House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  Ella allowed Esther enough time to take a seat in a stall, then walked into the restroom, praying it wouldn’t be crowded. It wasn’t. Only one other stall was being used; Ella could see a woman’s calf-high boots beneath the door. Esther’s bright blue running shoes were visible in the other occupied stall. Ella peeked under the door of the stall Esther was using, and there was Esther’s purse, on the floor, near her feet. Ella dropped to her knees, and quick as a striking cobra, she grabbed the purse. She heard Esther shriek as she ran toward the bathroom door.

  Ella threw Esther’s purse into her shopping bag and walked quickly to the nearest large store, a JCPenney. As she walked toward one of the fitting rooms, she dropped her orange baseball cap on the floor near a rack full of puffy ski jackets. In the dressing room, she removed Esther’s purse from the shopping bag, opened it, and found what she wanted: Esther’s key ring.

  There were only two keys on the ring, and one looked as if it might open a safe-deposit box at a bank. The other key was certainly for Esther’s apartment door. Ella put the keys and the cash she found in Esther’s purse—a grand total of forty-two bucks—in her jeans and dropped the purse back into the shopping bag, where she also deposited the black wig she was wearing and her new Knicks jacket. The reason Ella had bought the jacket and the orange baseball cap in the first place was so that if a witness spotted her when she stole Esther’s purse, the witness would most likely identify those two distinctive items—items Ella was no longer wearing.

  Ella left JCPenney and walked rapidly to the nearest mall exit. The information she’d looked up on her smartphone was the location of hardware stores near the Manhattan Mall, and she’d found a place called Elm Electric & Hardware between West Thirty-first and Thirty-second, less than two blocks from the mall. She wouldn’t even have to use her car to get there.

  Outside the mall, Ella jogged to the hardware store and had a copy of Esther’s door key made. It took only fifteen minutes. Now she had to return Esther’s purse to Esther, because the last thing she wanted was Esther changing her lock. Back at the mall, she stopped the first security guard she saw, and said, “I saw this purse on a bench. Someone must have forgotten it.”

  By now Esther would have reported to mall security that someone had stolen her purse, and Ella figured that before long an announcement would be made over the public address system telling lucky Esther where she could reclaim her property. And when Esther saw that the only thing missing was her cash, but that her credit cards and keys were still there, she’d thank the Lord—and certainly wouldn’t change her lock.

  15

  Ella returned to the assisted living facility the following day, arriving there just before lunchtime. Ten minutes later she saw Esther get off the elevator and walk toward the dining room. As soon as Esther disappeared into the dining room, Ella headed to her apartment on the fourth floor and, using the key she’d had made, opened the door.

  She noticed that Esther’s furniture was simple and sleek, not the old floral-patterned, heavy stuffed chairs and couches she’d expected. She had a beautiful Persian rug in her small living room and a secretary’s desk painted in black lacquered enamel with a gold foil design that Ella thought was really quite lovely. But Ella didn’t have time to spend admiring Esther’s furniture.

  She went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet above the sink—and was surprised to see how few items were in it. There was a toothbrush, toothpaste, and dental floss; it appeared as if Esther still had her own teeth. There was deodorant, a box of laxatives, a big bottle of Tylenol for arthritis pain, and a blue bottle of Mylanta. There were also three amber-colored prescription vials with white “easy open” tops that are harder than shit to open—exactly what Ella had been hoping to find.

  Reading the labels, Ella saw that the first prescription vial contained omeprazole, the second Coumadin, and the third digoxin. Ella knew that omeprazole was for acid reflux, because Bill had to take it at one time. Ella couldn’t help smiling when she thought about Bill and the omeprazole. One day while they’d been playing golf, Bill had thought he was having a heart attack—he’d scared the hell out of her—but it had turned out to be acid reflux and the doctor had given him a prescription for omeprazole. Bill, instead of changing his eating and drinking habits, started taking the omeprazole in advance on nights when he was planning to overindulge.

