“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
