Michael’s lips weren’t relaxed anymore, and a muscle worked in his jaw. “So what did Guidry do?”
“He made me report it. I went to the office on Ringling and looked at mug shots. I didn’t see anybody that looked like Vern, but the guys investigating already know who he is. He works for Tucker, sort of a hanger-on. They don’t know who the other men were, but the deputies have the tape that was put on my mouth. They’re running latents from it through IAFIS to see if they get a match.”
Michael walked around the butcher block island a few times, like a man on the deck of a ship that he can’t get off of. Ella watched him with big round eyes.
“So what’s going to happen now? Is Guidry taking care of this?”
Michael’s tone said that if Guidry wasn’t doing his job, Michael would.
I said, “Guidry’s in homicide, so he’s not part of the official investigation, but he’s involved. So is Paco.”
“Paco knows about this?”
“Yeah, we had dinner together last night and I told him.”
He looked a little hurt, so I hurried to tell him about Ruby being married to Zack Carlyle.
He brightened. “Zack Carlyle? No kidding.”
He said it as if Zack Carlyle went around wearing a red cape and leaping over tall buildings.
At least I’d got his mind off Vern kidnapping me.
Upstairs, Guidry had neatly made up my bed before he left. I found it sort of touching that he’d gone to the trouble. After a shower, a nap, and some time spent updating my client records, I cleaned my apartment. I got rid of every speck of dust, every smear on a mirror, every dull haze on anything chrome. I polished and disinfected and vacuumed until I was high on bleach and ammonia fumes. My brother handles stress by cooking. I handle it by cleaning the heck out of everything. My brain tells me that bad things can happen to people with clean apartments, but my Scandinavian genes tell me that cleanliness and order are as good as a horseshoe over the door. They protect you even if you don’t believe in them.
As I put away the vacuum, I heard a peculiar tapping noise coming from my kitchen window. A female cardinal was obsessively flying at the glass and hitting it with her chest and beak while the male flew in anxious circles behind her. Cardinals do that sometimes during springtime nesting when one sees its reflection and thinks it’s another bird invading its territory. But this was September, not a time of building nests, so the female’s attack on her own image seemed out of the natural order of things. I wondered if the bird was afraid a rival female was on the periphery of her territory ready to move in. Whatever her reason, the cardinal attacked her own image with the intention of keeping a tight hold on what was her own. A noble purpose, perhaps, but she could kill herself.
I stood for a while and shooed her away. Every time I left the window, she came back to do her kamikaze dives at the glass. I taped paper to the glass, but it didn’t stop her. I found a magazine picture of a glaring owl and taped it to the glass, but she wasn’t fooled. While I dressed for afternoon rounds, the sound of her beak hitting the glass was like the relentless sound of a ticking clock. I had mental images of her beak splitting down its length and making it impossible for her to eat.
When it was time to leave my apartment to make afternoon rounds, I was acutely conscious that a bird was slowly committing suicide at my kitchen window. On the sandy shore, a few gulls, terns, and sandpipers braved the glaring sun to pick up microscopic nutrients from the lapping sea, their subdued cries like doleful omens. Driving slowly, so as not to disturb the songbirds and parakeets taking siestas in the trees lining the drive, I was all the way to Midnight Pass Road before I got myself under control. Nature has been getting along without my direction since the beginning of time. The cardinal would either give up her attacks on her reflection or she wouldn’t. In either case, I had done all I could do to save her.
Nevertheless, I had a skitty feeling that the cardinal carried some sort of message for me, a woman-to-woman bit of wisdom. But I wasn’t flinging myself against a hard surface that would hurt me, and I didn’t believe that some other female was trying to steal my mate. At least I didn’t know of one.
14
At Tom Hale’s condo, Billy Elliot met me at the door with a big grin. Tom was in the kitchen with his laptop open on the table.
He yelled, “I want to show you something.”
As if he wanted to make sure I stayed focused on my reason for being there, Billy Elliot walked close beside me to the kitchen. Tom pointed at a photograph on the computer screen.
