Lucky Stiff (39 page)

I need to call Izzy and tell him I’ve changed my mind. I grab my cell phone, speed-dial his number, and he answers on the second ring.

“Izzy, hey, it’s Mattie. Listen, I’ve been thinking about this whole job thing, and about Hurley, and I think I made a hasty decision earlier. I’ve changed my mind about quitting.”

There’s an uncomfortably long pause on his end before he says, “Your timing is astoundingly bad. I called Jonas this afternoon, right after you and I talked, and offered him the job. He accepted and he’s set to start in two weeks, maybe one if I can convince the PD to cut him loose early.”

I say nothing back to him at first. I can’t. I’m too stunned. After a long silence, he says, “Mattie, are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I manage to reply.

“Why the change of heart? Do you want to talk about this?”

God, no. I’d rather stab myself blind with a dull fork. How the hell did I manage to screw everything up so spectacularly in such a short amount of time? The last thing I need right now is someone feeling sorry for me. I don’t want Izzy to know how utterly devastated I am, or how utterly stupid I’ve been. So I pull myself together and say, “No, I don’t need to talk. I was just having second thoughts, some last-minute jitters and doubts. It will be fine. And we can talk about it tomorrow.”

“Are you sure? Dom and I are out for dinner, but we can come home if need be.”

“No, I’m sure. I’m fine.”

“Call me if you change your mind.”

“Thanks, Izzy. I’ll see you in the morning.” Before he can say another word, I disconnect the call.

Chapter 38

I drop my cell phone back into the charger and sit on the couch, staring at the wall, trying to digest everything. I’m angry as hell at David, at Hurley, at myself, and the whole frigging world. I’m angry at Barbie and her implied promises of a perfect life with Ken, and at Harriet for having such a good life with Ozzie. Somehow I’ve become a tragic figure in the soap opera that is my life, and I’ve hit an all-time low. I mean, what the hell else could possibly go wrong?

No sooner do I think this than there is a knock at my door. I’m afraid to answer it, thinking I’ve just tempted the Fates a little too much and a cloaked figure with a scythe will be waiting on the other side. I realize I’m overreacting and it’s most likely just Izzy; but to my surprise, I find Paul Fletcher standing there.

“Hi,” he says. He smiles, flashing those pearly whites at me. “I know this is a bit strange, coming to your house and all, but I understand that you have Lisa’s cat, Tux, here.”

“I do,” I say, wondering where this is going.

“Oh, good. I was worried about him.”

“He’s doing fine.”

“Good, good.” He shuffles his feet for a few seconds. “It’s a terrible thing that happened to Lisa,” he says. “She was a good employee, and a good friend.”

Maybe not as good as you think.

“Anyway, I thought I’d come by and offer to take Tux off your hands. I’ll be happy to take him home with me. I think it’s what Lisa would want.”

Great. I haven’t had nearly enough losses tonight. I want to tell him no, but I really don’t have any grounds to do so. Tux isn’t my cat; and while he isn’t Fletcher’s, either, he probably has more of a claim to him than I do.

“Yeah, all right,” I tell him. “Come on in.”

Fletcher steps inside and I shut the door. Hoover walks over and tries to sniff Fletcher’s pant leg, but Fletcher pushes him away with his foot and mumbles, “Get off me, dog.”

I call Hoover over and he scurries to my feet and sits.

“I think Tux is in the bedroom. Hold on and I’ll get him for you.” I call to Hoover to follow me and he does so. I find Tux asleep on my bed on one pillow, Rubbish on the other. I scoop Tux up and he settles into my arms and starts to purr. I tell Hoover to stay and carry Tux out to the living room, holding him out to Fletcher. “Here you go.”

Fletcher is hesitant at first, looking as if he’d rather do anything than take the cat, but he finally reaches for him. As soon as he touches him, Tux tenses up, hisses, and wriggles himself loose, scratching Fletcher’s gloved hand in the process. Tux hits the floor, running, and dashes back into the bedroom.

“Sorry about that,” I say. “He’s been through a lot. I think he’s just spooked. Let me get the carrier I use for my cat. If I can get Tux into it, you can use it to take him home, and I’ll get it back from you at a later date.”

