The Best Laid Plans

by Judy Penz Sheluk

  “Sure,” Bill said, being congenial. Thornberry had made a bad impression on me, and both men knew it.

  Marta and her assistant moved two bodies to the end of the hallway, where the roof remained intact, and covered them with sheets. Their beds were too wet to bother with. Bill and I joined her in the room where the third resident had died.

  “Nothing suspicious about those two.” Marta gestured toward the bodies in the hall. “Flying debris hit one of them. Part of a window frame was still on top of her. I think the other one had heart failure. I’ll verify that. This gentleman, however,” she indicated the body in the bed, “he’s interesting. Major trauma to the back of the head, which is probably what killed him. We’ll know for sure once we get him on the table. Here’s why it’s suspicious. Someone knocked on the head like that usually falls forward and lands with their arms and legs every which way. But here he lies, flat on his back, limbs neatly arranged, as if he were laid out. Crazy stuff happens in a hurricane, but his room? Hardly disturbed.”

  The forensic investigator took photos and measurements, and he and Marta made notes. More techs would be arriving to dust for fingerprints, look for hairs and fibers, the usual meticulous aftermath.

  “Possible weapon there.” The investigator pointed to a walking cane with a decorative brass knob on the floor next to the bed.

  Marta examined the back of the dead man’s skull. “That knob might explain why his head looks like this.”

  A staff member delivered a residents’ roster, courtesy of Thornberry. Reading from the list, I said, “The victim’s name is Tim Wood.” Glass crunched underfoot, and I bent over a broken picture frame. “This him?” In the black and white photo, two men grinned into the camera, a ballpark in the background.

  Marta squinted at the photo. “That’s him.”

  Bill pointed to the other man. “That’s Branch Rickey.” His jaw dropped. “Is he that Tim Wood?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t they teach anything in school these days? For decades, Timber Wood was the country’s greatest sportswriter. Baseball was his specialty.”

  “Timber Wood and Branch Rickey?” I asked. Marta rolled her eyes.

  “Tim was really great at predictions.” Bill was on a roll. “He’d study a baseball team’s roster, monitor the off-season trades, watch a few early games, and predict who’d be league champion.”

  “That’s useful,” I said, thinking about my brothers’ fantasy sports obsession. I glanced through the other names on the list. “Oh my god. And across the hall is Gloria Major. I love her movies…if that’s her.”

  “Never heard of her,” Bill said.

  “1950s Hollywood epics? Men in togas? Racing chariots? Don’t tell me you never watched them.”

  “Nah.”

  “I’ll go talk to her. Who knows? Maybe she saw something.”

  The moment I stepped into the room I knew the woman in the bed was Gloria Major, former Hollywood star. Nightstand cluttered with cosmetics, filmy peignoir draped over a side chair. She was sitting up in bed, reading Variety. I introduced myself.

  “Is he dead?” Her voice was rough and cigarette-worn.

  “Who?”

  “Tim, of course.” She side-eyed me. “You’re too late.”

  “Mr. Wood is dead. How do you mean, ‘too late’?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Clearly, she’d pegged me for an idiot. She turned a page.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “And I’d adore giving you some answers, but I’m fresh out.” She turned another page.

  I leaned against the wall. “Hero of Sparta is my favorite film of yours. I love the scene where you bid farewell to Leonidas before he leaves to fight the Persians.”

  She glanced at me before returning to her magazine.

  “Afraid I lost track of you after that.”

  She put Variety down. “After the big epic wave died, I did twenty years of training videos, all with the theme of ‘if the little lady can do it, so can you.’”

  I laughed. “Really?”

  “Really. Boring as hell, but I still get the occasional royalty check. I learned to change a tire, use a hand truck, run a forklift, weld. Once I was supposed to move a shipping container from a dock to a ship, but the crane was too high. Freaked me out.”

  “Wow,” I said, meaning it.

  “Sit down.”

  I sat. “Last night must have been rough.”

