Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (5 page)

It was one o’clock when I put my grooming equipment in the back of the Bronco and started home. The sky was a clear Crayola blue, with a relentless white sun that lasered the top of my head. Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d been up since 4:00
A.M
. and my brain wasn’t working on all cylinders.

The lane leading to my apartment is covered with oyster shells that have leeched lime and become hardened by rain into a concrete-hard surface. Australian pines, mossy oaks, sea grape, and palms line one side of the drive, and the other side edges the sandy beach. It’s a private drive with a sign at its entrance proclaiming it not for public access, but people turn into it anyway and nose down to see what lies at its end.

On most of Siesta Key, a private road like ours will take the curious to a multimillion-dollar house whose owners are readily recognizable from movies or book jackets or TV talk shows. Our road leads to a weathered two-bedroom house where my brother and his partner live, and to a detached four-slot carport with an upstairs apartment where I live. My grandfather bought the house from Sears, Roebuck in the fifties for a thousand dollars, now the house and garage apartment together are worth about fifty cents. The beachfront property they sit on is worth about five million. Or at least that’s what we’ve
been offered for it. We wouldn’t sell at any price, so it doesn’t matter.

Michael and Paco were in the carport putting away fishing gear, both with the bleezy, sun-blasted look that men get when they’ve happily spent arduous hours sweating and squinting at a blazing sea. Michael is thirty-four, blond and blue-eyed like me, but a lot taller and wider. He’s a fireman, and when he’s suited up in his fire-fighting gear he’s roughly the size of Sasquatch. Women fling themselves at Michael the way mating lovebugs splat themselves on car windshields in the spring. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them bear razor scars on their wrists at the futility of it, because he and Paco have been together for over twelve years and counting.

As slim and dark as Michael is blond and broad, Paco is with the Sheriff’s Department’s SIB—Special Investigative Bureau—which means he gets involved in cases that require him to take on disguises his own mother wouldn’t recognize. Cases that we don’t question him about. Michael is my best friend in the whole world, and Paco is my second-best friend. When I lost Todd and Christy, Michael and Paco sort of sandwiched me between them and kept the world out until I was ready for it.

Michael works twenty-four/forty eight at the firehouse, which means a twenty-four-hour shift on, followed by forty-eight hours off. He usually spends his off-time fishing. Paco works mysterious hours that nobody can predict, many of them after midnight. When he isn’t working or sleeping, he goes out in the boat with Michael. I never do. I love to look at the Gulf and I love the sound and smell of it, but I don’t like being on it. It’s too big and willful for me. I don’t much like things I can’t control, at least a little bit.

I got out of the Bronco and shaded my eyes against the
glare. Out in the Gulf, sunlight sparked diamonds off glittering waves undulating toward the beach where they gently exploded into lacy white froth. A few gulls half-heartedly squawked and spiraled overhead, but most of them had retreated to shady nooks for a siesta.

I said, “What’d you get?”

“Some nice pompano. A couple of snapper.”

“There was a dead man in one of my houses this morning.”

They both stopped what they were doing and stared at me with identical expressions of shocked concern. I felt like a kid with a great Show and Tell.

“Marilee Doerring’s house,” I said. “I found him in the kitchen with blood on the back of his head and his nose taped in the cat’s water bowl. I’m not supposed to tell the part about the water bowl yet.”

Michael said, “Well hell, Dixie. What’d you do?”

“Called nine one one. Sergeant Owens came out, and a detective I never heard of before. Paco, do you know a guy named Guidry?”

“Nope, must be somebody new.”

Having delivered my impressive news, I said, “Well, I’m going to go take a nap,” and left them staring after me as I dragged my weary butt upstairs to my little private world.

I have a wide covered porch, a living room with a one-stool breakfast bar and galley kitchen at the side, and a bedroom barely big enough for a single bed, a nightstand, and a double dresser. Photographs of Todd and Christy sit on the dresser. They’re the last things I see before I turn off the lamp, and the first things I see when I get up in the morning.

