Blaize Clement - Dixie Hemingway Mysteries 04 - Cat Sitter On a Hot Tin Roof p.02

She said, “Sheila will be right with you, Mr. Gorgon.”
He said, “Well, get her up here, I don’t have all day.”
The young woman with the Statue of Liberty hair whipped around the front counter with a smile as phony as Ruby’s. “I’m right here, Mr. Gorgon. You can come on back.”
As he strutted away, I watched him with the repulsed fascination I’d give a nest of baby vipers. Maurice and Ruby seemed equally unable to tear their eyes away from him.
Even Baby had cocked his ears and was staring at him with big astonished eyes.
Sheila of the white spiked hair bustled around a manicure stand, getting him seated, making sure he was comfortable, offering him something to drink, putting out her bowls
and bottles and tools as if she were getting ready to do major surgery. The man all but sneered at her, but he allowed her to touch his broad hands. They seemed to have
something of a practiced routine.
As if we all came out of a trance, Maurice and Ruby and I turned away from them at the same moment.
In a barely audible murmur, Maurice said, “Speak of the devil.”
Brilliantly, I said, “Huh?”
He leaned close and pretended to arrange a hair behind my ear while he whispered, “That’s the man Laura’s seeing!”
Since she’d only lived in Sarasota a few weeks, she couldn’t have seen much of him. Besides, anybody with two brain cells to rub together would know he wasn’t Laura’s
type. Then I remembered how she’d talked about how rich her husband was, and how much she’d liked being a rich man’s wife. This guy sporting diamonds on his hammy
hands obviously had money. Maybe his money was enough to make Laura overlook his nasty disposition. I gave the man another look. I knew he wasn’t the man who’d called
while I was there because his voice was gruff and harsh, not the unctuous smarm of the guy who’d come to Laura’s door.
I thanked Maurice profusely, tried to give him a tip which he refused, and left him and Ruby telling Baby how wonderful he was. I didn’t say goodbye to Sheila. I was afraid
it would interfere with her concentration and enrage her manicure customer.
That’s the kind of thing that makes me grateful for my own profession. I don’t have to be a different person at work than I am at home. I don’t have to suck up to people I
despise so that little pieces of my soul get chipped away every day.
As I trudged back to the Bronco, I thought how women tend to envy beauties like Laura, but if we’re going to envy anybody, it probably should be women like Ruby. She
was a lot happier than Laura, she had a man who loved her whole zaftig self, and she was content with her life. I suspected that Laura’s experience with men was that they all
wanted to show her off to other men, like a rare jewel in their possession.
Oddly, I felt sorry for Laura. She probably needed a friend as much as I did. Maybe some of her cool self-esteem would rub off on me, and maybe I could help her feel that
she was more than just a lovely face.
9
At the diner, Judy was too busy to talk, but she was quick with the coffee. After she poured the first cup she stepped back to let a young Hispanic man carrying a bright-eyed
baby boy in a plastic carrier pass, and for a second he and Judy did one of those sidestepping routines in which each offers right-of-way to the other. While that went on, the
baby and I smiled at each other and he waggled his bare feet in innocent ecstasy at being cute and lovable. I tapped one of his plump little brown toes with my finger, and he
laughed before his father moved forward and took the baby out of my reach. It’s just disgusting what a pushover I am for babies.
Judy hurried away as a middle-aged man and a dewy-eyed young woman—probably office workers taking an early lunch—stopped at the empty booth across the aisle.
The girl slid into the booth’s bench seat, and the man hesitated a moment as if he might slide in next to her. Flushing, she quickly put her handbag on the seat, and he sat down
across from her. A strand of hair had fallen forward over her face. As if it couldn’t help itself, his hand floated across the space between them and smoothed the errant hair
away from her brow. She looked startled, and he jerked his hand back in a shamed spasm. He wore a wedding band. She wore a look that said she might soon change jobs.
By nature’s design, men have the same response to pretty girls that women have to babies. They are compelled to touch them, caress their soft skin, inhale their scent. Lust
and tender yearning are two facets of the same diamond.
Judy slid my breakfast in front of me. “Tanisha says hi.”
I looked up and waved a thank-you at Tanisha’s shiny black face smiling at me through the opening to the kitchen. Tanisha is wide as a bus from eating her own cooking, so
she took up most of the opening.
As usual, she had done my breakfast exactly the way I like it—two eggs over easy, extra-crispy home fries, and a biscuit. No bacon, because I have a bacon monitor in my
head that knows how much bacon I can eat without ending up big as Tanisha. Some days I tell the monitor to mind its own business, but only when I really, really need fried fat
to ease my soul.
Judy scooted away and left me to enjoy my breakfast. The man and the girl across the aisle were busy eating now, neither looking at the other or talking. A little bacon might
have made them both feel better.
I ate as fast as I could, dropped money on the table, and waved goodbye to Judy and Tanisha. My mind and body were screaming for sleep.
Except for sloshing surf and squawking seabirds, everything was quiet when I got home. The parakeets were having a siesta, and only a few bored shorebirds ambled along
the sand. The day seemed to have lasted a week or two, and my Keds made weary shuffling sounds as I dragged myself up the stairs to my apartment.
Ella was waiting for me inside the French doors, which meant that Paco had brought her up before he went off to catch a drug dealer or nab a bank robber or do whatever
his job of the day was. I picked her up and kissed her nose, feeling better the instant I heard her start to purr. That’s the neat thing about cats. You can be feeling like
yesterday’s cold oatmeal, and the sound of a cat’s purring just because you’re there makes you feel like you might be worth something after all. She blinked cat code for I love
you and then twisted out of my arms and leaped to the floor, where she proceeded to hike her back leg in the air and gnaw at the base of her tail.
That’s another neat thing about cats. They don’t waste time in feel-good sentiment when there’s an itch that needs attention.
I stood for a while under warm water and then fell naked into bed and oblivion. I woke up annoyed at myself for going into a funk over things that were, to be honest about
it, none of my business. I was a pet sitter, not a surgeon or social worker. That being the case, I needed to keep my mind on my own life and not indulge in the ego trip of
taking on other people’s problems.
I told myself that Jeffrey had excellent surgeons and caring parents. I told myself that Laura was an intelligent woman with a family she could call for any support she needed.
I told myself that no matter how much I sympathized, I actually couldn’t make any difference in what either of them was going through.
With that determined, I got up and padded naked to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Carrying the tea to my closet-office, I flipped on the CD player to let Patsy Cline’s
no-nonsense, no-equivocation, no-shit voice break the silence. That’s what I needed, less of my own morbid thoughts and more of Patsy Cline’s soul. While I whipped through
the clerical parts of my business, Ella sat on my desk and tapped her tail in sympathy for Patsy Cline falling to pieces at the sight of an old lover.
After we were done with record-keeping and grooving on the heartbreak of love, I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust in my apartment. I scrubbed my
bathroom shiny too, until I was high on Clorox fumes. All the time I did it, I heard my grandmother’s voice saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” which annoyed the heck
out of me because it reminded me that I’ve become as much a cleanliness freak as she was. I swear, all those bromides that mothers and grandmothers repeat must change a
person’s DNA.
Nevertheless, I felt in control of my little corner of the world when I’d got my environment clean and neat. I almost swaggered when I put away the vacuum. Then I ambled
to the closet-office and pulled on a satin thong. I put on a bra too, because I would see Pete later and I didn’t want to give him shortness of breath.
I still had some time before I had to leave for my afternoon rounds, so I took Ella out to Michael’s deck for a spirited session of chase-the-peacock-feather. Watching a
moving peacock feather arouses a cat’s innate hunting instincts, so I buy peacock feathers by the dozen. Both of us were a little winded when I got my grooming kit and put
Ella on the plank table. Being a Persian mix, she has medium-long coarse hair with an undercoat that can knot up, so she needs to be groomed every day.
As soon as I put her on the table and got out my brush, a squirrel with an exquisitely buoyant tail scampered to the foot of the old oak at the edge of the deck. He picked up
an acorn in his paws, turned a backward somersault and came up still holding the acorn. While Ella and I stared at him in round-eyed admiration, he scampered up the tree
trunk and disappeared in the branches.
I said, “My gosh, squirrels must be the clowns of the animal kingdom.”
Ella said, “Thrrripp!” She didn’t exactly shrug, but she sounded as if she thought it was time to talk about her and not about a squirrel.
Like all cats, Ella likes her throat brushed more than anything in the world, so I started there. Careful not to tilt my slicker brush and bite her skin, I ran it down her throat
while Ella stretched her neck and closed her eyes, swooning at the pleasure of it. It took just a few seconds more to move down her chest and under her arms, back to her
throat for a couple of soothing strokes, and to the outside of her front legs. Then a quick pass over the top of her head and neck, a cat’s second most favorite grooming spot, a
few strokes down both her sides while I ran a protective finger down her spine, and then her bloomers.
For a second, my mind drifted to Jeffrey, but I jerked it away as if it were a dog on a leash going somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Like his parents, I had to believe
Jeffrey would come through the surgery with no problems. I had to believe the surgery would completely end his seizures. The alternatives were too terrible to even
contemplate.
I finished grooming Ella with a fast flick around her tail and a couple of final strokes down her throat. To distribute natural oils to the tips of her hair and make her coat shiny
and smooth, I quickly passed a soft-bristled brush all over her body. All fluffed up, she was a glorious burst of technicolor beauty, and I told her so.
Ella preened contentedly. Deep in her kitty heart, Ella believes she’s the most beautiful creature alive. I like that about cats. They don’t compare themselves with other cats.
They don’t talk themselves into feeling dumb or ugly or fat or thin, they just enjoy feeling gorgeous. Too bad humans don’t do that.
I put Ella in Michael’s kitchen, made sure she had fresh water in her bowl, and gave her a goodbye kiss on the nose. Then I went outside, spritzed the table with my handydandy
water and Clorox mixture, and headed out in the Bronco for my afternoon rounds.
As I drove, I caught myself humming a tune and beating time to it on the steering wheel. The lyrics had been in my head all morning, as if I had a jukebox in my brain and
somebody had fed it a lot of coins. Actually, it was just the first line of a song’s lyrics. My grandmother had always maintained that each of us has an invisible Guide who is
always with us, and the Guide communicates with us by directing our attention to book titles or billboard signs or song lyrics. I’m not sure I believe the Guide idea, but I have
noticed that my mind has a way of knowing things before I’m aware of them, and lots of times I don’t catch on until I hear my own voice singing some song I hadn’t thought of
in years. This time it was “You don’t know me.”
Silly thing to hear over and over, but I couldn’t shake it.
10
At Tom Hale’s condo, Tom was at the kitchen table working on tax returns. He called hello to me and I yelled back, but I didn’t stay to chat because Tom and I both had
work to do. Besides, I thought Tom might be embarrassed to have told me about his personal problems with Frannie, and I knew I was embarrassed to have been so blatant
about how I felt about the woman. We both needed a bit of distance for a few days, the same way I needed distance from Laura for a few days.
I seemed to have become the sort of person who knew so much about my friends’ private business that I couldn’t be friendly to them anymore.
My afternoon went fast because two clients had returned home that day, one the human of a Siamese couple, and the other the human of an orange Shorthair. All I had to do
was pop in to make sure they had indeed returned as planned, collect a check, and be on my way. Two white Persians, Stella and Marie, were almost as easy. The cats were
sisters, so content with each other’s company that they deemed me important only as the human who combed them and put out food for them. While I ran the vacuum to pick
up hair they had flung on the carpet, Stella sat on the windowsill looking longingly at the birds around the feeder, and Marie lay on the sofa watching a kitty video of darting fish.
When I told them goodbye, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.
Mazie was my last call of the day, and I rang the doorbell with dread nibbling the back of my neck. Both Pete and Mazie answered, and the minute I saw Pete’s worried
face, I braced myself for whatever bad news he had about Jeffrey. Mazie looked as distressed as Pete, with the corners of her mouth downturned and sad. She looked sharply
at me, sighed heavily, then stepped back to let me in.
Pete said, “She was hoping you were somebody else.” He said somebody else in the tone people use when they’re trying to speak in code so a child won’t understand.
I said, “Sorry, Mazie, it’s just me.”
Pete’s saxophone was out of the case and lying on a chair. He held a child’s picture book in his hand, a finger crooked into it to hold his place.
He said, “I’ve been reading to her. She seems to like it.”
He didn’t mention playing the saxophone for her, but I suspected he had been doing that too.
I looked at the book and laughed. It was The Cat in the Hat.
I said, “That was Christy’s favorite story. She loved Dr. Seuss.”
