Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

by Blaize Clement

  I skipped down some of the steps and jumped down the others, sort of a semivictorious hustle. I had somehow managed to magnetize a man who was probably the head of a gang of thieves and killers. My brother had the man in a death grip, and now Guidry could arrest him and thank me.

  I said, “Guidry, this is the man I’ve been telling you about, the one who’s Jaz’s stepfather.”

  Guidry gave the man a curt nod. “I’m Lieutenant Guidry, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department.”

  To me, he said, “What’s going on here?”

  I said, “This man followed me home and threatened me. I kicked him down the stairs and Michael stopped him from escaping.”

  The man said, “That’s not true. I didn’t threaten her. My stepdaughter is missing and I think this woman knows where she is. I’m just trying to find my stepdaughter.”

  Guidry said, “Your stepdaughter would be the girl named Jaz?”

  The man grimaced. “She calls herself that. It’s really Rosemary.”

  Guidry said, “Whatever her name is, we have reason to believe she knows members of a gang wanted for murder.”

  The man heaved a huge sigh and wiped his face with the hand Michael didn’t have a grip on, rubbing it as if he wanted to erase his own skin.

  He said, “Christ, I hate this job.”

  We all waited. I wondered if he was actually going to confess that he was the head of a gang that he sent out to sell drugs and rob people.

  He said, “I’m a United States marshal, Lieutenant.”

  My mouth fell open, but Guidry merely regarded him with dispassionate eyes. He said, “Show me some ID.”

  Wincing a bit, the man reached into his breast pocket, drew out a slim wallet, and flipped it open to show his creds.

  Guidry said, “Michael, let him go.”

  Michael narrowed his eyes and looked at the man for a long moment before he loosened his hold. Rotating his sore shoulder under his navy polyester, the man arched his back as if his entire spine hurt.

  Michael said, “You need me here?”

  Guidry shook his head and Michael walked toward his kitchen door. He was flinging his punching hand from his wrist to get the blood circulating, but otherwise he looked as if he had more important things on his mind.

  Guidry said, “What’s your connection to the girl?”

  The marshal looked up at me as if he’d prefer not to speak in front of me, then made a what-the-hell shrug. “She was a witness to a drive-by killing in L.A. Right now she’s the only witness.”

  Guidry said, “You’ve got her in the Witness Protection Program?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Guidry said, “I guess that explains why you’re paying an exorbitant rate to keep her at the Key Royale.”

  “It’s the safest place we could find. Guards at the gate, lots of security on the premises. Room service, maid service, unlimited movies on big-screen TV. It wasn’t going to be forever, just until the trial next month.”

  With a surly glance at me, he said, “She stayed there until this woman and her friend interfered. After that, I believe she has been sneaking away. With all the security there, I don’t know how she managed it, but I suspect she’s left more than once.”

  Guidry said, “The manager at the Key Royale says they gave you a special off-season rate.”

  The man and I both stared at Guidry. I was surprised he’d got the Key Royale people to give up a detail like that, and I suppose the marshal was surprised they’d talked at all.

  The man rubbed his face again. “One kid is more trouble than an entire Mafia family. Kids don’t understand the danger they’re in, they don’t have any self-discipline, you have to watch them every minute or they’ll call their old friends and give away their location.”

  I said, “Did Jaz call those boys who’re looking for her?”

  His face sagged. “I didn’t know any boys were looking for her.”

  I said, “Three boys came in a house where I was working. One of them was named Paulie. They asked for Jaz by name.”

  Guidry said, “We got latents from that boy and identified him. Name was Paul Vanderson, one of the three charged with the drive-by killing in L.A.”

  The marshal said, “She wouldn’t have called them. She’s scared to death of them.”

  I said, “I think she gave somebody a description of the honeymoon cottage she was staying in at the Key Royale. The boys just went looking for a house that fit the description.”

  The man scowled. “I gave her a phone so she could call me if she needed anything, but I took it away from her because she was making calls to L.A. She claimed she only called a girl from her school, but if she told where she was, the girl could have spread it around.”

  I thought about going over and kicking him. I said, “What is it with you government people? Are you all dead from the neck up? You leave a girl that young alone, of course she’ll call a friend! And of course the friend will talk about it! What were you thinking?”

  For the first time, he looked faintly ashamed. “Look, terrorism is the focus now, and we’re spread all over the place. We don’t have the personnel to babysit teenagers. In the beginning, we assigned a female marshal to her, and the two of them holed up in a hotel room in Kansas. But the trial date got changed, that marshal got reassigned, and we brought her here where she’d have more freedom. I know it’s not an ideal situation, but I checked on her twice a day. I brought her comic books and candy bars. I even took her to Target a couple of times for shampoo and stuff. It wasn’t like she was in jail.”

  “Couldn’t you have put her with a family someplace?”

  He met my angry glare with dull eyes. “Until the murder trial is over, putting her with a family would expose them to grave danger.”

  I said, “What about Jaz’s parents? Why aren’t they with her?”

  “Her mother split when she was a baby, father took off a few years later. She lived with a grandmother, but the old lady died a few months ago. She was in a foster home when she saw the shooting. Everybody on the street scattered, nobody will talk. She’s the only one we’ve got.”

  His voice was gruff, but tension around his lips said he felt sadness along with his frustration and anger.

  Guidry said, “How long has she been missing?”

  “She wasn’t at the hotel when I went to check on her last night. I checked again this morning and nothing had changed.”

  His eyes shifted to me, as if he still hoped I knew where Jaz was.

  Guidry said, “Could she have run away?”

  “Her things were all there. If she’d run away, she would have taken her personal things.”

  Guilt was pouring over me like hot oil. I hadn’t encouraged Hetty to give Jaz sanctuary, but I hadn’t discouraged it, either. With the best of intentions, Hetty and I had given Jaz an escape from boredom and loneliness, but the escape may have caused her to be killed.

  I said, “I followed Jaz yesterday morning when she was on her way back to the hotel. She ran into the nature preserve behind the hotel, right at a spot where a Hummer was waiting at the curb. I think the guys from L.A. were in that Hummer. If I hadn’t been on the street, they would have grabbed Jaz then. They probably went back yesterday afternoon and caught her when she was on the way back to Hetty’s house.”

  We all fell silent, each of us knowing the worst might already have happened.

  The marshal took out a card and handed it to Guidry. “We’ll cooperate with any local investigation involving one of our charges, Lieutenant, but I doubt you’ll find the girl alive.” Bitterly, he added, “Without her, those guys will walk.”

  With a barely civil nod to me, he walked to his car and drove away.

  I still didn’t know his name and I still didn’t like him. On the other hand, he had tried to keep Jaz safe. At least he got credit for that.

  I said, “How did you know he was here?”

  “I didn’t. I came to talk to you about something else.”
>
  Even with my heart heavy because of Jaz, a little bubble like a champagne blip rose through the sorrow.

  He said, “I’d like to talk to you about the murder of Victor Salazar.”

  I should have known. Now that Victor was dead, the investigation was no longer just a kidnapping but also a homicide. Guidry wasn’t here for any personal reason. He was here strictly as a homicide detective.

  The little bubble took on feet, and one of its feet was mired in quicksand. I could almost hear the sucking sound it made as it pulled its foot up and got ready to stand its ground.

  I said, “You’d better come upstairs.”

  22

  I went up the stairs ahead of Guidry. I felt like a bear with a thorn in its paw. Guidry could just ask me his detective questions and leave. If the only thing he was interested in was what I knew about homicides, that’s all he would get.

  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 dishonest. 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 hande
d 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.”