Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (14 page)

21

A
fter a long nap, I went to my closet-office and listened to messages while I stepped into fresh underwear and cargo shorts. None of the messages were urgent, so after I pulled on a fresh T and laced up clean Keds, I went downstairs to visit with Michael and Ella. At that time of day the air on the key leans heavy on your back, draping its sweaty arms over your shoulders in a dazed torpor. Songbirds were hidden away having a siesta, and only a few seabirds wheeled in the sky. On the shore, some sleep-deprived gulls and terns made stubborn footprints in the sand.

In the kitchen, Michael was bent over a tray of meatballs he’d just taken out of the oven, and Ella was on her preferred perch on a stool at the butcher-block island. They both gave me
I love you
messages when I came in, Ella by blinking her eyes slowly, and Michael by offering me a meatball on a toothpick.

He said, “Wait, there’s stuff to dip it in.”

He plopped a spoonful of something creamy white into a small bowl and shoved it toward me. “See how you like that.”

I rolled the meatball in the dip and took a bite. “Yum. What is it?”

“Mostly ground turkey and sesame seeds, with some spices. The dip is just mayonnaise and Dijon mustard and horse radish.”

“Are you taking them all to the firehouse?” I sounded like a four-year-old about to whine.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave some here. By the way, Paco and I are going out to dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“How’s the kid?”

“He’s good, they’ve moved him to a room.”

He gave me a quick sideways look, but he didn’t ask anything else about Jeffrey.

Luckily, he didn’t even think to ask anything about Laura’s murder. If I’d told him that I’d been asking questions about it, his sad look would have changed to one that said
Have you lost your mind
? I protected him by not volunteering any information. He already had enough worry and anxiety from being in a partnership with an undercover cop, he didn’t need to worry about his sister too. Also, I didn’t want to listen to him yell at me.

I ate another meatball, then washed my hands at the sink and took Ella out on the deck to groom her. I had just put the final stroke on her when Guidry’s dark Blazer rolled around the curve.

Damn! Why couldn’t he have given me some notice before he came? If I’d known, I could have slicked on a bit of lip gloss and run a brush through my hair. At least I was clean. Half the time when I see Guidry I’ve just thrown up on myself or I’m covered with dog drool and cat hair.

I hustled Ella inside and said, “I’ll be back later.”

Ignoring Michael’s questioning look, I scooted out without telling him Guidry was outside.

I met Guidry coming toward the deck. He was carrying a manila envelope. He looked dead serious. He nodded to me, formal as a funeral director. Something about the grim look in his eyes made my fingers fold into my palm.

He said, “I need to talk to you.” His voice had an unusual strained sound, as if he wished he weren’t saying what he was saying.

I said, “Let’s go upstairs,” and led the way.

On my porch, he tossed the envelope on the glass-topped table and took one of the chairs. “I want you to look at these.”

I searched his face for meaning, but he wouldn’t return my look. Suddenly dry-mouthed, I sank into a chair and watched him open the envelope.

He pulled out a couple of photographs and slid them across the table to me. They were mug shots of a man I recognized immediately—the wide jaw, the arrogant tilt of the head, the self-assured look in the eyes. Even in police custody, he had exuded raw power.

I said, “That’s the man I saw with Laura. That’s her husband.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

He put the photograph back in the envelope and tapped his fingers on the tabletop as if he were drumming out ideas.

He said, “Since her sister will tell you anyway, I’ll give you this much. That man is Martin Freuland. He’s the president of a bank in Laredo, Texas, where Laura Halston worked as a teller.”

I shook my head like a stunned boxer. “She didn’t mention that when she told me about leaving her husband. She must have gone to Laredo for a few weeks and then come here.”

“She didn’t have a husband, Dixie. Her sister says she never married, and there is no Dr. Reginald Halston. Not in any state.”

“I could have remembered the name wrong. He was a surgeon, played college football. He told her he would kill her if she left him. She didn’t want his craziness to infect their child.”

“There was no child, Dixie.”