It was amazing how that had just popped out of my mouth, flowing out easily, not choked by sobs or hoarse from a closed throat. I had been doing that a lot lately,
mentioning Christy or Todd easily and casually. It was a strange and bittersweet feeling to be able to do that.
Pete said, “Hal called. The boy’s still out from the anesthesia.”
“Maybe that’s normal.”
“I don’t think so. I think he should be awake by now. Hal said the doctors keep coming in to check on him.”
“Well, they would anyway.”
Mazie raised her head and looked back and forth at us, like a spectator at a tennis match. Then she heaved another huge sigh. When a dog sighs a lot, it’s a sure sign of
stress. In this case, it was also a sure sign that Mazie knew that neither Pete nor I knew diddly about what was normal for a three-year-old after brain surgery.
I got her leash and jingled it. “Let’s go for a walk, okay?”
Like a dutiful soldier, she hiked with me down the driveway to the sidewalk. We hesitated there, both of us uncertain which way we wanted to go. As if we had held a
discussion about it and came to the same decision, we both turned at the same moment and walked toward Laura’s house. As we passed it, we turned our heads and peered
through the shielding trees, but we didn’t see any sign of Laura.
I wondered if Laura’s defiance with her husband that morning had been an act. I wondered if she were inside her house needing a friend to talk to. I was her friend, or at
least wanted to be, but I couldn’t ring her doorbell and say, “This morning I hid behind some bushes and eavesdropped on you and your husband. Want to talk about it?”
No, the best thing to do was to wait a day or two and ask her to have dinner with me. Then, if she wanted to tell me what was going on with her husband, we could talk.
At the end of the block, Mazie and I stopped to look at a couple of great blue herons standing at the base of a power pole. They were watching a fish hawk atop the pole.
The fish hawk was downing a flopping mullet, and the herons were waiting to catch the leftovers.
Mazie made a wuffing sound and sat down with her tail wagging, probably a form of doggie applause for such a sensible display. Nature is neither squeamish nor wasteful. In
the animal kingdom, every creature aids and is aided by every other creature. Humans, on the other hand, haven’t evolved yet enough to do that.
When the show was over, Mazie got up and walked back home with me. It seemed to me that the corners of her mouth were raised a bit, not in a smile exactly, but not in
the morose look she’d had before. I felt more positive too. It’s good to be reminded of nature’s intelligence. Even when we can’t see it in our own lives, it’s still there.
As Mazie and I went past Laura’s house, I didn’t even look toward it.
I will never know if it would have changed anything if I had gone to her door right then.
11
On the way home, Ray Charles was still in my head singing “You don’t know me,” while I beat time on the steering wheel and grinned at the contradiction of a wide-hipped
Silverado pickup with a gun rack in the back and a RAPTURE! sticker on the bumper. Florida is an Old Testament state where God walks with us in the cool of the evening.
But he tells us not to get too smart, not to eat of the tree of knowledge, or we will die. And all around us, a sibilant sea whispers the soul’s terrifying truth: “If you eat of the
tree, you will not die.” It’s no wonder so many of us are gun-toting fundamentalists.
At home, I pulled into the carport just as the sun plunged into the Gulf in a final burst of Technicolor glory. Paco was on the deck with Ella in his arms watching the show,
and I trotted over to join them. Only Paco could manage to look slim and fit in slouchy black sweatpants and a floppy white T-shirt. The pants even accentuated the fact that
he has the most gorgeous butt in the universe.
Gorgeous butt or not, he looked lonely.
He slung his free arm over my shoulder and we stood taking in the floating sky banners of turquoise and hot pink and orange. We didn’t speak until the colors had finally
faded and the sun’s glittering path from horizon to shore disappeared.
As the surf wrote frothy messages on the sand, Paco said, “Have you eaten?”
“No, and I’m starving.”
“Me too.”
We both sighed in unison. Without Michael to feed us, we were like newly hatched chicks without a mother.
Paco said, “There’s some turkey and stuff in the fridge.”
I said, “We could make sandwiches.”
We both perked up. Sandwiches weren’t as good as what Michael would have fed us, but we had solved the dinner problem, and we had each other.
I said, “I’ll be down in ten minutes,” and loped upstairs.
Ten minutes later, I skipped down barefoot and still slightly damp from a speed shower, but decently covered in elastic-waist cotton pants and an oversized T-shirt, a female
version of what Paco wore.
In the kitchen, Ella was perched on her stool looking wistfully at the spread on the butcher-block island. Paco had hauled out everything remotely related to sandwich
making, and was crouched in front of the refrigerator poking into its innards.
He said, “I can’t find the horseradish mustard.”
“On the door. What kind of beer do you have?”
He held up a dark glass bottle with a long neck. “Some exotic stuff Michael got at the Sarasota Brewing Company. You can have Golden Wheat, Midnight Pass Porter, or
Sunset Red.”
“Ooh, cool. I’ll have the porter.”
I got plates and made room for them by shoving aside cutting boards holding sliced turkey and ham, sliced tomatoes and onions. There was a loaf of pumpernickel bread
and one of rye, along with jars of mayonnaise, three kinds of mustard, two kinds of pickles, black and green olives, several varieties of relish, both mild and hot salsa, and some
things I didn’t recognize. Also chips, both potato and corn. We could have fed half of Siesta Key.
We took seats and fell on the food like happy cannibals, smearing big globs of mayonnaise and mustard on bread and layering on meat and condiments to hoggish heights.
Being a lady, I daintily cut my sandwich in half, on the diagonal. Paco just held his carefully so nothing would slip out the bottom. For a few minutes, the only sound was the
crunch of crisp pickles and snap of chips.
After a while, I said, “You know the woman I told you about? The one with the sadistic surgeon husband?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, he’s found her. This morning I overheard them talking. He was scary.”
“All the more reason for you to stay out of it. That woman’s situation sounds like a plane crash about to happen.”
“She needs a friend, Paco. That’s all I’m offering.”
“Sounds to me like she needs a good lawyer. Maybe a good shrink.”
“Just because she left her husband doesn’t make her crazy.”
“I’m just saying she needs more help than you can give her.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so we chewed for a few more minutes without talking.
But I’m the one who, when I was five years old and made to sit in a corner in kindergarten because I talked too much, told my mother that if you went too long without
talking all your mouth bones would grow together. I don’t have any trouble with silence if I’m alone, but when another person is present, my mouth is still afraid all its bones will
fuse if I don’t speak.
I said, “You know those songs or commercials that get stuck in your head?”
“They’re called ear worms. Comes from some German word that sounds like ear worms and means the same thing. Don’t remember what it is.”
“Huh. Well, I’ve got one. I keep hearing Ray Charles singing ‘You don’t know me.’ That’s all. Just ‘You don’t know me’ over and over. It’s making me nuts.”
“Yeah, I hate those things. I hate commercial jingles the most. One time when I was on a stakeout, I kept hearing a voice say, Raid kills bugs dead. All the damn night long,
I heard that commercial.”
I drained the last of my porter and set the bottle on the butcher block.
“The little boy who had surgery hasn’t waked up yet. Surgery was at seven this morning. Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”
Paco’s dark eyes studied me. “You said he’s three years old, right?”
My throat worked for a moment in a vain attempt to deny his implicit meaning, but I knew he was right.
I said, “Okay.”
In the shorthand communication that develops between people who love and support one another, he was telling me that I was seeing my three-year-old daughter in Jeffrey,
seeing her crushed skull every time I thought of Jeffrey’s brain surgery, feeling the edges of the same cold anguish I’d felt when Christy was killed. He had warned me not to do
that anymore, and I had agreed to stop. Those unspoken codes may be the best thing about families.
I helped Paco put away all the leftovers and tidy up the kitchen, then blew kisses at him and Ella and went upstairs to bed. As I fell asleep, Ray Charles was still softly singing
in the shadows of my mind.
“You don’t know me,” he said, “You don’t know me.”
12
By a quarter to five next morning, I was dressed and on my porch, trying to shake the feeling that the day would be a bad one. I was glad that Michael would come home at
eight o’clock and would be home for the next forty-eight hours. I’ve felt safer all my life when Michael was nearby, and I guess I always will.
The sky was clear and milky, moon and stars withdrawn into its haze. Subdued bird twittering and gentle surf made morning music, the sea’s breath was cool and smelled of
salt and kelp, a new day’s forgiveness dispensed with open hand.
There was absolutely no reason for a ton of weight to ride on my chest.
The next few hours flowed with the same smoothness. No unpleasant surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary. At the Sea Breeze, Billy Elliot and I galloped around the oval
parking lot until he was satisfied and grinning, and I was gasping for air. After Billy Elliot, I walked a sedate pug and then a pregnant collie mix. When the dogs were all walked
and fed and brushed, I saw to the cats on my list. At each house, I fed them, groomed them, and spent about fifteen minutes playing with them. Sometimes we played with a
cat’s own toys, and sometimes with one of mine.
Dogs don’t much care what games you play with them, they’re just tickled that you’re playing with them at all. You can roll old ratty foam balls around for dogs, or even
throw them a cat’s toy, and they’ll think you’re the coolest playmate they’ve ever had.
Cats, on the other hand, are as fickle about their toys as they are about their food. Wave a peacock feather at a cat one day, and he’ll jump for it with ecstatic excitement.
Wave the same feather the next day, and the cat will sit with a disdainful sneer on his face and look at you as if you have insulted him, his mother, and all his ancestors back to
Egypt.
At Mazie’s house, I heard saxophone music as I went up the walk to the front door. Pete answered the doorbell with the sax in his hand, all the lines in his face curving
upward.
“The boy’s doing fine. Hal called early this morning, said he came out of the anesthetic late last night. He was groggy and confused for a while, but now he’s alert. Hal said
they’d be moving him to Sub-ICU sometime this morning.”
My knees went weak with relief. “Did Hal say what the doctors think about the seizures?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to keep him. Poor guy, he sounded exhausted. He just wanted to tell me Jeffrey was out of ICU and to make sure Mazie was
okay.”
At the sound of her name, Mazie raised her head, then lowered it with a sigh and stretched her chin against her forepaws.
Pete said, “I’m worried about her, but I told Hal she was okay. I didn’t want him to worry too.”
I knelt beside Mazie and stroked her head. “Jeffrey will be home soon, Mazie, and he’s going to be fine.”
I hoped with all my heart that I was telling her the truth—that Jeffrey would come home soon and never have another seizure.
Neither of us enjoyed our walk, and when we came back and turned into her driveway, something at the edge of my vision streaked across the street and into the trees and
foliage. I turned my head, but whatever it was had disappeared. I had only caught a quick flash of movement, but I’d got the impression of a small brown animal with a long
tail. Somewhat like a lemur, except lemurs live on a different continent. Actually, it had seemed like a small brown cat. To be even more specific, it had seemed like Leo on the
lam.
I led a reluctant Mazie down the sidewalk closer to Laura’s house. I didn’t see any signs of life, but that didn’t mean Laura wasn’t home. She could be inside reading the
morning paper and Leo could have run out when she went outside to get it. She could be in the shower, not realizing that Leo was loose. Or she could be on the jogging trail,
completely unaware that Leo had slipped out when she opened the door.
Mazie pulled on the leash, wanting to go home. I hesitated a moment, torn between wanting to let Laura know her cat was outside, and knowing Mazie was right. I was on
her time, not Leo’s. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I had seen Leo. It could have been some other dark cat with a long tail.
Telling myself Leo would eventually come home—if it had been Leo—I led Mazie back to her house. Pete was waiting outside the front door like an anxious father.
I handed Mazie’s leash off to him and said, “I think I saw Laura Halston’s cat while Mazie and I were walking. He runs out every time he sees an open door.”
“Why?”
“I guess he’s a nature cat. Doesn’t like living inside.”
“That’s how I’d be if I were a cat. I’d join the circus again, be on the move all the time.”
“Are there circus cats?”
“Well, sure, lions and tigers. A few people have got domestic cats to do some tricks, jump through hoops, that kind of thing, but cats don’t have a strong desire to please
people like good circus animals have. Cats are liable to get bored in the middle of an act and just flat quit.”
“I think I’ll go next door and tell Laura, just in case it was Leo. He might have gone out when Laura opened the door to go running.”
“She ran real early this morning. I took Mazie outside to pee, and I saw her run across the street to the jogging trail.”
“I’m not even sure it was Leo.”
“A bobcat, maybe. People see bobcats in their yards all the time. Bobcats and panthers were here first, poor things.”
I didn’t think it had been a bobcat I’d seen. I was almost positive it had been Leo.
