“That would be awfully nice of Mr. Davies.”
“Can I schedule a time for you and your mother to stop by and take the nickel tour?” Director Fedorchak asked. “I believe Silver Years is the best assisted living facility that our little village of Lansing or, quite frankly, all of Chicago has to offer.”
“Maureen and I are in Orlando next week, but I’ll be in touch as soon as we return,” the caller said. “Personally, I think your retirement home is going to be an excellent fit.”
“I look forward to meeting your mother.”
“Thank you,” Everyman told the Silver Years director. “You had me at hiking trails.”
CHAPTER 22
The dogs began to bark—a Greek chorus announcing an imminent arrival. I peeked from behind a blind. A white Chevy Malibu parked in my driveway. A second later Kippy Gimm stepped out in jeans and a denim shirt, not on duty this time round.
“Hey,” I said, stepping outside.
“Hey,” she replied. “Sorry I’m so early, but I thought I’d see if Vira and the others would be up for a walk.”
“Think you could handle all the girls?”
“Of course.”
As soon as Kippy and the thrilled trio rounded the corner of my driveway, I bolted back inside, hit the bathroom, squeezed an earthworm-sized line of Crest onto my toothbrush and polished the ivories for a minute. I ran a hand through my hair, twice, then three times, and then tore through a bottom drawer in which I had an indistinct memory of tossing a bottle of cologne that Mickie had once picked up for me. Of course it was lying sideways and leaking in the far back. I sprayed both wrists as well as the front and back of my neck before I spotted Sue sitting in the hallway staring up at me.
“What?” I said.
Sue turned and headed back to his couch, but I’ll take a polygraph my German shepherd shook his head in incredulity before departing.
I ran to my laundry closet, yanked a clean shirt from the dryer and swapped it out with the one I’d been wearing.
Twenty minutes later Kippy and the three amigas returned.
* * *
“He hid under the bed?” I asked in amazement.
Kippy laughed. It was her day off and she’d called ahead of time, asked if she could stop by—toss a Frisbee around the yard with Vira—and bring me up to date on the rest of the Ocampo murder case, the bits and pieces that would never make the evening news.
Who was I to say no?
I even set out coffee.
“Ocampo Junior knew his mom and Nunez were rekindling, restraining order or not. He also knew—spoiled little shit that he was—his mother’s bungalow was worth a small fortune. You see, North Mayfair is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Junior also knew his mother had some savings in the bank, a sizable 401(k), and a small life insurance policy through work. So if Nunez goes away for her murder, Junior winds up with the entire pot of gold.”
“But he hid under the bed?”
Kippy dumped a couple of my shoplifted McDonald’s creamers into her cup of java. “Ocampo left work early, parked the BRZ a couple blocks over, and got to the old house before Nicomaine came home from her job. And, yes, he hid under the queen-sized bed in the master bedroom. Mom comes home, cooks up some Thai salmon with ginger for her and Nunez. They have a little wine with the candlelit dinner, get amorous, and shake it down on the bed Junior’s hiding under.”
“Icky.”
“Did you just say icky?”
“I think I did.”
“Very icky,” Kippy agreed.
“So where was Nunez when his wife was killed?”
“Nunez is truly an alcoholic. He finished the rest of the wine from dinner, had a couple of tallboys, and then started sucking down some brandy before crashing on the couch in front of the TV while his wife cleaned up the kitchen. Junior had crushed up some sedatives—Restoril, which is a benzodiazepine—and spiked the brandy to ensure that Nunez would stay passed out if any subsequent struggle got out of hand.”
“Charming.”
“After it was done, Junior lays the knife gently on Nunez’s lap on his way out the door. A couple hours later Nunez comes to, he’s groggy as hell, grabs the knife out of confusion, walks to the kitchen, sees his wife, and calls the police. He’s heavily intoxicated and sedated and has no memory of seeing or hearing anything.”
