Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

by Blaize Clement

  He averted his eyes and his throat bobbled in a nervous swallow. I tried to put myself in his place, a kid coming home after an evening that had to be kept secret from his parents and seeing a woman he thought was a neighbor get into a car and drive away.

  “Did the woman see you?”

  He bobbled his head in a staccato motion I took to be an affirmative nod. “I think maybe she did. She looked over her shoulder toward where I was and it seemed like she jerked a little bit—you know, like she was surprised or scared or something.”

  “And then what?”

  He looked directly at me for the first time. “Then she got in the car and left.”

  Carefully, I said, “What time do you think this was?”

  “I don’t want to get anybody else mixed up in this.”

  “I’m not asking you where you’d been or who you’d been with, just what time you saw a woman leaving Marilee Doerring’s house.”

  “It was a little after four.”

  I remembered the flash of movement in the woods that morning when I was walking Rufus. That had been around 4:30.

  “Did you see me that morning?”

  He blinked at me. “You? No, ma’am, I didn’t see you.”

  Poor kid, he was obviously terrified, and with good reason. If the woman he saw thought he could identify her, he could be in a lot more trouble than his family finding out how he spent his nights.

  “Phillip, if we’re going to be friends, you have to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “You have to stop calling me ‘ma’am.’ And my name is Dixie, not Ms. Hemingway. Got that?”

  He gave me a weak smile. “Okay.”

  “You were right to tell me about the woman, and it’s something Lieutenant Guidry needs to know. I’ll tell him what you saw, and he’ll probably want to talk to you again. If he does, don’t be scared. I’ll tell him to be sure and talk to you in private, and he’s not going to repeat anything you say to your parents or to anybody else. He’s a nice guy, you can trust him.”

  “Okay.”

  I was so proud of him for having the guts to confess what he’d seen that I didn’t check his story with my builtin lie detector.

  We looked at each other for a second, sort of cementing a new friendship, and then he gave me a genuine smile. “I have to go play now. Are you going to stay for a while?”

  “I’d love to, but it’s way past my bedtime.”

  We got up and walked together down the aisle toward the piano. Before I left him, I turned and gave him a hug. “I’ll come back another night, when I can stay.”

  He was blushing and smiling when he waved goodbye.

  When I stepped outside, all the lights were out in the parking lot, the only illumination coming from a waning moon. Nobody else was around, and the spaces between the cars were black wells where anything could have been hiding. I stood a minute outside the door, wondering if I should go back inside and tell the manager about the lights, then decided to let it go. My footsteps made quick scrunching noises in the loose shell as I stepped across the dark lot toward my car.

  Part of me was proud that Phillip had trusted me enough to confide in me. The other part was dismayed. Now I knew something that could get the kid in a lot of trouble. If he had seen the killer leaving Marilee’s house, he would most likely be called upon in the future to say so in public, bringing upon himself the full glare of media attention that would inevitably reveal that he was gay. He was a good kid, and I didn’t want to be the one who outed him. But I had to let Guidry know about the woman he’d seen.

  A pair of egrets fluttered low over my head, making those guttural egret sounds that always remind me of somebody trying to cough up a popcorn husk. I turned my head to look over my shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that I was afraid. That’s the trouble with allowing yourself to start feeling emotions after you’ve been closed down for a long time. You can’t feel selectively. You have to let the whole gamut of feelings in, even fear.

  As I started jogging toward my car, a form detached from the shadows and ran after me. I picked up my speed and ran like hell. Thanks to Billy Elliot, I had recent experience in covering ground fast. I beeped the car unlocked, tore the door open, and leaped inside, pulling the door shut and locking it a second before the man slammed a fist against the passenger window and pushed his face against the glass. Even with his nose and mouth mashed flat in a grotesque mask clearly intended to frighten me, I recognized the bullet-headed man from the bar. I threw the Bronco into reverse and whipped out of the parking space, almost hoping the man would be foolish enough to run after me so I could run him down. He didn’t. He ran behind the row of cars and ducked out of sight. I sat with the motor churning for a couple of minutes and then pulled out of the lot.

