“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.
Ames stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You do some fool things,” he said, his eyes and his gun leveled at Alberta.
She was holding her injured shoulder now. She was also crying.
“I’m not a monster,” she sobbed.
19
Four hours later I knocked at Flo’s door. She took a long time answering. When she did, she had the baby in her arms and the voice of Johnny Cash behind her telling me he kept his eyes wide open all the time and walked the line.
I could have used Cash’s advice when I got up that morning.
“She’s sleeping,” Flo whispered. “Loves the man in black.”
I stepped in and she closed the door.
“Adele?”
“In school. You look like a soaked coyote that’s just dragged itself out of the Rio Grande.”
Flo’s knowledge of coyotes and the Rio Grande were acquired from movies, television and country music. She was a product of New York City, but a longtime citizen of popular country-and-western land.
“Ames is in jail,” I said.
“What the hell did he do now?” she said, moving to the sofa in the living room.
I sat in the straight-backed armchair across from her.
“Want to hold her?” she asked, offering the baby.
“No,” I said. “No thanks.”
Looking at Catherine was all I could handle. I wanted no responsibility. I hadn’t been doing very well with responsibility lately, particularly this day.
“He blew an office door open with a shotgun,” I said.
“What the hell for?”
“To save my life,” I said. “The gun is legal, owned by Ed at the Texas, but Ames has a record. He’s not supposed to carry a gun.”
“He saved your life?” Flo asked as Johnny Cash rasped out that he kept a close watch on his heart.
“Long story,” I said.
“I like long stories,” she said. “Just keep it interesting.”
I told her what had happened, kept it as short as I could and then said, “When the police came to Alberta Pastor’s office, she was crying. Very convincing. She insisted that the police arrest Ames and me. I told them that Alberta was a murderer. There were two of them, both too young to remember when Reagan was president. They took all three of us in. I asked for Ed Viviase. Alberta Pastor asked for her lawyer. I asked for Tycinker.”