His blue forehead furrowed suspiciously. “Why?”
“Gilda says Ziggy is in it.”
Laboriously, he did a U-turn and headed back toward the kitchen. I gave one last look at Gilda, who appeared to be deep in thought, and followed him. Seen from the back, Kurtz presented a different persona—partly because his shoulders were surprisingly broad for such an emaciated man and partly because I could make out the outline of a small handgun nestled in a holster above his buttocks under his plaid bathrobe. It looked an awful lot like the kind of backup that every law enforcement officer carries somewhere on his person.
As I followed his agonized shuffle through the kitchen and dining room, I went over all the possible reasons that a man who had a private guard outside his house would also wear a gun inside. It could have been because he was crazy paranoid—a definite possibility—or it could have been because whoever killed the guard had intended to kill Ken Kurtz, and Kurtz knew it. Something strange was definitely going on in this house, and whatever it was had to do with the reason somebody had called me about the iguana.
We turned the corner into the living room, the west wing of the house, where the fire in the humongous fireplace was still blazing away. This part of the house seemed to be the only place without a glass wall looking out at the courtyard. Instead, glass walls flanked the double front doors and looked out at the palm privacy hedge. Kurtz hobbled past the fireplace and I trailed behind, walking so slowly to match his pace that it made me feel off-balance. The fireplace must have had a fan arrangement to blow heated air into the room, because I felt a welcome warmth on my legs as I heel-toed past it. Even Kurtz seemed to relax a bit when he felt it, if you can call easing one arm down to his side relaxed. The arm had been doubled in front of him before, crossed over his stomach as if he needed it to hold his skin down.
At the far end of the living room, the southern end, we came to a closed door. Kurtz took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door while I calculated that it led to a windowless room behind the row of garages. Kurtz pulled the door open, revealing a dark, cavernous space. He fumbled for a moment for a light switch, but when he found it the room wasn’t much brighter than before. What light there was came from a red bulb like a photographer’s darkroom illumination. In its eerie light, towering shelves leaped into view, all lined up like library stacks, each stack full of dark bottles that gave off odd purplish glints. The walls were lined with shelves of wine too. Overall, I estimated the room at about ten feet deep and twenty feet long—approximately a third the size of my apartment.
In my supermarket, wines are set upright with stickers on the fronts of the shelves to let me know which ones are on sale for less than ten dollars—my favorite vintage. Kurtz’s wines were laid so their necks pointed down at an angle, and I was pretty sure the price of one bottle would be fifty times what I paid for mine.
I said, “What’s the temperature in there?”
“Fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit.”
Huh. Only a scientist or an intellectual show-off would have tacked on that “Fahrenheit,” and Kurtz didn’t strike me as a show-off.
“Can you turn on a brighter light?”
“Bright light isn’t good for the wine.”
Okay, maybe he was an intellectual show-off after all.
I said, “You don’t need to go in. I’ll find him.”
Kurtz looked slightly relieved. He probably hadn’t been looking forward to shuffling around between those stacks of wine bottles. I stepped into the room and stood a minute to get my bearings. The room wasn’t frigid, but I wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time in it. To an iguana, it would feel even colder. I turned to the right and moved along the outside wall, peering down each aisle between rows of shelves for the outline of a giant lizard. At the far end, I circled to the other side and walked straight along the long corridor to the stacks on the left side of the door. I found Ziggy with his head butted against the back wall and his long tail stretched out along the back corridor. He was immobile, with all his systems on hold. Poor guy didn’t even know where he was. Iguanas locate themselves in space not by the view through their regular eyes but by light entering a parietal eye at the base of their skull. That “third eye” sloughs off like a contact lens when they shed their skins. In the dull red light of the wine room, Ziggy’s navigational parietal eye was rendered useless.
I said, “Hey, boy. You okay?”
