Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (3 page)

I rang the doorbell, and while I waited I met Ghost’s outraged eyes. I blinked at him slowly, which in cat language means “I love you.” That usually calms an agitated cat, but it didn’t do much this time. Ghost definitely didn’t blink back.

The woman who answered the door gave
stiff-necked
a whole new meaning. Her neck rose from her narrow shoulders like a soaring redwood, broader at the base and held stiffly upright by thick cords that showed bruised blue under her sallow skin. In comparison to her neck, her head seemed too small, made even smaller by the way her pale hair was pulled into a tight knot high at the back of her skull. She held her chin tilted upward, with her eyes squinted and the corners of her rubbery mouth turned down. From the deep grooves running from her thin nose to her jawbone, I surmised that her inverted mouth was a habitual expression.

I said, “Sorry to bother you. I’m Dixie Hemingway. I take care of Ms. Doerring’s cat. There’s been an incident at her house, so the Sheriff’s Department will be working there for a while. I can’t leave the cat in the house with all the people going in and out, and I don’t have my car with me. I was hoping I could leave him with you for an hour or two.”

She started to close the door and said, “I don’t want to be involved.”

Her carefully enunciated syllables oozed with barely suppressed contempt. She definitely felt she was speaking to an inferior, and she wanted me to know it.

I slid my foot in the door before she could close it.
“The deputy over there wants me to leave him someplace, and there’s really no place else to take him.”

She frowned and allowed her eyes to open all the way.

I said, “He can stay on the lanai, and it will just be for a little while.”

She spun around and walked away, managing to do that without moving her head. Since she hadn’t slammed the door in my face, I assumed I was to follow. I stepped into a large square living room with a glass wall across the back. It was dark inside, not just because no lamps were burning but because the glass was covered by thick draperies. They were more appropriate for a cold clime where you need insulation against frigid winds, not for a sun-filled place like Florida.

Instead of pulling the cord to open the drapes, she pushed the edge aside, unlocked the slider, and held them back while I slipped through the opening. She watched me while I took Ghost to the far corner under the roof. I knelt down and let his hind legs touch the floor between my knees while I kept my hand under his chest to hold his front paws up.

I said, “You’re just going to stay here for a little while, and then I’ll come get you and take you to Kitty Haven. You’ll like it there.”

I lowered his front feet to the floor but kept one hand under his chest, ready to lift them if he tried to run. His whiskers were anxiously pointed up, and I talked low to him while I eased my backpack off. I got out one of my emergency Tender Vittle packets, along with a disposable bowl. Semi-moist cat food is like Froot Loops for a child—both are poor excuses for nutrition, but they’ll do in a pinch. Ghost eyed the pouch and made his skin quiver, either to show revulsion or enthusiasm, I wasn’t sure. I emptied the pouch into the bowl and put it on the
floor. Slowly, I pulled my hand away from his chest and stroked his head and neck. He dropped his eyelids to half-mast to show me he was not pleased with me, but he didn’t run when I stood up.

Instead, he crouched in a martyred sulk, tail wrapped tightly to his side, paws folded under his chest, head looking straight forward. Do whatever you want, his posture said. I have to eat breakfast in a strange place and there’s a dead man in my house, but don’t give me a second thought. I’ll be fine.

I went back inside, and as the woman let the drapes fall shut, I saw Ghost hunker over the Tender Vittles and dig in.

“I don’t know your name,” I said. “I should have asked.”

She switched on a lamp that managed to look both priceless and ugly at the same time, and in its weak glow I noticed that a gleaming grand piano dominated the room.

“I am Olga Winnick,” she said stiffly.

A tall skinny boy with white-blond hair and an innocent mouth stepped into the room with his knobby neck angled to the side trying to see what was going on. He was dressed for school in jeans and a white polo shirt with a collar. His eyes were red and puffy, as if he needed several hours’ more sleep. He stopped like a spooked horse when he saw me.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m Dixie Hemingway. Your mother is letting me leave my cat on your lanai for a couple of hours while the Sheriff’s Department is in the house next door.”