“How did the blood get in the trunk of the kid’s car?”
“That’s the thing of it, Reid.”
“Call me Mace.”
“That’s the thing of it, Mace. If Junior had brought along a plastic garbage bag or grabbed one at the house, he’d be home free. Instead, he took off his pullover hoodie—his killing shirt, if you will, as he’s got a T-shirt on underneath—and folds that in half and uses it as some kind of makeshift bag. He shoves the goalie mask he wore and gloves inside, hightails it back to the Subaru, and tosses his hoodie bag into the trunk where some of his mom’s blood began to seep through.”
“So Nicomaine sacrifices everything to raise the kid, all by herself … and she ends up with a psychopath for a son who kills her because he wants her stuff.” I shook my head. “That’s just depressing.”
“You want to know the weird thing?”
“It gets weirder?”
“Junior told Detective Triggs he wished he could take it back—all of it. He told Triggs he wore the goalie mask and tied down the hoodie so his mother wouldn’t recognize him—would think it was a burglar or home invader in her last seconds of life—but she kept whispering his name, over and over again, as he stabbed her to death.”
“She knew.”
“Probably recognized his eyes through the hockey mask.”
Vira lay on Kippy’s feet, resting herself for a round of Frisbee. Delta Dawn and Maggie May sat on opposite ends of my old leather couch and stared straight ahead. Sue sat in the middle looking only mildly perturbed. I think the three were doing a more-than-fair impression of me watching a Bears’ game on a Sunday afternoon, sans my frustrated theatrics. Kippy had brought along enough treats and toys to pass around so, in Delta Dawn and Maggie’s view, she cut the mustard. And the near-empty jar of peanut butter Kippy handed off to Sue made Kip an ally for life.
I reached for a cream at the same instant Kippy grabbed for a sugar packet. I pulled my hand back.
She smiled. “I owe you an explanation.”
“About what?”
“Remember when you asked me out for coffee?”
“I did?” I said. “Completely slipped my mind.”
Kippy smiled again.
“I want you to know my no wasn’t a personal rejection,” she said. “It’s just that I’m off guys.”
“You’re off guys?” I said, and then it dawned on me. “Oh, okay. I see.”
“No, I’m not a lesbian,” Kippy corrected me. “Although I’d probably have better luck if I went that route. You see, I just came off a relationship that ended poorly.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, although I wasn’t too saddened to learn she wasn’t currently in any relationship.
“And by ‘poorly,’ I mean really shitty,” she continued. “It was heartbreaking. He really hurt me. So I’m taking a timeout.”
“Emotionally speaking, right? He didn’t physically hurt you?”
She smiled, but this time I could tell she didn’t mean it. “I wish it had been physical. Then I could have kicked his ass into Lake Michigan.”
After the events of the past year—in this, my post-Mickie era, that is—I was on a first-name basis with heartache. Heartache had moved all of his shit into my spare bedroom. Heartache and I were about to restore a 1968 Ford Mustang from scratch. Heartache and I were getting serious about forming a garage band. And, just for the record, Heartache never flushes.
After a while I asked, “How long is your self-imposed exile?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll just kind of know when it’s safe to get back in the water.”
“I
t was that bad, huh?”
“You’re dying to know what he did, aren’t you?”
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“I thought he might be the one. I really did. We’d even begun talking as though the two of us were in it for the long haul. So one Sunday I slid out of bed and ran a bath. He was sound asleep so I left the door open in case he wanted to join me. I’m taking this marathon soak when he woke up. He thought I’d left and gone back to my apartment, so he called up a pig friend of his and I laid there in the tub listening as the son of a bitch bragged about everything he’d ever done to me—sexually—including half a dozen things we’d never done. The SOB even talked about how I was almost as good as some one-nighter he’d picked up after a softball game a couple of Fridays earlier. I slipped out of the bathtub, quietly dried off as he prattled on to his pig friend about my … anatomy. He even used this X-rated language that I’d never heard him use before to describe our sex life.”
