’t dead. She was alive. That enough?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

“What is going on?” she asked and then held up both hands and added, “Don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know.”

I got back to my car without running into Trent and considered picking up Ames, but that would take time and I just wanted this over with.

Nothing had changed about the house on Orchid, but it felt different. There was no car in the driveway and the garage doors were down. When I knocked at the door, a plain woman of about forty wearing a wary smile, which showed clean but uneven teeth, answered it.

“Mrs. Pastor home?”

“Vivian is,” she said with a distinct inland southern Florida accent.

“No, Alberta,” I said.

“At work,” said the woman.

“You take care of Vivian?”

“Yes, I do, but we don’t call her Vivian. Her nickname is Gigi. Mrs. Pastor, Alberta, says she was given the name by one of her grandchildren and it stuck. That’s what she wants to be called.”

I looked over her shoulder into the dark living room. It was filled with cardboard boxes.

“How long have you been taking care of her?”

“Two, no, three days,” she said. “Had a sheet of paper up at the Mennonite post office over in Pinecraft saying I was available for in-home care. Mrs. Pastor called and here I am. It’s only for a day or two more. They’re moving, you know.”

“I’m a friend of the family,” I said. “I’ve got some papers I need signed. You know where Mrs. Pastor works?”

“Sure,” the woman said brightly. “Over on Clark right near I-75. You know where the new building just went up is? Medical offices and such-like?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She has an office in there.”

“Trapezoid,” came the voice of the old woman inside the house.

The woman at the door said, “She’s a hoot. Poor old thing. Comes up with the darndest things. Doesn’t make much sense, though. Easy to take care of. Just feed her, remind her to use the bathroom and let her look at the TV or her ads.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Sure you don’t want to just pop in and say hi to Gigi? She likes company.”

“Next time,” I said.

I stopped to make a phone call and then took the Trail to Clark and across to the new two-story medical /office building. The last time I had seen it, the building had been swarming with workmen and the land around it was a tire-rutted mess of dirt and mud. Now it looked finished, professional and surrounded by something that looked a little like grass. Two palm trees propped up by wires were doing sentry duty on the lawn.

I pulled into the lot next to the building. Eleven or twelve cars were parked there. One had a caved-in right front fender and a broken headlight.

The lobby smelled Lysol fresh with a hint of recent pain in the background. There was a bank of names, nine of them, black on white plastic tabs mounted on the wall next to the elevator.

Alberta Pastor, massage therapist, was in Suite 203. There are no offices in Sarasota. Everything, even a cramped single room with a desk and space for another chair, was a suite. Calling your business a suite was worth a 10 percent markup on your bill.

There was a carpeted waiting room beyond the door to Suite 203. It was big enough for two wooden chairs, a small table with a wooden dish filled with Tootsie Rolls and wrapped root beer barrels. A neat pile of old People magazines sat next to the dish. An orchestra played a languid Muzak version of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

I could hear voices through the closed door of the room beyond the one I was in. I sat, selected a root beer barrel, unwrapped it and placed it in my mouth. I sat for twenty minutes learning about the latest clothes, sex partners, awards, problems and triumphs of people named Justin, Renee, Antoine, Mel, and Russell.

The outer door opened. A young blonde woman with a pink, healthy face, large breasts, long legs came in, looked at me and said, “You waiting for someone?”

“Mrs. Pastor,” I said.

She looked at her wristwatch. It had a big round face with large numbers. She was wearing washed jeans and a white blouse.

“I think I’ve got the eleven o’clock,” she said.

“Mrs. Pastor may be running a little late,” I said.

“Emergency?” the young woman asked, sitting across from me.

“You could say that,” I said. “Tootsie Roll?”

She nodded yes and I handed her one.

“Your back?” she asked.

“Haven’t been gone,” I said.

She laughed. She had a nice deep laugh.

“No,” she said, “are you having trouble with your back?”

“No,” I said.

“I am,” she said, popping the small Tootsie Roll into her mouth. “Ski accident. Tahoe. Last week. Alberta’s a wizard with her hands.”