“But—”

“She wasn’t pregnant. Laura Halston lied to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Her sister says she lived in Laredo for several years and worked in Freuland’s bank. We’ve corroborated that. We’ve even nailed down the exact date she left Laredo. That’s the one thing everybody is sure of when they talk about Laura Halston, that she left Laredo, Texas, on February twenty-second.”

Stupidly, I felt like a betrayed child. Laura had lied about living in Dallas. She’d lied about being married to a Dallas surgeon. She’d lied about being pregnant. Apparently the only thing she hadn’t lied about was having a sister.

I’d been so sure that Laura and I had made a true connection, like soul sisters finding each other in the midst of a jungle. But if what Guidry said was true, I’d been a naïve fool. Laura had simply been acting a role, and I had obligingly played her audience.

Oddly, he said, “I’m sorry, Dixie.”

My eyes burned and I looked away. “I hardly knew her.”

“But you believed in her. Losing faith in another person is almost worse than losing a friend.”

There was a shadow in his eyes that said he spoke from personal experience.

I said, “That man, Martin whoever, said he would make her pay for leaving him.”

Guidry tapped the tabletop a few more times. “According to her sister, Freuland and Laura were lovers, and she left him because he wouldn’t divorce his wife.”

“So he killed her.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Dixie. There’s more to this story than a love affair. Freuland is under federal investigation for helping drug traffickers launder money. They believe he handled buffer bank accounts for money that had been delivered in cash to currency exchanges in Mexico. They wired the money to his bank, and he took big payoffs for not reporting it. The feds got an anonymous tip about what he was doing, and the sister claims the tip came from Laura.”

I felt as if I were whirling through a wormhole in space. “He killed her because she reported him for laundering drug money?”

Dryly, Guidry said, “It could rile a man up to know he was going to spend the next twenty or thirty years of his life in jail.”

I searched Guidry’s face. He wasn’t telling the whole story. Laura’s killer hadn’t just stabbed her to death, he had also made ribbons of her face. Stabbing her was a crime of intense passion, an act of rabid vengeance that could have been motivated by fury. But slashing her face had brought a different kind of satisfaction to the killer. Slashing her face seemed more like a psychopath’s doing than an outraged banker. Not that a corrupt bank president couldn’t also be a psychopath, but it was a stretch.

Dully, I said, “Did you get my message about the man who was stalking her?”

He grunted. “I’m not even going to ask how you got that information. You must send out invisible taser beams that cause people to go into shock and tell you everything they know.”

Since I was still in shock myself, I let that pass.

Guidry shook out another photo sheet from his envelope and scooted it across the table. “Ever see this guy?”

It was another mug shot, this one of a puffy man with close-set eyes and marshmallow lips. He looked like the actor who would play an uptight high school principal or a holier-than-thou church youth director, the one who sucked all the fun out of life. In some shots, he wore rimless glasses that added to his professorial look.

I shook my head. “I don’t recognize him.”

Guidry got out his ever-present notepad and flipped through some pages.

“Name’s Frederick Vaught. He’s a nurse, or used to be until he lost his nursing license. He was charged with elder abuse after another nurse saw him holding a pillow over a patient’s face in a rehab center. The patient didn’t die, and there wasn’t enough hard evidence to convict him of attempted murder, so he got off by pleading no contest. He got five years’ probation, and had to do two hundred hours of community service. That’s how he wound up driving people at Bayfront. It was a volunteer position.”

“They let somebody like that drive people?”

“His driving record was okay, it was his nursing record that was faulty.”

Guidry did that finger-tapping thing again. “Your tip about him was a good one. The ER people remembered him as the driver who brought the Grayberg woman in. And Laura Halston was at the emergency room at the same time. You were right about that.”

Damn straight I’d been right about that. Even if I’d been wrong about a lot of other things.

He said, “Several patients under his care died under uncertain circumstances. They were all between eighty and ninety years old.”

I thought of how he’d told Ms. Grayberg she should have been smothered at her first infarct, and shuddered. If I hadn’t come around the curtain, would he have smothered her right then?

