“You could 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?”
“Vivian Pastor,” I said.
“My mother-in-law is at home.”
“Mind if I take another root beer barrel?”
“Help yourself,” she said.
I did.
“I know the woman in your house isn’t your mother-in-law,” I said. “Dorothy, one of the Seaside residents, said Vivian was a big woman who played four bingo cards at a time. The woman in your house is nearly a munchkin and I don’t think she can tell a bingo card from a Dove bar.”
“And?”
“If I bring someone from Seaside to see her,” I said,
“they’ll know she isn’t Vivian Pastor. That’s what you were afraid of, why you wanted to kill me, why you’re packing to leave town. Who is the old woman in your house?”
“My mother,” she said. “Your turn.”
“You killed your mother-in-law and now you’re trying to convince the world that she’s not dead. Emmie Jefferson was new at Seaside. First night. She didn’t know what Vivian Pastor looked like, saw an old lady in the car with you and assumed with a little help from you that it was your mother-in-law. You were lucky a new nurse was on duty.”
She was shaking her head no now.
“Not luck,” she said. “Turnover at nursing homes and assisted living facilities is constant. I work in the physical therapy room at Seaside once a week. Let’s say I waited till I found out a new nurse was going to be on duty.”
“You planned it?”
She leaned forward and spoke softly. “Maybe.”
She wanted to talk, wanted to be admired for what she had almost gotten away with.
“But you left your mother-in-law’s door open enough for Dorothy, who was taking a late-night walk, to see you killing her. You saw Dorothy.”
Alberta held up her hands. The fingers were long, strong.
“You pushed Vivian’s body out the window and climbed out after her. Then you closed the window and moved the body where it wouldn’t be seen from the window if Emmie Jefferson came in the room and went to the window.”
No answer.
“Dorothy went to the nursing station to report the murder,” I said. “You waited till the doors were locked to the outside and you were sure no body had been discovered. Then you pressed the night button. Emmie Jefferson let you in. You pretended you were just coming in and you told Emmie Jefferson-”
“That I’d had Vivian out for the day, that she, my mother-in-law, wanted to leave Seaside immediately. She didn’t know the procedure. I told her. Then, I asked her to help me carry Vivian’s things out to my car.”
“You wanted her to see an old woman in your car.”
Alberta was silent.
“Then when Emmie Jefferson went back in, you moved the car right near the end of the building, picked up the body and put it in your trunk without anyone seeing you. Right?”
“Let’s for the moment say it’s possible.”
I reached into my pocket and came up with the folded slipper I had found behind Seaside.
“Now all we have to do is find Cinderella,” I said.
“Why would I want to kill Vivian?”
“I know why,” I said.
“You can’t,” she said.
“The Internet is a wondrous thing, especially if you know a hacker,” I said. “You are coholder with your mother-in-law of a joint checking account. Her social security checks are directly deposited, sixteen hundred dollars every month. She has an annuity your husband set up for her, twenty-three hundred dollars a month. That gets directly deposited too. Stocks, as of yesterday, worth about 313,000 dollars. You asked a month ago to sell it all and put it into an IRA rollover with quarterly deposits of fifty thousand dollars going into that checking account.”
“And don’t forget,” she said, “with her out of Seaside, I don’t have to pay them. There are a lot of perks, Mr. Fonesca, as long as the world thinks Vivian is still alive.”
“Just takes the murder of an old woman to get them,” I said.
“I haven’t got time for any more games with you. I’m going to try to explain but you’re not going to understand,” she said. “David died broke. Vivian wouldn’t help, well, no more than a few thousand here and there. We couldn’t touch her money. David wouldn’t. The old woman checked her accounts twice a week. David was the cosigner on everything till he died. Then Vivian was advised by Trent to put me on the accounts with her.”
“Why?”
“Because I told Trent I’d see to it that a donation of one hundred thousand dollars went to Seaside when Vivian died or, if he preferred, to a charity of his choosing.”
“Like the bank account of Amos Trent?”
