Stuart Kaminsky - Denial

“Remember Carmine Forest?” asked the redhead.

Gladys shook her head and said to us, “Carmine, what was it, three, four years ago?”

“Three,” said the redhead.

“Carmine,” Gladys went on, “claimed vampires were stalking the halls at night, turning the residents into vampires.”

“Said he could prove it,” Gladys continued. “Said the residents were getting pale, losing blood. Even claimed he had seen fang marks on their necks.”

“Which closed almost immediately after they were bitten,” said the redhead. “He started painting crosses on the doors with Magic Marker.”

“Permanent black marker,” said the redhead.

“Got ugly,” said Gladys. “Mrs. Schwartz and Mr. Wallstein complained that it was an attack by anti-Semites. They called a rabbi. Carmine called a priest. Rabbi and priest got together and calmed things down.”

“Carmine demanded an exorcism,” said the redhead. “Priest said the Church didn’t recognize the existence of vampires.”

“Carmine wrote to the pope,” said Gladys. “No answer.”

“Then he sent in a letter of resignation from the Catholic Church and said he was going to become a Hindu because they believed in vampires and would send someone to deal with it.”

“Did they?” I asked.

“We’re still waiting,” said Gladys.

“Oh,” said the redhead, suddenly remembering. “What about Carla Martin?”

“One one one,” I said, starting to move away from the nursing station.

“One eleven, right,” said the redhead.

Ames and I went in search of Dorothy Cgnozic’s room while Gladys and the redhead recalled whatever Carla Martin’s delusion had been. We found the room at the end of a corridor and around a bend. The door was closed. I knocked.

“Come in,” came a woman’s voice.

I tried the door.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“Who are you?” came the voice.

“Lewis Fonesca. You called me this morning.”

Silence. Then the sound of something padding on the other side. The door opened.

Dorothy Cgnozic was not small. She was tiny, maybe a little over four feet high. She was wearing a bright yellow dress. Her short white hair was brushed back and she had a touch of makeup on her almost unlined face.

She looked at me and then up at Ames.

“Come in,” she said, looking past us down the corridor in both directions.

We entered and she closed and locked the door before turning into the room. We moved past a bathroom on our right and around her walker with the yellow tennis balls on the feet The room was big enough for a bed with a flowered quilt, a small refrigerator, a low chest of drawers with a twenty-four-inch Sony television on top of it and three chairs next to a window that looked out at the tops of trees about forty or fifty feet away.

“Sit,” she said.

We did.

“This is my friend Ames McKinney,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Ames said.

“And you, Mr. McKinney,” she answered. “You may call me Dorothy.”

“Ames,” he said.

“If you-” I began.

“Would you like some chocolate-covered cherries?” she asked.

“One,” said Ames.

There was a low table piled with books, a Kleenex box and a pad of paper with a sheet on which I could see neatly handprinted names. She got a small candy box from the one-drawer table at her side, opened it and held it out to Ames, who took one. I declined.

“I don’t know which room it was,” she said, putting the candy box back and sliding the drawer closed. “I may have gotten it wrong. It was down the corridor in front of the nursing station, toward the end. The door was open. The room was dark but there was light from outside. A person was being strangled, definitely an old person in a robe. She was being strangled by someone big.”

“Man or woman?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Would either of you like a Diet Sprite?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Yes, please,” said Ames.

Dorothy Cgnozic smiled, rose and moved to the refrigerator. She moved slowly, hands a little out to her sides for balance, and came back with a can of Diet Sprite and a disposable plastic cup. Ames thanked her, opened the can and poured himself a drink.

“The nurses said no one died here last night,” I said. “Everyone’s accounted for. Maybe-”

“I am eighty-three,” she said. “Six operations for bladder, hip and some things I’d rather not mention. My body’s going. My brain is fine. My eyesight is nearly perfect with my glasses on and I was wearing my glasses. I saw someone murdered. I told Emmie.”

“The night nurse?” I asked.

“Yes.”

She reached for the pad with the names and handed it to me.

“List of all the residents as of last Monday,” she said. “I’m trying to find out who is missing.”

“You think the nurses are lying?”

“Mistaken, confused,” she said. “People come and go speaking of Michelangelo.”

“Michelangelo?”

“Poetry, metaphor. T. S. Eliot. I’m not displaying signs of Alzheimer’s or dementia,” she said. “I saw what I saw.”

“Maybe the murdered person wasn’t a resident,” Ames said.

Dorothy and I looked at him.

“Maybe the murdered person was a visitor. Maybe staff.”

“In a robe?” asked Dorothy.

Ames took a deep gulp of Diet Sprite and said, “Dark. Light from behind. Maybe it was a coat, not a robe.”

“And maybe pigs can fly and geese can give milk,” she said. “I saw what I saw.”

I think Ames smiled.

“You think whoever did it might want to hurt you?” I asked. “Your door was locked.”

“If someone wants to murder an eighty-three-year-old woman in an assisted living facility,” she said, “it doesn’t take much effort, but …”

She reached down for a white cloth bag near the table holding the Kleenex and pulled it over to her. She reached into it, dug deep and came up with a formidable-looking hunting knife in a leather sheaf.

“I will not go gently,” she said. “My husband would turn away from me in heaven or hell when we met if I didn’t protect myself.”

“Cgnozic?” said Ames. “Any relation to Gregory Cgnozic?”

“My husband,” she said with obvious pride. “You know his work?”

“A fine poet,” Ames said. “Ran with Kerouac, Ginsberg. Heard him once in Butte. Sense of humor. A little like Ferlinghetti.”

“People don’t remember Gregory,” she said.

“More than you think.”

“Not many,” she said.

She reached back, lifted the box of Kleenex and pulled something from under it. The something was a check for two hundred dollars made out in my name. She had spelled my name correctly.

“You don’t have to-” I began.

“It doesn’t mean anything if I don’t pay you,” she said. “I pay you and the service you perform remains mine. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ames.

I pocketed the check. I now had one hundred dollars in cash and a check for two hundred dollars in my pocket. They weighed as much as the hopes of two women.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Prove me right,” she said, standing. “Lunchtime. Food’s not really bad here. People complain, but it’s not really bad. Chicken salad today, but you can always get a toasted cheese if you want and you can get popcorn and coffee whenever you want.”

Ames and I both stood. She took the empty can and disposable cup from Ames.

“We’ll work on it,” I said.

Gladys, the big nurse, wasn’t at the nursing station when we went by but the redhead looked up at us from her desk and said, “Well? You don’t still believe her?”

“Mind if we go through the motions?” I asked.