Final Stroke Page 11

  “Did someone initiate an actual investigation?” asked Jan.

  “I don’t think so,” said the LPN. “We have to file a special report if the patient dies here, but she died in the ambulance in transit, so it’s up to the hospital to take care of the death certificate, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I guess what bothers me, and what seems to be bothering my husband, is that there are some loose ends here.”

  The LPN opened her eyes wide. “Loose ends?”

  “Yes,” said Jan. “For example, if the paramedics took time to wipe up the blood, as you said, wouldn’t that indicate they weren’t in a big hurry to leave and that maybe she was already dead?”

  The LPN shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t any blood, or maybe someone on staff wiped up the blood after the am bulance left.”

  “But if someone other than paramedics wiped up the blood, why wouldn’t they take time to mop up the puddle?”

  Steve slowed his walk as he passed the counter, giving Jan a smile and a nod when she turned to him, apparently pleased with what he heard. It was a turning point, the first smile since his seizure. Then he continued his walk at a faster pace, the rubber feet on the walker beginning to squeak on the tile floor.

  The LPN made a smirky half smile. “Well, perhaps you’d have to know something about health care procedure to answer that. Per haps it had something to do with paramedics always being more careful around blood because of the obvious risk of exposure. Perhaps part of their procedure is to remove any blood from the scene of an accident.”

  “What if it wasn’t an accident? I’m sure when paramedics treat someone who’s been shot they leave the blood there for evidence. Who exactly would have the authority to determine if something like this really was an accident? I know there wasn’t a weapon, but things hap pen and if I were related to Mrs. Gianetti I’d want to know exactly what happened. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Jan tried an engaging smile, but it was obvious by the LPN’s face that she felt threatened.

  “That’s what I get for trying to be nice,” said the LPN, looking down and shuffling papers behind the counter. “If you want to talk to someone about this any more, you’ll have to contact the business office.”

  Later that afternoon, Jan and Steve sat in their usual alcove in the third floor television lounge with windows facing the parking lot and woods. It was early, most of the others in the wing still down in rehab. Steve had brought the chart from his room on which they sometimes transferred information gleaned from whichever handful of magazines Jan brought in from the back seat of her car that day. But they did not unroll the chart on the coffee table or open any of the magazines yet, because it was obvious Steve wanted to know about Jan’s trip to the business office. She had promised to go to the main business office, which was downtown at the main hospital, then fill him in if he prom ised to take an afternoon nap like the doctor suggested.

  Steve sat to her right on the sofa that faced the windows and held her right hand with his left hand. He sat forward and watched her face as she spoke.

  “It was the typical bureaucratic nightmare. I had to tell my tale to four people before someone finally sent me to the legal office, and then the legal guy made an appointment for the two of us to go talk to the head hospital administrator. Basically, they said that in a hospital, or in one of its branch facilities, it was reasonable for staff to assume the malady that brought the patient there might be considered the cause of death when the circumstances fit. They said many patients, and especially stroke victims, act differently than they normally act because of physical or emotional stress. They said it would be impos sible to launch an investigation every time someone died in a hospital and would only take away resources from others. They also said they could not stop nursing home residents from walking off unassisted if that’s what they wanted and that falls were more common in the nurs ing home wing for that reason.

  “When I asked under what circumstances they would launch an in vestigation, they said, for example, if Marjorie had fallen and anything that could have been used for a weapon had been found, then they would have investigated. They said the only thing that was found near the body was her walker, and they did not consider that a weapon.”

  Steve squeezed her hand. “Walker?”

  “Yes. They said they found her walker nearby. I asked if it had been upright or lying down and they said they didn’t know but they could ask the staff member who found her.”

  Steve squeezed again. “Fast walker?”

  “Right, I thought of that. From what the LPN said earlier, it sounded like Marjorie was doing the hundred-yard-dash down the hall and I wondered how fast she could be going and how hard she could have fallen if she was using a walker.”

  “Find out?”

  “I did. When I brought it up, the administrator had someone call the nurses’ aide who found Marjorie. She was on duty and they had her drive over to the hospital while they made a big deal about treating me to coffee. The girl who found Marjorie was scared, probably her first job, and I felt sorry for her. But we all went ahead and questioned her and determined the walker had been found some distance from where Marjorie fell. She said the walker was at the corner where the hallway turns, and it looked like Marjorie might have left it there and went off down the short hall without it. She said she called for help right away and tried to revive Marjorie until help came. She said she had a pulse, but that it was weak. Then, when the paramedics arrived and took over, she said she didn’t know what else to do and took the walker back to the nurses’ station so no one would come around the corner and trip over it.

  “She seemed to be telling the truth, Steve. If there’s anything fishy about this, I don’t think she had anything to do with it. She just found Marjorie and determined she wasn’t dead and called for help.”

  Steve smiled and squeezed her hand twice. Two squeezes was his positive signal. Sometimes it meant yes, sometimes thanks, or some times it meant he was glad she was there.

  Steve had brought his water cup from his room and he picked it up and handed it to her. There was no water in it and she knew he hadn’t had a drink from it so she asked him about it.

