He rounded the corner at the end of the hallway just as laughing voices exploded through the doorway across from the nurses’ station, shushing one another and going their separate ways. He was out of sight, in the long hallway leading to the activity room.
He parked his wheelchair against the wall to one side and stud ied the scene. Scene was another fine word from the past. The scene of the crime. Yeah, right. Poor Marjorie slips and falls on a wet spot, actually a puddle he could see was still on the floor, and he thinks it’s a scene of the crime because he used to be a private dick. Dick, ha. Everything’s connected in this damn world. Staff probably left the piddle puddle for the early morning cleaning crew to take care of.
At least on his floor there was an early morning crew, the ones who got out all the noisiest polishers and buffers they could find in janitors’ closets and woke everyone up while they made the tile floors into mirrors. Too bad he wasn’t a kid in grammar school anymore, because back then he would have sidled up to the girls and had a fine time looking up their skirts.
Thinking of grammar school made him think of Dwayne Matu sak. For some reason, since his stroke, he had recalled one particular summer from boyhood in which Dwayne Matusak announced that by end of summer they would have a knockdown drag-out fight and only one of them would come out alive. At the time he actually thought he would die. When he watched Dragnet on television that summer he tried to imagine himself cool and fearless like Sergeant Joe Friday. And now here he was in the hallway of a damn nursing home staring at a puddle of urine thinking about an ancient black and white televi sion series.
Crazy bastard. A stroke was one thing, but at least he wasn’t per manent in this place like folks in this wing. Not unless he had an other stroke and this one knocked him for a loop. Or maybe in his condition a seizure would do it. He had a seizure a few weeks earlier and, even though the doctor said seizures wouldn’t damage his brain, he still wondered.
But what good did it do to think about it? Only thing to do was keep working on it and get the hell out of here. A lot more years left in this old dick. Fifty-three down, or so they told him. Given a week’s notice, he could still get it up.
He laughed, then wondered why the hell he was suddenly in such a damn good mood. One minute he’s worried about seizures, next minute he’s a laughing hyena. Here he is poking into the circum stances of Marjorie’s recent death and he gets this idiotic self-satisfy ing feeling.
The puddle on the floor was not quite a yard across, exactly as Sue had described it less than an hour earlier. But when he leaned forward and studied the edges of the puddle more closely, he could see that it was surrounded by a series of barely discernible rings marking where the puddle had originally extended, but had dried.
Across the hall was one of those janitors’ closets he’d been think ing about when he recalled being awakened each morning by the noisy cleaning crew. The closet was straddled on either side by a men’s room and a ladies’ room so as to line up the plumbing during construction. As he stared across at the door to the janitors’ closet with its Staff Only sign, he saw where small droplets on the floor had dried. The drop lets were in front of the Staff Only door and seemed to lead toward the large puddle as if someone had stomped in the main puddle like a kid with brand new galoshes.
The hallway tile was one of those nondescript patterns of flecks on a beige background. Foot squares placed so tightly together it was difficult to see the dividing lines between them. And, because of the apparent randomness of the pattern, it was difficult to find the repeti tion. Like looking at the photograph of a planet surface. But eventu ally he did find the pattern, and when he did he saw that each tile had been turned ninety degrees from the previous tile by the installer.
Before the perimeter dried, the puddle had been spread out over roughly a three-foot circle and he could see, because of breaks in the dry line at the edge of the perimeter, that something had disturbed the puddle not long after it was made. When he examined these breaks in the dry line more closely, he could see where thin tires had rolled through the puddle and gone on down the hallway away from the ac tivity room and toward an alarmed door. Although the tire tracks were dry, he could definitely see them.
