Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (15 page)

23

I
t was close to five when I got to Fish Hawk Lagoon, and shadows were lengthening along the sidewalk. The crime-scene cars were no longer in Laura’s driveway, but Bill Sullivan’s HAZMAT van was there. I parked in Mazie’s driveway and tried the doorknob before I rang the bell. The door was locked, which made me glad and sad at the same time. Glad that Pete had taken my reprimand to heart about leaving it unlocked, and sad that it had been necessary.

Between trying the knob and ringing the bell, I’d heard the sweet strains of Pete’s saxophone. I wondered how many hours a day he spent playing for Mazie. The music stopped, and in a few seconds Pete opened the door with Mazie close at his heels. Both man and dog had stressed faces.

I said, “How is Jeffrey?”

“He’s talking, but he’s weak. Hal held the phone to him so he could talk to Mazie, but Jeffrey didn’t understand and just cried. It was a mistake, and we won’t do that again. Mazie went nuts for a while, running around like she was looking for Jeffrey.”

I said, “She probably thinks he needs her, and that she’s not doing her job. For a service dog, that’s about the worst thing that can happen.”

Pete looked miserable. “I shouldn’t have asked Hal to let Jeffrey talk to her.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Pete. We all thought it was a good idea. Maybe when Jeffrey is stronger, Hal can try again.”

I opened the hall closet door and got Mazie’s leash. “Has she eaten?”

“Very little. Just a few bites, and then she wouldn’t look at it again. I brushed her this morning, and she seemed to like that.”

I said, “Come on, girl, let’s go for a run.”

Listlessly, she followed me outside and allowed herself to be drawn into a run. We covered about three blocks and then turned and ran all the way back home. Mazie had the joyless look of somebody exercising only because she knew it was good for her. I felt somewhat the same way.

When we got back to her house, a beige Camry was parked behind Bill Sullivan’s HAZMAT truck, and a woman with corn-tassel hair stood behind it, looking around the neighborhood. When she saw me and Mazie, she began walking toward us at a fast clip.

A persimmon-mouthed woman, she had the pronounced calf muscles and bony shoulders of someone who took exercise seriously. She looked a few years older than me, early forties probably, and wore a pale blue no-nonsense suit and cream colored pumps. I would have suspected she was a news reporter there to get a juicy murder story, but the handbag hanging from the crook of her elbow matched her pumps, and she wore panty hose. She was too domesticated to be a reporter.

With a wide smile, she said, “Hello, I’m Celeste Autrey, Laura Halston’s sister.”

She had a brisk, snappy voice with a chirpy undertone, like a kindergarten teacher or the X-ray technician who does your mammogram.

Now that I knew who she was, I searched for a resemblance to Laura. She was fair, but not with Laura’s near-albino skin. Her blond hair was neither smooth nor silvery platinum like Laura’s, and her eyebrows were plucked to an almost invisible line. Her nose and chin were longer and more pointed, and her eyes closer together. When Mother Nature had dispensed the gifts of beauty, she had been generous to Laura but extremely frugal with Celeste.

Still with that incongruous smile, she said, “There’s a man in Laura’s house who won’t let me in. I don’t know who gave him authority to be there, but it certainly wasn’t me. He was very rude, said he wasn’t finished yet, and that I couldn’t come in no matter who I was. I took his license number, and I’ll report him to his employer for being so discourteous. He gave me a lecherous look too. I think if he hadn’t been afraid I’d call the cops, he would have tried something with me. But that’s typical, isn’t it? Nobody seems to have any respect for anybody else, they just trample all over you.”

All the time she spoke, her lips were stretched in a frozen smile. For a second, I felt as if I were back in junior high listening to the mean girls slicing and dicing reputations with their razor-sharp little tongues.

I said, “That’s a crime-scene cleaner. He was sent by the Sheriff’s Department. You won’t be able to go in the house until he’s finished. It’s for health reasons.”

“You would think I’d have been consulted before they sent somebody. I don’t want strangers going through my sister’s things. She had some valuable jewelry, just the kind of thing people would take if they’re not supervised. I doubt if they even did an inventory before they sent somebody in there. That’s inexcusable negligence, but I don’t suppose you can ask for anything better in a one-horse town like this.”

