Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split (11 page)

“How awful,” Cheryl said, shaking her head. “But Alzheimer’s wouldn’t make somebody like Mel turn really violent, would it? He’s always been such a sweet old guy. You don’t think he did it—do you?”

“No,” Truman said. “I’ve known Mel a lot of years. He couldn’t do what the murderer did, slash that poor girl’s throat. But who knows what Alzheimer’s has been doing to his mind?”

“Another beer?” Cheryl asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Souchak,” Truman said suddenly. “No thanks.”

“What?” Cheryl was totally confused now.

“Steve Souchak,” Truman said. “That was the kid’s name. His old man ran for county commissioner that year. He was a real horse’s ass.”

“You’re amazing,” Cheryl said, giving him a hug. “I couldn’t have come up with that guy’s name in a million years. Not if you paid me.”

“Souchak,” her father repeated. “Maybe I’m not so senile after all.”

The room was stifling, it smelled of talcum powder and mothballs and medicine. Pearl gestured toward the bed. Mel lay on his side, legs curled to his chin, his eyes blinking rapidly. “He’s been like that all day. I’ve tried to talk to him, tried to get him to eat, but he just blinks his eyes that way.”

Truman tried not to look shocked at Mel’s runaway decline.

“Has he eaten at all?”

Pearl bit her lip. “Jackleen, she’s such a sweet girl, she brought up a tray. All his favorites. Mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, bread pudding. I managed to get him sitting up, and I put the tray on his lap. But, Truman, it was as though he’d never seen a fork before.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, despite the heat in the room. “He’s never been this way before.” She paused. “TK, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“How about I sit with him for a while? You’ve been cooped up in this room all day.”

“No,” she said quickly, “I couldn’t leave him.”

“Pearl,” he said, trying to sound stern. “He’ll be all right. If he wakes up, I’ll talk to him. We’ll talk baseball.

Go on now, get outta here. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten either.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I’d forgotten about food. I’ve been so worried …”

“Go on,” Truman said, giving her a tiny push. “I don’t want to see you for at least an hour.”

When she was gone, Truman took off his cardigan and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He pulled a chair up beside Mel’s bed. The patient had turned over and was facing the wall, not stirring.

Truman looked around for something to read. He found a neatly folded copy of the Sunday paper.

“Good,” he said aloud. He’d only had time to read the local news earlier in the day. Now he took the front section and started reading, methodically, cover to cover, the way he’d read papers his whole life. When he’d been with the AP he’d read half a dozen papers a day, every day. The
St. Petersburg Times
, of course, plus the
Miami Herald
, and the
Orlando Sentinel
. Plus
the New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and the
Wall Street Journal
. Most of the time, he’d see bylines by an old friend or former colleague. In those days newspaper journalism was a small world. Everybody knew everybody else or had worked with them at a smaller paper along the way. Now, though, he read only the one paper, and rarely saw a name he recognized. Newspapering was a young man’s game now.

He heard the sheets rustling, looked over, and saw Mel sit up, surprised, as though he were Rip van Winkle waking up twenty years later.

“Hiya, Mel,” Truman said quietly. “Pearl just stepped out to get a little supper. I got the sports section here. You wanna take a look?”

Mel blinked. In his thin cotton pajama top, with his bony sternum showing, he looked like an undersized plucked chicken. “How’d the Bucs do last night?”

Taken aback, Truman had to think about it for a moment. It was as if somebody had suddenly turned the light back on inside his friend’s head. He wanted to run from the room, call Pearl, tell her, “Hey, look, Mel’s okay. He’s back. He’s gonna be okay.”

Instead, he opened the sports section to an inside page, took his reading glasses out of his breast pocket, put them on, and started scanning. “Lemme check the box scores,” he said. “I didn’t catch the news last night.”

“That colored kid, Clemente,” Mel said, “he’s something else, ain’t he? I think he’s gonna be the greatest right fielder ever, best arm in baseball, hits the ball anywhere he wants. He makes Musial look like a sandlot chump. Where’d you say Pearl went?”

