Disturbed Ground (7 page)

Some neighbors found her extraordinarily friendly, but others called her "weird" or "off the wall," noting that she was "always yelling at people if they put even a step onto her lawn."

That temper.

Eventually, Dorothea brought up the subject of Mexico with John Sharp, the one tenant who had a car. She suggested that they might all travel down to Guadalajara after he got his SSI payments started and asked if he would drive.

The prospect of driving all the way from northern California into Mexico, shut inside a car for days with his dubious housemates, seemed about as appealing as self-flagellation. John Sharp was no martyr: He told her no.

Sharp didn't socialize much with the other boarders. He found Bert uncommunicative and childlike, sitting in the living room and watching cartoons. Sometimes, tormented by voices, Bert would stomp on the floor in frustration, "having a tantrum," in Sharp's view, until Dorothea would come and calm him, uttering motherly reassurances in Spanish.

John Sharp's vice was poker, not liquor, and the sober old gent didn't find much in common with the drinkers of the house either. But on a couple of occasions, he did enjoy standing outside and conversing with Ben Fink and his younger brother, Robert, who visited him there. Ben, who had moved into Dorothea's place in March, wasn't too bad a fellow, really. But it was mainly Robert, who looked like a rugged extra from a Clint Eastwood movie, who was sober and coherent enough to hold Sharp's attention.

Ben Fink never really bothered anybody, and though his room was just a thin wall away, Sharp didn't spend much time with him. He knew Fink was quite a drinker, and he could hear him moving about, coming and going. Each month, after receiving his benefit check, Ben would go on a major drinking binge until the money ran out.

In the spring of 1988, though, things were about to change.

Sharp heard Ben Fink come to the back door, heard him fumbling with his keys. Sharp's door was open, as usual Ben staggered past, bleary-eyed, his hand wrapped around a bottle in a paper sack. In a minute, his neighbor's door closed, then he heard the familiar creak on the other side of the wall as the bed accepted Fink's weight.

John Sharp more or less forgot about Ben until later that evening
when he bumped into the landlady in the hall. Dorothea promptly told him that Ben needed sobering up. "I'm going to take him upstairs," she announced, "and make him feel better."

Well, perhaps this particular bender had been going on a bit too long. Maybe Dorothea thought that, after three or four days of pathetic drunkenness, Ben was getting out of hand. But after that, Sharp noticed, he didn't hear or see Ben Fink around anymore. The room next door was dead still.

About four days later, John Sharp climbed the back stairs to use the telephone, and when he walked past the spare bedroom by the kitchen, he was hit by a distinct and terrible odor. He recoiled, his nose sniffing at a memory. Years before, he'd worked in a mortuary; he knew the awful stench of death.

Ben Fink's disappearance struck him with new clarity.

For hours afterward, Sharp puzzled over what he should do. Should he confront Dorothea? Should he contact the authorities? But what if he were wrong? He could imagine how angry Dorothea would be, and he sure didn't want to end up back on the street….

Dorothea Puente was soon fretting about the smell herself, telling John Sharp that the sewer had backed up, complaining that she didn't know how to get the smell out of the house. "It has ruined the carpet," she said. "I just don't know what to do."

Soon a noisy machine was rumbling back and forth, back and forth, above the heads of the downstairs tenants. The landlady had resorted to the obvious solution and rented a rug shampooer. But apparently even repeated shampooing proved futile, for it seemed to John Sharp that Dorothea must have shampooed that carpet at least a dozen times. Finally, she had workers tear the carpet out.

Then she called Patty Casey, the cab driver, and went shopping. On the way, Dorothea explained that she had to get new carpeting for one room in the house that "had a curse."

By late May Puente's next-door neighbor, Will Mclntyre, was also grumbling loudly about the stench permeating the neighborhood. The tenants in his three apartments were complaining, he said. It got so bad that he couldn't even use his air conditioner because "it would suck the smell in, and you would have to go outside to get away from it."

When Mclntyre confronted Mrs. Puente about the stink, she just clucked and agreed, "It sure is bad. I think it's coming from that
duplex out behind my house." Seemed like it must be the sewer, she said.

By then Mclntyre had called public health officials to complain about the foul smell, and on June 1 they sent out an inspector, who couldn't find the source of the dreadful odor.

Weeks passed, the smell diminished, and Dorothea Puente continued to work early every morning in her garden. The plants and flowers flourished under the encouragement of her green thumb, and she was rightfully proud of the results. She even walked Ricardo Ordorica around the grounds as if she were the owner and he the guest, pointing out this or that improvement—the gazebo, the new flower bed, the rosebushes, the walkway—telling him how much she'd increased the value of his property.

Ben Fink wasn't the sort of man that many people would miss or come looking for, but Peggy Nickerson, the street counselor who had placed him at Puente's, later stopped by asking about him. Dorothea told her that he'd left. And Nickerson, who was used to dealing with transients who come and go without notice, didn't find this too peculiar.

Sometime later, John Sharp thought he saw a man on the street who looked like Ben, and he mentioned this to Dorothea.

"No, that can't be," she told him. "Ben has gone up north."

CHAPTER 6

As soon as Mary Ellen Howard came into view, Judy could sense tension. Her friend usually greeted everyone with a refreshing openness, but this time she wore gravity stamped across her brow. Polly Spring, who Judy knew less well, also seemed somber.