He rolled down the hallway and studied a floor plan mounted on the wall with arrows showing various emergency escape routes. Ac cording to the map, the alarmed door opened to a hallway that bor dered the kitchen and eventually led to a loading dock. The spread between the wheels that had made the tracks was too large to be a wheelchair, and each wheel was paired with another that almost, but not quite, paralleled its course. And, since it was way past any meal time and no food carts would have passed this way late in the evening, he figured the tracks leading away from the puddle must have been made by the gurney that had taken Marjorie away. Made sense that the ambulance would park at the loading dock, back here where resi dents wouldn’t have to watch one of their own being carted away.
Felt good to be doing a little dissecting at the scene, even if it wasn’t a crime scene. And Marjorie, who loved mysteries and conspiracy theo ries, would have been proud. She was probably sitting on cloud nine right now, happy as a clam he was staring down at the tracks of the gur ney that took her away. Of course, if he found something …
The self-satisfaction he felt a moment earlier turned bitter, then became comic as he imagined himself smiling to death the perpetrator of the so-called “foul play.” Or maybe getting out a violin and play ing it until the guy pukes his guts out. Or maybe letting word out on the street so Marjorie’s husband’s old cronies blow into town for a final hit. He could almost see them crawling out of the woodwork of vari ous nursing homes around the country. They’d show up at Hell in the Woods in wheelchairs and walkers. They’d rough up a few aides and nurses. A Keystone Cops scene in which the cronies stagger after the aides and nurses, wielding their canes.
Or maybe it would be different. The guards at the front desk would try to put up a fight, but the crew of cronies, like a wrecking crew come back from the dead, would mow them down with their canes—the canes, of course, having had rapid firing weapons con cealed in them James Bond style ever since the cronies went into the homes in case anyone ever sent in a hit on them.
Was this a story he and Marjorie once shared? Or was it really that way? Hoods in nursing homes with loaded canes? Funny. So damn funny.
He backed away from the door to the loading dock, turned and wheeled back to the puddle where the tracks originated. On the side of the puddle nearest the janitors’ closet, where the kid in new galoshes had splashed, he saw something else. He wheeled around the puddle. Yes, there was evidence here. Several specks on the doorjamb, hard to see because of the dark color of the doorjamb, but when he reached out and found that the speck he rubbed came off fairly easily, he knew it was blood and not paint. Perhaps there had been more blood, a puddle on the floor near the door and away from the urine puddle, the para medics wiping up a larger puddle of blood and missing the specks on the doorjamb. But if there was that much blood, why no investiga tion? Where was the yellow police tape? Where was the cop to protect the evidence? After all her theories about conspiracies, was this how Marjorie would check out? Slipping in a puddle of piss and no one even questions the circumstances or bothers to clean it up?
As he leaned forward in his wheelchair rubbing at another of the reddish-brown specks and examining the stain transferred to his fin ger, something else bothered him. For a moment he thought he would fall out of the chair, and if that happened, he’d tumble end-over-end, not stopping until … until what? He sat up and closed his eyes and tried to think. Yes, something was there. A smell. A smell from ear lier while sailing down the hallway, but a smell that was not here. And now, as he sniffed, trying to detect an odor from the puddle on the floor, a memory came to him. A memory from the distant past that made him sit up and close his eyes.
A stairwell. A feeling of being closed in. An unsafe place. The weight of a gun in his hand and he’s c
limbing the stairs and there’s the smell of urine. Must be from the time he was a Chicago cop. Even though he hadn’t known Jan then, she told him about it, saying she knew a lot of his old cronies and that she would teach it all to him again and he’d be as good as new. But this thing—climbing a dark stairwell with a gun in his hand and the smell of urine all around— this thing he did not remember Jan telling him. This thing came from someplace else, someplace dark and frightening. And now a phrase emerged. That phrase was simply, the projects.
As he sat with his eyes closed recalling the smell of urine from a stairwell climbed long ago, he wondered why, although he had leaned forward in his chair and taken a deep breath, he had not smelled urine here.
