“Look, you have to have somebody here. Ziggy has to be fed, you have to be fed. You have to let somebody come in and help you.”
“I was hoping that would be you.”
“I’m a pet sitter, not a nurse.”
“I’m more animal than human, so you’re highly appropriate. All the iguana and I need is a bit of food once a day. You could do that for us, couldn’t you? Just for a few days? Until Gilda returns?”
“What makes you think Gilda will come back?”
“Oh, she’ll be back. And soon. I’m sure of that.”
Now here’s the thing about being a little bit off-center—you’re never sure if you’re a bona fide loon or if you have insight that other people don’t have. You have to navigate through life using a kind of psychic gyroscope to keep from falling too far one way or another, and you feel a peculiar kinship with other people who are also a little bit off-center. Ken Kurtz was right. In some fundamental way, he and I were alike.
I said, “I’ll give you a few days, but if Gilda’s not back by the end of the week, you’ll have to make other arrangements.”
He made a sound halfway between a bitter laugh and a growl. “I wish it were that simple, Dixie.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that. The house and the man were making me claustrophobic. I practically ran to the kitchen to stash Ziggy’s veggies and Ken Kurtz’s leftover food in the empty refrigerator. I had already crammed it on the shelves when it occurred to me that Guidry might have wanted the refrigerator to remain as Gilda had left it.
I could hear him in Gilda’s room talking to some crime-scene people. No doubt about it, he was treating Gilda’s disappearance as an important part of the murder investigation. I closed the refrigerator door and hurried to the living room and out the front door, pausing just long enough to log the time on the Contamination Sheet. Within seconds, I was in the Bronco and on my way home.
I didn’t know whether I was shivering from the cool air or from the sure and certain knowledge that I was too involved in something bizarre and dangerous.
EIGHT
Michael and I learned that our mother had left us for good when we came home from school one day and found our grandparents sitting side by side on the living room sofa. Something about their stiff postures alerted both of us that something had happened in the mysterious world of grown-ups. My grandmother was the one who told us. She just came right out with it, as if she had to say it fast and get it over with.
“Your mother has run off with a man she’s been seeing. He doesn’t want any children, and she wants him.”
My grandfather frowned and said, “I don’t think that’s necessary, Christina.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “They need to know the truth of it.” She turned to us and said, “We’ve already packed your things. You’re going to live with us now, and I’m glad.”
The thing was that when my mother had been there, she was really there, so her absence was all the more glaring. With hindsight, I decided she had probably always wanted to leave but she had waited until after our father died, putting out a fire to save somebody else’s children. My mother never forgave him for dying. Perhaps she had never forgiven him for being a fireman.
At any rate, our grandparents took Michael and me in and finished doing what their daughter wasn’t willing or capable of doing herself. Like the rhythm of the sea, they never changed, and in their frame house overlooking the Gulf I felt I’d come to a place of stability and safety. When they moved on to wherever we go when we die, they left the beachside property to Michael and me. Michael and Paco moved into the house, and after Todd and Christy were killed I moved into the apartment over the carport, where the sound of the surf anchored me.
Driving home from the Kurtz house, I decided not to tell Michael and Paco about the morning’s bizarre events. They worried too much about me as it was, and Michael was still touchy about the man I’d killed. I guess no matter how old Michael and I get, he’ll always feel it’s his job to protect me. When he can’t, he feels guilty, and when he feels guilty he gets grumpy.
Turning off Midnight Pass Road, I eased down our twisting lane. As usual, flocks of wild parakeets blossomed from the mossy oaks, pines, and sea grape as I passed, circled overhead in a kind of mock frenzy, then zoomed back to their perches as if they’d had a wild moment of excitement they’d never had before. Parakeets are such drama queens.
When I nosed the Bronco under the carport, I mentally groaned when I saw Michael in front of the shelves of a storage closet. He was meticulously rearranging tools and all the little jars of nails and touch-up paint that men collect. There’s something about laying things out so they all face the same way or lining them up in alphabetical order that makes super-organized people feel better. Not being a particularly organized person, I’ve never arranged stuff like that in my life, but I still find things when I need them. Usually.
