Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

by Blaize Clement

  The first woman said she had found somebody else, and the next one slammed down the phone when I told her my rates, as if I’d said something obscene. The other woman said she thought they were extremely reasonable.

  Everything is relative. I made an appointment to stop by the approving woman’s house to meet her cat and get the pertinent information, then spent the rest of the hour entering the morning’s visits into my client records.

  I keep meticulous records, recording the date and time I arrived, the time I left, and what I did while I was there, along with notes about anything a pet needed or did that was out of the ordinary. If a pet has a medical condition that requires medications or vitamins or treatments, that’s recorded. I have the history of illnesses, injuries, and pregnancies, along with the dates of all immunizations, the number on the animal’s ID tag, and whether it’s been declawed, spayed, or neutered. I know each pet’s preferences in food, toys, TV programs, and music. I’m probably too compulsive about keeping all that information, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Someday it might be important to know precisely when I gave a bath or a vitamin or a prescription medication.

  At four o’clock, I got a banana from its special little hanger in the kitchen and ate it as I went down to the carport. A great blue heron standing on the hood of the Bronco watched me as I got a sixty-watt lightbulb out of the storage closet. I tossed the last bite of banana toward the shore, and the heron fluttered to the sand to get it. I threw the peel in the garbage can, got in the Bronco, and drove back to the Graysons’ house, where Rufus was ecstatic to see me. We played a short game of roll the ball on the living room floor before his supper. While Rufus ate, I hauled out a ladder from the garage and changed the burned-out bulb in the coach light. I put the ladder away, closed the garage door, and brought in the Graysons’ mail. I checked the house for any doggy accidents, giving the carousel horse a pat on the rump as I walked by. Everything was in order, and I washed Rufus’s food and water bowls and gave him fresh water before we went for a walk. We walked the quarter block to Midnight Pass Road and jogged past the wooded area, where Rufus insisted on stopping to bark at unseen squirrels or rabbits. I finally persuaded him to walk with me to Marilee Doerring’s street.

  Eight

  A deputy’s car was in Marilee’s driveway and the crime-scene tape was still on the door, but there were no CSU cars. That meant the ME had come and put the body in a bag and taken it away, but the forensics people weren’t finished getting photos, latent prints, hair, fiber, and all the other evidence they gather. Next door at the Winnick house, a yard vacuum lay in the driveway with an orange extension cord snaking under the partially opened garage door.

  I parked behind the deputy’s car and went to his open window. He was making notes, and he looked up at me with the flat, impersonal look that law-enforcement people learn.

  I said, “Hi, I’m Dixie Hemingway. I found the dead man this morning, and I told Detective Guidry I’d stop by this afternoon when I was in the neighborhood.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Okay, I’ll call him later. Thanks.”

  Rufus was contemplating a bird of paradise plant as if he thought it needed to be peed on, so I pulled his leash and started back down the driveway. Passionate piano music started coming from the Winnicks’ house, and I turned my head that way. Now that I knew it was the kid practicing and not the radio or a CD, I was truly impressed. Not that I know diddly about classical music. My taste runs more to jazz and blues and country, but I know talent when I hear it, and the kid could play. Even Rufus cocked his head and listened with doggy respect.

  Mrs. Winnick suddenly rose from behind a row of low shrubs between the two lots and walked rapidly around to the driveway. She wasn’t wearing gardening gloves or carrying a trowel or any other gardening tools, and I had the distinct impression that she had been hiding behind the shrubs. She seemed to deliberately avoid looking my way. Maybe she was pissed that I hadn’t told her about the murder.

  She leaned down to get the handle of her yard vac and switched it on, intently looking at the driveway and moving the wand back and forth over the pavement. She wore black stretch Lycra tights with a boxy white T that stopped at her hipbones. Except for her skinny butt, her body was surprisingly muscular. Her butt wasn’t muscular. It was the kind that hangs in two saggy loops, like basset ears.

