Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

by Blaize Clement

It was now close to eleven, which meant Laura had been killed within the last five or six hours. The killer could have got inside Laura’s house while she was running and killed her when she came back. Then he must have left the door open as he ran away, and Leo got outside.

  I pulled the car door open, and Mazie trotted over to look up toward the cat carrier where Leo was still crying. Service dogs are trained from puppyhood to live amicably with other household pets, so Mazie was free of cat prejudice.

  With the same sympathetic concern that Mazie had, Pete said, “Why don’t you leave the cat with me and Mazie? We can take care of him, and I’m sure Hal and Gillis would want to help out a neighbor.”

  I opened the Bronco door and got in. “I’d need their permission, and this is not the time to ask for it.”

  His shoulders dropped with the reminder of Jeffrey.

  While he and Mazie watched me with identical expressions of sadness, I started the engine and backed out of the driveway. As I drove away, I looked toward Guidry’s Blazer in front of Laura’s house. I reminded myself to tell him what time Pete had seen Laura. On TV, medical examiners can tell exactly what time a person died. In real life, nailing down a time of death usually becomes somewhere between the time a person was seen alive and the time she was found dead.

  Leo was quiet on the way to the Kitty Haven. Maybe he was soothed by the car’s movement, or maybe he was just relieved to get away from the gruesome scene inside his house.

  A yellow frame house with sparkling white shutters and a front porch that begs for a swing, Kitty Haven is owned by Marge Preston, a round white-haired woman who speaks English and Cat with equal fluency. Inside, the décor is a comforting blend of a grandmother’s house and a brothel, with lots of burgundy velour, lace curtains, and crocheted tablecloths. Several slack cats were draped on windowsills and plump chair backs in the waiting room. When I carried Leo in, they all looked at me as if I were the most interesting specimen of humanity they’d ever seen.

  When I lifted Leo from the carrier, Marge said, “Oh, what a beauty! You don’t see many of those.”

  “His name’s Leo. There’s been a death in his family, and he needs a place to stay until relatives come.”

  Marge took him from me and then looked suspiciously at the paw pad he raised.

  I said, “He needs a bath too.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Yeah.”

  I left Marge telling Leo that he was safe and beautiful. Marge knows that even when you’ve stepped in blood, it makes you feel better to be told you’re safe and beautiful.

  Heavy with the lethargy that follows a prolonged surge of adrenaline, I drove south like a homing pigeon. At the tree-lined lane leading to my apartment, I turned in with hope tensing my stomach. When I rounded the last bend and saw my brother’s car in the carport, I let out a sigh of relief. Michael usually spends his off-hours fishing or cooking, so his car meant he was home cooking. As he had been doing all my life, Michael would see that I held together.

  Before I faced him, I slogged upstairs to my apartment’s porch and fell into the hammock. I kept remembering Laura’s husband saying he would see that she paid for what she’d done. She had said he was abusive and mentally unbalanced, but what he’d done went way over being unbalanced. He had to be a raving psychopath to have killed his wife just because she wanted a divorce.

  With a little jolt, I remembered the man who’d called and come to her door while I was there, the one she’d met at the emergency room when she twisted her knee. He’d sounded like a nutcase too, and I’d forgotten about him when I talked to Sergeant Owens. Then another jolt hit. Damn, I’d forgotten about the man who’d come in the Lyon’s Mane too, the one Maurice had said was after Laura. If she’d turned him down, his obsessive lust might have turned homicidal. I didn’t know if he was as crazy as Laura’s husband, but I knew he’d looked capable of brutal murder.

  Tears came in a sudden torrent, not only from shock and sadness over the murder of a woman I’d liked a lot but from a deep reservoir of unspeakable fear that lies deep in every woman’s heart. No matter how much equality we gain with our brains, our street smarts, and our ability to handle weapons, the fact remains that we are physically weaker than men. Furthermore, we belong to a species that does unspeakable things to one another. Until that changes, we will be vulnerable, and every woman knows it.