  Driving north on Midnight Pass Road, I watched the rearview mirror for headlights in case the man was following. At the drive to my house, I passed it and drove straight ahead to the firehouse, where I backed into a parking place across the street. From where I sat, I could see all the traffic on Midnight Pass Road, and I could also see the firehouse where Michael was sleeping. Just knowing Michael was nearby made me feel calmer. Traffic was sparse, and after a while I decided I hadn’t been followed, so I drove home. Paco’s car was in the carport, but his Harley was gone, so I knew he was still on an undercover job. I ran up the stairs to my apartment two at a time.

  Everything in the apartment seemed exactly as I had left it, but I still felt jittery. The malevolence of the man’s eyes looking at me through the passenger window weren’t what scared me. What had me feeling uneasy was that he had seemed so determined, as if he had a particular goal and I was it. I lowered the metal storm shutters, checked the answering machine, brushed my teeth, did a few turns around the apartment to work off my nervous energy, and finally went to bed with a million questions buzzing in my head.

  If the woman Phillip saw had been Marilee, she would have been leaving Harrison Frazier dead in her house. Did that mean she had killed him? And if she had, who had been driving the car she got into? If it hadn’t been Marilee, who was it? It could have been Shuga Reasnor. She knew Harrison Frazier, and maybe she had some personal reason to kill him. Maybe she had lured Frazier to Marilee’s house on some pretext and killed him there. Maybe Marilee had a good alibi of where she was at the time Frazier was killed. Maybe she and Shuga had planned it together, thinking nobody would connect Shuga to the killing. I wondered if Shuga had an alibi for that night. I would ask Guidry when I talked to him.

  I turned over and pounded my pillow and tried to go to sleep. It wasn’t my job to find Harrison Frazier’s killer. My job was to take care of Ghost. But who the hell had killed Frazier? Maybe his wife had followed him to Marilee’s house and conked him on the head and had somebody pick her up afterward in a black Miata. That didn’t seem very likely, though. And why did Marilee have her locks changed before she left town? It had to have been because somebody had a key to her house and she didn’t want that person to go in, but who? And why? Maybe she and Shuga Reasnor had had a falling-out and she was making sure Shuga couldn’t get in while she was gone. Maybe Dr. Coffey still had a key to her house from when they were engaged and she’d just gotten around to making sure he couldn’t use it. Maybe Coffey had hired a woman to go in and kill Harrison Frazier. No, that was dumb. Why would he do that? If he wanted anybody killed, it would be Marilee, not Frazier.

  I turned on my back and took deep breaths. Why had that man in the parking lot been after me? Had he been so pissed off that I’d given him the cold shoulder that he’d waited out there for me all that time? Surely it wasn’t the first time he’d been turned down by a woman. Surely he wouldn’t have let something like that cause him to become so violent. Maybe he had been on something. Maybe he had snorted or shot up or ingested his drug du jour after he left the bar and got so high that he came back for lust revenge. Maybe it was just coincidence that he had chosen me, maybe he had just been there to
go after any woman coming out alone.

  My eyelids popped open. Oh shit, I should have called the Crab House and warned them that a psycho was loose in the parking lot. I should have told them to be sure no woman went out by herself. I turned over again and smacked the pillow. It was too late now, it was after two, and the Crab House was closed. But if somebody had been raped in that parking lot, it would be all my fault.

  On that cheerful note, I finally drifted to restless sleep.

  Seventeen

  Thunder woke me in the night. Hard rain was pelting the roof and making drumming music on the storm shutters. It was a comforting sound. I love sleeping in a storm, safe and dry while a deluge rages outside. I went back to sleep, and when the alarm sounded at 4:00, I smacked it off and groped my way to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I estimated that I’d had all of two hours’ sleep, tops.

  The rain had stopped, so I left the Bronco at home and took my bike, riding out into a glorious Sunday morning. On the lane to the street, I stirred up a flock of wild parakeets in the damp treetops, and their chattering brought answering cello tones of mourning doves from their hiding places. The temperature was around seventy degrees, the humidity low enough to be tolerable, and the air had a fresh, just-washed smell. Even with a sluggish brain from last night’s fear and sleeplessness, I loved the feel of the day.

