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the island in the dead of night. And some thing else. Jan said he had his violin with him. Crazy. Jan insisted he used to play the violin, and when she brought it into the hospital shortly after his stroke, he had to admit that, although he could not recall ever having played the violin before, he was able to make sounds on it. But they were terrible sounds, and when Jan said that was how he’d always played, he asked her how she could stand it, and they both laughed like hell.
    But there was something more to this island story. Jan said what he did that night showed he was unwilling to let things go, that he was a detective through and through and always would be. Then she said something about him being honorable and that it was in his blood. This, of course, made him laugh. But Jan did not laugh. Instead, she said she would also be a detective, her first case being to help him re discover his world.
    So that was the answer, down here in the nursing home wing be cause finding out for certain if Marjorie had an accident or not was in his blood.
    Voices still came from the room across from the nurses’ station. As he inched nearer, he could tell they were women’s voices. Although he could not hear complete sentences, he heard one of the women screech out, “Eleven-inch dick! Really! Really he does!” This was followed by laughter and one of them stomping her foot and someone else having a coughing fit.
    He decided to take advantage of the moment. Last time he looked he didn’t quite measure up, so he knew they weren’t talking about him. As he pushed hard on the wheel with his left hand and swung his body to the left to correct the wheelchair’s direction, the laughter continued, but the voices seemed closer to the door. He pushed harder, sailing along, a breeze in his face that smelled like soap and bed linen and al cohol and urine. The end of the hallway was coming up fast and he slowed, using left hand on the wheel and left foot on the floor. A shat tered image from boyhood flashed by. Memorial Day out in the back yard with the radio propped in the kitchen window … Yes, listening to the Indianapolis 500!
    He rounded the corner at the end of the hallway just as laughing voices exploded through the doorway across from the nurses’ station, shushing one another and going their separate ways. He was out of sight, in the long hallway leading to the activity room.
    He parked his wheelchair against the wall to one side and stud ied the scene. Scene was another fine word from the past. The scene of the crime. Yeah, right. Poor Marjorie slips and falls on a wet spot, actually a puddle he could see was still on the floor, and he thinks it’s a scene of the crime because he used to be a private dick. Dick, ha. Everything’s connected in this damn world. Staff probably left the piddle puddle for the early morning cleaning crew to take care of.
    At least on his floor there was an early morning crew, the ones who got out all the noisiest polishers and buffers they could find in janitors’ closets and woke everyone up while they made the tile floors into mirrors. Too bad he wasn’t a kid in grammar school anymore, because back then he would have sidled up to the girls and had a fine time looking up their skirts.
    Thinking of grammar school made him think of Dwayne Matu sak. For some reason, since his stroke, he had recalled one particular summer from boyhood in which Dwayne Matusak announced that by end of summer they would have a knockdown drag-out fight and only one of them would come out alive. At the time he actually thought he would die. When he watched Dragnet on television that summer he tried to imagine himself cool and fearless like Sergeant Joe Friday. And now here he was in the hallway of a damn nursing home staring at a puddle of urine thinking about an ancient black and white televi sion series.
    Crazy bastard. A stroke was one thing, but at least he wasn’t per manent in this place like folks in this wing.