Ten
The Asp stared down at the old man whom he had knocked unconscious, as the man lay faceup on the dim corridor’s floor.
Gray haired and mustachioed, the man was dressed just as a film cowboy of the Wild West would dress. He wore ornate leather boots, blue jeans, and a wide-brimmed hat, which now rocked on its crown alongside his head. All that was missing was a holstered six-shooter on the man’s hip.
The Asp sprang back into the old woman’s room, held his palm above her nose and mouth, and felt the faintest respiration.
He gently pinched her nose with the fingers of his right hand, while he pressed his left palm across her mouth.
She was so frail that she barely stirred. It was over in seconds, though it felt like minutes. He wiped her face with his handkerchief, then turned to leave.
“Help!” The old cowboy on the corridor floor called out.
Before the old man could stir, the Asp stepped to him and returned him to unconsciousness with another head kick.
Fast footsteps approached from the stairwell up which the Asp had climbed. More footsteps sounded from the corridor’s opposite end, around a corner. His escape routes were blocked, and within seconds, he would be seen.
He stepped across the hallway, entered the linen closet in front of which the cart had stood, then pulled the closet’s door shut behind himself.
In the corridor, separated from him only by the unlocked door’s thickness, a pair of excited voices muttered, and he heard one voice phone for emergency assistance. Moments later they were joined by a third voice, female.
* * *
Ten minutes later the Asp remained standing in the closet’s darkness. The thick parka already made him overwarm. His heart pounded, while the aromas of laundry soap and starch mingled in his nostrils.
He rubbed his temple, and winced at the tender lump already swelling there, due to the blow the old man had landed with the heavy carton he carried. If the Asp’s older brother were here, he would mock his baby brother’s incompetence.
The Asp closed his eyes in the darkness. Again he was a child, playing hide-and-seek in the sweltering summer heat, in the laundry and kitchen building behind the Zamalek house. Only the knife, now held ready in his hand, and the consequences if he were discovered, had changed.
A fourth voice sounded in the corridor, this one accompanied by occasional static and bursts of conversation. These, the Asp deduced, came from a policeman’s radio.
At the sound, hair rose on the Asp’s neck. Just as outside the filling station in Denver, he was instants away from confronting an adversary who outgunned him.
The fourth voice said, “Well, Frank Luck. I haven’t seen you out cold, intoxicated, on a floor in three whole months.”
The cowboy’s voice said, “Dammit, Cody! That hippie provocateur—”
“Frank, he was a Democrat from New Jersey.”
“That’s what I said. And he coldcocked me.”
“The bartender said you swung first. You know, an Eagle County Sheriff’s Deputy has more significant miscreants to interrogate on Saturday nights than you.”
“Did you see him?”
“Him? What I see is a drunk cowboy passed out on the floor. In an old folks’ home. At two thirty in the morning. You okay, Frank?”
“Is she okay?”
One of the other voices said, “If he’s talking about the woman in room two thirty-six, she’s dead.”
The Asp heard sounds of a scuffle.
The cowboy roared, “That son of a bitch!”
“Whoa, Frank! Lie back down. You smell like a brewery, and you had a fall. Your pupils are dilated like you’ve been concussed. A doctor probably should look you over. I expect they’ll keep you overnight for observation.”
“Doctor my ass! I’m fine.”
“Okay. We’ll see. Now, what happened? Start at the beginning.”
“The beginning? I drove into town for Saturday dinner, like always. Had a beer.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe I had several. There’s no law against walking while under the influence.”
“True.”
Luck said, “After closing time, I walked over here to have a couple more beers with Rosie Martinez. Her kids sold the ranch after Carlito died. Then they parked her in this place four months ago. They never come to see her. So I come up once a week, after the bars close, and we talk.”
The deputy said, “Hold up, Frank. What did you mean when you asked whether I saw a son of a bitch?”
Silence.
English was not the Asp’s first language, but the pause between question and answer struck him as abnormal, and no doubt struck the policeman the same way.
Before Luck the Cowboy answered, murmurs, and the sound of shuffling feet, rose in the hallway. Undoubtedly the commotion had awakened other residents.
A female voice quavered. “Frankie! Madre de Dios!”
The old cowboy said, “Rosie?”
The policeman raised his voice, “You in there! Leave the decedent in the bed for a minute, and come out here.”
“Yes, Deputy?” It was a different voice.
“If this lady standing beside me is Frank’s friend Rosie Martinez, who’s the lady in the bed there?”
“Eleanor Love. Like the card on the wall beside her door says.”
