Final Stroke by Michael Beres Page B

tele vision screen on the old Motorola in his parents’ living room. Lights off so he can see out the front window in case Dwayne Matusak is there waiting beneath the streetlight.
    The puddle still unmopped didn’t surprise him. It was around the corner at the end of a hallway where no one important would spot it. Night staff would just as soon wait for the early morning cleaning crew to take care of it with their howling machines meant to wake the dead. Soon the puddle would be gone, along with any other traces. Too bad he didn’t have a tape recorder from second floor rehab so he could record his findings. He laughed at this, imagining the unintel ligible babble being played back and causing Georgiana to crease her forehead.
    The puddle still had what he assumed were dried gurney tracks leading away, but now there were newer tracks that hadn’t been there before. When he realized these were the tracks of his own wheelchair catching the edge of the puddle as Betty-who-talks-too-much pushed him away not an hour earlier, he laughed at himself again.
    He wheeled around the puddle to the ladies’ room, knocking lightly before he entered. The sink was clear, nothing moveable in sight. He wheeled to the men’s room and found the same was true there. But in the janitors’ closet, after he found the light switch and scanned the closet filled with cleaning equipment and stacked with cardboard boxes, he discovered something interesting. Even if it turned out to be nothing, even if Marjorie’s death was an accident, having this bit of potential evidence in his possession would at least make him feel he’d done what he could, that he’d covered all the bases the way Joe Friday would have done.
    The water glass sat on a ledge at the back of a deep laundry-tub sink. He knew from the puddle around the glass, and the fact there was a bit of water in the bottom of the glass, that it had been used within the last several hours. He had to push the wheelchair close to the laundry tub in order to reach the glass. He carefully lifted the glass with his good hand, holding it along the top edge, careful not to touch any other part of it. It was one of the water glasses used for resi dents at meals. Not one of the plastic cups used in resident rooms, real glass, crystal clear, except this one was greasy as if it hadn’t made it to the dishwasher in the kitchen since its last use. He eased back into his chair, placing the glass safely between his legs. He thought of tucking it beneath his robe, but he didn’t want to wipe anything off the glass. Joe and his partner would have been proud, the partner saying some thing about delivering the glass to the lab boys.
    In a way, all of this was like floating in space. Like one of those moments in life when you say to yourself, “What am I doing here?” One of those moments you could never have predicted even if you had a billion monkey brains working for you. The stroke was one thing, distancing him from reality the way it did, making him ques tion whether Steve Babe had ever existed. But this—inside a janitors’ closet where there was a perfectly good mop and bucket on wheels to clean up the puddle outside and still no one had bothered to do it, and him with a water glass held close as if it contained secrets to unravel ing what was left in his noggin—this was insane. Any minute they’d bring the strait jacket, and when he mumbled his protests, saying he simply wanted to get the glass in case it had fingerprints on it the way Joe Friday and his partner would, they’d laugh like hell and he’d laugh with them.
    He turned his wheelchair toward the open door and shut off the light. When he did this he again recalled the dark living room when he was a boy looking out the window and seeing Dwayne Matusak across the street leaning against the lamppost, daring him to come out. He sat for a moment, trembling with fear dredged up from childhood by his stroke, as he stared out at the harsh