Kiss

10

Birdie Reeves recognized Carver immediately and brightened the already brilliant reception area with her country-girl smile. Even her freckles seemed to glimmer. “Here to see Mr. Williams?”

Carver nodded and mumbled and gave back the smile. Birdie had been leafing through a sheaf of papers on the curved reception desk and diligently returned to the task as he limped past. Like yesterday, there were several Sunhaven residents in the lobby area. But the cast had changed except for the two men playing checkers, who again stopped their game to observe Carver’s passage. No one had to be restrained in their rocking chair or wheelchair with a knotted sheet. No one was drooling or rambling incomprehensibly. The great dignity of age lay over the place today, and not the physical infirmities that assaulted that dignity.

In the hall, a white-uniformed attendant gave Carver a head-peck hello and bustled on. Carver passed Kearny Williams’s closed door and knocked on the next one. The knock sounded surprisingly loud.

The door opened immediately and a once tall, now stooped man with gravity-drawn features stared out at Carver. His face was long and jowly, as if it were melting, and there were wattles of flesh beneath his chin. He was wearing old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like an owl after an all-night binge, yet there was a hint of defiance in his unblinking brown eyes and even in the way he held his emaciated bent body. Not defiance of Carver, but of diminishing time. Of where his world had finally cornered him. It was a defiance that rang hollow because it was born of his personal realization of mortality and his abject fear of it. Courage had become bluff.

“Amos Burrel?” Carver asked.

“Me,” the man said.

“I’m Fred Carver.”

“Hell, I know that. C’mon with me.” He stepped into the hall and shut the door to his room. “Wish I could lock that damned thing, only they won’t let us do that here. People steal any loose item they can get their hands on in a place like this. Steal a wart right off your ass just for the joy of it if they thought it could be removed. Get their jollies that way, some people. Figure you might not be around long enough to accuse them if you ever do work out who’s the thief. Damned senior-citizen punks!”

“I thought we might talk privately in your room,” Carver said.

“Why in hell would we do that when I told you it was you and Kearny talking in his room prompted me to phone you? Think the wall’s any thicker from the other direction? Huh?”

“Guess not,” Carver said, extending the cane as far in front of him as he dared with each step and struggling to keep up. Amos was at least in his mid-seventies, but he had a long-legged, awkward stride, a kind of rhythmic lurching that covered ground amazingly fast. If the Senior Olympics had a hall-walking event, Amos would be the guy to beat.

They left the building and crossed to another by way of a walkway walled with pink plastic panels. Beyond the tinted panels were pink-hued palm trees, a pink resident gliding past, pushed in her wheelchair by a pink attendant. Beyond pink palms rolled the endless pink ocean. In the hot sunlight streaming through the panels, Carver glanced down at his hand gripping the crook of his cane. Pink.

A sign read VISITOR CENTER. An extra-wide pneumatic door hissed open, and fast Amos led Carver inside. It was much cooler in the visitor center, a relief. Carver was breathing hard. Amos wasn’t.

The color of the panels had changed; everything here had a slight copper tint. It added color to some of the residents being visited by family and friends, made them seem almost robust despite the wheelchairs, canes, and metal walkers. Despite the infirmities dragging them down. Carver wondered if there were green plastic panels anywhere at Sunhaven.

The copper-hued rectangular room was one large area where vinyl sofas and chairs were clustered about in conversation groupings. So visitors wouldn’t feel as if they and the aged residents were being eavesdropped upon, or too closely overseen by the uniformed staff that roamed casually about. Care was taken so the attendants didn’t bring to mind the word guards. The building had long, thick brown drapes along the west wall, almost like theatrical curtains. The floor was carpeted in beige. The ceiling was white acoustical tile. Sound didn’t carry well here, as Amos knew.

“Siddown, Carver,” he said, dropping into a low brown vinyl sofa so hard Carver was afraid the old guy might snap a bone. The sofa sighed in protest, realized Amos didn’t weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds, and immediately shut up.

Carver sat opposite Amos in a matching brown armchair. He glanced around. There were about a dozen other residents in the room, chatting with visitors whose dark hair and supple bodies made them seem as out of place here as extraterrestrial beings. The nearest of these was a young woman talking to an older woman in a wheelchair. They both had wide cheekbones and identical turned-up noses. Carver was sure they were mother and daughter. The young one looked infinitely sad, then momentarily panic-stricken, as she studied the woman in the chair, whose faded eyes had for a second been averted. The future was as real as the past. Waiting.