  Rufus and I retraced our walk toward his street. At the wooded area, where an abandoned drive disappeared into the trees, he stopped and barked again, tugging eagerly at the leash. The wooded swath between Marilee’s street and Rufus’s street is about fifty feet wide, and runs all the way from Midnight Pass Road to the bay. A wooden fence runs along both sides to separate it from people’s backyards. Originally, it spanned a private driveway to a house on a peninsular extension into the bay. The owners had died years ago and the property was frozen in some kind of litigation for so long that the house fell apart and the land leading to it reverted to its original wild state. A useless metal gate stretched across the old shelled drive as mute testimony of how quickly nature reclaims its own.

  I explained to Rufus that the woods were too brambly for dogs and women in shorts, and he reluctantly abandoned the idea of exploring it. When we got to his house, I turned on some lights and the kitchen radio and he and I kissed each other goodbye.

  My next stop was across Midnight Pass Road at the Sea Breeze, a pink stucco honeycomb of condos tucked into a slim slice of land at the edge of the Gulf. Every condo has a curved stucco roof over its balcony, so the balconies look like dark caves cut into the side of a mountain. The whole thing resembles an excavated Indian ruin. Inside, it’s anything but a ruin, with a marbled lobby dotted with great urns of green things and tasteful paintings by local artists. Sarasota probably has more artists per capita than anyplace in the world, so it’s not hard to find good art here.

  I took the stainless-steel and mirrored elevator up to Tom Hale’s condo. Tom is a round man—rosy round face, warm round black eyes behind round steel-rimmed glasses, round head of curly black hair, round little belly that rests lightly on his lap. Until a wall of shelves at a home-improvement store fell on him and crushed his lower spine, Tom headed a large CPA firm. He had gone to pick up some piano wire to hang a large painting in the house he shared with his wife and two children, but you know how it is, you can’t go to one of those places without wandering around looking at all the neat stuff. As he remembers it, he had no reason to walk down the aisle between towering stacks of lumber and ready-to-hang doors. Nobody ever knew what caused the shelves to topple over, but they did, spilling all their contents onto the floor and anybody who happened to be there. Luckily, only one other person was in the aisle at the time, and he escaped with a concussion and broken arms. Tom wasn’t so lucky.

  He sued, of course, but it took several years before the case finally settled, and by that time his CPA firm was kaput because he’d spent so much time having surgery and learning how to function in a wheelchair. The lawyers for the store claimed that he was partly responsible for his own pain and paralysis because he was an intelligent man and should have known better than to walk down that aisle. The jury didn’t buy that argument, and they awarded Tom half a million dollars. His lawyers got half, plus reimbursement for all their expenses. Then his wife divorced him because she couldn’t bear living with a man in a wheelchair, and she and the children moved to Boston where her parents lived. In the divorce settlement, she got most of the money that was left, and Tom got a studio apartment in the Sea Breeze. The only thing standing between him and utter loneliness was a greyhound named Billy Elliot, a former racing dog that Tom had rescued. I suppose Tom identified with the dog.

  Tom and I trade services. He does my taxes and I go by twice a day and walk Billy Elliot for him. I could hear Billy Elliot’s nervous toenails skittering on the marble floor before I opened the door. He started to jump on me when I came in, then crouched in fear when I held my palm f
lat and said, “Down!” It always breaks my heart to see a dog cower like that, because it’s a clear signal the dog has been beaten in the past.

  I knelt beside him and stroked his smooth neck. “You’d feel terrible if you jumped on somebody and knocked them down,” I said. “That’s why jumping’s not allowed.”

  He thumped his tail on the floor and grinned hopefully at me. From the kitchen, Tom yelled, “Hey, Dixie! Come tell me about that dead man!”

  Billy Elliot followed me in and stood whipping my legs with his tail while I gave Tom the condensed version of finding a dead man in Marilee’s kitchen.

  Tom said, “Have they contacted Marilee?”

  “We don’t know where she is. She didn’t leave me a number.”

  “Maybe her grandmother would know.”

  “Marilee has a grandmother?”

