Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues (5 page)

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Authors: Blaize Clement

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“What did you say your name was?”
I looked at him then. “It’s Dixie Hemingway.”
“Any relation to—?”
“No, and I don’t have any of his six-toed cats, either.”
“I guess you get asked that a lot.”
A form walked past the glass window, and I took a
deep breath. I knew that form. Lieutenant Guidry had arrived and was about to ring the doorbell. Like a dog salivating to the ringing of a bell, various parts of my anatomy began to do all kinds of things, some of which are illegal in Republican states.
I had fairly recently come to realize that I had the hots for Guidry, and it scared me to death. I didn’t want to want a man, and certainly not another deputy. Todd had been the love of my life, and when he died I had laid away all thoughts of romance or love or sex or any of those things that most thirty-two-year-old women have at the forefront of their minds. But my body was telling me it had an entirely different agenda. My mind could make whatever plans suited its ideals, but my body wasn’t going along.
I said, “You might want to get rid of that gun before you talk to the homicide detective.”
May God strike me dead, I don’t know what possessed me to say that. Maybe it was a way to deny to myself that I was excited at seeing Guidry. Maybe it was because Kurtz had looked sad when he saw Ziggy’s dark color. Maybe it was the fact that the man was so ugly he would scare little children, and probably crazy to boot. I’ve always been a pushover for the underdog, and Ken Kurtz had way too many strikes against him for his own good. Whatever it was, I suddenly wanted to protect him the same way I wanted to protect Ziggy.
The bell rang, and I moved to open the door.
As usual, instead of looking like the typical style-challenged cop, Guidry looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of
GQ
. He wore dark gray slacks most likely made from tender wool taken from some as yet undiscovered animal in the Andes, a black turtleneck, and a brown leather bomber jacket that had apparently been beaten into submission.
Guidry is fortyish, a head taller than me, with shortcropped dark hair showing a little silver at the temples. He has a beaky nose and calm gray eyes, and every cell in my body did a shivery little shimmy the minute I looked into those eyes. It was damned annoying, so I scowled at him.
“Good morning, Lieutenant.”
“Some reason why you’re answering the door at this house?”
I found that unnecessarily snippy, since I was sure Sergeant Owens had told him I was there and why. But before I could tell him so, Kurtz spoke from behind me.
“It’s a courtesy Miss Hemingway is showing me, Lieutenant. It’s difficult for me to move, and she was saving me some steps.” He looked toward the kitchen wing and added, “Especially since my nurse seems to have stopped working.”
If Guidry was shocked at what he saw, his eyes remained impassive as he took in Kurtz’s blue color, the jerking whirlpools under his skin, his pain-racked face and emaciated frame in the red plaid bathrobe.
He said, “Mr. Kurtz, do you mind if I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Actually, I mind a great deal. I am in considerable pain and should be in bed. However, I am aware that a crime has been committed on my property, and I realize you have questions to ask, so come in, Lieutenant. Let’s just get it over with as quickly as possible.”
Guidry nodded and crossed to where Kurtz was still standing in front of the fireplace. Guidry’s eyes swept the room, taking in the gigantic fireplace and its leaping flames, the closed door to the wine room, and then coming to rest on Ziggy. Ziggy remained stretched across the floor pillows on the hearth, dull and immobile as a rock.
Some people think iguanas are things of nightmares, but I think they’re beautiful. Basically, they’re big cold-blooded lizards with long banded tails, four legs, and clawed feet. They can run fast as a cat, and since their outer toes are made for gripping things, they can zip up a tree trunk in no time. Males have thin strips like Velcro on their inner thighs for sticking to a female when mating, which probably accounts for both sexes’ lipless mouths lifting at the corners in perpetual
smiles. Unless they want to smell something, they generally keep their mouths closed. Their olfactory centers are in the roof of their mouths, so if they’re curious about how food or a threat smells, they stick out their tongues and touch it. Their tongues aren’t forked like a snake’s, but they have two sensory channels on their undersides that serve the same purpose—they feed back information about which way to go to be safer, warmer, or fed.
I especially like iguanas’ dewlaps and back crests. The dewlaps hang from their necks, and if they’re excited or scared they can puff them up so they look twice as big and threatening, which I think would come in really handy for humans. The dorsal crests are just cool—pointed dragonlike spikes running down their backbones. Who wouldn’t like to have that?
