Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues (7 page)

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Authors: Blaize Clement

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Ziggy was still sluggish enough to spare me any tailwhipping resistance when I pulled him close again and carried him to Ken Kurtz’s gym. Kurtz didn’t even open his eyes when I sidled through his bedroom. I laid Ziggy on the floor of the spa, made sure the heat was set just warm enough for comfort but not warm enough to burn, and left him there. He looked a damn sight better than Kurtz. Lying back against his black satin pillows, Kurtz looked more comatose than asleep when I left his room.
I took the southern corridor back to the living room and slipped out the front door without telling anybody goodbye. I wanted to leave Ken Kurtz’s house and never come back, but there was a good possibility Ziggy hadn’t eaten in at least three days, and I hadn’t seen anything that remotely resembled vegetables and fruit for him. Even though I’d been tricked into taking the job, I felt responsible for Ziggy. That meant getting him food.
Glumly, I clumped down the driveway past the crime
scene investigators. I knew without having been there what they’d been doing. They had taken all their measurements and all their photographs. They had gone over every inch of the guardhouse and its surround for fibers, stray hairs, or latent prints, any minutiae that might point them toward the killer. They had slipped the corpse into a body bag and zipped it shut, and the body had been taken to the Medical Examiner’s pathology lab for autopsy. Now technicians were widening their search, walking in slow circles around the grounds, looking for a weapon, shell casings, bullets, footprints—anything they could use to solve the crime.
Like them, I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me. I was minding my own business. This murder investigation had nothing to do with me, and as soon as I got food for Ziggy I was out of there.
On the way to the Crescent Beach Market, I met several cars with big red velvet Christmas bows attached to their hoods. On every street, Christmas stuff had suddenly appeared all over the place. Wreaths on doors, red velvet ribbons tied to outside security lights, baskets of poinsettias at every doorway. It was as if people had looked at the calendar and panicked when they saw we were only twelve days away from Christmas. Either all the Jews and Buddhists and agnostics and atheists on the key had converted, or there was a cosmic conspiracy to make me look Christmas square in the face.
Even in the best of circumstances, Christmas on Siesta Key has a surreal quality. We know from TV shows what a real Christmas is like. That’s when families gather in the big house where they grew up, where
their dying or divorced-but-friendly parents have festooned everything in sight with swags of fir, and where everybody ends up outside in the snow whooping like kids and rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas. We can never have that. On Siesta Key, our fir swags are fake, our snowmen are Styrofoam, and the closest we can come to a snowball fight is to kick sand at one another.
To children, of course, Christmas is Christmas no matter where it happens, and that was really what was causing my heart to ache. It would be the fourth Christmas since Christy had been killed. She had been three when she died, old enough to be thrilled with writing letters to Santa and sharing Christmas secrets and going shopping for presents for the people she loved. Every Christmas since she died has been a day of pain for me. For that matter, so has Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and Thanksgiving and Easter. All those holidays bring memories of Todd and Christy, and there have been times when I thought my heart would burst from them.
The best holiday is New Year’s because it isn’t imbued with images of children and loving families like all the others. Anybody can participate in New Year’s. Old people who haven’t seen their ungrateful progeny in years can still raise a glass to toast a new beginning. Single rejects who haven’t had a date in decades can still see another year of possibilities opening like a portal to a deodorant ad of fields of flowers while they run in slow motion into the arms of a new beloved.
On all the other holidays, I stay to myself and dull the memories of Todd and Christy by thinking of new
ways to groom belligerent cats or fresh approaches to flea dips. But on New Year’s Day I live it up. I drink champagne and eat black-eyed peas and watch big men on TV chase a football and knock each other down. And at the end of the day, I look in the mirror and say, “Good girl, Dixie, you made it through another year. Now do it again.”
But first I had to get through Christmas.
Outside the market, a Salvation Army Santa was ringing a bell with cheerful deliberation and calling out “God bless you” to people tossing coins in his pot. I didn’t exactly say “Bah, humbug,” when I passed, but that was how I felt.
Inside, “Jingle Bells” was playing. I tried to ignore the music while I filled a basket with kale, turnip greens, bok choy, escarole, collard greens, romaine, parsley, and yellow squash. As I hotfooted it to the TEN ITEMS OR LESS line, the music changed to “Here Comes Santa Claus.” If I had to listen to that all day long, I’d be a blithering idiot.
Ahead of me, a white-haired woman was telling the checker that she and her husband had started the trip from Oregon to Sarasota this season via a cross-Canadian train ride.
She said, “It was my first train trip,” and in an instant I was six years old and holding my mother’s hand while we edged our way down a train car. Michael was behind me with his eight-year-old face set in stern, disapproving lines. It had been the Christmas season then, too. Our mother had wakened us early, with an exuberant giddiness that meant she’d already been drinking, and told us we were going on a trip. An adventure, she
called it, but we both knew she was really taking us away from our father. The adventure came after she sobered up and found herself stranded in a little town in Georgia with two hungry kids and not even enough change in her purse to call home. It had been Michael who took control. He had marched up to a Salvation Army Santa at the train station and said, “My little sister and I need help. Our mother is sick and we have to take her home.”
I think that was the moment our mother became afraid of Michael’s strength and capability. It was also the moment when I knew I could always depend on him.