The deputy asked, “You were the first one on the scene?”
“Yep. I’m the senior night attendant. I heard somebody yell for help. When I got here, this gentleman was flat on his back on the floor, right where he is now. Out cold. The six pack was on one side of him, and his hat on the other. Right where they are now. He’s not one of our residents, so I called 9-1-1. And here you are.”
“You didn’t see anybody else?”
“Just the other night staff, when they showed up.”
The policeman said, “Tell me about this Eleanor Love.”
“Not much to tell. I didn’t realize she had passed away until after I called for you.”
“You don’t seem shook up about it.”
“Bristlecone’s not a regulated nursing home. But it’s not a seniors’ health club either. She was listed as ninety-seven years old, when she moved in three months ago. She had one bad leg. But she could walk. She could attend to her own bodily functions. She was lucid enough to take care of herself, and order her meals. Our residents have to be able to do all that. But she went downhill. That’s basically the only direction our residents go.”
“Then why was she still here?”
“She probably wouldn’t have been here after noon tomorrow. A doctor visits all the residents here, once a week. Her dementia had gotten worse lately. She just speaks—used to speak—gibberish, lately. We expected she’d go any time. Or the physician would send her out for hospitalization tomorrow. If she lasted that long.”
“Any reason to think she was helped along?”
“No! No. I don’t mean to sound like an asshole. But death is the rule here, not the exception. Our residents don’t live here because they enjoy the mountain air. Mountain air’s thin, and their lungs are generally shot. They live here because it’s close to where they’ve lived all their lives. And because it’s cheap, compared to full-on senior care.”
The policeman said, “Had she been ill?”
The attendant said, “Ms. Love had had bouts of pulmonary edema—fluid buildup in the lungs. That’s common here. She had a weak heart. That’s common here, too. So FPE—Flash Pulmonary Edema—a sudden recurrence—certainly could’ve finished her. There’s no sign she did anything but stop breathing in her sleep.” The voice paused.
The Asp slightly relaxed his grip on his knife.
Perhaps his plan had not gone entirely awry.
The materials the Sheik had provided only gave the old woman’s address.
That this place had proved so soft a target had been a bonus. He had expected she would neither help him, nor put up a fight. He had come only to tie up a loose end.
It was now obvious that coming here, to silence her, had been an unnecessary blunder, and stupid. But it now appeared likely he would get away with it. It reaffirmed God’s blessing on the Asp’s mission.
In the corridor, the attendant spoke. “Deputy, you can’t be thinking Frank, here—?”
The policeman said, “Wait. You know Frank?”
The attendant said, “Sure. I work this shift every Saturday. Frank visits Rosie every Saturday night, after the bars close. The two of them share a couple beers and chitchat. It’s the highlight of Rosie’s week.”
“2:00 a.m. is visiting hours?”
The attendant said, “Official visiting hours end at 8:00 p.m. But our residents don’t generally have the kind of family who visit at all. We don’t lock the door, because somebody’s usually on the front desk after eight, anyway.”
“Usually?”
“The desk person’s also supposed to do chores. Like empty the public area trash cans, and walk around the floors every couple hours. I mean, nobody sneaks in to a place like this. We keep most of the residents’ valuables, and all the meds, locked up.”
“You have a security camera on that front door?”
“No. The only security camera we have covers the safe closet on the lower level. That’s where the valuables and the meds are locked up.”
“Don’t scrub that camera’s record.”
“Sure. We’ll keep it.”
“No other cameras?”
“Nope. Like I said.”
The deputy said, “None of that explains why Frank is lying here in front of Eleanor Love’s room, if he was coming to see Rosie Martinez.”
The attendant said, “This is room two thirty-six. Rosie’s room is three thirty-six. Right above this room. It’s an easy mistake. The floors look alike. I’ve done it myself.”
Another voice, young and female, said, “Sir, do we have to shut this area off or something?”
The deputy said, “There’s no evidence of trauma or suicide. She wasn’t in the custody of law enforcement, or of a public institution. She was not in good health?”
The male voice said, “Like I told you, she was dying.”
“And she’d been seen by your doctor here within the last thirty days?”
“Absolutely. And the doctor’s due to visit again five hours from now, around breakfast time.”
“Next of kin?”
“None listed. Her bill auto-payed out of her own bank account. She never had visitors.”
“That checks all the statutory boxes I’m responsible for. Cause of death, and a decision whether to notify the county coroner, will be up to your doctor, when he gets here today. Anything beyond that will be up to the Eagle County District Attorney’s Office.” The deputy paused, then said, “Except for you, Frank. You never answered my question about whether I saw some son of a bitch.”