“Sorceress,” I said. “Wizards are men.”

“You are funny,” she said.

“I’m not trying to be.”

The inner door opened. A man in his sixties on crutches came out, looked at us. He gave the girl a pained smile. He didn’t seem to notice me.

Alberta Pastor, wearing a pair of white trousers and a white short-sleeved T-shirt, stood in the doorway and watched the man leave. Then she looked at the blonde woman and said, “I’m sorry, Christina. I’ve got to take care of Mr. Fonesca. Could you possibly come tomorrow? Nine? I’ll give you a double session and only charge for one.”

Christina checked her watch again and said, “I guess I can go to the bank and pick up some things I need on St. Armand’s. Nine tomorrow?”

“Nine,” said Alberta Pastor.

Christina gave me a thumbs-up and left. Alberta Pastor sat in the chair the young woman had been in and looked at me for the first time.

“I tried to find the Florida Assisted Living and Nursing Home Board of Review when you left my house,” she said. “There is no such organization.”

“I made it up,” I said. “Forgot it when I was out your door. You looked my name up in the phone book.”

“Not many Lewis Fonescas in the Sarasota/Bradenton phone book,” she said.

“Only two in Chicago,” I said. “The other one is my uncle.”

“Interesting,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Confess?”

She shook her head no.

“You tried to kill me,” I said. “You’re not much of a shot but you did manage to finish off a Dairy Queen Blizzard.”

She looked at me calmly and said, “I thought you were someone from Seaside, someone planning to blackmail me. You’re not. What are you, Fonesca?”

“I find people,” I said.

“And who are you looking for?”

“Vivian Pastor,” I said.

“My mother-in-law is at home.”

“Mind if I take another root beer barrel?”

“Help yourself,” she said.

I did.

“I know the woman in your house isn’t your mother-in-law,” I said. “Dorothy, one of the Seaside residents, said Vivian was a big woman who played four bingo cards at a time. The woman in your house is nearly a munchkin and I don’t think she can tell a bingo card from a Dove bar.”

“And?”

“If I bring someone from Seaside to see her,” I said,

“they’ll know she isn’t Vivian Pastor. That’s what you were afraid of, why you wanted to kill me, why you’re packing to leave town. Who is the old woman in your house?”

“My mother,” she said. “Your turn.”

“You killed your mother-in-law and now you’re trying to convince the world that she’s not dead. Emmie Jefferson was new at Seaside. First night. She didn’t know what Vivian Pastor looked like, saw an old lady in the car with you and assumed with a little help from you that it was your mother-in-law. You were lucky a new nurse was on duty.”

She was shaking her head no now.

“Not luck,” she said. “Turnover at nursing homes and assisted living facilities is constant. I work in the physical therapy room at Seaside once a week. Let’s say I waited till I found out a new nurse was going to be on duty.”

“You planned it?”

She leaned forward and spoke softly. “Maybe.”

She wanted to talk, wanted to be admired for what she had almost gotten away with.

“But you left your mother-in-law’s door open enough for Dorothy, who was taking a late-night walk, to see you killing her. You saw Dorothy.”

Alberta held up her hands. The fingers were long, strong.

“You pushed Vivian’s body out the window and climbed out after her. Then you closed the window and moved the body where it wouldn’t be seen from the window if Emmie Jefferson came in the room and went to the window.”

No answer.

“Dorothy went to the nursing station to report the murder,” I said. “You waited till the doors were locked to the outside and you were sure no body had been discovered. Then you pressed the night button. Emmie Jefferson let you in. You pretended you were just coming in and you told Emmie Jefferson-”

“That I’d had Vivian out for the day, that she, my mother-in-law, wanted to leave Seaside immediately. She didn’t know the procedure. I told her. Then, I asked her to help me carry Vivian’s things out to my car.”

“You wanted her to see an old woman in your car.”

Alberta was silent.

“Then when Emmie Jefferson went back in, you moved the car right near the end of the building, picked up the body and put it in your trunk without anyone seeing you. Right?”

“Let’s for the moment say it’s possible.”

