“You got a lot of goddamned explaining to do, Bill. I’m going to let you stand up, walk over and sit you in a chair here. Then you’re going to tell me what I want to know. You try to fight me and I’ll kick your balls all the way to the lake. Got that?”
“I want my lawyer and I didn’t do it.”
“Yeah, yeah, now stand up real slow and get your ass into this chair. Tim, maybe you should secure this haunted house before Billy tells us everything he hasn’t done.”
Hess, with the janitor’s key ring in one hand, started with the left hallway. The place smelled like a portable outhouse that has been out in the sun a long time. The hornets droned. He came to a door on his right and looked through the window. He could see the wrought-iron grating that protected the glass from the inside. Beyond the grating was a small room lit by a fluorescent shop lamp affixed high on one wall. A small twisted person lay upon the bed, half covered in the sheets. Sharp bones and skin, weak light and shadow. Mouth open, no sound. The person blinked. Hess saw the excrement on the floor around a hole cut directly into the wood. A clipboard hung from a nail outside the door listed the patient as J. Orsino. The hornets buzzed in and out, clung to the walls, pivoted on the light fixture.
The next room down held a young woman laughing. All Hess could see of her was her backside, the honey-colored hair and the arms of the gray straitjacket criss-crossed around her waist. Her bed was pulled into the middle of the room and she sat on the far side of it, facing the wall, her head bowed like she was crying or thinking. Laughing. There was an upturned pot on the floor beside her bed, food stuck to the bottom and sides, hornets flickering on the red enamel. Beside that a kitchen tub that appeared half full of water.
The last room off this hallway held a man who lay atop his bed and stared at the ceiling. The chart said B. Schuster.
Hess tried to breathe deeply but it was hard to inhale the foul air without tasting it all the way down. He retraced his steps to the entry room and went down the hallway to his right. In one room was a disfigured boy; the other was empty.
Upstairs. The unemphatic moaning was an adolescent girl who looked out at Hess from under the covers of her bed. When she saw him she stopped and smiled.
Upstairs on the third level Hess found a spacious room that served as an office. It was well lit. An air conditioner groaned steadily, cutting the temperature and the stench. There was a desk along one wall, one chair and six tall file cabinets. There was one framed picture on the desk — a young couple with a small boy — one of the small black-and-whites popular in the fifties, from which era Hess had several of himself. He recognized neither the people nor the landscape.
He found the business license and county permit for the Rose Garden Home — “an intensive care and hospice” facility. The owner operator was a woman — Helena Spurlea. She’d been in business for eleven years. The small photograph on her county permit showed a stubborn-faced woman with dark bangs and unhappy eyes. She looked like the woman in the little black-and-white, forty years older.
They both looked at him when he walked in. Merci had pulled up two chairs to face Wayne, backs forward. She sat with her arms on the wood, and a mildly amused expression on her face.
“Billy’s decided he doesn’t need his lawyer right now. We’re going to have a little chat, let him go if that’s what seems right. Sound good?”
Hess got the cue. “I wouldn’t let that sonofabitch go if I had a gun to my head.”
Merci sighed, looked at William Wayne. “This is Tim, by the way. He eats chicken heads for breakfast, but he’s an okay guy.”
Hess opened his mouth and slowly bit down on his thumb.
Wayne stared at him from what looked to be a wholly exclusive universe. Then he turned to Merci again. “Maybe I could just talk to you.”
“That mean Tim can look around a littler?”
“It’s the doctor’s place.”
“But you’re in charge.”
“I am in charge.”
“Let him look around, and we can get this over with. Get all of us back to what we were doing.”
“I was feeding 227. I’m in charge when she’s gone.”
“I want to hear about that. Tim, maybe you should take a tour.”
Hess studied William Wayne as he backed out of the room.
“Okay, Billy,” said Merci. “Now what’s the deal with the Porti-Boy?”
Billy giggled. “What’s that?”
The file cabinets in the upstairs office contained patient records. William J. Wayne was a twenty-three-year old native of Riverside, born to an alcohol and methedrine-dependent mother. He was born with “substantial” mental retardation and his developmental age was estimated to be eleven. Hess noted that he was capable of writing his name, which looked like something a first grader might produce, the letters put together one line at a time. There was no mention of any crime in Wayne’s file, sexual or otherwise. Parents long divorced, mother in Beaumont, father’s LKA Grant’s Pass, Oregon. Wayne’s mother apparently signed over her state checks to the Rose Garden Home, in return for the care her son received: $388 per month. Hess made notes.
He got Bart Young’s home phone number out of his blue notebook and used the desk phone to dial it. Young told him that the method of payment on William Wayne’s Porti-Boy was a money order, if he remembered correctly. He could confirm in the morning. He also said they usually used UPS for deliveries in the western states. Hess then called Brighton at home, who said he could get UPS Security at this hour. Five minutes later the phone on Helena Spurlea’s desk rang. Hess spent the next minutes explaining his needs to the UPS regional security director, who said he would fax a signed delivery receipt to the Sheriff Department first thing in the morning. Hess thanked him and hung up.
He called for a law enforcement DMV run on Helena Spurlea: 1992 Cadillac Seville and 1996 Chevy panel van. Three points on her driving record. He wrote down the plate numbers. Her CDL was current and a fax of it and her record was on its way to the Sheriff’s Department Homicide Detail, attention Tim Hess. The van, he thought: where is it?
He pulled out the bottom file cabinet drawer and fingered his way through the folders. Cancelled checks. Invoices. Receipts for expenses. Handwritten notes. He pulled one at random: the expected payments for mortgage and utilities, staples and medications, vehicle maintenance, repairs of appliances, labor costs for landscape, painting, cleaning. Some unexpected expenses, too: $956 for H. Spurlea, round trip travel from LAX to Dallas to Brownsville, Texas, in the fall of 1998; payment of $370 to New West Farms in nearby Temecula for “ostrich and emu products” in 1997; regular monthly payments of $875 to the Schaff Management Group of Newport Beach for “storage” and $585 to one Wheeler Greenfield of Lake Elsinore for “rent.” There was a $1,235 payment to Inland Glass for “wall glass installation” back in 1997, which Hess found odd because he’d not seen a single mirrored wall in the Rose Garden Home so far.
Lots of outlay, thought Hess. She makes some money in this hellhole. Enough to buy “emu and ostrich products” to feed her patients. And why so much for “storage”? What’s she storing — cows?
More scribbles into his blue notebook, Hess’s fingers feeling thick and unwilling, his sense of disgust growing.
In the receivable files, Hess found a dizzying labyrinth of private payments, insurance reimbursements, and state, county and federal payouts. Some were payable to individual patients, some to family, some to Helena Spurlea, some to the Rose Garden Home. Between the discharged, the transferred, the institutionalized and the deceased it was impossible for Hess to account for the income per patient. Even his cursory inspection revealed that one A. Bohanan had expired in March of 1996 and received monthly medical insurance payments of $588 through September of the same year, payable to the Rose Garden Home. A similar benefits-for-the-dead history for M.A. Salott.