Neither Ames nor I said anything.
The man flicked on the lights.
“No one’ll see the light,” he said conversationally. “Even if they look at the door, there’s nothing out there but trees, grass, the creek and Rose Teffler’s gator. Well?”
“You know what we’re looking for?” I asked.
“Dorothy told me,” he said. “My name’s Ham Gentry, by the way.”
“You knew we’d come here?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “I’m a night wanderer like Dorothy and a few others, Sid Catorian, Lilly Carnovski. You can hear Sid’s wheelchair whining fifty feet away. I just happened to see you when I came out of the toilet at the end of the hall.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
He pointed past me to the wall. There was a corkboard a few feet above where I sat. It was covered with neatly posted memos and announcements skewered with colorful tacks. I had looked at the board when I came in. There had been nothing about patient discharges.
“Under the green brochure about Medicare and Medicaid,” he said.
I got up, lifted the brochure and saw a report marked, Discharges, Admissions. The date at the top was yesterday.
“I saw him put one of those up there a few months ago,” said Gentry. There were others beneath it dating back a week.
“Why’s he hide it?” Ames asked.
I put the report on the desk and began to copy the information I needed onto the back of an envelope I took out of the trash can under the desk.
“I think he juggles the numbers,” said Gentry. “My guess is he uses it to skim moola, dinero, a few bucks here and there. Not sure how, but I’m working on it and when I find out, there will be perks aplenty for Hamilton Gentry and his friends.”
“Got it,” I said, writing down the last of four names and the addresses.
I put the report and the brochure back on the corkboard as close to where they had been as I could remember. Ames and I headed toward the door but Gentry raised his hand to stop us.
“Just go out the window here,” he said. “I’ll lock it behind you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Dorothy says someone was murdered here, then someone was murdered here,” he said. “Nurses here are damned nice, considering what they have to put up with, but Amos Trent is… what the hell, get going.”
Ames opened the window, lifted his right leg over the sill, and then his left followed and he dropped into the darkness. I followed him. When my feet touched the ground, the window lock clicked. A few seconds later, the light went out.
I followed Ames along the brick wall and made it past Rose Teffler’s window without encountering Jerry Lee.
I dropped Ames at the Texas and headed to my office. There were no cars in the DQ lot. When I opened my office door, I half expected the phone to be ringing, but it wasn’t. I didn’t look at the information I had copied. I just placed it on my desk in the dark and headed for the back room, where I stripped down to my boxers and lay down on the cot, two pillows under my head. I wasn’t sleepy. I watched the lights between the slats of my blinds from occasional cars passing on Washington.
It was, I guessed, a little after three-thirty.
Sleep came, but not quickly.
8
Someone was knocking at my door. I opened my eyes. The sun was casting bands of dusty light through the slats of my blinds. More knocking. Not hard. Not insistent, but not giving up either. I reached for my watch, almost got it before it fell off the chair next to my bed. Then I almost fell out of the bed reaching for the watch.
It was a few minutes after eight.
I got up and stood for a few seconds, swaying slightly, blinking, wanting the knocking to stop so I could fold myself back onto my cot.
The knocking didn’t stop. In need of a shave, clad in my blue boxer underwear with the little white circles and an extra-large gray Grinnell College T-shirt that I picked up at the Women’s Exchange for fifty cents, I was as ready as I wanted to be for visitors.
When I opened the door, the sun greeted me just over the acupuncture center across Washington Street. A cool breeze and the sight of a man wearing a Tampa Bay Bucs sweatshirt dappled with stains from coffee and liquids unknown also greeted me.
“Digger,” I said.
“Little Italian,” he said, with a smile showing white, inexpensive but serviceable false teeth.
Digger, until a few months ago, had been homeless. Well, not homeless if you were willing to consider the rest room five doors down a home. Digger, bush of pepper gray hair and nose tilted slightly to the right, was a thinker. Once, when I was shaving in the rest room, he had said, “Why do women complain when men leave the toilet seat up? Why shouldn’t men complain when women leave the toilet seat down?”
We stood looking at each other for a few seconds, Digger with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly, me with my hands at my sides, waiting.
“Job’s gone,” he said, looking over his left shoulder.
I knew what he was looking at, the second-floor dance studio across the street where he had been working as an instructor. Digger had dug deeply into his memory of different times to call up what he called “the Spirit of Terpsichore.” The studio had closed a few days ago. No notice. Just gone, cleaned out, empty.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
“I bear no gifts,” he said.
“I expect none,” I said, stepping back.
He came in and I closed the door.
“Lewis,” he said, facing me. “I am optimistic.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” I said.
“Wrong word,” he said. “You are not happy. I have never seen you happy. I have seen you relieved.”
“I’m relieved to hear that you are optimistic,” I said.
Digger looked at the chair in front of my desk. I motioned for him to sit. He did. I went into the back room, changed into my yellow boxers with the little gray sharks, put on my jeans and a clean short-sleeved white button- down shirt, white socks and white sneakers. Then I went back into the office, Cubs hat in hand, where Digger was examining the sheet of names and addresses from the Seaside I had scribbled.
He looked up as I sat behind the desk and said, “I’m optimistic. My room rent is paid for two weeks. I have prospects, ideas.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“I thought you should be the first one I told because you were the one who lifted me from the chill confines of the WC and the depths of ignominy to the dignity of steady work and eating regular.”
Digger was smiling. With people who look like Digger, the conclusion to jump to was that he had spent the night cuddling with a bottle of inexpensive but well-advertised wine or some drug not of choice but of last resort. Neither was true. Digger neither drank nor used drugs. His troubles were deeper than that, rooted, as he put it, in faulty genes, ill-fated life choices, a series of concussions and a god or gods who enjoyed experimenting on him. I knew those gods.
“Ideas,” he said, looking down at my list and then back up at me. “I’ve thought of starting a church, the First Presbyterian Church of the Tupperware. Sell religion and plastic containers that you put things in and pop the tops. On top of each lid will be an inscription: jesus saves; so should you.”
I nodded. Digger leaned forward.
