Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (20 page)

That really hurt my feelings. I felt like a little kid whose best friend had just told her she didn’t like her anymore.

The last call was from Phillip Winnick. His words were slurred, but more intelligible than they’d been the day before. It wasn’t how he talked that alarmed me, it was what he said.

“Um, Miz Hemingway…I mean Dixie…this is
Phillip…If I don’t see you again…I just want to say…thank you…That’s all. Oh, and…I’m sorry I lied.”

I played the message several times, and every time he sounded terrified and desperate. Something was going on, and whatever it was had made Phillip think he might not see me again. I put the phone down with a chill running down my spine.

Feeling leaden and dull, I took a shower and changed clothes. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that the Winnicks loved Phillip, I couldn’t shake a feeling of impending doom. Phillip was about as scared and miserable as a kid could get, and it sounded as if he was feeling guilt for not being honest about being gay. I knew his family wasn’t likely to give him the love and support he needed. If anything, they were more likely to add to his despondency. Phillip needed a friend, and right now I might be the only one he had.

I finally couldn’t stand it any longer, so I marched out the front door and down the street to the Winnicks’ house.

I could hear voices shouting even before I got to the front door. Olga Winnick shrill and pleading, Carl Winnick harsh and threatening. Under their harangue, a tortured undertone that was Phillip. It was exactly what my worst fears had been, and maybe even worse. I didn’t care if Phillip was their son, I was going to take him out of there. He was over eighteen, they couldn’t keep him if he wanted to leave.

I jabbed the doorbell and then banged on the door for good measure. Once I could have yelled, “Sheriff’s Department, open up!” but I couldn’t do that anymore. Anyway, I wasn’t there in any official capacity. I was there as a friend, which takes precedence over all other reasons.

The door didn’t open, and the yelling continued. I rang the bell again and banged harder on the door. Olga
screamed, a long wail that brought fine bumps to my skin. Carl Winnick shouted something that sounded like “What the hell are you doing?”

Faintly, I heard Phillip reply, but I couldn’t make out the words.

Something was terribly wrong. I grabbed the handle on the door and tried the thumb latch. The door wasn’t locked. I rapped on it one more time and pushed it open, calling out as I did.

“Hello? Phillip?”

Olga and Carl Winnick stood in the shadowy living room with their backs to me, their postures strained and stiff and angry. Phillip stood beyond them in front of the closed drapes. I couldn’t see him very well in the murky light, but he seemed to be in dark pajamas almost the same shade as the bruises on his face.

Olga whirled and shrieked, “Get out of my house!”

I didn’t try any pretense. I said, “I’ve come to get Phillip.”

Olga came at me like an avenging Fury, actually running with her arm held out stiff and her fist closed like a battering ram. The woman was nuts if she thought she could scare me with that fist.

I grabbed her wrist and twisted it, then got her other wrist and locked it behind her back. The woman was wiry, and stronger than I’d expected, but I knew I could have her on the floor in a second. She seemed to know that, too, because she didn’t kick at me, just twisted her stiff neck and panted like a tethered dragon, sending out hot air and the odor of liquor.

Carl Winnick ran past us toward the kitchen. Without his executive suit jacket, his barrel chest and short legs made him look almost pathetically misshapen.

Olga said, “This is all your fault! You and people like you, filling his head with filthy ideas!”

I called to Phillip over her head. “Phillip, you’re a good, decent, talented young man, and you don’t have to stay here. Come with me.”

He shook his head. “It won’t…make any difference.”

“It will! Of course it will. You’re hurt now, but you’ll heal and everything will be okay. You don’t have to live a lie anymore.”

“Just…live with my parents hating me.”

“They don’t really hate you. They just don’t know you. They’ll change, you’ll see.”

Carl ran from the kitchen and jammed his red face close to mine. “I’ve called the police, girl, so you’d best leave before they come and arrest you.”

I stared at him, and something clicked into place in my brain.

Phillip took a couple of steps forward and said, “Leave her alone, Dad.”

That’s when I saw the gun. The barrel was dark, like his pajamas, and he carried it with the muzzle pointed down by his thigh. In his large hand, the stock was almost invisible. But I could see the telltale red pinprick that showed the safety was off. I should have known. In addition to teaching his son to open doors for ladies, Carl Winnick had taught his son how to handle a semiautomatic.

I said, “Phillip, what are you doing with a gun?”

Too calmly, he said, “I’m going to kill myself with it.”

