Blaize Clement - Dixie Hemingway Mysteries 04 - Cat Sitter On a Hot Tin Roof p.03

20
I was so famished by the time I got to the diner that I felt bared-teeth feral, as if my growling stomach was giving the world fair warning that I was about to pounce on
something and kill it.
Judy took one look at me, poured coffee, and scurried away to make sure Tanisha knew the she-wolf had arrived. She must have filched somebody else’s order, because
I’d barely finished the first mug of coffee when she brought my food. Nobody talked to me, which was just as well. When I’d thrown enough food down to my monster, I
perked up and gave Tanisha a friendly wave. From behind the kitchen’s pass-through counter, her wide face dimpled as she winked at me. It’s good to have friends like
Tanisha. They know your nasty disposition is really hunger, so they feed you.
I left money on the table for Judy, with an extra tip for having to put up with my crankiness, and slumped out to the Bronco. Now that I’d eaten, I needed a nap bad.
Driving slowly behind a motorcycle driven by a shirtless spring break guy with a sunburned young woman plastered to his back, I suppressed a yawn as I drove past the
Lyon’s Mane. Then a little alarm in my head jerked me awake, and I swerved into a parking space. I wanted to know what Ruby and Maurice knew about Gorgon.
When I went in the salon, Ruby was at the front desk with Baby in tow, and she gave me a dazzling smile.
I said, “I think I may need some conditioner.”
She and Baby looked hard at my hair, and she reached to a glass shelf and got a fancy-looking bottle. When I scrabbled for money, she shook her head.
“It’s on the house. Next time you come in, we’ll charge you out the wazoo, but right now you’re still getting rewards for rescuing Baby.”
I laughed and tucked the bottle under my arm.
“Ruby, when I was in here before, a man named Gorgon came in. Maurice said he was a friend of Laura Halston’s. Do you happen to know anything about him?”
“I know Laura was murdered.”
“What about Gorgon?”
“Dixie, when I was a kid in New Jersey, one of our neighbors talked about a man we knew. Next day, the neighbor got shot in the head. Killed dead. You understand what
I’m saying?”
Even the conditioner in the bottle understood what she was saying.
I said, “Lieutenant Guidry is the homicide detective investigating Laura’s murder. If anybody had any information that might help catch the killer, they could make an
anonymous phone call.”
“Honey, with caller ID, no phone call is anonymous anymore. And anyway, I don’t have any information.”
I thanked her for the free conditioner and left. I didn’t believe she didn’t have any information, but I fully understood why she didn’t want to talk to me about Gorgon. I felt
jazzed. I was on a roll. Through my own cunning I had verified that Mr. Gorgon was indeed as thuggish as he looked. I hadn’t exactly got his mafia ties or anything to connect
him to Laura’s murder, but at least I had done something, which seemed a hell of a lot more than Guidry had done. At the rate things were going, I might have to go out and
find Laura’s husband myself.
Cora’s neatly folded muumuu was in the passenger seat, so since I was near the tailor shop, I decided to drop the dress off before I went home. The shop was in a part of
Siesta Key’s business district so old the stucco on the buildings could have been applied by one of de Soto’s men in the 1540s. It was purely coincidental that it was across the
street from Ethan Crane’s office. I wasn’t even thinking of Ethan when I chose it.
Okay, maybe it crossed my mind a tiny bit. Maybe it zipped across without calling attention to itself, but that’s all.
The tailor promised to chop off at least two feet of Cora’s muumuu and have it hemmed by midafternoon, and I came out fully intending to get in the Bronco and drive
straight home. But my eyes crossed the street and stood at the entry to Ethan’s building, and that caused my feet to stop.
My eyes stayed across the street, and after a second my feet said, Shoot, we’re going too.
The next thing I knew I was opening the door with its flaking gilt sign that said ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Then I was standing in the dingy vestibule looking up at stairs that
had been trod by so many feet they sagged in the middle.
All that venerable decay and wear would make people expect an old man in the upstairs office, but the sign on the door had been put there by Ethan’s grandfather, and most
of the feet that had climbed the stairs had been to the elder—now deceased—Ethan Crane. The present and very much alive Ethan Crane was in an office at the top of those
stairs.
I told myself I could still go out the door and cross the street and drive home, and Ethan would never know I had been there.
I ignored myself and climbed the stairs, because if I didn’t do it then I might never do it at all, which seemed a terrible waste of something. A chance to rekindle a chemistry
that had been there from the first time Ethan and I had met, maybe. Or just a chance to remain friends with a great guy.
From the top of the stairs, I could see Ethan moving around in his office. His suit jacket hung on a coat rack, neatly fitted on a coat hanger, but his tie was close at the neck
and the sleeves of his blue and white pinstripe shirt were held in place by silver cuff links. I like people who take their work seriously, and Ethan was a professional, head to
toe. Ethan was a lot of things, head to toe, things I shouldn’t have been thinking about.
Ethan claims to be one-quarter Seminole, and his high cheekbones and straight black hair do indeed look Native American. He’d got a haircut since I’d last seen him.
Instead of falling halfway to his shoulders, his hair was neatly trimmed above his ears.
He has damn nice ears.
He saw me and stopped moving, just stood with a law book in his hand and watched me walk toward him. My knee joints felt weird, as if they’d forgotten what their
function was and needed conscious direction. I stopped in the doorway and tried to think of something intelligent to say.
Instead, I said, “I’m sorry I never knew your grandfather.”
As if it were a perfectly reasonable opening remark, Ethan said, “My grandfather almost single-handedly kept Siesta Key from going the way Longboat and Bird have gone.
He wanted Siesta to be for real people.”
I said, “I hate to burst your bubble, Ethan, but real estate on Siesta is no steal.”
“I didn’t say he wanted Siesta for poor people, I said real people. Big difference. Real people don’t barricade themselves in mega-mansions.”
I said, “That isn’t what I came to talk about.”
He quirked one thick black eyebrow, which caused my tongue to have an out-of-body experience in which it leaped across space and licked the eyebrow’s arched peak.
I said, “I mean . . . I wanted to, you know . . . just say hello, and tell you . . . .”
My voice trailed off because I hadn’t actually had a plan, and because my tongue was still vibrating from its out-of-body moment.
He said, “I think I know what you wanted to tell me. Something like, ‘I really dig you, Ethan, but not enough to make any kind of commitment to getting to know you and
seeing where it might take us.’ Is that about right?”
I opened my mouth to protest, and then snapped it shut. It was exactly right, and I felt like a high school tease.
Ethan pulled his desk chair out, laid the law book on the desk, and sat down. He put both hands behind his head and leaned back. His dark eyes were serious as a coming
hurricane.
“Dixie, I’ve never asked you to make any kind of commitment to me, and I never will. But I’m not the kind of man to play footsie either. You’ve sent me a different message
every time we’ve met, so now I’m not sure what you want. Hell, I’ve never been sure about anything with you.”
I sat down too, dropping into one of the old butt-sprung leather chairs facing the desk. The chair’s arms were darkened by thousands of palms that had gripped them. I
rubbed my fingertips on one arm and looked at the mellow sheen of the big mahogany desk where Ethan’s grandfather had sat for so many years. Everything in the office,
including the law books on the shelves that lined the room, were symbols of continuity, generation to generation. Ethan might look like a man on the prowl with his dark good
looks and sure manner, but deep down he was a man of tradition and family values. Not the phony family–values of politicians who use the term as code for white, straight, and
Christian, but true family values of honor and integrity and loyalty. A woman would be a fool to turn away from a man like Ethan.
I said, “I don’t know what I want either. I just know what I don’t want.”
He took his hands down and laced his fingers together on his desk. “So what is it that you don’t want, Dixie?”
My voice grew suddenly thick. “I don’t want to love a man and then lose him. Not again. Not ever again.”
Ethan studied my face for a long moment. “I never took you for a coward.”
Stung, my face went hot and I stood up so fast my head swam. “It’s easy for you to say that, Ethan, you’ve never lost anybody you loved.”
“How can you be so sure of that, Dixie? How do you know what I’ve lost?”
I couldn’t answer that. The truth was that I didn’t know much about Ethan’s past. I’d been so preoccupied with my own, I’d never asked.
He said, “It may sound trite, but it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And it’s cowardly to refuse to love for fear of losing. If everybody in
the world operated that way, we would all live like isolated islands, never getting involved with anybody else. Is that how you want to spend your life?”
I looked away, and for a second my throat burned with threatened vomit, bile roiled from some dark ugly place I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Ethan’s voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dixie. I swore I’d never put pressure on you, and I just did.”
Through stiff lips, I said, “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, and I won’t do it again. And just for the record, that wasn’t a proposal or anything. I don’t know if we’re right for each other; maybe we’re not. But when
you feel strong enough, I’d like to explore the possibility.”
And there it was, the something I thought it would be a shame to waste. It wasn’t chemistry or friendship that I might be wasting, it was the possibility of love.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For things too numerous and screwy to go into.”
I turned my back and walked out with a determined stride.
As usual, I hoped my butt had looked good as I left. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s the truth.
I drove home wishing I hadn’t reacted the way I had, wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut. I talked far too much, and it was time to just shut the fuck up.
It was also time to quit stringing Ethan along. He deserved better. A lot better.
When I got home, I went to the closet-office and stared a long time at the black party dress hanging by itself as the closet’s featured attraction. The party shoes were parked
in their fancy box in a separate spot too, and the dinky little purse hung on a hook like a trophy.
In just three days, I would slither into that new dress, step into those new shoes, and sling that little purse over my shoulder—with or without a condom inside like the
saleswoman had recommended. At the party, I would probably dance with Guidry. In his arms, moving my feet close to his feet, my legs close to his legs, his hand on my back
down low.
I groaned.
Guidry was a cop. Ethan was an attorney. Cops get killed a lot more often than attorneys. Ethan was one of the nicest, smartest, sexiest men in the universe, and my
hormones stood up and tap-danced every time he was near. And yet I had walked away from Ethan, and I was going to the party with Guidry.
I groaned again, and went and stood a long time under the shower. I was still as stupid when I got out as I’d been when I got in.
21
After a long nap, I went to my closet-office and listened to messages while I stepped into fresh underwear and cargo shorts. None of the messages were urgent, so after I
pulled on a fresh T and laced up clean Keds, I went downstairs to visit with Michael and Ella. At that time of day the air on the key leans heavy on your back, draping its
sweaty arms over your shoulders in a dazed torpor. Songbirds were hidden away having a siesta, and only a few seabirds wheeled in the sky. On the shore, some sleepdeprived
gulls and terns made stubborn footprints in the sand.
In the kitchen, Michael was bent over a tray of meatballs he’d just taken out of the oven, and Ella was on her preferred perch on a stool at the butcher-block island. They
both gave me I love you messages when I came in, Ella by blinking her eyes slowly, and Michael by offering me a meatball on a toothpick.
He said, “Wait, there’s stuff to dip it in.”
He plopped a spoonful of something creamy white into a small bowl and shoved it toward me. “See how you like that.”
I rolled the meatball in the dip and took a bite. “Yum. What is it?”
“Mostly ground turkey and sesame seeds, with some spices. The dip is just mayonnaise and Dijon mustard and horse radish.”
“Are you taking them all to the firehouse?” I sounded like a four-year-old about to whine.
“Don’t worry, I’ll leave some here. By the way, Paco and I are going out to dinner tonight.”
“Okay.”
“How’s the kid?”
“He’s good, they’ve moved him to a room.”
He gave me a quick sideways look, but he didn’t ask anything else about Jeffrey.
Luckily, he didn’t even think to ask anything about Laura’s murder. If I’d told him that I’d been asking questions about it, his sad look would have changed to one that said
Have you lost your mind? I protected him by not volunteering any information. He already had enough worry and anxiety from being in a partnership with an undercover cop,
he didn’t need to worry about his sister too. Also, I didn’t want to listen to him yell at me.
I ate another meatball, then washed my hands at the sink and took Ella out on the deck to groom her. I had just put the final stroke on her when Guidry’s dark Blazer rolled
around the curve.
Damn! Why couldn’t he have given me some notice before he came? If I’d known, I could have slicked on a bit of lip gloss and run a brush through my hair. At least I was
clean. Half the time when I see Guidry I’ve just thrown up on myself or I’m covered with dog drool and cat hair.
I hustled Ella inside and said, “I’ll be back later.”
Ignoring Michael’s questioning look, I scooted out without telling him Guidry was outside.
I met Guidry coming toward the deck. He was carrying a manila envelope. He looked dead serious. He nodded to me, formal as a funeral director. Something about the
grim look in his eyes made my fingers fold into my palm.
He said, “I need to talk to you.” His voice had an unusual strained sound, as if he wished he weren’t saying what he was saying.
I said, “Let’s go upstairs,” and led the way.
On my porch, he tossed the envelope on the glass-topped table and took one of the chairs. “I want you to look at these.”
I searched his face for meaning, but he wouldn’t return my look. Suddenly dry-mouthed, I sank into a chair and watched him open the envelope.
He pulled out a couple of photographs and slid them across the table to me. They were mug shots of a man I recognized immediately—the wide jaw, the arrogant tilt of the
head, the self-assured look in the eyes. Even in police custody, he had exuded raw power.
I said, “That’s the man I saw with Laura. That’s her husband.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
He put the photograph back in the envelope and tapped his fingers on the tabletop as if he were drumming out ideas.
He said, “Since her sister will tell you anyway, I’ll give you this much. That man is Martin Freuland. He’s the president of a bank in Laredo, Texas, where Laura Halston
worked as a teller.”
I shook my head like a stunned boxer. “She didn’t mention that when she told me about leaving her husband. She must have gone to Laredo for a few weeks and then come
here.”
“She didn’t have a husband, Dixie. Her sister says she never married, and there is no Dr. Reginald Halston. Not in any state.”
