Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “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.

  19

  FOUR HOURS LATER I knocked at Flo’s door. She took a long time answering. When she did, she had the baby in her arms and the voice of Johnny Cash behind her telling me he kept his eyes wide open all the time and walked the
line.

  I could have used Cash’s advice when I got up that morning.

  “She’s sleeping,” Flo whispered. “Loves the man in black.”

  I stepped in and she closed the door.

  “Adele?”

  “In school. You look like a soaked coyote that’s just dragged itself out of the Rio Grande.”

  Flo’s knowledge of coyotes and the Rio Grande were acquired from movies, television and country music. She was a product of New York City, but a longtime citizen of popular country-and-western land.

  “Ames is in jail,” I said.

  “What the hell did he do now?” she said, moving to the sofa in the living room.

  I sat in the straight-backed armchair across from her.

  “Want to hold her?” she asked, offering the baby.

  “No,” I said. “No thanks.”

  Looking at Catherine was all I could handle. I wanted no responsibility. I hadn’t been doing very well with responsibility lately, particularly this day.

  “He blew an office door open with a shotgun,” I said.

  “What the hell for?”

  “To save my life,” I said. “The gun is legal, owned by Ed at the Texas, but Ames has a record. He’s not supposed to carry a gun.”

  “He saved your life?” Flo asked as Johnny Cash rasped out that he kept a close watch on his heart.

  “Long story,” I said.

  “I like long stories,” she said. “Just keep it interesting.”

  I told her what had happened, kept it as short as I could and then said, “When the police came to Alberta Pastor’s office, she was crying. Very convincing. She insisted that the police arrest Ames and me. I told them that Alberta was a murderer. There were two of them, both too young to remember when Reagan was president. They took all three of us in. I asked for Ed Viviase. Alberta Pastor asked for her lawyer. I asked for Tycinker.”

  “Sounds like a goddamn mess,” said Flo.

  The baby stirred as the song ended. Flo rocked her gently. Johnny walked into a ring of fire and Catherine was still again.

  “Alberta said Ames and I were trying to blackmail her about a story we made up about killing her mother-in-law. When she refused to give in to us, we threatened her.”

  “What about the missing mother-in-law?” asked Flo.

  “She said her mother-in-law checked herself out of the Seaside and insisted on being driven to the Tampa airport, where she said she was getting as far away from Sarasota as she could, that she was going to stay with friends. Alberta says her mother-in-law didn’t say where she was going.”

  “But she lied to you about her mother being her mother-in-law,” said Flo.

  “She says she never said it, that I was making it up on the spot.”

  “What about the nurse, Emmie Jefferson?” asked Flo, leaning forward.

  “They talked to her, showed her a picture of Vivian Pastor. She said it wasn’t the woman she had seen in Alberta’s car the night of the murder, but Alberta Pastor had never said Gigi was her mother-in-law.”

  “What’s Alberta Pastor say now?”

  “She insists that the police conduct a nationwide search for her mother-in-law to prove her story. I told Viviase that Alberta had fed her mother-in-law in pieces to the gators in Myakka Lake.”

  “How many gators in the lake?” asked Flo. “A few thousand?”

  “Right, the police would just have to cut open a few thousand gators looking for body parts,” I said.

  “You went in ass first and she almost tore it off,” said Flo, smoothing down the baby’s fine yellow hair.

  “I underestimated her,” I said.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Probably at her lawyer’s office filing a civil suit against me and Ames.”

  “They let you go?”

  “Viviase believed me,” I said. “Told me I should have come to him with what I had instead of going to Alberta’s office.”

  “He was right, Lewis.”

  “He was right.”

  “What’s the word? Hubris. That’s it, right?” she asked.

  “Walked into a ring of fire,” I said. “Brought Ames with me. We got burned.”

  “And you want me to buy you asbestos suits or did you just feel the need to tell your tale to someone who’d listen to you and pat you on the cheek and say, ‘Poor boy’?”

  “I’ll settle for you coming up with Ames’s bail.”

  “Good,” she said, standing up. “I’ll get Catherine dressed and we’ll go down and get the Lone Ranger out of the jail. One condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stop feeling sorry. for yourself and nail the bitch. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  When we got to the lockup on Ringling Boulevard, Viviase met us and ran the maze to get Ames out. He also told me that there was a restraining order against Ames and me. We couldn’t get within sight of Alberta Pastor.