I reached into my pocket and came up with the folded slipper I had found behind Seaside.

“Now all we have to do is find Cinderella,” I said.

“Why would I want to kill Vivian?”

“I know why,” I said.

“You can’t,” she said.

“The Internet is a wondrous thing, especially if you know a hacker,” I said. “You are coholder with your mother-in-law of a joint checking account. Her social security checks are directly deposited, sixteen hundred dollars every month. She has an annuity your husband set up for her, twenty-three hundred dollars a month. That gets directly deposited too. Stocks, as of yesterday, worth about 313,000 dollars. You asked a month ago to sell it all and put it into an IRA rollover with quarterly deposits of fifty thousand dollars going into that checking account.”

“And don’t forget,” she said, “with her out of Seaside, I don’t have to pay them. There are a lot of perks, Mr. Fonesca, as long as the world thinks Vivian is still alive.”

“Just takes the murder of an old woman to get them,” I said.

“I haven’t got time for any more games with you. I’m going to try to explain but you’re not going to understand,” she said. “David died broke. Vivian wouldn’t help, well, no more than a few thousand here and there. We couldn’t touch her money. David wouldn’t. The old woman checked her accounts twice a week. David was the cosigner on everything till he died. Then Vivian was advised by Trent to put me on the accounts with her.”

“Why?”

“Because I told Trent I’d see to it that a donation of one hundred thousand dollars went to Seaside when Vivian died or, if he preferred, to a charity of his choosing.”

“Like the bank account of Amos Trent?”

“His choice,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Where’s Vivian Pastor’s body?”

“Let’s say there’s a well-fed alligator or two in the lake at Myakka.”

She checked her watch, stood up, locked the door, turned to me and said, “I think it should take about ten minutes to kill you but I’ll give myself extra time. You’re not very big. You’ll fit in the closet in the other room. I’ll give Jean Herndon her three o’clock session and close up for the day. Then I’ll come back sometime after midnight and get you.”

I was no match for Alberta Pastor. I needed a weapon. I didn’t think a pile of magazines or a wooden candy dish would do.

“I’m really not a bad person.”

“Hitler loved dogs and little children. Goebbels’s children called Hitler Uncle Adolph.”

“Vivian was the monster, not me. With more help from her, David wouldn’t have had the stroke. She was eighty-seven years old, Fonesca, and mean as a drunken redneck. She would probably have lived another ten years.”

“If you hadn’t killed her.”

“If I hadn’t killed her, yes.”

“I’m not a monster,” I said, standing. “Why kill me?”

“You’re an obstacle. I deserve something more than eight-hour days on my feet, kneading the bodies of people who tell me how they’ve hurt their shoulders at Vail or slipped a disc in Paris.”

I could have thrown the candy dish at her. Tootsie Rolls and root beer barrels would crack against the walls and bounce on the floor, but it wouldn’t stop her. I reached for the door to the inner room.

“No place to hide in there,” she said, taking a step toward me. “No window. Just a massage table, a pile of towels, a locked cabinet and closet. If you like, you can shout for help, but no one can hear. The door behind me is very thick and nearly soundproof. I’m really sorry about this, really I am.

“That’s it. Anything else to say? Like, ‘You’ll never get away with this,’ or ‘If I found you, someone else will’ or even ‘I told someone, maybe the police, where I was going and they’ll be here any moment’?”

“All of the above.”

“I don’t understand you, Fonesca,” she said. “You don’t look frightened.”

“You do,” I said.

She looked at her hands. They were shaking. Then she looked at me.

“I deserve something good,” she said. “I’ve earned it.”

It would be more dramatic to say her hands were around my throat and I was trying to get a punch in when the door exploded. But it wasn’t like that. She was just standing there, hesitating.

The open door crashed against the wall, hitting Alberta Pastor’s left shoulder and sending her into the wall next to me.

Ames stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You do some fool things,” he said, his eyes and his gun leveled at Alberta.

She was holding her injured shoulder now. She was also crying.

“I’m not a monster,” she sobbed.