“I could have remembered the name wrong. He was a surgeon, played college football. He told her he would kill her if she left him. She didn’t want his craziness to infect
their child.”
“There was no child, Dixie.”
“But—”
“She wasn’t pregnant. Laura Halston lied to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Her sister says she lived in Laredo for several years and worked in Freuland’s bank. We’ve corroborated that. We’ve even nailed down the exact date she left Laredo.
That’s the one thing everybody is sure of when they talk about Laura Halston, that she left Laredo, Texas, on February twenty-second.”
Stupidly, I felt like a betrayed child. Laura had lied about living in Dallas. She’d lied about being married to a Dallas surgeon. She’d lied about being pregnant. Apparently
the only thing she hadn’t lied about was having a sister.
I’d been so sure that Laura and I had made a true connection, like soul sisters finding each other in the midst of a jungle. But if what Guidry said was true, I’d been a naïve
fool. Laura had simply been acting a role, and I had obligingly played her audience.
Oddly, he said, “I’m sorry, Dixie.”
My eyes burned and I looked away. “I hardly knew her.”
“But you believed in her. Losing faith in another person is almost worse than losing a friend.”
There was a shadow in his eyes that said he spoke from personal experience.
I said, “That man, Martin whoever, said he would make her pay for leaving him.”
Guidry tapped the tabletop a few more times. “According to her sister, Freuland and Laura were lovers, and she left him because he wouldn’t divorce his wife.”
“So he killed her.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Dixie. There’s more to this story than a love affair. Freuland is under federal investigation for helping drug traffickers launder money. They
believe he handled buffer bank accounts for money that had been delivered in cash to currency exchanges in Mexico. They wired the money to his bank, and he took big
payoffs for not reporting it. The feds got an anonymous tip about what he was doing, and the sister claims the tip came from Laura.”
I felt as if I were whirling through a wormhole in space. “He killed her because she reported him for laundering drug money?”
Dryly, Guidry said, “It could rile a man up to know he was going to spend the next twenty or thirty years of his life in jail.”
I searched Guidry’s face. He wasn’t telling the whole story. Laura’s killer hadn’t just stabbed her to death, he had also made ribbons of her face. Stabbing her was a crime
of intense passion, an act of rabid vengeance that could have been motivated by fury. But slashing her face had brought a different kind of satisfaction to the killer. Slashing her
face seemed more like a psychopath’s doing than an outraged banker. Not that a corrupt bank president couldn’t also be a psychopath, but it was a stretch.
Dully, I said, “Did you get my message about the man who was stalking her?”
He grunted. “I’m not even going to ask how you got that information. You must send out invisible taser beams that cause people to go into shock and tell you everything they
know.”
Since I was still in shock myself, I let that pass.
Guidry shook out another photo sheet from his envelope and scooted it across the table. “Ever see this guy?”
It was another mug shot, this one of a puffy man with close-set eyes and marshmallow lips. He looked like the actor who would play an uptight high school principal or a
holier-than-thou church youth director, the one who sucked all the fun out of life. In some shots, he wore rimless glasses that added to his professorial look.
I shook my head. “I don’t recognize him.”
Guidry got out his ever-present notepad and flipped through some pages.
“Name’s Frederick Vaught. He’s a nurse, or used to be until he lost his nursing license. He was charged with elder abuse after another nurse saw him holding a pillow over a
patient’s face in a rehab center. The patient didn’t die, and there wasn’t enough hard evidence to convict him of attempted murder, so he got off by pleading no contest. He got
five years’ probation, and had to do two hundred hours of community service. That’s how he wound up driving people at Bayfront. It was a volunteer position.”
“They let somebody like that drive people?”
“His driving record was okay, it was his nursing record that was faulty.”
Guidry did that finger-tapping thing again. “Your tip about him was a good one. The ER people remembered him as the driver who brought the Grayberg woman in. And
Laura Halston was at the emergency room at the same time. You were right about that.”
Damn straight I’d been right about that. Even if I’d been wrong about a lot of other things.
He said, “Several patients under his care died under uncertain circumstances. They were all between eighty and ninety years old.”
I thought of how he’d told Ms. Grayberg she should have been smothered at her first infarct, and shuddered. If I hadn’t come around the curtain, would he have smothered
her right then?
I said, “A nurse would know how to use a scalpel. Maybe he was a surgical nurse at one time.”
“Maybe.”
He met my gravelly stare and sighed. “As I’ve already said, don’t jump to conclusions.”
“But you will pick Vaught up?”
“Of course. If nothing else, he violated about a hundred rules of his probation by going to that nursing facility.”
I said, “I asked about that other guy, Gorgon, at the Lyon’s Mane. Ruby wouldn’t talk about him, but I’m sure he’s deep in organized crime.”
His gaze measured me for a moment. “Dixie, I would really, really appreciate it if you’d stop asking questions about this murder. That’s my job, not yours.”
His gray eyes were calm, but his eyelids flickered just enough to tell me he wasn’t being completely honest.
“What’s the real reason you want me to stop?”
“We’re looking for a psychopathic slasher. Killers like that don’t need a lot of reason to go after another victim. I don’t want you to attract his attention.”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to go into all the reasons why fear wasn’t a good deterrent to keep me from looking for Laura’s killer. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted
Guidry to know that I was more afraid of fear than I was of a killer.
I took a deep breath and stood up. “I have pets waiting for me.”
He nodded and followed me down the steps. Downstairs, we got into our respective vehicles and gave each other sober waves before we started our engines. Guidry went
first, easing his car around the meandering lane and causing the parakeets to do their usual paranoid panic. I followed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands like an old
woman afraid of losing control.
22
I weighed about two tons when I slogged into the downstairs lobby at the Sea Breeze. As I went in, the elevator door opened and Tom Hale’s girlfriend came out. She was
mincing along on red high heels and carrying a cardboard box so big she had to peer around its side to look ahead. Since she had her hands full, I turned back to open the
door for her.
She stopped and gave me a defiant look. “I know what you’re going to say, but women have to put themselves first. If we don’t, who will?”
“Excuse me?”
“I need a man who can protect me. Look at what happened to that woman over in Fish Hawk Lagoon! Somebody came in her house and killed her in the shower. That
could’ve been me, and Tom couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”
I looked from her flaming face to the box in her hands. “Are you saying you’re leaving Tom because a woman you’ve never met got killed?”
“I’m saying a woman needs a man to protect her. Every woman, not just me.”
I said, “That’s pure bullshit. You’re just using that as an excuse to leave Tom.”
“You’re so crazy about him, why don’t you move in with him?”
I considered saying that Tom and I were good friends, but that we had no sexual attraction. Not because Tom was in a wheelchair, but because we just didn’t. I considered
saying that Tom deserved a woman who wasn’t shallow and vapid, and that I was glad she was leaving him. But saying those things would have taken more energy than she
was worth. Besides, I had become so sane and well-balanced that I no longer leaped to tell idiots they were idiots. Instead, I only said one teensy thing.
I said, “Lady, I sure hope you’ve been spayed. It would be a damn shame for you to reproduce.”
She snorted and pranced out on her red high heels, leaving me wishing I hadn’t regained so much sane self-control. A year ago, I might have gone bananas and pulled out all
her flat-ironed hair. As it was, I had let the bitch walk away with all her hairs intact.
Upstairs, I tapped on Tom’s condo door and then used my key. He and Billy Elliot were in the living room, and they both gave me doleful looks when I went in.
I said, “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t tell me you’re actually sad the bitch has gone! Puh-leeze!”
They both looked startled, but Billy Elliot began to grin with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
Tom said, “When your husband was alive, did you feel safer?”
“Of course.”
“You thought he could protect you.”
“It wasn’t that I thought he would protect me, it was just that there were two of us. Even if we were miles apart, there were still two of us, and I always knew if I got in a
jam, I could call Todd and he would help me. That made me feel safer.”
“Frannie couldn’t rely on me like that.”
“How come?”
He looked down at his paralyzed legs. “You know.”
“Oh, big doo-doo! She could rely on you for lots of things. You solve problems for people every day. You know things, you have information, you know how to get things
done. Women don’t need a bodyguard, they need somebody with good sense to help them solve problems. Frannie’s a poisonous toad. Just get over it.”
Peering up at me with narrowed eyes, Tom gnawed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. Then he grinned.
“I just remembered a movie I saw one time where this guy rubbed a lamp and got a genie that fulfilled his every wish. He wanted a pile of money, boom, he had unlimited
supplies. He wanted a fancy hotel suite, boom, he was in it. He wanted two or three women, boom, they were there. He wanted drugs and booze and every kind of sex he
could think of, boom, he got it all. Anything he wanted, he got. Man, he was beside himself. He’d found nirvana, heaven, the Garden of Eden. Then after a while it started to
get old, you know? And he thought he’d leave for a while and spend some time alone. But he couldn’t. He was locked in that room with those sluts and the drugs and the
booze and the unlimited supply of money. And he realized he was in hell.”
“Your point being?”
“At first I thought Frannie was the answer to my dreams. Sexy, good-looking, great in bed, everything a man wants. But for the last few weeks I’ve been in hell.”
“Well, there you go.”
“I guess the moral is to be careful what you ask for.”
I patted his shoulder. “If I meet a genie, I’ll remember that.”
I was already reviewing my list of women who were better than Frannie. I figured I’d give Tom a few weeks to get over her, and then play matchmaker.
Billy Elliot and I went downstairs and did our run, and both of us felt happier when we came back upstairs. Tom seemed to have recovered his equilibrium too.
He said, “Speaking of the woman who was murdered, what’s going on with that?”
Apparently, he and Frannie had done a lot of speaking about Laura’s murder, because I hadn’t mentioned it.
I said, “I don’t think I told you that I’d had dinner with her. I really liked her. I thought we would become good friends.”
“I didn’t realize this was a personal loss for you.”
“It turns out she lied to me about a lot of things. I thought she was one kind of person, but she turned out to be something else.”
“Like Frannie.”
“In a way.”
“Disillusionment sucks, doesn’t it?”
“It looks like Laura hurt some people.”
“Including you.”
“She didn’t hurt me. I barely knew her.”
“Uh-huh, and I still have two good legs, and nobody ever broke my heart and left me.”
A slight sea breeze moved in to wave palm fronds as I left Tom’s place, and my disposition lightened. Funny how the weather seems to have an organic connection to
humans and animals. A drop in pressure brings aching joints and pain in old injuries, spring’s explosion of new green stirs a surge of adolescent hormones, and winter’s snow
makes people pack up and move to Florida.
I had to spend extra time on my afternoon rounds on account of a recent magazine-shredding binge by twin-mitted Ragdolls named Annie and Bess. Ragdolls are large longhaired
cats who fall limp in your arms when you pick them up. Then they look up at you with such a sweet expression in their deep blue eyes that you’re instantly a goner.
Annie and Bess were blue colorpoints with white chins, mittens, and boots. They were loving and gentle, but they knew they were the mistresses of the manor and that I was
their servant, so they weren’t the least apologetic about flinging paper dandruff all over the house. They watched with bored disinterest while I vacuumed it up, and when I
suggested that it might have been a better use of their time to watch the birds outside their window than to tear up a magazine, they merely flipped their tails. In their former
lives, they had probably been opera divas.
After they had eaten and I had washed their dishes and put out fresh water, we ran around on the lanai for a few minutes playing jump-for-the-peacock-feather until we were
all winded. Then I took them inside, kissed them goodbye, and headed to the Village to get Cora’s muumuu. Not that she needed the dress right that minute, but I didn’t like to
think of her by herself, hobbling around on that sore ankle. I didn’t even look across the street toward Ethan’s office when I got it. Well, I may have let my eyes slide that
direction, but I didn’t really look.
With the newly shortened dress in a nice shopping bag, I drove over the north bridge and wound my way around to Bayfront Village. I left the Bronco under the portico for
a valet to disappear into the bowels of their parking garage, and swished through doors that automatically opened when they felt me coming. As I went toward the elevator, the
concierge waved at me, friendly again, and pointed to her phone, meaning she had already notified Cora that I was on the way. I waved back and hustled on to the elevator.
As soon as the elevator door opened on the sixth floor, I could smell chocolate bread from Cora’s apartment. Cora had opened her door for me, and when I went in the
look of joy on her face was enough to make me forget how rushed I was.
She said, “I figured you’d be here this afternoon, so I made us some chocolate bread.”
Cora has an ancient bread-making machine her granddaughter gave her, and she makes decadently delicious chocolate bread in it. She claims her technique is a secret,
which is okay by me. The secret results in a round whole-wheat loaf studded with almost-melted spots of oozing dark chocolate. Just smelling it makes my taste buds sit up
and smile.
I put the bag with her muumuu on a chair.
“I thought you were supposed to sit with your foot propped up.”
“Oh, I do, every chance I get. I’ll sit right now, and you can bring me some bread and tea.”
She plopped herself in one of the graceful iron chairs at a little round table covered with a pink and turquoise tablecloth.
She said, “Would you mind boiling me an egg? I used up all my zip making that bread.”
I said, “I’ll boil two. You should have more protein than one.”
She watched me over the bar while I clattered around finding everything. I boil eggs the way my grandmother taught me and Michael—cold water almost but not quite
covering the eggs, cover the pot, bring them to a rolling boil, then turn off the heat and let them sit exactly three minutes. While that was happening, I made a pot of tea, tore off
chunks of chocolate bread from the loaf—because it’s best torn, not sliced—and put it all on a tray. When the timer announced the eggs done, I took them out of the water,
ruthlessly guillotined them through their shells, and scooped their quivering flesh into a small bowl before the soft yolks had time to run.
When I carried the tray to the table, Cora’s eyes lit up in a way that made me suspect she hadn’t eaten since she’d been home. For a few minutes, the only sound was the
clink of Cora’s fork and my soft whimpers of pleasure. Cora’s chocolate bread is another thing I expect to be in unlimited supply in heaven, along with bacon.