Off the bedroom, I have a tiny bathroom, a laundry room, and a big walk-in closet that doubles as an office. It’s where I handle my pet-sitting business—at a desk in a
windowless cubicle in front of a wall of shelves holding folded Ts and shorts and jeans, Keds and sandals and a couple pairs of heels. A lone rod across the short end holds a few dresses and skirts.

I went inside just long enough to go to the bathroom and check my answering machine. I had three calls from women asking for my pet-sitting rates. I didn’t return any of the calls. I’d already had way more than my daily quota of people, and the day was only half over.

I went back to the porch, switched on both ceiling fans, and lowered myself into the hammock strung in the corner. The surf was tumbling in its endless rhythm and gulls squawked overhead. My thoughts tumbled and squawked along with them as I let the terrible truth of the morning settle in. A man’s life had been taken, and whoever did it had made sure his dignity was stripped away, too. I felt personally violated. I didn’t know him, but he was a fellow human being.

I drifted to sleep and dreamed that Christy was running on the beach throwing chunks of bread to the seagulls, laughing into the sky as they swooped down to catch them in their beaks. Her hair was almost white in the sunshine, and it bounced on her shoulders from a ponytail high on the back of her head. I was thinking I’d let her play until all the bread was gone and then call her into the shade so she wouldn’t burn.

I woke up without knowing I was awake, with the edges of the dream blending with the sounds of the gulls and the surf. I lay there for a moment with my eyes shut before I realized it had just been a dream.

Those of us who’ve lost loved ones to terrorists or religious fanatics or doped-up drivers or some other senseless violence ask, “Why? Why? Why?” But after a while, the question becomes “Why not?” Why should we get to have our loved ones around us when people all over the
world are keening the loss of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, lovers? So many people dying for so little reason.

Todd and Christy were killed when a ninety-year-old man slammed his Cadillac into them in a Publix parking lot. If I say it fast like that, I can keep my voice even, but just.

Todd and I had talked on the phone before he left to pick Christy up at day care. “We need some milk and Cheerios,” I said. “I think we’re out of orange juice, too.”

“Christy and I will get it on our way home,” he said. “See you a little after six.”

For the rest of my life, I’ll play that conversation over and over in my head, wishing I could rewind it and do it over, wishing I had said, I love you, my darling, and I always will, wishing I had told him how safe he made me feel, how protected and cherished.

He and Christy were both killed instantly. Todd was thirty. Christy was three.

The man who hit them said he had accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake. He felt terrible about it. His son came to see me after the funeral and told me his father was a good man who had resisted giving up his independence even after macular degeneration had robbed him of most of his sight. Florida allows people to renew their driver’s license over the phone, so he had just kept driving in spite of his family’s objections. The son said he had taken the car away from his father after the accident, and that his father had wept every day since it happened. From grief and guilt, he said, not just because he couldn’t drive. As if that made us even.

For a long time I was so consumed by anger that it almost destroyed me. Anger at the state for allowing people to renew their driver’s license without an eye exam. Anger at a man for continuing to drive after his vision
and reflexes were shot. Anger at his family for not taking his car away sooner. In the end, forgiveness came not because I stopped feeling the gash of bitterness, but because I was exhausted by it. My anger has settled down from a flaming roar to a dull simmer now, like a volcano that seems calm but may erupt when you least expect it. It’s the volcanic part that’s the problem, the part I can’t control—especially if I see somebody abusing a child or a pet. Then I go totally apeshit, and there’s no telling what I’ll do.

I got up feeling flushed and swollen and went inside and stood in front of the open refrigerator and glugged an entire bottle of cold water. I carried another bottle to my closet office, and put in a call to Lieutenant Guidry. He wasn’t in, so I left my number. Then I called Shuga Reasnor.

She answered the phone on the first ring, and her voice had that mix of desperation and annoyance that people get when they’ve been hovering around a phone for a long time hoping it would ring.

