Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues (18 page)

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Authors: Blaize Clement

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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.
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 them 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.
The living room wasn’t lit, but through the glass wall I could see flames leaping in the fireplace. It was almost eighty degrees outside, and he had a fire. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. Ken Kurtz seemed almost as
cold-blooded as Ziggy. While I waited for him to come to the door, I remembered there had been a basket of firewood by the fireplace. Fire must be important to Kurtz.
His shadowy form moved past the window toward the door faster than he had moved before. Perhaps all the excitement of the guard’s murder and Gilda’s disappearance had given him a spurt of new energy. Or maybe it was the food I’d brought him from Anna’s. Maybe real food had cured the guy, the way menudo had cured my concussion.
He opened the door in the same bedraggled bathrobe he’d worn before and stepped aside to let me in without speaking. The house was like an oven.
I said, “Hello, Mr. Kurtz.”
I didn’t see any point in telling him his house was being picketed by religious fanatics. The man had enough problems without knowing that.
Ziggy had left the dry sauna and was running up and down the corridors. Iguanas only poop once every three or four days, and from the hint of desperation in his scurrying, I had a feeling this was the day.
I said, “It’s eighty degrees outside. Shall I put Ziggy out?”
Kurtz flapped his blue hands. “Take him out. He needs the fresh air.”
I opened one of the sliders to the courtyard and went to Ziggy’s side. Kurtz seemed to lose interest and shuffled down the corridor toward the living room. Keeping a wary eye on Ziggy’s tail, I got ready to slip my arms under his body and grab his legs to lift him. But he stuck out his tongue and tasted fresh air from the
open slider and scampered out, heading straight for a clump of hibiscus bushes.
Remembering that my grandfather’s iguana had also preferred to poop on the roots of hibiscus, I grinned and went to the hospital-white kitchen to gather Ziggy’s fruits and vegetables for the day. Most of the leftovers from Anna’s were still in the fridge, so Kurtz wasn’t in danger of starving. For Ziggy, I sliced zucchini and yellow squash, bananas and pineapple, added romaine and swiss chard, and carried them outside in a big wooden bowl.
I said, “Hey, Zig, I brought you some goodies.”
With an extra-satisfied smile on his face, he bobbed his head and sniffed me with his tongue. He was beginning to associate me with food, so I smelled good to him.
I knelt to set the bowl on the ground, and Ziggy raised himself on his front legs and flicked out his tongue to smell it. That’s when I saw the telltale evidence of an indwelling tunneled catheter low on his chest wall—not like Kurtz’s ordinary PICC line that any good nurse can insert, but one like my grandfather had in the months before he died—the kind that is surgically inserted directly into the large vein that enters the heart.
Somebody had been giving Ziggy transfusions or withdrawing blood, and on a regular basis. But why? And what was the connection to the catheter in Kurtz’s arm?
The implications made me dizzy, but so did everything else in this weird house.
I left Ziggy eating his dinner and went looking for Kurtz. He was in the wine room, moving slowly down
the line of bottles as if he were taking inventory. In the eerie red light, his bluish skin looked faintly puce.
He said, “Did you feed the iguana?”
It was another moment when I had a choice. I could keep my mouth shut and walk out the front door and go home. Or I could open my big mouth and then walk out the front door and go home.
I said, “I promised Jessica Ballantyne that I’d give you this message—
Ziggy is no longer an option. You must act now
.”
I turned and almost made it across the living room before Kurtz shouted at me. “Dixie! For the love of God, please!”
Sap that I am, I turned to look back at him. In the red-lit door to the wine room, he stood with both arms pressed overhead against the door frame. With his arms raised like that, his bathrobe sleeves had drooped over his sinewy arms, exposing the gauze dressing on the inside of one elbow.
“Jessie’s alive?”
“She said you abandoned her.”
He pulled his arms down and sagged against the doorway. “How does she look?”
“As opposed to what? She looked okay to me, but then I don’t know her from Adam’s off ox, so I really can’t say if she looked unusually good or not. All I know is that somebody she called
they
are tapping your phone and that you’re in danger. She’s the one who set the fire last night, at which time, by the way, somebody hit me on the head and gave me a concussion. So thank you very much for involving me in your life, Mr. Kurtz. So far it’s been a real pleasure.”
“Jessie was here last night?”
“She said you ran out on her, that you left her to die. Evidently she loves you anyway, because she wants to warn you about
them,
whoever
they
are.”
“I wouldn’t have left her there! I thought she was dead. They said she was dead.”
“Would these
they
be the same
they
who are watching you now?”
He wiped his hand against his face. “Jesus. I have to see her.”
“I don’t think so. From what she said, she can get in a whole lot of trouble from
