Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (11 page)

He did that shoulder-tapping thing again. “See you later.”

Judy came with her coffeepot and we watched him leave. I seemed to be watching his back a lot these days. Which wasn’t bad, with those shoulders and the easy way he moved. But it still made me uneasy to see him leaving, as if every time was the last time I’d ever see him.

It occurred to me that whenever Guidry mentioned New Orleans, his voice took on a longing quality. Like a man speaking the name of a woman he’d once deeply loved and lost. Or a woman he’d once loved and wanted back.

I was still thinking about that when I headed for the Bronco, so engrossed in all the awful possibilities of the idea that I almost walked into Ethan Crane. Ethan is a tall, drop-dead gorgeous attorney with jet-black hair and dark eyes from Seminole ancestors. When I saw him in front of me, we did that self-conscious side-stepping dance that men and women do who were never lovers but once had the hots for each other. To tell the truth, we sort of still did, but we had both decided that somebody else was really more appropriate for us. Another attorney for Ethan, another cop for me. I had met Ethan’s new girlfriend, and he knew Guidry. We approved of the other’s choice, but my hormones still stood up and applauded when they smelled Ethan, and from the way his eyes lit up when he saw me, I suspected certain parts of his anatomy were also standing up.

We stood in the glaring sun and bantered a little bit, nothing important, just the usual awkward small talk people do to try to cover up the fact that they really want to ask each other more important questions. Like
Do you miss me?
Like
Are you happy with somebody else?
Like
Do you ever regret your choice?
My answer would have been that I was happy with Guidry and I had no regrets, but I sort of hoped that Ethan sometimes regretted his.

When we said goodbye, I felt that odd exhilaration that comes with knowing you’ve spent time with a man who thinks you’re desirable. Even if you don’t want him, it’s exciting to know he wants you.

At home, Paco’s truck was gone, but Michael’s car was in his slot. Instead of going straight upstairs, I walked across the sandy yard to the wooden deck and opened his kitchen door. When he and Paco had moved into our grandparents’ house, they remodeled the kitchen to bring it into the twenty-first century. A butcher block eating island with a salad sink at one end stands where our grandmother’s round pedestal table once took center stage, and Michael has added enough Sub-Zero built-in refrigerators to hold all the fruits and vegetables at any farmer’s market, plus two or three steers.

When I walked in, he was leaning over a refrigerator drawer forcing a stalk of celery to fit into a space already filled with other vegetables.

He looked over his shoulder at me. “Hey.”

Ella Fitzgerald was on her assigned stool. She and the guys have an agreement—if she stays on the stool and doesn’t beg for food, she can sit there and adore them. I smooched the top of her head.

I said, “I want you to hear this from me.”

Michael straightened and looked down at me with eyes that had suddenly gone slitty. “Hear what?”

“Well, here’s the thing, I’m here and I’m obviously okay. So it’s not important, but it happened, and I know sooner or later you’ll hear about it, so I just want to be the one to tell you.”

His eyes got slittier. Ella sat up straighter and looked alarmed.

I said, “The thing is, yesterday morning a guy named Vern mistook me for a woman named Ruby and drove me out past Seventy-five to that stretch of big estates where everybody has a landing strip and a hangar. He took me to a man named Kantor Tucker, but as soon as Tucker saw me he knew I was the wrong woman. Vern drove me to Friendly’s and gave me fifty dollars for a cab. I called Guidry and he came and got me. That’s all there was to it.”

“So Vern just asked you nicely to get in his car, and you did, and he drove you to a place where a stranger could get a look at you. Is that how it was?”

“Pretty much. I’m taking care of Ruby’s grandfather’s cat, and I guess Vern saw me leaving there and jumped to the conclusion that I was Ruby. She’s a witness in Myra Kreigle’s trial. You know, the woman who ran the real estate Ponzi scheme. Ruby worked for her.”

“What else?”

“That’s it, truly. Except for the part about the two guys in Vern’s limo who grabbed me and put a hood over my head. Vern drove while they taped my wrists and ankles, and put tape over my mouth. But they didn’t hurt me, Michael. They overpowered me, but they didn’t rough me up or anything.”

Michael’s lips weren’t relaxed anymore, and a muscle worked in his jaw. “So what did Guidry do?”