  With the Graysons back home, I only had Billy Elliot to dog walk. The rest were all cats, which was good. Cats are a lot easier than dogs, and I needed an easy day. My plan was to wait until eight o’clock and call Guidry with last night’s information, see to all the cats, and go home and sleep. Michael would come home this morning, which meant we’d have a good dinner at home tonight. Maybe Paco would be home, too, and I could catch them up on everything that had happened.

  Tom Hale was asleep when I went into his condo, but Billy Elliot met me at the door. We went outside and ran like idiots, and then I kissed Billy Elliot goodbye inside the condo and panted my way back to my bike. It was still dark, but the sky was taking on a vanilla tinge of false dawn, and birds were beginning to wake in the trees and call sleepily to one another.

  My next stop was at the home of twin calico tabbies named Stella and Marie. If they had been humans, they would have been lounge singers. Stella spent her time on the windowsill, looking longingly at her reflection in the glass, and Marie lolled on the sofa, waiting for somebody to come do her nails. When I groomed them, they preened and posed with delicious self-absorption, and when I ran the vacuum to pick up hair they had flung on the carpet, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.

  I cleaned their litter box while they ate, then washed their food bowls and put out fresh water for them. “I’m leaving now,” I said. “I hope you won’t miss me too much.”

  From the windowsill, Stella lowered her eyelids to half-mast in grudging acknowledgment of my existence, but Marie merely flicked the tip of her tail and yawned. I was still grinning when I got on my bike and started to the next stop. A pale coral tint was washing over the sky by then, gilding the eastern edges of puffy little clouds with a darker salmon pink. In another hour, the sun would be fully up and traffic would get thicker.

  As I pulled onto Midnight Pass Road, a bakery truck coming back from making a delivery of breakfast croissants and bagels sped by, barely swerving enough to avoid hitting me, and sending a fine spray of puddle water onto my legs. Unnerved, I jerked onto the shoulder and planted my soaked Keds on the ground. I was in the entrance to the old abandoned road leading into the woods behind Marilee Doerring’s house. Muttering words that would have made my grandmother wash my mouth out with soap if she’d heard, I took some deep breaths to get my heart quieted down.

  A faint sound caught my attention and I looked toward the rusty metal gate stretched across the old road. The road had once been paved with crushed seashells, but time and weather had taken its toll, and now weeds and low-growing vegetation covered most of the shell. The sound came again, low and urgent. Thinking an animal had been hit by a car and had crawled into the bushes, I got off my bike and walked down the road.

  As I got closer, I glimpsed a flash of blue fabric, and realized it wasn’t a hurt animal moaning in the bushes, but a person. I stopped. The odds were against it, but this could be somebody pretending to be hurt and I might be walking into a trap.

  I called, “Is someone there?”

  The moaning sound came again. I went closer, and then rushed forward. Phillip Winnick, caked with blood and dirt, lay sprawled in the tangled wet underbrush. Somebody had worked him over good.

  I knelt at his side. “Phillip? Phillip, it’s me, Dixie. I’m going to call for help. It’s okay now. Phillip?”

  His bruised lips struggled to form a word, but it was so faint, I couldn’t hear. I leaned close to his face and said, “Tell me again, Phillip. I didn’t hear you.”

  Weakly, he breathed a prayer into my ear. “Please don’t tell my mother.” Then he passed out.

  I called 911 on my cell and gave them the location. Then I sat cross-legged beside Phillip and talked to him while I waited for the ambulance. I wanted him to have a voice to hold on to for the moments that he floated to awareness.

  “This is a shitty thing somebody did to you, Phillip, but it’s not the end of the world. You’ll get over this, and you’ll be good as new.”

  A surge of alarm went through me and I looked quickly at his hands. They didn’t appear to be injured, and I sent up a silent thank-you for that.

