Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

by Blaize Clement

  Back at Kurtz’s bedside, I opened my mouth to tell him I was on my way to get Ziggy and put him in the sauna. But the words that came out weren’t what I had intended to say.

  I said, “Who is that woman, Mr. Kurtz?”

  He opened his eyes and looked up at me. “Gilda? She’s my nurse.”

  “I mean the woman in the photograph.”

  “I believe you’re here to take care of my iguana, Ms. Hemingway, not to pry into my personal life.”

  Every intelligent cell in my body was jumping up and down and yelling, Let it go! Don’t say anything else!

  I said, “She stopped me this morning. I think she wanted to make sure I was coming here.”

  The shock on his face was almost too painful to see. “You must be mistaken. It couldn’t have been her.”

  “She had a miniature bulldog with her, and she said the dog’s name was Ziggy.”

  For an instant, a look of wild joy flared in his eyes and just as quickly died.

  “Sheer coincidence. You met somebody who resembled my old friend in the photo, and she had a pet also named Ziggy. That’s all.”

  “Your old friend, does she have a name? In case she stops me again?”

  He shot me a look that held poisoned arrows. “I’m warning you, Ms. Hemingway, drop it now.”

  I left him and headed toward the living room, taking the southern corridor so I wouldn’t have to talk to Guidry again in the kitchen. My head was whirling, and I felt almost faint. Only pure idiocy could have moved me to ask Kurtz about the woman. Or insanity. Or both. It was entirely possible that I had gone completely round the bend. It was not only entirely possible, it seemed to be a proven fact. I had to get Ziggy safely stored in the sauna and get the hell out of this house before I did something even loonier than the things I’d already done.

  SEVEN

  Ziggy was still sluggish enough to spare me any tailwhipping resistance when I pulled him close again and carried him to Ken Kurtz’s gym. Kurtz didn’t even open his eyes when I sidled through his bedroom. I laid Ziggy on the floor of the spa, made sure the heat was set just warm enough for comfort but not warm enough to burn, and left him there. He looked a damn sight better than Kurtz. Lying back against his black satin pillows, Kurtz looked more comatose than asleep when I left his room.

  I took the southern corridor back to the living room and slipped out the front door without telling anybody goodbye. I wanted to leave Ken Kurtz’s house and never come back, but there was a good possibility Ziggy hadn’t eaten in at least three days, and I hadn’t seen anything that remotely resembled vegetables and fruit for him. Even though I’d been tricked into taking the job, I felt responsible for Ziggy. That meant getting him food.

  Glumly, I clumped down the driveway past the crime scene investigators. I knew without having been there what they’d been doing. They had taken all their measurements and all their photographs. They had gone over every inch of the guardhouse and its surround for fibers, stray hairs, or latent prints, any minutiae that might point them toward the killer. They had slipped the corpse into a body bag and zipped it shut, and the body had been taken to the Medical Examiner’s pathology lab for autopsy. Now technicians were widening their search, walking in slow circles around the grounds, looking for a weapon, shell casings, bullets, footprints—anything they could use to solve the crime.

  Like them, I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me. I was minding my own business. This murder investigation had nothing to do with me, and as soon as I got food for Ziggy I was out of there.

  On the way to the Crescent Beach Market, I met several cars with big red velvet Christmas bows attached to their hoods. On every street, Christmas stuff had suddenly appeared all over the place. Wreaths on doors, red velvet ribbons tied to outside security lights, baskets of poinsettias at every doorway. It was as if people had looked at the calendar and panicked when they saw we were only twelve days away from Christmas. Either all the Jews and Buddhists and agnostics and atheists on the key had converted, or there was a cosmic conspiracy to make me look Christmas square in the face.