He gave me a tight, self-conscious grin, the way adolescents do when they can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do next.

Mrs. Winnick said, “My son is a pianist. He isn’t interested in what happens next door.”

I said, “Is that you? I’ve heard you. I always thought it was the classical radio station.”

He didn’t answer, either from embarrassment or because his mother jumped in before he could.

“He’s going to Juilliard soon.” From the way she said it, she might as well have added “you stupid clod.”

I made appropriate noises to show how impressed I was that the kid was a musician, while he looked like he would have been extremely grateful if the floor had opened and let him fall through to oblivion. Neither of them volunteered his name, but I was afraid he would have a nervous breakdown if I asked, so I let it slide.

“I’ll pick the cat up as soon as I can,” I said. “Would you mind giving him a bowl of water? If he has water, he’ll be okay.”

Mrs. Winnick turned to look at me full on. “I am allowing you to leave that woman’s cat on my lanai. That should be enough.”

Her son’s face flamed, and he turned and left us.

I got out as fast as I could, with the slamming front door making it clear that Mrs. Winnick felt sorely imposed upon.

Another green-and-white patrol car was pulling into the drive as I got back to Deputy Jesse Morgan, and an ambulance was slowly gliding to the curb. Morgan’s eyes flicked to my braless bosom and up again. “Got the cat squared away?”

“For a little while. I have some other pets on my schedule, and I have to go home and get my car. Would it be okay if I do that before I talk to anybody?”

Morgan looked toward the street, where a third deputy was parking in front of the ambulance. Both deputies got out of their patrol cars and spoke to the EMTs standing at the back of the ambulance. An unmarked sergeant’s car and a crime-scene truck with forensics people drove up
and parked behind the ambulance. People swarmed into the street and up the driveway. I knew most of them. I did not look forward to the moment when they recognized me.

Sergeant Owens spoke to me first. Owens is a skinny fifty-something African-American a foot taller than me, which makes him about six three. He has a long face and droopy eyes like a basset hound. His slow and easy facade masks a lightning-quick mind. More than one person who thought it would be easy to put one over on Sergeant Owens has found themselves in deep doo-doo. I served in his unit, and I speak from experience.

Maybe he already knew I was the one who had called in the report, because he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He put out his hand, cordial as if we were in a receiving line, and said, “How are you, Dixie?”

“Except for this little blip on my horizon,” I said, “I’m just fine.”

The last time I’d seen Sergeant Owens, he hadn’t asked me how I was, he’d told me. What he’d actually said was, “You’re totally fucked up, Dixie. No way are you ready to go back to work.” You have to respect a man who can look you in the eye and tell you that.

Deputy Morgan said, “Miz Hemingway was just asking me if it would be okay for her to take care of some other pets and then go home and get her car before she talks to anybody. There was a cat in the house, and she took it next door. She has to come back and get it and take it someplace else.”

Sergeant Owens narrowed his eyes in the exact same look that Ghost had given me from Mrs. Winnick’s lanai. Both of them seemed to have expected better of me.

“How long do you think you’ll be?”

“Two and a half hours, tops.”

“Okay, see you then.”

Another crime scene-unit was oozing down the street
looking for a place to park when I pedaled away. I was an hour behind schedule, and I felt guilty about it, as if the cats waiting for me were looking at their clocks and tapping their paws. I also felt a bit of envy for the quickened adrenaline all the people at the crime scene were having. I don’t care how gruesome and disgusting it is, crime is a lot more fascinating than cleaning litter boxes.