  Laura Halston had been an intelligent, healthy, able-bodied woman who had taken every precaution to stay safe. And yet somebody a lot bigger, stronger, and more brutal had come into her house and killed her.

  Was it somebody she knew? Somebody she had opened the door to? I kept going over what little I knew, gnawing on the details. A hunt might already be on for her Laura’s surgeon husband, the well-known Dr. Reginald Halston that she called Martin. I wondered how he would feel when he learned that Laura had been pregnant with his child when he killed her.

  Then I reminded myself that I couldn’t be sure her husband was the killer. Except I was.

  When I finally went searching for Michael, I found him in his kitchen, engulfed in clouds of aromatic steam coming from several big pots on the commercial range. He had an apron the size of a tablecloth wrapped around his broad torso, and a look of beatific joy on his handsome face. When he’s on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse. When he’s not on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse as well as for me and Paco. He has enough soups and stews stored in his freezer to feed all of Sarasota County.

  When I came in, Ella Fitzgerald jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. After I smooched the top of her head, she hopped back on her stool and licked her paws like a bimbo too involved with her manicure to pay attention to the little people.

  Michael said, “What’s wrong?”

  “You remember the woman I told you about? Laura Halston? She was murdered this morning. They didn’t tell me how, but I think she was stabbed to death. I took her cat to Kitty Haven.”

  Michael laid down his stirring spoon and came close, looking down at me with worried eyes.

  “Oh, hell, Dixie. Oh, sugar, I’m sorry.”

  I leaned into him, and he wrapped me in a bear hug, squeezing me as if he could shut out every hurtful thing. Then he held my shoulders in both hands and looked hard at me.

  “You haven’t had anything to eat this morning, have you?”

  “Michael, I can’t eat, I’m too upset.”

  “You’ve been up since four, and it’s nearly noon. Sit.”

  Michael is of the firm conviction that ninety-five percent of all wars and social ills would be wiped out if everybody ate a substantial breakfast.

  While he whirled into action, I poured myself a mug of coffee from the electric pot on the counter. I drank half of it in one long gulp before I dropped onto a bar stool. Beside me, Ella had decided her nails met her standards and was dreamily staring at Michael with the same love-dazed look that a lot of females get when they see him.

  Michael went back and forth between the Sub-Zero refrigerator and the giant range like Godzilla stomping over cities, and before I had finished my coffee he slid a bowl of white stuff in front of me and handed me a spoon.

  “Down the hatch, kid.”

  I took a tentative bite and felt my neck muscles relax. Fragrant white rice stirred into light cream, flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg, with a thin drizzle of maple syrup looped over the top. Soft and creamy. No chunks of anything that required serious chewing, no sharp surprises, no intellectual demands. Just smooth, uncomplicated nourishment that went down easy and warmed my heart.

  Ella looked at my rice and made a little pleading sound, but Michael shook his head sternly. “Rice isn’t good for you, and you’ve already had a shrimp.”

  Ella meekly flipped the tip of her tail. Nobody argues with Michael, not even Ella.

  I nodded toward the steaming pots on the stove. “What’re you making?”

  “Gumbo with shrimp and crab.
Rice to serve it over.”

  “Okra?”

  “Don’t be afraid of okra, Dixie, it’s a respectable vegetable.”

  “It’s slimy.”

  “Lots of good stuff is slimy.”

  He turned to waggle his eyebrows at me in a mock-lewd parody, but his eyes remained worried.

  “Dixie, I hope you’re not going to get involved in another murder investigation. I don’t think I can go through that again.”

  “This one doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “You knew the dead woman. You’re taking care of her cat. That involves you, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know anything other than what I’ve already told Sergeant Owens.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question.”

  I carried my empty bowl and cup to the sink and rinsed them before I put them in the dishwasher.

  I said, “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Michael’s forehead was wrinkled with worry, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would relieve his mind.