  Ames needed a shave. Catherine was awake and made it clear she wanted to be fed. I wanted someone to tell me to pack up and get out of town.

  “Fonesca,” Viviase said, his face pink, his red tie loose. “You are in serious need of a shrink.”

  “I’ve got one,” I said.

  “Double your sessions,” he said. “You were an investigator for the Cook County states attorney. You had to know what could happen when you went into Pastor’s office. What’d you think? She’d just break down, confess, say she was sorry, take a plea with the district attorney?”

  He was right.

  “She killed her husband’s mother,” said Ames.

  “And she’s going to pay for it, right?” said Viviase with a sigh. “You have any idea of how many murderers are driving around the city drinking coffee at Starbucks, deciding if their next car is going to be a Lexus or a … the hell with it. You two.”

  He pointed at Ames and me.

  “You two come with me and you, Mrs. Zink, the baby’s hungry,” Viviase said.

  “I’ll get her home,” Flo said.

  “You do that,” he said.

  “I’ll call you later, Flo,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Let’s go,” Viviase said when Flo went through the door.

  “Where?”

  “To talk to a witness who might be able to save your very pathetic carcass,” he said, leading the way through a thick steel door. “But don’t count on it.”

  “Who?” asked Ames.

  “Georgia Cubbins,” he said.

  We turned a corner, walked down a narrow corridor of polished white concrete. Viviase stopped at a door, reached for it.

  “McKinney, you wait here,” he said.

  “Who’s Georgia Cubbins?” I asked.

  “Alberta Pastor’s mother,” he said. “Gigi.”

  “But she—” I started as he opened the door.

  “I told you not to count on it,” he said.

  We were in a small dark room without furniture. In front of us was a glass partition, a two-way mirror. Beyond the window seated at a table was the old woman I had last seen at the Pastor house concentrating on newspaper ads and coupons in a state that could be called out-of-it. A very thin young woman in her early thirties wearing a white blouse and dark skirt sat across from Gigi Cubbins, who was drinking from a white porcelain mug. She held the mug in both hands and nodded, smiling at something the young woman, who had a pad of yellow, lined legal paper in front of her and a pen in her hand, said.

  “Alberta Pastor’s lawyer is out looking for a judge, the chief of police, the governor or the president of the United States to get her mother out of here,” Viviase said. “If we’re lucky, we’ve got about half an hour.”

  He pushed a button on the wall and we could hear what was being said inside the room beyond.

  The young woman held up two fingers and said, “Mrs. Cubbins, how many fingers am I holding up?”

  The old woman’s eyes widened and she said, “You mean you don’t know how many fingers you’re holding up?�
��

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So do I,” Georgia Cubbins said.

  “How many?” asked the young woman patiently.

  “Two.”

  “Good.”

  “What is?”

  The young woman reached over and patted Gigi’s wrinkled hand.

  “Do you know your husband’s name?”

  “He’s dead,” Gigi said.

  “Yes, but do you know what his name is?”

  “Was,” Gigi said, putting down her cup and looking puzzled. “Is it still his name if he’s dead?”

  “Yes,” the young woman said.

  “Good.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Samuel.”

  “Good and—”

  “Walter.”

  “Was it Samuel or Walter?” the young woman asked.

  “Samuel Walter Cubbins,” Gigi said with a smile.

  “And your son-in-law?”

  “Dead too. Almost everyone is.”

  “His name?”

  “My … ?”

  “Your daughter’s husband.”

  “David.”

  “Your daughter’s name?”

  “Turnkey.”

  “Her name is Turnkey?”

  “It’s what I call her. Her name is Albert, no, Alberta.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s good that her name is Alberta? Wasn’t my idea. My husband’s mother was named Alberta. I never liked the name.”

  “Okay,” the young woman said.

  “Did I pass?” asked Gigi.

  “Yes. Do you mind if a policeman asks you a few questions?”

  “Not silly ones like ‘What’s your name?’”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The young woman got up and said, “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Cubbins.”

  Viviase opened the door to the room beyond the two-way mirror and the woman stepped out.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  She looked at me, pursed her lips and shrugged.

  “Dementia’s there,” she said, “but I think she likes to play games. She also doesn’t like her daughter.”

  Viviase entered the room beyond the window. There was a crackle on the speaker when Viviase said brightly, “Good evening, Mrs. Cubbins.”

  The old woman looked up at him in confusion. I saw no hope beyond the sheet of glass. I looked at Ames, who stood at near military attention, his eyes fixed on the old woman.