Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (9 page)

13

I
took the phone back out and called 911. A deep male voice answered, one of those molasses tones that make you feel like weeping with relief because you’ve found somebody with broad shoulders you can fling yourself against. It took several tries to get my voice to work, and then it came out sounding like something fired from an old rusty cannon.

I said, “I have reason to believe a woman has been attacked in her home. I’m outside the door now, but I’m afraid I’ll disturb evidence if I go in. I’m an ex-deputy.”

I felt it was important to say I was an ex-deputy, as if that would make me sound more credible.

The man said, “Why do you think there’s been an attack?”

“I overheard the woman’s husband threaten her yesterday, and now her front door is open a few inches and her cat’s outside. The cat has left a trail of bloody paw prints from the house.”

He took the address, Laura’s name, and my name.

He said, “Somebody will be there shortly.”

I could imagine him calling it in: “Crazy woman thinks another woman has been attacked because her cat’s outside and she imagines she sees bloody paw prints. Go check it out.”

I sat down on the walk and waited. Leo waited. Leo yawned and stretched, then continued grooming a leg. The house was quiet and calm. The yard was quiet and calm. I was the only thing not calm, but it was very possible that I was a paranoid case. It was very possible that I’d been involved in so many crimes in the last year that I’d come to expect the worst even in innocuous situations.

One of those ear worm things started in my head again, Randy Newman singing “I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.”

After what seemed eons, a green-and-white deputy’s car pulled into the driveway and Deputy Jesse Morgan got out. The fact that a sworn deputy had come instead of one of the Community Policing officers meant the dispatcher had taken my call seriously, but I did an inward groan. Morgan and I have met over a couple of dead bodies, and I think he sees me as somebody whose presence spells trouble. He may be right.

I stood up to meet him, and it seemed to me that his stride faltered a bit when he recognized me. From the top of his close-cropped hair to the hem of his dark-green deputy pants, Morgan was crisp and all business. The only thing about him that hinted of a life outside law enforcement was the discreet diamond stud in one ear-lobe.

With his eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, I had to go by his lean cheeks and firm lips to tell what he thought, and he wasn’t giving anything away.

He stopped a few feet away and rocked back a bit on his heels. “Miz Hemingway.”

I said, “I know how this seems, but I’m concerned about the woman in this house. I saw her cat run across the street about an hour ago. I think the cat ran out when somebody went in.” I pointed toward the dark round circles. “Those are paw prints.”

Morgan’s head tilted a fraction of an inch toward me, either in acknowledgment of my powers of deduction or because he thought it was a good idea to be polite to a crazy woman.

As he moved past me toward the door, I said, “Don’t scare the cat away.”

He stopped and turned his head toward Leo. “Tell you what, Miz Hemingway, why don’t you go pick the cat up, and then I’ll go in the house.”

I didn’t like the careful way he said it, as if he were humoring somebody who might fly apart at any moment. Still, he had a point. Cautiously, I moved forward and stooped to pick Leo up. As if to show Morgan what an overanxious idiot I was, Leo went limp as a sack of jelly.

Avoiding the paw prints, Morgan zigzagged to the door, rang the doorbell, and rapped on the glass. “Sheriff’s Department!”

Silence.

He rang again, rapped on the doorjamb, and called louder. “Sheriff’s Department!”

He did that three times, each time louder, then used the back of his knuckles to push the door open. “Miz Halston? Sheriff’s Department!”

He walked inside out of my view, but I could hear him calling to Laura and identifying himself. I carried Leo to the end of the driveway and stood by the street waiting. I already knew what Morgan would find.

In a few minutes, he stepped outside with his phone to his ear. His face had gone several shades paler. He paused to talk, and I heard the word
stabbed
. The word confirmed what I’d been expecting. Call it intuition or hunch or simply the fact that I knew Laura’s husband was a sadist with scalpels, I knew Laura had been murdered and that the killer had stabbed her to death.

Morgan clicked the phone closed and put it back on his belt. Then he walked to the corner of the house, leaned over with one hand on the wall, and very efficiently threw up.

I had firsthand knowledge of some of the gruesome things Morgan had seen, but I’d never seen him lose his poise. Morgan was an experienced law enforcement officer, and law enforcement officers become inured to scenes that would turn a normal person’s stomach. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth, then slowly turned toward me. I could feel his eyes on me behind his dark shades, and I knew he was debating how much to tell me. His chest rose in a deep breath, and he came down the driveway.

I said, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“The crime-scene guys will want to talk to you.”

I said, “I’m going to put Leo in my car.”

Woodenly, I walked to my Bronco in the driveway at Mazie’s house and put Leo in a cardboard cat carrier. Lowering all the car windows, I left him there and went back to Laura’s house. As I got there, a sheriff’s car pulled to the curb and Sergeant Woodrow Owens got out. When he saw me, his face registered pleasure, dismay, and sadness all at one time.