  Even in the best of circumstances, Christmas on Siesta Key has a surreal quality. We know from TV shows what a real Christmas is like. That’s when families gather in the big house where they grew up, where their dying or divorced-but-friendly parents have festooned everything in sight with swags of fir, and where everybody ends up outside in the snow whooping like kids and rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas. We can never have that. On Siesta Key, our fir swags are fake, our snowmen are Styrofoam, and the closest we can come to a snowball fight is to kick sand at one another.

  To children, of course, Christmas is Christmas no matter where it happens, and that was really what was causing my heart to ache. It would be the fourth Christmas since Christy had been killed. She had been three when she died, old enough to be thrilled with writing letters to Santa and sharing Christmas secrets and going shopping for presents for the people she loved. Every Christmas since she died has been a day of pain for me. For that matter, so has Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and Thanksgiving and Easter. All those holidays bring memories of Todd and Christy, and there have been times when I thought my heart would burst from them.

  The best holiday is New Year’s because it isn’t imbued with images of children and loving families like all the others. Anybody can participate in New Year’s. Old people who haven’t seen their ungrateful progeny in years can still raise a glass to toast a new beginning. Single rejects who haven’t had a date in decades can still see another year of possibilities opening like a portal to a deodorant ad of fields of flowers while they run in slow motion into the arms of a new beloved.

  On all the other holidays, I stay to myself and dull the memories of Todd and Christy by thinking of new ways to groom belligerent cats or fresh approaches to flea dips. But on New Year’s Day I live it up. I drink champagne and eat black-eyed peas and watch big men on TV chase a football and knock each other down. And at the end of the day, I look in the mirror and say, “Good girl, Dixie, you made it through another year. Now do it again.”

  But first I had to get through Christmas.

  Outside the market, a Salvation Army Santa was ringing a bell with cheerful deliberation and calling out “God bless you” to people tossing coins in his pot. I didn’t exactly say “Bah, humbug,” when I passed, but that was how I felt.

  Inside, “Jingle Bells” was playing. I tried to ignore the music while I filled a basket with kale, turnip greens, bok choy, escarole, collard greens, romaine, parsley, and yellow squash. As I hotfooted it to the TEN ITEMS OR LESS line, the music changed to “Here Comes Santa Claus.” If I had to listen to that all day long, I’d be a blithering idiot.

  Ahead of me, a white-haired woman was telling the checker that she and her husband had started the trip from Oregon to Sarasota this season via a cross-Canadian train ride.

  She said, “It was my first train trip,” and in an instant I was six years old and holding my mother’s hand while we edged our way down a train car. Michael was behind me with his eight-year-old face set in stern, disapproving lines. It had been the Christmas season then, too. Our mother had wakened us early, with an exuberant giddiness that meant she’d already been drinking, and told us we were going on a trip. An adventure, she called it, but we both knew she was really taking us away from our father. The adventure came after she sobered up and found herself stranded in a little town in Georgia with two hungry kids and not even enough change in her purse to call home. It had been Michael who took control. He had marched up to a Salvation Army Santa at the train station and said, “My little sister and I need help. Our mother is sick and we have to take her home.”

  I think that was the moment our mother became afraid of Michael’s strength and capability. It was also the moment when I knew I could always depend on him.

  I hadn’t thought about that train trip in ages, or about my mother. Just the possibility that I might be shirkin
g responsibility like she’d always done was enough to jerk me to attention. As the checkout line moved forward, I stacked Ziggy’s veggies on the conveyor and resolved to do what I had to do and not whine.

  On the way out, I folded a five-dollar bill and put it in the Salvation Army Santa’s pot. Not that I’d suddenly come down with the Christmas spirit, it was just the memory of that first Salvation Army Santa and how kind he had been. Maybe my five dollars would help some other stranded kids get home.

  It was nearing noon and I’d been up since four o’clock without caffeine or food. Not having Ziggy’s ability to store fat under my dewlap when food was scarce, I made a detour to the village and went into Anna’s Deli, where the woman at the counter had hair almost as red and carelessly abundant as Gilda’s.

  I said, “I need a surfer sandwich bad.”