“He made it sound like a Penthouse letter?”
“You read Penthouse?”
“No.” In truth, I’d not seen a Penthouse since Mickie caught me paging through one a buddy had snuck into class in high school over a decade earlier. “God no.”
Kippy shrugged. “I guess he made it sound like a Penthouse letter.”
“What did you do?” I steered the conversation away from Penthouse.
“Put on my clothes, gathered all of my stuff in a grocery bag, and left.”
“What did he have to say for himself?”
“Well, he was certainly stunned when I walked out of the bathroom—that’s for sure. He hung up on his pig friend and tried to Hey, Honey it as though I were an idiot. Then he started in on how all guys talked like that, even though the most benign thing he’d said in the previous ten minutes had been to describe the circumference of my areolas.”
I tried to kill a grin in its infancy, but failed miserably.
“See,” she said. “You’re laughing about this. You Y-chromosomes are all alike.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Kippy. We’re not all alike,” I said. “I would have made sure your car was gone before I started calling my friends.”
“Cute.”
“Look, Kip,” I said, instantly realizing I showed familiarity by shortening her name. “Maybe your premise is right and all guys are pigs. So you need to find one who can suppress it, keep it hidden, and camouflage it up. My grandma didn’t realize Grandpa was piglike until her late sixties, and by then it was too late to do anything about it, and she had accumulated some affection for the old codger.”
Kippy took a long sip of coffee, put it down, and said, “Why haven’t you been snarfed up? You’ve got that campy, outdoorsy thing going.”
“I don’t go camping that much, but you think I’m a rugged, outdoorsy guy?”
“Did I say rugged?”
“Rugged goes hand in hand with outdoorsy. It’s a given.”
“But you needed a girl to save you from that twelve-year-old.”
I put my coffee down. “Feral-boy was strong as hell. And that knife was like a machete.”
“Relax, Mace, I’m just joshing,” she said. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why haven’t you been snarfed up?”
I shrugged. “I guess I’m in the spitting-out phase of having been snarfed up.”
“You’re divorced?”
I nodded.
“And you didn’t want it?”
I shifted about in my chair and shook my head.
We sat in silence for a few seconds.
“Did you do a shitty?”
“A shitty,” I said. “No, I didn’t do anything shitty. We just grew apart. Or maybe it was Mickie that grew apart. I’m not sure what happened to be honest. We were high school sweethearts … and they always say those never last.”
“I’m sorry.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I’ve been in the spitting-out phase for quite a while now, actually. Mickie’s getting remarried.”
We sipped coffee in further silence. I regretted how my remembrance had cast a pall over the entire conversation. I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for a stupid joke when Vira stood, walked over to the Frisbee laying by the sliding glass door, got ahold of it in her teeth, and then delivered it to Officer Gimm’s lap.
“You just got served with a summons.”
Kippy laughed. I laughed. The world righted itself.
CHAPTER 23
Goddamned fixed income.
Weston Davies’s social security check got direct deposited into his bank account on the third Wednesday of every month, no matter what date that Wednesday happened to fall upon. Of course the bulk of his SSA check went to living in this dump. And no matter how Davies budgeted, crunch time always came the week before his money was deposited.
Which meant the dry spell came mid-month and Davies found it next to impossible to get a drink around here. Especially since the bean counters at Visa had frozen his credit card and kept sending him those threatening letters and making downright unsociable phone calls. Weston Davies snickered—it was almost as though he owed Visa more than twelve grand or something.
The idea came to him as he watched TV in the community lounge yesterday afternoon. Someone at Silver Years, or possibly the family of one of the old farts warehoused here, had brought in a baker’s box stuffed full of them saucer-sized ginger snap cookies. When no one was looking, Davies grabbed a dozen of the ginger snaps—six in each hand—and jogged them back to his room. Then he went down to the kitchen and asked a staff member for a Ziploc bag. Then Davies went to the craft’s room where a flock of the usual biddies sat farting around with yarn and paste and shit all day every day as though they were in preschool. He asked the least-constipated-looking one if he could have a ribbon. Plus some construction paper, some tape, and a couple of colored markers.