She said, “Have you heard anything else about that little boy?”
“He’s doing well, they’ve moved him to a room.”
As if I’d said the opposite, she said, “I don’t worry about dying, you know. To tell the truth, I sort of look forward to it. Not the last-breath part, but the next breath in a
new place. I imagine it’s sort of like being born, don’t you? I mean, coming into this world is no picnic for a baby, all that squeezing and pushing going on around it, but then it
pops out in a whole new world.”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if somebody else was with us and she didn’t want to be overheard saying something controversial. “Between you and me, I
never have believed that business about golden streets and angels flying around playing on harps. That would get old real fast. No, I imagine when we die here, the next thing
we know we’re popping out of our next mother, babies again, starting all over.”
“Reincarnation.”
She looked blank. “I don’t know about that. I just think the good Lord gives us another chance to get it right. I’m gonna do better next time.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “You’ve done just fine this time, Cora. I don’t know anybody who’s done it better.”
To stop all the talk about death, I said, “I’m going to a party Saturday night. A big shindig the Humane Society is throwing. Guidry invited me.”
She sat up straight and beamed at me. “That nice detective fellow?”
“That’s the one.”
“That’s why you got your hair cut.”
I touched my ends. “You could tell?”
“It was a little uneven before.”
“That’s not why I got it cut.”
She waggled a hunk of chocolate bread at me. “Yes, it is. You wanted to look pretty for that nice detective. Did you get a new dress?”
“New dress, new shoes, new purse, new underwear, the works.”
She smiled at me, her papery skin cracking into a zillion fine lines. “Ha! It’s about time. That’s all I can say. It’s about time.”
Everybody who loved me seemed to be pushing for me to get involved with a man. Michael hoped it wouldn’t be Guidry, Paco hoped it would be, and Cora would have
been happy with either Guidry or Ethan Crane. It made me feel a little bit like a filly on the track that people were betting on. Only thing was, I wasn’t sure I was ready for the
race.
23
It was close to five when I got to Fish Hawk Lagoon, and shadows were lengthening along the sidewalk. The crime-scene cars were no longer in Laura’s driveway, but Bill
Sullivan’s HAZMAT van was there. I parked in Mazie’s driveway and tried the doorknob before I rang the bell. The door was locked, which made me glad and sad at the
same time. Glad that Pete had taken my reprimand to heart about leaving it unlocked, and sad that it had been necessary.
Between trying the knob and ringing the bell, I’d heard the sweet strains of Pete’s saxophone. I wondered how many hours a day he spent playing for Mazie. The music
stopped, and in a few seconds Pete opened the door with Mazie close at his heels. Both man and dog had stressed faces.
I said, “How is Jeffrey?”
“He’s talking, but he’s weak. Hal held the phone to him so he could talk to Mazie, but Jeffrey didn’t understand and just cried. It was a mistake, and we won’t do that again.
Mazie went nuts for a while, running around like she was looking for Jeffrey.”
I said, “She probably thinks he needs her, and that she’s not doing her job. For a service dog, that’s about the worst thing that can happen.”
Pete looked miserable. “I shouldn’t have asked Hal to let Jeffrey talk to her.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Pete. We all thought it was a good idea. Maybe when Jeffrey is stronger, Hal can try again.”
I opened the hall closet door and got Mazie’s leash. “Has she eaten?”
“Very little. Just a few bites, and then she wouldn’t look at it again. I brushed her this morning, and she seemed to like that.”
I said, “Come on, girl, let’s go for a run.”
Listlessly, she followed me outside and allowed herself to be drawn into a run. We covered about three blocks and then turned and ran all the way back home. Mazie had
the joyless look of somebody exercising only because she knew it was good for her. I felt somewhat the same way.
When we got back to her house, a beige Camry was parked behind Bill Sullivan’s HAZMAT truck, and a woman with corn-tassel hair stood behind it, looking around the
neighborhood. When she saw me and Mazie, she began walking toward us at a fast clip.
A persimmon-mouthed woman, she had the pronounced calf muscles and bony shoulders of someone who took exercise seriously. She looked a few years older than me,
early forties probably, and wore a pale blue no-nonsense suit and cream colored pumps. I would have suspected she was a news reporter there to get a juicy murder story, but
the handbag hanging from the crook of her elbow matched her pumps, and she wore panty hose. She was too domesticated to be a reporter.
With a wide smile, she said, “Hello, I’m Celeste Autrey, Laura Halston’s sister.”
She had a brisk, snappy voice with a chirpy undertone, like a kindergarten teacher or the X-ray technician who does your mammogram.
Now that I knew who she was, I searched for a resemblance to Laura. She was fair, but not with Laura’s near-albino skin. Her blond hair was neither smooth nor silvery
platinum like Laura’s, and her eyebrows were plucked to an almost invisible line. Her nose and chin were longer and more pointed, and her eyes closer together. When Mother
Nature had dispensed the gifts of beauty, she had been generous to Laura but extremely frugal with Celeste.
Still with that incongruous smile, she said, “There’s a man in Laura’s house who won’t let me in. I don’t know who gave him authority to be there, but it certainly wasn’t me.
He was very rude, said he wasn’t finished yet, and that I couldn’t come in no matter who I was. I took his license number, and I’ll report him to his employer for being so
discourteous. He gave me a lecherous look too. I think if he hadn’t been afraid I’d call the cops, he would have tried something with me. But that’s typical, isn’t it? Nobody
seems to have any respect for anybody else, they just trample all over you.”
All the time she spoke, her lips were stretched in a frozen smile. For a second, I felt as if I were back in junior high listening to the mean girls slicing and dicing reputations
with their razor-sharp little tongues.
I said, “That’s a crime-scene cleaner. He was sent by the Sheriff’s Department. You won’t be able to go in the house until he’s finished. It’s for health reasons.”
“You would think I’d have been consulted before they sent somebody. I don’t want strangers going through my sister’s things. She had some valuable jewelry, just the kind
of thing people would take if they’re not supervised. I doubt if they even did an inventory before they sent somebody in there. That’s inexcusable negligence, but I don’t
suppose you can ask for anything better in a one-horse town like this.”
Careful not to use words like blood or bacteria, I said, “They won’t go through her things, they’ll just clean the areas that need cleaning.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t do anything about it now, anyway. Do you mind if I come in? I don’t like standing out here on the sidewalk with the neighbors watching.”
There wasn’t a neighbor’s house in sight, but she apparently thought we were under close observation. With her lips still smiling, her eyes gave me an aggrieved look, as if I
were personally responsible for her discomfort. She moved toward the Richards’ front door, her high heels making clicking sounds on the walk. No question about it, I had lost
control of this situation from the get-go.
I did a fast mental debate and then led Mazie after her. Laura had been a neighbor, and I was sure Hal and Gillis would want me to be hospitable to her sister, even if she
had a snotty attitude. I could even halfway tolerate her snarky disposition because I knew she’d suffered a terrible shock. Besides, I wanted to hear what she had to say. I
wanted to learn the truth about Laura.
At the door, she stopped and stood aside to let me open it, as hard in her skin as a premature banana.
Before obeying her peremptory direction, I made a feeble attempt at asserting some control. “This isn’t my house. I’m here to walk the dog.”
“The detective told me about you. Your name is Hemingway.”
So much for gaining control. I opened the door and motioned her in ahead of me.
I said, “It’s Dixie Hemingway, and I’m very sorry about your sister.”
Pete stood up from the sofa, and Mazie strained at the leash to go to him. I didn’t blame her. Of the two of us, Pete was the one she could depend on.
I said, “Ms. Autrey, I’d like you to meet Pete Madeira.”
Pete extended one hand to take Mazie’s leash and the other to shake Celeste Autrey’s hand, but she didn’t offer it. She didn’t even seem aware that Pete was there.
With machine-gun precision, she said, “The detective said you had my sister’s cat. I don’t know why she kept that cat. That man gave him to her, I suppose that’s why.
Laura never used any judgment when it came to men. Not when she was a girl and not when she was a woman, just jumped from bed to bed, man to man. Never had any
morals, not from the beginning. She was my sister, and I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Laura has always been a slut. Never could turn down any man that wanted her, and
believe me, there were plenty of bad ones after her. Martin Freuland was the worst, the very worst. I tried to tell her, but Laura never listened to me. Not ever, not about
anything. She wanted his money, and she thought she could get it. Now look what it got her.”
Even with that odd smile, her voice held so much acid that Pete’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, and Mazie edged closer to his side.
Pete said, “If you two will excuse us, Mazie and I will be on the lanai.”
Celeste dropped into a chair as if she intended to spend the rest of her life there. I perched on the arm of the sofa. I wasn’t sure why she was there, but I knew it wasn’t
because she was concerned about Leo.
I said, “You think Martin Freuland killed Laura?”
“Of course he did. He found where she’d gone and he came here and killed her. I warned her. As soon as she told me he was here, I told her to leave, but she laughed at
me. Laura thought she could twist every man around her finger. I don’t suppose anybody could blame her for thinking that. She started with our father and moved on to every
man she ever met. It was a sickness she had, a weakness of character. I think she was born with it. But she went too far with Martin Freuland.”
I caught an odd note of satisfaction in her voice, as if she were glad Laura had got what was coming to her.
I said, “Laura told me she was married to a surgeon. She said she had gone to work for him as his receptionist and then married him.”
Her laughter spewed like ice cubes falling from a refrigerator’s icemaker. “She actually said that? Oh, she was good! That’s what I did, not Laura. My husband is a surgeon,
and I’m the one who was his receptionist. But I’m not surprised she told you that. She was so jealous of me, she stole my life! She tried to steal my husband too, but he saw
right through her. Not like most men—she had most men fooled. Men are stupid, you know, they’ll believe anything a woman tells them, and Laura knew all the right ego
buttons to push. She was oversexed, I think. Maybe it was hormones or some extra chromosome thing. Whatever it was, she never thought of anything except sex.”
I thought back to our evening together. Two women sharing secrets have plenty of opportunities to talk about sex, but the topic hadn’t come up. Grief does strange things to
people, but in Celeste’s case it seemed to have turned her into a vile disloyal gossip.
I said, “I didn’t know Laura well, but she seemed like a nice person to me. I can’t imagine her doing something so bad that it would cause a man to kill her.”
Her head snapped toward me, and in the movement a ray of light from a table lamp caught two thin wet trails on her cheeks. Her lips were still pulled back in a parody of a
smile, but her eyes were leaking tears. Strangely, she seemed unaware of them.
“Let me set you straight about Laura. From the day she was born, she seduced every man she met, beginning with our father. I was four when she was born, and I don’t
think Daddy ever looked at me again. Oh, she was cute, no doubt about it. I don’t dispute that. Every time we went out in public, strangers would stop us on the street to rave
about how pretty she was. Right there in front of me, they’d go on and on about her looks, and she ate it up. I was cute too, plus being smart, but she hogged all the attention.
It was a sickness of hers.”
She leaned forward and dropped her voice an octave, getting serious. “You know what someone said to me? They said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but your sister is a narcissist.’
That’s what they said, a narcissist. I’d never heard the word before, I had to look it up in the dictionary. It’s a mental illness, is what it is. Narcissists are selfish and controlling,
just like Laura. They’re outrageous liars too, you can’t believe a thing they say, and they don’t care about anybody but themselves. They use you and use you and use you, and
then they throw you away.”
Her voice had taken on a corrosive bitterness. “When Laura was eight, she made Daddy take her to a kid’s modeling agency. Oh, she knew the effect she had on men, she
knew they’d want her. They did too, snapped her right up, and after that, the whole family lived on the money she made. Needless to say, all the photographers were men.
Even then, she was using men to get what she wanted. We moved to a big house, my parents got new cars, and neither of them ever worked another day. Laura was their
princess, like she’s been ever since.”
I clamped my teeth tight to keep from reminding her that Laura’s mutilated body lay in the county morgue no longer a princess. No longer anything.
She said, “Laura drew in every man she ever knew. Teachers, neighbors, every man around. She was just naturally seductive, even when she was little. She was a bad seed,
depraved, no morals whatsoever. She even seduced Daddy. That’s how low she was.”
With tears glistening on her cheeks like snail trails, she peered at me to see how I was taking what she said. Increasingly willing to give her every opportunity to sink to her
lowest self, I gave her my best I’m listening look.
“We were still young enough to sleep with our bedroom doors open. Laura’s room was directly across the hall, and there was a night-light in the hall in case we needed to
go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. One night I woke up and saw Daddy in my door. He was so big he blocked out all the light from the hall. He pulled my door shut,
and then I heard Laura’s door close too. I knew she had got him to come in there, and I knew what was going on. Can you believe that? She was that depraved. After that he
went in her room almost every night. She had him under her thumb but good.”
My stomach lurched. Celeste Autrey was not only viciously disloyal to her sister, she had a maggot-ridden mind.
“How old was Laura then?”
“Nine or ten. Our mother knew what she’d done, too. She turned hateful to Laura, really spiteful and mean, but Daddy was so much under her spell that he went out of his
way to let us know that Laura could have anything she wanted.”
She gave a short bark of a laugh. “It backfired on her, though. It always does, doesn’t it? Like they say, what goes around comes around. Daddy managed Laura’s career,
getting her modeling jobs, making sure she got attention, handled all her money. But he wasn’t very good at it, and when he and Mama were killed, Daddy had run up huge
debts that he’d expected to pay with Laura’s earnings.”
“Your parents are dead?”
“Killed in a car wreck when I was in college and Laura was seventeen.”
So much for the story Laura had told about parents in Connecticut who owned her house.
With a hint of satisfaction, Celeste said, “By that time, Laura was past the adorable-kid stage, and the catalog ads and magazine cover jobs weren’t rolling in anymore.”