“He made me report it. I went to the office on Ringling and looked at mug shots. I didn’t see anybody that looked like Vern, but the guys investigating already know who he is. He works for Tucker, sort of a hanger-on. They don’t know who the other men were, but the deputies have the tape that was put on my mouth. They’re running latents from it through IAFIS to see if they get a match.”

Michael walked around the butcher block island a few times, like a man on the deck of a ship that he can’t get off of. Ella watched him with big round eyes.

“So what’s going to happen now? Is Guidry taking care of this?”

Michael’s tone said that if Guidry wasn’t doing his job, Michael would.

I said, “Guidry’s in homicide, so he’s not part of the official investigation, but he’s involved. So is Paco.”

“Paco knows about this?”

“Yeah, we had dinner together last night and I told him.”

He looked a little hurt, so I hurried to tell him about Ruby being married to Zack Carlyle.

He brightened. “Zack Carlyle? No kidding.”

He said it as if Zack Carlyle went around wearing a red cape and leaping over tall buildings.

At least I’d got his mind off Vern kidnapping me.

Upstairs, Guidry had neatly made up my bed before he left. I found it sort of touching that he’d gone to the trouble. After a shower, a nap, and some time spent updating my client records, I cleaned my apartment. I got rid of every speck of dust, every smear on a mirror, every dull haze on anything chrome. I polished and disinfected and vacuumed until I was high on bleach and ammonia fumes. My brother handles stress by cooking. I handle it by cleaning the heck out of everything. My brain tells me that bad things can happen to people with clean apartments, but my Scandinavian genes tell me that cleanliness and order are as good as a horseshoe over the door. They protect you even if you don’t believe in them.

As I put away the vacuum, I heard a peculiar tapping noise coming from my kitchen window. A female cardinal was obsessively flying at the glass and hitting it with her chest and beak while the male flew in anxious circles behind her. Cardinals do that sometimes during springtime nesting when one sees its reflection and thinks it’s another bird invading its territory. But this was September, not a time of building nests, so the female’s attack on her own image seemed out of the natural order of things. I wondered if the bird was afraid a rival female was on the periphery of her territory ready to move in. Whatever her reason, the cardinal attacked her own image with the intention of keeping a tight hold on what was her own. A noble purpose, perhaps, but she could kill herself.

I stood for a while and shooed her away. Every time I left the window, she came back to do her kamikaze dives at the glass. I taped paper to the glass, but it didn’t stop her. I found a magazine picture of a glaring owl and taped it to the glass, but she wasn’t fooled. While I dressed for afternoon rounds, the sound of her beak hitting the glass was like the relentless sound of a ticking clock. I had mental images of her beak splitting down its length and making it impossible for her to eat.

When it was time to leave my apartment to make afternoon rounds, I was acutely conscious that a bird was slowly committing suicide at my kitchen window. On the sandy shore, a few gulls, terns, and sandpipers braved the glaring sun to pick up microscopic nutrients from the lapping sea, their subdued cries like doleful omens. Driving slowly, so as not to disturb the songbirds and parakeets taking siestas in the trees lining the drive, I was all the way to Midnight Pass Road before I got myself under control. Nature has been getting along without my direction since the beginning of time. The cardinal would either give up her attacks on her reflection or she wouldn’t. In either case, I had done all I could do to save her.

Nevertheless, I had a skitty feeling that the cardinal carried some sort of message for me, a woman-to-woman bit of wisdom. But I wasn’t flinging myself against a hard surface that would hurt me, and I didn’t believe that some other female was trying to steal my mate. At least I didn’t know of one.

14

At Tom Hale’s condo, Billy Elliot met me at the door with a big grin. Tom was in the kitchen with his laptop open on the table.

He yelled, “I want to show you something.”

As if he wanted to make sure I stayed focused on my reason for being there, Billy Elliot walked close beside me to the kitchen. Tom pointed at a photograph on the computer screen.

“Is this the guy who kidnapped you?”

In a newspaper photo, Vern and Kantor Tucker stood in front of an airplane, Vern a little bit behind Tucker. They were both smiling, Tucker more broadly than Vern. The caption read, “Kantor Tucker at his aero-compound.” An accompanying article identified the plane as a new Boeing 707, the latest addition to “Tuck” Tucker’s private fleet of planes. There was no mention of Vern.