Head to tail tip, Ziggy was about five feet long. On his best day, he would be a clear Granny Smith color, with creamy dorsal spikes and underbelly. But this definitely wasn’t his best day. Instead of being green, he was dull and dark, almost black, and his eyes were hidden behind closed lids. He looked so unhandsome that I bristled in advance at the insulting things Guidry might say about him.
Guidry leaned to get a closer look. “Is he okay?”
I said, “Not really. He was left in a cold wine room and got chilled.”
He turned to Kurtz. “Why was your iguana put in a cold room?”
Kurtz looked surprised. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. I didn’t put him there. My nurse may be able to tell you how he got there, since she knew about it.”
“Who lives here, besides you?”
“My nurse has a room here. Nobody else.”
“Your nurse is here now?”
“She’s in her room. I expect she’s upset about the guard being killed. I think they were good friends.”
Guidry cut his eyes toward me, and I felt my face go hot. Yep, I had blown it by telling Kurtz there had been a murder. That should have come from Guidry, so he could see how Kurtz and the nurse reacted to the news. I had made it possible for them to concoct a story and rehearse it in their minds before time to tell it.
Guidry said, “Maybe the nurse put the iguana in the cold room?”
Kurtz said, “Lieutenant, I appreciate your concern about my iguana’s well-being, but I fail to see what that has to do with a murder investigation.”
Guidry gave him a level look. “I’d appreciate a look at the wine room.”
Kurtz gave a suppressed snort of disgust, turned his back, and hobbled across the living room to the wine room door. The outline of a gun was no longer visible under his bathrobe, and I felt myself blush again. It had been stupid and wrong to warn him to get rid of the gun, and I still didn’t know why I’d done it. I also didn’t know where he’d stashed it.
Again, he took out a key and opened the door. Guidry ambled across the tile and stood in the doorway looking in.
Turning to me, he said, “Did you go in there?”
I nodded, already knowing where he was headed.
“Did you cover much of the room?”
“I walked around the perimeter, starting at the right
side. I didn’t go down any of the aisles except the one in front of the door.”
“Uh-hunh. And you carried the iguana out?”
“Yes, and his tail was dragging.”
Kurtz seemed to understand for the first time what was going on. “You’re talking about footprints, right? Ms. Hemingway may have disturbed footprints?”
“And the iguana’s tail,” said Guidry. “Don’t forget the dragging tail.”
I said, “Oh, please!” and then saw Guidry’s quick warning look that said,
Just once, Dixie, try to keep your mouth shut.
He had some reason for wanting Kurtz to think I’d obliterated footprints in the wine room. It was possible I had, but ceramic tile isn’t likely to yield good prints unless there was mud or blood on the shoes. Besides, it was more likely that whoever had put Ziggy in the room had simply deposited him inside the doorway. But since I’d blown it by blabbing about the dead guard, not to mention warning Kurtz to get rid of the gun, I figured I owed Guidry a bit of silence, so I went back to the hearth and stood next to Ziggy.
“Where did your guard come from?”
“I believe he was a Mexican national.”
“I mean what agency supplied him.”
“He was an independent.”
“You hired him personally?”
“No, my nurse hired him.”
“She vet him first?”
“I suppose. I haven’t been able to attend to those kinds of details for a while.”
Guidry said, “Did the guard spend time inside the house?”
Kurtz hesitated for just a fraction of a second too long. “Not to my knowledge, Lieutenant.”
“But he may have come inside without your knowledge?”
“Sometimes I don’t come out of my room for days at a time. On those occasions, I am not aware of anything in the rest of the house.”
“You said your nurse was a good friend of the guard’s?”
“I believe she was, yes.”
“Any particular reason why you think that?”
Kurtz raised a hand to his face as if he hoped to calm the contracting areas under his skin. “It was just a general impression I had.”
“Do you think they were friends before your nurse hired him?”
“No.”
“The wine, is it drinking wine or investment wine?”
“Both.”
Trust Guidry to think of wine as an investment. He was so secretive that I hadn’t yet got the full story on him, but no man dresses like Guidry or handles himself like Guidry unless he’s got a pedigree a mile long. About the only thing I knew about him was that he came from New Orleans and wasn’t Italian. Also, he had called me a liar one time in French. That wasn’t a lot to go on, and I didn’t care anyway because it was none of my business, but he probably grew up in a mansion with well-stocked wine cellars and trusted old
servants who lugged the stuff up the stairs and opened it. He probably wouldn’t be caught dead drinking the supermarket stuff I bought.