Sergeant Owens is a tall laconic African American who had been my immediate superior when I was a deputy. There’s not a finer man in the world, or a smarter one. He was smart enough to tell me I was too crazy to carry a gun for the department after Todd and Christy were killed. Actually, what he’d said was, “Dixie, you’re way too fucked up to be a deputy.”

That’s how smart he was.

Now he said, “Damn, girl, I was hoping you’d stopped attracting dead bodies.”

“Me too.”

He flapped a bony hand at me and went past me to confer in low tones with Morgan. They both went inside the house for a few minutes, and when they came out Sergeant Owens held his mouth clamped in a straight line. Morgan studiously held his head with his chin tilted up, as if he’d decided never to look at the floor again.

While Morgan went to his car and got out yellow crime-scene tape and began stretching it around the perimeter of the yard, Owens whipped out his phone. He spoke in clipped tones for a while, then closed it and walked back to me.

“What’s the story?”

“The woman who lives here is Laura Halston. I don’t know her well, but I had dinner with her night before last, and she told me she’d left her husband. He’s a sadistic surgeon, used to carve her up with scalpels. They lived in Dallas, and she ran away and came here. Then he found her.”

“She told you he’d found her?”

My face got warm. “I happened to overhear them talking yesterday. I was putting a turtle out by the lake, and they were on the other side of the hibiscus hedge that runs along the street. He told her he would make her pay for what she’d done. She walked away from him, and he drove off.”

“You ever see him again?”

“That’s the only time.”

“Got a name for him?”

“Dr. Reginald Halston. He’s a prominent doctor in Dallas.”

He scribbled the name, and I said, “She called him Martin.”

“When you were listening to them behind the trail?”

I felt myself blush again. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, they just happened to come by while I was there.”

“How do you know he was the husband?”

“I heard her talking to him on the phone the night we had dinner. She called him Martin then, too.”

“And she said he was her husband?”

“She said he was her soon to be ex-husband.”

“In Dallas.”

“That’s what she said.”

“You know a next of kin to notify?”

“Her parents live in Connecticut, but I don’t know their name. She mentioned a sister in Dallas named Celeste. She didn’t say a last name.”

Owens deliberated a moment. “You know anybody else who could identify her body?”

“Besides me?”

“I think it would be better if it was somebody else, Dixie. You don’t need to see that.”

My heart quivered. Morgan had upchucked at seeing Laura’s body, and now Owens wanted to protect me from seeing it.

“It’s that bad?”

“It’s about as bad as it can get, Dixie.”

It’s funny how your mind can split at times like that. One side of my brain recoiled from what was happening around me. The other side was cool as grass. The cool side knew investigators would look through Laura’s address books looking for names and numbers for her relatives. The cool side knew calls would be made, awful truths said, grim arrangements made.

The cool side said, “I’ll take care of Leo until the house is cleaned up.”

“Leo?”

“Laura’s cat. I’ve put him in my car.”

Owens gave me a slow look, then nodded. “Lieutenant Guidry will be handling the homicide investigation. He’ll want to talk to you.”

As if on cue, Guidry’s dark Blazer pulled to a stop in the street, and Guidry got out and walked to us.

Owens said, “Dixie knows the woman. She spent some time with her night before last.”

I said, “I was only with her a few hours. She invited me for a glass of wine, and then we had dinner.”

Owens flapped his notebook at Guidry. “The woman has a husband in Dallas. A surgeon. She told Dixie he was a sadist, used to scare her with scalpels. Dixie believes the man came here and found her. She saw the woman with a man she believes is the husband.”

Guidry nodded, digesting the scant information without comment.

I said, “She was a runner. Ran every morning. That’s how I met her. She’d opened the door to go running and Leo got out. Leo’s her cat. I’ve put him in my car.”

Guidry’s face took on the pained look he always got when I mentioned pets, but neither man answered me.

I said, “She wore serious running shoes. The expensive kind.”

I studied their implacable faces for a moment and knew it was time to shut up.

I said, “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

As I turned away, Owens said, “Dixie? We don’t need to tell you not to divulge anything about the ex-husband and the scalpels.”

Of course he didn’t. When word of the murder got out, the usual loonies would come forward to make false confessions. Guilty people would give false alibis. Citizens would call with leads and misguided information. The murder would be public knowledge, but the fact that Laura’s ex-husband was a surgeon who liked to play with scalpels was information that only the homicide investigators would know. And me.

Without answering, I turned away and trudged back to the Bronco.

14

A
t the Bronco, Leo was peering out the air holes in the cardboard carrier and making piteous noises. I leaned in the window and said, “It’s okay, Leo.”

My mouth said that, but my feet knew it was a huge lie, and the next thing I knew I was kicking the bejesus out of my front tire, all my rage and horror banging in useless fury.