Most of the time when people threaten to kill themselves, you can hear in their voice a silent plea to talk them out of it. To bargain with them. To promise them that things will change, that their lives will get easier, that some injustice to them will be righted, that somebody will listen to them and actually hear what they’re saying. Phillip wasn’t doing any of those things. He was stating a cool intention,
one that he’d already worked out in his head, one for which he could see no alternative.

Carl said, “Didn’t you learn anything when you got beaten up?”

“I learned how ashamed I make you. I learned I’ll never be the son you want.”

Slowly, Phillip’s arm raised so the gun’s barrel was at the side of his head. I heard a silent whimpering inside my own head, and a sick metallic taste coated my mouth. I had to stop him somehow, but every idea carried the possibility of making him pull the trigger.

Even Carl seemed to understand that something had to be said that would change Phillip’s mind.

“I’m not an unforgiving man, son, you know that. You can make me proud of you again!”

Phillip’s voice took on a new irony. “Sure, all I have to do is kill myself.”

“Do you have any idea what that would do to me and your mother? Do you want to heap more shame on us?”

I lost hope then. Just completely lost the last thread of thin hope I’d been clinging to.

So did Phillip. Wearily, he said, “There’s more than one way to kill myself. With a bullet, or living the way you want me to live. Either way, I’ll be dead.”

I had loosened my hold on Olga, and she suddenly twisted free.

“Phillip, we’re going to send you to a hospital! They’ll cure you! When you’re yourself again, you can still go to Juilliard!”

Phillip barked a hoarse laugh that jerked his head backward, and the gun sounded with a roaring blast. He crumpled to the floor with blood spilling around his head in a bright pool. Olga screamed and covered her face with both hands. Carl gripped the door frame and stared
goggle-eyed and frozen. I tried to push past them, my cell phone in hand, already dialing 911.

I didn’t realize I was sobbing until Deputy Jesse Morgan gently shoved me aside.

“Somebody already called,” he said.

He had his own phone out, calling for an ambulance, then he rushed to Phillip and blocked my view.

The thin wail of an ambulance’s siren was already cutting through the mid-morning heat, and I knew that several more cars from the Sheriff’s Department would soon arrive. I walked back to Marilee’s house and closed the door.

I didn’t want to see them take Phillip’s body out in a bag. I was afraid I might kill Carl Winnick if I did.

Back in Marilee’s guest room, I crawled into bed. With the wooden blinds closed, the room was dark as a cave, and the stucco walls were thick enough to muffle sounds from outside. If I covered my head with a pillow, I couldn’t hear any noise at all from the Winnicks’ house.

I knew how to do this. I knew how to numb myself from horror. I knew how to withdraw into myself so the sharp edges of reality wouldn’t scrape me and jab me and cut me. I had thought I could face life, but I couldn’t. I didn’t even want to.

Ghost slithered under the covers and pushed himself into the crook of my body, sending his body heat into my stomach. Instinctively, I cupped my hands around him and felt his heart beating. His rough tongue lapped at my wrist, and he began to purr. Dumb animal to dumb animal, he was sending me love in the only way he knew how, and gradually it crept into my cold veins and to my anguished heart.

I finally had to admit to myself that it wasn’t the world I was retreating from, but my own rage. I truly and sincerely might take my.38 in hand and go over and fill Carl Winnick with bullets. I truly and sincerely might go over
and pistol-whip Olga Winnick to death. I had it in me to do that, and I knew it and was terrified by it. I also knew there’s nothing so paralyzing as unexpressed fury.

My cell phone rang in my pocket and sent Ghost scrambling out of bed. I checked the ID and groaned. It was Guidry.

Without any preambles, he said, “Dixie, the Winnick boy is alive. He’s on his way to St. Pete’s trauma center. I don’t know how badly he’s hurt, but he’s alive.”

I sat up and wiped at the tears on my face with the edge of the sheet. “Carl Winnick was the man who took the pipe away from Tanisha. He either clubbed Phillip himself or he hired Bull Banks to do it for him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know. He used the same words to me that he used to Tanisha, called us both
‘girl.’
I know it was him.”

“Deputy Morgan says you were at the door when Phillip shot himself. The Winnicks say they don’t know why he did it. Do you?”

“Sure. He told them why. They didn’t want the son they had, and he couldn’t live with that. His mother’s response was that they were going to send him to a hospital to ‘cure’ him.”

“Jesus. Poor kid.”