It was almost nine o’clock when I finished seeing to the other pets, and I had a no-caffeine-yet headache and slippery armpits. I pedaled home, tossed my dirty clothes in the washer to run later, and jumped in the shower. My hair is the drip-dry kind that I can pull back in a ponytail and forget, so all I had to do to make myself presentable was slather on sunscreen and roll transparent color on my mouth. I love the sun, but I tend to fry when I’m in it, so I pretty much keep the Beaver 43 people in business. I put on clean khaki shorts and a sleeveless knit top, this time with a bra, and in less than fifteen minutes, I was in my Bronco and headed back up Midnight Pass Road. The leather seats were already hot on the backs of my thighs, but a blast from the AC cooled my face and left my nipples pleasantly puckered.

I drove north on Midnight Pass Road to Marilee’s street and parked at the curb. A second crime-scene unit had arrived, along with trucks from all the local media. A few neighbors and curious onlookers had gathered outside to stare and talk, and reporters from NBC, ABC, CBS, Blab, and Fox were interviewing anybody who would talk to them. Crime-scene tape was stretched across the front entrance, and a contamination sheet had been posted by the front door for everybody to sign as they entered and left.

When I walked up the drive, Deputy Jesse Morgan was
outside keeping the curious at bay, and Sergeant Owens was just coming out of the house. He saw me and did a U-turn, flapping his hand at me in a gesture that I took to mean “Wait here.”

In a moment, he came out with a man in dark pleated trousers and an unlined teal linen jacket with the sleeves casually pushed up. Open-collared white knit shirt. Leather sandals. Smooth bronze tan, like somebody who spent a lot of time on the tennis courts or polo grounds. At first I thought they had found a rich Italian relative of Marilee’s, but Owens said, “Dixie, this is Detective Guidry of CIB. He’ll be handling the case.”

Guidry stepped close and held out his hand. He had a nice handshake, firm and dry. His face was sober edging onto stern, but laugh lines fanned from the corners of his eyes, and his mouth had twin parentheses at the sides. A beaky nose and dark hair cut short, with beginnings of silver showing at the temples and above the ears.

Before he could speak, I said, “I hate to ask you to wait some more, but I’m really worried about the cat. I left it next door and I told the woman I’d come get it in a couple of hours. It’ll take me about ten minutes to run it over to the day-care place. Is that okay?”

He said, “You found the body a little before six this morning, right?”

“Around then.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“No, and I’m about ready to start gnawing on my arm.”

He grinned. “Why don’t you take the cat wherever it has to go and we’ll eat while we talk?”

I could have kissed him. We agreed to meet in fifteen minutes at the Village Diner and then he and Sergeant Owens went back inside the house. I went to the back of my Bronco and unfolded a cardboard cat-carrying case. I put a folded towel on its floor and loped to the Winnicks’,
where a black Mercedes now sat in the driveway. The front door flew open before I got to it, and a dark-haired man in a powder blue suit came storming out with an infuriated scowl on his face.

He stopped when he saw me, and I could almost see the deliberate muscle-by-muscle transition as he got himself under control. His shoulders and chest were broad as a linebacker’s, but his short legs made him eye-to-eye with me. His face was familiar, the kind you see on billboards and flyers during campaigns for local elections, but I couldn’t place it.

“Good morning,” he said. He reached to shake my hand, revealing a raw scratch running diagonally across the back of his right wrist. His eyes were a little too close together for my taste, and if he’d ever had a sweet mouth like his son, it had gotten narrowed into one that seemed to have forgotten how to make a sincere smile.

I gave him the tips of my fingers to shake, and he enfolded them in a hot meaty hand. “I’m Dr. Win. I understand there’s some kind of problem next door.”

I flinched. I knew that voice, and I knew that name. Carl Winnick was a radio psychologist beloved by people who felt they’d been cheated out of their deserved special place by single mothers, minorities, homosexuals, and feminists. He daily filled the airwaves with ranting diatribes about how public schools were teaching sex perversion to eight-year-olds, how white men were losing their jobs to illegal immigrants, and how working women were causing children to become drug addicts. He was best known for fighting to keep alive an idiotic Florida law that required unmarried mothers giving up their babies for adoption to run newspaper ads giving their names and the dates and places where they’d had sexual intercourse. Three years before, he had added me to the list of people he considered a threat to his definition of a family.

