Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Know what it looks like to me?” St. Arthur said. “Our Professor Welles found a legal way to commit suicide and leave his daughter a pile of money.”

  It looked that way to me too. I suggested that he might want to talk to a Detective Michael Ransom in Sarasota, that the death of Kyle McClory was his case. St. James said he would.

  Ames shook his head.

  Sally and her friend had taken charge of Jane Welles. I called Sally on her cell phone when St. Arthur let us go.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “We’re keeping her busy,” said Sally. “We reached Welles’s cousin in Reno. She’s coming. Should be here tomorrow to handle the funeral arrangements. We’ll start the paperwork to get Jane placed in her custody. Lew, you want to come by the apartment tonight?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Basil’s roasted chicken,” she said.

  “I’ll let you know. You might want to let Andrew Goines know what happened.”

  “I’ll call his mother,” Sally said.

  I drove Ames back to the Texas. We didn’t talk. We had nothing to say. I knew he would take his scooter the next day to retrieve his shotgun from wherever he had stowed it behind Welles’s house.

  “Beer?” he asked, getting out of the car.

  “No,” I said. “Not now. I might come back later.”

  He looked at me for several beats and shook his head no to let me know that I wouldn’t be coming back, at least not that night.

  I picked up two burgers and a large banana Blizzard at the DQ and went to my office, closing the door behind me, not turning on the lights. There was still light filtering through the blinds. I flicked on the air conditioner and sat at my desk. I had finished one burger when the phone rang. I considered not answering it. I considered it for sixteen rings.

  It couldn’t be Welles. He was dead. I realized that I would miss his calls, at least for a while. I wasn’t sure why.

  “Fonesca,” I said, picking up the phone.

  “This is Darrell’s mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to thank you,” she said. “Darrell’s been talking about what-all you did. I know he’s making up more than half of it but whatever you did, he’s looking forward to doing more of it. And he said something about a Dixie and computers. Wants me to go with him to see her. She really mean it?”

  “She means it,” I said.

  “And you’re gonna keep seeing Darrell?”

  “I like Darrell,” I said.

  “Most don’t,” she said. “Next Saturday?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” I said.

  “Thank you again,” she said. “Wait. He wants to talk to you.”

  I took another bite of burger and Darrell came on. “You catch that guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And? What happened?”

  “We’ll talk about it next Saturday,” I said.

  “Old Ames, he shot him, right?”

  “No. Next Saturday,” I said. “Stay out of trouble.”

  I hung up before he could say more and the word came to me, the word I needed, the word that had been playing with me for almost two days. I was tired. I was more than tired. If I went to bed, dreams might come and I might lose the word.

  “There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name,” I said rather than sang. “B-I-N-G-O.”

  I was pretty sure I knew who had died at the Seaside Assisted Living Facility. I was also pretty sure who the woman was who was trying to kill me.

  I called Dixie’s phone number. She was home. I told her what I needed. She said she had a date with a SaraSox first baseman, but that she had about forty-five minutes and could probably find what I needed through the Internet in less than half an hour.

  There were still a few things about it I needed to know. They would have to wait till tomorrow. I finished eating and sat in the near dark waiting for Dixie’s call. It took her less than half an hour.

  I wrote the information she gave me in my notebook, thanked her and said I’d drop an envelope with a cash payment in the mail the next day.

  I made another call, this one to the Seaside Assisted Living Facility, and asked one question.

  When I got my answer, I hung up and unplugged the phone.

  Ann Horowitz had said I kept the phone plugged in because even though I denied it, I wanted some connection with the outside world, the world of the living.

  This night she was wrong.

  18

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I parked in the Seaside lot next to a small white van with the words MICRON LABS written on its side in red letters. I was halfway toward the nursing station when Amos Trent, the hefty director of Seaside into whose office Ames and I had broken, stepped out of a doorway and blocked my path.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mr. Fonesca,” he said.

  “I’ve come to see Dorothy,” I lied.

  “I’m afraid she’s resting now,” he said. “We can’t disturb her.”

  “I’ll wait till she wakes up.”

  I tried to walk around him but he took a sidestep and was in front of me again.

  “I think it would be better if you don’t come here again. In fact, if you do return, I’ll have our lawyer seek a restraining order.”

  His voice was low. His breath was minty.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because residents and their families are now asking questions about the murder Dorothy dreamed up,” he said. “People don’t like to send their family members to an assisted living facility where someone may have been murdered.”

  “And if you found out that someone had been murdered?”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  “It did,” I said.

  He inched closer to me.

  “If our residents and their families believed that,” he said, “they would start an exodus from which it would be very difficult to recover. We’re running a good facility here, but our profit margin is very low. So, if you are trying to blackmail us, not only is there no money to pay you, but I would be forced to report it to the police.”

  “Emmie is on duty,” I said.

  He looked puzzled.

  “Emmie Jefferson?”

  “You’ve got more than one Emmie?”

  “What are you doing, Fonesca?”

  A man in janitor blue denim jogged past us, they keys attached to his belt jangling.