“We can talk okay here,” Amos said. “Far as the attendants know, you’re my son from Syracuse come to visit me.”

“You got a son in Syracuse?” Carver asked.

“Could have. I was a policeman there forty years ago, before I became a paint salesman.”

“What’s being a policeman got to do with fathering a son?”

“Not s’posed to have anything to do with it, but it did. That’s why I left the force and sold paint. First it was all oil-based and didn’t move for shit, then when we started carrying a latex-based line I made a damned good living out of it. Stores can’t sell people paint they gotta spend the whole day washing off themselves and everything else after they change the color of a wall. Latex is water-soluble and don’t cause that problem. Know that?”

“Know it,” Carver said. “You’re not still selling paint, are you, Amos? You didn’t lure me here so you could talk me into two-coating my house?”

Amos adjusted the horn-rimmed glasses where they rested on his ears and looked angry. “I tend to ramble now and again,” he admitted. “It aggravates the piss outta me, Carver, even while it’s boring you. But don’t worry, I don’t lose my place. I know why I asked you here.”

“You overheard the conversation I had with Kearny Williams,” Carver said.

“No need to remind me. Nor to remind me what was said. So Sam Cusanelli suspected there was something wrong with this place, did he? Well, lah-de-dah.”

“That’s what he told me yesterday. But you know that; you were listening.”

“Well, Sam was right. When I heard you were private heat and a friend of that Lieutenant Desoto, I figured you’d be the one to tell.”

“Tell what?”

Gray bushy eyebrows shot up in irritation. “Why, that there really is something wrong here in this colored ice-cube tray of a hell.” Amos wasn’t going to be used in any testimonial ads by Sunhaven.

“Why don’t you leave here?” Carver asked.

Amos’s jowly chin quivered and then became firm. “I as much as been told by my no-good daughter and son-in-law that if I do, they’ll start legal proceedings to have me declared non compos mentis, unable to handle my own affairs.”

“Really? Could they do that?”

Amos grinned, the loose flesh of his face arranging itself into a thousand creases. A light danced in his brown eyes. “It ain’t a hundred percent certain. So they’d rather keep footing the bill for me here, while they wait patiently for me to die so they can inherit my money.”

“How much wealth does a latex paint salesman accumulate?” Carver asked.

Amos’s grin turned foxy. “Question is, how much do some people think he can accumulate?”

Carver was getting tired of this; he decided to drive to the point. “Can you tell me what’s going on here that had Sam Cusanelli suspicious?”

“Same thing had me suspicious, maybe. ’Bout a month ago old Jim Harrison died. Nicest fella. From Eugene, Oregon.”

Carver waited, watching Amos, whose eyes remained alert yet somehow disengaged, as if looking at some portion of the past that had abruptly materialized around them and that Carver couldn’t see.

“People die here, Amos,” Carver said gently.

“Yeah, it’s that kinda place. And Jim had been sick. Like half the folks inside these walls. He had the room right opposite mine, and the night before he died I heard noises, somebody coming and going there. Wouldn’t have struck me as odd, only it was three in the morning.”

“Maybe Harrison felt sick and called for a doctor.”

“No, I heard voices, but they weren’t talking that way at all. Not like doctor and patient.”

“Talking how, then?”

“Not arguing, just talking normal, but I couldn’t make out the words. I happened to be awake, took the wrong goddamn pill for my arthritis and it got me hyper as a cat.”

And maybe imagining things, Carver thought.

“It seemed to me I sniffed a burning smell, too. Like somebody’d just struck a match and lit a cigarette. Hell, I ain’t smoked in years.”

“Maybe that’s why it’s been years.”

“Anyways,” Amos went on, “next morning they found Jim dead in his bed. Stroke, they said took him. It can happen anytime, I guess, but Jim seemed healthy as Hercules the day before he died. Then I got to thinking about that late-night visit, and what I’d seen the night before that.”

“You do a lot of observing at night,” Carver remarked.

“My window looks right out on the parking lot. Besides, I got insomnia.”

Not the wrong pill.