“Is this the guy who kidnapped you?”
In a newspaper photo, Vern and Kantor Tucker stood in front of an airplane, Vern a little bit behind Tucker. They were both smiling, Tucker more broadly than Vern. The caption read, “Kantor Tucker at his aero-compound.” An accompanying article identified the plane as a new Boeing 707, the latest addition to “Tuck” Tucker’s private fleet of planes. There was no mention of Vern.
I said, “That’s Vern.”
Tom said, “Here’s another picture.” He clicked some keys and the screen filled with a mug shot of Vern’s bruised, sullen face.
He said, “This is from Indiana, a year or so ago. His name is Vernon Brogher. He was arrested after he slammed a guy’s head into a wall in a bar. The guy had asked him to stop taking cellphone photos of the guy’s girlfriend, and Vern nearly took the guy’s head off. Literally.”
“Is he a pilot?”
Tom snorted. “I don’t imagine Vern is smart enough to fly a paper airplane, much less a jet.”
“Ruby said he’s Tucker’s muscle.”
“Does that mean he’s Tucker’s bodyguard or the man who beats up people for him?”
“With Vern’s history, it probably means both. How’d you find those pictures?”
“If you spend enough time on the Internet, you can find anything, especially things of public record.”
Billy Elliot leaned against my knees to remind me that time was passing. Tom watched me snap Billy’s leash on his collar.
I said, “Do you know anything about drag racing? The professional kind?”
“You taking it up?”
“Ruby is married to Zack Carlyle. He’s a drag racer. You know, one of those guys who race around on a track.”
His face took on the look of a kid hearing about a really cool video game.
He said, “Drag racers don’t go around on a track, Dixie. A drag race is a straight shot and it only lasts a little over four seconds. Two cars at a time race over and over, until one car has beat out all the others in its class.”
I said, “Hunh.” No matter what Tom told me, I kept imagining a line of cars tearing around an oval track. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a straight race that lasted only four seconds.
Billy Elliot whuffed to remind me that I was there to run with him, not to chat with Tom, so I led Billy out to the elevator in the hall.
When we came back upstairs, I unsnapped Billy Elliot’s leash and waved goodbye to Tom.
He said, “How’d you like to go to a drag race? You and Guidry, me and Jennie.”
It seemed like every being in the world was either in a new relationship, like the humans I knew, or fighting to keep a relationship, like the self-destructive cardinal flying into my kitchen window. I guess some relationships bring serenity and some bring desperation.
Jennie was Tom’s new girlfriend, and she had passed my test of worthiness by running on the beach with Billy Elliot. But I wasn’t sure if Guidry and I were at a double-dating stage yet. Joining another twosome makes a different kind of statement than doing things alone as a couple. I wasn’t sure what the statement was, but I didn’t think we were ready to make it yet.
I said, “I’m sure Guidry would like to go to a drag race, but I don’t think drag racing is my thing.”
I didn’t say it, but what I thought was that Zack Carlyle might be a name that men got excited about, but as far as I was concerned, he was a man who had f
ailed the test of loyalty to his wife and baby.
Tom said, “It might not be a good idea anyway. Those guys who grabbed you may have something to do with drag racing, and men who kidnap women off the street aren’t usually the kind of men who’d appreciate her following them. Especially if she’s following them with a cop.”
“They wouldn’t know Guidry is a cop. He doesn’t look like a cop.”
Tom’s eyes got a pitying look. “Dixie, even Billy Elliot could look at Guidry and know he’s a cop. Cops look like cops. They can’t help it. They have cop eyes and cop mouths, they move like cops. Believe me, you go to a racetrack anywhere in the world with Guidry, and half the people there will take one look at him and remember pressing engagements elsewhere.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I thought about what Tom had said. When I looked at Guidry, I didn’t see a cop, but it was true that cops get a look in the eyes that people in other professions don’t have. A watchful look. Not like rangers scanning the horizon for forest fires or like store detectives on the lookout for shoplifters. More like a three-hundred-sixty-degree awareness of everything going on around them even when they aren’t looking directly at it. I had to admit that Guidry had that look. If we went to a racetrack where Vern and his buddies were, they might recognize the look. If they did, it might scare them enough to leave the county, which would be fine with me.