I said, “That’s Vern.”

Tom said, “Here’s another picture.” He clicked some keys and the screen filled with a mug shot of Vern’s bruised, sullen face.

He said, “This is from Indiana, a year or so ago. His name is Vernon Brogher. He was arrested after he slammed a guy’s head into a wall in a bar. The guy had asked him to stop taking cellphone photos of the guy’s girlfriend, and Vern nearly took the guy’s head off. Literally.”

“Is he a pilot?”

Tom snorted. “I don’t imagine Vern is smart enough to fly a paper airplane, much less a jet.”

“Ruby said he’s Tucker’s muscle.”

“Does that mean he’s Tucker’s bodyguard or the man who beats up people for him?”

“With Vern’s history, it probably means both. How’d you find those pictures?”

“If you spend enough time on the Internet, you can find anything, especially things of public record.”

Billy Elliot leaned against my knees to remind me that time was passing. Tom watched me snap Billy’s leash on his collar.

I said, “Do you know anything about drag racing? The professional kind?”

“You taking it up?”

“Ruby is married to Zack Carlyle. He’s a drag racer. You know, one of those guys who race around on a track.”

His face took on the look of a kid hearing about a really cool video game.

He said, “Drag racers don’t go around on a track, Dixie. A drag race is a straight shot and it only lasts a little over four seconds. Two cars at a time race over and over, until one car has beat out all the others in its class.”

I said, “Hunh.” No matter what Tom told me, I kept imagining a line of cars tearing around an oval track. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a straight race that lasted only four seconds.

Billy Elliot whuffed to remind me that I was there to run with him, not to chat with Tom, so I led Billy out to the elevator in the hall.

When we came back upstairs, I unsnapped Billy Elliot’s leash and waved goodbye to Tom.

He said, “How’d you like to go to a drag race? You and Guidry, me and Jennie.”

It seemed like every being in the world was either in a new relationship, like the humans I knew, or fighting to keep a relationship, like the self-destructive cardinal flying into my kitchen window. I guess some relationships bring serenity and some bring desperation.

Jennie was Tom’s new girlfriend, and she had passed my test of worthiness by running on the beach with Billy Elliot. But I wasn’t sure if Guidry and I were at a double-dating stage yet. Joining another twosome makes a different kind of statement than doing things alone as a couple. I wasn’t sure what the statement was, but I didn’t think we were ready to make it yet.

I said, “I’m sure Guidry would like to go to a drag race, but I don’t think drag racing is my thing.”

I didn’t say it, but what I thought was that Zack Carlyle might be a name that men got excited about, but as far as I was concerned, he was a man who had failed the test of loyalty to his wife and baby.

Tom said, “It might not be a good idea anyway. Those guys who grabbed you may have something to do with drag racing, and men who kidnap women off the street aren’t usually the kind of men who’d appreciate her following them. Especially if she’s following them with a cop.”

“They wouldn’t know Guidry is a cop. He doesn’t look like a cop.”

Tom’s eyes got a pitying look. “Dixie, even Billy Elliot could look at Guidry and know he’s a cop. Cops look like cops. They can’t help it. They have cop eyes and cop mouths, they move like cops. Believe me, you go to a racetrack anywhere in the world with Guidry, and half the people there will take one look at him and remember pressing engagements elsewhere.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I thought about what Tom had said. When I looked at Guidry, I didn’t see a cop, but it was true that cops get a look in the eyes that people in other professions don’t have. A watchful look. Not like rangers scanning the horizon for forest fires or like store detectives on the lookout for shoplifters. More like a three-hundred-sixty-degree awareness of everything going on around them even when they aren’t looking directly at it. I had to admit that Guidry had that look. If we went to a racetrack where Vern and his buddies were, they might recognize the look. If they did, it might scare them enough to leave the county, which would be fine with me.

As I pulled into Mr. Stern’s driveway, I instinctively looked upward at the Kreigle house next door. No face was in a window looking down at me. I hoped the sad young woman had gone someplace where she would be happier.

Inside the Stern house, a new tension rode on the air. Ruby was silent and grim, Mr. Stern was on the phone in the kitchen. Even Opal seemed to have pulled inside herself.