I said, “It’s Dixie Hemingway, Ms. Reasnor. I just wanted to ask you something. Do you know Dr. Coffey?”

She waited so long to answer that I thought for a moment she might have laid the phone down and walked away. Then she said, “Why do you ask?”

“I saw him in the Village Diner, and I asked him if he knew where Marilee might have gone. I thought since they were engaged, he might have some idea. He got very angry. Wouldn’t even talk to me. It seemed odd.”

“He’s odd. He’s mean and he’s odd. Stay away from him. Don’t talk to him about Marilee.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous? Do you think he might have been the one who killed the man in Marilee’s house? Jealous, maybe?”

“Gerald Coffey’s too big a coward to kill anybody. He might hire somebody to do it, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”

“But you think he might do that? Hire somebody?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said he didn’t have the balls to kill anybody himself.”

“If you think of anything that the Sheriff’s Department ought to know about Dr. Coffey, I hope you’ll tell them.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I knew she wasn’t going to tell Guidry about Coffey. Shuga Reasnor didn’t sound like a woman anxious to help in the investigation. In fact, she sounded like a woman with something to hide.

I spent the next hour attending to business. I called the people who wanted to know my rates, which is twenty dollars a day to make a morning and afternoon visit. If they want a sitter in the house overnight, it’s forty dollars. For twenty-four-hour care, the fee is sixty dollars. Most pets are accustomed to being home by themselves during the day, but I have a crew of retirees who do sleepovers and round-the-clock care.

All my fees are spelled out in a contract I have my clients sign, along with our respective responsibilities. If a pet becomes ill and needs medical care when the owners are gone, I pay for it. If some disaster happens that causes water to be shut off or the pet to have to be evacuated, I supply whatever is needed, including new quarters. When the owners return, they reimburse me for my expenses. Taking on the care of a beloved pet while its owners are away is like taking on the care of a child. I have to trust the owners, and they have to trust me.

The first woman said she had found somebody else, and the next one slammed down the phone when I told her my rates, as if I’d said something obscene. The other woman said she thought they were extremely reasonable.

Everything is relative. I made an appointment to stop by the approving woman’s house to meet her cat and get the pertinent information, then spent the rest of the hour entering the morning’s visits into my client records.

I keep meticulous records, recording the date and time I arrived, the time I left, and what I did while I was there, along with notes about anything a pet needed or did that was out of the ordinary. If a pet has a medical condition that requires medications or vitamins or treatments, that’s recorded. I have the history of illnesses, injuries, and pregnancies, along with the dates of all immunizations, the number on the animal’s ID tag, and whether it’s been declawed, spayed, or neutered. I know each pet’s preferences in food, toys, TV programs, and music. I’m probably too compulsive about keeping all that information, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Someday it might be important to know precisely when I gave a bath or a vitamin or a prescription medication.

At four o’clock, I got a banana from its special little hanger in the kitchen and ate it as I went down to the carport. A great blue heron standing on the hood of the Bronco watched me as I got a sixty-watt lightbulb out of the storage closet. I tossed the last bite of banana toward the shore, and the heron fluttered to the sand to get it. I threw the peel in the garbage can, got in the Bronco, and drove back to the Graysons’ house, where Rufus was ecstatic to see me. We played a short game of roll the ball on the living room floor before his supper. While Rufus ate, I hauled out a ladder from the garage and changed the burned-out bulb in the coach light. I put the ladder away, closed the garage door, and brought in the Graysons’ mail. I checked the house for any doggy accidents, giving the carousel horse a pat on the rump as I walked by. Everything was in order, and I washed Rufus’s food and water bowls and gave him fresh water before we went for
a walk. We walked the quarter block to Midnight Pass Road and jogged past the wooded area, where Rufus insisted on stopping to bark at unseen squirrels or rabbits. I finally persuaded him to walk with me to Marilee Doerring’s street.

