When we got to the Seaside, Ames motioned for us to stay in the car. He got out, shotgun under his slicker, and looked around before motioning us to get out.
“Where’s the gator?” asked Darrell, looking around.
“Behind the building,” I said.
“We gonna look at it?”
“Maybe,” I said, leading the way through the glass doors of the Seaside, which slid open automatically.
The office doors to our right were closed for the weekend. We made our way to the nursing station, where a tiny black woman in a blue nursing smock was dispensing medicine to an ancient old man with a large freckled bald head. The man took some pills on his tongue, accepted a small plastic cup of water from the nurse and washed down the medicine with a quick gulp.
The man looked at the three of us, blinked and said, “Is there a carnival in town?”
“John,” the little nurse admonished, taking back the plastic cup.
“Well, I mean it,” John said. “Look at them. I worked a carnival summers when I was a kid. We had a couple of Negro midgets.”
“I ain’t no midget,” said Darrell.
“You ain’t?” John said, looking astonished. “You fooled me. This other fella, though,” he went on, pointing a bony arthritic finger at Ames, “definitely runs a shooting gallery.”
“John,” the nurse warned wearily.
“He’s carrying a gun right under that yellow raincoat,” John said.
“John likes his little jokes,” said the nurse, who looked beyond tired.
“I like a good bowel movement too from time to time,” he said. “I don’t ask much.”
With that John turned his back and shuffled down the hall.
“Can I help you?” the nurse said, turning to us. She was black, thin, in her mid-forties and obviously tired.
I read the name tag on her uniform. It said EMMIE.
“You’re the night nurse,” I said.
“Most nights,” she said.
“You were here the night Dorothy Cgnozic reported that someone had been murdered.”
“I was,” she said. “My first night on the job, people checking out, woman tells me she saw a murder. Crazy night. Who are you?”
“Friends of Dorothy’s,” I said.
“Sometime I’d like to hear the story of how that friendship began, but not today. I’m on my second straight shift. Can you believe two nurses came down with some kind of flu? I’ve been on almost fourteen hours.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She shrugged and said, “Time and a half. I’m not complaining, not with two-year-old twins to raise, just tired.”
“Dorothy told you she just saw someone murdered?” I asked.
“Yes, she thought it was a woman. I looked in the room. No body, nobody missing. Checked the log, day-shift releases, and night maintenance man. I think maybe Dorothy had a bad dream.”
“The room where Dorothy said she saw the murder,” I said. “Where does the window open to?”
“Back of the building,” said Emmie. “Nothing but dark, woods, snakes and a crazy half-blind gator with a bad temper.”
Darrell looked at me. He was smiling. The existence of the promised gator had been validated.
“We’ve got a patient who keeps feeding the damned thing. One day that Stevie Wonder gator is going to take her arm off.”
“Jerry Lee,” Ames corrected.
“Who?” she asked.
“Gator’s name,” Ames said.
“Whatever,” she said with a sigh. “You want to see Dorothy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Know where her room is?”
I told her we did and she moved behind the desk to sit heavily in the wooden chair and close her eyes.
Dorothy was fully dressed and sitting in the small upholstered and faded salmon-colored chair next to her bed. She was watching something on television but turned it off with her remote when she saw us.
“Mr. Fonesca and Mr. McKinney,” she said with a smile. “And the young man?”
“Darrell Caton,” he said, not sure whether he should offer his hand, starting to hold it out, then changing his mind and pulling it back to his side.
“You found the murderer?” she asked.
“No, not yet.”
“You find out who got killed?”
“No, but I think I’m getting close. Has anyone tried to get you to stop me from talking about the murder?”
“No one’s asked me to stop, nobody but the nurses and some of them just look at me like I’m a dotty old coot keeping herself busy with a harmless delusion.”
“Want to take us to Rose Teffler’s room?” I asked.
“That’s not where the murder happened,” Dorothy said.
“But on the same side of the building a few doors down from her room?”
“Suppose so,” said Dorothy. “Waste of time. I already asked her if she heard or saw anything.”
“Still-” I started and she interrupted with, “Okay. Let’s go.”
We walked down the hall, a bizarre quartet, probably looking like a spoof of the walk down the corridor at the beginning of Law amp; Order. We went to the right, though the most direct way would have been back past the nursing station.
It took us about five minutes to get to Rose Teffler’s door. Dorothy moved slowly with her walker. A sprig of some dried flowers hung on the door. Their color was almost gone.
I knocked. No answer from inside, though Ames did cock his head as if he had heard something move behind the door. Then the door opened.
Rose Teffler was tiny, no more than four foot six. She squinted at us with suspicion and Dorothy said that we had some questions.
“What about?” the old woman said.
“The night Mrs. Cgnozic saw someone a few doors down being attacked,” I said. “If someone committed murder and took the body out during the night, they would have to go past your window.”
“What time?”
“After eleven at night,” I said.
“I’m not up at that time,” she said. “Always get nine hours of sleep.”
“You get up to feed Jerry Lee,” said Ames.
Rose Teffler looked at Ames with fear.
“They don’t care about the gator, Rose,” Dorothy said. “Everybody knows you feed the gator.”
“They do?”
“They do,” Dorothy repeated. “These people don’t care about your feeding Jerry Lee.”
“I do,” said Darrell.
“The night-” I started, but Rose Teffler was already saying, “Yes. I thought Jerry Lee had gotten whoever it was. Lots of noise. Heard Jerry Lee out there thrashing around. I was about to feed him. Someone screamed or something. By the time I got to the window and opened it, all I could see was someone or something slouching away next to the building. Looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
“Charles Laughton,” I said.
“Lon Chaney,” Rose corrected.
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Maybe it was Charles Laughton,” said Rose. “You won’t tell about Jerry Lee.”
“No one left to tell except Trent. No one tells him anything,” said Dorothy, but Rose wasn’t listening.
We left and walked Dorothy back to her room, promising her that we’d get back to her soon.
“I know what I saw,” she said, sitting in the chair next to her bed. “Wait.”
She reached back to the bedside table to her right. She opened the drawer and came out with a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints. She handed the box to Darrell.
“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.