Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

by Blaize Clement

  The building’s corners looked even more chipped than the last time I’d been there, and when I pulled open the the glass-topped entrance door, I saw it was still etched with his grandfather’s name, ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Ethan apparently had seen no reason either to change the sign or spruce up the building when he inherited it.

  A small vestibule inside the door led to a flight of stairs whose every step had been worn slightly lower in the center from decades of climbing feet. At the top of the stairs, a broad corridor stretched toward Ethan’s office, with another office to the left where a plump secretary with white-streaked hair sat at a desk facing the door. Christmas cards hung on a string in a drooping line across the front of her desk, and a miniature Christmas tree with miniature electric lights glowed on her windowsill. She looked up with raised eyebrows when she saw me, but Ethan’s door was open and I headed straight back without giving her a chance to stop me.

  Ethan was standing in front of a bookcase holding a book in his hands, and when he turned and saw me his face registered surprise, annoyance, and pleasure all at one time.

  I said, “I wanted to come in person and apologize for being so bitchy this morning.”

  Some of the annoyance drained out of his face, but all he said was, “That wasn’t necessary.”

  I said, “It was the concussion. A concussion causes mood swings.”

  My ears flamed with embarrassment when they heard my mouth make such a whiny, victimized statement. It practically bore a banner demanding that he feel guilty for even a moment of irritation because I’d been so nasty to him.

  Quickly, I added, “I don’t mean that as an excuse, it’s just an explanation.”

  He grinned. “Does that mean we can try again?”

  Okay, that was better. He wasn’t being so reserved now, and I’d got the megawatt smile. I absolutely hate it when people are disappointed in me. I can live with people not liking me from the get-go, but I always feel challenged when they start out liking me and then something happens that makes them think less of me.

  His face took on stern lines again and he motioned toward one of the rump-sprung leather chairs facing his desk. “Dixie, tell me again what happened to you.”

  “There’s not much to tell, really. I stopped at Kurtz’s house on my way home last night, and when I got out of the car somebody conked me on the back of the head and knocked me out. When I came to, there was smoke in the air and I called nine-one-one. A chemical fire had been set behind the house, and the fire marshal thinks the arsonist hit me to keep me from seeing him. The homicide detective took me to the emergency room and then stayed with me until Paco came home.”

  Okay, so I wasn’t telling the whole truth, but the fact of Jessica Ballantyne setting that fire was something I would only tell Guidry.

  Ethan said, “Homicide detective?”

  “Somebody was murdered at Kurtz’s house yesterday morning. The arson is probably connected somehow, so the detective went to his house.”

  Ethan’s dark eyes flashed with some emotion I couldn’t decipher. “Would that be Lieutenant Guidry? The one who investigated the other murders you were involved in?”

  I felt my face flame again. “I haven’t been involved in any murders, Ethan, I just happened to get caught in their backlash. But yes, Guidry is the investigating detective. Now, of course, there’s also an arson investigation, but the fire marshal is handling that.”

  “You could have called me. I would have stayed with you.”

  “I wasn’t up to calling anybody, to tell the truth. I was sort of dazed for most of the night.”

  “How’s your head now?”

  “I still have a headache, but it’s a lot better.”

  “Think you’ll be up to having supper at my place Saturday night? Just the two of us.”

  As he scribbled his address on a notepad, time suddenly swirled backward, and for a stricken second I remembered that Saturday nights were reserved for Christy. This year she would be old enough for the two of us to make dough with flour and salt and oil for Christmas ornaments. We might make bells and candy canes and wreaths, bake them until they were like concrete, and then Todd would help us paint them. We would string popcorn and cranberries, too, for our Christmas tree, and on Sunday the three of us would go choose a tree to put all our handiwork on.

  Those time warps are always so vivid that when reality snaps into place I feel disoriented. Silent as a rock, I came back to the present, where there were no Christmas ornaments or Christmas cookies or Christmas tree, no Todd or Christy, and when Christmas would merely be a day my heart would break again because they weren’t there with me.