I left the Bronco in Mazie’s driveway and walked to Laura’s house, peering all around as I went in case Leo had returned to his own yard. As soon as I started up Laura’s
walk, I saw that her front door was ajar. When I got closer, I saw Leo in the corner of the small porch. He was gnawing on one of his paws as if something was stuck between
his toes. I wasn’t surprised that he’d come home. Cats have an unerring sense of direction, and they usually return soon enough when they’ve run away.
Cats are also skittish, and Leo might streak away if I approached him. I knelt on the walk and talked softly to him.
“Hey, Leo, remember me? Would you let me pick you up?”
He paused in his paw cleaning, tilted his ears toward me, and then went back to cleaning his foot. He seemed to be telling me that he wasn’t unfriendly, but to not take him
for granted.
I looked toward the door again. If I ignored Leo and rang the doorbell, he might take offense at my nearness and run away. The smart thing would be to call Laura and tell
her he was out and let her handle him. Keeping an eye on him, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed information, then remembered that Laura’s landline number was in her
parents’ name and she hadn’t given me her cell number. I put the phone back in my pocket and got to my feet.
Leo turned his attention to another paw, going at it with a determined intensity. Whatever his feet had picked up on his dash to freedom was something he didn’t want to
keep. Watching him from the corner of my eye, I took a few cautious steps toward the door and realized my heart was pounding much harder than the situation warranted. I
told myself a cat had got out through a door accidentally left ajar, that’s all there was to it.
But I knew Leo had been outside now long enough for Laura to have missed him. I knew there was something terribly wrong about that open door. And above all else, I
knew what Laura’s husband had said to her the day before. He had told her he would see that she paid for what she’d done.
While I debated what to do next, Leo stopped gnawing at his toes and watched me. Old deputy habits made me scrutinize the door facing for signs of forced entry. I didn’t
see any, but when I looked more closely at the landing, I made out several small dark brown circles.
I don’t know why it had taken me so long to see them. Perhaps I had known all along they were there and denied them. Whatever the reason, they told me why Leo was so
busily cleaning the pads of his paws.
13
I took the phone back out and called 911. A deep male voice answered, one of those molasses tones that make you feel like weeping with relief because you’ve found
somebody with broad shoulders you can fling yourself against. It took several tries to get my voice to work, and then it came out sounding like something fired from an old
rusty cannon.
I said, “I have reason to believe a woman has been attacked in her home. I’m outside the door now, but I’m afraid I’ll disturb evidence if I go in. I’m an ex-deputy.”
I felt it was important to say I was an ex-deputy, as if that would make me sound more credible.
The man said, “Why do you think there’s been an attack?”
“I overheard the woman’s husband threaten her yesterday, and now her front door is open a few inches and her cat’s outside. The cat has left a trail of bloody paw prints
from the house.”
He took the address, Laura’s name, and my name.
He said, “Somebody will be there shortly.”
I could imagine him calling it in: “Crazy woman thinks another woman has been attacked because her cat’s outside and she imagines she sees bloody paw prints. Go check it
out.”
I sat down on the walk and waited. Leo waited. Leo yawned and stretched, then continued grooming a leg. The house was quiet and calm. The yard was quiet and calm. I
was the only thing not calm, but it was very possible that I was a paranoid case. It was very possible that I’d been involved in so many crimes in the last year that I’d come to
expect the worst even in innocuous situations.
One of those ear worm things started in my head again, Randy Newman singing “I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.”
After what seemed eons, a green-and-white deputy’s car pulled into the driveway and Deputy Jesse Morgan got out. The fact that a sworn deputy had come instead of one
of the Community Policing officers meant the dispatcher had taken my call seriously, but I did an inward groan. Morgan and I have met over a couple of dead bodies, and I
think he sees me as somebody whose presence spells trouble. He may be right.
I stood up to meet him, and it seemed to me that his stride faltered a bit when he recognized me. From the top of his close-cropped hair to the hem of his dark-green deputy
pants, Morgan was crisp and all business. The only thing about him that hinted of a life outside law enforcement was the discreet diamond stud in one ear-lobe.
With his eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, I had to go by his lean cheeks and firm lips to tell what he thought, and he wasn’t giving anything away.
He stopped a few feet away and rocked back a bit on his heels. “Miz Hemingway.”
I said, “I know how this seems, but I’m concerned about the woman in this house. I saw her cat run across the street about an hour ago. I think the cat ran out when
somebody went in.” I pointed toward the dark round circles. “Those are paw prints.”
Morgan’s head tilted a fraction of an inch toward me, either in acknowledgment of my powers of deduction or because he thought it was a good idea to be polite to a crazy
woman.
As he moved past me toward the door, I said, “Don’t scare the cat away.”
He stopped and turned his head toward Leo. “Tell you what, Miz Hemingway, why don’t you go pick the cat up, and then I’ll go in the house.”
I didn’t like the careful way he said it, as if he were humoring somebody who might fly apart at any moment. Still, he had a point. Cautiously, I moved forward and stooped
to pick Leo up. As if to show Morgan what an overanxious idiot I was, Leo went limp as a sack of jelly.
Avoiding the paw prints, Morgan zigzagged to the door, rang the doorbell, and rapped on the glass. “Sheriff’s Department!”
Silence.
He rang again, rapped on the doorjamb, and called louder. “Sheriff’s Department!”
He did that three times, each time louder, then used the back of his knuckles to push the door open. “Miz Halston? Sheriff’s Department!”
He walked inside out of my view, but I could hear him calling to Laura and identifying himself. I carried Leo to the end of the driveway and stood by the street waiting. I
already knew what Morgan would find.
In a few minutes, he stepped outside with his phone to his ear. His face had gone several shades paler. He paused to talk, and I heard the word stabbed. The word
confirmed what I’d been expecting. Call it intuition or hunch or simply the fact that I knew Laura’s husband was a sadist with scalpels, I knew Laura had been murdered and
that the killer had stabbed her to death.
Morgan clicked the phone closed and put it back on his belt. Then he walked to the corner of the house, leaned over with one hand on the wall, and very efficiently threw
up.
I had firsthand knowledge of some of the gruesome things Morgan had seen, but I’d never seen him lose his poise. Morgan was an experienced law enforcement officer, and
law enforcement officers become inured to scenes that would turn a normal person’s stomach. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth, then
slowly turned toward me. I could feel his eyes on me behind his dark shades, and I knew he was debating how much to tell me. His chest rose in a deep breath, and he came
down the driveway.
I said, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“The crime-scene guys will want to talk to you.”
I said, “I’m going to put Leo in my car.”
Woodenly, I walked to my Bronco in the driveway at Mazie’s house and put Leo in a cardboard cat carrier. Lowering all the car windows, I left him there and went back to
Laura’s house. As I got there, a sheriff’s car pulled to the curb and Sergeant Woodrow Owens got out. When he saw me, his face registered pleasure, dismay, and sadness all
at one time.
Sergeant Owens is a tall laconic African American who had been my immediate superior when I was a deputy. There’s not a finer man in the world, or a smarter one. He
was smart enough to tell me I was too crazy to carry a gun for the department after Todd and Christy were killed. Actually, what he’d said was, “Dixie, you’re way too fucked
up to be a deputy.”
That’s how smart he was.
Now he said, “Damn, girl, I was hoping you’d stopped attracting dead bodies.”
“Me too.”
He flapped a bony hand at me and went past me to confer in low tones with Morgan. They both went inside the house for a few minutes, and when they came out Sergeant
Owens held his mouth clamped in a straight line. Morgan studiously held his head with his chin tilted up, as if he’d decided never to look at the floor again.
While Morgan went to his car and got out yellow crime-scene tape and began stretching it around the perimeter of the yard, Owens whipped out his phone. He spoke in
clipped tones for a while, then closed it and walked back to me.
“What’s the story?”
“The woman who lives here is Laura Halston. I don’t know her well, but I had dinner with her night before last, and she told me she’d left her husband. He’s a sadistic
surgeon, used to carve her up with scalpels. They lived in Dallas, and she ran away and came here. Then he found her.”
“She told you he’d found her?”
My face got warm. “I happened to overhear them talking yesterday. I was putting a turtle out by the lake, and they were on the other side of the hibiscus hedge that runs
along the street. He told her he would make her pay for what she’d done. She walked away from him, and he drove off.”
“You ever see him again?”
“That’s the only time.”
“Got a name for him?”
“Dr. Reginald Halston. He’s a prominent doctor in Dallas.”
He scribbled the name, and I said, “She called him Martin.”
“When you were listening to them behind the trail?”
I felt myself blush again. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, they just happened to come by while I was there.”
“How do you know he was the husband?”
“I heard her talking to him on the phone the night we had dinner. She called him Martin then, too.”
“And she said he was her husband?”
“She said he was her soon to be ex-husband.”
“In Dallas.”
“That’s what she said.”
“You know a next of kin to notify?”
“Her parents live in Connecticut, but I don’t know their name. She mentioned a sister in Dallas named Celeste. She didn’t say a last name.”
Owens deliberated a moment. “You know anybody else who could identify her body?”
“Besides me?”
“I think it would be better if it was somebody else, Dixie. You don’t need to see that.”
My heart quivered. Morgan had upchucked at seeing Laura’s body, and now Owens wanted to protect me from seeing it.
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s about as bad as it can get, Dixie.”
It’s funny how your mind can split at times like that. One side of my brain recoiled from what was happening around me. The other side was cool as grass. The cool side
knew investigators would look through Laura’s address books looking for names and numbers for her relatives. The cool side knew calls would be made, awful truths said,
grim arrangements made.
The cool side said, “I’ll take care of Leo until the house is cleaned up.”
“Leo?”
“Laura’s cat. I’ve put him in my car.”
Owens gave me a slow look, then nodded. “Lieutenant Guidry will be handling the homicide investigation. He’ll want to talk to you.”
As if on cue, Guidry’s dark Blazer pulled to a stop in the street, and Guidry got out and walked to us.
Owens said, “Dixie knows the woman. She spent some time with her night before last.”
I said, “I was only with her a few hours. She invited me for a glass of wine, and then we had dinner.”
Owens flapped his notebook at Guidry. “The woman has a husband in Dallas. A surgeon. She told Dixie he was a sadist, used to scare her with scalpels. Dixie believes the
man came here and found her. She saw the woman with a man she believes is the husband.”
Guidry nodded, digesting the scant information without comment.
I said, “She was a runner. Ran every morning. That’s how I met her. She’d opened the door to go running and Leo got out. Leo’s her cat. I’ve put him in my car.”
Guidry’s face took on the pained look he always got when I mentioned pets, but neither man answered me.
I said, “She wore serious running shoes. The expensive kind.”
I studied their implacable faces for a moment and knew it was time to shut up.
I said, “If you need me, you know where to find me.”
As I turned away, Owens said, “Dixie? We don’t need to tell you not to divulge anything about the ex-husband and the scalpels.”
Of course he didn’t. When word of the murder got out, the usual loonies would come forward to make false confessions. Guilty people would give false alibis. Citizens
would call with leads and misguided information. The murder would be public knowledge, but the fact that Laura’s ex-husband was a surgeon who liked to play with scalpels
was information that only the homicide investigators would know. And me.
Without answering, I turned away and trudged back to the Bronco.
14
At the Bronco, Leo was peering out the air holes in the cardboard carrier and making piteous noises. I leaned in the window and said, “It’s okay, Leo.”
My mouth said that, but my feet knew it was a huge lie, and the next thing I knew I was kicking the bejesus out of my front tire, all my rage and horror banging in useless
fury.
Behind me, Pete said, “Dixie? What’s wrong?”
A surge of adrenaline brought teeth-rattling shakes, and I turned around to lean against the Bronco with my knees stiffened and my elbows braced on the car. Pete had
Mazie on her leash, and both man and dog were taking in the fact that Leo was crying in the car, and that Laura’s yard was marked by yellow crime-scene tape.
An ambulance and several marked and unmarked sheriff’s cars passed by, slowing to a crawl in front of Laura’s house and then oozing to parking places by the curb. I
knew what the criminalists would do. They would post a Contamination Sheet by the front door to record every person who entered and left the house. Then they would
photograph the interior of Laura’s house, dust for latent prints, and look for shoe tracks, for fibers, for hair, for anything that might point to the identity of the person or persons
who had killed her. Outside, they would walk shoulder to shoulder around the area looking for anything a killer might have dropped.
Pete said, “Something’s happened to that woman, hasn’t it?”
Still shuddering, I bobbed my head up and down.
Inside the Bronco, Leo made a long wailing noise. Mazie whimpered and trotted toward the sound, moving her tail back and forth in a nervous show of sympathy.