  “Pandemonium. The staff yelling at those poor old folks. The storm howling. The residents howling even louder. They wanted us to move downstairs. I refused. If I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go right here with my few bits. Precious little that it is.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Years. My apartment’s in Building C, but I’ve been in here since I fell a couple days ago. Never planned on being here, but I’m going home soon. I’ll miss Tim. His apartment was right across the hall.”

  “Why was he here?”

  “Cardiac flare-up. They were keeping an eye on him. We were both due to be discharged.”

  “Why are you living here in Delray Beach?”

  “My son’s idea. He moved me out here to be close to him, then promptly took a job in Boston. I stayed put. Didn’t relish the cold. Weather. Hunh.”

  “You got a big dose of it last night.”

  “That’s not the worst.” She craned her neck to look past me, as if for a lurking eavesdropper. I recognized the move from Moon over Pompeii.

  “Please tell me.”

  “Who could sleep? So about four a.m., I decided to check on Tim, and I saw someone sneak out of his room.”

  “Wasn’t it dark?”

  “Too dark to see who it was, but there was a lot of lightning while the hurricane’s eye passed over, and I saw a silhouette in Tim’s doorway, then a dark shadow slip down the hall. That scared me, so I came back into my room and climbed into bed.”

  “Why did that scare you?”

  “Because Tim has a priceless collection of baseball memorabilia. He was sure someone would try to steal it. It’s supposed to go to Cooperstown, when the time comes.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I guess it’s come.”

  I gave her a minute. “Can you describe this intruder? Man or woman?”

  She shrugged. “He or she wore a hoodie under a rather voluminous long, dark raincoat.”

  “Interesting. Here’s my card.” I handed it over. “If you remember anything else?”

  While Marta waited for help in removing the bodies, Bill and I went in search of Thornberry. We found him in his office.

  “Well?” he said, pronounced “Weh-yull.”

  “The medical examiner thinks Mr. Wood’s death was foul play,” Bill said. “Preliminary, but likely.”

  “Foul play? With the roof gone, furniture blown to bits, debris flying a hundred and fifty miles an hour?”

  “Not in his room.” I sounded testy.

  Stop arguing with the man.

  “Are you in charge of this whole place?” Bill asked.

  “All of Sunshine Rest? No, sir. I run the nursing facility, or nursing home, folks used to call it. Don’t confuse it with ‘home.’ Home is the apartments. There’s a whole separate admin team for them.”

  Our conversation with Thornberry was interrupted numerous times. Staff had can’t-wait questions. Anxious family members phoned for updates. As our investigation proceeded, a few of those people proved interesting.

  One was Tony Radke. He wore a blue nursing uniform, dark rings of sweat looped under his arms. “Mr. Thornberry,” he interrupted, too exhausted to notice the conversation in progress. “It’s not cooling off down here a damn bit. We’ve got wet sheets on them and Janine got ice from somewhere, but it’s not enough.”

  “Tony, y’all need to handle it, even if you have to load them into the van and your private automobiles and drive them around with the AC cranked up. I can’t have any more bodies on my watch. You hear?”

  �
��Yessir.” He shuffled away.

  “He’s upset about Tim, like a lot of folks,” Thornberry said in a low voice. “He helped with Tim’s rehab. Spent a lot of damn time with him.”

  “Maybe having some good conversation was part of the rehab,” I said.

  “You a clinician?” Thornberry asked.

  “My sisters are nurses. They believe in care of the whole patient.”

  “Maybe so, but here, we’ve got performance standards to meet. Handholding’s not in the job description.”

  My irritation with Thornberry was on full simmer.

  The administrator worked his jaw, assessing me. “You have no i-dee how many government rules we put up with. Plus, most residents’ families live up north. They visit once or twice a year, if that, and let dad and mom dwindle and die alone. But they’ll haul ass down here faster than that”—he snapped his fingers—“if they think we neglected any little thing. They’d make my life hell. Them and their lawyers. No ma’am. We check all the boxes, and don’t have time to do more.”