I said, “A nurse would know how to use a scalpel. Maybe he was a surgical nurse at one time.”

“Maybe.”

He met my gravelly stare and sighed. “As I’ve already said, don’t jump to conclusions.”

“But you will pick Vaught up?”

“Of course. If nothing else, he violated about a hundred rules of his probation by going to that nursing facility.”

I said, “I asked about that other guy, Gorgon, at the Lyon’s Mane. Ruby wouldn’t talk about him, but I’m sure he’s deep in organized crime.”

His gaze measured me for a moment. “Dixie, I would really, really appreciate it if you’d stop asking questions about this murder. That’s my job, not yours.”

His gray eyes were calm, but his eyelids flickered just enough to tell me he wasn’t being completely honest.

“What’s the real reason you want me to stop?”

“We’re looking for a psychopathic slasher. Killers like that don’t need a lot of reason to go after another victim. I don’t want you to attract his attention.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to go into all the reasons why fear wasn’t a good deterrent to keep me from looking for Laura’s killer. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Guidry to know that I was more afraid of fear than I was of a killer.

I took a deep breath and stood up. “I have pets waiting for me.”

He nodded and followed me down the steps. Downstairs, we got into our respective vehicles and gave each other sober waves before we started our engines. Guidry went first, easing his car around the meandering lane and causing the parakeets to do their usual paranoid panic. I followed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands like an old woman afraid of losing control.

22

I
weighed about two tons when I slogged into the downstairs lobby at the Sea Breeze. As I went in, the elevator door opened and Tom Hale’s girlfriend came out. She was mincing along on red high heels and carrying a cardboard box so big she had to peer around its side to look ahead. Since she had her hands full, I turned back to open the door for her.

She stopped and gave me a defiant look. “I know what you’re going to say, but women have to put themselves first. If we don’t, who will?”

“Excuse me?”

“I need a man who can protect me. Look at what happened to that woman over in Fish Hawk Lagoon! Somebody came in her house and killed her in the shower. That could’ve been me, and Tom couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”

I looked from her flaming face to the box in her hands. “Are you saying you’re leaving Tom because a woman you’ve never met got killed?”

“I’m saying a woman needs a man to protect her. Every woman, not just me.”

I said, “That’s pure bullshit. You’re just using that as an excuse to leave Tom.”

“You’re so crazy about him, why don’t you move in with him?”

I considered saying that Tom and I were good friends, but that we had no sexual attraction. Not because Tom was in a wheelchair, but because we just didn’t. I considered saying that Tom deserved a woman who wasn’t shallow and vapid, and that I was glad she was leaving him. But saying those things would have taken more energy than she was worth. Besides, I had become so sane and well-balanced that I no longer leaped to tell idiots they were idiots. Instead, I only said one teensy thing.

I said, “Lady, I sure hope you’ve been spayed. It would be a damn shame for you to reproduce.”

She snorted and pranced out on her red high heels, leaving me wishing I hadn’t regained so much sane self-control. A year ago, I might have gone bananas and pulled out all her flat-ironed hair. As it was, I had let the bitch walk away with all her hairs intact.

Upstairs, I tapped on Tom’s condo door and then used my key. He and Billy Elliot were in the living room, and they both gave me doleful looks when I went in.

I said, “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t tell me you’re actually sad the bitch has gone! Puh-leeze!”

They both looked startled, but Billy Elliot began to grin with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

Tom said, “When your husband was alive, did you feel safer?”

“Of course.”

“You thought he could protect you.”

“It wasn’t that I thought he would protect me, it was just that there were two of us. Even if we were miles apart, there were still two of us, and I always knew if I got in a jam, I could call Todd and he would help me. That made me feel safer.”

“Frannie couldn’t rely on me like that.”

“How come?”

He looked down at his paralyzed legs. “You know.”

