The Cat Sitter's Cradle

by John Clement,Blaize Clement

  I said, “Kenny, why did you come to Siesta Key?”

  He shook his head. “I wanted to see him. I wanted to know who he was. I … I wanted to know why. Why did he leave us? I wanted him to look me in the face and explain it, man to man. I mean, I get it—he wanted to run away. Everybody feels like that once in a while, right? But how could he just leave his family like that? I felt like I couldn’t go on with my life until I had an answer. So one day I just packed up my truck and drove down here. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going.”

  “But how did you find him?”

  “It was easy. The return address on his letters was always the same—a post office box in Siesta Key. There’s only one post office here. So I just hung out in the parking lot until I saw somebody that looked familiar, and then I followed him home.”

  He picked up the photo and slipped it back into his breast pocket. “At first he had written that he lived like a bum, slept on the beach, jumped from job to job, didn’t have any friends. But eventually he admitted that was a lie, too. Turned out he was filthy rich and he wanted to make it up to me. He said his stepkids were worthless and I could have it all. It was too late to change what he had done, but at least he could set me up for life. He wanted to buy me a house and everything.”

  I frowned. “So that’s why you’re here.”

  He shook his head. “No. No way. I didn’t come here to get rich.”

  “Then why did you pretend to be a pool cleaner and work your way into his home?”

  “I didn’t pretend. I was broke. I started cleaning pools because I didn’t have enough money to get back to California. So I made up some flyers saying I cleaned pools and could do odd jobs and started leaving them around town. One day this dude calls me up and asks if I can clean his pool, somebody had referred me. When he gave me his address I knew right away. It was Roy Harwick.”

  I said, “And you never told him who you were?”

  “No. I was going to. But things got a little complicated…”

  “You mean Becca.”

  Kenny’s face flushed red as he looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Becca.”

  Ethan turned to me and whispered, “Who’s Becca?”

  “Mr. Harwick’s daughter. She’s pregnant.”

  He nodded. “Ah, of course.”

  I could tell Ethan was getting a little impatient with the whole story, and to be honest so was I. Kenny must have wanted something more from the Harwicks. Why else would he come all this way and infiltrate himself into their home, not to mention their daughter?

  “So when was the last time you saw your father?”

  He looked down at the floor, struggling to keep his emotions under control. “It was at his house. The night before you found him.”

  I shook my head. “No, Kenny. You’re lying. Mr. and Mrs. Harwick were in Tampa that night.”

  He let out a little laugh. “Really? Well, as soon as he heard what I had to say, he came right back home, didn’t he?”

  For the first time I could feel his anger, not just at Mr. Harwick but at the world. I think I would probably have felt the same. If he was telling the truth, his father’s selfishness had triggered a chain of events that led to his mother’s suicide. He had already grieved away his childhood over the drowning of his father, and now it looked like he was going to have to do it all over again.

  I said, “What did you say to him?”

  “When he answered the phone I said, ‘Mr. Harwick, my name isn’t Kenny. It’s Daniel. Daniel Imperiori. I’m your son.’”

  The human brain is such an amazing thing. It’s constantly absorbing new things and adapting and changing. Scientists have even proven that a person’s intelligence isn’t some static constant, like an IQ number, but something that can be improved just by giving it the right combination of food, rest, and exercise. It’s like a kitten—but kittens can be very predictable. I guarantee that if you wiggle the tip of a peacock feather in front of a kitten, some magical unseen force will immediately take over, and that kitten will pounce on that feather without a moment’s thought.

  It’s kind of the same with the human brain. It can be pretty predictable, too. As a cop, I learned to recognize certain signals that people give off when they’re being less than honest. For example, if you’re making something up that’s not true, nine times out of ten your eyes will wander to the right without your even knowing it. But if you’re telling the truth, trying to remember something that actually happened, most of the time your eyes will wander to the left. As Kenny remembered his conversation with Mr. Harwick, I noticed his eyes. He wasn’t lying.

  “What was his reaction when you told him who you were?”

  “Nothing at first. I started to think he was going to hang up on me. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’ I told him I wanted to talk and that it couldn’t wait, so he said to meet him at his house that night. He was whispering, so I knew he didn’t want Mrs. Harwick to know about it.”

  “What time did you meet him?”

  “Late. When I left it was almost midnight.”

  His words hung in the air. I knew Ethan and I were both silently thinking the same thing: And where exactly was Mr. Harwick when you left?

  He looked from me to Ethan and then back again. “Look. I didn’t kill him. I know what you must think, but it’s not like I planned it to happen this way. I admit—it was totally cool to be able to watch him, to be right there under his nose. But once I saw what kind of person he was, the way he treated people, the way he made his money, I didn’t want anything to do with him. I was sorry I ever met him. Dixie, you have to believe me.”

  I said, “I understand, but you’re going to have a tough time convincing the police of that. Mr. Harwick was a very wealthy man. You show up, his only living son, the abandoned heir to his fortune, and then all of a sudden he’s found dead in the bottom of a swimming pool and you were the last person to see him. It’s a little hard to believe you wouldn’t want all that money.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said, too. But I’m not stupid. I know what Sonnebrook is, and I don’t want anything to do with that crap. I told him he could take his money and rot in hell—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath.