  “Yes, I see it’s empty. You thirsty? You want me to fill it?”

  “No.”

  “So it has something to do with what you want to tell me?”

  “Yes, Marjorie.”

  “This cup has something to do with Marjorie’s accident?”

  He stared at her for a moment and she could see the look of mild frustration he always got when he wanted to say something but could not. She put the cup down on the end table on her side of the sofa and held his hand. “Go ahead, I’ll try to figure it out.”

  With a look of concentration on his face, he squeezed her hand and stared past her at the cup on the table. Finally he said, “Cups in the water. No, water in cups. The place … very good if you know what it is.”

  When she did not answer, he let go of her hand, reached across her to pick up the cup, grunted as he pulled himself up into the walker that stood before him, and made his way to the window. Then he pre tended to drink from the cup and tapped on the window glass with his fingertip.

  “Had one, but broke,” he said.

  “You had a cup. No, you had a glass, but it broke?”

  He nodded, then came back to the sofa and sat down. He handed the cup back to her and held her hand again. “Downstairs. Me. The broken thing. Water. Floor.”

  “You mean the urine that Marjorie slipped in?”

  Steve shook his head, spoke slowly and deliberately. “Water. know. Tried it.”

  When she did not respond, he displayed one of his overly exasper ated looks. “Listen. One word at time.”

  “Okay,” she said. “One word at a time like you do in rehab.”

  “Good.”

  After a pause he began, spacing the words, sometimes by several seconds. “Water. Floor. Not pee. Gl
ass. Sink. Shit.”

  “Take your time. I won’t interrupt.”

  “Okay. Glass. No … sink, then glass, then water, then floor, then me, then … yes, then fingerprints … then crash.”

  “You mean the puddle on the floor wasn’t urine? You mean it was water?”

  Steve nodded and gave the come-ahead signal like playing charades.

  Jan went through several iterations of this until she got it right.

  “Okay, one more time. The puddle on the floor was water, so it had to come from somewhere. There was a sink nearby and you found a glass with some water in it. You were going to bring the glass back

  and get someone to fingerprint it, but the glass broke.”

  Steve hugged her and laughed.

  Jan knew better than to ask qualifying questions like, how did he know it wasn’t urine, because that would simply throw him off track and they’d have to start over. Instead, she repeated the scenario about the water and the sink and the broken glass and simply led Steve on, trying to get him to add information, bit by bit, piece by piece, the way they did when she visited and tried to get him to recall a magazine ar ticle they had gone over on a previous visit.

  After an hour or so of letting Steve go on with his single word concepts, and Jan filling in the gaps to make sentences, this is what she had: When he heard Marjorie had been found dead, Steve remem bered things she recently said to him in rehab. One day, while they were watching Wheel of Fortune and playing along, Marjorie said her family had big money, enough to keep her there forever, but for what ever reason, this upset Marjorie and she said something to the effect that a bunch of keys would be needed sometime in the future. An other thing that upset Marjorie was that she suspected staff members of stealing equipment, and maybe even drugs. Another thing that upset her was her claim that her son was different from other boys. This didn’t bother her so much, but she knew it would have bothered her dead husband, and that bothered her. Although she never came out and said it, Steve figured her son must be gay. Marjorie had often spoken of the fact that her husband had been a mobster, but never in detail, and not in a serious vein, not until recently. Another thing Steve got across to Jan was Marjorie saying in rehab that her husband loved Ronald Reagan and hated Jimmy Carter, and that something had been said before the election, something about waiting until the votes are in. All of this on its own didn’t seem to mean much, but taken together, and having a gut feeling about Marjorie’s accident the way Steve did, he’d decided to investigate and now felt he’d proven, if only to himself, that perhaps Marjorie’s fall was not an accident. Things had happened in the past that upset her and he had a feeling these things had something to do with her death.

  Jan had written this all down, and Steve, reading it, smiled with pride. But then he frowned.

  “A fly in the ointment,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. “It sounds like there could be one or two.”

  “Something else … other things.”

  “There are other things that are fishy, but you can’t remember them right now?”

  Steve nodded. “No … funeral.” He pointed to Jan then to him self. “Us? Her funeral?”

  “Right,” she said. “I’ll find out about it and we can go.”

  Steve smiled. Then he said, “Last time … seizure … thought stroke. This time I know … just seizure.”

  They hugged and went back to his room where they closed the door and kissed. After the kiss, while Jan straightened her hair, Steve managed to push the chair from beside the bed to the door and prop the backrest beneath the door handle. Then he leered at her, trying to make it look as obscene as he could.

  She went to him and put her arm around his waist to help him walk back to bed. “Do you think we should so soon after a seizure?”

  “What the hell,” he said, holding the back of her head with his good hand as they walked slowly toward the bed. “What the hell.”

  “What the hell has become our own private shorthand. It stands for all the cliches. Life is short, we’re not getting any younger, and if we don’t do it now we might kick ourselves later.”