I waited until a final tremor released me, then said the thing that had to be said.
“Laura’s been killed.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I said, “I’m going to take Leo to Kitty Haven until Laura’s family comes.”
I put my hand on the door handle and then turned to him. “Pete, what time was it that you saw Laura?”
“Oh, it was early. Around five, probably. I get up early, you know, and once I’m up Mazie is up, so we went outside for a few minutes. That lady came down the driveway
over there and ran across the street. Just sort of squeezed through the hibiscus there where the running path is.”
It was now close to eleven, which meant Laura had been killed within the last five or six hours. The killer could have got inside Laura’s house while she was running and
killed her when she came back. Then he must have left the door open as he ran away, and Leo got outside.
I pulled the car door open, and Mazie trotted over to look up toward the cat carrier where Leo was still crying. Service dogs are trained from puppyhood to live amicably
with other household pets, so Mazie was free of cat prejudice.
With the same sympathetic concern that Mazie had, Pete said, “Why don’t you leave the cat with me and Mazie? We can take care of him, and I’m sure Hal and Gillis
would want to help out a neighbor.”
I opened the Bronco door and got in. “I’d need their permission, and this is not the time to ask for it.”
His shoulders dropped with the reminder of Jeffrey.
While he and Mazie watched me with identical expressions of sadness, I started the engine and backed out of the driveway. As I drove away, I looked toward Guidry’s
Blazer in front of Laura’s house. I reminded myself to tell him what time Pete had seen Laura. On TV, medical examiners can tell exactly what time a person died. In real life,
nailing down a time of death usually becomes somewhere between the time a person was seen alive and the time she was found dead.
Leo was quiet on the way to the Kitty Haven. Maybe he was soothed by the car’s movement, or maybe he was just relieved to get away from the gruesome scene inside his
house.
A yellow frame house with sparkling white shutters and a front porch that begs for a swing, Kitty Haven is owned by Marge Preston, a round white-haired woman who
speaks English and Cat with equal fluency. Inside, the décor is a comforting blend of a grandmother’s house and a brothel, with lots of burgundy velour, lace curtains, and
crocheted tablecloths. Several slack cats were draped on windowsills and plump chair backs in the waiting room. When I carried Leo in, they all looked at me as if I were the
most interesting specimen of humanity they’d ever seen.
When I lifted Leo from the carrier, Marge said, “Oh, what a beauty! You don’t see many of those.”
“His name’s Leo. There’s been a death in his family, and he needs a place to stay until relatives come.”
Marge took him from me and then looked suspiciously at the paw pad he raised.
I said, “He needs a bath too.”
“Oh, my.”
“Yeah.”
I left Marge telling Leo that he was safe and beautiful. Marge knows that even when you’ve stepped in blood, it makes you feel better to be told you’re safe and beautiful.
Heavy with the lethargy that follows a prolonged surge of adrenaline, I drove south like a homing pigeon. At the tree-lined lane leading to my apartment, I turned in with hope
tensing my stomach. When I rounded the last bend and saw my brother’s car in the carport, I let out a sigh of relief. Michael usually spends his off-hours fishing or cooking, so
his car meant he was home cooking. As he had been doing all my life, Michael would see that I held together.
Before I faced him, I slogged upstairs to my apartment’s porch and fell into the hammock. I kept remembering Laura’s husband saying he would see that she paid for what
she’d done. She had said he was abusive and mentally unbalanced, but what he’d done went way over being unbalanced. He had to be a raving psychopath to have killed his
wife just because she wanted a divorce.
With a little jolt, I remembered the man who’d called and come to her door while I was there, the one she’d met at the emergency room when she twisted her knee. He’d
sounded like a nutcase too, and I’d forgotten about him when I talked to Sergeant Owens. Then another jolt hit. Damn, I’d forgotten about the man who’d come in the Lyon’s
Mane too, the one Maurice had said was after Laura. If she’d turned him down, his obsessive lust might have turned homicidal. I didn’t know if he was as crazy as Laura’s
husband, but I knew he’d looked capable of brutal murder.
Tears came in a sudden torrent, not only from shock and sadness over the murder of a woman I’d liked a lot but from a deep reservoir of unspeakable fear that lies deep in
every woman’s heart. No matter how much equality we gain with our brains, our street smarts, and our ability to handle weapons, the fact remains that we are physically
weaker than men. Furthermore, we belong to a species that does unspeakable things to one another. Until that changes, we will be vulnerable, and every woman knows it.
Laura Halston had been an intelligent, healthy, able-bodied woman who had taken every precaution to stay safe. And yet somebody a lot bigger, stronger, and more brutal
had come into her house and killed her.
Was it somebody she knew? Somebody she had opened the door to? I kept going over what little I knew, gnawing on the details. A hunt might already be on for her
Laura’s surgeon husband, the well-known Dr. Reginald Halston that she called Martin. I wondered how he would feel when he learned that Laura had been pregnant with his
child when he killed her.
Then I reminded myself that I couldn’t be sure her husband was the killer. Except I was.
When I finally went searching for Michael, I found him in his kitchen, engulfed in clouds of aromatic steam coming from several big pots on the commercial range. He had an
apron the size of a tablecloth wrapped around his broad torso, and a look of beatific joy on his handsome face. When he’s on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse. When
he’s not on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse as well as for me and Paco. He has enough soups and stews stored in his freezer to feed all of Sarasota County.
When I came in, Ella Fitzgerald jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. After I smooched the
top of her head, she hopped back on her stool and licked her paws like a bimbo too involved with her manicure to pay attention to the little people.
Michael said, “What’s wrong?”
“You remember the woman I told you about? Laura Halston? She was murdered this morning. They didn’t tell me how, but I think she was stabbed to death. I took her cat
to Kitty Haven.”
Michael laid down his stirring spoon and came close, looking down at me with worried eyes.
“Oh, hell, Dixie. Oh, sugar, I’m sorry.”
I leaned into him, and he wrapped me in a bear hug, squeezing me as if he could shut out every hurtful thing. Then he held my shoulders in both hands and looked hard at me.
“You haven’t had anything to eat this morning, have you?”
“Michael, I can’t eat, I’m too upset.”
“You’ve been up since four, and it’s nearly noon. Sit.”
Michael is of the firm conviction that ninety-five percent of all wars and social ills would be wiped out if everybody ate a substantial breakfast.
While he whirled into action, I poured myself a mug of coffee from the electric pot on the counter. I drank half of it in one long gulp before I dropped onto a bar stool.
Beside me, Ella had decided her nails met her standards and was dreamily staring at Michael with the same love-dazed look that a lot of females get when they see him.
Michael went back and forth between the Sub-Zero refrigerator and the giant range like Godzilla stomping over cities, and before I had finished my coffee he slid a bowl of
white stuff in front of me and handed me a spoon.
“Down the hatch, kid.”
I took a tentative bite and felt my neck muscles relax. Fragrant white rice stirred into light cream, flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg, with a thin drizzle of maple syrup
looped over the top. Soft and creamy. No chunks of anything that required serious chewing, no sharp surprises, no intellectual demands. Just smooth, uncomplicated
nourishment that went down easy and warmed my heart.
Ella looked at my rice and made a little pleading sound, but Michael shook his head sternly. “Rice isn’t good for you, and you’ve already had a shrimp.”
Ella meekly flipped the tip of her tail. Nobody argues with Michael, not even Ella.
I nodded toward the steaming pots on the stove. “What’re you making?”
“Gumbo with shrimp and crab. Rice to serve it over.”
“Okra?”
“Don’t be afraid of okra, Dixie, it’s a respectable vegetable.”
“It’s slimy.”
“Lots of good stuff is slimy.”
He turned to waggle his eyebrows at me in a mock-lewd parody, but his eyes remained worried.
“Dixie, I hope you’re not going to get involved in another murder investigation. I don’t think I can go through that again.”
“This one doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“You knew the dead woman. You’re taking care of her cat. That involves you, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know anything other than what I’ve already told Sergeant Owens.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question.”
I carried my empty bowl and cup to the sink and rinsed them before I put them in the dishwasher.
I said, “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Uh-huh.”
Michael’s forehead was wrinkled with worry, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would relieve his mind.
No way was I staying out of this murder investigation. What had happened to Laura could have happened to me or to any other woman. I was going to do everything I
could to see that Laura Halston’s killer was caught and put away forever.
15
I stood a long time under a hot shower, but it didn’t wash away the memory of the bloody paw prints leading from Laura’s front door or my sense of outraged grief. Fatigue
made me feel like a balloon that had lost its air, but before I fell into bed for a nap, I called Guidry. Miracle of miracles, he answered his cell phone.
I said, “Guidry, I forgot to tell Sergeant Owens about a man who came to her house while I was there Sunday night. He called, too, and begged her to let him in. She didn’t,
even after he banged on the door. She said he was stalking her.”
“He have a name?”
“She didn’t say a name, but she said she’d met him at the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial. She went there with a sprained knee and he was there too.”
“Okay.”
“There’s another man, too. Thuggish guy named Gorgon. I don’t know much about him, but Maurice at the Lyon’s Mane said he was after Laura too.”
“Dixie, I don’t know what the hell you just said.”
“The Lyon’s Mane is a hair salon. It’s owned by Maurice and Ruby. Maurice does Laura’s hair. Did. Gorgon is one of their clients too. Gets his manicures there. According
to Maurice, he was putting a lot of pressure on Laura.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to Maurice.”
“There’s something else. A man I’ve put in charge of the dog next door saw Laura leave her house this morning about five o’clock to go running.”
The line was silent for a moment, and I knew Guidry was deciphering what I’d meant about a man I’d put in charge of a dog. I wasn’t in a mood to spoon-feed him, so I let
him figure it out for himself.
He rallied and said, “He’s sure about the time?”
“Not positive, but around that time. He gets up early, and he’d taken Mazie outside for a few minutes when he saw her.”
“Okay.” His voice was oddly flat.
I said, “Did you contact her family?”
“Her sister will be here as soon as she can. Probably tomorrow.”
“When is the autopsy scheduled?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“She was my friend.”
“Owens said you barely knew her.”
“That’s true, but she was still my friend.”
“Autopsy will be tomorrow morning.”
“Have you found her husband?”
“Dr. Reginald Halston, the surgeon? The one in Dallas?”
I didn’t like the way his tone had gone crispy.
“Yeah, that one.”
“We have somebody working on it.”
After I hung up, I crawled in bed and allowed myself to drift off to sleep. But even as my brain pulled the blinds to darken its rooms, I couldn’t ignore an internal blinking red
light that said Guidry didn’t believe what I’d told him. When I woke up, the red light was still blinking, but I didn’t know exactly what Guidry didn’t believe or why he didn’t
believe it.
It was almost time for my afternoon rounds, so I pulled my hair into a ponytail and put on fresh clothes. Then I clattered down the stairs and across the cypress deck to
Michael’s back door. The gumbo and rice had disappeared, probably into freezer containers, and Michael had disappeared too. Damn. I had hoped he would give me
something else to eat. It had been almost four hours since the little bowl of sweetened rice I’d had for breakfast, and it had long since been converted into energy. Now I
needed a new source. Preferably one that didn’t require any effort on my part, because I was still drained from the morning’s shock.
I could have dived into Michael’s cavernous refrigerator and found something to eat, but that was almost sure to require heating something or slicing something or spreading
mayo or mustard on something, all of which seemed as daunting as climbing Everest.
Ella Fitzgerald trotted into the kitchen and made a few musical firping and trilling sounds, but that didn’t fill my empty stomach or tell me where Michael was. I got a handful
of cookies from the jar on the counter, gave Ella a pat on the head and promised her I would groom her when I came home that night, and trudged out to the Bronco. Tossing
back cookies, I drove to Tom Hale’s condo.
From the living room where he was watching TV, Tom said, “Hey, Dixie. Have you heard about this?”
I went to stand beside his wheelchair and looked at the screen, where a young woman pointed at a spot that had been roped off with yellow crime-scene tape. Under the
shot on the screen, a hyperventilating banner told us we were watching a special news bulletin. To prove it, the young woman was pertly announcing that a woman had been
murdered in the house behind the tape. She sounded so thrilled you would have thought she was reporting a sale on Manolo Blahniks. Not that I’ve ever worn Manolo
Blahniks, but sometimes when I’m waiting on line at Publix, I leaf through a Vogue, so I know what they are.
Tom said, “That happened over at Fish Hawk Lagoon.”
“I know, I was there when they found her body.”
Tom turned his wheelchair to look directly at me. “What is it with you? You have a magnet that attracts dead bodies?”
