Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “It was a good joke,” I said.

  “You’re not smiling.”

  “I don’t smile.”

  “Your name?”

  I told her and she checked the list on her clipboard.

  “Don’t see your name here. They expecting you, the Churches?”

  “Tell them I’m from Seaside.”

  “Check,” she said, moving back into the shack and picking up the phone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but she was back out again in a few seconds.

  “You know how to get there?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t so she gave me directions to 4851 Tangerine Drive Circle. The gate went up and I passed Tangerine Drive, Tangerine Parkway, Tangerine Drive Street, Tangerine Drive Avenue and made a right turn onto Tangerine Drive Circle.

  The house was small with a finely manicured lawn of something that resembled but wasn’t grass. There were no cars in the driveway so I pulled in and walked up the narrow brick path to the front door, which opened before I could push the button.

  An old woman in a flowery dress and a necklace of colorful beads stood before me. Her hair was white, neatly frizzled, her skin unblemished but slightly wrinkled.

  “Ellen Gallagher?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You were at Seaside Assisted Living?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why you left?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Miles Archer,” I said. “Assisted Living Quality of Care Office.”

  She pursed her lips, thought for a moment and said, “Let’s see. The food is mediocre. The conversation inane. The staff patronizing. The lure of twice-a-week bingo resistible. The complaints of my fellow inmates repetitious. I doubt if I was much better but I didn’t have to listen to me. Reasons enough?”

  “Why now? I mean, why did you pick that day to leave?”

  “Because my grandson and his wife invited me, as my own children had not,” she said. “They just moved here from Buffalo. Want a sandwich? Some coffee? My grandson and his wife are at work.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Foggy,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was a high school English teacher for more years than you’ve been on earth,” she said. “Now I have the run of the house, my own television with cable.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I told you that because I thought I was beginning to see the I-feel-sorry-for-the-old-lady look on your face.”

  “No,” I said. “I always look like this.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then have a foggy day. I’ve got an Ann Rule book I want to get back to.”

  She closed the door. I turned and took a few steps. The door opened behind me.

  “Here,” she said. “Take this.”

  She handed me a very large chocolate chip cookie and went back into the house, closing the door.

  I ate the cookie as I drove east on University to 1-75 and then went south, getting off about ten minutes later at the first exit to Venice. The new address of Mark Anthony Katz, the second name on my list, was a low-rise apartment complex in Osprey, which was still under construction; piles of dirt dotted the landscape. There was no gate. There were no guards. There were plenty of trucks rumbling in and out.

  Mark Anthony Katz’s name was on Apartment 4, Building 2, first floor. I knocked. The building smelled like fresh wood and concrete. I knocked again and was about to give up when the door opened.

  A lean old man with a wisp of hair on his speckled head stood in front of me. He wore a long-sleeved orange cardigan buttoned to the neck and held on to a walker. Across the walker was a bumper sticker that read: I CAN’T REMEMBER SHIT!

  “Mr. Katz?”

  “No soliciting,” he said. “You see the signs?”

  “I’m not selling anything,” I said.

  “Not insurance?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Cemetery plots, subscriptions to Things to Do When You’re Nearing Death magazine?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want me to sign some petition to save the manatees, whales, seals or sea grass?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I miss anything?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So what the hell do you want? And who the hell are you?”

  “Archie Goodwin, Consumer Advocates for the Retired,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I watch Nero Wolfe on television. I can’t remember shit, but I do remember names.”

  “My mother was a Wolfe fan,” I said. “Father’s name was George Goodwin.”

  He regarded me with prune-faced distrust.

  “I want to know why you left Seaside.”

  “Why? You want to talk me into going to the Assisted Living Home for Retired Housepainters or to join Geriatrics Anonymous?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No,” he said. “No offense. I just don’t want you knocking me down, stealing whatever I’ve got and leaving me to crawl to the phone.”

  “Fine. Why did you leave Seaside?”

  “Don’t need it. Drove me nuts. I don’t like people much. Winn-Dixie’s right over there.” He pointed. “I can take a taxi anywhere I want to go, including the movies at …”

  “Sarasota Square,” I supplied.

  “Right. I can’t remember shit.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s written on your walker.”

  “It’s been a nice visit, Goodwin,” he said and closed the door.

  I checked him off my list, got in the Saturn and headed toward escapee number three. Her address was on Orchid, the east side of 41 where the houses were smaller, the costs were lower and the lawns not all kept neat and trim.

  Finding the house was easy. It was a one-story white frame that needed a coat of paint. I parked on the street. Next to the house was a weed-filled lot with a sign on a stick saying the lot was for sale.

  The woman who opened the door was big, probably about fifty. She was built like an SUV and wearing a business suit. She looked like she was on the way out or had just come in.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m looking for Vivian Pastor,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Just have a few questions.”

  “About?”

