Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  The kids kept playing with the dogs as the three of us guys sat around in the den talking about the Flyers and their chances for the Stanley Cup that year. My dad had gotten tickets through work for at least one hockey game a season when I was growing up, and though neither of us were big sports fans, he and I had gone to the games, cheering for the home team. When the women joined us, we talked about skating on Mirror Lake in the winter, and eventually we all began yawning.

  Lili and I left soon after that. We were both tired and I was a little drunk, and in the kitchen when I went to get water for Rochester I knocked a glass off the countertop, and it shattered on the floor.

  Rochester immediately wanted to investigate and I had to body-block him. “You take him in the living room and I’ll clean up,” Lili said. She pulled a pair of blue plastic gloves from the drawer and began picking up the big pieces of glass.

  I watched her work, and the sight of those gloves reminded me of the ones the aides had worn at Crossing Manor when they had to clean up after the patients. And that reminded me of my conversation with Rick. Had those deaths at Crossing Manor been a natural progression? Coincidence? Or the work of a killer on the loose?

  When Lili finished picking up the glass, she went upstairs and I sat at the dining room table with my laptop, with Rochester curled protectively around my chair. I opened up a browser and typed in “nursing home deaths” to see how Crossing Manor stacked up against similar facilities.

  I was stunned at how many hits came up – over twenty-one million. More than thirty percent of nursing homes had some incidents of elder abuse, and thousands of deaths that might be the result of negligence – bedsores, starvation, dehydration and so on. Nearly one-quarter of deaths in the US occurred in nursing homes. I hadn’t seen any open wounds, dirty linens or other visible signs of abuse on the people that I’d spoken with at Crossing Manor. The symptoms of emotional abuse were harder to pin down, but again, the patients I’d spoken with had been in good spirits – at least those who could communicate.

  There was a big difference, though, between elder abuse and outright murder. I found an awful lot of information, though, on nurses who took matters into their own hands and committed what they called “mercy killings.” Four women in Austria were alleged to have killed over two hundred patients; a VA nurse who used epinephrine to induce heart attacks; and a male nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who had killed forty patients with lethal injections of Digoxin, a heart medication.

  Some of those killer nurses appeared to need the validation of trying to save someone, even if he or she had induced the problem. Others liked the power that drugs like Lidocaine or muscle relaxants gave them. In many cases the victims were elderly, which made their deaths go unnoticed, though I found one pediatric nurse who had killed forty-six children in her care.

  The research began to upset me, so I gave up and pushed back my chair. Was someone killing off the patients at Crossing Manor? Poor Mrs. Tuttle had dementia. How could someone have a grudge against her? Could it be someone wanted to put her out of her misery? How could anyone know if she was miserable, if she couldn’t communicate?

  Then there was Mrs. Divaram. She wasn’t happy because she felt that her son’s second wife had forced him to push her aside. But according to Mrs. Vinci, her roommate wasn’t sick. Had she alienated someone at the home with her complaints?

  Mr. Pappas had Crohn’s Disease, which had kept him in and out of hospitals his entire life. But according to Edith, he had been feeling better, and planning for discharge.

  Mr. Fictura was certainly a complainer, and from the way Allison had called him Mr. Fistula, a pain in the ass. I had the feeling he wasn’t loved by the staff. Was there anything in common between the four of them, besides staying at Crossing Manor? One was demented, one abandoned, one congenitally ill, one angry.

  Rochester got up from his place on the floor and nosed against my knee. I reached out to pet him. “What do you think, boy? You’re a good judge of humans. Could somebody be killing patients at Crossing Manor?”

  He rolled over on his back in his dying cockroach posture, waving all four of his legs in the air. That was a signal that he wanted a belly rub, but could he be saying something more? He looked up at me and woofed once. “All right, bossy dog, I’m coming,” I said. I settled on the floor and began scratching his soft white tummy.

  I already knew that the general population was aging, but even so, the predictions that by 2050 there would be nearly three times as many people eighty-five and older were surprising. What was going to happen to all those elderly people? To me and Lili? Would medical science keep us healthy until death? Or would we be warehoused in facilities, abandoned by loved ones, cared for by minimum-wage attendants?

  Rochester must have sensed my mood – or maybe I wasn’t scratching well enough. He scrambled up, nodded toward the stairs and woofed once, then galloped up to the landing. “You really think you’re in charge around here, don’t you?” I asked.

  I stood up and followed him to the bedroom, where Lili was sitting up in bed, reading. He sprawled on the carpet, his head on his paws, watching me.

  Lili looked up from her book, and I asked, “What do you think will happen to us when we get old? Neither of us have children to look after us.”

  “That’s a grim question.” She put aside her book and I sat beside her. “Look at Edith. She doesn’t have children either, but she has friends in the community and a long-term care policy. If we plan properly, we’ll be all right.”

  “How can we be sure, though?” I asked. “Look at my father. He thought he’d be okay because he had me to look after him. But when he was sick, I was in prison and I couldn’t even make sure he was all right.”

  She took my hand. “Do you think you could have done anything more to help your father if you’d been here?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I could have visited him and, I don’t know, poured water for him, made sure he was getting the right medications.” I looked down, to where Rochester was sprawled beside me on the floor. “What if my going to prison made him worse? Like he gave up or something?”