“I just happened to be next door when her cat ran out, and I went to see why he was out. I saw bloody paw prints from the front door and called nine-one-one.”
“They don’t say who she is.”
“They always wait until they’ve notified the family.”
I didn’t look at him when I said that. I’d told Michael her name, and I shouldn’t have.
“They didn’t say how she got killed either. You say there was blood the cat had stepped in?”
Billy Elliot whuffed from the foyer to let me know he had enjoyed listening to me and Tom as much as he could stand, so I used that as an excuse not to answer. Billy needs
his daily runs the way hopeless addicts need their fixes. I got his leash from the foyer closet, snapped it on his collar, and let him pull me toward the front door. But inside, a
shrill voice was shouting, She was stabbed to death! Her ex-husband used to carve his initials on her skin with scalpels, and now he’s killed her!
On the way to the elevator, my cell phone rang. Only a handful of people have my cell number, so when it rings I know it’s important. Billy Elliot looked over his shoulder
when I answered, the expression on his face exactly the way I feel when I hear people answer their phones in public. Like, Excuse me, but do you have to do that now?
Without any preamble, Guidry said, “Dixie, what’s the guy’s name who says he saw the Halston woman leaving her house this morning?”
“Pete Madeira.”
“Got a number for him?”
I gave him Pete’s cell number, and did not tell him that Pete was a sweet guy, so to be kind to him. Pete was fully capable of taking care of himself, and Guidry was never
rude. Except to me, and then I wouldn’t exactly call him rude, more like confrontive. Personally, I hate confrontive, especially when it’s directed toward me.
This time, he thanked me politely and clicked off. The polite part should have comforted me, but somehow it made me suspicious. Why was he being so carefully polite? It
was downright weird.
I said, “Damn!” and slammed the phone into my pocket just as the elevator door opened. A man with a cocker spaniel on a leash stepped out with a disapproving look at
me. Billy Elliot looked up with an I told you so grin and trotted into the elevator ahead of me.
On the ride downstairs, I started thinking about Laura’s murder, and my heart began pounding as if it were happening right then. And to me. That’s the problem with
imagining things. Your mind sees a picture of something that might have happened halfway across the world, and your body thinks it’s happening right that moment, and that it’s
happening to you. I’ll bet half the people under gravestones gave themselves fatal heart attacks imagining awful things.
By the time we got to the downstairs lobby and went out the front door to the parking lot, I’d got myself under control. At that hour, we couldn’t run as freely as we do at
four-thirty in the morning when we have the oval blacktop between parked cars all to ourselves. In the mornings, Billy Elliot zips around like he’s a young racer again while I
lope along behind him trying not to pass out from exertion. Afternoons, we have to skirt the edge of the track while we watch for careless drivers, but it’s still a good hard run
for both of us.
When we went back upstairs, Tom was at the kitchen table where he does accounting work. I unsnapped Billy Elliot’s leash, kissed him goodbye, and slipped out before
Tom could ask me anything else about Laura Halston’s murder.
By the time I finished with all the other afternoon calls and went to walk Mazie, shadows were lengthening, the late sun was blotted out by treetops, and I had an emptystomach
headache. Guidry’s Blazer and several crime-scene cars were still at Laura’s house, but the ambulance was gone. That meant the medical examiner had come,
examined Laura’s body, and zipped it into a plastic body bag for transfer to the morgue.
Inside Mazie’s house, Pete sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a face alternating between happiness and worry.
Mazie lay beside him, her dark eyes full of sadness.
I said, “Have you heard from Hal again?”
Pete nodded. “Jeffrey’s out of ICU, and all the neurological tests are good. Hal says they’ll probably move him to a regular room soon.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down. “Does that mean he won’t have any more seizures?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it does, but I didn’t ask. These things are always one step at a time, nobody can say anything for sure, and even if they do they don’t
always know.”
Pete’s voice was full of bitter memories that I didn’t probe.
“Has Mazie eaten today?”
“A little bit, not much. She’s got so much heart, and it’s hurting.”
Mazie rolled her eyes up to look at us, but she didn’t lift her head.
I stood up and got her leash. “Okay, Mazie, it’s time for some exercise.”
She sighed, but got to her feet. Outside, we walked in the opposite direction from Laura’s house. I moved briskly to get Mazie’s blood moving, but I kept the walk short.
Mazie was panting hard, a sure sign that she was overstressed. Service dogs need to be of service, that’s their entire focus in life. Take away the person to whom they give
service, and they’ve lost their purpose. Every day that passed without Jeffrey to watch over would bring more stress to Mazie.
When we went back inside, I pulled out my cell phone and called Hal. He answered in the hushed tones of someone sitting vigil beside a sleeping child.
I said, “Hal, I know this is an interruption, but would you mind speaking to Mazie for a minute? She needs to hear your voice.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Hal’s voice, thick with suppressed emotion. “Of course, Dixie. Thank you.”
I squatted beside Mazie and held the phone to her ear. Her neck stiffened when she heard Hal’s voice, but she stayed very still and listened. I couldn’t hear what he was
saying, just the faint sound of speech. In a minute or two, her tail moved in an almost wag, and her throat worked as if she wanted to make some kind of reply.
I brought the phone to my own ear and heard Hal say, “We love you, Mazie.”
I said, “I think Mazie will be happier now.”
“Of course she will. I should have thought of it myself.”
“Maybe it would be a good idea to tell Jeffrey you talked to her.”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
We said quick goodbyes and I clicked my phone closed.
Pete said, “He should have put the phone to Jeffrey’s ear, let Jeffrey listen to Mazie. He needs to know that Mazie wants him to come home.”
He had an inspired look in his eyes. I didn’t want to spoil it by reminding him that Mazie didn’t talk.
I said, “She’ll probably eat better now. Next time Hal calls, let Mazie listen to him for a minute. When Jeffrey’s up to it, he can talk to her too.”
I left him and Mazie looking slightly happier than they’d been when I arrived. Driving away, I did not allow my head to turn toward Laura’s house. I could not bear another
thought of her murder. There would be time enough for that tomorrow.
16
When I got home, an orange sun was hanging above the edge of the glittering sea, its heart visibly beating as it gathered courage to drop into that vast unknown. Michael and
Paco were standing on their deck raptly watching, and when I joined them they barely acknowledged my presence. We all stood in fixed fascination as the giant orb suddenly
let go and slid into those waiting watery arms, turning the sea bronze and sending up piercing golden rays that gilded the wings of celebratory gulls.
Michael put out a hand and squeezed the back of my neck. “Supper’s almost ready.”
I was so near starving that I felt like my navel had sucked in and stuck to my backbone.
I said, “I’m past ready,” and thundered up the stairs to shower and pull on baggy pants and a loose T.
Barefoot, I hustled down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the big butcher-block island was set for three. Michael was at the stove. Paco was beside the island tossing a
green salad. Ella Fitzgerald was on her bar stool. They all looked up when I came in and waved something—spatula, salad spoon, tail.
I was sure Michael had told Paco about Laura’s murder, but by unspoken agreement nobody mentioned it. While Michael dished up whatever we were eating and Paco put
salad into three salad bowls, I poured three glasses of Shiraz from the open bottle sitting on the butcher block. The fact that three wineglasses were out instead of two meant
Paco wasn’t on duty that night. I didn’t comment, I just noted it and felt a bit more relaxed. Those of us who love people whose jobs put them in mortal danger live in a
constant state of red alert, even when we aren’t aware of it. Having already lost a firefighter father and a deputy husband, I take danger seriously. It isn’t just an idea, it’s a
lurking shadow always ready to destroy your happiness.
Michael set down three plates of yummy-smelling something, opened the oven and mitted a hot loaf of bread onto a dish towel, flopped the sides of the towel over it, and
tossed it on the table. We all took seats. Ella Fitzgerald’s whiskers twitched, but otherwise she made a good show of not being interested.
I looked at my plate. “Oooh.”
Lightly sautéed sea scallops lay over a heap of white beans. The white beans were atop a mound of steamed fresh spinach leaves. The whole thing was topped with a
scattering of chopped red tomatoes. It was a red, white, and green dish, sort of an Italian flag of food.
Michael nodded modestly. “New idea. Try it.”
I already knew before I took a bite that I’d love it. Anything Michael makes is delicious, and this was downright soul-stirring. The white beans were flavored with garlic and
something else that raised them above ordinary white beans, the scallops were delicately sweet and tender, and the spinach and tomatoes made everything else sit up and take
notice. I tried not to make a pig of myself, but I had two helpings, plus two hunks of hot bread with butter.
My idea of heaven is a place where people who love one another gather for good food and good conversation, so I was in heaven. It’s good to be able to recognize those
heavenly moments, good to be inwardly grateful to be so lucky.
We didn’t speak about Laura. Instead, we talked about how much better traffic was now that most of the snowbirds had gone home. Paco told us about a procession of
bikini-clad young women on spring break following a line of slow-crossing Mottled Ducks that had stopped traffic on Ocean Avenue that morning, and how nobody in the line
of cars had objected to the wait—some because they liked the bikinis and some because they liked the ducks. I said lots of bright cheery things too, the way women do to
avoid topics they don’t want to talk about. And Michael and Paco nodded and smiled, the way men do when they really aren’t listening to a word you say, but they love you
and don’t want you to guess they’re thinking about carburetors or football scores or whatever it is that men think about.
After Todd and Christy died, especially in that terrible first year, the only person I told my feelings to was a shrink I went to for a while. I never told Michael and Paco that I
wanted to die as well. I never let them hear me rail about the half-blind old man who had run into my husband and child in the parking lot. I never told them how I despised the
state for allowing people to renew their driver’s license without a visual exam, how furious I was at God for allowing my husband and baby to be taken from me. Michael and
Paco had been almost as devastated as I was. Dumping all my emotions on them would have made them feel even worse.
The problem with only telling the good happy stuff is that all the bad, scary, sad stuff that doesn’t get told ferments and grows like underground mold, and you never know
when it may reach its nasty fingers up and grab you by the throat.
After dinner I helped them clean the kitchen and then told them good night. No matter how shocked I was over Laura’s murder, I still had to post my pet visits for the day. I
finished entering all the information a little before nine o’clock and was halfway through undressing for bed when the phone rang. I let the machine answer.
A crisp woman’s voice said, “Ms. Hemingway, this is Ruth Avery at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit. Cora Mathers asked me to call and let you know she’s a patient
here.”
I did a one-legged hop for the phone, but she had hung up. In a breathless rush, I pulled on jeans and a less saggy T-shirt and charged downstairs.
Cora Mathers is the grandmother of a former client who got herself murdered while I was taking care of her cat, and she’s become very dear to me. She lives in a posh
apartment her granddaughter bought her at Bayfront Village, one of Sarasota’s best retirement communities. The thought that she was in Bayfront’s nursing unit pushed my
heart into my throat.
Outside the nursing unit at Bayfront, I careened into the parking lot and practically jumped out of the Bronco before it came to a stop. A smattering of cars in the parking lot
said visiting hours weren’t over yet, but I knew I didn’t have much time. A pleasant-faced woman at the reception desk seemed to brace herself as she watched me barrel into
the lobby.
I said, “I’m here to see Cora Mathers. And don’t tell me I can’t see her, because I’ll raise such a stink you can’t believe.”
The woman turned to peck keys on a computer keyboard and peer at a screen.
Mildly, she said, “She’s in Room Two-oh-four.”
I gave her a curt nod, probably the way Genghis Khan acknowledged people who stepped out of his way when he was trampling over the countryside, and took the stairs
instead of the elevator. I didn’t have time to wait for an elevator.
I didn’t have to look for Room 204. It was directly across the hall from the stairwell, and the door was open. An old sitcom from the seventies was blaring from a small TV
on a movable metal contraption at the foot of the first hospital bed, where a woman with drug-glazed eyes was lying flat on her back looking at the screen.
Hurrying around a curtain separating her bed from the next one, I found Cora sitting in an easy chair. She had one foot propped on a stool and was looking out the window
at pale spots of sailboats on the darkened bay. Soaking wet, Cora might weigh eighty pounds, and she’s roughly the height of an average sixth-grade child. Except for an
exasperated look on her face, she looked normal—which is to say she looked frail and old, but healthy.
When my grandmother was Cora’s age—closer to ninety than eighty—she went beach walking every day, read everything published, and seriously considered taking up
wind surfing. Cora, on the other hand, is the kind of woman who peaks at fifteen, is matronly at forty, and old at sixty. Age doesn’t have anything to do with how many times
the earth has revolved around the sun since one’s birth, it’s about health and being protected. If circumstances had been different, Cora might have ended up as robust as my
grandmother, but she started out living hand-to-mouth and scared. Now she’s living high on the hog and lonely. In either case, she has faced reality without losing her faith in
goodness, which I consider a major life accomplishment.