It was a dumb question. Ziggy didn’t know I was there and didn’t care. More than likely, Ziggy didn’t know anything right then. He was totally tuned out, not just to what was going on outside himself but to what was going on inside too. If it hadn’t been for his sides moving in and out with each breath, I would have thought he was dead. Even so, he was still capable of instinctive response, and I knew from painful experience that picking up an iguana so that he doesn’t feel securely supported is a good way to make him panic and lash you with his powerful tail. Which won’t kill you, but it hurts like hell. I knelt by his side and slid one arm under his neck to get a good grip on his front leg and the other arm under his back end to grip his back leg. When I lifted him off the floor, I pulled him snug so he was not only supported on my arms but close against my body. Then I sidestepped down the outside corridor until I came to the aisle leading to the door.
Kurtz was still in the doorway, one hand leaning against the doorjamb as if he might collapse any minute. The sleeve of his bathrobe had fallen away to expose a gauze dressing on the inside of his elbow, like the dressing that covers an indwelling catheter for receiving medication or blood transfusions. Gilda might be a flake, but she apparently was a competent nurse.
When he saw me, he straightened up in a way that made me think of a military man snapping to attention. No doubt about it, Kurtz was either an ex-cop or an ex-serviceman of some sort. But what kind of cop or serviceman retires with enough money for Kurtz’s lifestyle?
When I sidled through the door, Kurtz looked down at Ziggy’s cold-darkened body and a flicker of something like anguish moved across his face. My mind flashed to the way my grandfather had cried when our pet iguana died. I’d always thought it was because he’d been grieved to lose Bobby, but now I realized he’d wept because he was disappointed in himself for not protecting Bobby from the cold. We humans who take on the care of pets are really setting tests for ourselves of how responsible and caring we can be. If we fail our pets, we fail the test.
I said, “He’s black because he’s cold. When he warms up, his normal color will come back.”
Kurtz made a rasping noise intended for a laugh. “Wish I could say the same for myself.”
With Ziggy’s side hard against my waist, I headed for the living room and the warmth of the fireplace. A basket filled with fireplace logs and kindling was at one side of the hearth, and a neat stack of large floor pillows sat at the other end. They invited people to sit on the floor and gaze into the fire and have a glass of wine, but I doubted that anybody in this house had ever sat on one. I kicked at the stack until I had enough pillows in front of the fire to make a soft bed for Ziggy, then gently lowered him and stretched his long tail out behind him. His eyelids were closed. He didn’t move. If somebody who didn’t know better had seen him, they would have thought he was a stone carving.
Kurtz had made it to the fire by this time. I heard him shuffle up and stop, but I didn’t look at him. I was busy watching Ziggy.
Kurtz said, “I think those pillows are made from antique Persian rugs.”
“Good, then they’re probably not synthetic. I don’t like synthetics around my pets.”
“What did you say your name was?”
I looked at him then. “It’s Dixie Hemingway.”
“Any relation to—?”
“No, and I don’t have any of his six-toed cats, either.”
“I guess you get asked that a lot.”
A form walked past the glass window, and I took a deep breath. I knew that form. Lieutenant Guidry had arrived and was a
bout to ring the doorbell. Like a dog salivating to the ringing of a bell, various parts of my anatomy began to do all kinds of things, some of which are illegal in Republican states.
I had fairly recently come to realize that I had the hots for Guidry, and it scared me to death. I didn’t want to want a man, and certainly not another deputy. Todd had been the love of my life, and when he died I had laid away all thoughts of romance or love or sex or any of those things that most thirty-two-year-old women have at the forefront of their minds. But my body was telling me it had an entirely different agenda. My mind could make whatever plans suited its ideals, but my body wasn’t going along.
I said, “You might want to get rid of that gun before you talk to the homicide detective.”
May God strike me dead, I don’t know what possessed me to say that. Maybe it was a way to deny to myself that I was excited at seeing Guidry. Maybe it was because Kurtz had looked sad when he saw Ziggy’s dark color. Maybe it was the fact that the man was so ugly he would scare little children, and probably crazy to boot. I’ve always been a pushover for the underdog, and Ken Kurtz had way too many strikes against him for his own good. Whatever it was, I suddenly wanted to protect him the same way I wanted to protect Ziggy.