Frank the Cowboy said, “Now that I think on it, Cody, I don’t really remember. I think you and this fella got it right. I just happened to count floors wrong. Then I slipped on the floor, and picked a bad place to take a nap.”
There was another silence, then the deputy said, “Nothing here says ‘crime scene’ to me. Unless you’re lodging a complaint about Frank trespassing?”
“He wasn’t, really. He was just a late guest.”
The deputy said, “Alright.”
The Cowboy said, “Then I can go home?”
The deputy said, “In your shape? Only if you walk. I’ll give you a lift out to your place.”
“I suppose you’re confiscating my beer? As evidence?”
“Frank, Eagle County doesn’t want your beer. Or your guns. Or your health plan. We just want you to go home, and sleep it off. Without another fistfight over the Second Amendment.”
The Asp realized that he was sweating, and he was sweating because of the parka he wore in the confined space. He felt the parka’s pocket, found it empty, and remembered. The steel case that he had kicked under the linen cart! Evidence! When it was discovered, the tidy story would unravel.
* * *
Twenty minutes later the corridor beyond the door had been silent for five minutes. The Asp cracked the linen closet’s door and, after the closet’s darkness, squinted against even the corridor’s subdued night lighting. The only sounds were, once again, muffled snores.
The policeman was gone, presumably with the drunken cowboy in tow. The other doors along the again empty corridor were closed.
He opened the door of his hiding place, stepped into the corridor. Opposite the linen closet the door to the old woman’s room had been closed.
He crept into the room’s darkness, touched the woman’s emaciated form, now covered head to foot by a sheet, and confirmed it was a corpse’s familiar dead cold.
He returned to the linen cart. It remained exactly at the angle that he recalled it had been. He crouched, and felt beneath the cart for the steel case. When his fingers touched only floor tile, he flattened himself on his belly and peered into the inky shadow beneath the cart, then stood and moved the cart aside. Nothing remained on the floor space that the cart had covered.
He tiptoed back into the old woman’s room, searched the room’s drawers and closet, and found only a hairbrush, dentures, and clothing.
Then he padded to the staircase, and stood hands on hips on the landing, in the stairwell’s dark silence, while he evaluated the new situation.
The steel case’s loss, itself, was trivial. Only some of its contents mattered, and those remained safely in his possession. The old woman’s silence was now guaranteed.
The sole problem remaining from the night’s events was the fact that the drunken cowboy had seen his face, and possibly now possessed the steel case. Both circumstances jeopardized the Asp’s greatest asset, his anonymity.
The Asp doubted that the Cowboy had genuinely forgotten what had happened, as he had told the policeman. However pleasant and gullible American police seemed, the Asp suspected that the Cowboy had his own reasons for withholding his recollection of their encounter.
The Cowboy unquestionably knew that the case had fallen on the floor during their scuffle. From his vantage, supine, on the floor, a mere turn of his head would have allowed him to see the case, although it remained out of sight of the policeman and the others. From his position on the floor, the Cowboy could easily have swept the case from beneath the cart, then concealed it on his person, while the policeman and employees conversed.
And the Cowboy had a reason to do so, because the case would unravel his denial if discovered, but would corroborate his tale of a phantom intruder, if in the future he chose to reveal the truth.
The Asp left the building, walked back to the spot where he had parked the Expedition, then sat in the driver’s seat thumbing through the internet. Within seven minutes his inquiries led him to an address for one, and only one, Frank Luck, age sixty-two, of Eagle County, Colorado.
The address was barely fifteen minutes’ drive from the Expedition’s current location, and the satellite view of the small house and outbuildings among evergreens showed the nearest neighboring residence was a good half mile from it.
The Asp had no way of knowing how long it might take until the policeman delivered Luck to his home, then left him alone to sleep off his drunkenness. But the Asp was sure the policeman had other work to do.
A police encounter, no matter how unlikely, was too great a risk. To maximize the time buffer between the policeman’s departure from Luck’s residence and the Asp’s own arrival, the Asp decided that thirty minutes of darkness would offer all the cover he needed.
He had now been awake, and under intense physical and mental stress, for nearly twenty-two hours. Those twenty-two hours had immeasurably changed the odds in his favor, once the matter of Frank Luck, and the missing steel case, was resolved.
The Asp set an alarm on his phone that would allow him to sleep, wake, drive, and arrive at Frank Luck’s residence thirty minutes before local sunrise. Then he reclined the car’s seat, and drifted off.