When she saw me, she threw both arms out wide and grinned. “Well, hallelujah and pass the biscuits! I’ve been waiting for you all this damn day.”
I leaned to hug her slight shoulders. “I didn’t know you were here. What happened?”
“Oh, it’s the silliest thing. I slipped in the bathroom last night and twisted my ankle a little bit, and nothing would do them but I had to come over here and spend the night.
Now they won’t let me go home until the swelling goes down. It’s plain stupid, is what it is, so I told them to call you.”
She was trying for anger, but I could see fear in her eyes. When a resident of a retirement community is no longer able to live alone, they are routinely moved to the facility’s
nursing wing, and their apartment is sold. Every old person fears they’ll be unfairly railroaded into a nursing unit while they’re still capable of living alone.
I knelt beside the stool to look at her ankle. It was a little puffy but not bruised. I poked it with a tentative finger, and Cora flinched.
I said, “They feed you okay in here?”
She brightened. “I had bacon and eggs for breakfast.”
“No kidding. Real bacon or pulverized turkey skin?”
“Real pork. And real biscuits too. Lunch wasn’t bad either, and for dinner I had chicken and dumplings.”
Personally, I never have understood the appeal of boiled chicken with pieces of dough dropped on it, but I made enthusiastic noises before I bent over her bedside table to
make sure her water carafe was filled.
I said, “I guess they can afford to go all out when they know you’ll just be here a day or two.”
She looked thoughtful. “That’s true. I don’t think they feed the really sick people that good.” She pointed toward the curtain and lowered her voice. “She’s sick as a dog,
and all she got for breakfast was cream of wheat.”
I said, “As long as they’re feeding you good, it might not be such a bad idea to let them wait on you until your ankle stops hurting. That racket from the TV bother you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Plays that thing all day long. I think she’s a little, you know.” She twirled her forefinger at her temple with gossipy pleasure. “Poor thing, nobody comes
to see her.”
More than likely, nobody had come to see Cora either, but she obviously considered herself more popular than her roommate because I was there. When you get down to
it, it’s not the fact of things that are important, but how we interpret them. She had more color in her cheeks now that she had perked up, and fear had left her eyes. My own
fears were back in the box where they belonged too. Cora was okay, and Bayfront Village had done the right thing to put her in the nursing unit where they could take care of
her.
Behind the curtain, the TV noise stopped and an oily male voice said, “And how are we today?”
I stood up straight with my ears tingling. Where had I heard that voice?
A shaky old woman’s voice answered. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
With icy contempt, the man said, “Do you have any idea how weary I am of hearing you say that?”
Cora and I stiffened and gave each other raised eyebrows.
With more force to her voice, the woman said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
The man said, “God, what a waste of time and money! All you decompensating old Binswangers should have been smothered at your first cerebral infarcts.”
The back of my neck prickled, and I spun to glare at the white curtain. I didn’t know what a Binswanger was, but I knew the man had just said something cruel.
A moment of silence followed, and then his oily voice again. “You and the rest of the world will be better off when you’re gone.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I said, “What the hell?” and stepped around the curtain to confront the woman’s nasty visitor. All I saw was a man’s broad back hurrying out the door. The bastard hadn’t
even had the grace to say goodbye. I took a moment to make sure the woman was okay, then hurried to the door and looked down the corridor. An elderly man in a
wheelchair was pushing himself down the hall, but he didn’t look as if he had enough air in him to speak above a whisper.
A nurse came out of the room next door and saw me scanning the hall. “You need something?”
I said, “A man was just in here. Did you see him?”
“A man?”
“He was talking to Cora Mathers’s roommate. I don’t know her name.”
“Grayberg.” I noticed she didn’t give a first name. Maybe when you stop normally responding to other people, they stop thinking of you as a two-named person.
“He said some cruel things to her.”
The nurse studied me. “Are you related to Cora?”
“He told Mrs. Grayberg she should have been smothered when she had her first stroke.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was what he’d meant.
She said, “I didn’t see you get off the elevator. The nurse’s station is right by the elevator, and I didn’t see you get off.”
“I took the stairs. Oh, that’s probably where he went. He went down the stairs.”
“What did he look like?”
“I just heard his voice and saw his back as he left. He was big.”
“Ms. Grayberg watches TV a lot. Maybe it was a man on TV.”
“No, it was a real man.”
She turned away and started down the hall. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’ll watch for strange men.”
I could tell she didn’t believe me. When I thought about it, I didn’t blame her.
I went back to Cora’s room and spoke to Mrs. Grayberg. “Was that your son who was just here?”
Her face twisted in a rictus of despair. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
I couldn’t think of any appropriate answer, so I turned up the sound on her TV and went back to Cora’s side of the curtain.
I whispered, “Was that Mrs. Grayberg’s son?”
“Is that her name? We haven’t actually met, what with her being so loony and all. I wouldn’t worry about her boy. I don’t imagine she even heard him.”
From the despair I’d seen on the woman’s face, I thought she’d heard plenty, but I didn’t say so. It was probably better for Cora to be complacent about him than to be
vaguely alarmed like I was.
I promised to come back the next day, kissed the top of Cora’s downy head, and retraced my path past her roommate’s bed. She had stopped crying and gave me a slight
smile.
She said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
From the other side of the curtain, Cora laughed. I gave Ms. Grayberg a friendly wave and hoped nobody told her that Florida got hurricanes too.
As I went down the stairs, I probed all the corners of my mind, trying to remember where I’d heard the man’s smug, pompous voice before. But it was like trying to dislodge
a speck of lettuce stuck in your back teeth. Every time I thought I had it, it stayed locked in place.
I made it all the way to the parking lot before I remembered where I’d been when I first heard the man’s voice. It was so unlikely that I sat in the Bronco and argued with
myself for a long time before I pulled out my cell phone and called Guidry.
He answered with a curt, “Guidry here.”
I said, “I was just at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit, and a man came in the room to talk to the woman in the other bed. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you need
to know who he was.”
A beat or two passed, and Guidry said, “Dixie, I’m not even going to try to understand what you just said. Do you have something to tell me?”
I stuck my tongue out at the phone and took a deep breath.
“Cora Mathers is in the nursing unit at Bayfront. She has a roommate named Grayberg. While I was visiting Cora, a man came to visit Mrs. Grayberg. I didn’t see him
because a curtain was between us, but I recognized his voice, and I’m positive it was the same man who called Laura Halston while I was at her house. She said she met him at
Sarasota Memorial in the emergency room. Maybe he’s a doctor. Or a nurse.”
“You didn’t see him. You didn’t talk to him. But you’re sure it was the same man.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but he has a distinctive voice, and he speaks in a peculiar way. He left before I could get a look at him.”
“Peculiar how? Lisp? Stutter?”
“He talks like a college professor too full of himself. Pedantic. Prissy.”
“So you want me to go to the hospital unit over at Bayfront and ask this Mrs. Grayberg about him?”
“Well ah, Mrs. Grayberg is a little bit senile. She might not be able to give you much information.”
Guidry heaved a deep sigh. “I can’t talk any longer, Dixie. I’ll catch you later.”
He clicked off without saying goodbye, leaving me staring at the phone and wondering what he was avoiding telling me.
17
Idrove home in a fog of fatigue and fury. Even though I’d told Guidry about the other men who’d been irrationally drawn to Laura, I knew it was her husband who had killed
her. The man had to be completely insane to think he could follow her to Siesta Key and kill her without anybody knowing. His colleagues would know he was gone, and
everybody who knew him and Laura would suspect him the minute her murder became public knowledge. If he’d been a nobody, he might already be cooling his odious heels
in a jail cell. Since he was famous and wealthy, he would have an attorney to forestall the moment when homicide detectives talked to him. Guidry was probably collecting
irrefutable evidence before he moved.
Just the thought of Guidry investigating Laura’s murder sent a chill into my bones, because it was a reminder of Guidry’s job. Every day, he dealt with murder—the grisliest,
ugliest, most sordid side of humanity.
Being involved with any law enforcement officer means being vicariously close to violence, at least to some degree, but being involved with a homicide detective means being
close to the ultimate effects of brutal hatred. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough for that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be strong enough for that. I wasn’t sure I could spend my
nights in bed with a man who spent his days investigating murders.
Not that I’d been invited to spend any nights with Guidry. Not that he had ever even hinted that it was on his mind. But it must have been somewhere in my mind, and I
wished it weren’t.
At home, I trudged up the stairs to my apartment and fell into bed. Before I went to sleep, I remembered the noise Laura and I had heard while we ate dinner. Could it have
been her husband? Could he have been lurking outside, waiting to make sure Laura lived in that house? I wished I had gone outside and investigated. If I had, he might have
been frightened away, and Laura might not have died.
I woke with a start from the remnants of a bad dream. In the dream, my father had hit me. The dream was true. I had been seven years old at the time, and my gentle, patient
father had smacked my bottom for the first and only time in my life.
He had been about to leave for his shift at the firehouse, and I had sassed my mother one time too many. “You don’t speak to your mother like that,” he said. “It’s rude and
it’s unkind, and it’s unfair.”
I’d been so shocked that I yelled, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” and ran to my room. Within twenty-four hours, he had died saving a child in a burning house.
With a child’s belief in my own magical powers, I believed for a long time that I had killed him. Even now, I sometimes wonder about it. He hadn’t been the kind of man to
hit little children, and maybe he had been so upset over my hateful words that night that he’d lost his concentration and got careless.
When Todd and Christy were killed, that childish belief in magical powers must have returned because I had the same kind of nagging guilt. I knew the things the religious
fanatics said weren’t true—that God had not punished me for being a working mother. Even so, I’d grieved that I hadn’t remembered to buy Cheerios and orange juice when I
went grocery shopping, because if I had, Todd and Christy wouldn’t have been in that Publix parking lot when the old man hit the gas instead of his brake.
Now, lying in the darkness before my alarm sounded, I wallowed for a few minutes in slimy remorse. Then I rolled out of bed and stomped to the bathroom, where I stood
in front of the medicine cabinet and glared into my own eyes.
I said, “Don’t start that crap again! You didn’t cause your father to die, you didn’t cause Todd and Christy to die, and you sure as hell didn’t cause Laura Halston to be
murdered!”
My eyes in the mirror gazed back at me with a secret knowing. The old irrational guilt was just a way to cover up what I was truly feeling. I hate it when I come up with
insights that push me to be honest with myself, especially when the truth is something I don’t know what to do with.
The truth was that primal fear had its talons deep into my shoulders, deeper than I’d realized. No matter what, I had to do everything in my power to make sure Laura’s
killer was found and convicted. Otherwise, the fear of being a vulnerable victim might be an unwelcome companion for the rest of my life.
18
Mercifully, the morning calls went smoothly. No accidents to clean up, no signs of separation anxiety in any of the pets, no wistful calls from any of the absent pet owners
about their separation anxiety. Before I went to Mazie’s house, I called Pete to tell him I would be a little late. He said Hal had called to say Jeffrey had been moved to a
regular room.
“Hal says he’s talking and drinking fluids, but he’s not happy. He’s asking for Mazie and crying a lot.”
Pete and I exchanged silence for a few seconds, both of us imagining a little boy trying to comprehend all the strangeness of a hospital without his best friend.
Pete said, “Mazie’s not happy either. Hal talked to her again, but she’s still agitated. She’s not eating at all, Dixie, and she’s not drinking but a little. I brushed her and took
her out to do her business, but she’s not a happy dog.”
“She won’t be happy until Jeffrey comes home, Pete. But there’s not anything you can do beyond what you’re doing.”
He said, “The detective called about me seeing that lady next door. He didn’t seem to believe me.”
“Homicide detectives always sound suspicious.”
“They’re still over there, all those law people.”
I told him I’d see him later, and drove over the north bridge to the mainland and the Bayfront nursing unit. This time I took the elevator so the day-duty nurses could see me
get off. A nurse at the desk looked up and smiled as I approached her.
I said, “Hi, I’m here to see Cora Mathers in Two-oh-four.” “Are you the one taking her back to her condo? She said you’d be here.”
“Can I ask you something? What’s a Binswanger?”
She looked up at me and frowned. “Ms. Mathers doesn’t have Binswanger.”
“I just wondered what it was because a man called her roommate a Binswanger last night. I’d never heard the word before.”
“Who called her that?”