  “Steve. Did he ever say anything like that?”

  I shook my head. “I know he was disappointed in me, because he didn’t like Mary and didn’t think I should have married her. He wasn’t happy when we moved to California, and he said often that he wanted grandchildren. I couldn’t even do that for him.”

  She let go of my hand and pulled me close to her, and I snuggled up, resting my head on her shoulder. “My father had a heart attack when I was living in Rome with Adriano,” she said. That was her first husband, an Italian photographer she had met while studying in Italy. “By the time I got a flight to Miami, he was already gone. We had argued about my dropping out of college and marrying Adriano, and we never had a chance to make up.”

  “That must have been very tough,” I said.

  “It was. I was a real Daddy’s girl. He called me princesa, you know.”

  I sat up. “I didn’t know that. You don’t seem much like the princess type.”

  “I wasn’t spoiled. But I was named for my father’s mother and he always said that I looked just like her. We had a special bond.”

  “What about Federico?” I asked. “Was he more attached to your mother?”

  “No, Fedi was a real boy, and he and my father were both mad for soccer and used to go to games together, when my father wasn’t working.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “My mother wasn’t the warmest woman in the world. Her parents had been poor in Poland and they were poor in Havana. That experience formed her. Especially as we moved around from country to country she was obsessed with how we were going to live. She was always complaining to Fedi and me about how much we ate, how we always needed new clothes. Her favorite saying was ‘On gelt is keyn velt.’ Without money, there’s no world.”

  “That’s sad,” I said. “But your father was an engineer, like mine. Didn’t he make a good living?”
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  “When he could work,” she said. “In Cuba we had a nice house, and then in Mexico we lived like kings. But when we moved to Kansas City, my father worked as a janitor until his English was good enough to get an engineering job. My mother took in sewing. She had a real talent for clothing design, but she never had the chance to get herself established, because we moved so much.”

  “What happened to her after your father died?”

  “She stayed in Miami. There was a whole Juban community there, Cuban Jews, and she could speak Spanish and get cafecitos at a stand a block from her apartment. When Fedi graduated from architecture school he got a job in Miami, and so he was nearby, eventually with his wife and his kids.”

  She rolled her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. “I admit that I tried not to have much to do with her. As she got older, the anger that she always had inside began to curdle. She had these crazy ideas, that Fedi’s wife wanted to kill her, that Fidel was spying on her because her parents had left a fortune behind in Havana.”

  “Dementia?” I asked.

  “Yes. There was nothing we could do, the doctors said. One day the Miami Beach police called Fedi. She was walking down Lincoln Road in a torn housecoat and flip flops, and she got agitated when an officer tried to talk to her. She didn’t remember her name or address, but she always carried Fedi’s phone number with her in case she wanted to call him. Which she did, sometimes a couple of times a day.”

  “I can see why you wanted to stay out of the picture. It must have been a tough situation.”

  “I was a terrible daughter,” she said. “She used to say to me, ‘A hunt iz a mol getrei’er fun a kind.’ A dog is more faithful than a child.”

  She looked down to Rochester. “Is that true, boy?” He stood up and nuzzled his head against her hand. “After that, Fedi had her put into a nursing home with a special locked floor for dementia patients. When I visited I had to use a code for the elevator.”

  “But you did go visit her,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. But out of guilt, not out of love. Fedi bore the brunt of things. Soon after she went into the home I broke up with Philip and jumped into photojournalism, and I started traveling around the world. I was in the Sudan when Fedi called me to say she had died. It takes a really long time to get from Khartoum to Miami, you know. I told Fedi to go ahead and bury her, and I’d be there for the shiva.”

  “How did Fedi feel about that?”

  “Fedi has always been the responsible one. I was the one who couldn’t stay married, who flew around the world at the drop of a hat.”

  “Remind me not to marry you, then,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  “I’m not that person anymore,” she said. She sat back on the bed beside me. “I’m more comfortable in my own skin now. And what we have feels different from my marriages. More right, somehow.”

  She looked at me. “How do you feel?”

  I turned on my side. “I feel the same way,” I said. I leaned over and kissed her, and we moved on from there.

  23 – Soft Spot

  By Friday morning, River Bend had come back to life after the holiday quiet. Our neighborhood was like an obstacle course that morning between the recycling bins out for collection, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, contractors’ vehicles, and of course, other people walking dogs that either barked or snapped or strained at their leashes.

  A car that passed had a paw-shaped bumper sticker in purple that read “Rescued is my favorite breed,” and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Rochester had been a rescue dog, so of course I was in favor of such efforts. But the bumper sticker seemed to be a slap at those of us with purebred dogs, even though purebreds could be rescued as easily as mixed-breeds.

  Or maybe I was taking things too seriously. The holidays were about to end, I’d be back at work on Monday, and I needed to enjoy the last time I had. That is, after Felix Logato’s funeral was over.

  Soon after Rochester and I returned from our walk, Lili left for her mani-pedi appointment with Gracious Chigwe. An hour later I told Rochester to behave and drove to Animal House. The door was locked, and I rang the bell.