I slid out of the Bronco and said, “What’re you doing?”
He held up a jar of fish hooks. “Just sorting things.”
“Uh-hunh. Michael, how long’s it been since you used one of Granddad’s old hooks?”
“You never know when you might need something like that. You hungry?”
“I had a sandwich a little while ago.”
“You look funny. You looked funny when you were here before, too. What’s wrong?”
“It’s cold. I hate cold. I’m going to go take a hot shower.”
I left him staring after me and hurried upstairs, raising the metal security shutters with my remote as I went.
Michael yelled, “I have chili on the stove when you get hungry.”
I waved and smiled and opened the French doors. I kept the smile on my face all the way down the hall to the bathroom, as if Michael could see through walls. In the bathroom, I let the water turn steamy while I stepped out of my clothes, and then stood for a long time under water I was pretty sure was hot enough to kill germs. I even used germicidal soap. I didn’t know what was wrong with Ken Kurtz, but I knew enough biology to know his weird whirlpooling skin pointed to something systemic and neural. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it.
When I felt sufficiently decontaminated, I came out all red and hot, wrapped myself in a thick terry robe, and fell into bed and immediate dark sleep. I woke feeling a surprising clarity, as if the shock of the morning had put everything else into better perspective.
I mentally reviewed everything that had happened from the moment the phone call came from the man who claimed to be Ken Kurtz. I tried to recapture the timbre of the man’s voice, the rhythm of his words, the Irish accent with its lulling calmness that had made me trust what he said. At the time, I’d thought we had a bad connection, but now I wondered if the fuzzy sound had been because the man had been speaking through layers of fabric that made the voice less distinct.
For the first time, I wondered how he had got my number. Other than a small display ad in the monthly West Coast Woman, I don’t do any advertising. Half the time, I even forget to carry business cards. My business comes mostly from referrals, people I know well. And yet somebody had rejected all the pet sitters listed in the Yellow Pages and called me. Why?
With the question came the immediate answer. My name had been in the news just a few months ago when I’d killed that man, along with the information that I was a professional pet sitter. Somebody could have made note of the name and looked me up in the phone book. Maybe they’d thought I was a tough cookie, a former deputy who was a crack shot, a hard woman who didn’t flinch at killing and who therefore wouldn’t be sickened by Ken Kurtz.
If that were true, the person who called may have hoped I would do exactly what I’d done—feed the man as well as the iguana. Which would imply that he knew Gilda wouldn’t be around. Which all came back to the guard being killed and to Gilda freaking out when she learned he was dead, and to her running away with the iodine-smelling packages in the refrigerator, whatever the hell they were.
I got
up, collected the clothes I’d thrown on the bathroom floor, and rifled the pockets of my jeans before I tossed them in the clothes hamper. The key ring from Ken Kurtz’s back door made a hard little thunk when I shook it into my hand. Damn, I’d forgotten to give it to him. Unless he had a spare, that meant nobody could get out the exit door from the inside. I went in the living room where I’d tossed my shoulder bag and dropped the keys in the bag. I would return them the next time I was at Kurtz’s house.
Then I went to my office-closet, where the answering machine was blinking its little red eye. The readout said I’d had four calls. As I hit PLAY to listen to the messages, I shed my terry robe and reached for a pair of clean jeans. A fuzzy Irish voice from the answering machine made me freeze with the jeans dangling from my hand.
“Good afternoon, Dixie. I’m dreadful sorry that I lied to you, but it was the only way. And now I must ask you to do something else, something very important. Please write this down and repeat it to Ken Kurtz exactly as I give it to you: Ziggy is no longer an option. You must act now.”
I stood statue-still and stared at the machine, gripped by a strange malaise that made me unable to turn off the voice, either on the tape or in my head. It was the same man who had originally called claiming to be Kurtz.