With a mental image of two young sisters left alone with a mountain of debt that one of them was expected to pay off by being beautiful, I did some figuring.
“You were twenty-one then, right?”
She colored. “The older one, the one who should have helped Laura out, is that what you mean? I suppose I could have, but I had to survive too. I wasn’t making much
money, and I had rent to pay and car payments and clothes. I couldn’t afford to support her too.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you should have.”
“Well, plenty of other people suggested it, and I know Laura thought I should. She’d always got whatever she wanted, so she couldn’t imagine somebody else not rushing to
her side to take care of her.”
“What did she do?”
She shrugged. “She had high school friends who took her in, first one and then another until she graduated. Probably seduced all their fathers while she was at it. That’s what
she did, seduced men. Every boyfriend I ever had, she took. I could have done the same thing to her, but I had morals. Not Laura. She never thought twice about seducing
men. She still got some modeling jobs after high school, so it wasn’t like she was destitute. And anyway, I had my own problems. I had to support myself, and I had to do it
with my brains.”
“Unlike Laura.”
“You bet, unlike Laura. Not that I wasn’t pretty.” She looked intently at me. “I’m quite good-looking, you know.”
She wasn’t, but I nodded.
“I’m not saying Laura was dumb, but she wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string either. She didn’t have to be, all she had to do was smile pretty and men handed her money
on a platter.”
She smiled grimly. “And if they didn’t, she just helped herself, like she did with Martin Freuland.”
“She took money from Freuland?”
She gave a tense laugh and erased the air in front of her face.
“Listen to me! I sound like somebody on a talk show airing the family’s dirty linen. All I wanted to ask you was if you know anybody who’ll take that cat?”
It took a moment to realize she meant Leo. With a sense of relief, I said, “You’re not keeping him?”
“Oh, God, no. I hate cats. Laura was always begging for one when she was little, but I won that battle. Not that anybody really cared how I felt, but my mother hated cats
too, and she put her foot down on that one.”
I’m always confused when I hear somebody say they hate any kind of pet. I can understand that a person might not want one, but I can’t fathom hating an animal just
because it isn’t some other kind of animal.
She said, “I hate dogs too. If you ask me, it’s plain stupid for human beings to walk behind a dog, waiting for it to pee and picking up its shit. It must give dogs a big laugh to
know they’ve got humans to be their servants.”
I said, “I took Leo to the Kitty Haven. That’s a boardinghouse for cats.” My own voice had picked up its pace as if it wanted to keep up with hers.
“I suppose the Sheriff’s Department authorized that too. My God, they must have sent out invitations. Take the cat, come in the house, take her things. If any of her jewelry
is missing, I swear I’ll file an official complaint.”
Stiffly, I said, “Ms. Autrey, nobody will take your sister’s jewelry. And Leo couldn’t be left in the house after Laura was killed there. Now if there’s nothing else I can do for
you, it’s time for both of us to leave. As I said before, this is not my house, and I’m not authorized to invite strangers into it.”
She shot to her feet and stalked to the front door. “And your time is so valuable.” She laid heavy sarcasm on valuable, intent on letting me know that she thought my time
was worthless, and slammed the door behind her.
With the echo of the door still reverberating, I deliberately closed my eyes and relaxed my fists, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply—a trick my old shrink had
taught me when I wanted to go yank somebody bald-headed.
A little whining noise made me open my eyes. Mazie and Pete stood looking at me, Mazie with a quizzical tilt to her head.
Pete waffled his eyebrows. “Holy smokes! That woman could talk the balls off a pool table.”
I said, “She’s rabid, absolutely rabid.”
“You can tell that, just by listening to her yak, yak, yak. What the heck was she talking about?”
“She was telling me what a lying narcissistic slut her sister was.”
“The sister that just got murdered?”
“That’s the one.”
“Man, that’s cold.”
Like a sloth, I unfolded myself from the sofa arm and stood a moment looking at Pete and Mazie.
“Pete, if she comes back here, don’t let her in.”
“Hon, you don’t need to tell me twice. I don’t like that woman. Neither does Mazie.”
“That makes three of us.”
Pete said, “It’s a damn dirty thing to go around telling lies about your own sister, even if she hadn’t just been murdered.”
I said, “Yes, it is.”
But as I went out to the Bronco, I wasn’t sure anymore which sister told the biggest lies. Laura had lied about being married and being pregnant, and she had lied about her
parents. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had been telling the truth and Celeste was the liar.
Except about the pregnancy. For sure Laura had lied about that.
But maybe the parents truly lived in Connecticut, and maybe there truly was a husband somewhere, and maybe his name was truly Reginald Halston and he was truly a
surgeon. I wasn’t positive about any of those things anymore.
The only thing I was absolutely positive about was that children don’t seduce grown men.
24
The Camry was gone from Laura’s driveway when I left Mazie’s house, and a locksmith’s truck was behind Bill Sullivan’s HAZMAT van. I drove out of Fish Hawk Lagoon
and headed south on Midnight Pass Road, but instead of going directly home I turned onto Reba Chandler’s street. Reba is a brilliant, gracious, kind woman who teaches
psychology at New College. She’s also a bird lover, and I’ve been taking care of Big Bubba, her African Grey parrot, since I was in high school. Back then, it had been a
teenager’s way to make easy money. Now it’s my profession. Funny how life loops back on itself like that.
Reba’s house is a cypress two-story with shuttered windows that are always open because she doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. The shutters began life a deep turquoise,
but they’ve faded over the years until the color is almost non existent. Instead of ringing the bell, I walked along a rock path to the lanai at the back of the house. Big Bubba
lives in a large cage out there, and I knew I’d probably find Reba there too.
She wasn’t on the lanai but in the yard behind it, where she’s put up double-decked bird feeders. She carried two plastic bottles that had once contained water but now
were filled with seeds and peanuts. Lots of people who put out birdseed go to all kinds of lengths to keep squirrels and raccoons out of it. They set the feeders on tall poles,
surround them with chicken wire, suspend them from high branches, or put cayenne pepper in the seed to burn the squirrels’ mouths. Reba just puts out the food and lets
nature take its course. I guess psychologists know so much about human depredation they’re not fazed by anything animals do.
She said, “Dixie, how nice to see you!”
Reba is probably the only woman in the world who can sound like she’s in a receiving line while she’s feeding birds.
A young wood stork with a long dark bill and fluffy brown neck feathers stalked to the bird feeder as if he were claiming the best table at a fancy restaurant. Wood storks
have such big funny feet, they look like they’re wearing tennis shoes. Reba poured peanuts and seeds into the feeder, and a mottled duck waddled forward to join the wood
stork. A couple of blue jays swooped down to sort through the nuts, and the wood stork and duck withdrew.
So did Reba and I, hotfooting it to the lanai before the blue jays attacked us. I was annoyed at the thuggish dive-bombing blue jays for scaring the other birds away, but it
didn’t bother Reba. She doesn’t believe in imposing human morals on nature. I don’t either, but I still wished the wood storks and ducks had got all the seed first. As Reba has
told me more than once, I have a teensy judgmental streak.
From inside the safety of the lanai, we watched as several fish crows flew in and scared off the jays. Fish crows are even bigger bullies than jays. After the crows left with
their peanuts, they were replaced by a flock of rose-ringed parakeets chattering like high school girls on a field trip.
Reba said, “I used to get bobwhites, but I never see one anymore. I’m going to have a martini. Would you like one?”
“No, thanks.” I figured alcohol right then would make me either throw up or pass out.
“Glass of wine?”
“Thank you, no. I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Let me get my martini first. I have better answers when I’ve had a little vodka.”
She scurried into the house, and I went to Big Bubba’s cage to say hello.
With their gray feathers, white-rimmed eyes, dark gray wings, and curved bills, Congo African Greys look like prim executive secretaries. But then you catch a glimpse of
bright red petticoat feathers under their gray tails, and you know they have a racy side they don’t show the world.
I’m a little bit like that myself.
Another thing about African Greys is that they’re so intelligent they bore easily, and when they do they’re liable to rip out their own feathers.
I’m like that too, except for the feather-ripping part.
Big Bubba tilted his head to give me the one-eyed bird look. He said, “Did you miss me?”
I laughed, because I knew that was something Reba asked him every day when she came home. He laughed too, bobbing his head to the rhythm of his own he-he-he sound.
Big Bubba was a great talker, but not so hot as a conversationalist.
Reba came out with a martini glass in one hand and a plastic bowl of sliced banana in the other. She set her glass on the lanai table and put the banana in Big Bubba’s cage.
Then she motioned me to a chair at the table and sat down herself. With her eyes fixed on me, she took a dainty sip of her martini.
“What’s wrong?”
It’s a mistake to pretend with Reba, so I told her the truth.
“I’m sure you heard about the woman who was murdered in Fish Hawk Lagoon.”
“You knew her?”
“I have a client next door to her, and she invited me to dinner a couple of nights before she was killed. I’d only just met her, but I liked her a lot. She told me she had run
away from an abusive husband in Dallas. Said he was a sadistic surgeon. She said she was pregnant and didn’t want her husband to inflict his sickness on their child.”
“Do you think he killed her?”
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “As it turns out, there is no husband. She made the whole thing up. She wasn’t pregnant either.”
Reba took another sip of martini. “So she lied to you.”
“Yeah, and tonight her sister told me some other things about her. She said she’d seduced every man she’d ever known. She also said somebody had called her a narcissist.
What is a narcissist, anyway?”
Reba shook her head. “Wait, who called who a narcissist?”
“The sister’s name is Celeste. The murdered sister is Laura. Celeste said somebody told her that Laura was a narcissist.”
“Somebody who? Her hairdresser? A bartender? A jilted boyfriend?”
“Um, I don’t know. She just said somebody.”
Reba pulled a toothpick from her martini and nibbled on its olive. “People throw diagnostic terms around all the time without knowing what they mean, but narcissism is a
personality disorder marked by grandiosity—a grossly inflated sense of importance or intelligence or talent that has no basis in fact. There’s also a sense of entitlement.
Narcissists believe they should have whatever they want because they want it. They lie a lot, and they take unfair advantage of people who love them.”
“Laura didn’t seem grandiose to me. She seemed completely normal.”
“But she lied to you, and the lies would have eventually led to more lies, like a miscarriage or a divorce. We don’t know if what the sister said was true about her being
narcissistic, but lying about a husband and a pregnancy certainly raises a red flag. The truth is slippery to narcissists, even when there’s no advantage to them in lying. It’s part
of their need to control. If they can fool you, they feel powerful.”
I said, “I don’t know how truthful Celeste is either, because she also said Laura had seduced their father when she was nine years old. Said he went in Laura’s bedroom
almost every night because she lured him in.”
“Oh.”
I said, “She was very beautiful. Her sister said she was a child model. The whole family lived on the money she made modeling.”
“And the father sexually abused her.”
“If what the sister said is true, he did.”
Reba said, “If he molested one child, I’d be surprised if he didn’t molest the sister too.”
With a look of distaste, she took a deep breath and seemed to pull up some invisible page of lecture notes. “Children have instinctive expectations of love and loyalty from
their parents. Sexual abuse is the most basic disloyalty, not only from the parent who inflicts it, but from the parent who allows it.”
She took another sip of her drink and set her glass down with a gentle hand.
“The most basic human need is to love and be loved, but we have to be taught how to love by receiving love. Love always includes loyalty. When a child gets neither love
nor loyalty from her parents, she grows up with a narcissistic exaggeration of self-love. Even if somebody truly loved her, Laura would have been too emotionally fragile and
too involved with herself to seek real intimacy with another person. Instead, she would have focused on being in control so nobody could be in control of her.”
I nodded. “Her sister said she took advantage of people.”
“She wouldn’t have seen it as taking advantage. She would have seen it as being the one in power rather than the helpless one.”
“What about what the sister said about her being a slut and seducing every man she knew?”
Dryly, Reba said, “I doubt she had to work hard to seduce them, but narcissism frequently manifests as control through sexual seduction, especially if there has been sexual
abuse in the person’s childhood.”
I swallowed against nausea. “That all sounds terrible.”
“Narcissism is a terrible disorder, and it’s made even worse by the fact that narcissists are always desirable. That’s how they seduce.”
“There wasn’t anything sexual in my feelings for her.”
“Desiring somebody isn’t necessarily sexual. We desire intellectual stimulation from one person, humor from another, spiritual enlightenment from another, all those things are
just as seductive as sex.”
“Her sister thinks her former employer killed her. He was a bank president, and Laura worked for him.”
“According to the news reports, she was stabbed.”
“Repeatedly. I was there when the deputy found her, and it was so gruesome that he threw up. Her face was mutilated.”
“After she was dead?”
“How did you know?”
“Pathology is magnetic. One pathology attracts its own kind in a different form. Piqueurism is another personality disorder that basically derives from a need to control. A
piqueurist derives deep satisfaction from the power of causing terror.”
My mouth had gone dry. “There was a man stalking her. He’s a nurse who lost his license because they think he may have smothered some old people in a rehab center.
Suffocating people would give a psycho a sense of power, wouldn’t it?”
Reba drank the rest of her martini and set her glass down with a sharp click.
“Dixie, I hope you’re not involved in this investigation.”
“I’m not.”
“You say that, but you have a way of—”
“Honest, I’m not involved in any way. I thought I would be, because I felt like Laura’s murder was something that could happen to any woman, and I wanted to see her
killer caught. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“That may be the understatement of the century.”
I stood up. “Thank you, Reba.”
“You’re welcome.”
I told Big Bubba goodbye and left. The last I saw of Reba, she was headed back into the house with her martini glass. I had the distinct impression that our conversation had
caused her to need a second drink.
