“John,” the nurse warned wearily.
“He’s carrying a gun right under that yellow raincoat,” John said.
“John likes his little jokes,” said the nurse, who looked beyond tired.
“I like a good bowel movement too from time to time,” he said. “I don’t ask much.”
With that John turned his back and shuffled down the hall.
“Can I help you?” the nurse said, turning to us. She was black, thin, in her mid-forties and obviously tired.
I read the name tag on her uniform. It said EMMIE.
“You’re the night nurse,” I said.
“Most nights,” she said.
“You were here the night Dorothy Cgnozic reported that someone had been murdered.”
“I was,” she said. “My first night on the job, people checking out, woman tells me she saw a murder. Crazy night. Who are you?”
“Friends of Dorothy’s,” I said.
“Sometime I’d like to hear the story of how that friendship began, but not today. I’m on my second straight shift. Can you believe two nurses came down with some kind of flu? I’ve been on almost fourteen hours.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She shrugged and said, “Time and a half. I’m not complaining, not with two-year-old twins to raise, just tired.”
“Dorothy told you she just saw someone murdered?” I asked.
“Yes, she thought it was a woman. I looked in the room. No body, nobody missing. Checked the log, day-shift releases, and night maintenance man. I think maybe Dorothy had a bad dream.”
“The room where Dorothy said she saw the murder,” I said. “Where does the window open to?”
“Back of the building,” said Emmie. “Nothing but dark, woods, snakes and a crazy half-blind gator with a bad temper.”
Darrell looked at me. He was smiling. The existence of the promised gator had been validated.
“We’ve got a patient who keeps feeding the damned thing. One day that Stevie Wonder gator is going to take her arm off.”
“Jerry Lee,” Ames corrected.
“Who?” she asked.
“Gator’s name,” Ames said.
“Whatever,” she said with a sigh. “You want to see Dorothy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Know where her room is?”
I told her we did and she moved behind the desk to sit heavily in the wooden chair and close her eyes.
Dorothy was fully dressed and sitting in the small upholstered and faded salmon-colored chair next to her bed. She was watching something on television but turned it off with her remote when she saw us.
“Mr. Fonesca and Mr. McKinney,” she said with a smile. “And the young man?”
“Darrell Caton,” he said, not sure whether he should offer his hand, starting to hold it out, then changing his mind and pulling it back to his side.
“You found the murderer?” she asked.
“No, not yet.”
“You find out who got killed?”
“No, but I think I’m getting close. Has anyone tried to get you to stop me from talking about the murder?”
“No one’s asked me to stop, nobody but the nurses and some of them just look at me like I’m a dotty old coot keeping herself busy with a harmless delusion.”
“Want to take us to Rose Teffler’s room?” I asked.
“That’s not where the murder happened,” Dorothy said.
“But on the same side of the building a few doors down from her room?”
“Suppose so,” said Dorothy. “Waste of time. I already asked her if she heard or saw anything.”
“Still—” I started and she interrupted with, “Okay. Let’s go.”
We walked down the hall, a bizarre quartet, probably looking like a spoof of the walk down the corridor at the beginning of Law & Order. We went to the right, though the most direct way would have been back past the nursing station.
It took us about five minutes to get to Rose Teffler’s door. Dorothy moved slowly with her walker. A sprig of some dried flowers hung on the door. Their color was almost gone.
I knocked. No answer from inside, though Ames did cock his head as if he had heard something move behind the door. Then the door opened.
Rose Teffler was tiny, no more than four foot six. She squinted at us with suspicion and Dorothy said that we had some questions.
“What about?” the old woman said.
“The night Mrs. Cgnozic saw someone a few doors down being attacked,” I said. “If someone committed murder and took the body out during the night, they would have to go past your window.”
“What time?”
“After eleven at night,” I said.
“I’m not up at that time,” she said. “Always get nine hours of sleep.”
“You get up to feed Jerry Lee,” said Ames.
Rose Teffler looked at Ames with fear.
“They don’t care about the gator, Rose,” Dorothy said. “Everybody knows you feed the gator.”
“They do?”
“They do,” Dorothy repeated. “These people don’t care about your feeding Jerry Lee.”
“I do,” said Darrell.
“The night—” I started, but Rose Teffler was already saying, “Yes. I thought Jerry Lee had gotten whoever it was. Lots of noise. Heard Jerry Lee out there thrashing around. I was about to feed him. Someone screamed or something. By the time I got to the window and opened it, all I could see was someone or something slouching away next to the building. Looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
“Charles Laughton,” I said.
“Lon Chaney,” Rose corrected.
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Maybe it was Charles Laughton,” said Rose. “You won’t tell about Jerry Lee.”
“No one left to tell except Trent. No one tells him anything,” said Dorothy, but Rose wasn’t listening.
We left and walked Dorothy back to her room, promising her that we’d get back to her soon.
“I know what I saw,” she said, sitting in the chair next to her bed. “Wait.”
She reached back to the bedside table to her right. She opened the drawer and came out with a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints. She handed the box to Darrell.