  Steve held her with his left arm and swung his right arm around behind her. She could feel his right hand caress her buttocks weakly. “Physical therapy,” he said. “Physical therapy.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  For a change of scenery, Valdez took old Route ?? across to Naples instead of the Everglades Parkway. When he left Miami, after the morning call from Skinner, the sun had been in his face, forcing him to lower his visor and squint ahead into the haze of the horizon. He’d used eye drops before he left Miami, and because of the air conditioner in his face during the drive, used them again when he parked in the shade of the visitor breezeway at the side of Hanley’s palm-lined drive. Although it was not quite noon, the heat felt like a flame-thrower when he stepped out of his car. Yes, like he was a young man again in simpler times before all this global warming and terrorist crap. A young man new to the agency sent out to use flame-throw ers on a cannabis crop planted out on the Keys by a bunch of Cuban immigrants.

  He recalled that back then—decades before cell phones and the Internet—he had told his friends Skinner and Christensen about the flame-throwers during one of their regularly scheduled evening con tacts on whatever amateur radio band was open at the time. They had probably used the forty or eighty meter band because he recalled heavy static during their conversation. Skinner and Christensen joking that they could hear the crackling of the fire. Anyone new to Miami’s agency office in those days was sent out on these ATF and FBI-style assignments in order to maintain the office’s clandestine stature. All those years working out of the same office. All those years piled up so he and his wife could some day retire in comfort. All those years working and waiting, and then cancer comes along.

  During the short walk in the overwhelming heat to Hanley’s front door, Valdez felt as if the years trudging behind him were about to overtake him.

  Hanley answered the door. “You’re just in time for lunch.”

  “I’m too old for this,” said Valdez, stepping through a wall of cool air.

  “Too old for lunch?” asked Hanley.

  “Not that. I mean the heat, and the drive.”

  “But this time you won’t have to drive home in the dark,” said Hanley.

  Valdez followed Hanley through the cool house to the breakfast room that overlooked the lanai and the pool on the north side of the house. The table was set for two with a frosty pitcher of iced tea in the center. Valdez was glad to see they would not be having lunch out in the heat. Maria, Hanley’s Cuban housekeeper, brought salads from the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Mr. Valdez. How was your drive?”

  “Good morning, Maria. Except for the sun, the drive was fine. I’d forgotten the reason I used to come for dinner. Now I’ll have to drive back into the setting sun.”

  “Clouds are predicted this afternoon,” said Hanley. “So perhaps you’ll be spared the sun in your face … Thank you, Maria. Give us a few minutes to finish our salads.”

  Hanley and Valdez waited until Maria went back into the kitchen and closed the door behind her before they began speaking.

  Hanley got right down to business. “Please tell me what’s new with Mr. Babe.”

  “We checked again,” said Valdez. “He definitely had a stroke. At first we thought he might have been a plant to find out what Mrs. Gia netti knows. But now we don’t have to worry about Mrs. Gianetti.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Hanley.

  “She’s dead.”

  Hanley poured glasses of iced tea and they began eating their sal ads, glancing out toward the view of the coast to the north through the lanai windows. The sun shining down through the haze made the coast disappear several estates up from Hanley’s estate. Valdez thought this was appropriate, climate change and pollution erasing the Naples estates in the distance, estates most likely owned by executives of some of the bi
ggest polluters.

  Hanley finished chewing a mouthful and put his fork down. “What’s the game?”

  “Game?” asked Valdez.

  “The details,” said Hanley. “We’re both old enough as it is. You know how I despise dragging out the fact-gathering.”

  Valdez put down his fork. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you knew.”

  “You’re my source,” said Hanley. “That’s also part of getting older, and being retired.”

  “Mrs. Gianetti slipped and fell at the facility. It’s been reported as an accident, but we’re checking into it. Apparently, so is Babe. Or at least his wife is. She’s questioned the staff about the old lady’s death.”

  “Is there any indication that Mrs. Gianetti’s extended family might have been involved?”

  “We checked the bugs on Chicago mob phones,” said Valdez. “No chatter there.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Hanley.

  “I thought you knew,” said Valdez. “We’ve had access to the fre quencies and codes for their cells phones for quite some time. The Chicago mob isn’t as sophisticated as it used to be. Low level hoods let things out for a price.”

  “Any indication she might have revealed something before she died?” asked Hanley.

  “That’s always a possibility,” said Valdez. “She might have said something to visitors, to someone on the staff, or even to Babe, since the two of them attended rehab together. As I said last time, our man has been watching and listening, but he can’t be around all the time.”

  “I thought you were going to get a backup,” said Hanley.

  “I have assigned a backup,” said Valdez, smiling as he leaned back in his chair to reach into a side pocket. He pulled out several folded sheets of paper and handed them across the table to Hanley. “She’s new from Langley, but sharp. She was able to get hold of a notebook kept by the detective’s wife, Mrs. Babe. She made a copy of the contents and got the notebook back to Mrs. Babe without her knowledge.”

  Hanley took a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. After studying the sheets of paper for several seconds, he stared at Valdez above the reading glasses. “Your office has had more time to study this than me. What do you think it means?”