  “Is it possible you had an intruder upstairs last night?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Gloria Major says—”

  “Crazy as a bedbug,” Thornberry snorted. “Some of our residents’…faculties are diminished, and they don’t think too clearly in the best of times. Which last night was not.”

  “What about Tim?” Bill asked. “He was a legendary sportswriter.”

  “And never stopped talking about it. His mind was ok, and his memory was too good, if you ask me. People like that, questioning everything, make my job harder.”

  That left Bill and me momentarily speechless. Thornberry saw our raised eyebrows and added, “He had a long list of complaints. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  Statements like that never stop me from worrying. In fact, they fire up the worry machine.

  A maintenance man banging on the open door brought good news at last. He wore a dark uniform, steel-tipped shoes, and a Yankees cap. “Roof men coming. I yell a lot, now we in morning first thing.”

  “It is an emergency,” Thornberry said, unimpressed.

  “Not to roof men it ain’t.” The maintenance man—“Stan” his embroidered name tag read—squinted at us, something more to say. “I not knowing those dead women, but Tim, I feel bad. Could shoot the breeze like business of nobody.”

  “Yes, well, leave us,” Thornberry said. “We’re in the middle of something.”

  Stan spun around like a person with useful work to do.

  “Shame I have to let him go,” Thornberry muttered.

  “Really?”

  “Likes the track too much. Pompano Park, Hialeah. Can’t have that here. Vulnerable residents and whatnot. Did a great job last night, though. Carried residents downstairs like they were his own kids.”

  “He has quite an accent for someone named ‘Stan,’” I said, interested by the gambling.

  “He’s Hungarian or Slovakian or something. Full name’s Konstantine Suslak.”

  “Funny about Tim Wood,” Bill said, back on our earlier topic. “They said if he was as interested in the weather as he was in sports, he could have put the National Weather Service out of business.”

  “Heard that one too,” Thornberry said. He might as well have said, “So what?”

  The man’s lack of respect had my Cuban blood bubbling. “So you have this famous sportswriter and right across the hall an estupenda actress like Gloria Major—”

  “Yeah, well, this may not be the life they planned when they were in their prime, but that’s not who they are now, is it?”

  Bill laid a placating hand on my arm. “We’ll have more questions, but that’s it for now,” he said.

  As we neared Thornberry’s door, a chubby man with a bright blond hairpiece nearly knocked us down. “Where’s Mother?” he panted, while I studied how his fake hair sat at a strange angle, as if blown off-kilter by the storm. “Her room’s—”

  “Mr. Vance, she’s in the commons room.” Thornberry’s tone became unctuous. “We had to move most of the second-floor residents. The roof.” He gestured vaguely heavenward.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. We gave them lunch and started our cleanup—”

  Vance eyed Bill’s badge, clipped to his belt. “I heard about Tim. He’s really dead?”

  “Afraid so,” Thornberry said.

  “That awful storm. Poor Tim. Mother liked him. I took her to his room for a chat every day.”

  None of us mentioned that Tim Wood’s departure from Sunshine Rest was murder.

  “Go find your mother, Mr. Vance, and I’ll join you momentarily.” When the man left, Thornberry muttered, “Chats with Tim? Give me a break. His mother hasn’t said an intelligible word since her stroke two years ago. Now this place is the son’s social life. Pitiful.”

  We followed Thornberry into the hall. Gloria was ambling along, munching popcorn. Thornberry brushed past her.

  “Be not so hasty in your departure that you neglect your duty to those who serve you,” she said with a little bow in his direction, which he ignored.

  I put my fist to my mouth to keep from laughing. It was a line from Hero of Sparta. Gloria caught my eye and gave a one-shoulder shrug. I said, “Tell Bill about Tim Wood’s collection of baseball stuff.”

  “There’s a fortune in that,” Bill said.