them
if they find out she’s trying to help you.”
“Of course. Good God.”
I said, “Okay, I’ve delivered the message, and I’ve told you everything she told me. That’s all I’m going to do. It’s all I can do. You people have used me sixteen ways from Thursday, and I’m going home now and leave you to whatever it is that you’re doing. There’s just one thing—I saw the catheter in Ziggy. If you’re hurting him, I won’t be so nice and cooperative. You understand?”
He gestured toward the chairs in front of the fireplace. “Please, I’d like to explain.”
Okay, now we were getting somewhere. I dropped into a chair and waited until Kurtz had shuffled to a chair across from me. The fireplace was unpleasantly warm, but in its flickering amber light Kurtz didn’t look so sick.
He said, “Not that it makes what I’m going to tell you any more palatable but I’m a veterinary microbiologist
and pathologist with a long list of degrees and appointments.”
I raised an eyebrow, meaning
What the heck does that have to do with anything?
“I just want you to know that I’m not a mad scientist, never have been.”
“Okay, so you’re a professional.”
“Jessica and I were both bizogenetic researchers for the army.”
“Our army?”
He smiled. “I’m not a foreign terrorist, Dixie.”
Maybe not, but I had a feeling he might be a native terrorist, which in some ways is even worse.
“In the beginning, we were trying to develop vaccines or antidotes for a host of animal diseases that we expect to see in humans in the future. Some of them have already popped up here and there, like the outbreak of SARS, which originated in an obscure wild animal in China, or the West Nile virus, which originates in horses. A disease that’s benign in animals can be fatal to humans, and when a disease leaps from animals to humans, it can become highly contagious. Look at what happened with the bubonic plague. It spread from rats to humans via fleas, and in five years it wiped out a third of the European population. The next plague will probably come from poultry in Southeast Asia.”
His eyes had taken on the shine of enthusiasm that people have when they talk about something that gets their juices flowing. Even his voice seemed stronger and more confident.
I hated to be the ant at his picnic, but I said, “And then what happened?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you were developing vaccines in the beginning. What happened after the beginning?”
He took a deep breath, and the shine left his eyes.
“Then somebody in a position of power decided that a disease that began in animals and was fatal to humans could be a useful weapon. If we could find a way to create and disseminate an interspecies disease in a controlled way, we could wipe out an entire nest of terrorists or an entire population that we believed posed a threat to world peace.”
Hearing somebody talk about widespread killing in order to bring about world peace always makes me want to projectile vomit, but I kept quiet.
He said, “The army contracted with a civilian company to take responsibility for the work, but basically the same researchers continued doing what we had always been doing. We just had different employers. Our assignment was to develop a fatal disease that we could test on an isolated island in Southeast Asia.” Looking quickly at my face, he said, “Fewer than a thousand inhabitants, virtually no outside contact. It was an ideal testing locale, especially in the event that biocontainment was breached. That happens sooner or later in any animal disease lab, but in our location any accidentally released virus would disperse over the ocean.”
With a bitter grimace, he added, “We never expected the ocean to turn on us.”
“You lived there, on the island?”
“Yes, we lived among the people we planned to kill.”
“And did you? Did you kill them?”
A ripple of pain moved across his face. “We were just doing our job, Dixie. But no, we didn’t kill them. We killed our fellow researchers instead. Not by intent, of course—it was purely accidental. I imagine you find a poetic justice in that.”
I shrugged. “What’s the quotation,
He who lives by the sword dies by the sword
? I suppose that applies to those who live by diabolical research too.”
“You call it diabolical. We thought of it as exploring the limits of genetic engineering.”
“Okay. So what happened?”
Wearily, he said, “Our biocontainment lab was in a secret underground installation under a concrete complex that housed legitimate biotechnology laboratories. Our basement lab was divided into zones separated by heavy air-lock doors that opened and closed by a computer code known only to the senior researchers. The air pressure steadily decreased toward the central zone, where we kept freezers full of frozen viruses. That way, any stray pathogens would flow inward and up through a large particulate filter.”
He fell silent for a moment, as if he had to summon the courage to tell the rest of what he intended to say. I didn’t pressure him. I know all too well that some memories are too awful to tell all in one burst.
He said, “From the beginning, those of us in charge of the project were concerned about the fact that the air locks couldn’t be opened manually. We wanted a manual option in case of a power failure, but every time we complained, we got a runaround about the expense, or
the possibility of losing our secrecy, or some other bureaucratic crap.”

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