A deputy’s car was in Marilee’s driveway and the crime-scene tape was still on the door, but there were no CSU cars. That meant the ME had come and put the body in a bag and taken it away, but the forensics people weren’t finished getting photos, latent prints, hair, fiber, and all the other evidence they gather. Next door at the Winnick house, a yard vacuum lay in the driveway with an orange extension cord snaking under the partially opened garage door.

I parked behind the deputy’s car and went to his open window. He was making notes, and he looked up at me with the flat, impersonal look that law-enforcement people learn.

I said, “Hi, I’m Dixie Hemingway. I found the dead man this morning, and I told Detective Guidry I’d stop by this afternoon when I was in the neighborhood.”

“He’s not here.”

“Okay, I’ll call him later. Thanks.”

Rufus was contemplating a bird of paradise plant as if he thought it needed to be peed on, so I pulled his leash and started back down the driveway. Passionate piano music started coming from the Winnicks’ house, and I turned my head that way. Now that I knew it was the kid practicing and not the radio or a CD, I was truly impressed. Not that I know diddly about classical music. My taste runs more to jazz and blues and country, but I know
talent when I hear it, and the kid could play. Even Rufus cocked his head and listened with doggy respect.

Mrs. Winnick suddenly rose from behind a row of low shrubs between the two lots and walked rapidly around to the driveway. She wasn’t wearing gardening gloves or carrying a trowel or any other gardening tools, and I had the distinct impression that she had been hiding behind the shrubs. She seemed to deliberately avoid looking my way. Maybe she was pissed that I hadn’t told her about the murder.

She leaned down to get the handle of her yard vac and switched it on, intently looking at the driveway and moving the wand back and forth over the pavement. She wore black stretch Lycra tights with a boxy white T that stopped at her hipbones. Except for her skinny butt, her body was surprisingly muscular. Her butt wasn’t muscular. It was the kind that hangs in two saggy loops, like basset ears.

Rufus and I retraced our walk toward his street. At the wooded area, where an abandoned drive disappeared into the trees, he stopped and barked again, tugging eagerly at the leash. The wooded swath between Marilee’s street and Rufus’s street is about fifty feet wide, and runs all the way from Midnight Pass Road to the bay. A wooden fence runs along both sides to separate it from people’s backyards. Originally, it spanned a private driveway to a house on a peninsular extension into the bay. The owners had died years ago and the property was frozen in some kind of litigation for so long that the house fell apart and the land leading to it reverted to its original wild state. A useless metal gate stretched across the old shelled drive as mute testimony of how quickly nature reclaims its own.

I explained to Rufus that the woods were too brambly for dogs and women in shorts, and he reluctantly abandoned the idea of exploring it. When we got to his house,
I turned on some lights and the kitchen radio and he and I kissed each other goodbye.

My next stop was across Midnight Pass Road at the Sea Breeze, a pink stucco honeycomb of condos tucked into a slim slice of land at the edge of the Gulf. Every condo has a curved stucco roof over its balcony, so the balconies look like dark caves cut into the side of a mountain. The whole thing resembles an excavated Indian ruin. Inside, it’s anything but a ruin, with a marbled lobby dotted with great urns of green things and tasteful paintings by local artists. Sarasota probably has more artists per capita than anyplace in the world, so it’s not hard to find good art here.

I took the stainless-steel and mirrored elevator up to Tom Hale’s condo. Tom is a round man—rosy round face, warm round black eyes behind round steel-rimmed glasses, round head of curly black hair, round little belly that rests lightly on his lap. Until a wall of shelves at a home-improvement store fell on him and crushed his lower spine, Tom headed a large CPA firm. He had gone to pick up some piano wire to hang a large painting in the house he shared with his wife and two children, but you know how it is, you can’t go to one of those places without wandering around looking at all the neat stuff. As he remembers it, he had no reason to walk down the aisle between towering stacks of lumber and ready-to-hang doors. Nobody ever knew what caused the shelves to topple over, but they did, spilling all their contents onto the floor and anybody who happened to be there. Luckily, only one other person was in the aisle at the time, and he escaped with a concussion and broken arms. Tom wasn’t so lucky.