  “Everybody has a grandmother, Dixie. Marilee has one who lives at Bayfront Village. Name is Cora Mathers.”

  It was news to me that Tom and Marilee knew each other, but Tom did taxes for a lot of people on the key.

  I said, “Wasn’t Cora Mathers the Leave It to Beaver mother?”

  “No, that was June Cleaver. Ward and June Cleaver. The kid who played the Beaver was Jerry Mathers. Maybe his mother’s name was Cora.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to him.”

  “He probably bought his own island or something. Unless somebody screwed up and he didn’t get the money from all those shows.”

  “You think it would be okay if I called Cora?”

  “Oh, sure. From what Marilee’s told me about her, she’s a pistol.”

  Billy Elliot whuffed sharply, letting us know that he had enjoyed as much of our chitchat as he could stand. He and I took the elevator downstairs, and as soon as I thought we were far enough away from the front door, I let him pee on a bush. Then he stretched his body out and took off like he was back on the track chasing a fake rabbit. Even fattened up since his racing days, he was still faster than most dogs, and I ran behind him like a maniac. When we finally stopped, I had to bend over and take deep breaths while he pranced around and gave me annoyed little huffs because I had slowed him down. We trotted back to the Sea Breeze and took the elevator back upstairs, where I unsnapped his leash and stored it away. Tom was busy with somebody’s return and merely grunted and waved as I left.

  It was close to eight o’clock when I fed the last cat and went home. Michael and Paco were on the terrace between the house and the carport, firing up the grill.

  Michael said, “Hurry up, Dixie, we’re waiting for you.”

  I ran upstairs, peeled off my clothes, and tossed them and my Keds on top of the things already in the washer. I took a quick shower, toweled my body and hair dry, and pulled on a short strapless cotton dress and some flip-flops. My answering machine was blinking, so before I went downstairs, I punched the play button and got Shuga Reasnor’s voice.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “And I’d like to talk to you some more about the cat. Could you come to my place? Please call me as soon as you can. Or just come on by. I’ll be here all day.” She left her address and hung up, and the machine’s robotic voice announced that the call had come in at 4:37. I glared at the machine. I didn’t want to go see the woman, and I didn’t want to call her back.

  I took a deep breath and dialed her number. I got her machine, which thrilled me so much that I punched my fist into the air in a “Yes!” sign.

  Shuga’s recorded voice said, “You have reached…” and gave her phone number. Why do people give you their phone number when you’ve just called it?

  Talking fast in case she was monitoring her calls and might pick up, I said, “Miss Reasnor, this is Dixie Hemingway. I got your message, and I’ll try to stop by your place tomorrow morning around nine o’clock.”

  I was so relieved that I didn’t have to talk to Shuga Reasnor three times in one day that I almost skipped down the stairs to the terrace, where the outdoor table was set, the grill was ready, and the wine was chilling in a bucket.

  Michael said, “Well, the queen has arrived, so we can eat.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him, and Paco shook his head. “You two are so mature,” he said.

  Michael is the cook of the family. Even when we were kids, he was the family cook. He’s the cook at the firehouse, too. Michael believes that George Foreman’s grill has done more for the civilized world than Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he loves to do things that take a long time, like ribs and briskets and turkeys.

  Michael was four and I was two when our mother left us the first time. Our father was pulling a twenty-four-hour shift at the firehouse and didn’t know she had gone, so Michael took care of us until he got home. He fed us cold cereal with milk until we ran out of milk, and then we ate cold dry cereal. He climbed on a chair and got the peanut butter jar from the cupboard, and he found a jar of grape jelly in the refrigerator. We didn’t have any bread, so we ate it with a spoon.

  When our father came home, he found us curled up together like puppies, jelly-smeared and confused, but none the worse for wear. Our mother came back in a few days, and our life took up as if she’d never been gone. She left us for good when I was nine and Michael was eleven. Our father had died putting out a fire by then, so we went to live with our grandparents in their house on the Gulf. Now we’ve come full circle. Michael moved back into the house when our grandparents died, and I moved into the garage apartment after Todd and Christy died. And Michael’s still feeding me.