“Thanks,” he said.
Darrell, Ames and I moved out of the room. Behind us Dorothy clicked on the television remote and the long-dead people on a laugh track I’d grown up with found something very funny.
We passed the nursing station. Emmie was now drinking a cup of coffee. She nodded at us.
“Get anywhere with Dorothy?” she asked.
I told her we had and we went down the corridor and through the sliding glass doors. At the end of the building we turned left where Ames and I had been two nights ago.
The grass, shrubs and trees were thick, and through them you could see patches of the small marsh beyond.
“We gonna find the gator?” asked Darrell.
“Not if we’re lucky,” I said.
Ames had his shotgun out. The windows of the rooms of the residents in this wing of the Seaside were to our left. The ground was soggy.
I kept my eyes on the ground.
“What’re you looking for?” asked Darrell.
“Something that doesn’t belong here,” I said.
We were under Rose Teffler’s window now.
“Like this?” asked Darrell, reaching down to pick up something.
He turned to show us a slipper, dark blue. He handed it to me. I handed it to Ames.
“Hasn’t been here more than a week, maybe,” Ames said.
Ames and I were thinking of the same possibility. Someone could have taken the dead body out through the window and carried it past here. The slipper could have fallen off the body.
“Gator could have come thinking he was going to be fed,” I said.
“Maybe he was,” said Ames.
“You mean that old gator ate someone?” said Darrell gleefully.
�
��Let’s keep looking,” I said.
We did. No blood. No body parts. No second slipper. No evidence. We did manage to draw the attention of an old, nearly blind gator named Jerry Lee, who came slithering out, head raised through the thick reedy grass.
“There he is,” shouted Darrell.
Ames had his shotgun out. He was aiming it toward the slow-moving animal. Ames’s hands were steady.
“You gonna shoot him?” asked Darrell.
“If I have to,” said Ames, gun cradled firmly against his shoulder.
I pushed Darrell behind me. Ames was between us and Jerry Lee, who looked as if he might be smelling us out instead of looking at us. He slithered forward a few feet.
Something flew from behind me. A box of Girl Scout Thin Mints hit the alligator in the snout.
“Got him,” said Darrell.
“You got him mad is all,” said Ames.
Jerry Lee was coming faster now. The window behind us opened. Jerry Lee was a dozen yards away now and coming toward us.
Something else flew from behind me, but this time it wasn’t a box of cookies. It looked like a chicken leg and thigh. Jerry Lee opened his mouth and took it in.
“He shouldn’t eat during the day,” said Rose Teffler. “I saved that from lunch. Was going to give it to him tonight, but now …”
Jerry Lee chomped. We hurried back around the building to the parking lot. I was carrying the soggy slipper.
Darrell was beaming with delight as we got in the car.
“Where we goin’ now, hold up a bank or something?”
“We’re going to a lecture,” I said.
16
I FOUND A SPACE in the library parking lot. The library is less than ten years old. It is big, white and has pillars that look like they came out of a soft-serve ice cream machine. I’ve never been inside the building but Ames tells me it’s bright, has a nice pair of staircases, is easy to use, contains computer stations and has far fewer books on its shelves than he would like.
Ames was a reader. He always had a stack of four or five library books on the single table in his small room at the Texas, less than three blocks away. He also had a five-level bookcase filled with paperbacks and hardcovers he had picked up at garage sales. Most of the books were biographies of historical figures, but there were even a few poetry books and a novel or two.
Ames, Darrell and I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the Opera House. The Opera House was and is really an opera house. This was the first time I had entered it but I knew that much and more from Flo, who, when her husband, Gus, was alive, had been a donor, not out of a love of opera but as a tribute to a social system she and Gus had been part of.
I’d grown up with opera, Saturday’s Texaco broadcasts from the Met. My grandmother listened to the opera on Saturday more often than she went to church on Sunday. She heard them all, but her heart was only really into the Italian operas, particularly ones she had gone to when she was a girl in Italy.
For a long time the Opera House had been a movie theater. Flo told me that DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which was shot in Sarasota, premiered at the Opera House with Charlton Heston onstage after a circus parade including some of the actors in the movie. But now it was an opera house again, about one thousand seats, boxes at the rear of the main floor, carpets, paintings of donors on the walls, nice brass fittings in the toilets.
We were purposely late. It was just after three. I was hoping Welles wouldn’t spot me in the audience. I was hoping the lights would be turned down. I was hoping there would be a big crowd to hide in. I was wrong on all counts, though it took him a while to find me.
The lights were up though not bright. Fewer than two hundred people were scattered on the main floor. The balcony was closed.
There was a podium on the broad stage in front of a blue curtain that looked like velvet. A woman stood at the podium. Behind her sat John Wellington Welles. Ames, Darrell and I sat behind four women about twenty rows from the stage. In front of the stage was a table with two stacks of books.