“Oh, big doo-doo! She could rely on you for lots of things. You solve problems for people every day. You know things, you have information, you know how to get things done. Women don’t need a bodyguard, they need somebody with good sense to help them solve problems. Frannie’s a poisonous toad. Just get over it.”

Peering up at me with narrowed eyes, Tom gnawed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. Then he grinned.

“I just remembered a movie I saw one time where this guy rubbed a lamp and got a genie that fulfilled his every wish. He wanted a pile of money, boom, he had unlimited supplies. He wanted a fancy hotel suite, boom, he was in it. He wanted two or three women, boom, they were there. He wanted drugs and booze and every kind of sex he could think of, boom, he got it all. Anything he wanted, he got. Man, he was beside himself. He’d found nirvana, heaven, the Garden of Eden. Then after a while it started to get old, you know? And he thought he’d leave for a while and spend some time alone. But he couldn’t. He was locked in that room with those sluts and the drugs and the booze and the unlimited supply of money. And he realized he was in hell.”

“Your point being?”

“At first I thought Frannie was the answer to my dreams. Sexy, good-looking, great in bed, everything a man wants. But for the last few weeks I’ve been in hell.”

“Well, there you go.”

“I guess the moral is to be careful what you ask for.”

I patted his shoulder. “If I meet a genie, I’ll remember that.”

I was already reviewing my list of women who were better than Frannie. I figured I’d give Tom a few weeks to get over her, and then play matchmaker.

Billy Elliot and I went downstairs and did our run, and both of us felt happier when we came back upstairs. Tom seemed to have recovered his equilibrium too.

He said, “Speaking of the woman who was murdered, what’s going on with that?”

Apparently, he and Frannie had done a lot of speaking about Laura’s murder, because I hadn’t mentioned it.

I said, “I don’t think I told you that I’d had dinner with her. I really liked her. I thought we would become good friends.”

“I didn’t realize this was a personal loss for you.”

“It turns out she lied to me about a lot of things. I thought she was one kind of person, but she turned out to be something else.”

“Like Frannie.”

“In a way.”

“Disillusionment sucks, doesn’t it?”

“It looks like Laura hurt some people.”

“Including you.”

“She didn’t hurt me. I barely knew her.”

“Uh-huh, and I still have two good legs, and nobody ever broke my heart and left me.”

A slight sea breeze moved in to wave palm fronds as I left Tom’s place, and my disposition lightened. Funny how the weather seems to have an organic connection to humans and animals. A drop in pressure brings aching joints and pain in old injuries, spring’s explosion of new green stirs a surge of adolescent hormones, and winter’s snow makes people pack up and move to Florida.

I had to spend extra time on my afternoon rounds on account of a recent magazine-shredding binge by twin-mitted Ragdolls named Annie and Bess. Ragdolls are large long-haired cats who fall limp in your arms when you pick them up. Then they look up at you with such a sweet expression in their deep blue eyes that you’re instantly a goner. Annie and Bess were blue colorpoints with white chins, mittens, and boots. They were loving and gentle, but they knew they were the mistresses of the manor and that I was their servant, so they weren’t the least apologetic about flinging paper dandruff all over the house. They watched with bored disinterest while I vacuumed it up, and when I suggested that it might have been a better use of their time to watch the birds outside their window than to tear up a magazine, they merely flipped their tails. In their former lives, they had probably been opera divas.

After they had eaten and I had washed their dishes and put out fresh water, we ran around on the lanai for a few minutes playing jump-for-the-peacock-feather until we were all winded. Then I took them inside, kissed them goodbye, and headed to the Village to get Cora’s muumuu. Not that she needed the dress right that minute, but I didn’t like to think of her by herself, hobbling around on that sore ankle. I didn’t even look across the street toward Ethan’s office when I got it. Well, I may have let my eyes slide that direction, but I didn’t really
look
.

With the newly shortened dress in a nice shopping bag, I drove over the north bridge and wound my way around to Bayfront Village. I left the Bronco under the portico for a valet to disappear into the bowels of their parking garage, and swished through doors that automatically opened when they felt me coming. As I went toward the elevator, the concierge waved at me, friendly again, and pointed to her phone, meaning she had already notified Cora that I was on the way. I waved back and hustled on to the elevator.