  We were so practiced at getting dinner together that we all went into action like a circus act. Michael brushed olive oil on three pompano, dusted them with salt and pepper, and stretched them on the grill. Paco brought out a big wooden bowl of salad and a tray of sliced eggplant and zucchini from the kitchen, and I slathered the veggie slices with oil. Michael laid them on the grill with the pompano, and Paco tossed the salad with olive oil and lemon juice. Michael turned the fish, and I poured the wine. Michael turned the veggies, and Paco pulled out my chair. Michael flipped pompano and veggies onto a platter, and Paco and I grabbed our forks.

  If there’s any better way to end a day than sitting on a terrace with your favorite people while you eat fresh-caught fish and watch a spectacular sunset, I’ve never found it. The men had shaved and changed out of their scrungy shorts and sweatshirts with the sleeves cut out. Michael wore white linen pants and a crisp cotton shirt with thin blue and white stripes, and Paco had on black pants and a white linen shirt. Easy with themselves and the world, they exuded that special masculine energy that goes along with vibrant health and well-honed muscles. There were women all over Sarasota who would have given one of their ovaries to be with either of them, and I had them both. I also had their undivided attention.

  Over dinner, I told them everything I knew about the murder. I told them about finding the lanai door open and the bedroom and closet ransacked, and about finding the dead body. About leaving Ghost with Mrs. Winnick and how weird she was, and about meeting Dr. Win and how it had looked like the Winnicks had just had a fight. I gave them a word-by-word account of my conversation with Guidry and told about speaking to Dr. Coffey and Shuga Reasnor. I told them what Judy had said about Marilee and how she’d dumped Dr. Coffey, and about his bimbo girlfriend coming out of cocaine alley.

  At appropriate intervals, one or both of them said, “Huh,” and when I mentioned Dr. Win, they both twisted their mouths to simulate throwing up. They were especially interested in the gross details about the dead man, and shook their heads with prim disapproval when I told them how Marilee had conned Dr. Coffey. I guess men don’t get much pleasure out of hearing how a woman has tricked a man into giving her a million dollars.

  Nine

  When I was done telling it all, Michael set his wineglass down with a firm thud. “Stay out of it, Dixie. Let the homicide guys handle it.”

  Paco nodded soberly. “Dixie, you can get in the middle of something you don’t want to be in. S
tay out of it.”

  “I’m staying out of it! Did I say I wasn’t staying out of it? I’m just concerned about the cat. What if Marilee Doerring never comes home? Some people don’t, you know.”

  I saw the looks on their faces and stopped. Okay, so I was getting a little overheated about the cat.

  “I’ll stay out of it,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  Michael smiled and said, “Okay, folks, let’s get off this subject. I make a motion that we all go over to the Crab House for a while.”

  Paco got up and started gathering plates. “Good idea. Come on, Dixie, let’s hustle.”

  I knew what they were doing. Neither of them wanted me to go to bed thinking about death and loss. To tell the truth, I didn’t want me to do that, either. It was almost my bedtime, but the day’s excitement and my long nap had left me wide-awake.

  The Crab House is a bayside waterfront bar that has entertainment ranging from female impersonators to stand-up comics to rhythm and blues. It’s the kind of place where you don’t have to arrive on a Ducati and look fetching in black leather, but it helps. There’s a wooden porch across the back where people can eat dinner beside the dock. Inside, tables line the perimeter of an oblong room separated from the porch by a glass wall. Half the patrons come from the key and half from boats that tie up at the dock. They’re mostly gay, mostly good-natured, and mostly free of prejudice toward straights. My kind of place.

  The bandstand and a small dance floor is to the right of the entrance, and even before we opened the door, we could hear rollicking honky-tonk piano music. Several people were dancing, and as we went toward the tables, we automatically began bobbing our heads and dipping our knees to the music. We took a table in the corner and ordered margaritas from a finger-snapping, hip-twitching waiter.