Careful not to use words like
blood
or
bacteria
, I said, “They won’t go through her things, they’ll just clean the areas that need cleaning.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t do anything about it now, anyway. Do you mind if I come in? I don’t like standing out here on the sidewalk with the neighbors watching.”

There wasn’t a neighbor’s house in sight, but she apparently thought we were under close observation. With her lips still smiling, her eyes gave me an aggrieved look, as if I were personally responsible for her discomfort. She moved toward the Richards’ front door, her high heels making clicking sounds on the walk. No question about it, I had lost control of this situation from the get-go.

I did a fast mental debate and then led Mazie after her. Laura had been a neighbor, and I was sure Hal and Gillis would want me to be hospitable to her sister, even if she had a snotty attitude. I could even halfway tolerate her snarky disposition because I knew she’d suffered a terrible shock. Besides, I wanted to hear what she had to say. I wanted to learn the truth about Laura.

At the door, she stopped and stood aside to let me open it, as hard in her skin as a premature banana.

Before obeying her peremptory direction, I made a feeble attempt at asserting some control. “This isn’t my house. I’m here to walk the dog.”

“The detective told me about you. Your name is Hemingway.”

So much for gaining control. I opened the door and motioned her in ahead of me.

I said, “It’s Dixie Hemingway, and I’m very sorry about your sister.”

Pete stood up from the sofa, and Mazie strained at the leash to go to him. I didn’t blame her. Of the two of us, Pete was the one she could depend on.

I said, “Ms. Autrey, I’d like you to meet Pete Madeira.”

Pete extended one hand to take Mazie’s leash and the other to shake Celeste Autrey’s hand, but she didn’t offer it. She didn’t even seem aware that Pete was there.

With machine-gun precision, she said, “The detective said you had my sister’s cat. I don’t know why she kept that cat. That man gave him to her, I suppose that’s why. Laura never used any judgment when it came to men. Not when she was a girl and not when she was a woman, just jumped from bed to bed, man to man. Never had any morals, not from the beginning. She was my sister, and I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Laura has always been a slut. Never could turn down any man that wanted her, and believe me, there were plenty of bad ones after her. Martin Freuland was the worst, the very worst. I tried to tell her, but Laura never listened to me. Not ever, not about anything. She wanted his money, and she thought she could get it. Now look what it got her.”

Even with that odd smile, her voice held so much acid that Pete’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, and Mazie edged closer to his side.

Pete said, “If you two will excuse us, Mazie and I will be on the lanai.”

Celeste dropped into a chair as if she intended to spend the rest of her life there. I perched on the arm of the sofa. I wasn’t sure why she was there, but I knew it wasn’t because she was concerned about Leo.

I said, “You think Martin Freuland killed Laura?”

“Of course he did. He found where she’d gone and he came here and killed her. I warned her. As soon as she told me he was here, I told her to leave, but she laughed at me. Laura thought she could twist every man around her finger. I don’t suppose anybody could blame her for thinking that. She started with our father and moved on to every man she ever met. It was a sickness she had, a weakness of character. I think she was born with it. But she went too far with Martin Freuland.”

I caught an odd note of satisfaction in her voice, as if she were glad Laura had got what was coming to her.

I said, “Laura told me she was married to a surgeon. She said she had gone to work for him as his receptionist and then married him.”

Her laughter spewed like ice cubes falling from a refrigerator’s icemaker. “She actually said that? Oh, she was good! That’s what
I
did, not Laura.
My
husband is a surgeon, and
I’m
the one who was his receptionist. But I’m not surprised she told you that. She was so jealous of me, she stole my life! She tried to steal my husband too, but he saw right through her. Not like most men—she had most men fooled. Men are stupid, you know, they’ll believe anything a woman tells them, and Laura knew all the right ego buttons to push. She was oversexed, I think. Maybe it was hormones or some extra chromosome thing. Whatever it was, she never thought of anything except sex.”

I thought back to our evening together. Two women sharing secrets have plenty of opportunities to talk about sex, but the topic hadn’t come up. Grief does strange things to people, but in Celeste’s case it seemed to have turned her into a vile disloyal gossip.