I hit the REPEAT button. The voice said the same thing the second time, and the third and fourth. I replayed it at least a dozen times. I even wrote down every word. Then I played the other three messages while I pulled on jeans, a black T, and clean white Keds. I was stuffing the message in my pocket when I saw my forgotten underwear in the chair at the desk. Damn. Going braless is fine, I do that a lot. But wearing jeans without underwear is like sitting naked on the beach. Both take a certain masochism that I haven’t yet developed, so I took an extra two minutes to get some satin between my crotch and the denim inseam.
I would deliver the message, and then I was going to insist that Kurtz find another pet sitter to feed Ziggy. I was through with both man and beast.
As I grabbed my shoulder bag from the living room sofa, I stopped short. It was two o’clock, and I didn’t have to start my afternoon rounds for another hour. Why was I rushing? Why was I feeling an urgent need to get to Ken Kurtz and deliver the message? Why was I letting myself be used again by an unknown Irishman? Boy, talk about masochism! An inseam in the crotch is nothing compared to letting yourself be manipulated twice in twenty-four hours by a faceless voice.
I pulled out the message I’d written and read it again. Then I did what I should have done all along—I dialed Guidry’s cell phone. I had called that number so many times in my last involvement with murder that I knew it by heart. He didn’t answer, so I left a curt message.
“I have something to tell you about the guard’s murder. Please call me ASAP.”
I stuffed the note back in my pocket and went out the French doors and down the stairs to the carport. The sky was a clear expanse of blue now, all the clouds pushed away by a steady western breeze from the Gulf. A pelican stood on the shore congratulating himself on the catch in his pouch. A squadron of seagulls were flying straight into the wind like kamikaze pilots, then banking sharply and flying back to shore, arguing about who had flown the fastest before they headed out into the wind again.
I pulled the Bronco out and drove slowly down the lane so as not to alarm the parakeets, then turned north at Midnight Pass Road. I needed to talk to somebody smarter than me. That included most everybody in the world, but my actual possibilities were limited. I couldn’t talk to Michael because he would freak out. I couldn’t talk to Paco because that would put him in a position of keeping a secret from Michael, and he wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t talk to Tom Hale because he was too involved with his new girlfriend to have any energy left over for me or my problems. Cora Mathers was the only person I knew who was wise enough to give me good advice but not so emotionally close that talking to me would cause her problems.
Cora was the grandmother of a cat owner who’d got herself murdered on my watch, and Cora had sort of become a stand-in grandmother for me. She lived in the Bayfront Village, an exclusive gulfside retirement condo. Her granddaughter had plunked down an obscene amount of ill-gotten money so Cora could live in a large condo on the sixth floor where she had a view of the Gulf and the evening sunsets, but I suspected that Cora would have been just as happy in her old double-wide.
At the Bayfront Village, sliding glass doors breathed open for me, and the concierge waved to me from her desk. Chirpy as a spring robin, she trilled, “I saw you outside. I’ve already called Miz Mathers, and she said for you to go on up.”
I mouthed, “Thanks,” and threaded my way through gray-haired men and women milling around in the lobby. Some of them were smartly stepping along with tennis rackets or shopping bags in their hands, and some were stopping to take in all the Christmas and Hanukkah decorations.
A gentleman wearing bedroom slippers and cradling a teacup-sized white poodle in his arms got on the elevator with me. All the way to his floor, he talked to the poodle.
“You remember Elmer had one of those things, don’t you? He seemed to like it well enough, but I never thought it was completely safe. If there had been a power failure, Elmer could have been trapped there in that house, stuck halfway up the stairs. I’m glad we don’t have one of those, aren’t you?”
The poodle listened intently, his round black eyes fixed on the man’s face and shining with adoration. At the fifth floor, the doors opened and the man shuffled through, still talking.
“Elmer was always stubborn. He was a stubborn boy and a stubborn man. Not curious about anything, either. Not like you and me.”
The doors closed, and I was left alone to be glad I had never known Elmer.