I hadn’t thought about that train trip in ages, or about my mother. Just the possibility that I might be shirking responsibility like she’d always done was enough to jerk me to attention. As the checkout line moved forward, I stacked Ziggy’s veggies on the conveyor and resolved to do what I had to do and not whine.
On the way out, I folded a five-dollar bill and put it in the Salvation Army Santa’s pot. Not that I’d suddenly come down with the Christmas spirit, it was just the memory of that first Salvation Army Santa and how kind he had been. Maybe my five dollars would help some other stranded kids get home.
It was nearing noon and I’d been up since four o’clock without caffeine or food. Not having Ziggy’s ability to store fat under my dewlap when food was scarce, I made a detour to the village and went into Anna’s Deli, where the woman at the counter had hair almost as red and carelessly abundant as Gilda’s.
I said, “I need a surfer sandwich bad.”
Even as I spoke, part of my mind considered the odds of running across two women with messy red hair in one morning. I even considered the possibility that the entire morning was a dream, and that red-haired women were in it to symbolize something I needed to remember.
The woman must have sensed that I was spacing out because she barked out my order to the sandwich maker like a drill sergeant.
I said, “I need coffee, too.”
“Sure you do,” she said, in the tone one uses with a two-year-old about to have a tantrum or with a mental patient off her medication.
I wondered if my eyes were as big and white and staring as they felt.
While the sandwich person laid thin slices of ham, turkey, Swiss, and cucumber on thick marble bread, I thought of Ken Kurtz lying on his black satin sheets. He hadn’t had breakfast either. For all I knew, he hadn’t eaten in weeks.
The sandwich maker piled onion, lettuce, and tomato on my surfer, and topped the whole thing with Anna’s special sauce. As she sliced it in half, I held out my empty coffee cup.
“Give me a refill, please, and another surfer. Also another coffee, large. And some pickles and chips, two of each. Oh, and give me four cups of chicken soup, too. And a couple of brownies.”
Straight-faced, the woman said, “No salad?”
“Oh, yeah. One tuna and one garden. Ranch dressing.”
With bags of veggies for Ziggy in the backseat and
deli bags from Anna’s in the front, I tore off for Kurtz’s house, where a Contamination Sheet had been posted on the front door while I was gone. Technically speaking, a Contamination Sheet is only posted at a crime scene, and in this case the crime scene was solely the guardhouse. The presence of the sheet meant the nurse’s disappearance had extended the range of investigation.
Through the window, I could see Guidry in the living room talking to some crime-scene techs. Looking at him gave me a fizzy feeling like my blood had turned to 7-Up. I signed in, noted the time, and opened the front door without ringing the bell. When I came in, Guidry looked up and I frowned at him.
I said, “I’m going back to feed the iguana.”
He nodded, already bored with anything having to do with my pet-sitting duties, and I nipped down the southern corridor to the east wing and Ken Kurtz’s room.
Propped on those black satin pillows, his blue skin gave him the look of a two-day decomposed corpse. Only the furrows of pain on his face and the neural chaos under his skin showed that he was alive. He was the most alone-looking human being I’d ever seen in my life.
I said, “I’ve brought food for Ziggy,” and hurried through the bathroom to the gym.
Wide awake and bright green now, Ziggy looked like a not-so-miniature dragon. Even the spikes down his spine seemed to stand taller now that he was warm. When he saw me, he puffed out his dewlap to its fullest extent and bobbed his head at me. Iguanas bob their
heads just when they see something unfamiliar, but if I hadn’t known that he would have looked menacing.
I said, “Wow, I’ll bet you scare the hell out of a lot of people.”
I quickly knelt and put squash and romaine leaves in front of him, then nipped out so he could eat without the strain of trying to look dangerous.
Ken Kurtz was actually the scary, intimidating one, even though he still lay like a man half dead on his black satin bed.
Without any preamble, I set the bags of food on his bed and plopped myself down beside them.
“I brought you some food.”
He opened his eyes and watched me haul out containers.
“I don’t eat normal food. The nurse—”
“The nurse has flown the coop, and nobody else gives a hoot whether you eat or not. Since you won’t let Lieutenant Guidry call anybody, I’m your last hope.”
He groaned. I didn’t blame him. I’d hate to think I was my own last hope.
I took the lid off the container of soup and moved it around in the air to waft the scent to him. “It’s not like you don’t have choices. There’s a sandwich, with which you get chips and a pickle. There’s tuna salad. There’s a garden salad. And if all that’s too solid for you, there’s chicken soup.”
I made a lap tray out of a magazine, and put half a sandwich and a cup of soup on it. It seemed to me that his eyes got a little brighter, but maybe I was projecting.
I said, “There’s coffee too, and brownies.”
“I don’t drink coffee. The caffeine mixes with the toxins in my body.”
“And does what?”
He took a moment to consider. “I don’t know what the fuck it does, it’s just what the nurse always says.”
“Uh-hunh. So do you want it with cream and sugar?”
He managed a weak smile. “Black’s fine.”
He took a tentative bite of his sandwich, then leaned his head back against the pillows as if the effort had cost him.
I said, “Who do you think telephoned me and told me to come here?”
He leaned forward to sip chicken broth directly from the cup. “I don’t know who called you, Ms. Heming-way.”
“Dixie. Call me Dixie.”
He took another sip of soup and gazed at me. I had the strange feeling that he was waiting for me to ask a different question, and that if I asked the right one, he would answer it. It was senseless to probe for any answer at all, since every bit of information drew me deeper into a situation I didn’t intend to be in.
It seems to me there are two kinds of people in the world, those with little endurance for the inevitable pain in life and those who dig in their toes and survive, no matter what. In my darkest moments, even when I think there’s nothing to live for and no reason to go on, I remain a survivor. I could see the same hard determination in Kurtz’s agony-darkened eyes. I couldn’t even imagine the hell he’d gone through to cause him to end up as this pitiable figure who would frighten the toughest
street thug, but whatever it was hadn’t made him stop struggling to live.
I said, “I heard you tell Lieutenant Guidry that Gilda came from New York, but she didn’t seem American to me.”

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