“You’ll go after Carl Winnick, right? Because if you don’t, I will.”

“No you won’t.”

The phone went dead, and I slammed it against the covers.

“Son of a bitch! Egotistical bastard! Shithead!”

Yelling is always good when you feel totally helpless.

But Phillip wasn’t dead. Maybe a miracle would happen and he would be okay.

I got out of bed.

My cell rang again, this time Michael calling from the firehouse. “Dixie, I just heard about the Winnick boy.”

I collapsed right where I stood, crumpling to the floor and sobbing into the phone. “Oh Michael, that sweet, gentle boy! His beautiful face!”

“I know, Dixie. I know.”

“It’s not fair!”

“No, it’s not.”

Huddled on the floor, I clutched the phone to my chest and cried so hard it seemed I was stripping out the lining of my throat. I cried for the horror of what had happened to Phillip, for what had happened to Todd and Christy, and for every other senseless tragedy that destroys the light of the shining young. I don’t know how long I cried, but when I was able to hear again, I lifted the phone to my ear and Michael was still there, still holding me from his end of the line.

I said, “I’m okay.”

“If you need me, I can take a sick day and be with you.”

“No, I’m fine, really.”

“Call me in a couple of hours, okay?”

I wiped my wet face and nodded at the phone. “I will, but don’t worry. I really am okay. Or at least as okay as anybody would be after…you know.”

“Yeah. I’m not worried, but call me anyway.”

I got up and washed my face. What I’d told Michael had been true. Anybody would be disturbed by watching a boy shoot himself in the head, and the fact that I wasn’t any more upset than the average neurotic was encouraging.

Ghost trotted after me and patted at my ankles. I knelt to stroke his silvery fur, and he nosed his head into my hand and arched his back, insistent as a needy baby. I went to the Bronco and got my grooming kit out and took Ghost to the lanai. Pulling my slicker brush through his hair until his coat was smooth and shiny calmed us both down.

As I brushed him, I looked toward the Winnicks’ house. I could see a back window that was probably in Phillip’s room. He had been outside that window when he saw a woman get into a car in Marilee’s driveway. I had been sure that was the reason he had been beaten up, but I had been wrong. Phillip had been beaten because Carl Winnick had hired somebody to scare him straight, to punish him for being gay, to destroy his burgeoning self-esteem…who knew what Winnick’s sick reasons were?

I don’t often use the word
evil.
It smacks too much of wild-eyed fanatics eager to control the world by imposing their skewed ideas of right and wrong. But when I thought about the kind of mind that would hire a thug to beat up his own son because the kid was gay, the only word that came to mind was
evil.
Carl Winnick was truly an evil man, and the fact that he presented himself to the world as the voice of morality made him all the worse.

When Ghost was combed and feeling sleek again, I left my grooming supplies on the lanai table and carried Ghost through the slider before I pulled it closed. I’ve learned not to try to coax any cat through a door, because they will always get halfway in and decide to contemplate the secrets of life while you stand there like an idiot telling them to please get a move on. Instead, I carry them over the threshold like brides.

It took two hands to securely lock the slider, so I put Ghost back on the floor before I locked it. Then with Ghost trotting by my side, I went back in the kitchen and made a cup of tea. I drank it sitting at the snack bar while I imagined what was happening to Phillip at the trauma center. Doctors would be fighting for his life. There might be surgery, blood transfusions, ventilators, and all the other modern techniques that exist to preserve life. But no matter how many devices I could envision working for
him, I couldn’t escape the reality of what a bullet does when it explodes inside a skull.

I washed Ghost’s food bowl and my teacup while Ghost twined in and out between my ankles, arching his back and rubbing against me with his tail held high. I was touched. Cats have tiny scent glands on their faces and at the roots of their tails. When they rub against you, it’s their way of mixing their scent with yours. You can’t get any closer to a living being than sharing odors, and Ghost was telling me that he and I were now bonded as one. He was signing on as my closest friend, my confidant, and my protector.

Even domestic cats can be vicious, and Ghost was also letting me know that if he and I went hunting together in the wild, he would pounce on a rodent, stick his dagger-like eyeteeth in it, and sever its spine for me. He would shred its flesh into bite-size chunks and share them with me. Since we weren’t in the wild, he would have to content himself with bringing me the occasional unlucky lizard caught on the lanai. All that bonding behavior made it even more imperative that I find a new owner for Ghost before he became too attached to me. He had already lost one person he loved, I didn’t want him to lose another one.