As I pulled into Mr. Stern’s driveway, I instinctively looked upward at the Kreigle house next door. No face was in a window looking down at me. I hoped the sad young woman had gone someplace where she would be happier.
Inside the Stern house, a new tension rode on the air. Ruby was silent and grim, Mr. Stern was on the phone in the kitchen. Even Opal seemed to have pulled inside herself.
As I shook dry food into Cheddar’s bowl, Mr. Stern spoke to Ruby as if they were mid-conversation. “You’re a big girl, Ruby, and you know how to use the phone. You’re not doomed to starve just because I’ve ordered food for myself.”
She said, “I know that, Granddad. It just seems peculiar for a person to order dinner delivered without asking the other person in the house if she’d like something too.”
“I guess I got so used to not seeing you or hearing from you that it just slipped my mind that you were here.”
Ruby’s eyes flooded and she left the kitchen with Opal hugged tightly to her chest.
I didn’t speak. Just left Mr. Stern in the kitchen to sulk alone. I cleaned Cheddar’s litter box while he ate, then went back to the kitchen and washed and dried his bowls. I put fresh water in his water bowl and left the kitchen with my lips squeezed shut. Mr. Stern had a waiting empty wineglass on the bar, but he didn’t ask me to open a bottle of wine for him, and I didn’t offer.
Outside Ruby’s bedroom door, I tapped lightly and called her name. Her “Come in” was muffled, as if she’d had her face buried in a pillow. When I went in, she was sitting on the edge of the bed. Opal was in her crib watching the play of late sunshine on the wall.
I said, “This is my last stop for the day, and I’m going home to have dinner with my brother and his partner. My brother is the best cook in the world. Would you and Opal like to join us?”
She looked so grateful that I had to avert my eyes so she wouldn’t see the pity in them. “Do I need to change clothes?”
“Heck no, we’re barefoot diners.”
“I’ll just put a clean Onesie on Opal.”
I waited, thinking how young mothers may go out of the house looking like yesterday’s warmed-up oatmeal, but they want their babies to always look cute.
Before we left, Ruby ducked into the kitchen. “I’m going out with Dixie for dinner, Granddad. Can I have a house key?”
Taken by surprise, he muttered something I couldn’t hear, and when Ruby joined me at the front door she held a door key in her hand.
On the way to my place, neither of us spoke of the tension in Mr. Stern’s house, or of the fact that he was treating her shabbily. Neither did we speak of Myra Kreigle, of the trial, or of Vern. Instead, we talked about people on the street, the clothes they wore, the clothes movie stars and celebrities wore, the shops in Sarasota where women could buy those kind of clothes. Trivial woman talk to avoid deep woman talk.
At home, Michael and Paco accepted a guest lugging a baby with graceful equanimity. Paco hurried to set an extra plate on the redwood table on the deck, and Michael made the kind of admiring noises at Opal that warm the cockles of a mother’s heart. I left them on the deck to get acquainted while I zipped upstairs to shower and get into clean shorts and a T. When I came downstairs, Paco had Opal in his arms and Ruby was helping Michael carry food from the kitchen.
For a moment I felt as if I were looking at a slice of life preserved in the amber of time, with the baby being Christy, Ruby being me, and Todd a numinous presence somewhere in the shadows. The moment passed and we were just people getting acquainted—a woman who was a younger version of myself, a baby who was like my own child who had died, Michael and Paco who had always been there for me, and the wrenching memory of my beloved husband.
Ella did not share my bittersweet feelings. Ever since she had given Paco a scare by bounding into the trees while we ate, he had decreed that she would wear a light harness with a cotton leash looped around the leg of a lounge chair. She had come to tolerate that indignity, but she watched Michael and Paco fawning over the baby with the gimlet-eyed imperiousness of the Red Queen.