Behind me, Pete said, “Dixie? What’s wrong?”

A surge of adrenaline brought teeth-rattling shakes, and I turned around to lean against the Bronco with my knees stiffened and my elbows braced on the car. Pete had Mazie on her leash, and both man and dog were taking in the fact that Leo was crying in the car, and that Laura’s yard was marked by yellow crime-scene tape.

An ambulance and several marked and unmarked sheriff’s cars passed by, slowing to a crawl in front of Laura’s house and then oozing to parking places by the curb. I knew what the criminalists would do. They would post a Contamination Sheet by the front door to record every person who entered and left the house. Then they would photograph the interior of Laura’s house, dust for latent prints, and look for shoe tracks, for fibers, for hair, for anything that might point to the identity of the person or persons who had killed her. Outside, they would walk shoulder to shoulder around the area looking for anything a killer might have dropped.

Pete said, “Something’s happened to that woman, hasn’t it?”

Still shuddering, I bobbed my head up and down.

Inside the Bronco, Leo made a long wailing noise. Mazie whimpered and trotted toward the sound, moving her tail back and forth in a nervous show of sympathy.

I waited until a final tremor released me, then said the thing that had to be said.

“Laura’s been killed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I said, “I’m going to take Leo to Kitty Haven until Laura’s family comes.”

I put my hand on the door handle and then turned to him. “Pete, what time was it that you saw Laura?”

“Oh, it was early. Around five, probably. I get up early, you know, and once I’m up Mazie is up, so we went outside for a few minutes. That lady came down the driveway over there and ran across the street. Just sort of squeezed through the hibiscus there where the running path is.”

It was now close to eleven, which meant Laura had been killed within the last five or six hours. The killer could have got inside Laura’s house while she was running and killed her when she came back. Then he must have left the door open as he ran away, and Leo got outside.

I pulled the car door open, and Mazie trotted over to look up toward the cat carrier where Leo was still crying. Service dogs are trained from puppyhood to live amicably with other household pets, so Mazie was free of cat prejudice.

With the same sympathetic concern that Mazie had, Pete said, “Why don’t you leave the cat with me and Mazie? We can take care of him, and I’m sure Hal and Gillis would want to help out a neighbor.”

I opened the Bronco door and got in. “I’d need their permission, and this is not the time to ask for it.”

His shoulders dropped with the reminder of Jeffrey.

While he and Mazie watched me with identical expressions of sadness, I started the engine and backed out of the driveway. As I drove away, I looked toward Guidry’s Blazer in front of Laura’s house. I reminded myself to tell him what time Pete had seen Laura. On TV, medical examiners can tell exactly what time a person died. In real life, nailing down a time of death usually becomes somewhere between the time a person was seen alive and the time she was found dead.

Leo was quiet on the way to the Kitty Haven. Maybe he was soothed by the car’s movement, or maybe he was just relieved to get away from the gruesome scene inside his house.

A yellow frame house with sparkling white shutters and a front porch that begs for a swing, Kitty Haven is owned by Marge Preston, a round white-haired woman who speaks English and Cat with equal fluency. Inside, the décor is a comforting blend of a grandmother’s house and a brothel, with lots of burgundy velour, lace curtains, and crocheted tablecloths. Several slack cats were draped on windowsills and plump chair backs in the waiting room. When I carried Leo in, they all looked at me as if I were the most interesting specimen of humanity they’d ever seen.

When I lifted Leo from the carrier, Marge said, “Oh, what a beauty! You don’t see many of those.”

“His name’s Leo. There’s been a death in his family, and he needs a place to stay until relatives come.”

Marge took him from me and then looked suspiciously at the paw pad he raised.

I said, “He needs a bath too.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yeah.”

I left Marge telling Leo that he was safe and beautiful. Marge knows that even when you’ve stepped in blood, it makes you feel better to be told you’re safe and beautiful.

Heavy with the lethargy that follows a prolonged surge of adrenaline, I drove south like a homing pigeon. At the tree-lined lane leading to my apartment, I turned in with hope tensing my stomach. When I rounded the last bend and saw my brother’s car in the carport, I let out a sigh of relief. Michael usually spends his off-hours fishing or cooking, so his car meant he was home cooking. As he had been doing all my life, Michael would see that I held together.

Before I faced him, I slogged upstairs to my apartment’s porch and fell into the hammock. I kept remembering Laura’s husband saying he would see that she paid for what she’d done. She had said he was abusive and mentally unbalanced, but what he’d done went way over being unbalanced. He had to be a raving psychopath to have killed his wife just because she wanted a divorce.