He had left the door open, and Olga Winnick stepped forward to grip its edge, as if she had to hold on to something to keep from falling. Her face was wet with tears, and her mouth was open in a rictus of despair.

I said, “I just came to pick up the cat.”

He gave a false hearty laugh. “Oh, yes! The cat! Mustn’t forget the cat!”

He rushed past me and got in the Mercedes and started the engine. For some reason, I imagined his fingers shaking when he turned the key. As he backed out of the driveway, he gave me a side-to-side wave like a beauty queen in a parade.

Mrs. Winnick was still hanging on to the edge of the door, mournfully watching her husband’s departure the way a loyal dog watches her master drive away.

There was no use pretending I hadn’t caught her crying her eyes out. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is obviously a bad time to come.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “We had an argument. Just a heated debate, really.”

From the raw wound I’d seen on his hand, I thought it might have been more than a heated debate. I had been on enough domestic-disturbance calls as a deputy to know that husbands and wives who seem the epitome of decorum may go at each other like barroom brawlers.

As I got closer to her, I got a whiff of an odor on her breath that I remembered from living with my mother, the scent of alcohol overlaid with mouthwash. Even this early in the morning, Olga Winnick had been fortifying her courage with booze.

Inanely, I said, “These things happen.”

I made a beeline to the back sliders where the heavy drapes were still drawn. As soon as I opened the slider, Ghost came running toward me making little chirping noises of relief. I squatted on my heels to stroke him, then
lifted him into the cardboard case and closed it. He whined and poked a paw through one of the air holes, but it couldn’t be helped. I retrieved the food bowl and checked the lanai floor for errant Tender Vittles crumbs. There were none. There was also no water bowl.

With the carrying case in both hands, I went through the living room while Mrs. Winnick tracked along behind me.

“It’s this place,” she said. “Nothing but cheap, predatory women living here, and half of them are Jews.”

For a moment there, I had been feeling sorry for her, but the woman was as pompous and bigoted as her husband. It was a good thing they had found each other, instead of contaminating two marriages.

With my back teeth touching, I said, “Thank you so much for keeping Ghost,” and bolted.

She stood in the doorway and glared at me all the way back to my Bronco. I guess she thought I was one of the predatory women after her husband.

I put the cat-carrying case in the front seat and talked to Ghost as we drove north on Midnight Pass Road. He had got an arm through an air hole all the way up to his armpit and was waving it frantically while he made piteous mewing noises to alert people that he was being catnapped.

From the traffic light where Midnight Pass intersects with Stickney Point from the mainland, beachside condos and private clubs stand shoulder-to-shoulder behind hibiscus hedges and palm trees. They all have salty names like Midnight Cove, Crystal Sands, Siesta Dunes, Island House, Sea Club. My personal favorite is Our House at the Beach. If you spend your vacation there, you can truthfully tell your friends, “We’re going down to Our House at the Beach.”

At Beach Road, I turned left and slowed down so I wouldn’t hit any of the half-naked vacationers crossing
the street to get to Crescent Beach. It’s amazing how many normally sensible women come to the key, deck themselves out in skimpy bikinis, tie a beach towel around their hips, and step out into oncoming traffic with bemused smiles on their lips. I think it’s the seaside’s negative ions that get to them.

Kitty Haven is on Avenida del Mare about a block off Beach Road in an old Florida-style house—yellow frame with crisp white hurricane shutters and a deep front porch. Except for areas planted with liriope and palmettos and century plants, the yard is completely covered in cedar chips. Walking to the front door through the smell of all that cedar always makes me feel like I’m inside a gerbil cage.

