Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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