When I got off at the sixth floor, I saw Cora down the hall waiting for me in front of her door. Just the sight of her made me feel better, maybe because Cora reminds me a little bit of my own grandmother. From the top of her downy white hair to the soles of her little feet, Cora isn’t quite five feet tall, and she weighs less than a hundred pounds. She moves in little jerky motions because her joints aren’t what they used to be, but she’s plenty active inside her head.
She hollered, “You must have smelled my chocolate bread! I just took it out of the oven.”
That made me feel better too, because Cora’s chocolate bread is Webster’s second definition of decadent. She makes it with an old bread machine her granddaughter gave her, and she won’t say what her secret is, but the result is dark and moist, with spots of yummy melted chocolate. Since I love chocolate second only to crisp fried bacon, the devil could leave a trail of it and I’d probably eat my way straight to hell.
I gave Cora a big hug, careful not to squeeze too hard and break her, and followed her half steps into her apartment. A jaunty red-berry wreath was on her front door, a sprig of mistletoe hung from the ceiling in the foyer, and a small fake Christmas tree with demented blinking lights stood in the corner of her living room. The tantalizing odor of gooey chocolate was heavy in the air, and I could hear Cora’s teakettle whistling.
I said, “I’ll get the tea things,” and hurried to her narrow kitchen.
Cora transferred a stack of mail and some magazines from a small skirted round table set between her kitchen and living area while I put tea bags in her teapot and filled it with boiling water. She pulled out one of the ice cream chairs at the table and sat down with her elbows on the table and her chin resting in her hands. I could feel her keen old eyes watching me from under their hooded lids.
She said, “Don’t slice the bread, just tear off hunks of it. It does better that way. And don’t forget the butter.”
“I know, I’m getting it.”
I stacked bread plates and cups and saucers on a tray, added butter, a plate of fist-sized chunks of chocolate bread, and the teapot. When I carried it to the table, I moved my chair so I didn’t face the blinking tree. Cora deftly set out the plates and poured the tea while I tore into a hunk of bread.
I closed my eyes and moaned. “God, that’s good.”
“It is, isn’t it? I don’t do too many things good, but I’m good at chocolate bread. What’re you best at, Dixie?”
I stopped in mid-chew and considered. “I’m best with pets. Dogs. Cats. Right now I’m taking care of an iguana.”
“A whata?”
“Iguana. They’re big lizardlike animals. This one is a bright shade of green, about five feet long. Most of that length is tail, though.”
“Do they bite?”
“They can, but they don’t unless they feel attacked. They have little fish teeth, so their bite isn’t dangerous, but they can break the skin.”
“Huh. Imagine that.”
I set my teacup down and took a deep breath. It was time to tell her why I was there.
NINE
I said, “Cora, I’m not doing so good.”
She shrugged. “I imagine killing somebody would take the starch out of a person.”
“It’s not just that. It’s something else, like I’m not myself anymore.”
She sipped her tea and searched my face. “Who are you, if you’re not yourself?”
I slid the butter knife down the stick of soft butter and sliced off a large piece of it. I laid it on a fresh chunk of hot chocolate bread and watched it ooze into the bread’s pores. When it had totally disappeared, I took a big bite and chewed.
Cora waited until I swallowed and took a gulp of tea. Then she said, “Dixie?”
“I’m thinking. I guess I’m still myself, but I’m doing things I don’t usually do.”
“Well, sugar, nobody but a pure nincompoop spends their whole life doing the same things over and over. There comes a time when you start doing new things.”
“I lied to a homicide detective, Cora.”
She frowned. “You mixed up in something?”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s the iguana. Not the iguana itself, but the man who owns the iguana. See, somebody called me and said it was him, but it wasn’t, and when I got there the guard had been shot in the head. I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything again, so I left. I didn’t report it. I just went home and took a shower and then when I went to find the iguana’s house, it turned out that’s where he lived. There where the guard got killed.”
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Page 7
