Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (21 page)

I opened the french doors and pushed into my hot apartment. Ella was gone, which meant that Michael had come home earlier, moved her to his house, and then left again.

I said, “Sit down, I’ll turn on the air conditioner.”

He dropped to the love seat while I scooted into the bedroom and switched on the AC unit installed in the wall. I tossed my bag on the bed and went into the living room to face the music.

I said, “Let me save you some time. I knew all along about Victor Salazar being kidnapped. His wife is an old friend of mine, and she came right after she got the call from the kidnappers and told me. She said they’d
demanded a million dollars in cash. They wanted it left in the gazebo at Maureen’s boat dock. Maureen refused to let me call any law enforcement agency, and she asked me to go with her to deliver the money. I agreed to do it, and she came here and got me. After we drove to her house, she asked me to carry the money to the gazebo alone. I did what she asked, and she brought me home.”

Flat voiced, Guidry said, “You carried a million dollars down to Mrs. Salazar’s dock and left it for kidnappers.”

I firmed my jaw and looked him in the eye. “It isn’t illegal to pay off kidnappers, and that’s what Maureen chose to do. She said it was what Victor had always told her to do if he got kidnapped.”

Guidry said, “How well did you know Victor Salazar?”

“Barely. He and Maureen went off somewhere to get married, and I don’t think I was in the same room with him more than once or twice. He wasn’t what you’d call friendly.”

“What do you know about his business?”

“Maureen said he was an oil broker.”

“Tell me about the million dollars.”

“It was in twenty-dollar bills. Maureen put it in a pink duff el bag.”

“You saw the money?”

I crossed my legs, and a muscle twitched in Guidry’s jaw.

I said, “The money was already in the duff el bag when Maureen came to get me.”

“So you didn’t actually see it.”

Fine hairs on my arms stood up. “What are you getting at?”

Guidry studied me for a moment. “You trust Mrs. Salazar?”

My finger traced uneasy loops on my knee. “Maureen was a good friend in high school.”

“Honest and aboveboard?”

I cleared my throat. “I wouldn’t say Maureen was
dis
honest. Not really. Not much.”

He didn’t answer, and when I finally looked at him, I knew he was waiting for an explanation. A personal explanation.

I said, “It was complicated. We both had alcoholic parents who’d abandoned us. Nobody else understood what that was like, so we sort of supported each other.”

He let a beat go by, then said, “Mrs. Salazar told me she’d talked to you and that you’d delivered the money. I just wanted to corroborate what she said.”

I took a deep breath. “On the news, they’re saying that Victor drowned. Is that true?”

He shook his head. “He was already dead when somebody dumped him out of a boat.”

“How?”

“Contact shot to the forehead.”

“Like gangland execution style?”

“What makes you think that?”

I shrugged. “On TV crime shows, when somebody’s shot in the forehead, it always means organized crime.”

“You have any reason to think Victor Salazar was part of organized crime?”

“I told you, all I know about Victor Salazar is what Maureen has told me, and she says he’s an oil broker. You know what an oil broker does?”

He said, “Salazar’s ankles were tied to an anchor. Some snook fishermen snagged him in the Venice inlet by the riprap.”

In warm water, it doesn’t take long for a dead body to accumulate enough gas to float to the surface—but not a dead body bound to a heavy weight.

I said, “If he was attached to an anchor—”

Guidry compressed his lips as if he was afraid he might smile. “The rope they used was too long.”

My mouth tried to find something to say, but all I could do was stare at him and imagine a dead body bobbing upright just under the water’s surface, with a rope running from its ankles to an anchor on the silty bottom.

For Guidry, the fact that Victor had been anchored with a rope so long that it allowed him to float to the surface was an amusing fact in an otherwise gruesome homicide. He probably wasn’t even terribly surprised, since most criminals are caught because they do stupid things that make it easy to catch them.

For me, the too-long rope was a red flag that signaled more strongly than ever that Harry Henry had been involved in Victor’s kidnapping. Harry was the only person in the world dumb enough to anchor a dead body with a too-long rope.

