Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues (3 page)

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Authors: Blaize Clement

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Michael stuck his head out his kitchen door and yelled, “Want some breakfast?”
Michael cooks the way other people breathe; it’s a necessary rhythm to his life. If the world were poised for a direct hit from a meteor, Michael would probably ladle out soup. Since he’s one of the world’s best chefs, a lot of doomed people would line up to get it and feel a lot more cheerful about their prospects.
Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the chance to have one of Michael’s breakfasts, but I didn’t want him scrutinizing me this morning. He had been almost as traumatized as I was by the things that happened after I found the last dead man. If he learned I’d found another one, he was liable to insist that I get another line of work. One that didn’t have so many corpses in it.
I said, “No, thanks. I just came home to get the Bronco. I’ve still got two cats and an iguana.”
His face brightened. “No kidding? An iguana?”
“Yep. Haven’t met him yet.”
We grinned at each other with one of those coded memory-smiles that siblings have. Our grandfather had brought home a near-dead baby iguana when Michael was about twelve, and we had helped give it round-the-clock antibiotics sold for chickens—iguanas and chickens, having evolved from the same reptilian ancestor, have identical respiratory and digestive systems. By the time the baby iguana had gone from sick black to healthy green, Michael and I were both enchanted with it. For reasons that now escape me, we named it Bobby.
My grandmother never took to Bobby the way the rest of us did, and when he grew to be about four feet long, she banished him from the house. He lived the rest of his life in the trees, just coming down to nibble on the hibiscus and eat fruits and vegetables we left out for him. Except for a time when he sacrificed his tail to some unknown predator, his life was peaceful. His tail grew back darker and shorter than the original, but he seemed quite happy. He lived over ten years and died during an unexpected freeze that wiped out Florida’s citrus crop. When he died, our grandfather wept. Neither Michael nor I had ever seen our grandfather shed a tear before, and his grief over an iguana’s death had been as sobering as losing Bobby.
In the carport, a couple of great blue herons were sitting on the hood of my Bronco, where they’d taken shelter from the rain. Down on the shore, black gulls were putting on an aerialist show a few feet above the waves, while a few snowy egrets ignored them and made fresh tracks in the sand as they gathered up sand crabs washed in by the rain. I shooed the herons away and pulled the Bronco out of the carport onto the drive that winds to Midnight Pass Road. I told myself I wasn’t going to think about the dead guard again, but I knew I was lying.
For the next hour, I concentrated on feeding and grooming the two cats on my schedule. I played chase-the-peacock-feather with each of them, and I cleaned their litter boxes. Before I left them, I turned on their TV sets—the wild-life channel, but with the sound muted—and made sure they had plenty of fresh water. They both gave me a couple of tail swishes to let me
know they approved of my performance and then pretended to ignore me when I left. I love that about cats. They may be secretly gloating that they’ve made a human wait on them like they’re royalty, but they never lose their cool and actually show what they’re feeling. I wish I were more like a cat.
When I finished grooming the second cat, I checked the iguana’s address again and headed north, looking for the number. For private houses, street numbers are rare along that stretch of Midnight Pass Road. The general attitude is that nobody has any business going to a person’s house if they don’t already know where they live anyway, so why post street numbers just for the curious?
When I drove past the mansion with the dead guard in the guardhouse, I allowed my head to turn and look down the drive. Two ambulances, three green-and-white sheriff’s cars, and a Medical Examiner’s van were parked along the edge of the drive. At least I could stop worrying that the murdered guard was still alone in there.
A block or so later, I saw a street number and realized I’d passed the iguana’s house. I pulled into a condo parking lot and doubled back, driving slowly while I tried to find another house number. At the driveway to the guardhouse, the Bronco sort of turned itself in, and I sat staring at the crime scene cars while a horrible realization trickled into my brain.
My new iguana client lived in the house where the guard had been shot in the head.
I parked behind the sheriff’s vehicles and crawled out of the Bronco like a possum slinking out of a tree. The last thing I wanted was to explain to the crime-scene people why I was there.
Sergeant Woodrow Owens saw me first. A pained expression crossed his face, and he put his hand over his eyes for a moment like he hoped I was an apparition that would go away. Sergeant Owens is a tall, loose-jointed, sad-eyed African American who, if he were a dog, would be a basset hound. He was my commanding officer when I was a deputy. When Todd and Christy were killed and everybody else expected me to get my act together and come back to work, it was Sergeant Owens who finally had the grit to tell me the honest truth—I was way too fucked up to carry a gun for the county. I’ve always respected him for coming right out and saying it and not pussyfooting around. There’s something reassuring about having your own emotional instability recognized and authenticated. Once that’s done, you can get on with the business of
getting through life without the added stress of trying to fake normal.
He said, “Dixie, I’m almost afraid to ask why you’re here.”
I said, “I have a pet client in this house.”
“You know Kurtz?”
“Who?”
“Ken Kurtz, the man who lives here.”
So that was his name. Not Curtis, like I’d written when we talked.
