Stuart Kaminsky - Denial

“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?”

“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.