Fletcher nods and I head for my bedroom again. The carrier is in the back corner of the closet. I drag it out and leave it open and ready before approaching Tux again. He is now sitting between Hoover’s front legs. Talking softly in easy, sibilant tones, I pet Tux for a minute or two before picking him up. He is complacent in my arms and lets me slip him into the carrier without any further ruckus. Remembering how he freaked out in Hurley’s car, I realize I should have had the carrier with me when I took him from Lisa’s place.

Then it hits me. How did Fletcher know Tux was here?

I pick up the carrier and head back out to the living room. Fletcher is standing in the middle of the room, with his gloves off, rubbing at a nasty-looking scratch that is bleeding slightly. “Here you are,” I say, holding Tux out to him.

He takes the carrier, walks over toward the door, and sets it down on the floor. Then he turns back to me. “I’ll need his litter box, too,” he says.

“How did you know I had him?”

“What?”

“How did you know Tux was here?”

“Oh, um, I went by Lisa’s place right before I came here and talked to one of her neighbors, a lady named Tonya. She told me you took him in.”

My first thought is that Tonya seems determined to ruin my life tonight. My second thought is that I think Fletcher just lied to me. Even if he has the time wrong and he talked to Tonya some time ago, how would she know I took the cat in, as opposed to taking him to the pound?

“You just saw Tonya?” I say.

“Yeah, like ten minutes ago.”

“She was pretty shook-up the other night. How is she doing?”

Fletcher shrugs. “She seemed fine.”

Yes, she did, damn it.

Clearly, Fletcher is lying to me. The question is why? Why does he want Lisa’s cat?

“Um, the litter box?” he says.

“Oh, right,” I say. “It’s in the bathroom. I’ll get it for you.” I head into the bathroom, look inside Tux’s litter box, and see a rock-hard, dry-looking turd inside. I use a scooper to remove it and toss it into the toilet, thinking that Tux might need a kitty enema soon if this is what his output looks like.

And with that thought, I realize Jack Allen didn’t have to get his alcohol through an IV; he could have gotten it via enemas. The rectal mucosa absorbs medications and nutrients just as well as, if not better than, the gut. And when I think back to the condition of Jack’s body, the lower part of his torso was burned much worse than the upper. At the time, I thought it was just because of where the fire was in relation to his body, but now I realize it might have been the flammability of the alcohol in his intestines that caused it.

I also remember from reading Jack’s chart that he received a lot of enemas lately, and Lisa wasn’t the one who gave them. Paul Fletcher was. That realization leads me to another. It’s not Tux that Fletcher wants; it’s the litter box.

I look at it again. It’s a large, bulky thing with two halves that clamp together, and the bottom half has a plastic bag liner in it, making it easier to change. I glance over my shoulder to see if Fletcher is watching me; and to my chagrin, he is. I smile at him. “Just cleaning it out for you,” I say, waving the scooper. I turn back to the box and stick the scooper in again, even though there is nothing left to remove. I dig around through the litter, poking the scooper as deep as it will go. It doesn’t go far. Despite the fact that the bottom half of the box is about ten inches deep, the litter inside it is only a couple of inches thick. Either the box has a false bottom in it, or there is something beneath the liner. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

I make a show of scooping something more into the toilet, leaning to block Fletcher’s view so he can’t see that the scooper is actually empty. My mind is reeling, trying to think of a way to stall Fletcher, when he speaks right behind me. I hadn’t heard him approach.

“What are you doing?” he says. I jump and look up at him as my heart pounds in my chest.

“I was just cleaning out the box for you.”

“You seem nervous. Why is that?”

“You startled me, is all.”

The muscles in his cheeks are twitching and his eyes narrow at me. I can tell he’s weighing the truth of my statement. I see blood oozing from the scratch on his hand, and, thinking fast, I say, “Cat scratches are notorious for causing infections. I have some antiseptic in the medicine cabinet. Let me clean that wound up for you before you go.”

I stand and take a couple of steps toward the medicine cabinet over the sink, thankful the door will swing open toward Fletcher. I know I have a pair of sharp scissors in there; and if he can’t see inside it right away, I might have time to grab them. But just as I’m about to open the door, Fletcher stops me by splaying his hand on the mirrored front.

“You know, don’t you?” he says.