“I didn’t see him, I just heard him. He said, ‘All you old Binswangers should have been smothered when you had your first infarct.’ He had a priggy voice like an announcer
on a classical radio station. Do you have any idea who that could have been?”
A mottled red flush rose up her neck and face. “Nobody on staff here would have said that to her.”
“I went out in the hall looking for him, but he must have taken the stairs. Could it have been an orderly?”
Her entire body had gone rigid. “I hardly think so. Binswanger disease is a rare form of subcortical dementia.”
“So anybody familiar with that word would have medical training.”
“As I said, nobody on our staff would have said that to Ms. Grayberg.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll go get Cora now.”
No longer friendly, the woman watched me through narrowed eyes as I went toward Cora’s room. She would probably get together with the night nurse and talk about
Cora’s crazy friend who was spreading false gossip about a male nurse being mean to the patients.
In 204, Ms. Grayberg was watching an old I Love Lucy show. She didn’t take her eyes off the TV screen as I walked behind it. On the other side of the dividing curtain,
Cora was dressed and sitting in an easy chair reading the morning Herald-Tribune. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, just smiled and stood up.
She said, “I’m glad you’re here. I’m ready to get out of this joint.”
She wore a loose muumuu thing that swallowed her. One hand held it up above her little feet, while she reached for her handbag with the other hand.
She said, “I’m having to walk careful, because I’m afraid I’ll trip on this dress. I ordered it from a catalog, and it’s a little too long.”
It was at least a foot too long, and it looked dangerous as hell. I had mental images of her tripping on it and breaking some of her fragile bones.
“Your ankle okay now?”
“It’s still a mite tender, but I can nurse it at my own place. They said keep it elevated and put ice on it. That won’t be hard.”
A volunteer charged in pushing a wheelchair. I wondered if somebody had told her to get Cora out as quickly as possible, or if she always moved that fast. As soon as Cora
got settled in the chair with her skirt tucked in so it didn’t drag on the ground, I took over the pushing while the volunteer trotted along by our side. The elevator door was
already open, and we were gone in no time. I noticed that everybody at the nurse’s desk was too preoccupied to tell Cora goodbye. Either they knew who had been so mean
to Ms. Grayberg, or they thought I was a lying troublemaker and they didn’t want to encourage me.
I pushed the wheelchair across the Bayfront campus to the main building, where everybody from the doorman to the concierge rushed forward to welcome Cora home. The
manager came out to assure her that she had only to call the dining room at any time and somebody would bring up anything she wanted. I was pleased to see how well she
was treated, and Cora was as gracious as the Queen Mother flaunting her power. For the elderly, money not only buys decent health care, it buys respect.
Upstairs, she got up from the wheelchair lifting her dress with both hands.
I said, “Maybe it would be better if I took that dress to the tailor and got it shortened. Then you won’t have to hike it up when you walk.”
She looked surprised, as if the idea of shortening a too-long dress was a novel idea.
She said, “I’ll go change into something else.”
I held my breath while she shuffled into her bedroom. While I waited, I heated a teakettle of water and got out her tea things, because Cora likes to be ready for a cup of tea
anytime she wants one.
Cora’s apartment has a wide glassed sunroom facing the bay, pink tile floors, a spacious living room, and a small kitchen behind a breakfast bar. It’s airy and high-ceilinged
and comfortable, thanks to the generosity of her granddaughter. When I’d got her tea things ready and made sure her TV remote was handy, I stood at the glass wall and
inhaled the view—robin’s-egg-blue sky fluffed with cumulus clouds, white sails dotting a bay whose depths were signaled by violet, purple, jade, and emerald. With vistas like
that, people in Sarasota don’t need art on their walls.
Cora came out carrying the dress and wearing a velour warm-up suit with baggy pants that she’d pulled on crooked so the crotch seam angled up toward her right hip.
As she handed me the dress, she said, “Ethan Crane called me the other day. He asked about you. I think he’s sweet on you.”
I made a mumbling sound that I hoped sounded like an answer and made a big to-do of folding the dress into a little square. Ethan Crane is a drop-dead handsome attorney
who’d handled Cora’s granddaughter’s estate. It was true that he was interested in me. It was also true that any unmarried, unattached, undead woman with estrogen in her
veins would have been thrilled to have Ethan want her. So what the heck was wrong with me?
Before Christmas, Ethan had invited me to dinner at his house, and I’d gone planning to lose my second virginity—the one I’d assumed after my husband died—but Ethan
hadn’t given me a chance. Instead, he had walked me to my car after dinner, given me a kiss that seared the soles of my feet, and sent me home hot and astonished.
We probably would have had some follow-up dates if circumstances hadn’t intervened. Like a shoot-out when a man got killed, and like Guidry being there when I needed
somebody. Ethan had pulled back and seemed to be waiting for a sign from me—either a go-ahead sign or a closed shop sign. The problem was that I didn’t know myself well
enough to know which sign I wanted to give him. Especially now, when Laura’s murder was a stone in my shoe and the ultimate result of Jeffrey’s surgery something I couldn’t
even let myself think about.
Cora’s shrewd old eyes were sizing me up. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to stir memories of the way Cora’s granddaughter had been killed by mentioning Laura’s murder, and I didn’t want to make her sad by telling her
about Jeffrey’s surgery. On the other hand, protecting people from the truth is another way of shutting them out.
I said, “I’m concerned about a dog I’m taking care of. He belongs to a little boy who had brain surgery to stop seizures, but I don’t know yet if the surgery was a success.
The dog and the little boy are extremely close, and the dog doesn’t understand what happened to him. She’s under a lot of stress, and there’s not much I can do for her. It’s
impossible to communicate with animals and explain things to them.”
Like Paco, Cora went straight to the nub. “It’s a terrible thing to lose a child.”
I didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to be reminded that death is always in the wings. Whether you’re three or ninety-three, death knows your name.
I said, “Cora, do you think any of your neighbors might know who that man was that visited Ms. Grayberg over in the nursing unit? I don’t like the idea of somebody going
around talking to sick people the way he talked to her.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about that man, and I think I know who he was. I don’t know his name, but he drives people to the doctor. I was on the elevator one time
with him and a man that lives here. Prissy-voiced man. As I remember, he was on the pudgy side, and he had big fat lips.”
“He works here at Bayfront?”
“I guess he must. Anyway, he drives people. But don’t worry about him, Dixie. And don’t worry about that little boy either. You can only do what you can do, and that’s all
you can do.”
I grinned and took her muumuu. “You sound positively zen.”
She looked pleased. “Well, I do try to be positive.”
I kissed her goodbye and zipped off with the muumuu. I felt more positive too.
Downstairs, the lobby was buzzing with good-looking white-haired people carrying tennis rackets or shopping bags or just gathered in groups to gossip. All that energy and
good humor was almost enough to make me nostalgic for growing old.
Instead of going out the front doors, I detoured to speak to the concierge at the front desk. I said, “You know, Ms. Mathers was in the nursing unit for a couple of days.”
“I know, I’m so glad it was something minor.”
“She had a roommate over there named Grayberg. I heard a man talking to Mrs. Grayberg while I was there, and I thought I recognized his voice. He left before I could
make sure. I think he may work here driving people to the doctor. Do you happen to know who it might have been?”
She blinked at me. “I wouldn’t know.”
“He talked like a schoolteacher. You know, the boring kind that nobody listens to. He was nasty to her.”
Twin lines appeared between her eyebrows, and she went professional.
“I’m sure it wasn’t anybody connected with Bayfront. You’d have to ask Ms. Grayberg who he was.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that.”
I gave her a big friendly smile to remind her I was on her good side and went out to the porte cochere, where a valet galloped off to rescue my car. When he eased it under
the portico, I handed him a couple of bills. Tipping was prohibited at Bayfront, but he and I both knew that green was a color that got me quicker service.
He said, “You been visiting Ms. Mathers? She’s a sweet old lady.”
Cora would have despised being called a sweet old lady, but I smiled and agreed.
I said, “When she was over in the nursing unit, a man came in and spoke to her roommate. He had a deep voice and used lots of big words like he was reading the
dictionary. I think he may work here as a driver. Do you have any idea who he was?”
He grinned. “That old fart does talk like he’s reading a dictionary. That’s a good one. That would be Frederick. Used to work here, but he got fired for being weird.”
My pulse thrummed, and I had to clench my hand to keep it from throwing more money at him. “What’s his last name?”
“Don’t know, you’d have to ask the manager. But he’s really ticked at old Fred. The dumb boob lost a woman over at Sarasota Memorial. Took her to ER and forgot
about her.”
I said, “Ms. Grayberg.”
He looked surprised. “You know about that?”
“I heard some people talking about it over at the nursing unit, but I don’t know the details.”
He leaned close, eager to give me the scoop.
“Well, see, Frederick drove people shopping or to doctors’ appointments, things like that. Sort of a personal driver, but anybody living here could hire him. So Ms.
Grayberg had him take her to Saks to get something to wear to the birthday party they were throwing for her here—you know, they do that for everybody when they make it
to one of the big ones, eighty, ninety, a hundred. Anyway, while she was there she had a stroke. So instead of calling nine-one-one like he should’ve, Frederick put her in the
car and took her down the street to Sarasota Memorial. Took her to the emergency room, and then the dumb cluck forgot about her. Didn’t call here to report it or anything.
The hospital had to look in her purse and get her address to know where to call. So Frederick got fired.”
My body wanted to jump out of the car and run inside and ask the manager what Frederick’s last name was, but my head told me to be cool. I listened to my head for a
change, told the valet goodbye, and drove sedately out of the parking lot. As soon as I saw a driveway into a business lot, I whipped in and took out my cell phone to call
Guidry.
I got his voice message, so I was denied the pleasure of saying “I told you so.”
Instead, I said, “The man who came to Laura Halston’s door when I was there used to be a driver at Bayfront Village. Took people shopping and to doctors’ appointments.
His name is Frederick. I don’t know his last name, but he has fat lips. He was with Ms. Grayberg when she had a stroke. He drove her to the ER at Sarasota Memorial, but he
didn’t call Bayfront to report her stroke, and they fired him for it. I imagine if you check ER records, you’ll find that Ms. Grayberg was there about the same time Laura
Halston was there with a pulled knee.”
I closed the phone and pulled out of the lot into traffic. I was quite pleased with myself. Smug, even. I’d found out who the man was who’d stalked Laura and come to her
door demanding to see her. Since it seemed to me that nobody else was making a lot of effort to get answers, I was glad I was one who was. What the heck was wrong with
everybody else?
19
I was so hungry the palm fronds hanging over the street were beginning to look tasty, but I pulled into Dr. Phyllis Layton’s parking lot and hurried inside. I wasn’t sure I’d
been right when I told Pete there was nothing more he could do to make Mazie happy. If anybody knew better, it would be Dr. Layton.
I charged up to the receptionist’s desk so fast that my Keds probably made skid marks when I stopped.
I said, “I don’t have an appointment, but if Dr. Layton has a minute, I need to ask her advice about a dog I’m taking care of. She’s the dog’s vet. The dog is Mazie, belongs
to Hal and Gillis Richards.”
Behind the receptionist, Dr. Layton’s head popped around a corner, with a look in her eyes that said she was a damn busy woman and didn’t have time for pop-in visits
from pet sitters, but that she knew me well enough to know I must have good reason to be interrupting her schedule. Waggling her fingers at me, she came around to open the
door into her inner sanctum.
A comfortably plump African-American woman roughly my age, Dr. Layton has the ability to soothe and command at the same time. I felt more confident the moment we
stepped into a treatment room.
She leaned against a metal table and said, “There’s a problem with Mazie?”
“She’s terribly depressed, has been ever since Jeffrey left to have surgery.”
She looked surprised. “I thought that was scheduled for next month.”
“It was, but there was a cancellation or something and the hospital got him in a month early, and the surgery was Monday morning. He’s out of ICU and in a room, which I
hope means the surgery was a success, but Mazie is distraught. She’s not eating or drinking much, she’s panting and sighing a lot, and she runs around the house all day looking
for Jeffrey. I have a full-time sitter with her, a sweet man—he’s reading to her and playing the saxophone for her—but she’s more agitated every day.”
Dr. Layton smiled. “He’s playing the saxophone for her? That’s nice.” More somberly, she said, “A pet’s grief can be so intense it can cause them to become ill.”
“Jeffrey will be home in a week or so.”
“But Mazie doesn’t know that. Besides, the future doesn’t exist for a pet. All they know is right now, and right now Jeffrey is gone.”
Briskly, she went to a wall cabinet and moved some small dark bottles around.