With a little jolt, I remembered the man who’d called and come to her door while I was there, the one she’d met at the emergency room when she twisted her knee. He’d sounded like a nutcase too, and I’d forgotten about him when I talked to Sergeant Owens. Then another jolt hit. Damn, I’d forgotten about the man who’d come in the Lyon’s Mane too, the one Maurice had said was after Laura. If she’d turned him down, his obsessive lust might have turned homicidal. I didn’t know if he was as crazy as Laura’s husband, but I knew he’d looked capable of brutal murder.

Tears came in a sudden torrent, not only from shock and sadness over the murder of a woman I’d liked a lot but from a deep reservoir of unspeakable fear that lies deep in every woman’s heart. No matter how much equality we gain with our brains, our street smarts, and our ability to handle weapons, the fact remains that we are physically weaker than men. Furthermore, we belong to a species that does unspeakable things to one another. Until that changes, we will be vulnerable, and every woman knows it.

Laura Halston had been an intelligent, healthy, able-bodied woman who had taken every precaution to stay safe. And yet somebody a lot bigger, stronger, and more brutal had come into her house and killed her.

Was it somebody she knew? Somebody she had opened the door to? I kept going over what little I knew, gnawing on the details. A hunt might already be on for her Laura’s surgeon husband, the well-known Dr. Reginald Halston that she called Martin. I wondered how he would feel when he learned that Laura had been pregnant with his child when he killed her.

Then I reminded myself that I couldn’t be sure her husband was the killer. Except I was.

When I finally went searching for Michael, I found him in his kitchen, engulfed in clouds of aromatic steam coming from several big pots on the commercial range. He had an apron the size of a tablecloth wrapped around his broad torso, and a look of beatific joy on his handsome face. When he’s on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse. When he’s not on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse as well as for me and Paco. He has enough soups and stews stored in his freezer to feed all of Sarasota County.

When I came in, Ella Fitzgerald jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. After I smooched the top of her head, she hopped back on her stool and licked her paws like a bimbo too involved with her manicure to pay attention to the little people.

Michael said, “What’s wrong?”

“You remember the woman I told you about? Laura Halston? She was murdered this morning. They didn’t tell me how, but I think she was stabbed to death. I took her cat to Kitty Haven.”

Michael laid down his stirring spoon and came close, looking down at me with worried eyes.

“Oh, hell, Dixie. Oh, sugar, I’m sorry.”

I leaned into him, and he wrapped me in a bear hug, squeezing me as if he could shut out every hurtful thing. Then he held my shoulders in both hands and looked hard at me.

“You haven’t had anything to eat this morning, have you?”

“Michael, I can’t eat, I’m too upset.”

“You’ve been up since four, and it’s nearly noon. Sit.”

Michael is of the firm conviction that ninety-five percent of all wars and social ills would be wiped out if everybody ate a substantial breakfast.

While he whirled into action, I poured myself a mug of coffee from the electric pot on the counter. I drank half of it in one long gulp before I dropped onto a bar stool. Beside me, Ella had decided her nails met her standards and was dreamily staring at Michael with the same love-dazed look that a lot of females get when they see him.

Michael went back and forth between the Sub-Zero refrigerator and the giant range like Godzilla stomping over cities, and before I had finished my coffee he slid a bowl of white stuff in front of me and handed me a spoon.

“Down the hatch, kid.”

I took a tentative bite and felt my neck muscles relax. Fragrant white rice stirred into light cream, flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg, with a thin drizzle of maple syrup looped over the top. Soft and creamy. No chunks of anything that required serious chewing, no sharp surprises, no intellectual demands. Just smooth, uncomplicated nourishment that went down easy and warmed my heart.

Ella looked at my rice and made a little pleading sound, but Michael shook his head sternly. “Rice isn’t good for you, and you’ve already had a shrimp.”

Ella meekly flipped the tip of her tail. Nobody argues with Michael, not even Ella.

I nodded toward the steaming pots on the stove. “What’re you making?”

“Gumbo with shrimp and crab. Rice to serve it over.”

“Okra?”

“Don’t be afraid of okra, Dixie, it’s a respectable vegetable.”

“It’s slimy.”

“Lots of good stuff is slimy.”

He turned to waggle his eyebrows at me in a mock-lewd parody, but his eyes remained worried.

“Dixie, I hope you’re not going to get involved in another murder investigation. I don’t think I can go through that again.”

“This one doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“You knew the dead woman. You’re taking care of her cat. That involves you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know anything other than what I’ve already told Sergeant Owens.”

“Which doesn’t answer my question.”

I carried my empty bowl and cup to the sink and rinsed them before I put them in the dishwasher.

I said, “Thanks for breakfast.”

“Uh-huh.”

Michael’s forehead was wrinkled with worry, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would relieve his mind.

No way was I staying out of this murder investigation. What had happened to Laura could have happened to me or to any other woman. I was going to do everything I could to see that Laura Halston’s killer was caught and put away forever.