Michael and Paco were gone when I got home, but Michael had left a tomato-and-basil pie on my kitchen bar. The day sat heavily on my shoulders, and only the aroma of
Michael’s tomato pie kept me from going straight to bed. I poured a glass of Riesling and carried it and the pie out to the table on my porch. A yolk of sun was ankle high
above a glassy sea, and the sky was shade-shifting from lambent blue to mango. Pedestrian bird traffic was light on the beach, where a gentle surf was tatting lace edging on the
shore. A great egret glided down to my porch railing, pivoted toward the sun, pulled one leg into his skirts and balanced on one foot while the breeze luffed his feathers.
Michael’s pie was delicious—puff pastry, overlapping slices of ripe tomato, dark green basil leaves scattered over the top, good Italian olive oil drizzled on with a sure hand,
and a light touch of garlic—exactly the light supper I needed after all the heavy information I’d digested. I ate it while I watched the sun slide down the sky and slip below the
sea, sending out shimmering banners of gold and cerise.
The egret flew away with a great flapping of wings, and I sat in the draining light and thought about Laura Halston’s life. And about her death.
If what her nutcase sister had said was true, Laura had been treated as a sex object from the moment she was born. Used and abused by her father, envied and shunned by
her mother and sister, and ultimately left alone when her parents died. At seventeen, no longer able to command large fees for being a beautiful child, she’d had to create a
world for herself with no tools except her beauty.
It was hard to condemn her for using sexual seduction to keep from feeling helpless. That’s what she’d been programmed to do—it may have been the only thing she knew
how to do. I wondered if she had loved Martin, the bank president, or if, as Reba had said, she had never loved anybody because she’d never been loved. I had heard Martin
tell her she owed him, but he hadn’t said what she owed him. Was it love? Had Martin loved her and she had rejected him? Could he have been the one who got satisfaction
from seeing her terror as he repeatedly stabbed her?
When I’d had dinner with her, Laura had spoken of Celeste as if the two were close, but Celeste had seemed contemptuous of her sister. Had that been grief talking? Old
bitter rancor that had never been expressed when Laura was alive that was now boiling over? Or perhaps Laura had been playing a role for me when she spoke of her sister as
if they were friends.
Guidry had said Celeste claimed Laura was the one who had reported Martin to the federal authorities for handling buffer accounts for drug dealers. How did Celeste know
that? If Laura had told her, wouldn’t that point to a closeness between them? And what had Celeste meant when she said Laura had stolen from Martin? Stolen what?
I thought of Frederick, the nurse, and groaned. Was he just a sick man who preyed on the elderly, or had he been so enraptured by Laura’s beauty when they met in the ER
that he became obsessed with her and killed her? If Celeste was to be believed, Laura would never have given an out-of-work nurse a moment of her time because he had
nothing she would have wanted. But what about Gorgon, the thuggish guy I’d seen at the Lyon’s Mane? He probably had gobs of money, and he would have been a challenge
to a woman who liked to seduce and control. If, in fact, that’s what Laura had liked to do, which nobody knew for sure.
I kept thinking about what Reba had said about their childhood experiences causing Laura and her sister to get kinks in their personalities. But there are millions of people
who’ve been abused as children who don’t grow up to be liars and thieves, so what makes one person transcend damage done to her as a child, and another lets it become the
central core of who she is?
When our father died, Michael was nine and I was seven. While I drew into a knot of miserable guilt, Michael had spent several months hitting or kicking things. His grades
plunged and he went around with a ferocious scowl on his face. Our mother had been too stunned to deal with him, but our grandfather had finally come up with the perfect
solution. He got a big football tackle bag and hung it from a tree limb in our backyard. Then he had a talk with Michael about anger. Basically, he told him that anger is a
normal emotion and that hitting stuff is a normal action, but that hitting a tackle bag was a lot smarter than hitting walls. Then he gave Michael a pair of boxing gloves and let him
be.
After a while, I got so used to hearing Michael thump that tackle bag that I took to hitting it myself, only I used a stick to whack at it. I even saw our mother slam her fist into
it a few times. Now I wondered what would have happened to Michael’s fury if he hadn’t had that bag to hit. Maybe all that frustrated rage would have congealed and turned
him into a criminal instead of a courageous fireman.
It was too much to think about. I went to the kitchen to put away my empty plate and wineglass, and dragged myself to bed. It was only eight-thirty, but my mind had gone
blank. I couldn’t think anymore about what had happened.
I woke with a start, chasing remnants of a dream that escaped before my eyes were open. My bedside clock said it was quarter to four, time to get up and do my thing. I
stretched and yawned, enjoying the rare feeling of being fully rested. Then I remembered why I’d gone to bed so early. Laura Halston had been murdered, and I had learned
things about her that I wished I didn’t know.
I swung my feet to the floor and realized I’d slept in my clothes. I usually shower first thing when I get home at night, but last night I’d slept in my hairy clothes. Yuk. With the
extra few minutes I had, I took a quick shower and shampooed my hair. Toweling my hair, I padded naked to my closet-office and pulled on underpants and shorts and a
lightweight long-sleeved knit shirt. I even wore a bra. Pets don’t care if your boobs bounce or sag or swing or just lie there, but with all the stuff going on, I thought I might have
to deal with men before the morning was over. Men are not as evolved as pets, they are easily distracted by loose bosoms.
I pulled my damp hair into a ponytail, used my remote to raise the hurricane shutters on my French doors, and went out to face the day. A couple of snowy egrets asleep on
my porch railing watched me warily as I walked by, but it was too early for them, so they didn’t fly away. The sea air smelled of salt and life, the sky was that peculiar creamy
pre-dawn color, and the sea glimmered silver white. Down on the beach, a few early gulls waded in the surf’s thin foam and searched for goodies. A pelican was asleep on the
hood of my Bronco, and a great blue heron dozed on Michael’s car. They both took off with a loud thrumming when I got in the Bronco. Maybe they knew what the morning
would bring.
25
Tom Hale’s condo was dark when I let myself in. Billy Elliot was waiting for me in the foyer and we kissed hello, with a lot of panting and tail wagging on his part. I snapped
his leash on his collar, and we trotted out with our knees pumping like majorettes rehearsing for a parade.
The lobby downstairs was empty, with that gloomy feel that a place gets when it’s used to lots of traffic and finds itself deserted. Billy Elliot’s toenails made skittering sounds
on the marble floor and his leash jingled merrily, sort of livening up the joint. We blew through the double doors and started our usual jog toward the big oval track made by the
parked cars in the front lot. Just as we got to the end of the walk and stepped onto the asphalt, a whale-shouldered man stepped from behind a tall stand of cascading
firecracker plants.
I jumped and gave a little whoop! that immediately changed to a friendly half-laugh, the way people do when they’ve been startled but they don’t want the startler to feel
guilty about scaring them half to death. In the next instant, my heart clattered because the man didn’t look friendly at all. In fact, he looked menacing. He also looked like one of
the mug shots Guidry had shown me—the one of Frederick Vaught, the elder-smothering nurse. If I’d had any doubts, they evaporated when he spoke.
“Dixie Hemingway, I presume. The ailurophile.”
I scrambled for the meaning of the word and, thanks to high school Latin, came up with cat lover. He had eyes like peeled grapes, and they were bulging down at me with
glistening venom.
“Because of you, I have been questioned about a crime for which I haven’t a scintilla of involvement. You have besmirched my reputation, ruined my good name.”
His breath made low nose-whistles like the distant cooing of mourning doves.
With an effort, I found my voice. “You were involved. You were at Laura’s house. You were stalking her.”
His smile couldn’t have been any more condescending if he’d been giving lessons.
“Oh, the pretensions of those who provide services to others. You know nothing of Laura’s life or of my involvement with her. You’re a pet sitter. You were not her friend.”
My face went hot with anger and embarrassment. Somehow the man had an oily ability to make me feel small and insignificant.
“You were in Ms. Grayberg’s room at the nursing unit too. I just want to know why—”
“One of the indices of an inferior intellect is the obsession with the why of things.”
My back teeth made grinding movements, as if they had their own obsession of what they’d like to do to this condescending prick.
He said, “Your kind maintains the illusion that life is sacred, that the mere fact of having a breathing body with a beating heart somehow confers the right to continue one’s
inane existence. That ridiculous worship of oxygenated flesh is an obsession to which I have never fallen prey.”
“So you killed Laura because you didn’t believe her life was important.”
“Why, Ms. Hemingway, you surprise me! You actually understood what I said. Nevertheless, I had nothing to do with Laura Halston’s murder, and if you continue to stalk
me I shall have you arrested.”
“Stalk you?” As the words came out of my mouth, I knew he could make a good case for me stalking him. I had asked questions about him at Bayfront and at the nursing
unit.
His gaze was diamond hard. “Please don’t make it necessary for me to speak to you again, Ms. Hemingway.”
With surprising agility for a man his size, he spun away from me and walked rapidly to a minivan that bore evidence of a multitude of minor scrapes and collisions. Either
Guidry had been wrong about his driving ability or he’d been reduced to driving an old clunker formerly owned by a mother who did lots of stop-and-go driving.
I pulled Billy Elliot onto the asphalt track and followed him as he did his morning gallop, but my mind was on Frederick Vaught. Something wasn’t right about that man,
something more than his obnoxious personality and his history of mistreating elderly patients. Whatever it was, it made my skin quiver.
After three mad laps around the track, Billy Elliot slowed to a pace that other dogs would consider a frenzied dash and allowed me to lead him back in the building. I was
wheezing and wondering if it’s possible for lungs to collapse from running with a speed-obsessed greyhound. Billy was prancing and happily swishing his tail.
Upstairs, lights were on in the kitchen and I could hear a coffeemaker gurgling. I didn’t hang around, though. If I had, I might have told Tom about Frederick Vaught
accosting me, and he might have felt guilty that he hadn’t been downstairs guarding me with big manly muscles. I gave Billy Elliot a quick hug and left him grinning to himself.
I wasn’t grinning. I was thinking about Frederick Vaught. I thought about him for the rest of the morning, trying to define what it was that made him so repulsive. I was at a
rabbit’s house vacuuming up pellets of bunny poop when I realized what it was.
His hands were too clean! With their long thin fingers, his hands looked as if they’d been boiled until all the color had leached out. His fingernails were too pale too, and too
well-defined, like an alien’s tentacles with little suckers on their tips. Ugh! The thought of being touched by those long bloodless fingers made my spine run cold.
It was near nine o’clock when I cleaned the last litter box of the morning, and I was seriously considering raiding client refrigerators. The tomato pie I’d had for dinner had
been too little and too early, and I needed food. But first I popped in the Kitty Haven for a quick hello to Leo.
Marge brought him from his private room and knelt with me to gentle him on the floor. He didn’t exactly seem overjoyed to see me, but he did rub his cheek against my hand
to mark it with his scent.
Marge said, “He’s such a sweetheart. What’s going to happen to him?”
I didn’t want to tell her that Laura’s sister didn’t want him. It made him seem like a reject, and I knew there were lots of people who’d love to have him. Besides, it seemed
rude to say it in front of Leo.
Instead, I said, “The owner’s sister is in town. She’s at the Ritz. It will all work out okay.”
Marge may have heard the evasiveness in my voice because she didn’t ask anything else. I spent a little more time petting Leo and then kissed the top of his head.
I murmured, “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you’re with somebody as sweet as you are.”
When I left the Kitty Haven, I was torn between rushing to walk Mazie and then having breakfast, or eating first and then going to see Mazie. When I’d had that decision the
day before, I’d ended up practically crawling from weakness by the time I got food. I knew Pete would have already fed Mazie and taken her outside to potty. He had
probably brushed her too, because he and Mazie had come to enjoy him doing that. The only reason for me to go there was to run with her. I decided I would break my own
rule and take time for breakfast before I went to Fish Hawk Lagoon, with no harm done.
Besides, I dreaded seeing Mazie’s sad face. I dreaded seeing Pete’s sad face too.
Before I went in the diner, I called Pete to tell him I’d be a little late. He sounded dispirited.
“I don’t think the drops are helping, Dixie. I don’t think they’re helping at all.”
I ended the call feeling as down as Pete sounded. Mazie’s depression was like an anvil sitting on all of us.
At the Village Diner, Tanisha waved at me as I headed toward the ladies’ room. I ducked into a stall and from the next door cubicle heard a woman with a voice like an ax
splitting wood.
She said, “I was married to a man who couldn’t get it up unless you twisted his nipples. He would have liked it if I’d attached snapping turtles to them. He left me for a
woman who was a snapping turtle, so I guess they’re happy together.”
Another woman laughed, and they both flushed and went to the sinks. When I joined them, they went silent and we avoided one another’s eyes in the mirror. I washed my
hands, checked to make sure I didn’t have cat hair on my shoulders, and left them to continue their observations about love. I swear, if men knew half the things women say
about them, they’d probably give up romance altogether.
Judy had already poured a mug of coffee for me, and by the time I was ready for a refill she brought my breakfast.
She said, “You okay?”
I thought, I’m not okay at all. A three-year-old child has just had brain surgery, and I don’t know if it was successful. His seizure-assistance dog is in deep depression, and I
can’t make her happier. A woman I liked a lot has been murdered and her face was mutilated, and the killer is still out there. The truth is I’m scared for myself and for you and
for every other woman.
I said, “I’m fine.”
She heard the dryness in my voice and did a double-take. But before she could say anything, Guidry slid into the seat opposite me.
He said, “I’ll have what she’s having, with a side of bacon, extra crisp.”
Judy said, “I’d better bring you a double. Dixie steals bacon, especially if it’s crisp.”
She gave me a quick look that said You’re gonna tell me all about this meeting when he leaves and swished away to get him a coffee mug, leaving us looking bare-eyed
at each other.
I said, “Guidry, do you have a first name?”
I hadn’t planned to say that, it just popped out, like an embarrassing belly button.
His eyes narrowed a bit, as if I’d asked him something too personal. “Most people just call me Guidry.”