“If this were a permanent separation, I might give her something stronger, like Prozac. But I don’t like to medicate an animal unless it’s absolutely necessary.” She chose a
bottle and handed it to me. “This is an herbal supplement that might help calm her. Put ten drops in her water bowl every time you give her fresh water. If that doesn’t help, call
me and we’ll try something stronger.”
I thanked her and slipped the bottle in my pocket. Guiltily, I wished I had talked to Dr. Layton sooner. I was letting other things distract me and make me less focused on my
work than I should have been, and I didn’t like that about myself.
Since it was on my way, I made a fast stop at the Kitty Haven to check on Leo.
Marge Preston took me back to Leo’s private suite, a cubicle furnished with a litter box, climbing tower, and a small TV set that played kitty fantasies all day. It was actually
a jail cell, and Leo knew it, but it was a posh jail cell with the best food and tenderest jailers any incarcerated cat could ever hope for.
He looked healthy and well fed, but pissed. I didn’t blame him. Through no fault of his own, he’d been whisked away from a spacious house and a loving human to this small
world with strangers taking care of him. He didn’t know me any better than he knew Marge and her assistants, but I spent a few minutes with him anyway. I told him that
Laura’s sister was coming, and that she would soon take him to a new home. I told him that his world was going to get better in time, and that he would one day be as happy
as he had been with Laura.
Marge heard me. As I was leaving, she said, “I hope you were telling Leo the truth.”
“I hope so too.”
Marge never quizzes me about the cats I bring her, she never pries into their home lives. This time, though, I’d brought her a cat with dried blood on his paws, and she would
surely have guessed that the “death in the family” I’d mentioned had been the murder all over the papers and news shows.
She said, “I’m giving Leo vitamin C supplements for stress.”
“That’s good, Marge. I’ll let you know when his family arrives.”
The cats in Marge’s front room gave me looks of sweet disdain as I left. They probably considered me underprivileged because I wasn’t lucky enough to live full-time at the
Kitty Haven.
I was now beyond famished, but my rule for myself is that I don’t eat breakfast until I’ve finished every pet call. I still had to take Mazie for a run, and I particularly wanted
to give her the drops from Dr. Layton.
At Fish Hawk Lagoon, the crime-scene people were still at Laura’s house, and Guidry’s Blazer was among the cars at the curb. I parked in Mazie’s driveway and rapped
on the door before I opened it and went in.
Pete sat on the sofa with his saxophone in his lap as if he’d just finished playing it. Mazie lay on the floor in front of him.
With an edge to my voice, I said, “Pete, it’s not a good idea to leave the door unlocked.”
He shot me an annoyed look. “I never lock doors.”
“There’s a killer loose, maybe you should.”
We stared at each other for a beat, each of us defensive and tense. Mazie got up from her spot and made a soft whining noise. Her distress at our snippy voices made me
feel like an idiot.
I said, “I’m sorry, Pete. I’ve let it all get to me.”
“I guess I have too. But it can’t go on, Dixie. It just can’t go on much longer.”
He looked close to tears, and I knew he wasn’t concerned about a killer. He was distressed because it had been necessary for Jeffrey to undergo major surgery. He was
distressed because Mazie was so sad. He was distressed because he was a man accustomed to making people laugh and feel better, and he felt helpless.
I said, “I stopped at Mazie’s vet this morning and talked to her about Mazie. She said it’s normal for Mazie to be grieving, because she thinks Jeffrey has gone away
forever.”
I pulled the bottle from my pocket and headed for the kitchen.
“She gave me these drops to put in her water bowl. I’ll put some in now, and next time you give her fresh water, put ten drops in. Dr.
Layton says that will help calm her. If it doesn’t, she’ll give her something stronger.”
Pete followed me, skepticism and uneasiness making his eyebrows shimmy. “The doctor sent drugs?”
“No, it’s something herbal. From flowers, I think. She knows Mazie. She wouldn’t give her anything that wasn’t safe.”
I rummaged around in a junk drawer, found a marking pen, and wrote 10 drops on the bottle.
“I’ve marked the number of drops. Just put them in every time you give her fresh water.”
“She’s not drinking much water.”
“I know, but let’s give it a try.”
With Pete suspiciously examining the label on the bottle, I got Mazie’s leash and led her outside. We both needed to run off our tension, so as soon as she was willing, I took
off at a fast clip. As we ran, I kept glancing right and left, peering into the thick foliage beside the sidewalk and then across the street at the hibiscus hedge that hid the jogging
path. Laura’s killer could be hidden nearby, watching all the crime-scene activity and feeling proud of himself for causing it.
We ran hard for about five minutes, then stopped to pant awhile before we started back at a more leisurely pace. Mazie seemed less tense, but her forehead was still
furrowed in doggy concern.
As we approached her driveway, I saw Guidry and Pete standing next to my Bronco. Pete looked defensive, and Guidry was pulling his notebook from his pocket as if
ready to take notes.
As usual, Guidry looked like he was about to give last-minute instructions to the lackeys who ran his mansion. Black linen jacket that I could imagine being cut by an Italian
tailor with a thin mustache and an attitude, chocolate trousers with enough wrinkle to let you know they weren’t made from the cheap crap that doesn’t crease, and a soft
charcoal shirt open at the collar. I hated that look. It made me want to go open his jacket and lay my ear to his heart just to listen to it beat. I should have been locked up.
When he heard me and Mazie scuffing up the walk, he looked up and gave me a slight nod. He looked grim, and all the questions I wanted to ask him turned to dust in my
throat.
He said, “I’m just verifying some information from Mr. Madeira, and then I need to talk to you.”
My heart skipped a beat, but I waited demurely while he and Pete went on with their conversation. It only took a second to know Guidry was asking him about seeing Laura
on the day she was killed.
Pete said, “She had a cap pulled down low, one of those baseball caps women wear with their ponytails sticking out.”
“You saw a ponytail?”
Testily, Pete said, “I didn’t say I saw a ponytail, I said that’s what women do. Unless they have short hair.”
His voice became uncertain as he remembered Laura’s short hair. Guidry waited, watching Pete’s face.
Pete said, “You know, it may not have been her after all. Come to think of it, I think I did see some hair poking out of that cap. Not a ponytail, but more hair than Laura had.
I guess it was some other woman going for a run. They all look alike, with their caps and jogging shorts.”
Guidry snapped his notebook closed. “Thanks, Mr. Madeira. That clears up a point we couldn’t understand.”
Pete looked embarrassed. “Don’t think it’s because I’m old that I mistook one woman for another. It’s the way women dress nowadays.”
He and Guidry looked my way, and I drew my knees together under my cargo shorts and T-shirt, and above my Keds—the same kind of running clothes that Laura wore.
But I never wore baseball caps.
Guidry said, “It’s an understandable mistake.”
He gave me a pointed look that meant it was my turn to be questioned.
I handed Mazie’s leash off to Pete, told him I’d be back in the afternoon, and waited until he and Mazie had gone inside the house.
Guidry said, “Tell me again when you had dinner with Laura Halston.”
“Early Sunday night. I left sometime around seven-thirty, seven-forty-five.”
“Pasta?”
“Fetuccini Alfredo and salad.”
“Do you mind going in her house and see if you notice anything missing?”
I minded very much. “Guidry, I was only in her house that one time.”
“That’s one time more than anybody else.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Numbly, I walked down the sidewalk beside Guidry, waited while he noted the time on the Contamination Sheet by the front door, and then
stepped into the house.
Except for black print-lifting dust on every surface, everything in the living room looked pretty much the same as when I’d left Sunday night. In the kitchen, every evidence of
our dinner had been cleaned and put away. No wineglasses sitting out, no pasta pot, no salad bowl. Our lipstick-smeared napkins had disappeared, and I didn’t need to open
the dishwasher to know that our plates were neatly rinsed and filed inside. Women who live alone don’t run their dishwashers every day.
On the counter, a box of dried cat food, with a Post-it note attached. The note had an exclamation point on it, a memo Laura had left herself to buy more. My eyes burned
at the memory of how alive Laura had been, how we had both laughed and talked and eaten and drunk as if we had infinity stretched before us.
Guidry looked closely at me. “What is it?”
I cleared my throat. “Nothing. I don’t see anything unusual or out of place.”
“What’s the deal with the cat food?”
“She’d run out, so she put the box there to remind herself to buy more.”
He said, “What was she wearing that night?”
I took a minute to think. “Drawstring pants, T-shirt. She was barefoot.”
His jaws worked for a second as if he were gnawing on invisible gristle. “That was in the clothes hamper in the bathroom.”
I had to ask the question. “Where did he get her?”
“In the shower. Looks like she was taken by surprise.”
“He stabbed her?”
“Yep.”
I took a deep breath and asked the question I already knew the answer to.
“There was more, wasn’t there?”
A shadow crossed Guidry’s face, and his lips tightened as if I’d uttered the unsayable. He said, “Her face was disfigured.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and looked away from him while I fought to control hot tears that had suddenly filled my eyes. Deputy Morgan had thrown up after he’d
seen Laura, and Sergeant Owens had wanted to spare me from seeing her. Laura had been an unusually beautiful woman. Whoever had killed her had wanted to destroy her
beauty along with her life.
Carefully, Guidry said, “The mutilation was done postmortem.”
I said, “Laura Halston’s husband is a sick, sadistic surgeon. He throws scalpels at the ceiling for fun. Mutilating Laura’s face is the kind of thing he would do, and have fun
doing it.”
Guidry didn’t respond, just looked at me with level gray eyes.
I said, “She wasn’t raped?”
“No rape. And no theft that we know of. She wore some gold and diamond bracelets, and we found a diamond necklace that was pretty valuable.”
I understood the implication. Her killer hadn’t been a robber or a rapist, he’d been somebody who killed in a furious rage. But the ritualistic cutting was something else. That
wasn’t rage, it was psychopathic deliberation. And where there is psychopathic ritual, it points to a serial killer. Laura might not be the first person this killer had murdered, nor
the last.
I cleared my throat. “What about prints on her body? Deep-tissue X-rays?”
“Negative and negative. Most likely the killer wore gloves.”
I closed my eyes against the image of Laura in the shower. She had probably left the bathroom door open, the way women do when they live alone. The killer had probably
slipped in while she was showering, pushed the shower curtain aside, and stabbed her while the water continued to run. Laura would have tried to shield herself, would have
put up her hands to deflect the blows, but it would have been too late.
It was every woman’s nightmare, to be killed at home in her most vulnerable moment.
Guidry said, “Dixie? You all right?”
I said, “Sunday night, there was a noise outside the living room window. A cracking sound, like wood snapping. We thought it was a squirrel knocking a limb against the
house, but it could have been somebody outside, somebody waiting for me to leave.”
He touched my shoulder lightly. “You couldn’t have prevented this, Dixie.”
“I want to help find the person who did this. If her husband did it, I want him caught and put away for life.”
Guidry’s gray eyes were too steady. He was keeping something from me.
I said, “Has anybody talked to the husband yet?”
“We have somebody working on that.” His voice was too careful.
“What about her family?”
Guidry started maneuvering me to the front door. “Her sister arrived late yesterday and identified the body. She’s at the Ritz.”
I would have expected her sister to stay at a less expensive hotel, but for all I knew the sister was loaded.
I said, “I should let her know where Leo is.”
“Leo?”
“Laura’s cat. I took him to the Kitty Haven. I could pick him up for her when she’s ready.”
Guidry said, “She’ll come to the house after Bill Sullivan has finished up here.”
Bill Sullivan is a trauma cleaner who has the gruesome job of sanitizing crime scenes. Blood and body wastes contain bacteria that can cause disease. Carpet and tile often
have to be replaced, walls have to be scrubbed and possibly repainted. Since Laura had been killed in her shower, the drain would have to be sterilized.
At the door, I said, “What’s her last name? So I can call her about Leo.”
“Last name’s Autrey, but I wouldn’t call her today. It was an ordeal for her to identify her sister’s body.”
“Of course.”
Without making it too obvious that he was getting rid of me, Guidry had skillfully got me outside. It was just as well. I didn’t have any other information to give him, and I
needed to get out of that house.
He said, “Thanks, Dixie. I know that was hard for you.”
“It wasn’t hard for me.”
“Okay. Thanks anyway.”
I didn’t answer. Something was going on that he wasn’t telling me. As I slogged back to the Bronco and drove away, I reminded myself that I wasn’t a part of the
investigation and that Guidry had no obligation to tell me anything. But I had the distinct feeling that there was more to his reticence than the mere fact that it was none of my
business. For some reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I thought Guidry was concealing information because he thought it would hurt me to know it.