“His choice,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Where’s Vivian Pastor’s body?”
“Let’s say there’s a well-fed alligator or two in the lake at Myakka.”
She checked her watch, stood up, locked the door, turned to me and said, “I think it should take about ten minutes to kill you but I’ll give myself extra time. You’re not very big. You’ll fit in the closet in the other room. I’ll give Jean Herndon her three o’clock session and close up for the day. Then I’ll come back sometime after midnight and get you.”
I was no match for Alberta Pastor. I needed a weapon. I didn’t think a pile of magazines or a wooden candy dish would do.
“I’m really not a bad person.”
“Hitler loved dogs and little children. Goebbels’s children called Hitler Uncle Adolph.”
“Vivian was the monster, not me. With more help from her, David wouldn’t have had the stroke. She was eighty-seven years old, Fonesca, and mean as a drunken redneck. She would probably have lived another ten years.”
“If you hadn’t killed her.”
“If I hadn’t killed her, yes.”
“I’m not a monster,” I said, standing. “Why kill me?”
“You’re an obstacle. I deserve something more than eight-hour days on my feet, kneading the bodies of people who tell me how they’ve hurt their shoulders at Vail or slipped a disc in Paris.”
I could have thrown the candy dish at her. Tootsie Rolls and root beer barrels would crack against the walls and bounce on the floor, but it wouldn’t stop her. I reached for the door to the inner room.
“No place to hide in there,” she said, taking a step toward me. “No window. Just a massage table, a pile of towels, a locked cabinet and closet. If you like, you can shout for help, but no one can hear. The door behind me is very thick and nearly soundproof. I’m really sorry about this, really I am.
“That’s it. Anything else to say? Like, ‘You’ll never get away with this,’ or ‘If I found you, someone else will’ or even ‘I told someone, maybe the police, where I was going and they’ll be here any moment’?”
“All of the above.”
“I don’t understand you, Fonesca,” she said. “You don’t look frightened.”
“You do,” I said.
She looked at her hands. They were shaking. Then she looked at me.
“I deserve something good,” she said. “I’ve earned it.”
It would be more dramatic to say her hands were around my throat and I was trying to get a punch in when the door exploded. But it wasn’t like that. She was just standing there, hesitating.
The open door crashed against the wall, hitting Alberta Pastor’s left shoulder and sending her into the wall next to me.
Ames stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You do some fool things,” he said, his eyes and his gun leveled at Alberta.
She was holding her injured shoulder now. She was also crying.
“I’m not a monster,” she sobbed.
19
Four hours later I knocked at Flo’s door. She took a long time answering. When she did, she had the baby in her arms and the voice of Johnny Cash behind her telling me he kept his eyes wide open all the time and walked the line.
I could have used Cash’s advice when I got up that morning.
“She’s sleeping,” Flo whispered. “Loves the man in black.”
I stepped in and she closed the door.
“Adele?”
“In school. You look like a soaked coyote that’s just dragged itself out of the Rio Grande.”
Flo’s knowledge of coyotes and the Rio Grande were acquired from movies, television and country music. She was a product of New York City, but a longtime citizen of popular country-and-western land.
“Ames is in jail,” I said.
“What the hell did he do now?” she said, moving to the sofa in the living room.
I sat in the straight-backed armchair across from her.
“Want to hold her?” she asked, offering the baby.
“No,” I said. “No thanks.”
Looking at Catherine was all I could handle. I wanted no responsibility. I hadn’t been doing very well with responsibility lately, particularly this day.
“He blew an office door open with a shotgun,” I said.
“What the hell for?”
“To save my life,” I said. “The gun is legal, owned by Ed at the Texas, but Ames has a record. He’s not supposed to carry a gun.”
“He saved your life?” Flo asked as Johnny Cash rasped out that he kept a close watch on his heart.
“Long story,” I said.
“I like long stories,” she said. “Just keep it interesting.”
I told her what had happened, kept it as short as I could and then said, “When the police came to Alberta Pastor’s office, she was crying. Very convincing. She insisted that the police arrest Ames and me. I told them that Alberta was a murderer. There were two of them, both too young to remember when Reagan was president. They took all three of us in. I asked for Ed Viviase. Alberta Pastor asked for her lawyer. I asked for Tycinker.”
“Sounds like a goddamn mess,” said Flo.
The baby stirred as the song ended. Flo rocked her gently. Johnny walked into a ring of fire and Catherine was still again.
“Alberta said Ames and I were trying to blackmail her about a story we made up about killing her mother-in- law. When she refused to give in to us, we threatened her.”
“What about the missing mother-in-law?” asked Flo.
“She said her mother-in-law checked herself out of the Seaside and insisted on being driven to the Tampa airport, where she said she was getting as far away from Sarasota as she could, that she was going to stay with friends. Alberta says her mother-in-law didn’t say where she was going.”
“But she lied to you about her mother being her mother-in-law,” said Flo.
“She says she never said it, that I was making it up on the spot.”
“What about the nurse, Emmie Jefferson?” asked Flo, leaning forward.
“They talked to her, showed her a picture of Vivian Pastor. She said it wasn’t the woman she had seen in Alberta’s car the night of the murder, but Alberta Pastor had never said Gigi was her mother-in-law.”
“What’s Alberta Pastor say now?”
“She insists that the police conduct a nationwide search for her mother-in-law to prove her story. I told Viviase that Alberta had fed her mother-in-law in pieces to the gators in Myakka Lake.”
“How many gators in the lake?” asked Flo. “A few thousand?”
“Right, the police would just have to cut open a few thousand gators looking for body parts,” I said.
“You went in ass first and she almost tore it off,” said Flo, smoothing down the baby’s fine yellow hair.
“I underestimated her,” I said.
“Where is she now?”
“Probably at her lawyer’s office filing a civil suit against me and Ames.”
“They let you go?”
“Viviase believed me,” I said. “Told me I should have come to him with what I had instead of going to