  I glanced over at Ethan, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  Kenny regained himself and said, “So that’s why I gave him everything.”

  “Gave him what?”

  “A big envelope with all the letters he sent me. All the letters where he admitted he was my father, where he said he wanted to leave everything to me. All of it. There were even checks he sent me that I never cashed. The only thing I kept was this photo, just to remind me of what could have been. He said he didn’t care. He could still leave his money to me and I couldn’t stop him. I said, ‘If there’s anything I learned from you, it’s how to disappear. So good luck with that.’ Then I left.”

  I said, “Okay. Kenny, or Daniel … what am I supposed to call you?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Just call me Kenny. I’m used to it now.”

  “You’re going to leave here, and you’re going straight to the police. I’ll back your story up. If you tell them everything you’ve told us, they’ll believe you.”

  Kenny nodded. “You have to promise me one thing, though. That message I left on your machine. When I said I was about to do something big, I was talking about leaving town. I was going to leave those letters, say good-bye to Becca, and disappear.”

  “It’s okay. I figured that out.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. If the police get ahold of that tape, they’ll think it’s a confession. They’ll think I planned it all along. They can’t ever hear it.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I believed everything he had told us, or at least, I believed he believed everything he had told us. I believed his father had disappeared in the ocean when he was a child. I believed his mother had committed suicide on the beach where his father had disappeared a decade earl
ier. I think I even believed that his father was in fact Mr. Harwick. Still, there was a rage in Kenny, bubbling just beneath the surface, that I had never seen before. I couldn’t be sure that even he was aware of the kind of power that rage might have over him—the kind of power that could make him capable of murder.

  Ethan cleared his throat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Okay, this is where I come in. As an attorney, I can tell you without a doubt that you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you try to hide anything from the police. I’m sure Dixie would love to make that promise to you right now, but you’ve got to face the facts: If the detectives don’t already have a record of every phone call you made in the days leading up to the murder, they soon will. They’ll see right through it. You’ll just be digging yourself in a hole that you can’t get out of.”

  Kenny looked at me, and I tried to reassure him with a smile and a nod, but inside I was thinking, Yeah. What he said.

  * * *

  By the time Ethan and I watched Kenny descend the stairs down to the driveway and disappear into the night, it was just after 4:00 A.M., my normal rise and shine. I looked up at the moon and said a little prayer of thanks to the powers that be for giving me the forethought to ask Pete Madeira to cover my pet visits for the morning. We stepped back inside and shut the French doors. I looked at Ethan and he looked at me, and we both let out a huge sigh of relief.

  I said, “Well, there’s not much point in you going home now. The sun will be up soon.”

  He collapsed onto the couch. “I have to be at work in a few hours, and we still have to get your car.”

  “But it’s Saturday. You still have to go to work?”

  “Yep. Unfortunately.”

  “Well, I can bike into town later and get my car, so don’t worry about that.” I sat down on the edge of the coffee table and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For getting you involved in all this.”

  He grinned. “Dixie, how long have we known each other?”

  “I don’t know. A long time.”

  He reached out and pulled me toward him. “Yeah. Long enough for me to know better.”

  20

  I opened my front door a crack and squinted at the bright morning light slanting in through the trees. Michael and Paco were sitting out on the deck at the table my grandfather built when we were kids. They had laid out a breakfast fit for a king. There was hot coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, a bowl of locally grown strawberries and blackberries, and a platter heaped with glistening slices of cantaloupe, mango, and kiwi. Holding court at the center of the table was a basket of Michael’s freshly baked scones, still warm from the oven. I was only just a little bit disappointed not to see a platter of bacon, but since I was apparently going to be seeing more of Ethan from now on, I figured I could do without it. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, my grandmother always said.

  It all looked so good I practically skipped down the stairs and across the deck to the table. I could tell by their empty plates that Michael and Paco had already eaten, but waiting at my seat was an absolutely yummy-looking slice of spinach and mushroom quiche, lying on a bed of bright green baby lettuce. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to stay in bed this late, and I was pretty confident Michael and Paco had both been fast asleep when Ethan left for work. Not that I was trying to hide anything. I can do what I want. I’m a grown, mature woman, sort of.

  In fact, Michael and Paco had been encouraging me to go out with Ethan for months, so I knew they’d probably be pretty happy about it, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be bombarded with a hundred and one questions.

  Turns out I was out of luck. The moment I saw the looks on their faces, not to mention the stack of newspapers spread out in front of them, I knew I was in for a good ol’ session of Q and A with M and P.

  Of course they had read all about Mr. Harwick’s death, and now there were a number of articles in the paper with my name in them, and a quote from the police department saying there was a search under way for the primary person of interest: Kenny Newman, the Harwicks’ pool man. I told Michael and Paco the whole story of everything that had happened, excluding Kenny’s revelation about his father. I did tell them that Becca had revealed to me that she was pregnant, and that both of them had been missing ever since Mr. Harwick’s body was discovered.

