Retirement Can Be Murder (A Jake Russo Mystery) Read online

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “So did they find anything else?”

  “No, I remember that.” She’d collected herself. Dried her eyes. “I remember that the teenagers just saw Charlotte there, lying down. And then they couldn’t wake her up. That’s what they told the police, too.”

  “What about in her home?”

  “We can’t go in there. Each resident uses different terms. Charlotte set hers so that only her daughter could enter the apartment. I told Charlotte’s daughter what happened before you got here. She seemed better off than me.”

  “OK.” He wrote it down—they’d only found Charlotte’s body on the beach. He looked at her face. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Charlotte. “Did the hospital say anything?”

  “Well, they are sure it was natural, guessing from her history. Charlotte had so many different conditions. I remember once I stopped by to ask her something and I had to use the restroom. She had even more medication than most of our other residents. Some of it was for the back pain. But some of it was for more serious conditions.”

  Mel had been speaking normally, but now she started looking down again as they entered the office. Then she started crying.

  “Are you OK?”

  “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t even know her. I don’t know any of them.”

  On the flat screen television, a commercial played above her head.

  “You knew her some.”

  “I don’t know her.” She took a tissue and wiped it against her nose.

  “And it’s OK. It’s normal.”

  “The worst part is that I think she knew. She must have known that it was her time. So she took one last walk…”

  She stopped and shook her head. Her forehead was wrinkled and she bit her lower lip. He wanted to kiss it.

  “What else Mel?”

  “She always loved the beach, you know. It reminded her of her husband.”

  “Why?”

  “He used to take driftwood. She told me this once. And he’d carve something for her from it. It sounded nice. I’m sure that’s why…”

  “Why what?”

  “I think she walked out there to die.”

  She swallowed and then stood up. She went around her desk and started taking files and straightening them out. She took the papers on her desk and filed them, but she couldn’t keep it up. She walked over to him and put her head on his shoulder. He patted her on the back and thought about what Charlotte had told him.

  “I should get going,” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I really don’t know why.” She walked away and messed with the papers again. “I should be used to it by now.”

  “It’s good you aren’t.” He walked out the door.

  From the top of the hill, he could see the edge of the beach and then the water beyond it. The police hadn’t found anything. If they had, they probably couldn’t tell him. It made sense that Charlotte would walk out. Maybe the fear had gotten to her. Maybe she had just given up and gone into the night. They said that losing the will to live could be enough. He’d been eating chocolate when it happened.

  He started walking to his car and looked down the hill one last time. Then, he looked again, closer. A large woman with thick gray hair was yelling at a man. It was the man with the red-brimmed hat, the one he’d seen outside Building B. The woman waved her arms around and yelled again. She looked like she was about to hit his hat off of his head. The man walked away quickly in Jake’s direction.

  He walked with his head turned down to the ground, the top of the hat facing toward Jake. Jake couldn’t see the man’s face, only his stooped shoulders and carefully polished shoes. When he reached the top of the hill, he looked at Jake and seemed to swallow. He looked back at the woman, who was pulling a weed out of the sidewalk. Then he tried to walk past.

  “Sir,” Jake said. “How are you? I met you earlier outside Building B. We’d thought there had been an accident in Charlotte’s room. Do you remember?”

  “I do,” he said and started to walk.

  “It was my photographer, Gary. He was locked in a battle with his camera strap.”

  “I see. And you are?”

  “Jake Russo. What’s your name?”

  “I have to be going.”

  Jake pulled out his notebook.

  “Did you know Charlotte well?”

  “I suppose so. Why?”

  “So you heard what happened to her?”

  “What?”

  “That she died last night, walking on the beach.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said and brought his hand to his chest.

  “You didn’t know she’d died? Then why didn’t you say something when I asked if you had known Charlotte well.”

  “What do you mean?” He swallowed.

  “When I asked, I used the past tense, Mr…”

  “Samuels,” the man said. “I’m sorry. I heard about it this morning.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Yes, I knew her. I was sorry to hear what happened.”

  “Were you surprised?” He pressed the pen point on the paper.

  “I should go. Please. Please let me go.”

  Jake looked past the man for a moment. The gray haired woman was holding a weed in her hand, staring up at them. She looked away when Jake’s eyes met hers. The red brim on Samuels’s hat seemed to darken, like he was sweating through it.

  “It just seemed unusual,” Jake said. “So sudden.”

  “We’re all mourning.” He tipped the hat. “It was good to meet you.”

  He ducked down and started walking again, surprisingly quickly. Jake looked back to see the gray haired woman halfway down the hill. She dropped the weed from her hand and bent down to pull another. Jake looked toward his car. Then he got out his notebook and started walking toward the woman instead.