  I got up and stuffed Ethan’s address in my pocket. “I have cats and dogs waiting.”

  Giving him a parody of a smile, I scurried away, catching a glimpse of the secretary’s curious gaze as I rushed past her office. I wanted to turn around and tell Ethan I had been mistaken, I couldn’t spend Saturday night with him. But I knew if I spoke I would burst into tears, so I hurried down the stairs and out the door instead.

  As I ran to the Bronco, the man sitting on the sidewalk with his bag of gifts raised his hand like a beauty-pageant winner and called, “Merry Christmas, pretty lady!”

  I managed not to cry until I was in traffic, and the tears had stopped by the time I got to the first traffic light. I considered that a sign of progress. There had been a time when an onset of memories and tears would last for days. Maybe someday they won’t come at all, just an ache in the heart.

  On a sudden impulse, I turned toward the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I don’t believe in planting people, but my grandparents were not the kind of people to be cremated—too much possibility that the fundamentalists might turn out to be right and they’d wake up on Judgment Day with no bodies to reconnect.

  The cemetery is a morbidly pretty place with evenly manicured green grass. Except for the flat stone markers, it could be a golf course. Several people were decorating their loved ones’ graves with fake poinsettias and plastic holly wreaths. The best I could do was kneel and scrape a blob of dried bird shit from my grandmother’s marker.

  “Gran, I wish you were here. I could use some wise advice. Somebody got killed, and they think I might have done it. And there’s this kitten I’m worried about. They want to declaw it, and you know how awful that is. And then a man has invited me to supper at his house Saturday night, and it’s bound to get romantic. Sexy romantic. I know it’s time for me to start living like a normal woman, but the sex part scares me. If I have sex with a man, I’m afraid it’ll blot out my memories of Todd. If I do that, I’ll be somebody else.”

  An egret flew overhead making low gargling noises, but I didn’t think it was channeling my grandmother. She lay in her grave as silent as my grandfather in their double-bed burial site.

  I looked out at all the graves and their plastic flowers and wondered if this was what my grandparents had intended as their final statement. I doubted it. They had been too vital, too busy living and loving to want a vast synthetic silence to mark their wisdom.

  A little voice in my head said, There’s your answer, Dixie. Don’t be a coward. Throw yourself into life and it will meet you halfway.

  Maybe I was really just talking to myself, but I felt lighter when I left.

  Considering that my head still weighed about ten tons and a muffled drumbeat sounded every time I put a foot down, the afternoon pet visits went smoothly. I slow-walked my sedate dogs and slow-played with my cats, all the time thinking about the calico kitten and hoping it would grow up to be as graceful and sure on its feet as the cats I played with, and not like a ballerina surgically consigned to wearing clogs.

  I moved so slowly that it was an hour past sunset when I finished with the last cat. I stored my equipment in the back of the Bronco and drove to a street off Avenida del Norte where Joe and Maria Molina live in organized chaos with their children, Joe’s parents, and whichever relative is in need of a place at the moment.
<
br />   The Molina house is a rambling turquoise stucco that Joe’s father, Antonio Molina, bought fifty years ago for thirty thousand dollars. He had come from Mexico with nothing but the clothes on his back, a sharp mind, and a strong body. Now he has one of the area’s most successful lawn services, and the house is worth a couple of million. Joe grew up watching his father come home every day burnt dark as cork by the sun and decided to make his living some other way. He and his industrious wife, Maria, own a business that keeps half the houses on the key clean, and they do it in air-conditioned coolness.

  Tony Molina thinks grass is for suckers, so the Molina yard is landscaped with shell and beach-hardy plants. I parked in the wide paved driveway that curved around a thick clump of royal palms planted in redwood mulch. Strings of tiny white lights outlined the palm trunks, and near the front door a herd of dwarf reindeer stood in various poses. They were outlined in lights too, and methodically turned their heads side to side. Behind them, an inflated plastic Santa bathed in the beam of a floodlight waved his ballooned arms, while winged angels looked down from the rooftop. The Molina family had all Christmas bases covered.