  But Ella didn’t know what the other two prescription meds were for. It also appeared that Esther wasn’t going to need a refill anytime soon. There were about sixty pills in both the Coumadin and the digoxin vials; the labels on the vials said that Esther had to take one pill a day and that she’d started out with ninety pills in each vial. Ella went to the cute desk in Esther’s living room and found two small envelopes, the type used for birthday or sympathy cards. She wrote Coumadin on one envelope and digoxin on the other, returned to Esther’s bathroom, and placed the proper pill in the proper envelope. She was certain Esther wouldn’t notice a single pill missing.

  Then, because she was curious and wondered what else she might learn about the state of Esther’s health, Ella opened the linen closet in the bathroom. There were towels and washcloths neatly folded on the top shelf, but the other two shelves were a mess. There were hand mirrors, brushes, combs, and a hair dryer; there were a dozen squeeze tubes containing sunscreen lotions, creams for itches and bug bites, and antibiotic ointments; there were Band-Aids in every size imaginable. It appeared as if the linen closet was where Esther dumped all the crap she rarely used and the medicine cabinet was where she kept the things she used frequently, like her prescription meds.

  Ella then walked quickly through the apartment looking for one other thing she was sure she would find, but that she hadn’t seen in Esther’s bathroom. Nor was it in Esther’s bedroom on a nightstand, as she thought it might be. She hoped Esther didn’t keep it in her purse, but didn’t think she did because Ella hadn’t seen it in there when she’d stolen it. She finally found it on the small table in Esther’s kitchen, next to a napkin holder: one of those pill organizer boxes, the type that have little compartments marked with each day of the week. Ella opened the box and saw that the slots for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were empty but that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday each contained two pills: one Coumadin, and one digoxin. It appeared that Esther didn’t take the omeprazole on a daily basis.

  Ella glanced at her watch; only twenty minutes had elapsed since Esther had gone to lunch. She took one last look around the apartment to make sure she hadn’t left any telltale signs that she’d broken in. She poked her head out the door and glanced down the hallway. It was empty; not an old person in sight. She closed the door behind her, made sure it was locked, and left.

  Ella returned to her apartment in Chelsea, made a pot of coffee, then got on the Internet to learn about Coumadin and digoxin.

  She discovered that Coumadin was an anticoagulant used to prevent thrombosis, basically a blood thinner to prevent blood clots that could lead to strokes. Digoxin, Ella was surprised to learn, was essentially a poison made from the foxglove plant but used for treating various heart conditions like atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. After studying a dozen websites, Ella concluded that Esther had some sort of serious heart condition and that if she failed to take her medication she could have a heart attack or a stroke.

  Perfect.

  Ella noted that Esther’s Coumadin was a little blue pill. It had the word “Coumadin” and the number 4 on one side; nothing was written on the other. The digoxin pill was eggshell white and had the letters JSP and the number 545 on one side; as with the Coumadin pill, the other side was blank.

  Now knowing everything she needed to know, Ella went shopping. She visited two drugstores and one of those places that sold vitamins and diet supplements and all sorts of homeopathic crap. In each store, she bought two or three different medications that looked as though they might do. Then she went back to her apartment and examined the medications in detail and found one b
lue pill that was an over-the-counter antihistamine and a little white pill that was an appetite suppressant, a diet pill. The pills were identical in size and color to Esther’s Coumadin and digoxin pills, but had different markings on them. Ella doubted, however, that Esther studied the pills before she popped them into her mouth.

  Now Ella needed Esther to leave her apartment again, and she wanted her to be gone for more than an hour. The trip Esther had taken to the Manhattan Mall had been at ten a.m. on a Tuesday, and Ella was hoping that Tuesday was the regular weekly field trip day for the old folks. Ella arrived at the assisted living facility at nine thirty a.m.—and sure enough, the little bus pulled up at ten. Esther and her short pal were the first people to board, Esther again wearing her Yankees baseball cap.

