Stuart Kaminsky - Denial

“Thanks,” he said.

Darrell, Ames and I moved out of the room. Behind us Dorothy clicked on the television remote and the long-dead people on a laugh track I’d grown up with found something very funny.

We passed the nursing station. Emmie was now drinking a cup of coffee. She nodded at us.

“Get anywhere with Dorothy?” she asked.

I told her we had and we went down the corridor and through the sliding glass doors. At the end of the building we turned left where Ames and I had been two nights ago.

The grass, shrubs and trees were thick, and through them you could see patches of the small marsh beyond.

“We gonna find the gator?” asked Darrell.

“Not if we’re lucky,” I said.

Ames had his shotgun out. The windows of the rooms of the residents in this wing of the Seaside were to our left. The ground was soggy.

I kept my eyes on the ground.

“What’re you looking for?” asked Darrell.

“Something that doesn’t belong here,” I said.

We were under Rose Teffler’s window now.

“Like this?” asked Darrell, reaching down to pick up something.

He turned to show us a slipper, dark blue. He handed it to me. I handed it to Ames.

“Hasn’t been here more than a week, maybe,” Ames said.

Ames and I were thinking of the same possibility. Someone could have taken the dead body out through the window and carried it past here. The slipper could have fallen off the body.

“Gator could have come thinking he was going to be fed,” I said.

“Maybe he was,” said Ames.

“You mean that old gator ate someone?” said Darrell gleefully.

“Let’s keep looking,” I said.

We did. No blood. No body parts. No second slipper. No evidence. We did manage to draw the attention of an old, nearly blind gator named Jerry Lee, who came slithering out, head raised through the thick reedy grass.

“There he is,” shouted Darrell.

Ames had his shotgun out. He was aiming it toward the slow-moving animal. Ames’s hands were steady.

“You gonna shoot him?” asked Darrell.

“If I have to,” said Ames, gun cradled firmly against his shoulder.

I pushed Darrell behind me. Ames was between us and Jerry Lee, who looked as if he might be smelling us out instead of looking at us. He slithered forward a few feet.

Something flew from behind me. A box of Girl Scout Thin Mints hit the alligator in the snout.

“Got him,” said Darrell.

“You got him mad is all,” said Ames.

Jerry Lee was coming faster now. The window behind us opened. Jerry Lee was a dozen yards away now and coming toward us.

Something else flew from behind me, but this time it wasn’t a box of cookies. It looked like a chicken leg and thigh. Jerry Lee opened his mouth and took it in.

“He shouldn’t eat during the day,” said Rose Teffler. “I saved that from lunch. Was going to give it to him tonight, but now…”

Jerry Lee chomped. We hurried back around the building to the parking lot. I was carrying the soggy slipper.

Darrell was beaming with delight as we got in the car.

“Where we goin’ now, hold up a bank or something?”

“We’re going to a lecture,” I said.

I found a space in the library parking lot. The library is less than ten years old. It is big, white and has pillars that look like they came out of a soft-serve ice cream machine. I’ve never been inside the building but Ames tells me it’s bright, has a nice pair of staircases, is easy to use, contains computer stations and has far fewer books on its shelves than he would like.

Ames was a reader. He always had a stack of four or five library books on the single table in his small room at the Texas, less than three blocks away. He also had a five-level bookcase filled with paperbacks and hardcovers he had picked up at garage sales. Most of the books were biographies of historical figures, but there were even a few poetry books and a novel or two.

Ames, Darrell and I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the Opera House. The Opera House was and is really an opera house. This was the first time I had entered it but I knew that much and more from Flo, who, when her husband, Gus, was alive, had been a donor, not out of a love of opera but as a tribute to a social system she and Gus had been part of.

I’d grown up with opera, Saturday’s Texaco broadcasts from the Met. My grandmother listened to the opera on Saturday more often than she went to church on Sunday. She heard them all, but her heart was only really into the Italian operas, particularly ones she had gone to when she was a girl in Italy.

For a long time the Opera House had been a movie theater. Flo told me that DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which was shot in Sarasota, premiered at the Opera House with Charlton Heston onstage after a circus parade including some of the actors in the movie. But now it was an opera house again, about one thousand seats, boxes at the rear of the main floor, carpets, paintings of donors on the walls, nice brass fittings in the toilets.

We were purposely late. It was just after three. I was hoping Welles wouldn’t spot me in the audience. I was hoping the lights would be turned down. I was hoping there would be a big crowd to hide in. I was wrong on all counts, though it took him a while to find me.

The lights were up though not bright. Fewer than two hundred people were scattered on the main floor. The balcony was closed.

There was a podium on the broad stage in front of a blue curtain that looked like velvet. A woman stood at the podium. Behind her sat John Wellington Welles. Ames, Darrell and I sat behind four women about twenty rows from the stage. In front of the stage was a table with two stacks of books.

The woman, lean, green suit with a glittering red jeweled pin on one lapel, was at the podium reciting Welles’s writing and teaching credentials. Welles sat to her right on a folding chair trying to pay attention or at least pretending to pay attention. He was doing a bad job either way.

His eyes wandered but not toward the audience, not yet. Then his head bowed as if he were listening to a eulogy. He sat with his legs apart, hands folded almost in prayer. His hair needed brushing. His eyes needed Visine. His tie needed adjusting and his jacket needed to be donated to Goodwill.

“They gonna show a movie?” Darrell whispered.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“They got popcorn, candy? Some shit like that?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

One of the women in the row in front of us turned. I was sure she was going to tell us to be quiet. That was her plan but when she saw us she changed her mind. When she looked at me, I took off my Cubs cap. When she looked at Ames, he ignored her and adjusted his yellow slicker. When she looked at Darrell, he glared back at her.

The woman turned forward again.

The audience, what there was of it, was divided into three groups-college students, older women, and me, Darrell and Ames.

“And following his lecture, Dr. Welles will answer questions and sign any copies of his book you wish to buy. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Dr. John Welles.”

The applause was dusty polite. This was no rock music sensation, no rising star in the Democratic or Republican party, no best-selling author of an apocalyptic novel.

Welles slouched to the podium, adjusted the microphone, leaned toward it and said, “The destruction of moral definition.”

It was the same voice I had heard over the phone, the same person who had threatened, pleaded with me to stop my search for him.

There was a glass of water in front of him. He picked it up and drank and then looked out at the audience, his hands clutching the sides of the podium. The pause was long. There was shuffling in the seats. The woman who had introduced him and who now sat where Welles had sat in the folding chair held a benevolent hopeful smile.