“Your mother called you Guidry?”
His eyes softened. “My mother calls me Jean-Pierre.”
He pronounced the first name Zhahn, like an American drunk saying John, but when you hook that sound to Pierre, I knew he wasn’t speaking like an American.
“So you’re French, right?”
“Have you taken up journalism?”
“Why are you so secretive? Got skeletons in your family closet?”
Oh, God, why did I say that?
He gave me a long look, then firmed his jaw. “My father’s a lawyer in New Orleans, heads a big law firm there.”
“What about your mother?”
He smiled. “She’s always bringing home strangers who need help, feeding them, finding jobs for them, getting them whatever they need to get back on their feet. Used to
drive my father nuts, but since Katrina he’s been doing the same thing, giving his time to people who need legal help.”
Okay, so now I knew why he had a rich man’s aura. It was because he had grown up in a rich man’s house, with rich parents who had big hearts.
I said, “Did your father want you to be a lawyer too?”
He grinned. “Oh, yeah. And for a while I was. Went to law school, worked in his firm, tried to like it. But after a while we both knew I’d be a much better cop than I’d ever
be a lawyer.”
There it was again, that reminder that he was a cop, along with the uncomfortable comparison with lawyers. In spite of myself, I thought of Ethan Crane. Why couldn’t my
perverse body yearn to be close to an attorney instead of a cop?
Guidry said, “Dixie?”
I must have been staring over his shoulder for a while, seeing ghosts, remembering that cops get killed and leave you.
I said, “Do you know what piqueurism is?”
“Why?”
“I talked to Reba Chandler last night. She’s a psychology professor at New College. She mentioned the word. It seemed like something that fits with a scalpel stabbing.”
I buttered my biscuit and took a bite. Normal people probably wouldn’t have been able to eat while they talked about a woman being stabbed to death, but anybody who’s
been trained in law enforcement has learned to disconnect their stomachs from their hearts.
Guidry reached across the table and took a round of fried potato from my plate.
Ignoring my question, he said, “We talked to Gorgon. He owns the dealership where Laura Halston bought her Jaguar. He says she paid a hundred thousand plus change—
in cash. You have any idea where she got that kind of money?”
“She said she drove her Mercedes from Dallas and sold it in Arkansas.”
“Yeah, but that was a lie, since she didn’t live in Dallas and didn’t have a Mercedes.”
“What about Gorgon?”
“On the night Laura Halston was killed, Gorgon was with a woman in Naples. She backs up his story.”
Judy bustled back with Guidry’s plates—one with his eggs and fries, another with a double rasher of crisp bacon. She looked as if she wanted to say something but then
seemed to think better of it and left us.
Like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell, I automatically raised my head at the fragrance of fried hog fat. I am convinced that heaven is a place where crisp bacon is
served around the clock, anytime you want it, and that it won’t clog your arteries or go to your hips. I’ll bet angels sit around eating BLTs all day long. Probably with fries.
Gives me something to look forward to.
Guidry gave me a sympathetic look and moved a couple rigid strips to my plate. I didn’t offer any protest. After the last few days I’d had, I damn well deserved bacon.
We ate silently for a while, me taking mincing bites of my bacon to make it last longer, and Guidry chomping down half a slice at a bite. I watched him chew. His lower lip
had a teensy sheen of fat on it from the bacon. It occurred to me that I had never kissed a man who’d just taken a bite of bacon.
He said, “Tell me again how you came to overhear Martin Freuland threaten Laura Halston.”
The women in Guidry’s world probably never ate bacon. Probably didn’t eat any fat at all. Skinny anorexic bitches.
I said, “You know that little turtle I found?”
He shook his head, and it seemed to me that he wanted to roll his eyes.
“Well, I found this little box turtle, and I put her by a dock on Fish Hawk Lagoon. While I was there, Laura and that man came walking by on the jogging trail. I could see
them through the hedge, but they didn’t see me. The man was telling her that he’d see to it that she paid for what she’d done. He said it was the worst thing she’d ever pulled.
Then he said, ‘You owe me.’ She gave him the finger and walked off. He was furious. Got in his car and hauled off.”
He said, “You know what he was talking about?”
“At the time, I thought he was her husband and that he was talking about how she’d left him. Now that I know he was her boss, I have no idea. Her sister says she stole
from him.”
Judy skidded to a stop just then and refilled our cups. She looked at the bacon crumbs on my plate, pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything, and went off to
other customers.
Guidry said, “You talked to the sister?”
“She invited herself into the Richards’ house last night. She said some nasty things about Laura, what a liar she was, how she had always been a slut and always used men.
She also said their father had an incestuous relationship with Laura from the time she was about nine years old. She claims Laura seduced him, which proves Celeste has the
mind of a sewer rat. She also said somebody had told her that Laura was a narcissist. That’s really why I went to see Reba Chandler. I wasn’t sure what a narcissist was.”
His gray eyes studied me for a moment. “Are we still on for Saturday night?”
Surprised, I said, “Sure.”
“You get something different done to your hair?”
I touched it. “No.”
He grinned, as if he found me amusing. His fingertips beat a drumbeat on the table, and then he stood up and put money down. “See you later.”
I watched him go and tried to ignore the racket my pulse was making in my ears.
I could understand Guidry’s father wanting him to join his law firm, but Guidry was more cut out to investigate crime than handle legal affairs. Ethan Crane, on the other hand,
was great at legal problems but would probably suck at being a homicide investigator. I wondered if Guidry’s father was more like Ethan than like Guidry. I wondered if
Guidry’s father would like me, which was really stupid because I’d probably never even meet the man. I mean, why would I?
Judy was beside me almost before he’d got out the front door. “You and that hunky detective got something going?”
“He’s not hunky, and we don’t.”
“Honey, if he’s not hunky, I’m the Queen of Egypt. So what was he doing here?”
“Just wanted to ask me about a case he’s working on.”
“Runaway?”
“Maybe.”
“Poor kids, they don’t know what they’re getting into when they leave home.”
Judy walked away with her coffeepot, looking so sad that I wondered if she spoke from experience.
I slid out of the booth and headed for a post-coffee trip to the ladies’ room, where Tanisha was lathering her plump hands. I pulled out a brown paper towel from the
dispenser.
“Great breakfast, Tanisha. Thanks.”
Tanisha said, “I noticed you was with a man this morning. Nice-looking too. ’Course, how a man looks and how a man acts is two different things.”
She shook water from her fingertips, and I handed her the paper towel. She looked sternly at me while she dried her hands.
“You know how to tell what a man’s really like? You watch how he handles his package. If he’s always touching it, like he’s gotta make sure it’s still there since the last time
he checked, then you know he thinks he’s got God between his legs. He’ll expect you to get down on your knees to it too. If you don’t, hoo-ha, he’ll get all hurt like you took
the Lord’s name in vain. You don’t want a man like that.”
She tossed the wadded paper towel in the basket.
“You want a man that lets his stuff ride easy, acts like he cares more about your stuff than his own. ’Course he don’t, ’cause he’s a man, but at least he’s smart enough to act
like he does.” She looked intently at me. “I’m just telling you this ’cause I know you don’t have no mama. A girl’s gotta have somebody warn her about things like that.”
“I appreciate that, Tanisha.”
Her face creased in a deep dimpled smile. “That man you was with this morning, he’s got a big tidy package, but I never seen him touch it once. I was you, I’d keep him
around.”
Using her big behind to bump open the restroom door, she left me staring after her.
The whimper I made sounded a lot like Mazie’s sounds of stress.
26
Back in the Bronco, I sat a minute to get my act together, then pulled out my cell and made the call to Hal that I should have made a long time ago. Then I called Pete and
told him what I wanted him to do. When I put the phone back in my pocket, I felt as if a thousand-pound load had been lifted from my shoulders.
I was halfway to Fish Hawk Lagoon when I remembered that I hadn’t told Guidry about meeting Frederick Vaught.
At Mazie’s house, I parked in the driveway and looked toward Laura’s house. No cars were in her driveway, and I didn’t see any sign of Celeste. Maybe she had got on
her broom and returned to Dallas.
Before I went inside, I called Guidry on my cell. My fist did a victory pump in the air when I got his voice mail. I love voice mail. I didn’t want to talk to him, I just wanted to
give him information.
I said, “I forgot to tell you that Frederick Vaught accosted me this morning at the Sea Breeze. I came out to run with Billy Elliot, and Vaught popped out from behind a bush.
He played the big bad scary monster, told me to stop asking questions about him, said I’d besmirched his good name. Like he still has a good name. He didn’t threaten me or
anything, but I thought you should know.”
Having done my duty, I clicked off and slid out of the Bronco.
A dark sedan slowly passed in the street, the driver looking uncertainly toward Mazie’s house as if he didn’t recognize it. He may not have known for sure which house he
was looking for, but I knew for sure who he was—the big muscled man who wore power like a suit, the man I’d thought was Laura’s husband, the man I’d seen her with on
the jogging path. The man who may have killed her.
He pulled into Laura’s driveway, the car disappearing behind the trees, and I stood staring at the space he’d left. I thought about the locksmith’s truck that had been at the
house the night before. Ordinarily, if locks are changed following a crime, the new keys are immediately put into the hands of the home owner or a member of the owner’s
family. But Celeste had left while the locksmith’s truck had still been in the driveway the night before, and unless she’d returned she hadn’t got the keys.
Martin Freuland surely knew that Laura was dead. If Guidry hadn’t questioned him yet, he certainly knew he would be a logical suspect for her murder. So what was he
doing at Laura’s house? And what had the locksmith done with the new keys? I had an image of him calling Guidry or Celeste and saying, “I put the keys under a rock by the
front door,” or some such silliness.
I didn’t really believe he would do that, but on the other hand, Freuland hadn’t backed that sedan out of Laura’s driveway yet, so what was he doing? I imagined him
standing at Laura’s door, staring into the house through the glass panels. Celeste had told Guidry that Laura had tipped off the feds about his work for drug dealers. Guidry had
said he was under investigation and could end up spending twenty or thirty years in prison. Maybe Laura had records in her house that implicated him, and he wanted to
destroy them.
While I was wondering all that, my feet had gradually moved down Mazie’s driveway and turned onto the sidewalk, sort of ambling toward Laura’s house as if they didn’t
really have a destination. I told myself that it wasn’t any of my business. I told myself that Martin Freuland hadn’t been arrested for Laura’s murder, that he was a free man, and
that there was no law that said he couldn’t go to Laura’s door. But my feet kept moving, and when I got to Laura’s driveway I turned in and ambled past the empty sedan.
My Keds were careful not to make scuffing sounds, which might have seemed as if I were sneaking up on the man at the door, but it is simply the nature of Keds to do that.
Especially when they’re careful.
Martin Freuland was bent forward examining the pane of glass closest to the lock. The one that would, if it were knocked out, allow a person to stick a hand in and turn the
thumb switch that unlocked the door. Forget new keys, that door would be a snap to open.
I said, “You may not have noticed, but the door is locked.”
He jerked upright and spun to look at me, mouth open, eyes wide. He looked like a man who wasn’t accustomed to being surprised. He also looked desperate.
Rage began to climb me like a swarm of fire ants. I’d been deceived, tricked, conned, and manipulated. I’d had old murky fears and guilts raise their hoary heads and slash
at my sense of safety. I’d been accosted by a psycho nurse who smothered old ladies in their beds, and now I was confronting a corrupt bank president who might also be a
murderer. At the very least, he was obviously contemplating breaking into Laura’s house.
He walked toward me, his face not sure whether to try for appeasement or defiance. The first time I’d seen him, I’d seen him as a former football player turned orthopedic
surgeon. Even knowing he was really a bank president, the form still applied. As Laura had said, the man was big. He wore an expensive charcoal suit with a pale blue shirt
and dark tie, the threads of power in any profession.
He said, “You’re Ms. Hemingway. I’m told you were one of the last people to see Laura alive.”
“Who told you that?”
He made a vague gesture, erasing my question as if it weren’t important. “They say you’re taking care of her cat. I gave her that cat as a birthday present. I named him
Cohiba for the cigar.”
I squinted at him, wondering how he knew who I was.
I said, “I know. Laura told me.”
His face lit. “She spoke of me?”
“She said the man who’d given Leo to her had called him Cohiba.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Mr. Freuland, I hardly knew Laura.”
He looked slightly nonplussed when I spoke his name, then a flash of anger lit his eyes.
“She stole from me. Did she tell you that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She went in the vault and took it, brazen as always. Waited until the whole city was preoccupied with our George Washington celebration, and then made her move.” His
firm lips stretched a fraction in an aborted smile. “She was like that. It was one of the things that made her exciting.”
“George Washington?”
He scowled, as if my surprise was annoying.
“Laredo has a huge George Washington festival every year. It lasts a month, and half a million people come to it. Carnivals, parades, concerts, marathon runs, cook-offs, all
kinds of parties, brings in millions for local businesses. The big finale is the debutante ball on February twenty-second. Elaborate gowns that cost upwards of twenty thousand
dollars apiece, lots of spectacle.”
“What does that have to do with Laura?”
He looked surprised again. “Laura was like a big sister to the debs. She showed them how to walk, how to do makeup, hair, all that kind of thing. She’d been a model.”
I made a stirring motion with my hand, meaning Get on with it!
Doggedly, as if he had to tell the story in a particular order, he said, “Every year she’d bring her model’s bag to the bank on the morning of the twenty-second. Everybody
expected her to do that, she’d been doing it for years, had all the tricks of the trade in that bag. Then she’d leave and spend the day helping the girls.”
His jaw tightened, and for a minute he seemed loath to tell me the rest. “This year, she went in the vault and stuffed her model’s bag with money. Then she drove to her
sister’s house in Dallas. I reported her missing, but the police didn’t take me seriously. They thought she’d just left me. It took awhile to track her down.”
