“I don’t know. Are you?” Alberta asked.
“I don’t know,” answered the old woman. “See, what did I tell you?”
“About what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the old woman said with a laugh.
“Enough?” Alberta asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
The old woman went back to looking at the ads for toothpaste, Diet 7-Up and cans of Planters cashew halves.
Alberta Pastor led me back to the front door. “Anything else I can tell you?” she asked.
“Nothing I can think of,” I said. “Thanks.”
I was back in my car. Three checked off. All among the living. Only Gertrude Everhart remained. Her new address was the Pine-Norton Nursing Home on Tallavast just north of the Sarasota/Bradenton airport.
The Pine-Norton was sprawling, pink stucco, new and no trouble finding. I went through the automatic doors at the entrance and stepped out of the way for a young black nurse’s aide in a blue uniform pushing a shriveled old woman in a wheelchair. The woman’s head was leaning to the left as if her neck was no longer strong enough to support it. The door just to
my right had the word OFFICE in black letters on a white plaque next to it. The door was open.
A woman, probably in her thirties, but she could have been younger, was staring at the computer screen in front of her, her nose a few inches from it. She was frowning.
I knocked and she looked up with a harried smile.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
She was pretty, nervous, with ash blonde hair that wouldn’t stay in place.
“Gertrude Everhart,” I said. “I’d like to see her.”
“You are … ?”
“A concerned friend of the family,” I said.
The woman puckered her lips as if she had bitten into a lemon.
“Mrs. Everhart was admitted yesterday,” she said.
“Her choice?” I asked.
“Her … yes, she came voluntarily.”
She turned her chair around, faced a file cabinet, opened the third drawer from the bottom and pulled out a file. Then she turned back to me.
“Friend of the family?”
“Guardian angel,” I said.
“You know her son then.”
“Yes,” I said. “How is Gertrude?”
She tapped the file on her desk, made a decision, opened the file and scanned it quickly.
“Mrs. Everhart is suffering … no, I’m not supposed to use that word. I’ve only been here two weeks and, well, anyway, Mrs. Everhart, Gertrude, has a degenerative condition in her lower limbs. She is, as you probably know, confined to a wheelchair.”
I nodded.
“She is also, let me see … early stages of glaucoma, high blood pressure, recurrent bladder infections, emphysema … You want the whole list?”
She looked up.
“No,” I said. “Can I see her?”
“She just went out with Viola,” the young woman said, looking back at the computer screen.
“Old lady in the wheelchair?”
“Uh-huh. You know anything about computers?”
“They exist,” I said.
“About how they work?”
“In mysterious ways,” I said.
She looked up and said, “Thanks a lot.”
I left. Down the paved driveway lined with parked cars, Viola the nurse’s aide was slowly pushing Gertrude Everhart, which meant I had started with four and then there was none. Everyone in the Seaside on the night Dorothy Cgnozic said she saw a murder was accounted for.
No, I thought as I got back in the car, there was still the staff, but Dorothy had said she saw the nurse on overnight duty. I drove past Viola and Gertrude, turned on Tallavast and headed for 301 past the airport.
The problem was, I believed Dorothy Cgnozic. I just didn’t have a corpse.
The red-haired woman behind the desk at Seaside Assisted Living was filling in a report, pausing every few seconds to scratch her head with the back of the pen she was using. I hadn’t seen her before. She kept working without looking up and said, “Yes.”
“I’d like to see Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.
“Relative?”
“Friend.”
“The residents are having lunch.”
“When will they be done?”
She looked at her watch.
“Ten minutes. You know her room?”
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Maybe you should just wait here till she’s finished.”
“Sure.”
There were some wicker chairs in a little alcove next to the nursing station. A television set on a metal platform about six feet high was tuned to the game channel. I watched the young Alex Trebek get people to answer questions backward for a few minutes and listened to the redheaded woman mutter to herself.
I got up and moved back to the counter.
“Any of the staff quit or out sick?” I asked.
She scratched a nail just over her left eyebrow and said, “You looking for a job?”
“Definitely.”
“You want to fill out a form?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “There are no vacancies, no openings, nothing new coming up, nobody out sick. People like working here. The hours are terrible. You’re surrounded by the befuddled and dying. The central office in Orlando is always changing the rules. But the pay is good, very good. Anything else?”
“No.”
“They may be hiring at Beneva Park Club,” she said. “What can you do?”
“Try to learn from my mistakes,” I said.
She leaned back, stretched high, yawned and said, “A little levity is always welcome. Now if you’ll just …”
A trio of elderly women were coming toward me down the corridor to my left. One of them was talking nonstop, loud. The other two were listening, or not.
One of the nontalking women was Dorothy Cgnozic, pushing her walker.
“The war, the war, the war,” the talking woman said, waving her arms. “The man talked about nothing but the war till the day he died. Same stories. Jeep driver for General George S. Patton. Chased through some forest by seven or eight Nazis with those funny helmets. What his buddy John Something said when mortar shells were falling on them. What Eli the Jew did with his bayonet knife to a German he jumped on in a fox pit.”
“Foxhole,” Dorothy corrected.
The talking woman didn’t care or didn’t hear.
“Drove me crazy, those stories. Told them to the kid who delivered the groceries, the mailman, the insurance man, the guy at the Texaco station who couldn’t even understand English.”
“Dorothy,” I said as they moved behind me.
She looked over and stopped.