Mel was back all right, Truman realized. Back before his favorite ballplayer died in that 1972 plane crash. He’d heard somewhere that Alzheimer’s affected short-term memory. How short term, he didn’t know. Did Mel remember anything of last night or yesterday?

He chose his words carefully. “Pearl just went for a bite to eat. You’ve been sleeping most of the day. She’s been real worried about you, pal, you not eating and all.”

“The hell you say,” Mel said, snorting. “She won’t give me any food. I told her I was hungry, but she hid the food. I think she ate it all.”

“No, Mel,” Truman said, alarmed. “Pearl wouldn’t do that.”

He brought the tray over to the bed. “Look. Jackleen sent up some lunch. She’s been real worried about you too.”

Through a mouthful of pudding, “Jackleen?”

“The waitress in the dining room,” Truman said. “The girl who always takes good care of us. She went to the track with us last night. Remember?”

Mel wrinkled his brow, then picked up a roll and started buttering it. “The track? I was at a ball game last night. Clemente hit a triple offa Gibson. I won twenty bucks in the office pool.”

“Right,” Truman said, depressed. “You want a cup of coffee?”

By the time Pearl came back, ten minutes later, Mel had drifted off to sleep again.

“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed. “He never woke up?”

“Sure,” Truman said, a little too heartily. “He woke up, talked a little bit about the Pirates, even ate some supper.”

“Thank God,” Pearl said. She looked at her wristwatch. “You better get going to that meeting or all the refreshments will be gone.”

“I’m not going,” Truman said. “If this outfit has already bought the hotel, there’s nothing we can do.”

“You’ve got to go,” Pearl said, her voice rising. “We’ve got to do something. Nobody here can afford to pay the prices they’ll be asking. Where’ll we all go?”

Truman pulled the classified section out of the Sunday paper. “I was going to take this and start calling the apartment for rent ads. Face it, Pearl, it’s too late. They had painters in here yesterday. That means the sale is final.”

She snatched the classifieds away from Truman, trembling with anger and frustration. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Her anger took Truman by surprise. “You’ve got a home in Pittsburgh, Pearl. It’s not as though you lived here year-round, like me and Ollie.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve talked to my lawyer up home. I’m going to have to sell the house to pay for Mel’s nursing-home fees and medical care.”

“Sell it? Won’t the insurance take care of everything? What about Medicare?”

“Medicare doesn’t cover Alzheimer’s,” she said bitterly. “My lawyer thinks the house should bring enough money to cover the nursing-home bills, but just barely. I can’t afford to live anyplace else, TK.”

She stood there with her arms folded across her chest, glaring, waiting for him to say something.

“I’ll go,” he said reluctantly. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

The meeting was already in progress.

Arch Barchie stood at the front of the room, frowning down at a clipboard. At least twenty people were seated side by side in folding chairs. Cookie Jeffcote, the hotel’s leasing agent, was seated in the corner, like a child being punished.

Truman slid into an empty chair in the back row.

An elbow dug into his side. “You’re late.”

It was Jackleen. She was still in her waitress uniform.

“What are you doing here?” Truman whispered.

“You ain’t heard? Those church folks say they’re gonna close up the dining room. Make it into an infirmary or something. It ain’t much of a job, I know, but it’s all I got, and if I can, I need to hang on to it.”

Truman nodded. Up until now he’d thought of the Fountain of Youth buyout as an inconvenience. He’d have to move, rent an apartment somewhere else. The others in the room, like Ollie and Jackie and now Pearl, didn’t have the options he had. Not that he had many.

“What’s going on?” he whispered.

“I guess somebody appointed Mr. Barchie head man in charge. ‘Cause he used to be an accountant probably. He was just saying how he called the Mandelbaums, even sent ‘em a registered letter, asking ‘em to come to the meeting.”

“Obviously they declined,” Truman said dryly.