I said, “I don’t suppose you told them about the money.”
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “It was too complicated to explain.”
Some perverse part of me was glad she’d gone to Dallas. At least it made that part of her story true—the part about coming from Dallas. It wasn’t much, but it was a teeny
truth, and I was irrationally grateful for it.
With an effort, he got his face under control. “I didn’t kill her, Ms. Hemingway. I know I’m a prime suspect, but I didn’t do it. I was furious at her for stealing from me, but I
wouldn’t have hurt her.”
I remembered what Guidry had said and almost laughed at Freuland’s self-pity. The cash Laura stole might have been illegally deposited in his bank by drug dealers. Or it
might have been payoff money the drug dealers had given to Freuland as a commission for not reporting them. In either case, I wasn’t sure whether Laura had stolen from drug
dealers, the bank, or Freuland. Somehow stealing either drug trafficking money or money paid to a corrupt bank president didn’t seem as onerous as stealing money honestly
earned.
Freuland said, “I have to get that money back. I have to. If you know where it is, I’ll give you a handsome reward for taking me to it.”
My nostrils pinched inward and I took a step backward, the way you do when you’ve stumbled on something nasty.
I said, “I don’t know about any money, Mr. Freuland.”
I spun around so fast I almost tripped myself, and stalked away from him. As I walked, I pulled out my cell and punched in Guidry’s number again. My fingers didn’t even
need to think, they’d done this so many times.
This time he answered, with a curt, “Guidry here.”
I said, “Martin Freuland is at Laura’s house. He says she stole money from the bank vault and he has to get it back. He was examining the glass pane on her front door, and
I imagine he’ll be inside her house in about ten seconds. He offered to share the money with me if I told him where it was.”
Guidry actually chuckled. “People who take bribes expect other people to take them too. If she took money from the bank vault, it was probably his payoff money.”
“He wants it back.”
“I imagine he does. I’ll send somebody over there. By the way, the Autrey woman has officially named you the person responsible for her sister’s cat. Says you can do
whatever you want to with him.”
“Gee, the woman is all heart.”
“Will you take him?”
“I’m not a cat shelter, Guidry, but I’ll find a home for him.”
“Good. Ms. Autrey says she’s going back to Dallas late today.”
“So soon?”
“She’s already gone through her sister’s house and collected the valuables she wanted. I guess she doesn’t have any more reason to stay.”
“What about Laura? What about her sister’s body?”
“The ME won’t release it until the criminal investigation is completed. I assume Ms. Autrey will make arrangements with a funeral home before she leaves.”
That only meant Celeste would pay the cost of a cremation or a burial and then go home. There would be no memorial service or funeral for her sister, but since Laura had
only been in Sarasota a few weeks, maybe that was sensible. But if there were one, I would go, and Maurice and Ruby probably would go too. Also Gorgon, with his
diamond rings. Certainly Frederick Vaught would show up and be mournful. It would be a dismal service, but it seemed to me that Laura deserved something to mark the fact
that she had lived.
As I reached for the doorknob to go inside Mazie’s house, I realized that Celeste Autrey had to have been the person who’d talked about me to Freuland. She had
probably described me, perhaps described my vehicle as well, so that he immediately knew who I was. It seemed strange that Celeste would buddy up to Freuland since she
thought he’d killed her sister, but Celeste was cold enough to sleep on an ice mattress and think it was cozy.
Pete had left the front door unlocked again, but when I went in and saw his face, any lecture I might have given him evaporated. His eyebrows were nearly at his hairline, and
his expression was one I remembered Michael wearing as a teenager—defiant and determined and hopeful all at once. I guess men don’t ever lose those traits, even in their
eighties.
Mazie stood beside him, and it seemed to me that she had the same look. Per my instructions, she was wearing her blue Service Dog vest with its embroidered medical
caduceus symbol.
Pete said, “We should have done this sooner.”
I said, “We couldn’t do it before now. No hospital in the world will allow a dog in ICU, not even a service dog, so we had to wait until Jeffrey was in a room. Even then, we
had to have permission. From Hal and Gillis, from Jeffrey’s doctor, probably from the hospital.”
“You did all that?”
“I got Hal’s permission. He’s taking care of the rest of it.”
I wasn’t absolutely sure he could take care of the rest of it, but I was absolutely sure that somehow, some way, Pete and I were taking Mazie in to see Jeffrey.
Pete’s smile split his handsome face, and he actually gave a little hop of joy, like a boy. He said, “Then let’s go!”
He was practically out the door before he got the words out of his mouth, rushing to the Bronco and getting Mazie secured in a travel crate in the back. We made sure she
had water in her bowl, put down rolled towels to protect her from sliding in the crate, and got ourselves in the front.
I took one last look toward Laura’s driveway as we backed out, but I couldn’t see through the trees. If Martin was still there, I hoped the sheriff’s deputies came in time to
catch him.
27
As I got in the driver’s seat, Pete scurried to the passenger side. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I go to the hospital all the time and do clowning skits for the kids. They all know me
there. We won’t have any problem.”
“Uh-huh.”
St. Petersburg is about an hour from Sarasota via I-75 north, then over to I-275 and the Skyway Bridge. Before we got to the I-75 on-ramp, Pete said, “Do you mind if I
get something to eat? I was too worried to eat before.”
I swung into a drive-through lane at McDonald’s and waited while he studied the menu.
He said, “I’ll have a Quarter Pounder with cheese and fries. And a large Coke. And a pie thing. Apple.”
Happiness always perks up my appetite too. I decided to get one of the apple pie things.
I only ate when we were stopped at traffic lights, but the apple pie was gone by the time we hit the interstate. Pete was almost as fast with his burger and fries. After we had
done our boa constrictor acts, we rode along in thoughtful silence.
On that stretch of highway, more than half the vehicles were trucks—semis, panels, pickups, or big trucks with hoists and cranes or some other special equipment.
Southwest Florida has been under constant construction ever since the new kind of retirees came—no longer in mobile homes but with wads of money from the dot-com boom
or hefty executive payouts from bankrupt companies. New highways have been laid, new buildings erected, old buildings remodeled, all work done by men who drive trucks.
As we met them, passed them, and were passed by them, my mind went off on a little naughty thought trip about those truck drivers. It’s what minds do when they’re not
strictly disciplined. Especially female minds. I mean, let’s face it, construction workers, pool men, landscapers, all those outdoor guys have incredibly firm butts that you don’t
see on other men. They also have pelvises that move when they walk. Men who sit at desks all day have flat butts and walk just by bending their knees—their hips don’t move
at all. It makes a woman imagine the difference in their respective lovemaking abilities, and the truck drivers come off best.
I mused on those high-minded thoughts all the way to the exit to I-275. Then, as we headed toward the Skyway Bridge, my mind drifted to the memory of Ethan Crane’s
butt, which was fantastic. Better than Guidry’s, to tell the truth, and Ethan sat at a desk all day.
While my mind was wandering down that guilty little avenue, Pete’s had different priorities. To get my attention, he made a big to-do of wadding up his pie sleeve and
stowing it neatly in the McDonald’s bag with his used napkins and empty Coke cup.
He said, “That detective came back again. He asked if I was sure it was Tuesday morning I saw that lady crossing the street, and not the day before. I’ve already told him it
probably wasn’t Laura after all, and now he wants to know when I saw some completely other lady. Dumb shit must think I’m too old to know what day it is.”
“That’s odd.”
“Nah, lots of people think you lose your marbles once you pass about ten years older than they are. If they’re sixty, they think seventy is old. If they’re seventy, they think
eighty is old. Personally, I know people in their thirties that are older than me.”
“It’s odd that Guidry questioned you about when you saw some other woman crossing the street.”
We rode along for a while and I said, “You’re positive it wasn’t Laura?”
“I wasn’t up close, if that’s what you mean. I thought it was her, but I guess it wasn’t.”
“Did she see you?”
“She didn’t wave if she did. It was so early, she probably didn’t think anybody else was out.”
The first time I’d met Laura, she’d gone running after nine o’clock. I’d got the impression that she always ran around that time, but I could have been wrong. Lots of runners
get up as early as I do and get their exercising done before the sun is up.
After we passed through the tollbooths on the way to St. Petersburg, Pete’s brow furrowed and his eyebrows began to climb even higher, and I knew the reality of what we
were doing had hit him the same way it did me. We both knew there was no absolute guarantee that Hal had been able to get all the necessary permissions for Mazie to go to
Jeffrey’s hospital room. Jeffrey was a child. He had just had brain surgery. Mazie was a dog. Some people would think her presence in his room so soon after surgery could be
a health risk.
Besides that apprehension, I had other reasons to be tense, reasons that increased the closer we got to the golden girders of the Skyway Bridge. It’s silly, I know, but I
don’t like leaving solid ground. I especially don’t like the gigantic roller-coaster feel of the Skyway. By the time we got there and the Bronco’s nose began to point toward the
sky, I gripped the wheel with both hands. Call it phobia, call it my need to control, but if that sucker collapsed, cars would drop like boulders.
Once we left the Skyway behind and my breath was even, I began watching for the exit that would take us to I-175. Pete watched too, his eyebrows waggling like writhing
caterpillars. We found I-175, and after a while took the Sixth Street South exit. The closer we got to the hospital, the higher and twitchier Pete’s eyebrows got.
He contained himself until we were turning into the hospital parking lot.
He said, “You didn’t really get permission, did you?”
I looked at him the way a mouse coming out of its hole would look at a watching cat.
“Hal promised to clear it with the doctor and the hospital.”
Pete said, “I’m like that too. I always operate on the theory that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
I said, “I could go in first and talk to the charge nurse.”
“I’m afraid they’ll say no, Dixie.”
“I didn’t mean I’d ask if we could bring Mazie in. I’ll just talk. You know, as in distract-her-attention-from-the-man-going-down-the-hall-with-a-dog.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
I wasn’t sure if it was good or not. But right or wrong, that seemed to be what we were doing.
Pete directed me to a side lot near an unmarked entrance. “This is the wing where Jeffrey’s room is. He’s on the fifth floor. There’s an elevator near the side door that’s not
as busy as the main one. I’ve seen people taking therapy dogs up that elevator. I don’t think anybody will stop Mazie.”
Okay, that sounded good. At least for a moment. Therapy dogs and service dogs go into hospitals all the time, and Mazie was a service dog. But therapy dogs go in with
therapists who have been vetted and authorized by the hospital, and service dogs go in as authorized companions of a person visiting a patient. Mazie was a service dog, but
she was a companion to Jeffrey, not Pete. The bald truth was that Mazie was going in the hospital simply as a four-legged visitor to see a patient. If the hospital rules didn’t
allow dogs to visit patients, we were sunk.
I said, “Give me time to go around to the front entrance before you go in.”
I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea, but it seemed necessary at the time. It must have sounded good to Pete too, because he looked at his watch the way bank
robbers coordinate time before they make a big heist.
I parked and nipped around the lot to the front entrance where streams of somber-looking people were leaving and arriving. Inside the lobby, I realized I hadn’t asked Hal
or Pete for Jeffrey’s room number. Feeling as if somebody at the other end of a surveillance camera was probably watching me and calling security, I stopped at a welcome
desk.
A grandmotherly volunteer checked Jeffrey’s name on her computer. “He’s in the Neurology Center on the fifth floor. Room five-sixteen.”
I followed arrows to a hall to the Neurology Center, then joined a gaggle of people waiting for an elevator. My palms were sweaty. As the elevator descended, red numbers
above the door told us what floor it was on—now seven, now six, now five—moving, moving, moving. We stared up at the numbers as if our lives depended on knowing
when it would get to one. When the number two flashed, we all tensed like cattle about to stampede.
Inside the elevator, I tried not to think about why the other people were there. Children shouldn’t get sick. Childhood should be a golden time of laughter and play, it should
not include pain and weakness.
At the fifth floor, I left the elevator and walked briskly down a long hall toward a nurse’s station. The sound of crying babies and toddlers floated on the air, and several
nurses wearing bunny-printed smocks hurried past me, their rubber-soled shoes not making a sound. From one of the rooms, a woman in a dark leather recliner lifted a hand to
wave at me as I passed. A hospital crib was hidden behind a drawn curtain, and I got the feeling the woman had been keeping lonely vigil for a long time.
More bunny-printed smocks were at the nurse’s station, every person serious and intent. It looked as if five or six corridors met at the station, and from their vantage point,
they could see down every one to the elevator at the end. More than likely, some of their computer monitors showed every person who got off those elevators. They were
people who saved kids’ lives, good people who shouldn’t be tricked.
A man with calm eyes and a metal patient record tucked under his arm watched me approach the stand. I figured he could see right through my skin into my brain.
I said, “Look, here’s the thing. I’m here to see Jeffrey Richards, and my friend is coming up the elevator in a minute with Jeffrey’s seizure-assistance dog. Her name is Mazie,
and she hasn’t left Jeffrey’s side since they’ve been together. Jeffrey had surgery three days ago, and he and Mazie miss each other desperately. So we brought Mazie to see
him.” For emphasis, I said, “She’s his best friend!”
He looked over my shoulder and smiled. “Would that man be your friend?”
I turned to see Pete and Mazie coming toward us. Pete seemed to be pretending to be blind. Even Mazie seemed in on the act, walking in front of him as if she were leading.
“That’s Pete Madeira and Mazie. Pete’s a clown.”
“Come on, I’ll take you to Jeffrey’s room.”
I motioned to Pete, whose strained face broke into a smile when he realized we seemed to have permission. We followed the man down the hall to a closed door. With a
light tap, the man pushed the door open, and we all filed in.
Standing beside Jeffrey’s bedside, Gillis looked frazzled and exhausted, but ten years younger than she had four days ago. Knowing Jeffrey had come through the surgery
and was back to consciousness must have been a tonic for her. When she saw us, she blinked in momentary surprise, then gave a choked sob. Hal wasn’t there. He must not
have told Gillis that we were coming.