Then he heard a sound. Someone else on the stairwell in the proj ect. But when he opened his eyes, he saw the night LPN who every one called Betty-who-talks-too-much staring at him. Betty was from his floor. She stood on the far side of the puddle with her arms folded. She was smiling and he wondered how long she’d been there. Actually, he wanted to ask her this but, as usual, the words went upside-down and inside-out and he said nothing. Instead of talking he smiled back at Betty who came around the puddle behind his chair and began her one-sided dialogue.
“The desk said I’d find you here, Steve. I’m surprised you’d come down here. I figured a guy like you wouldn’t waste a trip to the first floor to visit the nursing home. I figured a guy like you’d be out on the grounds doing wheelies. This place is too old for you. How come you’re not glued to your TV watching one of the gumshoe videos your wife brings in?”
When Betty pivoted his wheelchair and began circling the pud dle to take him back to his room, Steve wanted to tell her to wait. He wanted to shout it. He wanted to tell her he needed to do some thing important before he went back to his room. He wanted to tell her there was evidence to be collected before the morning cleaning crew disturbed the crime scene. But, as usual, he was unable to sort the words from the ones spewing from Betty’s mouth. So, before she could wheel him away, he gasped and slumped to one side in his chair, sticking out his left foot to put on the brakes.
While Betty was busy putting his foot back up on the footrest so she could wheel him back to his room, she kept rattling on about the time of evening and where he should and shouldn’t be.
Damn it, Betty, have a heart! Read my mind, will you?
But of course, Betty could not read his mind. The only person who came close to being able to do that was Jan, and Jan wasn’t here.
But someone else was here. Sergeant Joe Friday was here bolster ing him for the upcoming fight with Dwayne Matusak. Sergeant Fri day, who would have to stoop down to look into a boy’s eyes. Sergeant Friday looking knowingly into his eyes. And so, taking a tip from Joe Friday, who often taste-tested questionable substances, he leaned to the side, reached down, and dipped his forefinger into the retreating pud dle on the floor. And on the way down the hallway, as the breeze of being rapidly wheeled the length of the nursing home wing cooled him and threatened to dry the evidence he had so astutely collected on Mar jorie’s behalf, he thought, Oh shit, to himself, thought about Joe Friday touching his finger to his tongue in that safer black and white world, thought about germs and bacteria and viruses contained in bodily flu ids, thought about who might have pissed here on this floor, figured an octogenarian’s piss wouldn’t stand up to piss collected from a stairwell corner in the projects, hoped to hell Betty hadn’t seen him dip his fin ger in the puddle or he might end up in the loony wing, and, finally, put his finger to his mouth and took a taste of what, for some reason, he already knew would not be there. Water. Nothing but water.
After backing him into the elevator, Betty was silent. All he could see before him was the closed elevator door and the controls to one side and the floor indicator lights above the door. Perhaps the silence was deliberate, the ride back to the third floor a time during which the psy chotic stroke victim was expected to collect his thoughts.
Among the thoughts going up with him in the elevator was a de ranged theory that we are all born with pure intelligence and the re mainder of our lives is spent destroying it. But as the second floor light above the door blinked out and the third floor light lit and the door slid open, the theory floated out ahead of him like so much vapor. Now, even though he knew it was only water on the floor, all that re mained for his effort was self-pity.
Poor Steve Babe, the stroke victim, the fool. Tasting a puddle on the floor to see if it’s piss. It’s come to this. It’s come to this.
CHAPTER
FOUR
To celebrate the opening night of her remodeled res taurant, Ilonka Szabo invited regular customers for a lavish feast. It was a dream come true, to invite friends in her adopted country to share in her good fortune.
Unfortunately, her most loyal customer would not be coming and this made her sad. His name was Steve Babe, shortened from the Hun garian Baberos at the turn of the century by a great grandfather unaware of jokes the shortened version would generate in the new country. The original name translated as one who is crowned with a laurel wreath as a mark of honor. As Ilonka came from the restaurant kitchen to give a toast she recalled years earlier when Steve told her the details. An immigration official at Ellis Island had confused Baberos with Barab bas, the thief released from crucifixion instead of Jesus. The official had convinced Steve’s great grandfather that his descendants would not want to be known as heathens and thieves in their new country.