I said, “I didn’t know Laura well, but she seemed like a nice person to me. I can’t imagine her doing something so bad that it would cause a man to kill her.”

Her head snapped toward me, and in the movement a ray of light from a table lamp caught two thin wet trails on her cheeks. Her lips were still pulled back in a parody of a smile, but her eyes were leaking tears. Strangely, she seemed unaware of them.

“Let me set you straight about Laura. From the day she was born, she seduced every man she met, beginning with our father. I was four when she was born, and I don’t think Daddy ever looked at me again. Oh, she was cute, no doubt about it. I don’t dispute that. Every time we went out in public, strangers would stop us on the street to rave about how pretty she was. Right there in front of me, they’d go on and on about her looks, and she ate it up. I was cute too, plus being smart, but she hogged all the attention. It was a sickness of hers.”

She leaned forward and dropped her voice an octave, getting serious. “You know what someone said to me? They said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but your sister is a narcissist.’ That’s what they said, a narcissist. I’d never heard the word before, I had to look it up in the dictionary. It’s a mental illness, is what it is. Narcissists are selfish and controlling, just like Laura. They’re outrageous liars too, you can’t believe a thing they say, and they don’t care about anybody but themselves. They use you and use you and use you, and then they throw you away.”

Her voice had taken on a corrosive bitterness. “When Laura was eight, she made Daddy take her to a kid’s modeling agency. Oh, she knew the effect she had on men, she knew they’d want her. They did too, snapped her right up, and after that, the whole family lived on the money she made. Needless to say, all the photographers were men. Even then, she was using men to get what she wanted. We moved to a big house, my parents got new cars, and neither of them ever worked another day. Laura was their princess, like she’s been ever since.”

I clamped my teeth tight to keep from reminding her that Laura’s mutilated body lay in the county morgue no longer a princess. No longer anything.

She said, “Laura drew in every man she ever knew. Teachers, neighbors, every man around. She was just naturally seductive, even when she was little. She was a bad seed, depraved, no morals whatsoever. She even seduced Daddy. That’s how low she was.”

With tears glistening on her cheeks like snail trails, she peered at me to see how I was taking what she said. Increasingly willing to give her every opportunity to sink to her lowest self, I gave her my best
I’m listening
look.

“We were still young enough to sleep with our bedroom doors open. Laura’s room was directly across the hall, and there was a night-light in the hall in case we needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. One night I woke up and saw Daddy in my door. He was so big he blocked out all the light from the hall. He pulled my door shut, and then I heard Laura’s door close too. I knew she had got him to come in there, and I knew what was going on. Can you believe that? She was that depraved. After that he went in her room almost every night. She had him under her thumb but good.”

My stomach lurched. Celeste Autrey was not only viciously disloyal to her sister, she had a maggot-ridden mind.

“How old was Laura then?”

“Nine or ten. Our mother knew what she’d done, too. She turned hateful to Laura, really spiteful and mean, but Daddy was so much under her spell that he went out of his way to let us know that Laura could have anything she wanted.”

She gave a short bark of a laugh. “It backfired on her, though. It always does, doesn’t it? Like they say, what goes around comes around. Daddy managed Laura’s career, getting her modeling jobs, making sure she got attention, handled all her money. But he wasn’t very good at it, and when he and Mama were killed, Daddy had run up huge debts that he’d expected to pay with Laura’s earnings.”

“Your parents are dead?”

“Killed in a car wreck when I was in college and Laura was seventeen.”

So much for the story Laura had told about parents in Connecticut who owned her house.

With a hint of satisfaction, Celeste said, “By that time, Laura was past the adorable-kid stage, and the catalog ads and magazine cover jobs weren’t rolling in anymore.”

With a mental image of two young sisters left alone with a mountain of debt that one of them was expected to pay off by being beautiful, I did some figuring.

“You were twenty-one then, right?”

She colored. “The older one, the one who should have helped Laura out, is that what you mean? I suppose I could have, but I had to survive too. I wasn’t making much money, and I had rent to pay and car payments and clothes. I couldn’t afford to support her too.”