“Never met him, but he called last night and asked me to come today and feed his iguana.”
I glanced at the yellow crime-scene tape around the guardhouse and tried to look innocent. “What’s going on?”
“Somebody shot the guard.”
“Anybody else hurt?”
“Just the guard.”
Well, that was a relief.
Sergeant Owens said, “When Kurtz called you, did he say where he was?”
“New York. He said he’d be home today.”
“You get a number?”
I felt myself redden. Heck, I hadn’t even got the man’s name right.
“He hung up before I could, and the ID thing said NUMBER UNAVAILABLE.”
“Okay, come with me.”
He went loping off down the driveway toward the areca palm hedge so fast I had to trot to keep up with him. Beyond the hedge, the driveway curved and widened to a four-car garage. At first I thought the garage
formed one wing of an L-shaped single-story house, but then I realized the house was built around a courtyard with a tall oak tree in its center. Sergeant Owens made a sharp right angle and walked down a long paved path between the privacy hedge and the side wall of the garage. We passed an expanse of clear glass and stopped at double doors painted glossy lipstick red. I had seen so much Christmas stuff that morning that I caught myself thinking a tasteful pinecone wreath would have looked good on the red door, but it was bare.
Looking over his shoulder to make sure I was still with him, Sergeant Owens jabbed one bony finger at the bell, and then we both took a step back and gawked through the glass like people in a department store staring at whatever dumb show is being flashed across a row of TV screens. The living room was decorated in low-slung,honey-hued , leather-steel-and-polished-stone furnishings like you see in
Architectural Digest,
the sort of room that makes me want to run amok flinging cat hair and peanut shells.
The back wall was dominated by a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, with a wide hearth and a bunch of brass and black iron tools for poking and shoveling fire stuff. Good-sized flames were leaping in the thing right now, which was downright bizarre. I mean, the weather was chilly but not
that
chilly. Even having a fireplace that size was an anomaly on Siesta Key, since we have maybe two weeks a year when a fireplace is inviting. The rest of the time it makes you feel sweaty just to look at one. People on the key who can’t resist the nostalgic feel of a fireplace keep them small and unobtrusive, little hollows where they can grow bromeliads
or ferns, but this baby was meant for serious roaring fires.
A woman came streaking past the fireplace toward the front door, and Sergeant Owens and I got our faces into neutral expressions.
The woman who opened the door took the term “drop-dead gorgeous” to a whole new level. She was the kind of woman who makes me remember that my split ends need trimming, my eyebrows need shaping, I need a manicure, and a facial wouldn’t hurt. Not that she looked like she tried to be gorgeous, it was just how she was. Pale-gold Eurasian skin, almond-shaped topaz eyes, masses of long red curls carelessly caught up at the top of her head to cascade around a graceful neck. Sweeping eyelashes a foot long. Naturally rosy full lips, with a tiny dark beauty mark beside them, as if the angel who’d made her had been so carried away by the perfection he’d created that he’d taken a little brush and added a coded signature. Her hands were in thin latex gloves like surgeons use, and instead of a Miss America sash draped shoulder to hip she wore wrinkled blue-green surgical scrubs and white running shoes.
She smiled at Sergeant Owens, revealing even white teeth like the dentist uses as the ideal when he’s telling you it’s time to bleach yours. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sergeant Owens suck in his skinny stomach and straighten his sloping shoulders. I could only imagine what other male responses he was having.
Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, the pet sitter is here.”
He said it so smoothly that anybody would have thought he gave a gnat’s ass that I had arrived. He was up to something, I just didn’t know what.
She looked at me with a harder expression in her eyes than she’d shown Sergeant Owens.
“I do not understand.” She spoke with an accent—not Caribbean, not French, not South American, but something I couldn’t place—and enunciated each syllable carefully, the way people do when English isn’t their first language.
Sergeant Owens said, “The pet sitter that Mr. Kurtz hired. She’s here to do her job. So if you’ll just show her the …”
He turned to me with a look that said
Help me out here,
so I said, “Iguana.”
She drew back a bit as if I had threatened her, and her big eyes got even wider. Considering that a murder had been committed not fifty feet away, I wasn’t surprised that she was jumpy. What surprised me was that she seemed suddenly scared of me.
“But no, he did not. Is impossible. No. He did not call.”
I decided her accent was fake and opened my mouth to tell her how I felt about being called a liar. Sergeant Owens wrapped his bony hand around my arm and squeezed. His face was as bland as buttermilk, but his grip said
Watch your mouth, Dixie
—words he’d said more than once when I was a deputy.
He said, “Ma’am, I’d like to talk to Miz Hemingway for a minute. We’ll be back.”
He steered me down the walk to the front of the garage. The look on his face approached excitement, or at least what passed for excitement for Sergeant Owens.
He said, “Okay, Dixie, this is good. Let’s move on this. Something funny is going on in that house, but I
don’t have any valid reason to get a search warrant. Go in there and look the place over. I’ll square it with Lieutenant Guidry when he gets here.”