Kitty Haven is like a cross between a brothel and a grandmother’s house, with lush velvet, soft music, and a TV screen that plays continuous films of twittering birds and darting fish. A bell tinkled to announce my arrival, and a couple of calico tabbies lolling on windowsills raised their heads to look me over. Marge Preston bustled from the back, leaving a floating wake of wispy cat hairs like the precursors of angel wings. If I were a cat, Marge is the person I’d want for my human. She’s plump and white-haired like Mrs. Santa Claus, with a soft voice and a light touch that soothe the most agitated cat. She took the case and held it up to look inside the vents, and I swear Ghost began to purr.

“You’ll have to keep his collar,” she said.

“Oh, of course.”

Marge set the case on the floor and she and I knelt to open it. I stroked Ghost’s head, letting my fingers slip down the back of his neck and under his velvet collar. The collar had an elastic insert to allow it to slide over his head, and I brought it out on my fingertips and pushed it up on my wrist.

“I don’t know how long he’ll be here,” I said. “Something happened at his house and he can’t go home just yet. His name is Ghost. He hasn’t had water or a litter box for over two hours. He’s had a lot of stress today, so when you feed him, you might stir in some vitamin C.”

Marge made tut-tutting sounds as she bustled off to the back room to set things right, while Ghost told her in self-pitying yips and growls how he’d been sorely mistreated.

I got back in the Bronco and whipped around the corner, and nosed into a parking place in front of the Village Diner. Detective Guidry was already seated in the last booth in the corner with two steaming mugs of coffee on the table. I tossed my backpack onto the seat and slid in, grabbing one of the mugs and taking a big hit almost before I was settled.

“God, that’s good.”

The charms on Ghost’s collar winked on my wrist, and I realized I still wore it. I wanted to explain that I wasn’t the kind of woman who wore black velvet wristbands decorated with little hearts and keys, but explaining would make me look like the kind of woman who cared what anybody thought, so I didn’t.

Judy, who’s been a waitress at the diner for as long as I can remember, appeared as if by magic with a full pot and a lifted eyebrow at seeing me with a man. Judy is smart-mouthed and efficient, with an angular frame, a dusting of orange freckles over her nose, and pecan-colored eyes that have the faintly astonished look of somebody whose dreams have been worn to a nub by disappointment. We have a close friendship that exists solely in the diner. We’ve shared our most hurtful stories, even though we never see each other anyplace else. I know about the men who’ve treated her like shit, and she knows about Todd and Christy.

I put the mug back on the table so she could top it off. “I’ll have the special,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She didn’t even write it down. I always have the special. Two eggs over easy, extra-crispy home fries, and a biscuit.

“I’ll have the same, with a side of bacon,” said Guidry.

Judy splashed another bit of coffee in my mug to replace what I’d drunk while Guidry ordered, and swished away with curiosity radiating out of her like lines of light.

I took another sip of coffee and said, “Okay, I’m ready now. Ask me.”

He pulled a narrow notebook from his jacket pocket and clicked a pen into readiness. “First, the particulars. Name?”

We went down the list. Name, address, phone, all those details that you give so many times it seems like they would be engraved on the air.

“Age?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Occupation?”

“Pet-sitter.”

He hesitated with his pen poised above the notebook. “Is that a real occupation?”

“Damn right it’s a real occupation. I’m licensed and insured and bonded.”

“Insured against what?”

“If I’m walking a dog and it bites you, my insurance will pay your doctor bills.”

He got the kind of surprised face that people always give when they find out that pet-sitting is a legitimate profession with its own rules and ethics and legal responsibilities.

“How long have you been a pet-sitter?”

“About two years.”

“Sergeant Owens said you used to be with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“I was.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Is that really important to your case?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

I felt rising anger and took a quick swallow of coffee.

“My husband was a sergeant with the Sheriff’s Department. He was killed three years ago, along with our little girl. Sergeant Owens was my superior officer. He and I decided it would be better for me to do something else.” I gave him a level look over the coffee mug. “I wasn’t real good with people then, and I’m not much better now.”

He nodded. His eyes were dark gray, edging toward blue. They didn’t give anything away. “Tell me about this morning.”