  Joe and Maria’s eleven-year-old daughter, Lila, opened the gift-wrapped door when I rang. She had a new thick-haired russet dog with her that looked like a chow mix. The dog yipped sharply and Lila bent to him.

  Solemnly, she said, “This is our friend Dixie. Never bark at her.”

  The dog woofed one more time to save face and then grinned at me.

  Lila said, “I’m teaching him who is a friend and who it’s okay to scare.”

  I said, “That’s a good thing to know. Sometimes I scare people who might want to be my friends.”

  Lila smiled and motioned me toward the kitchen, where delicious odors beckoned.

  “We got him at the animal shelter. He was so scared at first, he thought we might not keep him.”

  Passing a table holding a large crèche scene with fuzzy sheep and a holy family dressed in velvet, I stopped in the kitchen doorway and felt a momentary pang of envy for the dog. Papa Tony sat at the round oak table in the middle of the room drinking a Tecate and reading the Herald-Tribune. Maria was at the sink chopping an onion on a wooden board, and Joe’s mother, who had become everybody’s Abuela Rosa the minute her first grandchild was born, was stirring an aromatic something on the range. A young woman I didn’t know leaned on a counter with a chubby baby balanced on her hip, and Joe knelt in the corner talking eye-to-eye to his two-year-old son.

  When they saw me, everybody turned with such welcoming smiles that I was afraid I might get sloppy and cry again. I guess I still had concussion emotions.

  Joe introduced the young woman, one of Maria’s sisters, and picked the little boy up.

  “Say hello to Miz Dixie,” he told the kid, to which the child gave me a dimpled smile and hid his face in his father’s neck.

  Joe laughed and handed off the boy to Maria’s sister, who left the room with a kid on each hip, their chubby legs gripping her backside like little monkeys. Nature’s designs are infinitely practical—a woman’s round hips attract men, result in babies, and then provide transport for them.

  Maria said, “What happened to you, Dixie?”

  I fingered the knot on my head. “Somebody hit me on the head and gave me a concussion. Thanks for helping me out this morning. I want to pay you.”

  In unison, Joe and Maria shook their heads. Maria said, “You’ve helped us plenty of times. Don’t even talk about money.”

  At the stove, Abuela Rosa spoke to the ceiling. “You see? God spoke to me this morning and said, Make menudo, Rosa. I thought, Why must I make menudo? But I do not argue with God, so I made menudo. Now I know why. It is because you have a concussion. The menudo is for you. God always has a reason for everything.”

  With the same look Joan of Arc probably had when she rode off to do God’s bidding, Abuela Rosa bustled to a cabinet and got out a wide soup bowl.

  Joe said, “It’s true. Menudo cures everything.”

  Papa Tony folded his paper and said, “Sit, sit.”

  I didn’t need to be invited twice. I sat.

  Menudo is a wonderful Mexican soup of tripe, hominy, and chili in a rich, red, garlicky broth. Stewed for hours and eaten steaming and fiery, it is reputed to soothe the stomach, clear the head, and eliminate hangovers. The stuff works too. Just the steam from the big bowl Abuela Rosa set in front of me immediately tunneled through my sinuses to my bruised brain and made me feel more alert.

  Maria said, “What do you mean, somebody hit you on the head?”

  “I mean somebody hit me on the head. I stopped late last night at a house where I’m taking care of an iguana, and when I got out of my car somebody conked me on the head.” I spooned up more menudo and said, “I guess I should tell you it’s the same place where the guard was killed yesterday morning.”

  Immediately, every spine in the room stiffened, every face took on a guarded look.

  Papa Tony said, “The Kurtz house.”

  “You know him?”

  “I never saw him, but I took care of his grounds for a while.”

  I said, “I was wondering about that. How did you get inside the courtyard?”