  “Whirlpool’s down again,” the man in blue said to Trent as he hurried by.

  “See?” Trent said, turning back to me. “You know what it costs for parts for a whirlpool?”

  “No,” I said. “Emmie Jefferson.”

  “You want to talk to Miss Jefferson?”

  “Yes. To her or a policeman named Viviase if I have to,” I said.

  “She’s a night nurse,” Trent said.

  “But she’s on this morning. I called.”

  The corridor was cool, but Trent was perspiring, not much but enough to dapple his upper lip.

  “Let’s say we put you on a retainer for a while,” said Trent. “Two hundred a month for a year, to provide security. That’s all we can afford. Might that be incentive to give up your delusion that someone was murdered here?”

  “It’s not a delusion,” I said. “I talk to Emmie Jefferson or I talk to the police.”

  “You go public with this madness and I’ll sue you,” he said, his voice rippling with anger, his face pink.

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “I don’t own anything and you’d have to pay your lawyer.”

  He leaned very close now and whispered, “And what if I just beat the fucking shit out of you?”

  “It’s an option,” I said. “But it wouldn’t stop me.”

  Defeated, he took a step back and said, “Okay, five minutes with Emmie and then you are out of here. Let’s go.”

  He turned his back on me and headed for the nursing station.

  “Alone,” I said.

  He
stopped and looked over his shoulder at me.

  “I could just wait till she gets off of work and talk to her outside,” I said.

  “Five minutes,” Trent said, facing me again, holding up the fingers of his right hand. “You talk to her, you leave and I never see you here again.”

  I knew that wasn’t to be. He knew it too, but if it helped him save face in the hallway, it didn’t cost me to keep my mouth closed.

  “Thanks,” I said and walked past him to the nursing station. Emmie Jefferson was standing behind it talking to an old woman whose eyes barely reached the top of the counter. The old woman was wearing a black sweater with baggy sleeves.

  “Mrs. Engleman,” the nurse was saying, “there isn’t any mail for you. I’m sorry.”

  “He told me he would write every day,” the little woman said, reaching up to slap her palm on the counter.

  “If a letter comes for you, I’ll bring it to your room personally.”

  “You won’t look inside and read it?” the little woman asked with suspicion.

  “Cross my heart,” Emmie Jefferson said, crossing her heart.

  “A Bible promise would be better,” the woman said.

  “Swear on a Bible,” the nurse said, holding back a sigh.

  “Better if we had a real Bible you could put your hand right down on,” Mrs. Engleman said.

  “There’s one in the library if you want to go get it.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” the old woman said, stepping back. “Maybe I’ll just do that. I won’t tolerate censorship.”

  “I understand,” said Emmie Jefferson as Mrs. Engleman shuffled slowly away.

  She hadn’t seen me yet, but now she looked up, let out a massive sigh and put her right hand to her forehead.

  “Mrs. Cgnozic is sleeping,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “No, but that’s what I’ve been told to say if you or that old cowboy show up. Trent sees you here and he’ll throw a fit and probably call the cops.”

  “I just talked to Trent. He said he had no objection to my talking to you,” I said. “Call his office.”

  She folded her arms and looked at me, waiting for me to ask whatever it was I was going to ask.

  “The night Dorothy told you she saw someone murdered, your first night on the job, Vivian Pastor checked out.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Her daughter-in-law checked her out. I asked her to wait till the morning. I don’t know the paperwork, but she insisted, said her mother-in-law wanted out right then. I called Marie, the head nurse, woke her up. She said we’ve got no legal right to keep anyone here who doesn’t want to be here. Marie told me where the forms were.”

  “You saw Vivian Pastor leave with her daughter-in-law?”

  “Technically? No,” she said. “I was down the hall in Mrs. Denton’s room. She needed help getting to the bathroom. I saw Mrs. Pastor, the daughter-in-law, waiting for me at the desk. Told me she was checking her mother-in-law out for good.”

  “So you never saw Vivian Pastor?”

  “Didn’t say that,” said Emmie Jefferson. “Daughter-in-law asked me to help her carry some of the woman’s things out to the car. I thought she was plenty big enough to carry it out herself, but she pushed hard and offered me five dollars. So I helped, carried a lamp and a suitcase. Old woman was in the car. Just sitting there smiling. Skinny bag of bones, hands shaking.”

  “You’d never seen Vivian Pastor before?”

  “That was my first time on the job. No, I hadn’t seen her before. I told you. She wasn’t dead. She was alive. That enough?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “What is going on?” she asked and then held up both hands and added, “Don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know.”

  I got back to my car without running into Trent and considered picking up Ames, but that would take time and I just wanted this over with.

  Nothing had changed about the house on Orchid, but it felt different. There was no car in the driveway and the garage doors were down. When I knocked at the door, a plain woman of about forty wearing a wary smile, which showed clean but uneven teeth, answered it.

  “Mrs. Pastor home?”

  “Vivian is,” she said with a distinct inland southern Florida accent.

  “No, Alberta,” I said.

  “At work,” said the woman.

  “You take care of Vivian?”