FIVE
The bell rang, and I moved to open the door.
As usual, instead of looking like the typical style-challenged cop, Guidry looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of GQ. He wore dark gray slacks most likely made from tender wool taken from some as yet undiscovered animal in the Andes, a black turtleneck, and a brown leather bomber jacket that had apparently been beaten into submission.
Guidry is fortyish, a head taller than me, with shortcropped dark hair showing a little silver at the temples. He has a beaky nose and calm gray eyes, and every cell in my body did a shivery little shimmy the minute I looked into those eyes. It was damned annoying, so I scowled at him.
“Good morning, Lieutenant.”
“Some reason why you’re answering the door at this house?”
I found that unnecessarily snippy, since I was sure Sergeant Owens had told him I was there and why. But before I could tell him so, Kurtz spoke from behind me.
“It’s a courtesy Miss Hemingway is showing me, Lieutenant. It’s difficult for me to move, and she was saving me some steps.” He looked toward the kitchen wing and added, “Especially since my nurse seems to have stopped working.”
If Guidry was shocked at what he saw, his eyes remained impassive as he took in Kurtz’s blue color, the jerking whirlpools under his skin, his pain-racked face and emaciated frame in the red plaid bathrobe.
He said, “Mr. Kurtz, do you mind if I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Actually, I mind a great deal. I am in considerable pain and should be in bed. However, I am aware that a crime has been committed on my property, and I realize you have questions to ask, so come in, Lieutenant. Let’s just get it over with as quickly as possible.”
Guidry nodded and crossed to where Kurtz was still standing in front of the fireplace. Guidry’s eyes swept the room, taking in the gigantic fireplace and its leaping flames, the closed door to the wine room, and then coming to rest on Ziggy. Ziggy remained stretched across the floor pillows on the hearth, dull and immobile as a rock.
Some people think iguanas are things of nightmares, but I think they’re beautiful. Basically, they’re big cold-blooded lizards with long banded tails, four legs, and clawed feet. They can run fast as a cat, and since their outer toes are made for gripping things, they can zip up a tree trunk in no time. Males have thin strips like Velcro on their inner thighs for sticking to a female when mating, which probably accounts for both sexes’ lipless mouths lifting at the corners in perpetual smiles. Unless they want to smell something, they generally keep their mouths closed. Their olfactory centers are in the roof of their mouths, so if they’re curious about how food or a threat smells, they stick out their tongues and touch it. Their tongues aren’t forked like a snake’s, but they have two sensory channels on their undersides that serve the same purpose—they feed back information about which way to go to be safer, warmer, or fed.
I especially like iguanas’ dewlaps and back crests. The dewlaps hang from their necks, and if they’re excited or scared they can puff them up so they look twice as big and threatening, which I think would come in really handy for humans. The dorsal crests are just cool—pointed dragonlike spikes running down their backbones. Who wouldn’t like to have that?
Head to tail tip, Ziggy was about five feet long. On his best day, he would be a clear Granny Smith color, with creamy dorsal spikes and underbelly. But this definitely wasn’t his best day. Instead of being green, he was dull and dark, almost black, and his eyes were hidden behind closed lids. He looked so unhandsome that I bristled in advance at the insulting things Guidry might say about him.
Guidry leaned to get a closer look. “Is he okay?”
I said, “Not really. He was left in a cold wine room and got chilled.”
He turned to Kurtz. “Why was your iguana put in a cold room?”
Kurtz looked surprised. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. I didn’t put him there. My nurse may be able to tell you how he got there, since she knew about it.”
“Who lives here, besides you?”
“My nurse has a room here. Nobody else.”
“Your nurse is here now?”
“She’s in her room. I expect she’s upset about the guard being killed. I think they were good friends.”
Guidry cut his eyes toward me, and I felt my face go hot. Yep, I had blown it by telling Kurtz there had been a murder. That should have come from Guidry, so he could see how Kurtz and the nurse reacted to the news. I had made it possible for them to concoct a story and rehearse it in their minds before time to tell it.