  CHAPTER 15:

  She started talking before he even said hello.

  “You should know a few things about that man. Abram Samuels likes to put up a front.” She had a voice like a cough. Brooklyn, old Brooklyn. “Did you know his son is a hairdresser for a living? Abram will be happy to tell you about himself, but his son is living somewhere in New Jersey giving women perms for a living. Abram is a very handsome man of course. But his son is pretty.”

  When she stopped he told her his name.

  “Ech,” she said. “I’m Sheryl Goldfein.”

  Sheryl Goldfein. He remembered what Charlotte had said about Sheryl. She’d roll over you. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Charlotte, but he could say he agreed with her judgment of character. Sheryl didn’t wait for him to write down her name.

  “Where you from?”

  “Me?”

  “No, the palm tree.”

  “I live here in Sarasota. Before I came down, I was living in Long Island City—”

  “You had a place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you live in Manhattan? While you’re young?”

  “Well, I’m from Queens, and the salary is a little—”

  “Ech.” She dropped another weed from her hand. He hadn’t realized she was still holding one. “So why are you here?”

  “Did you hear about Charlotte?”

  “That she kicked it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t have enough fingers to count the relatives I’m missing. Let alone friends like Charlotte. She missed her husband anyway. Now him, he was all right.”

  “So you heard that she died?”

  “I heard. I’m sad.” She shrugged and scratched her head. “She was our fourth for a long time. We played bridge a good deal. She was always there, always very dependable. Do you put grease in your hair?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”
/>   “Your hair. It looks like a grease trap.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You know how you fold a slice of pizza, and all the grease drips off? It looks like you stood under a piece of pizza this morning.”

  “I use some product,” he said and touched his hair. Baked in the sun. Hardened.

  “I can tell.”

  “That’s not the point.” He looked back at his notebook. He’d written down “hair” unconsciously. “I don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “You just said that Charlotte was your fourth in bridge. I thought you’d stopped playing bridge with her. You kicked her out.”

  She snorted and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  “This month we stopped playing, of course. But she knew why.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time.”

  She started walking toward a bench further down the path. She shifted side to side as she walked, giving each side of the sidewalk equal pressure. He couldn’t see where she’d been finding weeds. The whole sidewalk seemed perfectly clean. But somehow she had found them. They walked toward a white bench underneath a palm tree. Sheryl talked loudly even though she seemed taxed by the effort.

  “Charlotte was an arrogant woman. She was my friend, but she could be arrogant.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you not know the word arrogant?”

  He ignored her.

  “She told me that things between you two went sour.”

  She muttered something he couldn’t hear.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that she knew why.”

  “Why then?”

  She ignored it and fired back at him.

  “Do you play bridge?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Of course not. You play videogames.”

  “I’m a little old for that.”

  “But you don’t play bridge?”

  “What did you mean when you said ‘she knew why?’”

  She ignored his question.

  “Charlotte was arrogant. Last winter, she says her daughter is a doctor. We find out she was a podiatrist!”

  “They’re doctors.”

  “Ech. Charlotte took everything she could. Even when other people needed it more…”

  She wiped her forehead.

  “Why didn’t I move to Arizona? A place with a dry heat.”

  “Please, continue.” They finally sat down on the white bench and looked at the buildings below. Jake knew he could see Charlotte’s window from there, but he wasn’t sure which one it was. Sheryl looked out to the water.

  “Once we stopped playing bridge with Charlotte, she couldn’t accept it. Things always have to be her way. That’s the reason she started protesting the community, going off on wild investigations, and trying to ruin me.”

  “She told me about that. She said you were switching the charities and that you didn’t have any information about the new one you were choosing.”

  “After the meeting,” Sheryl continued, “she went over to Abram Samuels. Abram was a gentleman, of course. But she says, ‘I’m thinking about starting my own bridge group.’ It was horrible!”

  “But you wouldn’t let her play bridge with you, right?”

  “Do you use mouthwash?”

  “What?”

  “You should consider it.” She pulled at her collar. “It’s this time of day that it gets the hottest. And what am I doing? Talking to someone from Queens.”

  “Sheryl,” he said. “You stopped letting Charlotte play bridge with you, right?”

  “True. But it lacked class for her to start rumors and bother everybody. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “So you kept her out? Why did you do it?”

  “Of course we kept her out. The way she acted…she was always immature. Always selfish. ”

  He looked at Building B again. Maybe that was Charlotte’s window, the one in the center. The sun glinted off it and made the blinds and inside invisible.

  “Sheryl, do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

  “Done what?”

  “Banned her from bridge. After what’s happened to her?”

  She paused then caught herself.

  “I wish certain things had been different.”