Guidry and I didn’t have much to say to each other after that. We said our goodbyes and he left, each of us mumbling something about talking later. I didn’t know how Guidry felt, but I felt oddly ashamed, as if I’d blundered into an X-rated movie and hoped nobody saw me.

I would never have imagined Harry Henry capable of kidnapping or murdering anybody, but every intuitive
bone in my body thrummed that he was up to his handsome cheekbones in Victor’s death. Harry had been in love with Maureen since we were in high school, he was loyal as a dog, and if she had asked him to kidnap Victor, he would have done it. But would he commit murder for her?

My mind felt like a pinball machine, ricocheting between awful images of Jaz taken by young men who wanted to keep her from testifying against them in a murder trial, and the possibility that two people I’d known and liked practically all my life might have colluded to kill a man.

And then there was Michael, who was downstairs with a hand swollen from hitting a U.S. marshal. I had caused him to turn into an avenging angel, and all his vengeance had proven unnecessary. He probably felt foolish, and I needed to go down and explain everything to him.

But as I started down the stairs, Michael slammed out of his kitchen door and strode across the deck to the carport like a man on a mission. He didn’t even notice me on the stairs, just got in his car and peeled out.

Everybody but me seemed to have a definite purpose.

Wearily, I went back inside, took a long shower, and crawled into bed. When I woke, I was a lot less tired but no less depressed about the state of my world. A peek over the porch railing at the cars in the carport told me that Michael had come home, so I got dressed in a hurry and went down to talk to him. It was time to tell my big brother everything that was going on.

I found him and Ella in the kitchen, Ella at her preferred
spot on a barstool, and Michael at the cooktop stirring something simmering in a huge pot.

I sniffed the air. “Is that chili?”

Even to me, my voice sounded pathetically hopeful. Michael waved his wooden spoon toward the butcher-block island.

“Get a bowl, I’ll give you some.” Then he did a double take at my face. “Other than kicking U.S. marshals down your stairs, what else have you been up to?”

I got one of our grandmother’s red-fired chili bowls out of the cupboard and handed it to him. I poured myself a mug of coffee from the pot heating on the counter.

Michael ladled dark brown chili into the bowl, put Godzilla-sized pinches of grated cheddar cheese and chopped onions on top.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got corn sticks ready to come out of the oven.”

Ella and I watched raptly while he opened the door on the wall oven and hauled out two special pans filled with steaming golden brown cornbread sticks. With synchronized flips of his wrists, he turned both pans over a dish towel spread on the countertop, and with a smart rap sent hot cornbread sticks tumbling out. He put two on a plate for me and set it on the butcher block next to my chili.

I sat down at the island bar. “I guess you’ve heard about Maureen’s husband being kidnapped.”

He did a get-on-with-it motion with his hand. It wasn’t swollen, just a little red.

He said, “I know some snook fishermen found his body.”

Careful not to let the inside of my lips touch it, I
crunched the tip of one of the hot cornbread sticks between my teeth. I chewed. I moaned softly. I took a bite of chili and moaned again. Venal sinners surprised to wake up in heaven would not have been more grateful.

Michael poured himself a mug of coffee and sat down across from me. Ella lowered her eyelids and gazed worshipfully at him.

“So what does Maureen’s husband have to do with you?”

“You know that night she came here? That’s what she came for, to tell me he’d been kidnapped. She’d got a call from the kidnappers asking for a million dollars.”

“Okay.”

“She wanted me to go with her to deliver it.”

He raised an eyebrow. I ate several more bites of chili in case he snatched it away after I’d told him the rest of it.

I said, “She came and got me the next night and I carried a duff el bag full of money down to a gazebo at their boat dock. Then she brought me home.”

He waited.

I said, “That’s all. At least that’s all I had to do with it. But Guidry told me that Victor had already been dead when he was thrown out of the boat. Somebody shot him. His body had been tied to an anchor, and the rope that tied him was too long. That’s how he floated up high enough for fishermen to snag him.”

Michael’s eyes got a look that said he might laugh. “They tied him to an anchor with a long rope?”

I said, “It’s not funny.”

“It’s a little bit funny.”

I ate some more chili.

Michael said, “So what was the deal with the marshal? Who was he looking for?”