Then Davies sat at a corner table, jazzed up the Ziploc bag, and made a colorful label reading Bake Sale Charity.
All that had been the easy part. This morning, however, was going to be the hard part.
Weston Davies had been called into Director Shelley Fedorchak’s office on more than one occasion in order to provide his version of some grievance that had been filed against him by one of the other residents at Silver Years. Plus, there’d been that unpleasantness at the start of last year where he’d been informed that Silver Years didn’t permit liquor store deliveries. Or was it just his liquor store deliveries? He’d forgotten which had caused the ruckus and, to this day, Davies wondered which of the retirement home’s octogenarians had brought the matter to Fedorchak’s attention and made such a federal case out of it. It could well have been the craft biddies, or perhaps those checkers-playing chuckle-fucks from the commons, or perhaps some other asshole.
Davies put on his single dress shirt and black pants. He combed his strands of white hair to the side, stared in the mirror a moment, and then used the comb on his unclipped eyebrows. On more than one occasion some damned fool or another had mentioned that with his white hair and eyebrows, his rosy red checks, he’d just need a fake beard to pass himself off as Santa Claus, albeit a thinner version of Kris Kringle. In fact, in his first Christmas at Silver Years, Director Fedorchak asked him if he’d dress up as jolly old St. Nick for their holiday party.
Of course he had declined.
So, as spruced up as he’d been in over a decade, Weston Davies held the decorative Ziploc bag and glanced in all directions before heading into the wing of the facility that housed those residents who could no longer live completely on their own—those who required extra care and attention when taking their medications, those who required help in their journeys to and from the restroom or shower, those currently wheelchair bound—an entire assortment of requirements for those senior citizens rounding third and heading home on the baseball diamond of life. Davies had absolutely no business being in this wing and figured a Silver Years’ staff member might go all Gestapo were he to bump into one.
Davies knocked on three doors before he heard a grunt and took it as an invite to enter. The name outside the room read Barry Anklan and that’s whom Davies assumed the man in the stained terry-cloth robe and wheelchair to be.
“Barry,” Davies said with a welcoming smile. “The cookies are here.”
“What?” the man in the wheelchair asked.
“The cookies from the charity bake sale have finally arrived.” Davies walked in and handed the Ziploc bag to Anklan. “Ginger snaps, right?”
“Cookies? I didn’t order any cookies.”
Davies looked confused. “I volunteered to help them deliver, and they told me Barry gets a dozen.”
Anklan held up the proffered bag. “Ginger snaps?”
“Remember—they stopped by last month to take orders.”
“Are these free?”
“I wish,” Davies said. “I went with four dozen and it cost me forty dollars, but it’s all for a good cause.”
Anklan looked up at him. “What’s the cause?”
Davies stared back, wishing it wouldn’t have gone on this far. “What?”
“What’s the bake sale for?”
“Charity.”
Anklan frowned. “What charity?”
Davies was getting pissed, but kept a stiff upper lip. “They need a dialysis machine over at the hospital.”
Anklan looked baffled. “A hospital’s throwing a bake sale to purchase a dialysis machine?”
Davies glanced about the room and said, “I think it’s so poor people can get treatment. Something like that.”
“All right,” Anklan said. “What do I owe you?”
“Ten dollars.”
“Christ.” Anklan spun the wheelchair sideways and rolled himself to a dresser, opened a middle drawer that appeared to be stuffed with underwear and socks, and then glared back at Davies.
“Oh, sure, okay,” Davies said and turned away. Great spot to hide your wallet, you old gimp, Davies thought. The Somalis on the night shift will never think of looking there.
The Finders Page 10