My heart did a little blip, either because Guidry would be the homicide detective on the case or because Sergeant Owens still had faith in my deputy skills, even though I hadn’t worn a badge in almost four years.
“Is that woman Mrs. Kurtz?”
“No, she’s Kurtz’s nurse. Or at least she says she is. She claims Kurtz is sick in bed, too drugged up to talk to me. See if you can find him.”
Without waiting for me to agree, he lurched back down the path with my arm still clamped in his big hand. The gorgeous woman was still in the open doorway, but now she looked as if she had remembered the influence she had on men and was ready to use it.
Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Is Gilda.”
He waited a beat for a last name and then smiled toothily. “Well, Gilda, I have to ask you to let Miz Hemingway come in and do her job.”
She shook her head so hard her trailing curls flew around her shoulders. “I say to you Mr. Kurtz no ask nobody to come. He no call nobody. Is impossible.”
She pronounced his name
Meester Koots,
and I decided the accent was too consistent to be phony.
Sergeant Owens gave her a loose-lipped grin and played the kind of dumb that only a really smart cop can play.
“Well, Gilda, I guess this time he did something by himself, now, didn’t he? He must be feeling stronger, is
what I’d say, so good for him. Now Miz Hemingway is just going to go in and make sure the whatchamacallit is okay. She won’t get in your way, will you, Miz Hemingway?”
He gave me a little shove while he talked, and Nurse Beauty was forced to step out of the way. Up close, she had a funny medicinal smell, sort of like the iodine my grandmother used to swear was the only thing that really killed germs dead. I walked fast into the living room, half expecting her to tackle me from behind. Instead, she slammed the door as hard as she could, I suppose to show her annoyance.
The room was even more impersonal than it had seemed through the glass. No Christmas stuff, no Hanukkah stuff. No flowers or plants, no books or magazines, no decorative objects, no framed snapshots. It looked as if a furniture company had delivered a truckload of expensive contemporary furniture one day and nobody had looked at it since. Except for the fire in the fireplace, the room had all the warmth of a morgue.
Over my shoulder, I said, “Where will I find Ziggy, ma’am?”
“Who?”
“Ziggy. That’s the iguana’s name, isn’t it?”
“Oh. I don’t … I don’t know.”
I stopped and turned, but she was looking off to the side with an apprehensive nervousness. Sergeant Owens was right. Something odd was going on, because she definitely didn’t want me inside the house.
I said, “He hasn’t been moved to a warm place?”
She gave a vague wave of her latex-gloved hand. “I do not know about animal.”
At temperatures lower than 60 degrees, iguanas begin to shut down. If they get too cold for very long, they die. Our temperature had been in the fifties for two or three nights.
A dragging sound came from around the corner, like the sound of tough iguana skin sliding across hard tile.
The nurse stiffened and raised her head, her topaz eyes darting side to side as if searching for a place to hide. Now I understood why Kurtz had wanted somebody else to feed his iguana. Some people are terrified of all reptiles, even the ones with four legs, and Kurtz’s nurse must be one of them.
I watched the floor, waiting for the first show of green lizard skin. What appeared was a man’s foot in heavy socks and slippers. When he came into full view, I felt an internal shudder of revulsion. I think I may actually have gasped. A haggard man, he wore a red plaid bathrobe loosely tied so that a lot of chest and lower leg were exposed, along with continent-shaped scars that glowed like abalone shell. His skin was a mottled plum-blue color that reminded me of a cadaver’s blood-puddled epidermis, and it was contorted by active minute contractions as if randomly jerked by internal wires. It gave his visage the quivering look of water’s surface when it’s being dimpled by fine rain droplets.
When I looked into his eyes, I saw such agony that I almost gasped again.
Involuntarily, I said, “I’m sorry.”
His voice was raspy and wheezing. “Yes, so am I.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. It’s a common reaction when people see me for the first time, a kind of kneejerk horror that such ugliness has a mind and a beating heart.”
“Actually, I meant I’m sorry you’re in so much pain.”
“Perhaps you can share your pity another time. For now, tell me who you are and what you’re doing in my house.”
Gilda said, “I say to her no, but policeman say I must let her in.”
He raised pain-glazed eyes to her. “Policeman?”
“Ramón has been in accident. Is hurt.”
I was getting fed up with her delicate twitchiness.
I said, “If Ramón was the guard, he wasn’t hurt, he was murdered. I’m here because a man who said his name was Ken Kurtz called me last night and asked me to come today and feed his iguana. My name is Dixie Hemingway. I’m a professional pet sitter.”
Both he and the nurse had gone very still, and for a second his bizarre skin seemed to pale.
In a guttural rasp, he said, “Don’t take me for a fool! Who sent you?”
I’d have traded six weeks of my life right then for a badge or a gun or at least a name tag that gave me a deputy’s authority. Since I didn’t have any kind of authority at all, I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.
“What is it with you people? I know you’ve had a bad experience here, but that’s no reason to be so damned rude. I was asked to do a job, and I’m here to do it. Now, do you want me to feed Ziggy or not?”

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