I was almost to the bottom of the chili bowl, so I ate the last of it and polished off the second breadstick before I answered him. I figured I’d need all the strength I could get.

“A couple of days ago, three teenage boys came in Reba Chandler’s house while I was there with Big Bubba. The parrot, you know. I turned around and there they were. They seemed to think a girl named Jaz lived there.”

“You know her?”

“She’s a teenager I had seen at the vet’s office, the same girl that marshal you slugged was looking for. He was with her at the vet’s. He’d run over a rabbit and killed it, and she was upset about it. Cute girl. He claimed he was her stepfather, but he was lying. She’s in witness protection and he’s her guardian or whatever.”

Michael erased the air with a flat palm. “I don’t want to hear about the girl. I want to hear about the guys that came in on you.”

“But they’re all connected. They’re all from L.A., and the boys are part of a gang there. One of them left latent prints on a jar of birdseed at Reba’s house, so the fingerprint people were able to identify him. He’s one of three guys who killed a boy in a drive-by shooting in L.A., and Jaz is the only witness willing to testify. That’s why she’s in witness protection. They hid her here to wait until the trial. Now Jaz has disappeared, and the marshal thinks the gang got her.”

He went still. “Why did he think you’d know where she was?”

“He probably saw my car at Hetty’s house and followed me.”

Michael raised an eyebrow asking for more information. I hate it when he does that.

I said, “Hetty Soames has a new service-dog pup she’s raising, and she took a shine to Jaz and offered her a job. She wrote her address for Jaz, so the marshal knew it. Jaz was secretive about where she lived—well, she was secretive about everything—so Guidry asked me to try to learn more about her. I’ve been stopping at Hetty’s every day.”

“Guidry has known about this?” Michael’s voice was defensive and a trifle hurt.

“He’s investigating a homicide that happened here a few days ago. A man was killed during a gang-related burglary. Some neighbors saw teenagers loitering outside the man’s house earlier, and they matched the description of the boys who came into Reba’s house. The sheriff’s office got a positive match on prints at the murdered man’s house and the prints left at Reba’s house, so they knew they were the same guys.”

“The gang members who killed a boy in L.A. also robbed and killed a man here?”

I could tell he was having a hard time finding slots in his brain to hold so many dismal bits of information. “Their trial in L.A. is the one Jaz is a witness in.”

Michael stood up and got a cornbread stick and ate it in two bites. He does that when he’s agitated. Probably a holdover from the time that feeding himself and me was the only escape he could find from our mother’s self-consumed immaturity.

“Okay. And what else?”

“I’m afraid Harry Henry had something to do with Maureen’s husband being kidnapped. I can’t believe he’d kill him, but I think he’s involved somehow.”

“Harry Henry? Nah, Harry wouldn’t do something like that.”

“He told me Maureen had planned to get a divorce from the first day she married Victor. Then he said he hadn’t seen her for two or three years, but I know he was lying about that. Besides, who else do you know who’d sink a dead body with an anchor but use a rope so long the body could float to the surface?”

Michael’s eyes had gone slitty.

“What do you mean, he
told
you? Did you ask him about it?”

“Not exactly. We just talked a little bit at the Sea Shack.”

Michael sat down and put his elbows on the table. He lowered his head between his hands and squeezed it for a long time while Ella widened her eyes and looked alarmed. When he raised his head, his eyes were considerably less cheery than they’d been when I first came in.

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s it. Harry asked about you, by the way. Said you were a good fisherman.”

“Hell, Dixie.”

“I’m not involved in anything, Michael. It’s just that I know all these people.”

Michael sighed. “Let me get this straight. You’ve delivered ransom money to kidnappers. You’ve talked to a man who might have killed Maureen’s husband. And
you’ve spent time with a girl who’s on the run from a murdering gang from L.A.”

“It’s not as bad as you make it sound.”

“Stay away from Harry Henry.”

“Aw, Harry’s all right, he’s just weird. He has a new dog, named him Hugh Hefner.”

“Figures. Hugh Hefner’s probably Harry’s hero.”

I got up and rinsed my bowl and cup and put them in the dishwasher. I went around the bar and kissed Ella’s nose. Then I kissed Michael’s cheek.