As soon as the elevator door opened on the sixth floor, I could smell chocolate bread from Cora’s apartment. Cora had opened her door for me, and when I went in the look of joy on her face was enough to make me forget how rushed I was.

She said, “I figured you’d be here this afternoon, so I made us some chocolate bread.”

Cora has an ancient bread-making machine her granddaughter gave her, and she makes decadently delicious chocolate bread in it. She claims her technique is a secret, which is okay by me. The secret results in a round whole-wheat loaf studded with almost-melted spots of oozing dark chocolate. Just smelling it makes my taste buds sit up and smile.

I put the bag with her muumuu on a chair.

“I thought you were supposed to sit with your foot propped up.”

“Oh, I do, every chance I get. I’ll sit right now, and you can bring me some bread and tea.”

She plopped herself in one of the graceful iron chairs at a little round table covered with a pink and turquoise tablecloth.

She said, “Would you mind boiling me an egg? I used up all my zip making that bread.”

I said, “I’ll boil two. You should have more protein than one.”

She watched me over the bar while I clattered around finding everything. I boil eggs the way my grandmother taught me and Michael—cold water almost but not quite covering the eggs, cover the pot, bring them to a rolling boil, then turn off the heat and let them sit exactly three minutes. While that was happening, I made a pot of tea, tore off chunks of chocolate bread from the loaf—because it’s best torn, not sliced—and put it all on a tray. When the timer announced the eggs done, I took them out of the water, ruthlessly guillotined them through their shells, and scooped their quivering flesh into a small bowl before the soft yolks had time to run.

When I carried the tray to the table, Cora’s eyes lit up in a way that made me suspect she hadn’t eaten since she’d been home. For a few minutes, the only sound was the clink of Cora’s fork and my soft whimpers of pleasure. Cora’s chocolate bread is another thing I expect to be in unlimited supply in heaven, along with bacon.

She said, “Have you heard anything else about that little boy?”

“He’s doing well, they’ve moved him to a room.”

As if I’d said the opposite, she said, “I don’t worry about dying, you know. To tell the truth, I sort of look forward to it. Not the last-breath part, but the next breath in a new place. I imagine it’s sort of like being born, don’t you? I mean, coming into this world is no picnic for a baby, all that squeezing and pushing going on around it, but then it pops out in a whole new world.”

She leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if somebody else was with us and she didn’t want to be overheard saying something controversial. “Between you and me, I never have believed that business about golden streets and angels flying around playing on harps. That would get old real fast. No, I imagine when we die here, the next thing we know we’re popping out of our next mother, babies again, starting all over.”

“Reincarnation.”

She looked blank. “I don’t know about that. I just think the good Lord gives us another chance to get it right. I’m gonna do better next time.”

I swallowed a lump in my throat. “You’ve done just fine this time, Cora. I don’t know anybody who’s done it better.”

To stop all the talk about death, I said, “I’m going to a party Saturday night. A big shindig the Humane Society is throwing. Guidry invited me.”

She sat up straight and beamed at me. “That nice detective fellow?”

“That’s the one.”

“That’s why you got your hair cut.”

I touched my ends. “You could tell?”

“It was a little uneven before.”

“That’s not why I got it cut.”

She waggled a hunk of chocolate bread at me. “Yes, it is. You wanted to look pretty for that nice detective. Did you get a new dress?”

“New dress, new shoes, new purse, new underwear, the works.”

She smiled at me, her papery skin cracking into a zillion fine lines. “Ha! It’s about time. That’s all I can say. It’s about time.”

Everybody who loved me seemed to be pushing for me to get involved with a man. Michael hoped it wouldn’t be Guidry, Paco hoped it would be, and Cora would have been happy with either Guidry or Ethan Crane. It made me feel a little bit like a filly on the track that people were betting on. Only thing was, I wasn’t sure I was ready for the race.