curtains. The floor was carpeted in beige. The ceiling was white acoustical tile. Sound didn’t carry well here, as Amos knew.
“Siddown, Carver,” he said, dropping into a low brown vinyl sofa so hard Carver was afraid the old guy might snap a bone. The sofa sighed in protest, realized Amos didn’t weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds, and immediately shut up.
Carver sat opposite Amos in a matching brown armchair. He glanced around. There were about a dozen other residents in the room, chatting with visitors whose dark hair and supple bodies made them seem as out of place here as extraterrestrial beings. The nearest of these was a young woman talking to an older woman in a wheelchair. They both had wide cheekbones and identical turned-up noses. Carver was sure they were mother and daughter. The young one looked infinitely sad, then momentarily panic-stricken, as she studied the woman in the chair, whose faded eyes had for a second been averted. The future was as real as the past. Waiting.
“We can talk okay here,” Amos said. “Far as the attendants know, you’re my son from Syracuse come to visit me.”
“You got a son in Syracuse?” Carver asked.
“Could have. I was a policeman there forty years ago, before I became a paint salesman.”
“What’s being a policeman got to do with fathering a son?”
“Not s’posed to have anything to do with it, but it did. That’s why I left the force and sold paint. First it was all oil-based and didn’t move for shit, then when we started carrying a latex-based line I made a damned good living out of it. Stores can’t sell people paint they gotta spend the whole day washing off themselves and everything else after they change the color of a wall. Latex is water-soluble and don’t cause that problem. Know that?”
“Know it,” Carver said. “You’re not still selling paint, are you, Amos? You didn’t lure me here so you could talk me into two-coating my house?”
Amos adjusted the horn-rimmed glasses where they rested on his ears and looked angry. “I tend to ramble now and again,” he admitted. “It aggravates the piss outta me, Carver, even while it’s boring you. But don’t worry, I don’t lose my place. I know why I asked you here.”
“You overheard the conversation I had with Kearny Williams,” Carver said.
“No need to remind me. Nor to remind me what was said. So Sam Cusanelli suspected there was something wrong with this place, did he? Well, lah-de-dah.”
“That’s what he told me yesterday. But you know that; you were listening.”
“Well, Sam was right. When I heard you were private heat and a friend of that Lieutenant Desoto, I figured you’d be the one to tell.”
“Tell what?”
Gray bushy eyebrows shot up in irritation. “Why, that there really is something wrong here in this colored ice-cube tray of a hell.” Amos wasn’t going to be used in any testimonial ads by Sunhaven.
“Why don’t you leave here?” Carver asked.
Amos’s jowly chin quivered and then became firm. “I as much as been told by my no-good daughter and son- in-law that if I do, they’ll start legal proceedings to have me declared non compos mentis, unable to handle my own affairs.”
“Really? Could they do that?”
Amos grinned, the loose flesh of his face arranging itself into a thousand creases. A light danced in his brown eyes. “It ain’t a hundred percent certain. So they’d rather keep footing the bill for me here, while they wait patiently for me to die so they can inherit my money.”
“How much wealth does a latex paint salesman accumulate?” Carver asked.
Amos’s grin turned foxy. “Question is, how much do some people think he can accumulate?”
Carver was getting tired of this; he decided to drive to the point. “Can you tell me what’s going on here that had Sam Cusanelli suspicious?”
“Same thing had me suspicious, maybe. ’Bout a month ago old Jim Harrison died. Nicest fella. From Eugene, Oregon.”
Carver waited, watching Amos, whose eyes remained alert yet somehow disengaged, as if looking at some portion of the past that had abruptly materialized around them and that Carver couldn’t see.
“People die here, Amos,” Carver said gently.
“Yeah, it’s that kinda place. And Jim had been sick. Like half the folks inside these walls. He had the room right opposite mine, and the night before he died I heard noises, somebody coming and going there. Wouldn’t have struck me as odd, only it was three in the morning.”
“Maybe Harrison felt sick and called for a doctor.”
“No, I heard voices, but they weren’t talking that way at all. Not like doctor and patient.”
“Talking how, then?”
“Not arguing, just talking normal, but I couldn’t make out the words. I happened to be awake, took the wrong goddamn pill for my arthritis and it got me hyper as a cat.”
And maybe imagining things, Carver thought.
“It seemed to me I sniffed a burning smell, too. Like somebody’d just struck a match and lit a cigarette. Hell, I ain’t smoked in years.”
“Maybe that’s why it’s been years.”
“Anyways,” Amos went on, “next morning they found Jim dead in his bed. Stroke, they said took him. It can happen anytime, I guess, but Jim seemed healthy as Hercules the day before he died. Then I got to thinking about that late-night visit, and what I’d seen the night before that.”
“You do a lot of observing at night,” Carver remarked.
“My window looks right out on the parking lot. Besides, I got insomnia.”
Not the wrong pill.
“But I don’t tell nobody,” Amos said. “Had it since I got the same uneasy feeling Sam Cusanelli had that something doesn’t set right around here. They don’t know here I was a cop long time ago. A detective-sergeant, matter of fact, I remember how to investigate. Night before Jim died I heard a car out on the lot and seen Nurse Rule talking to a fella had driven up by the main building. She got in the car with him and they sat and talked for a long time. Then out she climbed and went back in the building. A little later I heard her drive away in her own car.”
“How long did they talk?”
“I’d guess about fifteen minutes.”
“Maybe she met her boyfriend,” Carver said. “Talked with him a while, then came back inside to do some late-night work. See any romance inside that car?”
“Romance? Nurse Rule? You shitting me?”
“I don’t know the woman,” Carver explained.
“Well, I wouldn’t call her homely, but she’s the type might cut off your balls after you put it to her. Know what I mean?”
Carver wasn’t sure if he did. “Was it unusual for her to be here that time of night?”
“ ’Course it was. Why I brought it up.”
“She was never on the night shift?”
“Not Nurse Rule,” Amos said, with the same undercurrent of respect Carver had heard in Kearny Williams’s voice. “She’s the boss.”
“What about Dr. Macklin?”
“Hah! We don’t see much of Dr. Macklin around here. It’s Doc Pauly makes the regular rounds.”
“What kind of guy is he?”
“Good man, Doc Pauly.”
“Good doctor?”
“That, too.”
“Birdie Reeves?”
“Just a real sweet youngster. Reminds me when I was a teenager couple of million years ago. Kinda girl when you’re fifteen you’re sure you’re gonna marry someday.” A change crept into Amos’s worn voice. “Sometimes it even works out that way, but not often. Sure as hell didn’t for me.”
Carver tapped his cane on the carpet, rotated the tip a few times, and stared at the indentation it had made.