  Michael and Paco sat quietly and listened, except when I was describing the ordeal of pulling Mr. Harwick out of the pool and trying to revive him. I must have looked pretty shaken, because Michael got up and came around the table and put his hands on my shoulders.

  When I was finished, we all sat for a while in silence. Finally Paco said, “So, Michael, I think we should all agree right now to not ever say ‘I told you so’ about Kenny Newman.”

  Michael squeezed my shoulders and said, “Yeah. I totally agree, we should definitely not ever say ‘I told you so’ about that guy.”

  I rolled my eyes and said, “Hilarious,” but I knew their teasing was only meant to make me feel better about the whole thing. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that Michael wasn’t more upset—I hoped it meant that he was beginning to feel a little less responsible for looking out for me all the time. He had a few gray hairs mixed in with the blond, and I knew every one of them had my name on it.

  Paco said, “So still no sign of him, huh?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Michael said, “What do you mean, not exactly? You know where he is?”

  I took a bite of quiche and reveled in its buttery, cheesy deliciousness for a couple of moments. “Not really, but he paid me a visit last night.”

  Michael’s voice rose. “What? He was here? Goddammit, Dixie, what were you thinking?”

  “Michael, I know this is going to be hard for you to understand, but I just don’t think Kenny Newman is a dangerous person.”

  Michael started to interrupt, but I cut him off. “I know what you guys think about him, and I agree it doesn’t look good that he disappeared after Mr. Harwick died, but he has an explanation for all of it, and I think I believe him.”

  Michael took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m sorry. So what did he want with you?”

  “He wanted to talk to me about a message he left on my answering machine the night before I found Mr. Harwick. He was worried that if I turned it over to the police, they’d think it was a confession.”

  I could tell Michael was getting a little more agitated. He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, great. I can’t wait to hear this. What was the message?”

  I sighed. “He said he was about to do something. Something big. And that he was sorry.”

  Michael sat back down and rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers. “Dixie…”

  “I know, I know, I know,” I said. “But there’s something else, something that explains why Kenny has led such a secretive life here.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows. “What is that?”

  I said, “Mr. Harwick is Kenny’s father.”

  Michael had just taken a sip of coffee and almost spit it out all over the table. “What? How is that even possible?”

  I told them Kenny’s entire story, and even Michael, who’s about the most skeptical person I’ve ever known, had to admit it was almost too crazy to make up. He also brought up a point I hadn’t thought of before: Even though Kenny worked for me, he didn’t have anything to gain by explaining himself. If he had been planning on murdering Mr. Harwick, why would he have called me first to warn me about it? Any fool would know that would’ve aroused suspicion about him right away.

  I felt a sense of relief that Michael saw some logic in the whole thing. So much had happened in the last forty-eight hours I wasn’t sure I still had the ability to see straight. I was grateful he didn’t think I’d finally gone off the deep end.

  Paco had grown more and more quiet the whole time we’d been talking. Now he was holding his newspaper out in front
of him, taking an occasional sip from his coffee cup.

  I said, “Paco, what do you think?”

  He lowered the paper. “Hmm?”

  We both saw it in his eyes immediately. Paco’s not normally one to hold back his opinions, especially when it comes to matters of law and order. There was a reason he wasn’t chiming in with his thoughts. He knew something.

  I said, “What did you think of Kenny’s story about Mr. Harwick?”

  He nodded nonchalantly. “Yeah. Sounds about right to me,” he said and went back to his paper.

  Michael and I shared a look. As a member of the special crimes unit, Paco has a lot of experience with all kinds of investigations. One week he might be meeting with an informant to root out an illegal narcotics ring, and the next he might be working undercover as a temp in a law firm, gathering evidence for a corporate fraud investigation. If he was somehow involved in an investigation into the affairs of Sonnebrook or the Harwick family, that was about as much as we would get out of him.

  Michael turned to me. “So please tell me Kenny isn’t running out of town.”

  “No. By now he’s turned himself over to the police. I made him promise he’d go straight there after we talked.”

  He sighed. “Good. So your work is done. Right?”

  I bit into a juicy slice of mango. “Right.”

  * * *

  Weekends are usually busy on the Key, especially on a nice day. I was riding my bike up Midnight Pass, and I thought to myself, It’s not just a nice day. It’s a glorious day. The sky was a deep periwinkle blue, there wasn’t a cloud in sight, and the sun felt warm and healing on my body. The road was chock-full of cars and joggers and couples on bicycles. Every twenty feet or so I passed a family or a group of kids, all draped in towels and carrying chairs and coolers to the beach.

  Right before I got to the village center I took a quick detour down a side lane so I could ride by a pair of ancient magnolia trees. They’ve been there for about as long as I can remember, and I always make a point of going by them when I’m on my bike. They were in full bloom, their white cuplike blossoms tilted toward the sun. Their heady, sweet perfume was so powerful I could taste it on my tongue.