  Then she looked down where Jake had been looking, at Building B. She seemed to slow down. She wiped sweat from her face again, right at her cheeks, and looked out a little longer.

  “I don’t think that we caused it. Whatever happened.” Her voice had softened, from a saw to sandpaper. “I think she knew that. She knew that it was getting to be the time to go.”

  “I don’t think she did.”

  “And you knew her how long? A day?”

  “I knew her.”

  “Ech,” she said. Hard again. “It’s too normal of a thing. You’d get used to it. It’s the way things are. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I don’t feel that way.”

  She shrugged and patted out the wrinkles in her pants. She stood up, slowly.

  “I think you’ll be OK.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “Then why are you asking these questions?”

  “Why don’t you answer my questions?”

  “I never heard about you.”

  “I’ll tell you about Charlotte.”

  The pages had started sticking together, but he leafed through it all quickly. What would Thompson do? Be aggressive. Put it out there. He read over the notes. Charlotte’s threat. The end of the bridge games. The suspicious timing on the beach. The silhouette, running away. Charlotte had seemed paranoid, but there had to be something there.

  “Sheryl, I don’t think that Charlotte simply died. I think that she was murdered.”

  She sighed and barely reacted. She swallowed and looked down at Building B, where the reflected light shone back up. She breathed out slow, like she was exhaling cigarette smoke.

  “Do you know what I did?” she asked. “When I was working?”

  “No, how would I know that?”

  “I was a nurse. My husband was a cop, not a chief. A guy on the street. So I had to make money too. For a long time. I worked before we had our kids, and then when they turned twelve I went back to it. You’re from Queens?”

  He looked at the palm tree above them, its leaves drooping.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, then you know what I saw in Brooklyn. When I was working a long time ago, it wasn’t like it is now. It was different. I saw all the kids who were shot up, all the junkies, you know, all that.”

  “OK.” He wasn’t writing, just listening.

  “And you know, some black kid would get shot. And he dies. And then the mother would come in. Some of them were quiet. But a lot of them, they come in yelling about the doctor killing their babies. Or about malpractice, if they knew what malpractice was.”

  “What did you do?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “It got fixed. But I always noticed that those people were the ones who were the angriest. They were the ones looking for somebody to blame for their children getting shot or overdosing. The other patients’ families—a lot of them poor, too—they never yelled about that. It was always the parents of kids in gangs, or junkies.”

  “Right.”

  “They thought they could make up for what they had let their kids do. They thought they could make up for being a bad parent by yelling about malpractice or a bad doctor. But they couldn’t.”

  “I guess not.”

  “They couldn’t. The kid was gone. But these people couldn’t understand that the kid was just gone. That was it. You can’t earn extra points.”

  She looked at him and waited. He had to be aggressive.

  “Sheryl, this is different than your patients. I may not have known Charlotte.” He thought for a second. “But I can still believe in Charlotte. And I’m not stoppi
ng. Your story isn’t going to trick me into quitting. Maybe I’ll find nothing. But I’m going to look—even if you won’t help me.”

  “Have it how you want it.”

  She rose and began walking down the hill. She walked slowly, spreading her stride across the sidewalk, scanning in between the cracks. Then she bent down. The sidewalk had appeared perfectly maintained. But she found a weed and pulled it out.

  CHAPTER 16:

  The next day, Kaylie knocked at his door. This time he was wearing pants that fit.

  He’d been trying to learn more about Sunset Cove. At the same time, he had to schedule times to see different banquet spaces—he made an appointment for the next day with Jerry Rubenstein at the Palmstead. He’d write a little about good times and good friends. Maybe pad it with some stats about social gatherings and cardiac health. The daily grind.

  He answered the door and Kaylie was smiling. It was neighborly. She had on the same outfit as before, but different colors. A blue t-shirt and shorts, still barefoot. She walked past him and inside.

  “I’ve come for the proverbial cup of sugar.” She had a measuring cup and a smirk.

  “How are you?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “I try not to use sugar.”

  “Oh.” She cringed. “Your little diet.”

  “I just don’t cook.”

  “Right. I was also wondering if you knew when our rent is due.”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Oh. Well. I wanted sugar too.”

  “Sorry. I’m sure the building manager will understand.”

  She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs. She pointed her toes at the floor.

  “Were you working?”

  “I was. Would you like water?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He came in from the kitchen with a glass for himself.

  “I’m sorry, I checked. I don’t have sugar.”

  “What about flour?” she said and tilted her head.

  “What are you making?”

  “I’m just trying to squeeze you dry.”

  “I see.”

  “What were you working on?”

  “Just this thing.”

  “That’s descriptive. You really must be a writer.” She yawned and stretched. He looked at his water glass instead of her.

  “My editor wants me to write something about banquet spaces.”