With his head swathed in thick bandages and his tiny body in a miniature hospital gown, Jeffrey looked like a pale alien child. The top sheet on his bed had been folded
down, so his little bare legs stuck out from his hospital gown. I had a quick flash memory of Christy’s lifeless body and jerked my mind away.
Hal had told me that Jeffrey slept a lot, and he was asleep now, but frowning and fretful.
Mazie broke free of Pete’s hold and in one bound was on the bed beside Jeffrey. Gillis put out a protective hand, but she needn’t have worried. Mazie stepped with
exquisite care to look down into Jeffrey’s slack face. Then, turning cautiously, she stretched out on the bed close to Jeffrey’s legs.
Jeffrey smiled, and as one person we all exhaled the breaths we’d been holding. Jeffrey’s eyes were still closed, but he no longer frowned or whimpered. The man with the
patient record under his arm stepped forward and touched fingers to one of Jeffrey’s wrists. He had a kind face.
To Mazie, he said, “Good job, Mazie.”
Gillis said, “Dixie and Pete, this is Dr. Travis, Jeffrey’s surgeon. But I guess you know that since you got permission from him to bring Mazie in.”
Pete and I avoided each other’s eyes.
Dr. Travis grinned. “Hal talked to me. Maybe it would be better if you wait in the visitors’ lounge and let Mazie and Jeffrey be alone for a while.”
By alone, he meant with Gillis, who could not have been dislodged from Jeffrey’s side with a crowbar. Pete and I trailed out into the hall and found the visitors’ lounge,
where we each took one of the leather recliners lined up along the wall and stared straight ahead. Pete’s eyes were blood-rimmed, and my own felt as if the inside of my lids
had been scraped with emery boards.
Guilt was once again wrapping its slimy body around my neck. I had been so preoccupied with Laura’s murder that I’d failed to pay attention to my job. Even if nobody else
had thought of it, I should have known to bring Mazie to see Jeffrey the minute he’d been put in a floor bed. I was a pet sitter, not a detective, and I should have put all my
energy into making sure Mazie’s needs were being met instead of running around asking questions that were Guidry’s job.
Pete said, “Ever since I met that kid, I’ve been afraid something would go wrong with his surgery. I wish I hadn’t done that. All that fear probably made Mazie afraid.”
I guess guilt always tries to come along for the ride with everybody.
I said, “Mazie would have been worried and stressed no matter what you were thinking.”
I remembered Pete telling me once that his own daughter had died. I didn’t know how old she’d been, but the loss of a child at any age is devastating, and I felt a new
kinship to him. Every parent who’s ever lost a child has a link of sadness that nobody else can ever understand.
The room was quiet, the only sounds a distant ping of elevator doors and the hushed voice of a woman speaking on the hospital’s PA system.
I leaned my head against the recliner and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, Hal Richards was kneeling beside me and saying my name.
Like Gillis, he looked haggard with fatigue, but younger. “Thank you for bringing Mazie. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you came. Gillis and I are taking turns sleeping, and I
was at the hotel. It was a brilliant idea to bring Mazie, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
Pete said, “Mazie needed to see her boy. She didn’t know what had happened to him.”
Hal nodded somberly. “Jeffrey needed Mazie too.”
I looked at my watch and saw that two hours had passed since we’d left Mazie in Jeffrey’s room.
I said, “We should go now.”
With creaking sounds from the chair and his knees, Pete got to his feet and headed toward Jeffrey’s room. I followed, with Hal walking beside me. Pete opened the door
and we all stopped to look at Mazie and Jeffrey. He was sleeping soundly, and she had moved so she covered both his legs like a blanket. When she saw us, she lifted her
head as if she knew her time with Jeffrey had ended.
Hal said, “Hi, girl.”
Mazie’s tail wagged, and Hal went over to stroke her head. Meeting his wife’s eyes over Mazie’s head, Hal said, “Pete and Dixie are going to take Mazie home now.”
Pete said, “If it’s okay, I could bring her back tomorrow.”
Gillis gave him a radiant smile. “That would be great, Pete.”
Hal lifted Mazie and set her on the floor. Pete took her leash, and we all said awkward goodbyes. Silently, Pete and I went down the hall with Mazie walking between us. At
the elevator, Mazie whined and strained against the leash when Pete led her inside.
He said, “She wants to stay here.”
As the elevator descended, Pete and I met each other’s eyes. Something about this visit hadn’t gone right, and we both knew it.
We made it all the way to the parking lot before Mazie jerked away and tore back to the hospital.
28
Streaking to the side door where we’d come out, Mazie ran full out and determined. She had her mind set on going back to Jeffrey, and she wasn’t waiting for any human to
go with her. Pete and I ran to catch up. At the door, we met Hal.
He said, “Jeffrey’s crying again. Worse than before.”
Pete and I met each other’s eyes, both of us afraid the seizures had returned.
At Jeffrey’s floor, Mazie scrambled forward the minute the elevator doors opened, moving ahead so strongly that Hal had to run while he vainly tried to slow her to a walk.
Jeffrey’s door was open, and we could hear him crying before we got there. It was the same droning sound I’d heard him make before, the same sound Mazie was
accustomed to hearing when he was on the verge of a seizure. Jeffrey’s legs were kicking, and his face was grimly twisted like an old man’s. Dr. Travis was beside the bed,
and the room seemed to contain a lot of other people wearing bunny smocks and anxious looks.
Mazie jerked away from Hal and leaped onto Jeffrey’s bed and settled her body against his side. Abruptly, the crying stopped, Jeffrey’s legs went still, his eyes closed and
his face became calm. Everybody in the room smiled.
The only one who didn’t seem happy was Mazie. Pulling herself up on her elbows, she cocked her head and stared into Jeffrey’s passive face with an odd fierceness.
A couple of nurses whispered to each other that she was checking him out to make sure he was okay, but I didn’t think so. Something else was going on in Mazie’s mind,
but I wasn’t sure what it was. Hal and Gillis exchanged a look, and I knew they also thought Mazie had some perceptive knowledge the rest of us didn’t have. Whatever was
causing Mazie’s determined study, it gave her the invigilating look of a scientist inspecting a new find.
My own body hairs suddenly stood upright with a realization. Seizure-alert dogs recognize a change in body odor that presages a seizure, but maybe people with seizure
disorders always have a unique odor that only dogs can detect. If that were true, and if surgery had removed the cause of Jeffrey’s seizures, there would have been a subtle
change in his normal odor. To Mazie, that would be extremely puzzling because it would mean Jeffrey was no longer the same Jeffrey she knew.
As if she had come to a firm conclusion, Mazie got to her feet and stood on the bed with her legs braced beside Jeffrey’s feet. Lowering her head, she put her nose to his
toes and licked them.
Jerking his feet away, Jeffrey’s eyes flew open and he giggled. “Stop it, Mazie!”
Beside the bed, Gillis covered her face with both hands and sobbed quietly. Hal moved to put an arm around her shoulders, his own eyes wet. They didn’t need to say that
they’d had secret fears that Jeffrey would never laugh in his old way again. It had taken Mazie to harmonize the Jeffrey who’d had seizures with the Jeffrey who didn’t.
With an ear-to-ear grin, Dr. Travis said, “I think Mazie should stay here with Jeffrey.”
I felt like telling him that it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out. Instead, I almost gave myself whiplash from nodding.
Leaning to give Gillis a quick kiss, Hal said, “I’ll just walk to the elevator with Pete and Dixie.”
In the hall, Pete put a fatherly arm around Hal’s shoulders. “The boy’s going to be fine, just fine.”
I managed to make some squeaky sounds of agreement, but I was afraid I’d blubber if I tried to talk.
By the time we’d got to the elevator, we’d decided that Pete and I would go to a pet supply store, get the things Mazie would need, and bring them back to the hospital
before we headed back to Siesta Key. For the rest of Jeffrey’s hospital stay, Mazie would spend part of her time in the hospital room and part of her time in the hotel with Hal
or Gillis. When it was time for Jeffrey to come home, either Pete or I would go back and help transport Mazie.
Pete and I sort of floated out to the parking lot, grinning like idiots and wishing somebody would ask us why just so we could tell them that Jeffrey was okay.
I used my cell phone’s convenient locator service to find a pet supply store, and we were walking its aisles within fifteen minutes. We got a water bowl, a food bowl, a bag
of kibble, some doggie treats, and a sleeping cushion. As we went down the aisle toward the checkout counter, we passed the store’s cat-food section, and I noticed a box of
cat food like the one Laura had set out on her counter as a reminder. Something about that box of cat food set off little clanging bells in my head, but I didn’t know why.
The checker totaled up our purchases with a cheerful pinging sound, and I paid her and pocketed the receipt. Pete picked up the bags and we headed for the parking lot and
the Bronco. At the hospital, I waited in the parking lot while Pete hustled in the doggie supplies to Hal. When he came out, he was almost bouncing.
“Jeffrey’s sitting up. Not in a chair, but they’ve got his bed cranked up and he’s talking. Mazie is lying next to him, and he’s got a grip on her like he’s afraid she’ll leave him.
The doctor says he’ll send him some real food pretty soon. All he’s had so far is clear soup and Jell-O. They always give you Jell-O. The Jell-O company must make a mint off
hospitals.”
I laughed. Pete laughed. We would have laughed at the Jell-O itself if we’d seen it. We were high on sheer happiness. We didn’t look ahead. All that mattered was that
Jeffrey was alive and alert and that he was going to eat real food. Life is really very simple when you narrow it down to the things that really matter. I was so elated that I forgot
to be nervous when we went over the Skyway Bridge.
After we’d passed the tollbooths, Pete turned in his seat and faced me.
“I’m not going to work for you anymore, Dixie. I can’t take another case like this one.”
I couldn’t blame him. He’d expected a calm week or two, and he’d had emotional chaos.
I said, “I’m sorry it’s been so trying.” “I’ve been thinking about that cat. What’s going to happen to him?”
“Celeste has given me authority to find a home for him. She’s going back to Dallas and she doesn’t want him.”
“Could I take him? I think we’d get along just fine.”
I smiled to myself. Pete would probably play saxophone for him.
In the interest of full disclosure, I said, “He has a long tail that he leaves in doorways. You’d have to be careful that he didn’t trip you.”
“Honey, I’ve worked with circus monkeys that had tails so long they could wrap them around your waist. They were always leaving their tails looped around too, that’s just
their sense of humor. That’s not a problem for me.”
“Then you’ve got yourself a Havana Brown named Leo. As soon as you’re ready for him, I’ll bring him to you.”
“Do you think it would be okay if I changed his name? I worked with a guy named Leo one time, and he was a bad apple.”
I laughed. “A lot of cats start out with one name and end up with another. Leo’s first name was Cohiba.”
“Well, that’s dumb. I was thinking more of Percy. Like P-U-R-R-C. I always kind of wanted a cat named Purr-C, spell it like that.”
We didn’t talk much after that, both of us caught in our own thoughts.
Back on Siesta Key, I drove to Mazie’s house to drop Pete off so he could clean the house, wash his sheets, and generally erase all signs that he’d been there. Home
owners are glad to have somebody watching things when they’re gone, but they don’t want reminders of you when they return.
I was tired and sticky and unshowered, and my eyes felt like boiled tomatoes. I was also hungry. Nevertheless, it was time for my afternoon rounds.
Before Pete got out of the Bronco, he said, “Do you think you could get that cat today?”
I stared at him. “Today?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking, that cat hates being cooped up, that’s why he runs away so much. So he must really hate being in a cat hotel, all squeezed in a tiny little room. If I
were him, I’d want to get out of that hotel and move to a new house.”
Pete lives in an old Florida cracker house tucked away on one of Siesta Key’s tree-lined streets. It has a front porch where a tranquil cat could sit and watch the world go
by, and a quiet garden where a contented cat could have fun chasing butterflies and birds. Leo had been neither tranquil nor contented at Laura’s house, but now that I knew
more about the fireworks that had been going off inside her mind, I had a feeling he might have a personality change when he was with Pete.
I said, “When I’ve finished with my last call, I’ll go to the Kitty Haven and get Leo and bring him here.”
“Purr-C, not Leo.”
He looked toward Laura’s driveway and frowned. “Who’s that next door?”
I looked too and did a silent groan. The locksmith’s truck was at the curb, and Celeste’s rented Camry was in the driveway.
I said, “That’s the car Celeste drove.”
We both stared at the Camry.
Pete said, “Maybe now’s the time to ask her about me taking the cat.”
“We don’t need her permission for you to take Leo. She’s given me authority to find a home for him. It’s none of her business who gives him that home.”
Pete lifted one of his woolly eyebrows at my snarkiness. “Whatever you think.”
I sighed. “I just don’t want to talk to the woman.”
“Don’t blame you, but maybe she’s not such a pain in the patootie when things are going okay. It must have been a terrible thing for her to have to identify her sister’s body.”
I knew he was right. Of all people, I should have been more sympathetic to Celeste Autrey. I had been the one who had gone apeshit in front of a bank of cameras at Todd
and Christy’s funeral, and I had been the one who had been fueled by consuming rage for a long time after their deaths. I hadn’t been such a sweet person either, and I didn’t
have any business being so judgmental about Celeste’s attitude.
I said, “I’ll talk to her, but I’m not going to mention who’s taking Leo.”
Pete patted my shoulder. “You’re a good girl, Dixie.”
As he walked to the house he gave me a backward jaunty wave, and for a minute I wasn’t seeing his tall elegant frame but Laura’s body, flipping Martin a backward finger
as she left him. Martin had said he’d been furious at Laura, but that he wouldn’t have hurt her. But from what I’d seen of Martin Freuland, he would say anything that served
his purposes and do anything he thought he could get away with.