“Mr. Fonesca.”
The red-haired woman behind the desk with the pen tapping on the form in front of her nodded to show that I was vindicated and not a mad intruder.
“He got his wars confused at the end,” the talking woman said as she and the other woman left Dorothy behind to talk to me. “Korea, Vietnam. Came up with the notion that he had been part of the invasion of Japan.”
I walked with Dorothy down the corridor behind the talking woman. When we were out of earshot of the redhead, Dorothy said, “Did you find out who I saw get murdered?”
“No,” I said. “The staff is all accounted for. The residents are all accounted for. The four people who left are all accounted for. No deaths.”
“It’s no go,” she said. “My husband used to say that. It’s no go the picture show. It’s no go the Roxy. You can watch with wonder when Merman sings, but don’t go getting too foxy.”
I didn’t get it.
“Variations on Louis McNiece,” she said.
“Ah.”
“He was a poet, like my husband. I saw what I saw. Someone was murdered. Find out who and prove I’m not halfway to dementia. Find out who and tell the police. Find out who and what and why and I’ll tell every nurse, social worker, physical therapist, visiting children pretending they’re doctors, administrators. You’re sure none of the people who were released is dead?”
I pulled the list out of my pocket as we walked and read, “Ellen Gallagher, living with her grandchildren.”
“Not a socializer.”
“Mark Anthony Katz. Lives on his own.”
“Proud, crotchety.”
“Vivian Pastor. With her daughter-in-law.”
“Big. Lives for bingo. Checks off the days. Good for four cards a night.”
“Gertrude Everhart is in a nursing home,” I concluded.
“Now there’s a poor woman whose mind is definitely going,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes I think that’s a blessing.”
She stopped walking and put her thin hand on my arm.
“Do not give up,” she said. “You need more money?”
“No,” I said. “I need more ideas.”
“Yes, you do,” came a voice behind us.
I turned to look at Ham Gentry, the pudgy pink man with the walker who had caught me and Ames in
Amos Trent’s office. He shuffled his walker next to Dorothy’s. I had the sudden fantasy that they were about to race down the hallway.
“You have any?” I asked.
“Ideas? One. Ask more questions,” he said.
“I’ll do that.”
“I will too,” he said. He looked at Dorothy. “We both will. I believe in this woman.”
He was breathing heavily, definitely not ready for a walker race. He patted his chest and said, “Fish cakes. Taste all right, but don’t sit well. The sands of time are falling. Get moving. A man who believes in the Chicago Cubs,” he said, pointing to my cap, “cannot give up this easily.”
I nodded, said I’d be back in touch with Dorothy and watched the two of them move slowly down the carpeted corridor.
It took me less than ten minutes to get to Richard Tycinker’s office. The woman at the reception desk looked up at me, checked her watch and said, “They’re waiting for you in his office.”
I moved past her down the gray-carpeted corridor and knocked at Tycinker’s door. He told me to come in. I did and closed the door behind me. He was sitting behind his desk. Nancy Root, Richard McClory and Yolanda Root were there too, as far apart as they could be. McClory sat in one of the chairs across from Tycinker. Nancy Root sat on the black leather sofa. Yolanda Root sat in a matching black leather armchair against the wall.
“Nancy says you’re close to finding the man,” said Tycinker.
“I think so,” I said.
“Nancy, Dr. McClory and Yolanda would like to talk to you. I suggest you go into the conference room.”
I nodded. Tycinker got up from behind his desk, moved to the door I had just come through, opened it and waited for us to follow. We did. Nancy was first, then Yolanda, then McClory. I was next, with Tycinker last.
He motioned to his right. I knew where the conference room was.
“You’ll have complete privacy,” he said. “Take as long as you need. There’s coffee brewing and soft drinks and bottled water in the refrigerator.”
He opened the conference room door, waited till we were inside and then left, closing the door behind him.
I wasn’t sure who was in charge or what this was about. The table was freshly polished. The large windows looked out at a line of five evenly spaced palm trees. Yolanda went to the refrigerator, got a Pepsi and sat at the far end of the table popping the can. Nancy Root, looking strained, sat on one side of the table facing the window. McClory, needing a shave and looking as if he was hungover, sat across from his ex-wife with his back to the window. I sat at the end of the table across from Yolanda.
I took off my cap and placed it on the table, waiting for someone to tell me what we were doing here.
“Go ahead,” Nancy said, looking at her ex-husband.
“Look,” he said, not to me but to her.
“We agreed,” Nancy said.
Yolanda took a gulp of Pepsi and gave her former stepfather a look of open contempt and muttered, “Wimp.” McClory pretended not to hear.
“Kyle was my only child,” he said.
“He knows that,” said Yolanda. “And he was my only brother and Nancy’s only son. Jeez.”
Nancy suddenly stood up.
“You’re not going to do it, are you?” she asked, glaring at McClory.
“I’ll do it,” he said without enthusiasm.
Yolanda shook her head and pursed her lips. “Richard,” Nancy said firmly. “You and Yola wait outside.”
“Great,” said Yolanda sarcastically. “We’ve got so much to catch up on.”
“Look, Nancy …” McClory said.
She looked but said nothing.
McClory got up slowly, resigned, looked at me, brushed his hair back with his hand and came around the table. Yolanda across from me rocked and bit her lower lip, said, “Shit,” and got up. McClory and Yolanda left the room, closing the door behind them.