  No way was I staying out of this murder investigation. What had happened to Laura could have happened to me or to any other woman. I was going to do everything I could to see that Laura Halston’s killer was caught and put away forever.

  15

  I stood a long time under a hot shower, but it didn’t wash away the memory of the bloody paw prints leading from Laura’s front door or my sense of outraged grief. Fatigue made me feel like a balloon that had lost its air, but before I fell into bed for a nap, I called Guidry. Miracle of miracles, he answered his cell phone.

  I said, “Guidry, I forgot to tell Sergeant Owens about a man who came to her house while I was there Sunday night. He called, too, and begged her to let him in. She didn’t, even after he banged on the door. She said he was stalking her.”

  “He have a name?”

  “She didn’t say a name, but she said she’d met him at the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial. She went there with a sprained knee and he was there too.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s another man, too. Thuggish guy named Gorgon. I don’t know much about him, but Maurice at the Lyon’s Mane said he was after Laura too.”

  “Dixie, I don’t know what the hell you just said.”

  “The Lyon’s Mane is a hair salon. It’s owned by Maurice and Ruby. Maurice does Laura’s hair. Did. Gorgon is one of their clients too. Gets his manicures there. According to Maurice, he was putting a lot of pressure on Laura.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to Maurice.”

  “There’s something else. A man I’ve put in charge of the dog next door saw Laura leave her house this morning about five o’clock to go running.”

  The line was silent for a moment, and I knew Guidry was deciphering what I’d meant about a man I’d put in charge of a dog. I wasn’t in a mood to spoon-feed him, so I let him figure it out for himself.

  He rallied and said, “He’s sure about the time?”

  “Not positive, but around that time. He gets up early, and he’d taken Mazie outside for a few minutes when he saw her.”

  “Okay.” His voice was oddly flat.

  I said, “Did you contact her family?”

  “Her sister will be here as soon as she can. Probably tomorrow.”

  “When is the autopsy scheduled?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “She was my friend.”

  “Owens said you barely knew her.”

  “That’s true, but she was still my friend.”

  “Autopsy will be tomorrow morning.”

  “Have you found her husband?”

  “Dr. Reginald Halston, the surgeon? The one in Dallas?”

  I didn’t like the way his tone had gone crispy.

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “We have somebody working on it.”

  After I hung up, I crawled in bed and allowed myself to drift off to sleep. But even as my brain pulled the blinds to darken its rooms, I couldn’t ignore an internal blinking red light that said Guidry didn’t believe what I’d told him. When I woke up, the red light was still blinking, but I didn’t know exactly what Guidry didn’t believe or why he didn’t believe it.

  It was almost time for my afternoon rounds, so I pulled my hair into a ponytail and put on fresh clothes. Then I clattered down the stairs and across the cypress deck to Michael’s back door. The gumbo and rice had disappeared, probably into freezer containers, and Michael had disappeared too. Damn. I had hoped he would give me something else to eat. It had been almost four hours since the little bowl of sweetened rice I’d had for breakfast, and it had long since been converted into energy. Now I needed a new source. Preferably one that didn’t require any effort on my part, because I was still drained from the morning’s shock.

  I could have dived into Michael’s cavernous refrigerator and found something to eat, but that was almost sure to require heating something or slicing something or spreading mayo or mustard on something, all of which seemed as daunting as climbing Everest.

  Ella Fitzgerald trotted into the kitchen and made a few musical firping and trilling sounds, but that didn’t fill my empty stomach or tell me where Michael was. I got a handful of cookies from the jar on the counter, gave Ella a pat on the head and promised her I would groom her when I came home that night, and trudged out to the Bronco. Tossing back cookies, I drove to Tom Hale’s condo.

  From the living room where he was watching TV, Tom said, “Hey, Dixie. Have you heard about this?”