The woman, lean, green suit with a glittering red jeweled pin on one lapel, was at the podium reciting Welles’s writing and teaching credentials. Welles sat to her right on a folding chair trying to pay attention or at least pretending to pay attention. He was doing a bad job either way.
His eyes wandered but not toward the audience, not yet. Then his head bowed as if he were listening to a eulogy. He sat with his legs apart, hands folded almost in prayer. His hair needed brushing. His eyes needed Visine. His tie needed adjusting and his jacket needed to be donated to Goodwill.
“They gonna show a movie?” Darrell whispered.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“They got popcorn, candy? Some shit like that?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
One of the women in the row in front of us turned. I was sure she was going to tell us to be quiet. That was her plan but when she saw us she changed her mind. When she looked at me, I took off my Cubs cap. When she looked at Ames, he ignored her and adjusted his yellow slicker. When she looked at Darrell, he glared back at her.
The woman turned forward again.
The audience, what there was of it, was divided into three groups—college students, older women, and me, Darrell and Ames.
“And following his lecture, Dr. Welles will answer questions and sign any copies of his book you wish to buy. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Dr. John Welles.”
The applause was dusty polite. This was no rock music sensation, no rising star in the Democratic or Republican party, no best-selling author of an apocalyptic novel.
Welles slouched to the podium, adjusted the microphone, leaned toward it and said, “The destruction of moral definition.”
It was the same voice I had heard over the phone, the same person who had threatened, pleaded with me to stop my search for him.
There was a glass of water in front of him. He picked it up and drank and then looked out at the audience, his hands clutching the sides of the podium. The pause was long. There was shuffling in the seats. The woman who had introduced him and who now sat where Welles had sat in the folding chair held a benevolent hopeful smile.
“What is moral?” he asked. “The question is more than rhetorical. It is the essence of what I have to say. Before we can address its destruction or decline, we must first know what we mean. To even hope for success, all conversation must contain a common agreement of the meaning of the words we are using.”
He paused again and shook his head as if someone invisible had just whispered a truth in his ear.
“Morality,” he went on, “in its most simple and most illusory sense means a code of conduct. There are those who assume a universal morality, a universal code of conduct based on humanistic principles, often elusive humanistic principles. Where would such principles come from? Are we born with them? Are they simply common sense? If we follow this path, we are caught in a never-ending maze in search of definitions. For what is common sense?”
He looked to the audience as if he expected a challenge or question. There was none. He drank more water.
“And then there are specific moralities,” he went on. “Christian morality and Nazi morality differ at their very core conceptions.
“Nazi morality was based on simple principles, monstrous principles. Aryans were superior beings. Because they were superior, they deserved to rule. All others are inferior. Because they are inferior, they do not deserve to exist. This was a given, a supposedly undisputable truth. What is Christian morality based on? Doing good, following the golden rule because it is just and moral and obvious? No, the basis of Christian morality is not that people will behave with a benevolent God-given moral sense, but that they will display a moral sense because there is a reward for doing so.”
A hand shot up in the audience. Welles ignored or didn’t see it. He went on.
“The reward: eternal life, heaven. Christianity is not built
on the principle that moral behavior is to be engaged in simply because it is right, but because God wills it and will reward those who practice it. And when one fails to do what the community and they agree is right, they can still gain entry to heaven by a quick repentance and a belief in salvation through Jesus.”
The hand shot up in the audience again. This time Welles saw it and wearily paused, nodding at the young woman, who stood and said, “In your book you say—”
“Forget the book,” Welles said, waving away the young woman, his stack of books on the table below him, the past. “A. A. Milne, in addition to creating Winnie the Pooh, once said that if Jack the Ripper was ever caught, his defense would be that he was only behaving according to the human nature dealt to him.”
“I don’t see—” the young woman said loudly.
“No,” Welles said. “You do not see. Morality is based on the assumption that he who commits an immoral act will be aware of and troubled or plagued by his own guilt. But what if he doesn’t recognize his act, the rape, slaughter or torture, as immoral? Is there such a thing as a moral monster?”
He paused for the young woman to answer, but she was clearly confused and sat down.
“What’s he talkin’ about?” Darrell asked me.
“His conscience,” said Ames.
“All of our consciences,” said one of the women in front of us, turning to face Ames.
“No, ma’am,” said Ames. “Just his own.”
“Exemplo quodcumque malo committitur, ipsi Disclicet auctori. Prima est haec ultio, quod se Judice nemo nocensabsolvitur,” said Welles. “Juvenal in the Satires. Whatever guilt is perpetrated by some evil prompting is grievous to the author of the crime. This is the first punishment of guilt, that no one who is guilty is acquitted at the judgment seat of his own conscience.”
“But,” came the shout of a young man in the audience, “what if the guilty person is a sociopath or a psychopath and doesn’t believe he is guilty of anything?”
“Then he is fortunate,” said Welles. “He is protected by his own madness. Punishment will never come, only retribution.”
“Do you believe in the death penalty?” someone shouted.
“I’m living it,” Welles said.
“What does that mean?” asked the man who had shouted.
Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) Page 17
