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

by Blaize Clement

  He said, “I’m just finishing up. Had a heck of a time getting the sheets on the bed. Those king-size mattresses are big as a circus ring.”

  “Leo’s in the car. Can you use a hand?”

  “Purr-C. No, no, I’m almost done. My bags are packed and in the car. I just have to gather up some last-minute things, get my saxophone, make a last check to be sure I haven’t forgotten anything.”

  I said, “I’ll wait with Purr-C.” I was sort of looking forward to seeing how Leo would react when he found out his name had been changed.

  “Dixie? Did you think to get food for him?”

  I did a slow pivot to look at him. If he hadn’t looked so cute, with his white hair sticking up like a Smurf’s and his bramble eyebrows hovering above the kindest eyes in the world, I would have yelled at him. I’d been up since 4 A.M. with only a catnap in a hospital lounge, I’d driven over the Skyway Bridge to St. Petersburg, I’d shopped for supplies for Mazie, I’d been damn near attacked by a man who might be homicidal and who was definitely crazy, and I’d picked up Leo at the Kitty Haven, all without any food since nine o’clock in the morning, which was damn near twelve hours ago unless you counted the piddling little apple thing I’d eaten in the car on the way to St. Petersburg, a little apple thing I wished I had right then, and he wanted to know if I’d remembered to get cat food as well?

  With what I thought was admirable mildness, I said, “No, Pete, I didn’t.”

  “Well, I guess I can stop on the way home and get some. But I hate to leave him in the car by himself while I’m in the store, and I don’t want to take him home first and leave him by himself because he won’t know what’s going on. Do you think you could go pick up some things for him now? While I finish up inside? I’d go but I don’t know what brand to get. That’s one of the things I’ll have to learn.”

  Like a lazy shark, the memory of the box of cat food on Laura’s counter swam across my cortex, the box she had set out to remind herself to buy more. That was the brand Leo liked, but Laura had died before she could replace it. If she had lived long enough to buy another box, I could have simply used the key the locksmith had given me and gone in her house and got it. Got the box of cat food, got Leo’s food and water bowls, got his toys, got the cat treats I’d seen in Laura’s kitchen cabinet.

  It’s a wonder an orchestra didn’t pop up by the driveway right then with a rousing rendition of “The William Tell Overture,” because remembering the kitty treats made me remember the two whopping twenty-pound bags of organic cat food that had been in the cabinet with the treats. Forty pounds of dry cat food would be like money in the bank for a retired clown on a fixed income, and it would be a steady source of meals for Leo.

  I said, “There’s cat food at Laura’s house, and a lot of other things you’ll need. I’ll get it while you finish making the bed.”

  He looked anxious. “Is that all right? To go in her house?”

  I shrugged. “It’s Leo’s house too, and Celeste officially gave me authority to find a home for him. As far as I’m concerned, that includes handing his food and toys over to his new owner.”

  “Well, if you think it’s all right.”

  From the Bronco, Leo made a loud and indignant yowl. It was the first sound he’d made, and both Pete and I hurried to the car to see what had provoked him. He was poking his paws through the air holes in the carrier, and from the low growling noise he was making, I didn’t think he was going to be quiet much longer.

  Pete said, “I don’t want him to think I’m keeping him locked up in here. That’s not a good beginning for us.”

  I grunted and reached inside the Bronco for the carrier.

  I said, “I’ll take him with me.”

  “Well, maybe that’s good. He can say goodbye to his old home before he moves to his new one.”

  I grunted again. I was too tired and too hungry to speak. As I trudged down the sidewalk to Laura’s house with the cat carrier in my hand, a neon sign inside my head was flashing Will This Friggin’ Day Never End?

  32

  Laura’s house looked smaller in the dark. Security lights on each side of her front door cast glittering reflections on the glass panes, but dull grayness lay behind the glass. As I unlocked the door and pushed it open, I had a momentary apprehension that a passing motorist might see me going in and think I was an intruder.

  Out of habit, I locked the door behind me, but I didn’t switch on a light. I might have had every legitimate right to be there, but I didn’t want to call attention to it. An observer looking through the glass-paned front door and seeing me inside might get suspicious and call the cops, and then I’d have to explain the whole business. I was in no mood to explain myself to anybody.

  The house had the strange neutral feel that a place gets when its life odors have been eradicated. Crime-scene cleaners not only remove all traces of blood and body fluids, they destroy all possibility of bacteria and odor with a pall of ozone, then cover up the ozone with a spray that smells like cherry-flavored cough syrup.

  As I walked through the shadowy living room, Leo made a noise that seemed to end in a question mark.

  I said, “I know it smells different, but this really is your house.”

  At the end of the living room, where it made an L to a dining area next to the kitchen, I turned the corner and set Leo’s carrier on the bar between kitchen and dining area. Out of sight of the front door, I felt safe to flip on overhead kitchen lights.

  Leo whined and scrabbled at the roof of his carrier.

  I said, “We’ll just be a minute, and then you’re going home with Pete. You’ll like him, he’s a sweet guy.”