  “The nurse would open the last garage door and we went in that way. There’s a storage room at the back of that garage, with a door to the courtyard.”

  “So you know Gilda? The nurse?”

  He shook his head, looking as if he wished he hadn’t said anything. “I just went there a few times, then she fired me. Said we made too much noise and upset her boss.”

  “Did you know the guard?”

  “Ramón Gutierrez. Yes, I knew him.”

  Joe said, “They go to our church, he and his wife.”

  Maria said, “She belongs to some weird religious group too.” With a wary look at her mother-in-law, she said, “The kind that’s always worried about the devil. She has too much time on her hands. Thinks she’s too good to work, just wants her husband to take care of her.”

  I said, “Well, he won’t be taking care of her now.”

  Abuela Rosa crossed herself and shook her head sadly. “Pobrecita.”

  Joe said, “Do you know if the cops have caught the killer?”

  I took several slurps of menudo before I answered. Just in case they snatched the bowl away when I told them.

  “No, but I’m one of the suspects.”

  Abuela Rosa crossed herself again.

  I said, “I saw Ramón dead in the guardhouse just before the Herald-Tribune man came and found him. I knew he would call and report it, so I didn’t.”

  They all nodded vigorously. People with brown skin—including law-abiding citizens—understand all too well the wisdom of avoiding attention from the police when a crime has been committed.

  “The Herald-Tribune guy told them he’d seen me leaving the scene of the crime, so now I’m a suspect.”

  Abuela Rosa pressed both hands to her bosom and sighed.

  Joe said, “They can’t think you did that!”

  Papa Tony got up from the table with his face set in hard, stern lines. He stalked toward the door with an angry set to his shoulders. At the door he turned to me.

  “You know those cops, right? You tell them to look closer to home. Much closer to home.”

  He left the room before I could ask him what he meant, but not before I caught a look passing between Joe and Maria.

  I left the Molina house with a jar of menudo from Abuela Rosa and the knowledge that the Mexican community knew something about Ramón’s murder that they weren’t telling.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thanks to the menudo, my head was only doing a muffled roll when I got to the Kurtz house, not big bass drumming like before. Good thing, too, because a small sign-toting crowd was now gathered on the sidewalk. A few women were on their knees, eyes cast toward the sky, hands folded under their chins. Some others were blocking the driveway. I pulled to a stop and put down my window so I could ask the
m to move, but they were all concentrating on a man in a cowled brown robe who seemed to be giving a sermon.

  He shouted, “It is written that a vial was poured upon the earth and there fell a grievous sore upon the man who had the mark of the beast. The Bible tells us that the one with the mark of the beast has a number, and his number is six hundred threescore and six. Six hundred sixty-six, brothers and sisters! The number of this house! And hear this, brethren, it is also written that the beast worked miracles that deceived them that worshipped his image, and they were all cast into a lake of fire.”

  The crowd murmured approvingly, and several people seemed ready to go cast somebody into a lake of fire right then.

  I leaned out my window. “Excuse me, I need to drive through here.”

  A woman in a shiny black dress glared at me and waved her sign, but a man at the side called, “Let the car through!”

  The people parted to let me pass, but they all gave me hellfire looks.

  I parked in front of the garages and walked down the palm-screened path to the front door. When I reached the expanse of living room windows, something felt wrong, and it took a second to realize that it was the distance from the garage door. Now that I knew the wine room was behind the first garage, I had unconsciously stepped off the length of an average garage and added the ten feet or so of the wine room’s depth, which should have put me at the beginning of the living room’s glass wall. Instead, it was a good fifteen feet farther ahead. Ken Kurtz evidently had a garage about forty feet deep. Maybe he kept a stretch limo or a yacht in there.

  A helicopter flew over with a droning whap-whap! sound, and I wondered if there were surveillance cameras in it pointed at me. I thought about waving up at them, but the thought was only for my own entertainment. A little sick humor to jolly me along.