“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.
“If it will make Dorothy feel better and you don’t disturb any of the residents and you don’t run into the boss,” she said. “But believe me, everyone is accounted for. Nobody died.”
“Could someone have come in to visit a resident during the night?”
“Till eleven,” said the redhead patiently. “After that, no visitors. Doors are locked for the night. You have to ring to get in. Emmie Jefferson’s note said Dorothy’s murder happened at a little after eleven.”
“Could she be a few minutes off?” Ames asked.
“Possible,” said the redhead. “Does it make a difference?”
We thanked her and went down the corridor and out the door to the parking lot.
“Must be ways to get in here without ringing,” Ames said. “I’ll scooter back on my own later and check.”
“Right,” I said. “Gregory Cgnozic was a famous poet?”
I was driving now down the narrow road, past a trio of ducks quacking near the pond.
“No,” said Ames. “Just a poet. Happened to catch him that one night in Butte. He was a last-minute fill-in for another Gregory, Corso.”
“Was he good?”
“My opinion? Yes. That night in Butte he said John Lennon was the greatest poet of the twentieth century,” said Ames. “Audience applauded. Don’t think they believed it, though, but he wasn’t joking.”
“You believe her, about the murder?” I asked.
“Woman saw what she saw,” he said.
We went back to the Texas. It was crowded. There was no chicken salad on the menu. Just the items listed on the blackboard above the bar. Burgers of large size with whatever you wanted and chili as hot as you wanted. Ames went to work. I stood at the bar, made a phone call, went for the chili and corn bread, worried about Dorothy Cgnozic and drove over to Bank of America two blocks away to cash my check.