A receiver being slammed down emphatically.
Another hangup.
“Ms. Ackerman, this is Alfred Parkins at Better Care Nursing Home. We regret to inform you that your mother passed away this morning. Please contact us regarding arrangements.”
That message had come in today, at ten twenty-five.
Guy hated nursing homes, and he particularly hated Better Care. On Cheyenne west of North Las Vegas Air Terminal, it was a low-slung concrete-block structure with a flat roof upon which perched dozens of noisy swamp coolers. Not so much as a flower or shrub relieved its grim high-windowed facade. Inside was worse: corridors full of vacant-eyed people being warehoused in wheelchairs; cramped rooms devoid of comforting personal touches; medicinal smells overlying the stench of filth; officious personnel who treated their charges as if they were retarded children. Maybe his next book should be about a system in trouble: a healthcare system that abused and humiliated the infirm and elderly. Get in his licks and expose the shame before he became one of its victims—
Self-interest again, darlin’.
“Be quiet.”
“What?” Rhoda asked.
He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Oh, I thought you had.”
Thank God this awful place had her sufficiently distracted to accept his denial. He didn’t want this competent and rational woman to realize the man she’d allowed to participate in her investigation frequently carried on lively conversations with his dead wife!
Mr. Alfred Parkins, director of the home and most officious of all, led them into a room containing three beds, two of them occupied by motionless shapes that huddled beneath their covers, silent and seeming not to breathe. The space Judith Ackerman had occupied was tiny: narrow hospital bed; small locker and nightstand; TV mounted high on the wall. But next to the bed was a framed charcoal drawing, a sketch of Cascada Canyon similar to the one in Chrystal’s living room. The choice of medium was appropriate, the charcoal creating a brooding aura.
They’d already spoken with Parkins in his office and learned that Judith had died of a stroke, brought on by complications of multiple sclerosis. When he asked who would be handling the funeral arrangements since “that daughter” was also deceased, Rhoda told him he would have to search for other relatives. Her reply displeased Parkins. He steepled his fingers and put on a lugubrious face. A search would take time, he said, and time was money. Couldn’t she—
No, Rhoda told him, although her department would share any information they uncovered in the course of their investigation.
Now Guy watched as she opened the locker and sorted through Judith’s scant possessions. There was a gentleness in her touch, a respectfulness that pleased him. She seemed to care about this woman whom she had never met, in much the same way she cared about the daughter she’d only once seen alive.
“What kind of a person was Mrs. Ackerman?” she asked Parkins, fingering a fringed scarf in brilliant colors shot with gold thread.
“I’m sorry?”
“What was she like?”
“She was... a patient. I didn’t have much contact with her.”
“Who did?”
“The orderlies. The nurses.”
“Her doctor?”
“She wasn’t assigned to any particular physician. They rotate.”
Guy saw Rhoda’s fingers tighten on the scarf. Angry, he thought, in the same way he was.
“She wasn’t being cared for by a specialist?” Now her voice carried a critical edge.
Parkins flushed. “This isn’t a medical center, Deputy Swift. Our resources are limited, the patients’ even more so. Besides, her condition was terminal.”
Rhoda flashed Guy a stormy look. She removed the scarf from the locker and placed it on the stripped mattress, then turned her attention to the nightstand. Guy watched her sift through its contents. Eyeglasses, paperback romance novel, lurid-covered true-crime magazine, small photograph album, loose-leaf binder. She glanced through the latter items and said to Parkins, “I’ll have to take these, as well as the drawing on the wall, as evidence. Of course, I’ll give you a receipt.”
She had, Guy knew, no jurisdiction in Las Vegas and couldn’t legally take the items; she was probably claiming them as much out of anger as need. But Parkins either didn’t know that or wasn’t concerned.
The director moved his hand in dismissal. “No receipt will be necessary. Even if we locate a relative, I doubt they’d care about them.”
Rhoda’s expression said she doubted the word “care” was used with any frequency within the walls of this institution.
Rho moved quickly across the parking lot of the nursing home, glad to be out of the wretched place. Las Vegas was making her edgy — the heat, the traffic, the flatness, the often shabby neighborhoods. Guy, who had been cut off at the door by an aggressive orderly with a wheelchair, caught up with her at the car.
“Why’d you take those things?” he asked. “You know it’s not legal.”
“I know, but I didn’t want to have to wait around for Stevens, and besides, Parkins made me so mad.”
“That’s why you took the scarf too.”
“I guess.” She waited impatiently for him to unlock the door, slipped onto the hot passenger’s seat. It burned clear through her trousers. “I knew Parkins was right: Nobody’ll care about Jude’s things. She must’ve valued the scarf highly to bring it along to the home, where she had no use for it. I couldn’t see leaving it to be thrown out or stolen by one of the staff. Somebody ought to have it to remember her by — if only me.”
As she finished speaking she realized how foolish she must sound, but Guy glanced at her with eyes full of understanding. “It was a lovely thing to do. What was in the album and the binder?”
“Handwritten poetry and pictures taken with the other families in Cascada Canyon. They prove the Ackermans were the family who were squatting in the cabin on the ridge.”
“May I see them?”
“Later. I want to get to that diner Parkins mentioned and interview Sandy Viera before she finishes her dinner break and goes back to work.” Viera was the nurse who had known Judith Ackerman the best.
The diner was only a few blocks away: a desert-motif operation decked out in fake saguaro cacti and cattle skulls displayed in wall niches. A bank of slot machines, two of them in use, stood to the right of the door, and at the lunch counter a man in cowboy boots and Levi’s hunched over a beer, figuring what looked to be odds in a well-thumbed notebook. A blast of chill air penetrated Rho’s clothing. Another thing that bothered her about Las Vegas was the constant abrupt transition from heat to cold, cold to heat.
She scanned the room for a black-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform and spotted her alone in a booth by the windows. When she and Guy approached, the woman’s eyes grew wary, but after Rho explained why they wanted to talk with her, she nodded sadly and asked them to join her.
Sandy Viera looked to be in her mid-fifties, a plump woman with a round, relatively unlined face and dangly purple earrings that looked out of place with her crisp white uniform. Her mouth drooped as Rho told her about Chrystal.
“So Chrys is gone too,” she said. “Damn! This life, you know, it really stinks sometimes.”
Rho nodded. “What can you tell me about the Ackermans? Start with Judith.”
Sandy Viera set her fork down and pushed her half-eaten salad away. “Jude, she liked to be called. From the way she talked, I could tell that she used to think she was pretty hot stuff. Wild, a poet. But the disease caught her in her mid-thirties and progressed fast. When she came to Better Care she was worn out and bitter. Angry, too, but that’s natural. And she lied a lot.”