He sued, of course, but it took several years before the case finally settled, and by that time his CPA firm was kaput because he’d spent so much time having surgery and
learning how to function in a wheelchair. The lawyers for the store claimed that he was partly responsible for his own pain and paralysis because he was an intelligent man and should have known better than to walk down that aisle. The jury didn’t buy that argument, and they awarded Tom half a million dollars. His lawyers got half, plus reimbursement for all their expenses. Then his wife divorced him because she couldn’t bear living with a man in a wheelchair, and she and the children moved to Boston where her parents lived. In the divorce settlement, she got most of the money that was left, and Tom got a studio apartment in the Sea Breeze. The only thing standing between him and utter loneliness was a greyhound named Billy Elliot, a former racing dog that Tom had rescued. I suppose Tom identified with the dog.

Tom and I trade services. He does my taxes and I go by twice a day and walk Billy Elliot for him. I could hear Billy Elliot’s nervous toenails skittering on the marble floor before I opened the door. He started to jump on me when I came in, then crouched in fear when I held my palm flat and said, “Down!” It always breaks my heart to see a dog cower like that, because it’s a clear signal the dog has been beaten in the past.

I knelt beside him and stroked his smooth neck. “You’d feel terrible if you jumped on somebody and knocked them down,” I said. “That’s why jumping’s not allowed.”

He thumped his tail on the floor and grinned hopefully at me. From the kitchen, Tom yelled, “Hey, Dixie! Come tell me about that dead man!”

Billy Elliot followed me in and stood whipping my legs with his tail while I gave Tom the condensed version of finding a dead man in Marilee’s kitchen.

Tom said, “Have they contacted Marilee?”

“We don’t know where she is. She didn’t leave me a number.”

“Maybe her grandmother would know.”

“Marilee has a grandmother?”

“Everybody has a grandmother, Dixie. Marilee has one who lives at Bayfront Village. Name is Cora Mathers.”

It was news to me that Tom and Marilee knew each other, but Tom did taxes for a lot of people on the key.

I said, “Wasn’t Cora Mathers the
Leave It to Beaver
mother?”

“No, that was June Cleaver. Ward and June Cleaver. The kid who played the Beaver was Jerry Mathers. Maybe his mother’s name was Cora.”

“I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“He probably bought his own island or something. Unless somebody screwed up and he didn’t get the money from all those shows.”

“You think it would be okay if I called Cora?”

“Oh, sure. From what Marilee’s told me about her, she’s a pistol.”

Billy Elliot whuffed sharply, letting us know that he had enjoyed as much of our chitchat as he could stand. He and I took the elevator downstairs, and as soon as I thought we were far enough away from the front door, I let him pee on a bush. Then he stretched his body out and took off like he was back on the track chasing a fake rabbit. Even fattened up since his racing days, he was still faster than most dogs, and I ran behind him like a maniac. When we finally stopped, I had to bend over and take deep breaths while he pranced around and gave me annoyed little huffs because I had slowed him down. We trotted back to the Sea Breeze and took the elevator back upstairs, where I unsnapped his leash and stored it away. Tom was busy with somebody’s return and merely grunted and waved as I left.

It was close to eight o’clock when I fed the last cat and went home. Michael and Paco were on the terrace between the house and the carport, firing up the grill.

Michael said, “Hurry up, Dixie, we’re waiting for you.”

I ran upstairs, peeled off my clothes, and tossed them and my Keds on top of the things already in the washer. I took a quick shower, toweled my body and hair dry, and pulled on a short strapless cotton dress and some flip-flops. My answering machine was blinking, so before I went downstairs, I punched the play button and got Shuga Reasnor’s voice.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “And I’d like to talk to you some more about the cat. Could you come to my place? Please call me as soon as you can. Or just come on by. I’ll be here all day.” She left her address and hung up, and the machine’s robotic voice announced that the call had come in at 4:37. I glared at the machine. I didn’t want to go see the woman, and I didn’t want to call her back.