  The bus took off, and Ella, this time wearing a wig with short auburn curls, entered the lobby carrying a large bouquet of flowers to partially obscure her face—not that anyone was watching—and took the stairs up to Esther’s floor. She placed the flowers outside a randomly selected door, thinking some old person would get a nice surprise today. She entered Esther’s apartment using the key she’d had made, and walked straight to the medicine cabinet. She opened the Coumadin vial and started to dump the pills into the toilet—then stopped. No, dumping the pills wouldn’t be smart.

  She walked into Esther’s kitchen and got two plastic sandwich bags and returned to the bathroom. She poured the Coumadin pills into one of the plastic bags and the digoxin pills into the other. She filled up the prescription vials in the medicine cabinet with blue antihistamine pills and white diet pills, then did the same with Esther’s pill organizer, which was still sitting on the kitchen table. The next thing she did was put the half-empty bottles of antihistamine and diet pills in the linen closet where Esther kept the lotions and bandages and all the other medications she didn’t use very often.

  There had been approximately sixty Coumadin and digoxin pills in each of the prescription vials before Ella refilled them with antihistamine and diet pills, which meant that if Esther didn’t have some sort of cardiac event in sixty days, Ella would have to refill them. Ella knew that if Esther didn’t take her prescription meds it wouldn’t be good for her heart, but she wondered if the antihistamine and diet pills might actually speed her decline along. Oh, well, all she could do was hope for the best.

  Ella figured that if an eighty-six-year-old woman had a stroke and died there wouldn’t be an autopsy, and she doubted that anyone would examine her pills to see if they were the correct type. If, however, for some strange reason, someone did check and saw that the pills in Esther’s pillbox were diet and antihistamine pills rather than Coumadin and digoxin, then saw the appetite suppressant and antihistamine bottles in Esther’s linen closet, they’d conclude that a muddleheaded eighty-six year-old had just put the wrong pills in the pillbox.

  On the other hand, if someone saw that the prescription vials contained the wrong pills, that could be a problem. No way would Esther have filled up the prescription vials with the wrong pills; those vials would have been filled by a pharmacist. So Ella was going to have to find a way to deal with the unlikely but potential problem that someone might discover that Esther’s prescription vials contained the wrong meds.

  Ella returned to the assisted living facility the next day. She needed to find a way to keep tabs on Esther’s medical condition. In other words, she needed a spy. Ella had read enough spy novels to know there were basically three ways you recruited a spy: You paid him, you blackmailed him, or you appealed to his ideology. Ideology didn’t seem to apply to this situation, and she figured a combination of bribery and blackmail would be best.

  Ella spent two incredibly boring days watching the assisted living facility. Every day she arrived at six in the morning and parked in the lot behind the building in one of the visitors’ spots. The parking lot was good, because she could see the back of the building from there as well as the entrance on one side. She arrived early, figuring the staff—the nurse’s aides, the cooks, the maintenance guys—would arrive early.

  Ella was looking for a drunk. In the restaurants where she’d worked before meeting Bill, there was always a boozer, one of those guys who would periodically take little nips from a bottle he stashed in his car or out by the Dumpsters, then spend the day in cruise control: mellow but not falling-down, slur-his-words drunk. On the first day she found one candidate, and on the second day she found another.

  The first was a white man who was maybe sixty, and dressed as if he might be part of the kitchen crew. He had a white jacket and those checkered black-and-white pants cooks sometimes wear. He’d go out for a cigarette, then walk over to a beat-up Ford with Jersey plates parked at the far end of the parking lot. He’d look around to see if anyone was watching him, slip into the car, look around again, and pull a pint bottle out of the glove compartment. He’d take a couple of swigs from the bottle, return it to the glove compartment, and, as he walked back to the building, eat about a dozen Altoids.

  The second candidate wasn’t a boozer; he liked a little Mary Jane a couple times a day. He was a young black guy with dreadlocks that hung to his shoulders and dressed in blue coveralls like a maintenance man. He was well built and moved like an athlete, and Ella thought he was kind of cute.