  The doctor answered the ring wearing a long-sleeved black dress, with a winter coat over her arm. It struck me that I was seeing a lot of people without their traditional garb—first Jackie Conrad, now Dr. Horz.

  “Thank you for agreeing to take me,” she said as she stepped into her coat. She was so short that she might have been mistaken for a child if not for her white hair.

  “Not a problem. I’m glad you called me.”

  She didn’t speak again until we were almost at the highway. “My staff isn’t very happy with me at the moment,” she said. “Between the police activity after the potassium disappearance, and now Felix’s death.”

  “Did they know that he was an ex-con?” I asked, as we got onto I-95.

  She shook her head. “He asked me to keep it quiet, and I did. It didn’t come out until the theft. And then several people were so upset that I had to let him go. I feel terrible about that.”

  “You don’t think he stole the potassium, do you?”

  “No. But the whole thing is baffling. There’s no reason to steal something like that. I’m starting to believe the vials were misplaced, or accidentally disposed of.”

  “You know what those vials looked like,” I said. “Could one of them have been attached to an IV?” I fumbled through the explanation Jackie had given me.

  “What a horrible thought,” Dr. Horz said, when I was finished. “I can’t imagine any of my staff doing something like that.”

  I thought back to the research I’d done on the people who worked at the vet’s office. “How long has Sahima been working for you?”

  “Just a few months. She’s not the sharpest receptionist I’ve ever had, but she’s learning.”

  “Her grandfather is very sick, isn’t he? Do you think she knows enough about medicine to understand what potassium could do?”

  “Sahima? But she’s just a girl. And she has no medical background at all.”

  “What about Jamilla?”

  “Have you been investigating each of my staff members?” Dr. Horz asked. She turned toward me with an accusing look on her face.

  “I have,” I said. “I felt strongly that Felix was innocent so I wanted to see if anyone else might have a motive for the theft.”

  “Jamilla has been with me for four years,” Dr. Horz said. She faced forward again and crossed her arms. “She’s an excellent tech and a very caring human being. She’d never kill someone.”

  “Never say never,” I said. “Has she ever spoken about her friend Omari Jefferson?”

  “That’s such a sad story,” Dr. Horz said. She looked out the window as the barren roadside sped by. Farms and suburban developments abutted the highway, and the trees were bare, the grass and fields brown. “Omari is her best friend, like a sister to her. She has a very aggressive form of brain cancer, and the outlook isn’t good.”

  “So the very caring Jamilla might want to spare her best friend so much suffering,” I said. “A potassium injection could cause a heart attack and a very quick death.”

  Dr. Horz didn’t say anything, but I noticed that she pulled her coat closer around her.

  The farms and suburbs gave way to industrial developments and weedy lots as we got closer to Philadelphia. I exited I-95 where a stretch of highway would take me up to US 1. Apartments along the street still had their holiday decorations up, though they looked sad and bedraggled.

  “I’m sorry to be such a pain in the ass and keep badgering you,” I said to Dr. Horz, “but I think it’s important to consider who had access to your medicine cabinet, and who might have had a motive for the theft. Minna was a nurse in Israel, wasn’t she? And her husband’s a doctor. So she’d know about potassium.”

  “She would.”

  “And Hugh? I know he’s not quite all there, but could someone have influenced him?”

  �
�I’ve been thinking about retirement,” Dr. Horz said. “Maybe I should do that. Move to Florida, take in some rescue dogs. Stop dealing with people altogether.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Rochester would miss you too much.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” I said. “But if someone on your staff loses someone to a heart attack…”

  “I can’t even consider that.”

  We didn’t speak again until we approached the funeral home and I pulled into the parking lot. There weren’t many cars there, and I worried that perhaps we’d gotten the time or date wrong.

  It was bitter cold, and I pulled my scarf closer around my neck as Dr. Horz and I walked through the parking lot to the front door. Once inside, though, we saw a bulletin board with a listing for el servicio funeral for Felix Logato. Dr. Horz and I both signed our names in the book of memory at the front of the chapel, then walked in.

  The room was small, with a single stained-glass window at the far end. In front of the window, on an elevated dais, rested a simple black casket, with a podium to the left side.

  About a dozen people stood or sat in the wood pews. As a devout reader of mystery novels, I knew that sometimes killers attended the funerals of their victims – especially if the killer was someone close. Could it be that whoever killed Felix was there in the room with us?

  Dr. Horz took the lead, walking up to a short, heavyset woman a few years older than I was. Several young people stood beside her.

  We waited in line until it was our turn to speak. Dr. Horz introduced herself, and Senora Logato burst into frenzied Spanish.

  One of the young women interpreted. “I’m Yesenia, Felix’s sister. My mother says thank you for giving Felix a chance.” She wore bright red high heels with her short black dress, and had painted her long fingernails to match. I admired her spirit and thought Felix probably had liked those shoes on her.

  Yesenia shook hands with Dr. Horz and then turned to me. “My name is Steve Levitan,” I said. “I met Felix when I brought my dog into the office, and I was helping him improve his writing skills so he could apply to a vet tech program.”