“A cherished friend is absent tonight,” said Ilonka, holding up her glass. “Not long ago he suffered a stroke at the young age of fifty three. He’s at the Saint Mel in the Woods Rehabilitation Facility. He solves mysteries and is quite good at it. Although the stroke oc curred at home, he had been working on a case when it happened. A terrible time for a stroke to creep up like a thief in the night. Pray he solves the most important mystery of his life. Pray he recaptures his past and we’ll soon have him back with us and be able to share a meal with him.”
It was unfair to be here. The warmth, the smells, the voices of din ers, the smile from Ilonka Szabo, the white tablecloth, the candles, an elegant place setting for two—everything here made it unfair. When the toast was given, Jan saw that Ilonka and several regular patrons glanced toward her table. Jan had the feeling they focused on the seat across from her, the seat where Steve should have been. He would have turned and smiled and said something in Hungarian. She could al most see him there as he joins in the toast with that crazy smile.
Lydia Jacobson turned from Jan to join the toast, smiled. Because of the subdued lighting, Lydia’s face was shadowed. When Ilonka fin ished the toast, Lydia offered another toast. “Here’s to Steve.”
As Jan sipped the red Hungarian wine, she wondered if a daily dose of red wine throughout Steve’s lifetime might have made a difference.
“This place is great,” said Lydia.
“It was Steve’s favorite,” said Jan. “Before they remodeled he used to pick up carryout from here. He probably ate Ilonka’s food more often than he should. Americans have the second highest incidence of heart disease and stroke. Can you guess which country is number one?”
“Hungary?” asked Lydia.
“Right,” said Jan. “The home of Steve’s ancestors is one of many what-ifs. Like, what if he hadn’t eaten so much high cholesterol food? Or, what if he’d exercised regularly? Or, what if we’d made love three times a day for the last ten years? I hope to hell he never has another stroke. When he had a seizure a couple weeks back I thought that was it.”
Lydia reached across the table and touched Jan’s hand. She looked at Jan as if to say, “You can’t blame yourself.”
Jan and Lydia were close enough so sometimes they did not have to speak. Lydia had been with Jan the night of Steve’s stroke. They had been out to dinner, as they were tonight, leaving Steve home doing phone work. Lydia had been with Jan when she found Steve slumped over on the sofa with the phone in his lap. Lydia drove them to the hos pita
l. Lydia was the one who’d heard of the clot-dissolving drug which, if given within three hours of an ischemic stroke, was supposed to lessen its effects. The only problem was they did not know exactly when the stroke had occurred. Jan had tried calling some of the phone numbers Steve had written down on a notepad to narrow down the time, but the latest call she could come up with was to a friend from the Chicago PD and that was nearly two hours before she and Lydia found him. Count ing the time to drive to the hospital in an unseasonable November snow storm, and the time it took to get a doctor to administer the drug, she could not be sure about the magic three-hour window.
So far, Steve seemed to be doing fairly well recalling the recent past, the past after his stroke. But last week, when his mother and retarded sister visited from Cleveland, it was obvious Steve did not remember them. He put on a good act, though, knowing he should show recognition. Faking it was something a lot of recovering stroke victims did.
Despite not recognizing his mother and sister, there was hope. Recently he’d become obsessed by the recall of a boy from grammar school. A boy named Dwayne Matusak who apparently threatened Steve during an entire summer. Dwayne Matusak’s name came up more frequently during Jan’s visits, and, according to Steve’s therapists, during his occupational and speech rehab. Although Jan was able to visit Steve every day, his stringent rehab schedule kept her from seeing him as much as she would have liked. He was in an experimental pro gram consisting of eight to fourteen hours per day of therapy. Steve’s doctor said the medication combined with long hours of therapy was Steve’s best shot at recovery. Although this might have been more ex pensive than they could have afforded on their own, the program was experimental and therefore part of the cost was picked up.
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