Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

we’d like to see Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.
    “You were here earlier, weren’t you?”
    “We were,” I said. “Dorothy’s an old friend.”
    “You mean,” said Trent, “Dorothy is old and you are friends, not that you’ve been friends a long time.”
    Trent looked at Ames.
    “We’re friends,” he said.
    “Well,” said Trent. “That’s up to Dorothy, but I believe she is sleeping, afternoon nap. We don’t like to
wake our residents up when they’re napping. You understand?”
    “Perfectly,” I said.
    Trent looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to get to a meeting. Look, I know about Dorothy’s … mistake, delusion, dream. She’s been telling everyone, the residents, nurses, even the dining room staff about the supposed murder. No one was murdered. Dorothy has, let’s see how I can put this, Dorothy has an active imagination. Her husband was a poet.”
    I didn’t see how Dorothy’s husband being a poet had anything to do with her having an imagination, but I just nodded.
    He was looking at Ames again when he said, “If the time comes when you’re inquisitive about assisted living …”
    I didn’t give him any help.
    “Father? Uncle?” he tried.
    “Mr. McKinney is my friend,” I said.
    Ames wasn’t smiling. Ames smiled almost as little as I did and I never smiled.
    “Sorry,” said Trent. “I just thought …”
    “You boning me?” Ames said evenly.
    “Boning you?” repeated Trent with a smile.
    “Playing with me,” he said.
    “I wouldn’t play with my friend,” I said, recognizing the look in Ames’s gray eyes.
    In a few seconds if Trent didn’t leave or we didn’t back out, I was reasonably sure Ames would find a way to make the mustached manager of the Seaside suffer.
    “Let’s go,” I said, putting a hand on Ames’s sleeve.
    “Dorothy doesn’t get many visitors,” Trent said, folding his hands in front of him. “Please come back to visit.”
    In the parking lot we got into the car. I backed out
of the space and turned down the road past the pond, where two ducks floated.
    “He was boning me,” Ames said.
    “He was,” I agreed.
    Silence again as we drove south on Beneva and turned at Webber, heading for Tamiami Trail.
    “We’re goin’ back,” he said, looking straight ahead.
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    I looked at the clock on the dashboard.
    “About two in the morning,” I said. “Suit you?”
    “Suits me just fine,” he said.
    I drove Ames to the Texas Bar & Grille, and said I’d pick him up at one-thirty in the morning. That suited him fine too.
    Then I headed for El Tacito, the Mexican restaurant where Arnoldo Robles, the man who had witnessed Kyle McClory’s death, worked. El Tacito is in a shopping mall at Fruitville and Lime. I found a parking space four doors down from the restaurant in front of a dollar discount store.
    I had a friend, James Hahn, back in Chicago. He was an ex-cop who got a PhD in psychic studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He claimed that he could conjure up parking spaces, that by simply concentrating, envisioning and believing, he could make a space available when he arrived where we were going. I tried him on it a couple of times. It seemed to work for him. It never worked for me.
    I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in the miracles of the Bible. I’d like to. I’d like to believe that my wife is somewhere, that she is some kind of entity, that she is not simply gone, but I can’t. I’ve tried.
    There was an early dinner crowd, about twenty, at El Tacito, or maybe it was a late lunch crowd. The air smelled of things fried, sauces hot, and tacos crisp.
There were large color photographs on the wall, all of them of hills, mountains, probably in Mexico. Music was playing, guitars and a plaintive tenor almost in tears. I think it was “La Paloma.” The people at the red-and-white-tableclothed wooden tables paid no attention to the music. They talked, mostly in Spanish, ate, laughed and raised