  “Especially since his collection goes way back,” Gloria said. “He’d whittled it down, but he said what’s left is priceless.”

  “Definitely worth stealing?” Bill asked.

  “Worth killing for too, maybe,” she said.

  “Tell Bill what you saw last night.”

  She repeated her sketchy story about Tim’s hooded visitor.

  “So was the collection with him, in his room upstairs?” Bill asked.

  “No way. It’s locked up in a safe back at the apartment.”

  Gloria started to say more but was interrupted. A member of the medical examiner’s team came to tell us they were ready to remove the bodies. We needed to leave too. The smell of the place was getting to me, and we wanted to check Tim’s apartment.

  By the time we got over there, it was nearly dark. Building C, where Tim had lived, was considerably less damaged than the nursing unit. Its emergency generator hummed, and the hallways and apartments were dimly lit. Residents had been asked not to overtax the system by running their air conditioners, and many doors were propped open for airflow, more out of hope than expectation.

  Bill unlocked Tim’s apartment door, his bulk blocking my view when he flipped on the lights. He stopped short. “Holy…”

  I peered around him and “Ay-yi-yi” burst out of me. The apartment had suffered extensive damage, and it wasn’t from wind and water. Plants were overturned, their pots shattered. Glass and mirrors smashed. Cabinet doors and drawers hung open, their contents spilling out. In the bedroom, the mattress was slit open, clothing pulled from hangers, shoeboxes emptied.

  “Serious aggression,” I said.

  “No kidding. Looking for the collection? D’you think they found it? Or maybe they couldn’t find it and went to the nursing unit to make Tim tell where it is.”

  “And he wouldn’t…?”

  “Or did,” Bill said.

  “Either way, they had to kill him.”

  “Okay, we get the crime scene folks back here.” Bill pulled out his phone.

  I tried to imagine the level of anger or wantonness that could produce this much chaos. “And nobody would have heard it over the noise of the storm.”

  “Most of them probably don’t hear so well anyway.”

  The next morning we met with the head of security for the entire Sunshine Rest complex. He printed off a list of the keycards that had accessed Tim’s apartment since he was admitted to the nursing facility.

  “Who do they belong to?” Bill asked, frowning at the ten-digit numbers.

  “The first two, housekeeping. Staff doing their regular
Wednesday cleaning, judging by the dates,” he said. “If the apartment had been ransacked before they got there, they obviously would have reported it. The night of the storm, someone used a master key registered to the nursing facility. That’ll be the one of interest. The one last night—”

  “Was us,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Who has access to the nursing facility’s keys?”

  “Between us, security over there is crap. They keep good track of the narcotics—the nurses are on top of that—and most of the time they’re pretty sure where the patients are, but as far as building security? It never occurs to them anyone would want to break in. Securing master keys is not a priority.”

  “So if someone knew where they’re kept, they could just take one?” Bill asked.

  “Night of the storm? Anything might have happened. Total chaos.”

  “What about cameras?”

  “The nursing unit cameras went black when the generator was knocked out, but there’s one on the front door of Building C. Let’s take a look.”

  The recording showed nothing but storm until nearly four a.m., when we saw someone matching Gloria’s description of a hooded figure. Unfortunately, with the blowing rain and with him—or her—hunched over in the wind, all we saw was a smeary blob. About thirty minutes later, the blob left, possibly empty-handed.

  The rest of the day we interviewed residents and staff, trying to find out more about the intruder and whether anyone was especially interested in Tim’s collection. What we learned was that lots of baseball fans retire to Delray Beach. I paid another visit to Gloria to finish our conversation from the day before.

  By the time Bill and I returned to the station, my head pounded in the thumping rhythm set by the roofers. Our colleague Javier Batista had been working the phones and the internet, checking staff backgrounds.

  “Present for you.” Javier handed me some papers. “Cooperstown faxed a rundown of the collection Tim promised them. Now that I know what to look for, I can see if anything turns up on eBay and contact baseball memorabilia websites.”