  “Yes, I do, but we don’t call her Vivian. Her nickname is Gigi. Mrs. Pastor, Alberta, says she was given the name by one of her grandchildren and it stuck. That’s what she wants to be called.”

  I looked over her shoulder into the dark living room. It was filled with cardboard boxes.

  “How long have you been taking care of her?”

  “Two, no, three days,” she said. “Had a sheet of paper up at the Mennonite post office over in Pinecraft saying I was available for in-home care. Mrs. Pastor called and here I am. It’s only for a day or two more. They’re moving, you know.”

  “I’m a friend of the family,” I said. “I’ve got some papers I need signed. You know where Mrs. Pastor works?”

  “Sure,” the woman said brightly. “Over on Clark right near I-75. You know where the new building just went up is? Medical offices and such-like?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She has an office in there.”

  “Trapezoid,” came the voice of the old woman inside the house.

  The woman at the door said, “She’s a hoot. Poor old thing. Comes up with the darndest things. Doesn’t make much sense, though. Easy to take care of. Just feed her, remind her to use the bathroom and let her look at the TV or her ads.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sure you don’t want to just pop in and say hi to Gigi? She likes company.”

  “Next time,” I said.

  I stopped to make a phone call and then took the Trail to Clark and across to the new two-story medical /office building. The last time I had seen it, the building had been swarming with workmen and the land around it was a tire-rutted mess of dirt and mud. Now it looked finished, professional and surrounded by something that looked a little like grass. Two palm trees propped up by wires were doing sentry duty on the lawn.

  I pulled into the lot next to the building. Eleven or twelve cars were parked there. One had a caved-in right front fender and a broken headlight.

  The lobby smelled Lysol fresh with a hint of recent pain in the background. There was a bank of names, nine of them, black on white plastic tabs mounted on the wall next to the elevator.

  Alberta Pastor, massage therapist, was in Suite 203. There are no offices in Sarasota. Everything, even a cramped single room with a desk and space for another chair, was a suite. Calling your business a suite was worth a 10 percent markup on your bill.

  There was a carpeted waiting room beyond the door to Suite 203. It was big enough for two wooden chairs, a small table with a wooden dish filled with Tootsie Rolls and wrapped root beer barrels. A neat pile of old People magazines sat next to the dish. An orchestra played a languid Muzak version of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

  I could hear voices through the closed door of the room beyond the one I was in. I sat, selected a root beer barrel, unwrapped it and placed it in my mouth. I sat for twenty minutes learning about the latest clothes, sex partners, awards, problems and triumphs of people named Justin, Renée, Antoine, Mel, and Russell.

  The outer door opened. A young blonde woman with a pink, healthy face, large breasts, long legs came in, looked at me and said, “You waiting for someone?”

  “Mrs. Pastor,” I said.

  She looked at her wristwatch. It had a big round face with large numbers. She was wearing washed jeans and a white blouse.

  “I think I’ve got the eleven o’clock,” she said.

  “Mrs. Pastor may be running a little late,” I said.

  “Emergency?” the young woman asked, sitting across from me.

  “You coul
d say that,” I said. “Tootsie Roll?”

  She nodded yes and I handed her one.

  “Your back?” she asked.

  “Haven’t been gone,” I said.

  She laughed. She had a nice deep laugh.

  “No,” she said, “are you having trouble with your back?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I am,” she said, popping the small Tootsie Roll into her mouth. “Ski accident. Tahoe. Last week. Alberta’s a wizard with her hands.”

  “Sorceress,” I said. “Wizards are men.”

  “You are funny,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to be.”

  The inner door opened. A man in his sixties on crutches came out, looked at us. He gave the girl a pained smile. He didn’t seem to notice me.

  Alberta Pastor, wearing a pair of white trousers and a white short-sleeved T-shirt, stood in the doorway and watched the man leave. Then she looked at the blonde woman and said, “I’m sorry, Christina. I’ve got to take care of Mr. Fonesca. Could you possibly come tomorrow? Nine? I’ll give you a double session and only charge for one.”

  Christina checked her watch again and said, “I guess I can go to the bank and pick up some things I need on St. Armand’s. Nine tomorrow?”

  “Nine,” said Alberta Pastor.

  Christina gave me a thumbs-up and left. Alberta Pastor sat in the chair the young woman had been in and looked at me for the first time.

  “I tried to find the Florida Assisted Living and Nursing Home Board of Review when you left my house,” she said. “There is no such organization.”

  “I made it up,” I said. “Forgot it when I was out your door. You looked my name up in the phone book.”

  “Not many Lewis Fonescas in the Sarasota/Bradenton phone book,” she said.

  “Only two in Chicago,” I said. “The other one is my uncle.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Confess?”

  She shook her head no.

  “You tried to kill me,” I said. “You’re not much of a shot but you did manage to finish off a Dairy Queen Blizzard.”

  She looked at me calmly and said, “I thought you were someone from Seaside, someone planning to blackmail me. You’re not. What are you, Fonesca?”

  “I find people,” I said.

  “And who are you looking for?”