  While Leo growled and pushed at the carrier’s top, I searched for his food and water bowls. I found them in the utility room between kitchen and garage, where somebody had neatly stacked them on the dryer. I carried them to the bar and put them down beside the carrier. As I did, it occurred to me that it was going to be awkward, to say the least, to carry the bowls, two twenty-pound bags of cat food, and the cat carrier.

  I said, “Damn, I should have brought the Bronco.”

  Okay, no big deal. I’d just have to take Leo back to the Bronco and drive to Laura’s driveway, then come in and lug out the bags of cat food and the bowls. Except I’d have to let Pete know what I was doing so he wouldn’t get anxious when I left in the Bronco. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes it’s a real pain in the butt to play well with others.

  With a plan in place, I went to the pull-out cabinet where I’d seen the bags of cat food. Sure enough, there they were, each weighing twenty pounds. There were also several jars of vitamins, along with a bunch of twenty-ounce bags of sun-dried bonita treats. Laura had definitely believed in having plenty of stuff on hand, which was good. Cats love those fish flakes, and Pete would be glad to have them. They made a rather large heap when I piled them on the bar next to the carrier. They were also too slippery to carry by hand, so I went looking for a bag to put them in.

  While I was exploring the cupboards in the utility room, Leo popped open the top of the carrier, leaped to the floor, and streaked out of sight.

  Under my breath, I said, “Shit.”

  I had failed to take into consideration that Havana Browns are strong muscular cats, not to mention smart. Leo had used his brain and his muscles to open the carrier, which made him a lot smarter than me. Furthermore, every cat has its favorite hiding place, and Leo was bound to have his. Now, lucky me, I’d have to coax a stressed cat out of its hiding place.

  I found a stash of plastic grocery bags and filled one with the packets of bonita flakes. Leo’s food and water bowls went in another bag. I didn’t intend to take Leo’s litter box. I had plenty of temporary boxes in the Bronco and Pete could use some of them until he got a permanent one. All I had to do was get the bags of dry food out and persuade Leo to play nice with me.

  Back at the pull-out cabinet, I leaned down and lifted one of the bags. That sucker felt like a lot more than twenty pounds,
but I was so tired a five-pound weight would have seemed heavy. I carried it to the bar and plopped it beside the carrier. I looked again at the description of the contents printed on the bag. Chicken and lamb nuggets, it said. Twenty pounds, it said, but I could have sworn it was a lot heavier. It was also oddly rigid. Dry cat food is usually packed a bit loosely to allow for the contents to slosh around and not break through the bag. When you set it on the floor, it sits with a certain relaxed slump, like a woman sits when she doesn’t care if she bulges in spots.

  I started to get the other bag from the cabinet, then turned back to check the first bag again. The top inch had been neatly folded over and stapled. That seemed peculiar, because it seemed to me that most bags of cat food were glued at the top. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe some were glued and some were stapled, and what difference did it make? It didn’t make an iota of difference to a cat, and it shouldn’t make any difference to me.

  I got the other twenty-pound bag, and as I lifted it out I had an image of Laura Halston lifting her model’s bag after she’d stuffed it with money from Martin Freuland’s bank vault. The image was so clear and so sudden that I went to my knees with the shock of comprehension. With the bag between my knees, I examined the stapled top. The staples had been driven in with careful exactness, but they didn’t appear to have been done by a machine. Some human had laid those staples in that folded-over top, and the human had probably been Laura Halston.

  I stood up and got a table knife from a drawer, then knelt on the floor and gently used the knife to pry the staples out. Carefully unfolding the bag’s top, I peered inside. It took a moment to recognize what I was seeing, because I’d never seen anything like it. Two rows of brown paper bands, each band imprinted with $10,000, each wrapped around a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Six bands in all, holding sixty thousand dollars, and that was just the top layer. I sat down on the floor and pulled out one of the stacks. It was surprisingly thin, not even an inch thick. The bag itself was about twenty inches tall. I did some fast arithmetic and came up with around a million dollars in the bag. And there were two bags, which meant Laura had been hiding around two million dollars in plain sight in her kitchen.

  I said, “Son of a gun.”

  As if in response, a cracking sound came from the living room. My first thought was that Leo had become so agitated at the strangeness of his home that he’d knocked something over. My second thought was that somebody had knocked out a glass panel in the front door so they could unlock it. My third thought was that I had left my .38 in the Bronco.

  With the bag of money on the floor between my outstretched legs, I began scrambling to get upright. I was on one knee, with one foot on the floor, when the bag tipped over and spilled bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the floor. Dimly aware of the puddle of money on the kitchen tile, I was frantically sorting through my options, which were more or less limited to running to the back door and hoping to escape through the garage, or climbing into one of the kitchen cabinets.

  Martin Freuland came around the living room’s L and stood on the other side of the bar separating the dining area from the kitchen. He held a .9mm Glock in his hand, and his face registered a curious shock when he saw me.

  He said, “Oh. It’s you.”

  There were so many unspoken assumptions in those few words that I couldn’t think of a response. Obviously, he had known somebody was in the house, and obviously he had expected it to be somebody else.

  His gaze swung to the money on the floor, and he nodded. “I knew it was here.”

  Still on one knee, I said, “Was it really worth killing for?”