“But I don’t tell nobody,” Amos said. “Had it since I got the same uneasy feeling Sam Cusanelli had that something doesn’t set right around here. They don’t know here I was a cop long time ago. A detective-sergeant, matter of fact, I remember how to investigate. Night before Jim died I heard a car out on the lot and seen Nurse Rule talking to a fella had driven up by the main building. She got in the car with him and they sat and talked for a long time. Then out she climbed and went back in the building. A little later I heard her drive away in her own car.”

“How long did they talk?”

“I’d guess about fifteen minutes.”

“Maybe she met her boyfriend,” Carver said. “Talked with him a while, then came back inside to do some late-night work. See any romance inside that car?”

“Romance? Nurse Rule? You shitting me?”

“I don’t know the woman,” Carver explained.

“Well, I wouldn’t call her homely, but she’s the type might cut off your balls after you put it to her. Know what I mean?”

Carver wasn’t sure if he did. “Was it unusual for her to be here that time of night?”

“ ’Course it was. Why I brought it up.”

“She was never on the night shift?”

“Not Nurse Rule,” Amos said, with the same undercurrent of respect Carver had heard in Kearny Williams’s voice. “She’s the boss.”

“What about Dr. Macklin?”

“Hah! We don’t see much of Dr. Macklin around here. It’s Doc Pauly makes the regular rounds.”

“What kind of guy is he?”

“Good man, Doc Pauly.”

“Good doctor?”

“That, too.”

“Birdie Reeves?”

“Just a real sweet youngster. Reminds me when I was a teenager couple of million years ago. Kinda girl when you’re fifteen you’re sure you’re gonna marry someday.” A change crept into Amos’s worn voice. “Sometimes it even works out that way, but not often. Sure as hell didn’t for me.”

Carver tapped his cane on the carpet, rotated the tip a few times, and stared at the indentation it had made. “That’s it?” he asked. “All you have to tell me?”

“That, and my cop’s instincts are screaming there’s something going down in this place.”

Amos bit off his last word and clamped his lips together. Then he beamed and said, “This is Miss Jane Worthington.” There was something about the way he pronounced her name, like a sailor saying the name of his ship.

An old woman with cottony white hair and parchment skin was standing over them. She looked almost as tall as Amos and had a face from a Renaissance painting, oval and pure and somehow noble. She had the kind of beauty that never faded but instead settled in deeper with the years and made a mockery of superficial attractiveness. It had nothing to do with button noses or long eyelashes; it had to do with what she had been and was now, and how she would play in memory.

Jane Worthington waited a few seconds and saw that Carver wasn’t going to be introduced and wasn’t about to volunteer his name. Without commenting on this breach of etiquette she said, “Amos, you telling your lies to this fine young man?”

Amos didn’t answer. Carver smiled. “What lies are those?”

Her wise gray eyes flicked to his cane but registered nothing. She’d seen handicaps before and knew what they did and didn’t mean.

“I confided in Jane,” Amos said in a near whisper. “Had to tell somebody what I thought. Damn it, I ain’t Catholic-I couldn’t tell a priest.”

Jane shook her head. “Tell you the truth, Amos, I think you got two bolts and a nut loose. But it isn’t hard to understand why. It’s just that we don’t like to think our friends should die and leave us, even in a place like this. It doesn’t seem natural, though it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong here?” Carver asked.

“No, I don’t. But I play along with Amos and don’t tell anybody about his harebrained suspicions.”

“I told you Sam Cusanelli had the same suspicions. Somebody else around here does, too. I ain’t alone in this, Jane.”

“I know you’re not. It’s the kind of thing that spreads. An undercurrent of gossip.”

“Some gossip’s true.”

“Most isn’t. That’s why it’s called gossip.”

“See enough smoke,” Amos said gloatingly, “and you look and you’ll find a fire.”

“And sometimes an arsonist.”

Amos put on a huffy expression and leaned back in the sofa. He clearly didn’t like being one-upped. This was a difficult woman for sure.

“I’ve heard enough and played enough games for today,” Jane Worthington said. “Morning, Mr. Carver.”

She left them, moving regally, her tall, lean body still graceful and not acknowledging her years.

Amos looked embarrassed. “Well, I did tell her who you were and that I’d invited you here to talk. She’s the kinda woman you talk to and secrets sorta slip out.”

“Amos, I think you’ve got a crush on Miss Jane Worthington.”