Judy and Beth had worked peripherally with the veteran social workers, Polly Spring at Adult Protective Services and Mary Ellen at the welfare department. Usually clients brought them together; this request for a meeting seemed unusual. Judy's worried colleagues had called shortly after Will Mclntyre started complaining about the stench wafting past his residence. They said they wanted to meet with the two VOA partners, and rather than discuss it on the phone, they wanted to talk in person.

With few preliminaries, Mary Ellen launched into an explanation of what had brought them here, and Judy and Beth listened, dumbfounded, to her confusing tale: A client, who wasn't really her client, had been temporarily placed at Dorothea Puente's boardinghouse. Dorothea had kicked him out—for no reason, he'd said; for good reason, she'd said—and now he was living someplace else. Anyway (though it wasn't technically her responsibility), Mary Ellen Howard had called the proprietor—Dorothea, she'd said her name was—to try to work things out. But Dorothea had unleashed an abusive tirade, then hung up.

The incident had set her thinking, Mary Ellen said, about another landlady by the name of Dorothea whom she'd known of years before. Her memory wasn't clear, but she was so disturbed by the idea that this might be the same person that she'd done some checking. She'd called Polly Spring, then Mildred Ballenger, another former co-worker from Adult Protective Services. Ballenger was now retired, Mary Ellen said, but it was she who'd alerted authorities to Dorothea Johansson and had her sent to prison in the early eighties for victimizing elderly tenants.

Judy and Beth stared at Mary Ellen, flabbergasted.

What was she talking about? Was she suggesting that softhearted Dorothea Puente—caretaker of stray cats and unwanted souls—could be this awful Johansson character? It seemed ludicrous!

Much as she liked and respected Mary Ellen, Judy just couldn't fathom what she was getting at. She cleared her throat and ventured diplomatically, "Well, this really doesn't sound at all like Dorothea Puente, you know. Um, what did Johansson look like?"

Mary Ellen Howard and Polly Spring glanced at each other and gave it their best. When they'd finished, it was hard to imagine anyone
less
like Dorothea Puente than the woman they described: over two hundred pounds, given to wearing muumuus, dark hair piled atop her head. This Johansson woman hardly resembled small, snowy-haired Dorothea Puente.

"And, well, about how old would she be?" Judy asked.

Howard and Spring figured that Johansson would be in her late fifties.

"Then she can't be Dorothea Puente," Judy said, shaking her head. "She's at least seventy!"

The two veteran social workers persisted. They still believed that Puente
could be
Dorothea Johansson. And, they insisted, the woman was dangerous
.
She'd been convicted of some sort of crime, she’d been in prison. Mary Ellen Howard went on to explain that
Sacramento
magazine had even done an article about how Mildred Ballenger had put a stop to Johansson's evil deeds.

"I'd like to read that," Judy said, and Mary Ellen volunteered to get them a copy.

Still, Judy and Beth remained skeptical. How could Puente and Johansson be one and the same? Dorothea Puente's tenants thought the world of her. Some even said her boardinghouse was the best place they'd ever stayed. And Dorothea's results with Bert were so remarkable, so unequivocally positive, that Judy and Beth could only believe that Polly Spring and Mary Ellen Howard were sadly confused.

Judy shrugged. "This just doesn't mesh with our personal observations."

"That's right," Beth concurred. "It's amazing how well Bert Montoya has been doing since he moved there. He's improved in every way because Dorothea is such a good care provider."

"Well, if I were you," Spring advised in her throaty voice, "I wouldn't want my client staying in that woman's house."

"So where would you suggest Bert stay instead?" Judy wanted to know.

Spring replied, "The Gate House," [fictitious name], referring to a local room-and-board operation.

This hit a sour note with Judy and Beth. The manager of this establishment had neglected one tenant to the point of abuse, compelling them to file a report with Sacramento's ombudsman for senior care. They could hardly imagine a worse placement for Bert.

They were polite enough to stifle a scoff, but given their firsthand experiences, the VOA partners just couldn't take Spring and Howard's suspicions seriously. Still, since their colleagues were so obviously concerned, they promised not to place any more clients in Puente's boardinghouse and to ask Dorothea a few questions.

But Spring and Howard weren't about to stop with just one conversation with a couple of VOA employees. They were so profoundly
distressed by the idea that Dorothea Johansson might be on the loose again that they decided to push the limits of their respective bureaucracies. And for an unlucky few, the unfolding dance of accusation and acquiescence played out like a Kafkaesque plot.

By chance, Polly Spring shortly learned that Peggy Nickerson was also making placements at Dorothea Puente's boardinghouse. "She's crazy as a hoot!" she exclaimed to Nickerson. "I remember something about her being in trouble with the law. If I were you, I'd avoid Puente in the future."

Nickerson, who didn't have the highest opinion of Polly Spring to begin with, reacted with incredulity. She'd never heard a single word of complaint against Dorothea Puente. Hadn't Dorothea been terrific with all of her clients? In Nickerson's mind, she was "the best the system had to offer."

But Spring was tenacious; she recounted some of what she knew of Puente's history
,
believing she was imparting a "warning" to Peggy Nickerson.

Again, these allegations were so contrary to Nickerson's personal experience that she, like Judy Moise and Beth Valentine, simply couldn't swallow them.