Final Stroke (6 page)

The hearsay at Hell in the Woods was that the nursing home wing turned into a block-long tomb quite early in the evening. But all was not quiet in the nursing home wing. He’d made it through the auto
matic double doors and rolled the length of the intermediate section when he heard voices being raised. Apparently a few of the staff were in a room across the hall from the nurses’ station. As he approached the sound of the voices, he kept glancing behind him. He figured someone would come up from behind and he’d be sent back upstairs. But, so far, that hadn’t happened.

When he got to the doorway from which the voices emerged, he paused, trying to think of a good reason for being here. But mostly, he wondered what had made him come here.

The last time Jan visited, and they’d finished their usual emo
tional greeting, which sometimes resulted in her closing the door and propping the guest chair against it so they could have a little privacy, she’d spoken again about the case he was on when they met. She had hired him to find out who killed her husband and someone else. Yes, someone he knew. Sam Pike. When Jan questioned him about the case, all he could remember at the time was that it had something to do with kids. He had no idea whose kids or how many kids. He sim
ply remembered that the case had something to do with kids.

Jan was quite excited about this, saying he was getting much bet
ter at remembering things. For the few weeks since he’d been at Hell in the Woods, this is how it had gone with Jan. She would prompt him until he recalled some tidbit from the past—or from something she’d said on a previous visit, he wasn’t sure which—and she would use this recollection to begin telling him the details of an incident. When he’d recalled that the case involving Jan’s husband and Sam Pike had something to do with kids, she told what seemed like a tall tale, but insisted that every word of it was true.

The part of the tale he recalled now was that there were some kids being held on an island and that they were in danger. Young men with automatic weapons guarded the island and it was up to him and Jan to help the kids get away. Apparently those responsible for her hus
band’s and Sam Pike’s deaths were holding the kids. The kids were not related to him or to Jan, but someone had to help them. Jan said they took a rowboat out to the island in the dead of night. And some
thing else. Jan said he had his violin with him. Crazy. Jan insisted he used to play the violin, and when she brought it into the hospital shortly after his stroke, he had to admit that, although he could not recall ever having played the violin before, he was able to make sounds on it. But they were terrible sounds, and when Jan said that was how he’d always played, he asked her how she could stand it, and they both laughed like hell.

But there was something more to this island story. Jan said what he did that night showed he was unwilling to let things go, that he was a detective through and through and always would be. Then she said something about him being honorable and that it was in his blood. This, of course, made him laugh. But Jan did not laugh. Instead, she said she would also be a detective, her first case being to help him re
discover his world.

So that was the answer, down here in the nursing home wing be
cause finding out for certain if Marjorie had an accident or not was in his blood.

Voices still came from the room across from the nurses’ station. As he inched nearer, he could tell they were women’s voices. Although he could not hear complete sentences, he heard one of the women screech out, “Eleven-inch dick! Really! Really he does!” This was followed by laughter and one of them stomping her foot and someone else having a coughing fit.

He decided to take advantage of the moment. Last time he looked he didn’t quite measure up, so he knew they weren’t talking about him. As he pushed hard on the wheel with his left hand and swung his body to the left to correct the wheelchair’s direction, the laughter continued, but the voices seemed closer to the door. He pushed harder, sailing along, a breeze in his face that smelled like soap and bed linen and al
cohol and urine. The end of the hallway was coming up fast and he slowed, using left hand on the wheel and left foot on the floor. A shat
tered image from boyhood flashed by. Memorial Day out in the back
yard with the radio propped in the kitchen window … Yes, listening to the Indianapolis 500!

He rounded the corner at the end of the hallway just as laughing voices exploded through the doorway across from the nurses’ station, shushing one another and going their separate ways. He was out of sight, in the long hallway leading to the activity room.

He parked his wheelchair against the wall to one side and stud
ied the scene.
Scene
was another fine word from the past. The scene of the crime. Yeah, right. Poor Marjorie slips and falls on a wet spot, actually a puddle he could see was still on the floor, and he thinks it’s a scene of the crime because he used to be a private dick. Dick, ha. Everything’s connected in this damn world. Staff probably left the piddle puddle for the early morning cleaning crew to take care of.

At least on his floor there was an early morning crew, the ones who got out all the noisiest polishers and buffers they could find in janitors’ closets and woke everyone up while they made the tile floors into mirrors. Too bad he wasn’t a kid in grammar school anymore, because back then he would have sidled up to the girls and had a fine time looking up their skirts.

Thinking of grammar school made him think of Dwayne Matu sak. For some reason, since his stroke, he had recalled one particular
summer from boyhood in which Dwayne Matusak announced that by end of summer they would have a knockdown drag-out fight and only one of them would come out alive. At the time he actually thought he would die. When he watched Dragnet on television that summer he tried to imagine himself cool and fearless like Sergeant Joe Friday. And now here he was in the hallway of a damn nursing home staring at a puddle of urine thinking about an ancient black and white televi sion series.

Crazy bastard. A stroke was one thing, but at least he wasn’t per
manent in this place like folks in this wing. Not unless he had an
other stroke and this one knocked him for a loop. Or maybe in his condition a seizure would do it. He had a seizure a few weeks earlier and, even though the doctor said seizures wouldn’t damage his brain, he still wondered.

But what good did it do to think about it? Only thing to do was keep working on it and get the hell out of here. A lot more years left in this old dick. Fifty-three down, or so they told him. Given a week’s notice, he could still get it up.