The old man’s long face turned tomato red. “Piss on you, Carver! I was married to Mrs. Burrel forty-three years before she died of a liver infection in ’eighty-two. Besides, Jane’s too young for me. There’s damn near five years’ difference in our ages. I thought you’d take what I had to say serious instead of funning around.”

“I do take it seriously,” Carver said. “But what if I take what Jane Worthington says just as seriously? According to her, you tend to exaggerate now and then. Lies, she called them. But I don’t figure you for a liar.”

Amos’s face creased into a grin. “Then you believe me?”

“I do more or less. You’re the second person I’ve talked to who thinks Sunhaven’s something other than it should be. And we’ve got to include Sam Cusanelli’s opinion.”

“Sam seen the fella once, too,” Amos said.

“What fella?”

“Why, the fella Nurse Rule was talking to in the big white Cadillac night before Jim died. One you said mighta been her boyfriend.”

Amos suddenly drew in his breath in a gasp and his eyes fixed on something behind Carver and then wavered and dropped. He was staring at his lap as if he’d just spilled food there.

“Who’s your friend, Amos?” a crisp female voice inquired. Without looking up, Amos said, “This is Mr. Fred Carver, Nurse Rule.”

Though she was stockily built, she didn’t give the impression of being a large woman; yet she filled her space in the world. She was wearing a white uniform with a squared blue collar and carrying an empty clipboard with a pen clamped to it. Brown hair, narrow blue eyes, very thin lips that were probably always curved in a smile that meant nothing. A face like a lumpy potato, yet, as Amos had said, for some reason not exactly homely. Her hands were surprisingly small but strong-looking. Square-fingered and without nail polish. Functional tools of her trade.

She trained her dead but bright eyes on Carver and he felt a current of cold, primal knowledge; she was the stuff of black widow spiders and feral animals. She repelled and frightened and fascinated people more as they got to know her and depend on her.

“Are you a relative?” she asked Carver.

“He’s a friend,” Amos mumbled. The son-from-Syracuse story was forgotten. It wouldn’t wash with Nurse Rule.

She stared at Amos, her flat, bland features registering mild curiosity. “Amos?”

His head trembled on the stalk of his neck, but he looked up at her with effort.

Her curved lips arced in a wider smile that gained no warmth. “Have a nice visit, Amos.” Her gaze swung to Carver again. It meant something when she looked at people, every time, or she wouldn’t have bothered. “You, too, Mr. Carver.”

She walked away. A no-nonsense stride, no excessive arm-swinging and very little hip motion. Her white shoes trod soundlessly on the earth-colored carpet.

“Why are you so afraid of her?” Carver asked.

“My bath…” Amos said, still obviously shaken by the possibility of having been overheard by Nurse Rule.

“What about your bath?”

“Last time my back went out and I couldn’t move, I wrote a letter of complaint to the state about the way I was ignored all night when I kept ringing for help. Nurse Rule gave me my bath the morning after that and threatened to scald me bad if I wrote any more letters. She’d say it was an accident, something wrong with the hot-water thermostat. She’d get away with it, too; you can be damned positive of that.”

Carver wasn’t sure he was hearing right. “She what?”

“You heard,” Amos said softly. “I ain’t never told anybody till now. Not even Jane.” He stared into Carver with eyes that had completely lost their glint of defiance. “My back goes out from time to time. Never can tell when. Jesus, it makes me feel helpless! I’m counting on you, Carver.”

Carver stood up and leaned on his cane. He rested a hand on Amos’s thin shoulder but withdrew it hastily when the shoulder began to quake. Amos quickly shoved something into the hand. A damp scrap of white paper, tightly folded.

“What’s this?” Carver asked.

Amos wasn’t going to answer. Wasn’t going to look up from staring at his lap again. He was crying soundlessly when Carver limped away.

Was Jane Worthington right about Amos’s overactive imagination and his suspicions? Was the story about Nurse Rule and the bath true? Maybe Carver had wasted his time listening to the paranoid delusions of an old man haunted by the past.

An old man who’d seen Nurse Nora Rule sitting with someone in a white Cadillac.

Or thought he had.

The sun was still beating down outside, but Carver was chilled.

In the parking lot, he stood near the Olds and laboriously unfolded the scrap of paper Amos had given him. Scrawled in light pencil was a series of numbers. Carver knew immediately where Amos had copied it from.

A license plate.