  Even as I spoke, part of my mind considered the odds of running across two women with messy red hair in one morning. I even considered the possibility that the entire morning was a dream, and that red-haired women were in it to symbolize something I needed to remember.

  The woman must have sensed that I was spacing out because she barked out my order to the sandwich maker like a drill sergeant.

  I said, “I need coffee, too.”

  “Sure you do,” she said, in the tone one uses with a two-year-old about to have a tantrum or with a mental patient off her medication.

  I wondered if my eyes were as big and white and staring as they felt.

  While the sandwich person laid thin slices of ham, turkey, Swiss, and cucumber on thick marble bread, I thought of Ken Kurtz lying on his black satin sheets. He hadn’t had breakfast either. For all I knew, he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  The sandwich maker piled onion, lettuce, and tomato on my surfer, and topped the whole thing with Anna’s special sauce. As she sliced it in half, I held out my empty coffee cup.

  “Give me a refill, please, and another surfer. Also another coffee, large. And some pickles and chips, two of each. Oh, and give me four cups of chicken soup, too. And a couple of brownies.”

  Straight-faced, the woman said, “No salad?”

  “Oh, yeah. One tuna and one garden. Ranch dressing.”

  With bags of veggies for Ziggy in the backseat and deli bags from Anna’s in the front, I tore off for Kurtz’s house, where a Contamination Sheet had been posted on the front door while I was gone. Technically speaking, a Contamination Sheet is only posted at a crime scene, and in this case the crime scene was solely the guardhouse. The presence of the sheet meant the nurse’s disappearance had extended the range of investigation.

  Through the window, I could see Guidry in the living room talking to some crime-scene techs. Looking at him gave me a fizzy feeling like my blood had turned to 7-Up. I signed in, noted the time, and opened the front door without ringing the bell. When I came in, Guidry looked up and I frowned at him.

  I said, “I’m going back to feed the iguana.”

  He nodded, already bored with anything having to do with my pet-sitting duties, and I nipped down the southern corridor to the east wing and Ken Kurtz’s room.

  Propped on those black satin pillows, his blue skin gave him the look of a two-day decomposed corpse. Only the furrows of pain on his face and the neural chaos under his skin showed that he was alive. He was the most alone-looking human being I’d ever seen in my life.

  I said, “I’ve brought food for Ziggy,” and hurried through the bathroom to the gym.

  Wide awake and bright green now, Ziggy looked like a not-so-miniature dragon. Even the spikes down his spine seemed to stand taller now that he was warm. When he saw me, he puffed out his dewlap to its fullest extent and bobbed his head at me. Iguanas bob their heads just when they see something unfamiliar, but if I hadn’t known that he would have looked menacing.

  I said, “Wow, I’ll bet you scare the hell out of a lot of people.”

  I quickly knelt and put squash and romaine leaves in front of him, then nipped out so he could eat without the strain of trying to look dangerous.

  Ken Kurtz was actually the scary, intimidating one, even though he still lay like a man half dead on his black satin bed.

  Without any preamble, I set the bags of food on his bed and plopped myself down beside them.

  “I brought you some food.”

  He opened his eyes and watched me haul out containers.

  “I don’t eat normal food. The nurse—”

  “The nurse has flown the coop, and nobody else gives a hoot whether you eat or not. Since you won’t let Lieutenant Guidry call anybody, I’m your last hope.”

  He groaned. I didn’t blame him. I’d hate to think I was my own last hope.

  I took the lid off the container of soup and moved it around in the air to waft the scent to him. “It’s not like you don’t have choices. There’s a sandwich, with which you get chips and a pickle. There’s tuna salad. There’s a garden salad. And if all that’s too solid for you, there’s chicken soup.”

  I made a lap tray out of a magazine, and put half a sandwich and a cup of soup on it. It seemed to me that his eyes got a little brighter, but maybe I was projecting.

  I said, “There’s coffee too, and brownies.”