Guidry said, “Maybe the nurse put the iguana in the cold room?”
Kurtz said, “Lieutenant, I appreciate your concern about my iguana’s well-being, but I fail to see what that has to do with a murder investigation.”
Guidry gave him a level look. “I’d appreciate a look at the wine room.”
Kurtz gave a suppressed snort of disgust, turned his back, and hobbled across the living room to the wine room door. The outline of a gun was no longer visible under his bathrobe, and I felt myself blush again. It had been stupid and wrong to warn him to get rid of the gun, and I still didn’t know why I’d done it. I also didn’t know where he’d stashed it.
Again, he took out a key and opened the door. Guidry ambled across the tile and stood in the doorway looking in.
Turning to me, he said, “Did you go in there?”
I nodded, already knowing where he was headed.
“Did you cover much of the room?”
“I walked around the perimeter, starting at the right side. I didn’t go down any of the aisles except the one in front of the door.”
“Uh-hunh. And you carried the iguana out?”
“Yes, and his tail was dragging.”
Kurtz seemed to understand for the first time what was going on. “You’re talking about footprints, right? Ms. Hemingway may have disturbed footprints?”
“And the iguana’s tail,” said Guidry. “Don’t forget the dragging tail.”
I said, “Oh, please!” and then saw Guidry’s quick warning look that said, Just once, Dixie, try to keep your mouth shut.
He had some reason for wanting Kurtz to think I’d obliterated footprints in the wine room. It was possible I had, but ceramic tile isn’t likely to yield good prints unless there was mud or blood on the shoes. Besides, it was more likely that whoever had put Ziggy in the room had simply deposited him inside the doorway. But since I’d blown it by blabbing about the dead guard, not to mention warning Kurtz to get rid of the gun, I figured I owed Guidry a bit of silence, so I went back to the hearth and stood next to Ziggy.
“Where did your guard come from?”
“I believe he was a Mexican national.”
<
br /> “I mean what agency supplied him.”
“He was an independent.”
“You hired him personally?”
“No, my nurse hired him.”
“She vet him first?”
“I suppose. I haven’t been able to attend to those kinds of details for a while.”
Guidry said, “Did the guard spend time inside the house?”
Kurtz hesitated for just a fraction of a second too long. “Not to my knowledge, Lieutenant.”
“But he may have come inside without your knowledge?”
“Sometimes I don’t come out of my room for days at a time. On those occasions, I am not aware of anything in the rest of the house.”
“You said your nurse was a good friend of the guard’s?”
“I believe she was, yes.”
“Any particular reason why you think that?”
Kurtz raised a hand to his face as if he hoped to calm the contracting areas under his skin. “It was just a general impression I had.”
“Do you think they were friends before your nurse hired him?”
“No.”
“The wine, is it drinking wine or investment wine?”
“Both.”
Trust Guidry to think of wine as an investment. He was so secretive that I hadn’t yet got the full story on him, but no man dresses like Guidry or handles himself like Guidry unless he’s got a pedigree a mile long. About the only thing I knew about him was that he came from New Orleans and wasn’t Italian. Also, he had called me a liar one time in French. That wasn’t a lot to go on, and I didn’t care anyway because it was none of my business, but he probably grew up in a mansion with well-stocked wine cellars and trusted old servants who lugged the stuff up the stairs and opened it. He probably wouldn’t be caught dead drinking the supermarket stuff I bought.
He said, “Anything valuable enough for somebody to kill to get to it?”
“What a man will kill for, Lieutenant, is highly subjective, but I have a couple of cases of 1998 Pétrus that sells for about fourteen-fifty a bottle. I suppose a collector might murderously covet it. I also have a case of 1997 Romanée-Conti, somewhere over fifteen hundred a bottle, and quite a lot of Château Latour, some 1990, some 1993, some 1994. The Latour is cheaper, about seven or eight hundred a bottle.”
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Page 4