  “Your hands aren’t hurt, Phillip, and you’ll be playing the piano again soon. I know this is a terrible experience, but you’ll get through it. People get through these things, and you will, too. I’ll help you, and so will a lot of other people.”

  I babbled on, as much for myself as for him, until the ambulance came. Two EMTs jumped out and lifted Phillip onto a stretcher so quickly and so gently that I wanted to hug them both. A deputy’s car was just behind the ambulance, and Deputy Jesse Morgan came and stood beside me while the EMTs eased the stretcher into the back.

  “Miz Hemingway,” he said. I wondered if he had talked to some of the other deputies about me.

  I said, “Can I ride to the hospital with Phillip?”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s Phillip Winnick. He lives next door to Marilee Doerring, where the man was murdered Friday.” I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.

  He gave me a slow, level look. Oh yeah, somebody had been talking to him about me.

  “How long have you known him?”

  I read the look in his eyes and said, “I met him that morning when I took the cat over there.”

  “So he’s not a close friend?”

  One of the EMTs got in the back of the ambulance with Phillip and hooked him up to oxygen and some kind of IV, while the other came back to talk to Deputy Morgan. They stepped away and spoke out of my hearing, then Morgan came back to me and the EMT got in the ambulance and drove away.

  “I’ll notify his parents,” he said. “You’ll have to get permission from them to visit him in the hospital.”

  Defeated, I clamped my lips together and forced myself not to yell at him. Morgan was right. Phillip’s parents were the only people with the legal right to be with him in the hospital, and they had to be notified. But the thought of how his judgmental parents might react made my heart hurt.

  Morgan pulled out his notebook. “How did you happen to know he was here?”

  “I didn’t. A truck almost ran me down and I pulled into the road and heard him moaning.”

  “He say anything to you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think he was conscious.”

  “So you don’t know why he was out here at this hour?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He looked down at me with coolly appraising eyes. “You seem to be having a run of really bad luck. First finding a dead man and now finding somebody beat-up.�
�

  “Is that a question?”

  He flipped his notebook closed. “You’ll be available later?”

  “Sure.”

  He got into his car to go to ring the Winnicks’ doorbell and tell them their son wasn’t in bed asleep like they thought he was, but in an ambulance going to the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I started back down the old road toward my bike. As I did, something caught my eye at the end of the gate where a stunted key lime’s branches pressed against the upright supports. I walked to the end of the gate to get a better look.

  Key limes have long, lethal thorns, and this one had a wad of black human hair snarled on a thorny limb. The hair was long and curly, and it appeared to have been left there recently. I thought of Marilee’s shiny black hair caught in the brush of her hair dryer, and a cold snail trailed down my spine.

  When Christy was barely walking, I went to pick her up at the day-care center one day and found another mother raising hell because her little girl had a bald spot on her head. The day-care women were red-faced and almost in tears. They said another toddler had just reached out and grabbed a handful of the child’s hair and yanked it right out. They said he had never done anything like that before and he had done it so quickly, they hadn’t been able to stop him. The mother threatened to sue, and she was weeping when she took her child home. I didn’t blame her. Who wants their baby yanked bald-headed, even if the yanker is just a baby, too?

  I leaned my elbows on top of the gate and looked into the woods, where the tracks of the old road ran about fifteen feet before they disappeared into a tangled mass of live oaks, palms, hibiscus, lime trees, palmettos, ferns, and twisting potato vines. The foliage was so thick, I couldn’t see anything except green. Steam was beginning to rise from the damp ground, and the thick foliage absorbed it and breathed it out again.

  I put a foot on one of the gate’s crossbars and boosted myself up. I told myself to mind my own business and let Guidry investigate. I answered myself back that I only wanted to have a look beyond where the road became obscured. I slung a leg over the gate and scaled it. My Keds made gritty sounds as I walked down the devastated road to the spot where it disappeared into the brush. With both arms stiff, I parted the foliage hanging in front of my face. The road was visible for another few feet and then disappeared again in leafy branches. I let the branches close behind me and walked to the next barrier.