  “I don’t drink coffee. The caffeine mixes with the toxins in my body.”

  “And does what?”

  He took a moment to consider. “I don’t know what the fuck it does, it’s just what the nurse always says.”

  “Uh-hunh. So do you want it with cream and sugar?”

  He managed a weak smile. “Black’s fine.”

  He took a tentative bite of his sandwich, then leaned his head back against the pillows as if the effort had cost him.

  I said, “Who do you think telephoned me and told me to come here?”

  He leaned forward to sip chicken broth directly from the cup. “I don’t know who called you, Ms. Heming-way.”

  “Dixie. Call me Dixie.”

  He took another sip of soup and gazed at me. I had the strange feeling that he was waiting for me to ask a different question, and that if I asked the right one, he would answer it. It was senseless to probe for any answer at all, since every bit of information drew me deeper into a situation I didn’t intend to be in.

  It seems to me there are two kinds of people in the world, those with little endurance for the inevitable pain in life and those who dig in their toes and survive, no matter what. In my darkest moments, even when I think there’s nothing to live for and no reason to go on, I remain a survivor. I could see the same hard determination in Kurtz’s agony-darkened eyes. I couldn’t even imagine the hell he’d gone through to cause him to end up as this pitiable figure who would frighten the toughest street thug, but whatever it was hadn’t made him stop struggling to live.

  I said, “I heard you tell Lieutenant Guidry that Gilda came from New York, but she didn’t seem American to me.”

  His mouth quirked in wry amusement. “She claims her original home was one of the spice islands—the Bandas—and that may be true. With her coloring she might have Dutch or Spanish ancestors who went there to buy cloves and nutmeg. Nevertheless, she’s an American citizen, and she’d been living in New York when she came to work for me.”

  He sounded derisive, as if claiming to be from a spice island was a far-fetched idea, but I could easily imagine Gilda among nutmeg trees or bushes or vines or whatever nutmeg grows on. She would look a lot more natural in a sarong than in surgical scrubs, and I found it a bit suspicious that Kurtz downplayed her exotic beauty as if he hadn’t noticed it. I knew the man was sick, but only a dead man would be that oblivious.

  I said, “The woman I met this morning had something to do with all this, didn’t she?”

  Lord help me, I couldn’t seem to stop with the questions.

  The smile left his eyes.

  “Ms. Hemingway, you are far too nosy for your own good.”

  Squeakily, I said, “You can call me Dixie. I’m not formal. And I know she’s the woman
in the photo.”

  “The woman in the photo died two years ago.”

  “Then I met her twin this morning.”

  “They say we all have an identical twin somewhere in the world. If that’s so, I pity the poor bastard who’s my double.”

  A little stab at humor, I suppose, to get me off the subject of the woman.

  “You lied to Lieutenant Guidry about the guard coming in the house. You also lied when you said nobody but you knew about the wine room.”

  “And have you told Lieutenant Guidry that I lied?”

  I felt my face flame, and I took a drink of coffee. “Not yet.”

  “You won’t tell him.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “You won’t tell him I lied, and you won’t tell him that you warned me to get rid of my gun. And do you know why?”

  Trapped, I stared at him while my heart hammered against my ribs. This man had a strange effect on me that I couldn’t explain.

  Kurtz said, “You won’t tell because you’re like me, not like him.”

  I swallowed the last bite of sandwich and crumpled the paper it had been wrapped in.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you act on instinct, not on intellect, and your instinct tells you to keep quiet about my lies.”

  “My instinct also tells me you may be lying about a lot of things. Somebody chose me to come here, so I have a right to ask questions.”

  “The less you know, Dixie, the safer you’ll be.”

  I didn’t like the way this conversation was going, mainly because it made way too much sense. I stood up and gathered up the uneaten half of his sandwich and the unopened containers. “I’ll put this stuff in the refrigerator so you can have it later.”

  “I appreciate your thinking of me, Dixie.”