  The facility had grounds with walkways that wound through a garden filled with ferns and trees and flowering plants, and there were a number of benches where the old folks could sit. One of the benches was behind a big rhododendron that was in full bloom and more secluded than the others, and the pot smoker would take a seat there and light up a joint. For whatever reason—stupidity or maybe because he was always half-stoned—he didn’t seem concerned that another staff member might catch him.

  So. The old drunk or the young doper? She decided to go with the doper.

  She watched the next day when he walked out of the building and headed toward his smoking bench. She gave him enough time to light up, then sneaked up on him. When she popped into view, he was startled, trying to figure out what to do with the joint.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Finish your smoke. In fact, be polite and let me have a hit.”

  He smiled then and offered her the joint, and she took a puff, holding the smoke in her lungs, the way she used to do when she was a kid. She hadn’t smoked pot since she’d left Calhoun Falls.

  “Nice,” she said as she handed the joint back to him. “What’s your name?”

  “Curtis,” he said. “You, uh, visiting someone here?”

  “Yeah, Curtis, I’m visiting you. You’re going to do me a favor. It’s not a big deal, it’s nothing illegal, and in return for this favor I’m going to give you five hundred bucks today and two hundred bucks a week, as long as you continue to do me the favor.”

  “What’s the favor?” he said, now suspicious. At the same time, Ella could tell Curtis was already spending the money in his head.

  “Before we get to the favor, let me tell you what’s going to happen if you don’t do what I want. I’m going to march into the building and tell whoever’s in charge that you come out here every day to smoke dope and I don’t want my dear old aunt around people like you.”

  Curtis shook his head, like a guy that life had shit on before. “So what’s the favor?” he asked.

  “It’s simple. There’s a resident here named Esther Behrman.”

  “Yeah, I know Esther. She’s a good tipper.”

  That surprised Ella. “Anyway, what I want you to do is call me every day and tell me how Esther’s doing. Just leave a message if I don’t answer.”

  “How she’s doing?”

  “Yep, that’s all. I’m concerned about her health. It’s a family thing, a legal thing—you don’t need to know exactly what—but once a day you call and tell me if everything’s okay with her. If she gets hauled off to the hospital, I need to know.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “But how would I know how she’s doing? I’
m not on the medical staff.”

  “Esther eats lunch and dinner in the dining room every day. So you find a way to hang around the dining room before meals and see if she shows up. If she doesn’t show up, you find out why. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m sure you can do this, Curtis. You’re a smart guy. You’re also a good-looking guy, and I’ll bet the nurses and the kitchen ladies like you.”

  “But I’m off on Sundays unless there’s some kind of emergency, like a toilet backs up or something,” Curtis said.

  “I figured that. So I won’t expect a call from you on Sunday.”

  “I don’t know,” Curtis said. “Are you sure this isn’t illegal?”

  “How could it be illegal, you giving me a call and saying you saw Esther eating her lunch?” She pulled a roll of bills out of a pocket—twenty-five twenty-dollar bills, which made for a very fat roll—and held out the money to Curtis. He hesitated, just for a second, then took the money. “Now give me your address so I can mail you the two hundred every week.” Curtis gave her his address in Queens, which Ella put into her phone. Then she handed Curtis a yellow Post-it note. “That’s my phone number. Don’t lose it.”

  Phone security was one thing that Ella paid a lot of attention to. Cell phones were marvelous devices, computers that fit in the palm of your hand. You could look things up on the Internet—like where to get a key made—get directions, take pictures, read a book. On the other hand they were incredibly dangerous, because people—meaning cops—could locate you using your phone and listen in when you talked. So one of the first things Ella did at the beginning of a case was buy half a dozen prepaid cell phones.

  She’d given one of the phones she’d purchased to David Slade and she used another phone, one marked with Slade’s name, to communicate with him. The phone number she had just given to Curtis was the number of a third prepaid phone, and she’d mark his name on it with a piece of tape later. She didn’t like the idea of talking to Curtis on a phone, even a phone that couldn’t be traced to her, but it was going to be necessary in order to make sure things went right with Esther.