  “Why she left Seaside,” I said. “I’m with the Florida Assisted Living and Nursing Home Board of Review. It’s routine. Is she here?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman blocked the door.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “You can, but I don’t think you’ll get your answer from her,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know, but it will have to be reasonably fast. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “I’d like to talk to Ms. Pastor,” I said. “Actually, I have to. Board rules.”

  She looked at her watch, sighed and said, “Come in. Vivian is my mother-in-law. I didn’t think they were taking proper care of her. I’m Alberta Pastor.”

  She held out her hand. I took it. She had a grip that could crack walnuts.

  “My name is Lew Fonesca.”

  I followed her into the small dark living room filled with a 1950s padded couch and two matching chairs with indentations where people had plopped for decades. There wasn’t much light coming through the windows, whose curtains were closed, and the single standing lamp in the corner was vainly trying to hold back the darkness with a sixty-watt bulb.

  “I promised my husband, David, God rest his soul, that I’d take care of his mother.”

  She opened a door and we stepped into a small dining room with a round wooden table for four. At the table sat a very small old woman with bent shoulders and large glasses that made her eyes look enormous. She was wearing flannel pajamas with red and blue stripes against a white background. In her hand she held an advertising insert.
/>   “Mother,” Alberta Pastor said. “This man wants to ask you a few questions about Seaside.”

  “See what?” the old woman said, bewildered.

  “The place I got you out of,” the younger woman said patiently. “Where you were living. Remember?”

  “Haven’t I always lived here?” the old woman asked.

  “No, Mother,” Alberta said.

  “Ma’am,” I said. “Why did you leave Seaside?” The old woman looked at the younger woman in confusion.

  “The place you were staying,” I tried.

  “I don’t understand,” the old woman said with a smile.

  “Dementia,” Alberta Pastor said to me. “It’s been getting worse. They said they could take care of her, but she belongs in a nursing home or here with me. I don’t break my promises. For David’s sake, I’ll keep her with me as long as I can. I’ve got a woman who comes in to look after her while I work. She should be here any minute. She’s late. Vivian used to watch game shows, read, but now …”

  “I had breakfast,” the old woman said. “Didn’t I?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Alberta said patiently.

  “Am I hungry?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?” Alberta asked.

  “I don’t know,” answered the old woman. “See, what did I tell you?”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the old woman said with a laugh.

  “Enough?” Alberta asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The old woman went back to looking at the ads for toothpaste, Diet 7-Up and cans of Planters cashew halves.

  Alberta Pastor led me back to the front door. “Anything else I can tell you?” she asked.

  “Nothing I can think of,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I was back in my car. Three checked off. All among the living. Only Gertrude Everhart remained. Her new address was the Pine-Norton Nursing Home on Tallavast just north of the Sarasota/Bradenton airport.

  The Pine-Norton was sprawling, pink stucco, new and no trouble finding. I went through the automatic doors at the entrance and stepped out of the way for a young black nurse’s aide in a blue uniform pushing a shriveled old woman in a wheelchair. The woman’s head was leaning to the left as if her neck was no longer strong enough to support it. The door just to my right had the word OFFICE in black letters on a white plaque next to it. The door was open.

  A woman, probably in her thirties, but she could have been younger, was staring at the computer screen in front of her, her nose a few inches from it. She was frowning.

  I knocked and she looked up with a harried smile.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  She was pretty, nervous, with ash blonde hair that wouldn’t stay in place.

  “Gertrude Everhart,” I said. “I’d like to see her.”

  “You are … ?”

  “A concerned friend of the family,” I said.

  The woman puckered her lips as if she had bitten into a lemon.

  “Mrs. Everhart was admitted yesterday,” she said.

  “Her choice?” I asked.

  “Her … yes, she came voluntarily.”

  She turned her chair around, faced a file cabinet, opened the third drawer from the bottom and pulled out a file. Then she turned back to me.

  “Friend of the family?”

  “Guardian angel,” I said.

  “You know her son then.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How is Gertrude?”

  She tapped the file on her desk, made a decision, opened the file and scanned it quickly.

  “Mrs. Everhart is suffering … no, I’m not supposed to use that word. I’ve only been here two weeks and, well, anyway, Mrs. Everhart, Gertrude, has a degenerative condition in her lower limbs. She is, as you probably know, confined to a wheelchair.”

  I nodded.

  “She is also, let me see … early stages of glaucoma, high blood pressure, recurrent bladder infections, emphysema … You want the whole list?”

  She looked up.

  “No,” I said. “Can I see her?”

  “She just went out with Viola,” the young woman said, looking back at the computer screen.

  “Old lady in the wheelchair?”

  “Uh-huh. You know anything about computers?”

  “They exist,” I said.

  “About how they work?”

  “In mysterious ways,” I said.

  She looked up and said, “Thanks a lot.”