“Cowards,” Jackie said. “Instead, they sent her,” she said, glaring at Cookie. “Mr. Barchie says she’s from the new management.”

“Now then,” Barchie said, looking down at his notes. “The hotel has had an interesting history, which I’d like to share with you all before we begin. It was designed by the local architect Lowell Randolph in 1912, and constructed over the years 1912 to 1914, one of several hotels built downtown by the same firm. Early on the hotel was called the McLatchey, after the pioneer Florida family that used to own—”

“How much?” Sonya Hoffmayer’s frizzy red head bobbed up from the crowd. She stalked up to Cookie Jeffcote, who looked alarmed at her advance.

“How much are we gonna have to pay?” Mrs. Hoffmayer repeated, pursing her Kewpie-doll-painted red lips.

“Thought she was part of the family,” Jackie said, smirking. “Don’t look like they’re cutting her a discount, does it?”

“We’ll get to that, Sonya,” Barchie said, tugging nervously at his bow tie. “Now, as I was saying, the hotel was one of the earliest buildings in Florida to have steam heat and private tiled baths—”

“Ask that woman how much,” Mrs. Hoffmayer insisted. “She’s working for that preacher fella now. She ought to know.”

“Yeah, Arch,” came a high-pitched voice from the front. “Skip that other crap. We wanna know how much.”

It was Ollie. He stood on his chair in order to be seen.

Arch Barchie shrugged. He could ignore Sonya Hoffmayer, but Ollie Zorn was a different matter. He turned to Cookie. “Miss Jeffcote?”

Cookie licked her lips and tugged at her short white skirt. She stood up and approached the microphone.

“Well,” she said, looking around for an ally but seeing none. “Uh, Reverend Newby and the church elders have come up with a preliminary pricing schedule. Nothing is really set yet, so it’s too early—”

“How much?”

Rosemary Pickett, the plumper of the Pickett girls, was standing now. “My sister and I have a small trust fund. We need to know how much our unit will cost so we can start planning.”

Verbena Pickett stood up beside her twin. She was dressed in a blue flowered shift that was identical to her sister’s pink one. “That’s right,” she said shrilly. “Papa was very conservative in his investments.”

Cookie sensed that she was outnumbered. She ran her finger down the price chart Reverend Newby had drawn up and smiled brightly.

“It’s actually a very affordable plan. For instance, units start at sixteen thousand five hundred dollars and cap at eighty thousand for a deluxe St. Peter’s penthouse unit.”

The room was quiet for a moment while the residents took it all in.

“What penthouse units?”

Truman found himself standing, addressing Cookie Jeffcote. “The only thing on the top of this building are six one-bedroom apartments. There aren’t any three-bedroom penthouses here.”

Cookie frowned, trying to remember the name of the wiry man with the strawberry-blond eyebrows. Kicklighter, she thought his name was. Recently widowed. Fourth-floor front. Troublemaker.

“Now that’s the exciting part of the plan,” she said. “The church will build two luxury units on that top floor. The St. Peter’s units will have top-of-the-line amenities with European kitchens, garden baths, private entrance halls, and key-operated elevators—”

“Eighty thousand dollars!” Sonya Hoffmayer’s face was an alarming shade of purple. “I live on the top floor. What happens to me?”

Cookie frowned. The Mandelbaums had cosseted the old lady for years. Too bad for her that she came from the poor side of the family tree.

“All former Fountain of Youth residents will have an opportunity to purchase units,” she said. “I’m sure one of the smaller units on the lower floors, say, one of our St. Luke efficiency units, which will be sixteen thousand five hundred dollars, would suit you perfectly, Mrs. Hoffmayer.”

Ollie was jumping up and down on his metal folding chair. “Sixteen thousand five hundred for an eight-by-ten room with a toilet, a sink, and a view of the alley? You’re nuts, lady. And you can tell that goddamn preacher he’s nuts too. We ain’t paying. And we ain’t moving out, either. Are we?”