He said, “Anything valuable enough for somebody to kill to get to it?”
“What a man will kill for, Lieutenant, is highly subjective, but I have a couple of cases of 1998 Pétrus that sells for about fourteen-fifty a bottle. I suppose a collector might murderously covet it. I also have a case of 1997 Romanée-Conti, somewhere over fifteen hundred a bottle, and quite a lot of Château Latour, some 1990, some 1993, some 1994. The Latour is cheaper, about seven or eight hundred a bottle.”
Guidry didn’t look shocked, but I was. I couldn’t believe that a bottle of fifteen-hundred-dollar wine could taste a hundred and fifty times better than the ten-dollar-a-bottle stuff I drank.
Guidry said, “Anybody you know who might want your wine?”
“Until thirty minutes ago, Lieutenant, nobody even knew my wine existed.”
“Somebody has to sell it to you. Somebody has to put it on the shelves.”
“I order it flown in directly from the wineries. It’s delivered in unmarked crates, and I put it on the shelves myself.”
I thought,
And Gilda knew it was there, just like she knew Ziggy was in there with it.
The man was not only blue and grotesquely ugly, he was a big liar.
Guidry said, “You know, under Florida law, it’s a felony offense to ship wine in from out of state.”
“Collector’s wine falls under a different code, Lieutenant.”
Guidry cocked an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t challenge it. I didn’t know diddly about Florida’s laws about wine shipments, but I would have bet good money that Kurtz was bluffing.
Guidry said, “When’s the last time the guard handled your iguana?”
Kurtz’s face twisted, either from a spasm or from extreme annoyance. “Nobody
handles
my iguana, Lieutenant. And so far as I know, the guard never even saw my iguana.”
“Never picked him up? Never had any contact with him?”
“As I said, Lieutenant, when I’m in pain, a lot can happen inside my house without my knowledge. My nurse may be able to give you more information about the guard’s contact with the iguana.”
I thought,
Oh, sure, let Gilda take all the blame
.
Honest to God, some men aren’t worth the money it would take to buy a rope to hang them. With each answer Kurtz gave, I was regretting more and more my impulsive advice to ditch the gun he’d worn under his robe.
Guidry said, “How long has your nurse worked for you?”
Kurtz’s eyes flicked up and to the right for a quick instant, a sure sign a person’s preparing to lie.
“I hired her just before I moved here four months ago from New York.”
“From an agency?”
“No, she also was independent.”
“You mind asking the nurse to come in here?”
For a second, Kurtz’s face betrayed how much effort it was taking to stand and talk. Asking him to make the long walk back to Gilda’s room was like asking somebody who’d just had abdominal surgery without anesthesia to sew up his own incision.
I said, “I’ll get her.”
I nipped across the living room without waiting for either man’s permission and headed through the dining room and kitchen toward Gilda’s room. I hadn’t much liked Gilda before, not because she was gorgeous but because she hadn’t been concerned about Ziggy. Now I felt sorry for her. The thought even crossed my mind that I should warn her, one woman to another, that Kurtz was playing dumb about a lot of things. Not being a total idiot, I let the thought cross without flagging it down. I had already created enough trouble for myself by that inane protective gesture toward Kurtz. That decision was going to cost me, and I didn’t want to add any more to it.
In Gilda’s open doorway, I came to an abrupt spine-tingling stop. The room was still and silent as a coffin, and the bed’s white cover was military smooth. An open doorway on the opposite side of the room showed a white-tiled bathroom, also empty and silent.
“Gilda?”
I don’t know why I called. The room had a permanently empty feeling, the same deadness I remembered in my mother’s room after she abandoned me and my brother.
I called a couple more times, just to confirm what I already knew. “Gilda? Are you here?”
I even trotted down the wide eastern corridor where a glass wall overlooked the courtyard. I pasted myself against the glass to look out at the oak tree and the landscaped lawn around it. Unless Gilda had scaled the tree and was hiding in its branches, she wasn’t in the courtyard. The east wing had only one door and it was open—Kurtz’s bedroom. I stepped inside and got a quick look at a big bed with black satin sheets. I called Gilda, but I knew she wasn’t there. Gilda had left the house, and every instinct told me she hadn’t left to run a quick errand. Gilda had run away, and she didn’t intend to be found.

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