“Know what?” I say, trying to prolong the charade, even though I’m pretty sure my goose is cooked.

“The money,” he says. “You know about the money.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Clearly, my denial isn’t fooling him. He drops his hand from the medicine cabinet, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a scalpel, retracting the protective cover on the blade. He points it at me and says, “Take the lid off that litter box.”

I do as he says, unclamping the top and lifting the lid, which I set aside. “You killed Jack, didn’t you?” I say, knowing any further pretense is useless.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “It was an accident. He got drunker than I expected, and I guess he tipped his chair over reaching for another piece of pizza. His head got wedged between the chair and the coffee table, and either he passed out or he didn’t have the strength to move. I didn’t hear him fall, because I had turned up the volume on the Christmas music he had playing to cover up the sounds of me opening the safe. By the time I found him, he was already dead from asphyxia.”

“You got him drunk with the enemas,” I say.

He smiles at me. “I’m impressed. How did you figure that out?”

“There was no alcohol in his stomach. If he’d drunk himself into oblivion, it should have been full of it.”

“A miscalculation on my part,” he says, with a shrug. “I just wanted some of that money he was hoarding. I wasn’t going to take it all, just enough to keep the agency going and give me a little boost. Lisa told me she saw him with a big wad of cash once, and he had this key that he wore around his neck all the time. So I started snooping around and found that fake speaker safe. One day when I was there to give him an enema, I had just come from the liquor store and I decided to put some alcohol in the enema to see what happened. Within an hour, he passed out in his chair, so I took the key and opened the safe. He had wads of money in there, and I only took a few hundreds that first time. The next day, he was confused about what had happened, and I blamed it on a new med he was taking.

“I only meant to do it that one time, but my agency hasn’t been doing too well lately because the insurance payments we get are ridiculous. So I went back for more a few times. I never wrote those visits up, and I always parked over on the next block and came through Jack’s backyard to avoid being seen. But it all went wrong that last time. I was just going to take the money and leave; but I figured if someone found Jack dead, with a butt full of alcohol, it would look suspicious. So I set the fire to destroy the evidence and make it look like it was an accident.”

“What about Lisa? Was she in on it? Did she know what you did to Jack?”

“Not at first. But she started asking questions about why Jack was so drunk some of the time because she didn’t see any evidence of him drinking that much. I knew the guy across the street was an alcoholic and that he checked himself into some fancy out-of-state rehab facility a couple of weeks ago, so I raided his trash cans and stashed the empties in Jack’s trash.”

Ah, the mysterious missing Mr. Gatling.

“After you guys showed up at my office the other day, I was afraid you’d come to my house next. Once you went and talked to Lisa, I figured her place was safe, so I took the money there. I told her what happened to Jack and how I decided to take the money. I offered to give her some to pay for her habit if she let me stash it at her place temporarily. She’s been hooked on narcs for a long time now. As long as I supplied her, which is easy enough to do, since I can steal a couple pills here and there from my home care patients, she did anything I wanted.”

“Why not just take the money and run?”

“Because if I disappeared, I knew I’d be suspect number one. I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I planned to wait things out for a few weeks and then quietly close up shop and disappear. But Lisa hid the money and told me I had to take her with me when I left or she wouldn’t tell me where it was. Apparently, she was under the misconception that there was something romantic going on between us just because we had sex a few times.”

“So you overdosed her?”

He shrugs again. “I have a couple of hospice patients who are on morphine pumps and it’s pretty easy to siphon off a little here and a little there. She was doing heroin anyway, and I couldn’t very well have her going to the police, could I? But that stupid cat of hers screwed me. I searched her apartment; and when I didn’t find the money, I got her car keys and went to look in it. That damn cat ran out when I opened the door, not that I cared, but then that neighbor came home, saw the cat, and took it to Lisa’s apartment. I hid across the street and watched her call on her cell after she tossed the cat inside. And I stayed and watched when the cops showed up. That’s how I knew you had the cat. I heard you talking about taking him home. At first, I figured Lisa had stuck the money in a safe-deposit box or something; and when the cops found it, they’d figure she was the one who took it. But I never found a key for a safe-deposit box; and when I saw you walk out with that litter box, I realized that was the one place I hadn’t looked. So I followed you.”