I took a deep breath and dialed her number. I got her machine, which thrilled me so much that I punched my fist into the air in a “Yes!” sign.

Shuga’s recorded voice said, “You have reached…” and gave her phone number. Why do people give you their phone number when you’ve just called it?

Talking fast in case she was monitoring her calls and might pick up, I said, “Miss Reasnor, this is Dixie Hemingway. I got your message, and I’ll try to stop by your place tomorrow morning around nine o’clock.”

I was so relieved that I didn’t have to talk to Shuga Reasnor three times in one day that I almost skipped down the stairs to the terrace, where the outdoor table was set, the grill was ready, and the wine was chilling in a bucket.

Michael said, “Well, the queen has arrived, so we can eat.”

I stuck out my tongue at him, and Paco shook his head. “You two are so mature,” he said.

Michael is the cook of the family. Even when we were kids, he was the family cook. He’s the cook at the firehouse, too. Michael believes that George Foreman’s grill has done more for the civilized world than Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he loves to do things that take a long time, like ribs and briskets and turkeys.

Michael was four and I was two when our mother left us the first time. Our father was pulling a twenty-four-hour shift at the firehouse and didn’t know she had gone, so Michael took care of us until he got home. He fed us cold cereal with milk until we ran out of milk, and then we ate cold dry cereal. He climbed on a chair and got the peanut butter jar from the cupboard, and he found a jar of grape jelly in the refrigerator. We didn’t have any bread, so we ate it with a spoon.

When our father came home, he found us curled up together like puppies, jelly-smeared and confused, but none the worse for wear. Our mother came back in a few days, and our life took up as if she’d never been gone. She left us for good when I was nine and Michael was eleven. Our father had died putting out a fire by then, so we went to live with our grandparents in their house on the Gulf. Now we’ve come full circle. Michael moved back into the house when our grandparents died, and I moved into the garage apartment after Todd and Christy died. And Michael’s still feeding me.

We were so practiced at getting dinner together that we all went into action like a circus act. Michael brushed olive oil on three pompano, dusted them with salt and pepper, and stretched them on the grill. Paco brought out
a big wooden bowl of salad and a tray of sliced eggplant and zucchini from the kitchen, and I slathered the veggie slices with oil. Michael laid them on the grill with the pompano, and Paco tossed the salad with olive oil and lemon juice. Michael turned the fish, and I poured the wine. Michael turned the veggies, and Paco pulled out my chair. Michael flipped pompano and veggies onto a platter, and Paco and I grabbed our forks.

If there’s any better way to end a day than sitting on a terrace with your favorite people while you eat fresh-caught fish and watch a spectacular sunset, I’ve never found it. The men had shaved and changed out of their scrungy shorts and sweatshirts with the sleeves cut out. Michael wore white linen pants and a crisp cotton shirt with thin blue and white stripes, and Paco had on black pants and a white linen shirt. Easy with themselves and the world, they exuded that special masculine energy that goes along with vibrant health and well-honed muscles. There were women all over Sarasota who would have given one of their ovaries to be with either of them, and I had them both. I also had their undivided attention.

Over dinner, I told them everything I knew about the murder. I told them about finding the lanai door open and the bedroom and closet ransacked, and about finding the dead body. About leaving Ghost with Mrs. Winnick and how weird she was, and about meeting Dr. Win and how it had looked like the Winnicks had just had a fight. I gave them a word-by-word account of my conversation with Guidry and told about speaking to Dr. Coffey and Shuga Reasnor. I told them what Judy had said about Marilee and how she’d dumped Dr. Coffey, and about his bimbo girlfriend coming out of cocaine alley.

At appropriate intervals, one or both of them said, “Huh,” and when I mentioned Dr. Win, they both twisted their mouths to simulate throwing up. They were espe
cially interested in the gross details about the dead man, and shook their heads with prim disapproval when I told them how Marilee had conned Dr. Coffey. I guess men don’t get much pleasure out of hearing how a woman has tricked a man into giving her a million dollars.