  I left. Down the paved driveway lined with parked cars, Viola the nurse’s aide was slowly pushing Gertrude Everhart, which meant I had started with four and then there was none. Everyone in the Seaside on the night Dorothy Cgnozic said she saw a murder was accounted for.

  No, I thought as I got back in the car, there was still the staff, but Dorothy had said she saw the nurse on overnight duty. I drove past Viola and Gertrude, turned on Tallavast and headed for 301 past the airport.

  The problem was, I believed Dorothy Cgnozic. I just didn’t have a corpse.

  The red-haired woman behind the desk at Seaside Assisted Living was filling in a report, pausing every few seconds to scratch her head with the back of the pen she was using. I hadn’t seen her before. She kept working without looking up and said, “Yes.”

  “I’d like to see Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.

  “Relative?”

  “Friend.”

  “The residents are having lunch.”

  “When will they be done?”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Ten minutes. You know her room?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Maybe you should just wait here till she’s finished.”

  “Sure.”

  There were some wicker chairs in a little alcove next to the nursing station. A television set on a metal platform about six feet high was tuned to the game channel. I watched the young Alex Trebek get people to answer questions backward for a few minutes and listened to the redheaded woman mutter to herself.

  I got up and moved back to the counter.

  “Any of the staff quit or out sick?” I asked.

  She scratched a nail just over her left eyebrow and said, “You looking for a job?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You want to fill out a form?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “There are no vacancies, no openings, nothing new coming up, nobody out sick. People like working here. The hours are terrible. You’re surrounded by the befuddled and dying. The central office in Orlando is always changing the rules. But the pay is good, very good. Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “They may be hiring at Beneva Park Club,” she said. “What can you do?”

  “Try to learn from my mistakes,” I said.

  She leaned back, stretched high, yawned and said, “A little levity is always welcome. Now if you’ll just …”

  A trio of elderly women were coming toward me down the corridor to my left. One of them was talking nonstop, loud. The other two were listening, or not. One of the nontalking women was Dorothy Cgnozic, pushing her walker.

  “The war, the war, the war,” the talking woman said, waving her arms. “The man talked about nothing but the war till the day he died. Same stories. Jeep driver for General George S. Patton. Chased through some forest by seven or eight Nazis with those funny helmets. What his buddy John Something said when mortar shells were falling on them. What Eli the Jew did with his bayonet knife to a German he jumped on in a fox pit.”

  “Foxhole,” Dorothy corrected.

  The talking woman didn’t care or didn’t hear.

  “Drove me crazy, those stories. Told them to the kid who delivered the groceries, the mailman, the insurance man, the guy at the Texaco station who couldn’t even understand English.”

  “Dorothy,” I said as they moved behind me.

  She looked over and stopped.

  “Mr. Fonesca.” />
  The red-haired woman behind the desk with the pen tapping on the form in front of her nodded to show that I was vindicated and not a mad intruder.

  “He got his wars confused at the end,” the talking woman said as she and the other woman left Dorothy behind to talk to me. “Korea, Vietnam. Came up with the notion that he had been part of the invasion of Japan.”

  I walked with Dorothy down the corridor behind the talking woman. When we were out of earshot of the redhead, Dorothy said, “Did you find out who I saw get murdered?”

  “No,” I said. “The staff is all accounted for. The residents are all accounted for. The four people who left are all accounted for. No deaths.”

  “It’s no go,” she said. “My husband used to say that. It’s no go the picture show. It’s no go the Roxy. You can watch with wonder when Merman sings, but don’t go getting too foxy.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “Variations on Louis McNiece,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “He was a poet, like my husband. I saw what I saw. Someone was murdered. Find out who and prove I’m not halfway to dementia. Find out who and tell the police. Find out who and what and why and I’ll tell every nurse, social worker, physical therapist, visiting children pretending they’re doctors, administrators. You’re sure none of the people who were released is dead?”

  I pulled the list out of my pocket as we walked and read, “Ellen Gallagher, living with her grandchildren.”

  “Not a socializer.”

  “Mark Anthony Katz. Lives on his own.”

  “Proud, crotchety.”

  “Vivian Pastor. With her daughter-in-law.”

  “Big. Lives for bingo. Checks off the days. Good for four cards a night.”

  “Gertrude Everhart is in a nursing home,” I concluded.

  “Now there’s a poor woman whose mind is definitely going,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes I think that’s a blessing.”

  She stopped walking and put her thin hand on my arm.

  “Do not give up,” she said. “You need more money?”

  “No,” I said. “I need more ideas.”

  “Yes, you do,” came a voice behind us.

  I turned to look at Ham Gentry, the pudgy pink man with the walker who had caught me and Ames in Amos Trent’s office. He shuffled his walker next to Dorothy’s. I had the sudden fantasy that they were about to race down the hallway.