  I went to stand beside his wheelchair and looked at the screen, where a young woman pointed at a spot that had been roped off with yellow crime-scene tape. Under the shot on the screen, a hyperventilating banner told us we were watching a special news bulletin. To prove it, the young woman was pertly announcing that a woman had been murdered in the house behind the tape. She sounded so thrilled you would have thought she was reporting a sale on Manolo Blahniks. Not that I’ve ever worn Manolo Blahniks, but sometimes when I’m waiting on line at Publix, I leaf through a Vogue, so I know what they are.

  Tom said, “That happened over at Fish Hawk Lagoon.”

  “I know, I was there when they found her body.”

  Tom turned his wheelchair to look directly at me. “What is it with you? You have a magnet that attracts dead bodies?”

  “I just happened to be next door when her cat ran out, and I went to see why he was out. I saw bloody paw prints from the front door and called nine-one-one.”

  “They don’t say who she is.”

  “They always wait until they’ve notified the family.”

  I didn’t look at him when I said that. I’d told Michael her name, and I shouldn’t have.

  “They didn’t say how she got killed either. You say there was blood the cat had stepped in?”

  Billy Elliot whuffed from the foyer to let me know he had enjoyed listening to me and Tom as much as he could stand, so I used that as an excuse not to answer. Billy needs his daily runs the way hopeless addicts need their fixes. I got his leash from the foyer closet, snapped it on his collar, and let him pull me toward the front door. But inside, a shrill voice was shouting, She was stabbed to death! Her ex-husband used to carve his initials on her skin with scalpels, and now he’s killed her!

  On the way to the elevator, my cell phone rang. Only a handful of people have my cell number, so when it rings I know it’s important. Billy Elliot looked over his shoulder when I answered, the expression on his face exactly the way I feel when I hear people answer their phones in public. Like, Excuse me, but do you have to do that now?

  Without any preamble, Guidry said, “Dixie, what’s the guy’s name who says he saw the Halston woman leaving her house this morning?”

  “Pete Madeira.”

  “Got a number for him?”

  I gave him Pete’s cell number, and did not tell him that Pete was a sweet guy, so to be kind to him. Pete was fully capable of taking care of himself, and Guidry was
never rude. Except to me, and then I wouldn’t exactly call him rude, more like confrontive. Personally, I hate confrontive, especially when it’s directed toward me.

  This time, he thanked me politely and clicked off. The polite part should have comforted me, but somehow it made me suspicious. Why was he being so carefully polite? It was downright weird.

  I said, “Damn!” and slammed the phone into my pocket just as the elevator door opened. A man with a cocker spaniel on a leash stepped out with a disapproving look at me. Billy Elliot looked up with an I told you so grin and trotted into the elevator ahead of me.

  On the ride downstairs, I started thinking about Laura’s murder, and my heart began pounding as if it were happening right then. And to me. That’s the problem with imagining things. Your mind sees a picture of something that might have happened halfway across the world, and your body thinks it’s happening right that moment, and that it’s happening to you. I’ll bet half the people under gravestones gave themselves fatal heart attacks imagining awful things.

  By the time we got to the downstairs lobby and went out the front door to the parking lot, I’d got myself under control. At that hour, we couldn’t run as freely as we do at four-thirty in the morning when we have the oval blacktop between parked cars all to ourselves. In the mornings, Billy Elliot zips around like he’s a young racer again while I lope along behind him trying not to pass out from exertion. Afternoons, we have to skirt the edge of the track while we watch for careless drivers, but it’s still a good hard run for both of us.

  When we went back upstairs, Tom was at the kitchen table where he does accounting work. I unsnapped Billy Elliot’s leash, kissed him goodbye, and slipped out before Tom could ask me anything else about Laura Halston’s murder.

  By the time I finished with all the other afternoon calls and went to walk Mazie, shadows were lengthening, the late sun was blotted out by treetops, and I had an empty-stomach headache. Guidry’s Blazer and several crime-scene cars were still at Laura’s house, but the ambulance was gone. That meant the medical examiner had come, examined Laura’s body, and zipped it into a plastic body bag for transfer to the morgue.