G Is for Gumshoe

banging on a bedpan with a spoon. She was tall and thin, bald everyplace except her bony head, which was enveloped in an aureole of wispy white fuzz. Malnutrition had distended her belly, leaving her long limbs skeletal.
    The lower portion of her face had collapsed on itself, jaw drawn up close to her nose in the absence of intervening teeth. She had no visible lips and the truncated shape of her skull gave her the look of some long-legged, gangly bird with a gaping beak. She was squawking like an ostrich, her bright, black eyes snapping from point to point. The minute she caught sight of us, she fired the bedpan in our direction like a heat-seeking missile. She seemed to be having the tune of her life. A nurse's aide, maybe twenty years old, stood by helplessly. Clearly, her training had never prepared her for the likes of this one.
    Mrs. Renquist approached Agnes matter-of-factly, pausing only once to pat the hand of the woman in the next bed who seemed to be praying feverishly for Jesus to take her very soon. Meanwhile, Agnes, having asserted herself, was content to march around on the bedcovers saluting the other patients. To me, it looked like a wonderful form of indoor exercise. Her behavior seemed far healthier than the passivity of her ward-mates, some of whom simply lay in moaning misery. Agnes had probably been a hell-raiser all her life, and her style, in old age, hadn't changed a whit.
    "You have a visitor, Mrs. Grey."
    "What?"
    "You have a visitor."
    Agnes paused, peering at me. Her tongue crept into view and then disappeared again. "Who's this?" Her voice was hoarse from screeching. Mrs. Renquist held out a hand to her, helping Agnes down off the bed. The nurse's aide took a clean gown from the nightstand. Mrs. Renquist shook it out and draped it around Agnes's scrawny shoulders, pushing her arms into the sleeves. Agnes submitted with the complaisance of a baby, her rheumy-eyed attention still focused on me. Her skin was speckled with color: pale brown maculae, patches of rose and white, knotty blue veins, crusty places where healing cuts formed fiery lines of red. The epidermal tissue was so thin I half-expected to see the pale gray shapes of internal organs, like those visible on a newly hatched bird. What is it about aging that takes us right back to birth? She smelled sooty and dense, a combination of dried urine and old gym socks. Right away, I started revising the notion of driving back to Santa Teresa in the same tiny car with her. The aide excused herself with a murmur and made a hasty getaway.
    I held out a hand politely. "Hello, Agnes. I'm Kinsey Millhone."
    "Hah?"
    Mrs. Renquist leaned close to Agnes and hollered my name so loud that two other old ladies on the ward woke up and began to make quacking sounds. "Kinsey Millhone. She's a friend of your daughter's. "
    Agnes drew back, giving me a suspicious look. "Who?"
    "Irene," I yelled.
    "Who asked you?" Agnes shot back, peevishly. She began to work her lips mechanically, as if tasting something she'd eaten fifty years before.
    Mrs. Renquist repeated the information, enunciating with care. I could see Agnes withdraw. A veil of simplicity seemed to cover her bright gaze and she launched abruptly into a dialogue with herself that made no sense whatever. "Keep hush. Do not say a word. Well, I can if I want. No, you can't. Danger, danger, ooo hush, plenty, plenty. Don't even give a hint…" She began a warbling rendition of "Good Night, Irene."
    Mrs. Renquist rolled her eyes and a short, impatient sigh escaped. "She pulls this when she doesn't feel like doing what you want," she said. "She'll snap out of it."
    We waited for a moment. Agnes had added gestures and her tone was argumentative. She'd adopted the quarrelsome air of someone in a supermarket express line when the customer at the register tries to cash a paycheck. Whatever universe she'd been transported to, it did not include us.
    I drew Mrs. Renquist aside and lowered my voice. "Why don't we leave her alone for the time being," I said. "I'm going to have to put a call through to Mrs. Gersh anyway and ask her what she wants done. There's no point in upsetting her mother any more than we have to."
    "Well, it's whatever you want," Mrs. Renquist said. "She's just being ornery. Do you want to use the office phone?"
    "I'll call from the motel."
    "Be sure we know how to get in touch with you," she said, with a faint note of uneasiness. I could see a hint of panic in her eyes at the notion that I