  His smile was like a barracuda’s. “It will be, yes.”

  That was when I realized he meant killing me would be worth it.

  I said, “I was talking about killing Laura. You said you didn’t, but you did.”

  He moved the Glock back and forth like a head shaking. “You’re very naïve about the way the real world works. People like me don’t kill people like Laura. We pay other people to do it for us.”

  “Vaught?”

  He frowned and spoke louder. “I said we pay other people to do it for us.”

  Help me Rhonda, we were doing a “Who’s on First?” routine.

  I said, “A man named Frederick Vaught has confessed to killing Laura. Is that who you paid?”

  He actually laughed, an easy relaxed chuckle. “I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

  I wasn’t as naïve as Freuland thought. I knew about paid killers, knew how easy it is for somebody in Freuland’s position to hire somebody whose morality is measured in dollars. But professional killers simply do their job and leave. They lay a bullet in a precise location, or they surprise with a wire garrote around the neck or a swiftly driven blade between the ribs. They don’t hang around and slash the dead victim’s face in mad fury. Only killers with personal vendettas to settle do that. If Freuland hadn’t killed Laura himself, he had paid somebody with personal history with her to do it.

  A wave of dizziness swept over me as I realized how a thing can happen in one place, and the entire universe shifts to make space for the fact of it. A man accepts two million dollars from drug dealers who’ve made millions more from selling hopelessness to other men, and hundreds of miles away a gap in time appears, a cosmic breath is held until a woman is finally stabbed to death in her shower, a death that no longer has anything to do with the two million dollars, but is about a child knowing her father is in her sister’s bedroom doing something shameful, and she is stunted, maimed, soul-stained with jealousy because it means her father loves her sister best.

  I said, “Was mutilating Laura’s face part of what you paid Celeste to do?”

  If I’d had any doubts that he was telling the truth about not being the killer, they were dispelled by the shock in his eyes.

  “Mutilating her face?”

  “Her face was so cut up that the deputy who found her body threw up. Think about that, Mr. Freuland. Think about how lovely Laura was, and how she looked when Celeste finished with her.”

  A faint sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, that’s the problem with having somebody killed, isn’t it? You can’t control all the details of how they’ll do it.”

  For a moment, we looked into each other’s eyes with the stark rawness that can only happen when one person is about to blow another person to smithereens. He may have paid Celeste to kill Laura, but we both knew he fully planned to kill me himself. I had to stall him, had to keep him talking until . . . until what? Until Pete wondered what was taking so long and came to investigate and got killed too? I couldn’t let that happen, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

  I said, “You expected to find Celeste here tonight, didn’t you?”

  “She thought she could outsmart me and take all the money for herself. We’d gone all through the plan, all she had to do was show up, tell Laura she’d come to visit, act friendly, like a sister, and then take her by surprise and punish her for what she’d done. The bitch spent the entire night here searching for the money but she couldn’t find it.”

  Of course she didn’t. Celeste had never had a cat, and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that it was odd for a person to have forty pounds of cat food stored for one cat.

  Now I knew who it was that Pete had seen. It had been Celeste, dressed in Laura’s clothes. That’s why Guidry had questioned him so closely about the time, because Laura had been killed hours earlier.

  “I suppose you’ll kill her too, when she comes back?”

  He gave me that smile again. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be long gone when she shows up, and all she’ll find is your body.”

  “The cops will think she killed me, and she’ll tell them it was you.”

  He shook his head. “She can’t afford to implicate me because she knows I’ll tell them she killed her sister. And the police have no reason to believe she killed Laura. No, they�
��ll think the same person who killed Laura killed you, some unknown maniac.”

  I had to agree that it was a fairly tight plan.

  I had never imagined the end of my life happening this way. Even though my husband had died at thirty, and my child at three, I still thought of death as something that happened to old people, an inevitable closure to a long full life. But now here I was with a man who seemed determined to make my death as premature as Laura Halston’s.

  I said, “Could you just tell me why? Why did you want Laura killed? And don’t tell me it was because of the money she took, or because she reported you to the feds. That would make you bitter, but it wouldn’t make you a killer.”

  I didn’t need to ask why he planned to kill me. We both knew the answer to that.

  For a long silent moment, I thought I might have gone too far, and that the next instant might be my last. But then Martin spoke in a tight voice.

  “She treated me like a fish, reeling me in one minute and letting me flap at her feet, and then throwing me back.”

  “Why? Because you were too little to keep?”

  He wagged the gun at me like a head tut-tutting, and I bit my lower lip. I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut when a good line pops into my head.

  “She liked keeping me on the hook. Wanted me to dangle there in case one of her other men got away. Then she’d have me in reserve. On ice, so to speak.”

  I thought of how TV psychologists act, and drew my eyebrows together in a way I hoped looked sympathetic. “That must have been painful for you.”

  He was too smart for that. Walking around the bar, he came toward me with the Glock pointed at my forehead. “It’s time to end this charade.”

  I wish I could say I kept my cool, but I didn’t. My heart was hammering in my ears, and all I could think about was not letting him see how terrified I was. If this was going to be my last moment, I didn’t want it to end with my humiliation.