He laughed, then wondered why the hell he was suddenly in such a damn good mood. One minute he’s worried about seizures, next minute he’s a laughing hyena. Here he is poking into the circum
stances of Marjorie’s recent death and he gets this idiotic self-satisfy
ing feeling.

The puddle on the floor was not quite a yard across, exactly as Sue had described it less than an hour earlier. But when he leaned forward and studied the edges of the puddle more closely, he could see that it was surrounded by a series of barely discernible rings marking where the puddle had originally extended, but had dried.

Across the hall was one of those janitors’ closets he’d been think ing about when he recalled being awakened each morning by the noisy
cleaning crew. The closet was straddled on either side by a men’s room and a ladies’ room so as to line up the plumbing during construction. As he stared across at the door to the janitors’ closet with its
Staff Only
sign, he saw where small droplets on the floor had dried. The drop
lets were in front of the
Staff Only
door and seemed to lead toward the large puddle as if someone had stomped in the main puddle like a kid with brand new galoshes.

The hallway tile was one of those nondescript patterns of flecks on a beige background. Foot squares placed so tightly together it was difficult to see the dividing lines between them. And, because of the apparent randomness of the pattern, it was difficult to find the repeti
tion. Like looking at the photograph of a planet surface. But eventu
ally he did find the pattern, and when he did he saw that each tile had been turned ninety degrees from the previous tile by the installer.

Before the perimeter dried, the puddle had been spread out over roughly a three-foot circle and he could see, because of breaks in the dry line at the edge of the perimeter, that something had disturbed the puddle not long after it was made. When he examined these breaks in the dry line more closely, he could see where thin tires had rolled through the puddle and gone on down the hallway away from the ac
tivity room and toward an alarmed door. Although the tire tracks were dry, he could definitely see them.

He rolled down the hallway and studied a floor plan mounted on the wall with arrows showing various emergency escape routes. Ac cording to the map, the alarmed door opened to a hallway that bor dered the kitchen and eventually led to a loading dock. The spread between the wheels that had made the tracks was too large to be a wheelchair, and each wheel was paired with another that almost, but not quite, paralleled its course. And, since it was way past any meal time and no food carts would have passed this way late in the evening,
he figured the tracks leading away from the puddle must have been made by the gurney that had taken Marjorie away. Made sense that the ambulance would park at the loading dock, back here where resi dents wouldn’t have to watch one of their own being carted away.

Felt good to be doing a little dissecting at the scene, even if it wasn’t a crime scene. And Marjorie, who loved mysteries and conspiracy theo
ries, would have been proud. She was probably sitting on cloud nine right now, happy as a clam he was staring down at the tracks of the gur
ney that took her away. Of course, if he found something …

The self-satisfaction he felt a moment earlier turned bitter, then became comic as he imagined himself smiling to death the perpetrator of the so-called “foul play.” Or maybe getting out a violin and play
ing it until the guy pukes his guts out. Or maybe letting word out on the street so Marjorie’s husband’s old cronies blow into town for a final hit. He could almost see them crawling out of the woodwork of vari
ous nursing homes around the country. They’d show up at Hell in the Woods in wheelchairs and walkers. They’d rough up a few aides and nurses. A Keystone Cops scene in which the cronies stagger after the aides and nurses, wielding their canes.

Or maybe it would be different. The guards at the front desk would try to put up a fight, but the crew of cronies, like a wrecking crew come back from the dead, would mow them down with their canes—the canes, of course, having had rapid firing weapons con
cealed in them James Bond style ever since the cronies went into the homes in case anyone ever sent in a hit on them.

Was this a story he and Marjorie once shared? Or was it really that way? Hoods in nursing homes with loaded canes? Funny. So damn funny.

He backed away from the door to the loading dock, turned and wheeled back to the puddle where the tracks originated. On the side
of the puddle nearest the janitors’ closet, where the kid in new galoshes had splashed, he saw something else. He wheeled around the puddle. Yes, there was evidence here. Several specks on the doorjamb, hard to see because of the dark color of the doorjamb, but when he reached out and found that the speck he rubbed came off fairly easily, he knew it was blood and not paint. Perhaps there had been more blood, a puddle on the floor near the door and away from the urine puddle, the para medics wiping up a larger puddle of blood and missing the specks on the doorjamb. But if there was that much blood, why no investiga tion? Where was the yellow police tape? Where was the cop to protect the evidence? After all her theories about conspiracies, was this how Marjorie would check out? Slipping in a puddle of piss and no one even questions the circumstances or bothers to clean it up?

As he leaned forward in his wheelchair rubbing at another of the reddish-brown specks and examining the stain transferred to his fin
ger, something else bothered him. For a moment he thought he would fall out of the chair, and if that happened, he’d tumble end-over-end, not stopping until … until what? He sat up and closed his eyes and tried to think. Yes, something was there. A smell. A smell from ear
lier while sailing down the hallway, but a smell that was not here. And now, as he sniffed, trying to detect an odor from the puddle on the floor, a memory came to him. A memory from the distant past that made him sit up and close his eyes.

A stairwell. A feeling of being closed in. An unsafe place. The weight of a gun in his hand and he’s climbing the stairs and there’s the smell of urine. Must be from the time he was a Chicago cop. Even though he hadn’t known Jan then, she told him about it, saying she knew a lot of his old cronies and that she would teach it all to him again and he’d be as good as new. But this thing—climbing a dark stairwell with a gun in his hand and the smell of urine all around—
this thing he did not remember Jan telling him. This thing came from someplace else, someplace dark and frightening. And now a phrase emerged. That phrase was simply,
the projects
.