Dinner began with a cup of lentil soup with a squeeze of lemon to give it a lift. Michael whirred up a tiny bit in the blender for Opal and got a flirtatious flutter of eyelashes and a drooly smile. No matter how young or old, every female falls for Michael.
After the soup, Michael brought out poached Alaskan salmon with dill sauce, baby red potatoes, and a salad of cucumber, orange, and Florida avocado. Hot french bread and a crisp white wine made just the right finishing touch.
Over dinner, Michael and Paco and I kept the conversation moving, tossing topics around like beach volleyball players with the easy familiarity of people who know one another extremely well and speak a kind of code that doesn’t have to be explained. We talked of inconsequential things—the weather, a funny scene Paco had witnessed on the street, Michael’s buddy at the firehouse who had taken his family to Disney World.
“We’re taking turns filling in for him,” he told Ruby. “My day will be tomorrow.”
Ruby didn’t care what Michael’s schedule was—why would she?—but Paco and I nodded like business executives noting a significant change in plan. I didn’t know if Ruby was aware of how diligently we worked to avoid speaking of Myra Kreigle or her trial.
Dessert was big chunks of sweet watermelon, the real kind with black shiny seeds and honest flavor. Ruby let Opal gum a tiny bite, but she mostly drooled red juice on her Onesie, and the new experience of watermelon made her cry. Opal had enjoyed as much of new acquaintances as she could stand.
I said, “I think it’s time to drive you home.”
Ruby smiled. “If you don’t mind. It’s past Opal’s bedtime.”
While Ruby gathered up the diaper bag and said her thank-yous and goodnights to Michael, Paco slipped inside the house to put on shoes. He followed us to the carport and climbed into his dented truck. “I’ll follow you.”
His voice didn’t leave any room for discussion, which made me realize that in addition to adding shoes to his attire, he’d probably also added a few loaded guns. I looked toward the deck, where Michael was busily gathering up leftovers and chatting with Ella. He and Paco had come to a decision they hadn’t discussed with me, and the decision was that Paco would stick to us like glue and make sure nothing happened to Ruby on the way home.
If Ruby found it unusual to have an armed deputy riding on our bumper, she didn’t mention it. At Mr. Stern’s house, I pulled into the driveway and left the motor running while Ruby gathered her baby paraphernalia. Opal was fussy, but Ruby leaned across to hug me before she slid out of the car.
“Thanks, Dixie. I appreciate that dinner more than you can ever know.”
She slammed the car door closed and scurried toward the front door, with Paco close behind her. He waited until she had unlocked the door and disappeared inside, then glided past me to his truck. On the drive home, he stuck close to me, and it occurred to me that he was guarding me as carefully as he’d guarded Ruby. It was a disquieting thought.
Back home, I waved a thank-you to Paco and headed up my stairs while he ambled across the yard to his back door. I was inside my apartment before I realized he’d ambled with deliberate slowness to give me time to get inside. Another disquieting thought. I didn’t believe I was in danger, but apparently Paco thought it was a possibility.
A wave of exhaustion hit me as I got ready for bed, and I crawled between the sheets with the kind of mind fog that comes from too much thinking. Even so, I was still thinking. I wondered how long it would take Ruby to recover from the trauma of the last several years of her life. From what Mr. Stern had said, Ruby’s life had taken a sharp turn when she was in her early teens. Within two or three years, her mother had died a lingering death, her father had been killed in a war, her grandmother had died of heartache, and Ruby had been left with a grandfather who was incapable of showing affection. In her pain, she had turned to Myra Kreigle as a mother substitute. In her naivete, she had let Myra use her to defraud other people. With the same need for love that we all have, she had believed she had found it with a race car driver named Zack Carlyle. Zack had turned against her when he lost all the money he’d invested with Myra Kreigle, and Myra was willing to destroy Ruby to save herself.
I wondered what any individual’s limit is. How much pain and loss can any of us absorb before we collapse? I knew what my own limit was, and I knew every person has his or her own limit. Ruby had taken more hard knocks than most women could take, even women a lot older, but I knew a moment would inevitably come when she couldn’t take any more.
Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons Page 9