Looking over his shoulder to make sure I was still with him, Sergeant Owens jabbed one bony finger at the bell, and then we both took a step back and gawked through the glass like people in a department store staring at whatever dumb show is being flashed across a row of TV screens. The living room was decorated in low-slung,honey-hued , leather-steel-and-polished-stone furnishings like you see in Architectural Digest, the sort of room that makes me want to run amok flinging cat hair and peanut shells.
The back wall was dominated by a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, with a wide hearth and a bunch of brass and black iron tools for poking and shoveling fire stuff. Good-sized flames were leaping in the thing right now, which was downright bizarre. I mean, the weather was chilly but not that chilly. Even having a fireplace that size was an anomaly on Siesta Key, since we have maybe two weeks a year when a fireplace is inviting. The rest of the time it makes you feel sweaty just to look at one. People on the key who can’t resist the nostalgic feel of a fireplace keep them small and unobtrusive, little hollows where they can grow bromeliads or ferns, but this baby was meant for serious roaring fires.
A woman came streaking past the fireplace toward the front door, and Sergeant Owens and I got our faces into neutral expressions.
The woman who opened the door took the term “drop-dead gorgeous” to a whole new level. She was the kind of woman who makes me remember that my split ends need trimming, my eyebrows need shaping, I need a manicure, and a facial wouldn’t hurt. Not that she looked like she tried to be gorgeous, it was just how she was. Pale-gold Eurasian skin, almond-shaped topaz eyes, masses of long red curls carelessly caught up at the top of her head to cascade around a graceful neck. Sweeping eyelashes a foot long. Naturally rosy full lips, with a tiny dark beauty mark beside them, as if the angel who’d made her had been so carried away by the perfection he’d created that he’d taken a little brush and added a coded signature. Her hands were in thin latex gloves like surgeons use, and instead of a Miss America sash draped shoulder to hip she wore wrinkled blue-green surgical scrubs and white running shoes.
She smiled at Sergeant Owens, revealing even white teeth like the dentist uses as the ideal when he’s telling you it’s time to bleach yours. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sergeant Owens suck in his skinny stomach and straighten his sloping shoulders. I could only imagine what other male responses he was having.
Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, the pet sitter is here.”
He said it so smoothly that anybody would have thought he gave a gnat’s ass that I had arrived. He was up to something, I just didn’t know what.
She looked at me with a harder expression in her eyes than she’d shown Sergeant Owens.
“I do not understand.” She spoke with an accent—not Caribbean, not French, not South American, but something I couldn’t place—and enunciated each syllable carefully, the way people do when English isn’t their first language.
Sergeant Owens said, “The pet sitter that Mr. Kurtz hired. She’s here to do her job. So if you’ll just show her the …”
He turned to me with a look that said Help me out here, so I said, “Iguana.”
She drew back a bit as if I had threatened her, and her big eyes got even wider. Considering that a murder had been committed not fifty feet away, I wasn’t surprised that she was jumpy. What surprised me was that she seemed suddenly scared of me.
“But no, he did not. Is impossible. No. He did not call.”
I decided her accent was fake and opened my mouth to tell her how I felt about being called a liar. Sergeant Owens wrapped his bony hand around my arm and squeezed. His face was as bland as buttermilk, but his grip said Watch your mouth, Dixie—words he’d said more than once when I was a deputy.
He said, “Ma’am, I’d like to talk to Miz Hemingway for a minute. We’ll be back.”
He steered me down the walk to the front of the garage. The look on his face approached excitement, or at least what passed for excitement for Sergeant Owens.
He said, “Okay, Dixie, this is good. Let’s move on this. Something funny is going on in that house, but I don’t have any valid reason to get a search warrant. Go in there and look the place over. I’ll square it with Lieutenant Guidry when he gets here.”
My heart did a little blip, either because Guidry would be the homicide detective on the case or because Sergeant Owens still had faith in my deputy skills, even though I hadn’t worn a badge in almost four years.
“Is that woman Mrs. Kurtz?”
“No, she’s Kurtz’s nurse. Or at least she says she is. She claims Kurtz is sick in bed, too drugged up to talk to me. See if you can find him.”
Without waiting for me to agree, he lurched back down the path with my arm still clamped in his big hand. The gorgeous woman was still in the open doorway, but now she looked as if she had remembered the influence she had on men and was ready to use it.
Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Is Gilda.”
He waited a beat for a last name and then smiled toothily. “Well, Gilda, I have to ask you to let Miz Hemingway come in and do her job.”
She shook her head so hard her trailing curls flew around her shoulders. “I say to you Mr. Kurtz no ask nobody to come. He no call nobody. Is impossible.”
She pronounced his name Meester Koots, and I decided the accent was too consistent to be phony.
Sergeant Owens gave her a loose-lipped grin and played the kind of dumb that only a really smart cop can play.
“Well, Gilda, I guess this time he did something by himself, now, didn’t he? He must be feeling stronger, is what I’d say, so good for him. Now Miz Hemingway is just going to go in and make sure the whatchamacallit is okay. She won’t get in your way, will you, Miz Hemingway?”
He gave me a little shove while he talked, and Nurse Beauty was forced to step out of the way. Up close, she had a funny medicinal smell, sort of like the iodine my grandmother used to swear was the only thing that really killed germs dead. I walked fast into the living room, half expecting her to tackle me from behind. Instead, she slammed the door as hard as she could, I suppose to show her annoyance.
The room was even more impersonal than it had seemed through the glass. No Christmas stuff, no Hanukkah stuff. No flowers or plants, no books or magazines, no decorative objects, no framed snapshots. It looked as if a furniture company had delivered a truckload of expensive contemporary furniture one day and nobody had looked at it since. Except for the fire in the fireplace, the room had all the warmth of a morgue.
Over my shoulder, I said, “Where will I find Ziggy, ma’am?”
“Who?”
“Ziggy. That’s the iguana’s name, isn’t it?”
“Oh. I don’t … I don’t know.”
I stopped and turned, but she was looking off to the side with an apprehensive nervousness. Sergeant Owens was right. Something odd was going on, because she definitely didn’t want me inside the house.
I said, “He hasn’t been moved to a warm place?”
She gave a vague wave of her latex-gloved hand. “I do not know about animal.”
At temperatures lower than 60 degrees, iguanas begin to shut down. If they get too cold for very long, they die. Our temperature had been in the fifties for two or three nights.
A dragging sound came from around the corner, like the sound of tough iguana skin sliding across hard tile.
The nurse stiffened and raised her head, her topaz eyes darting side to side as if searching for a place to hide. Now I understood why Kurtz had wanted somebody else to feed his iguana. Some people are terrified of all reptiles, even the ones with four legs, and Kurtz’s nurse must be one of them.
I watched the floor, waiting for the first show of green lizard skin. What appeared was a man’s foot in heavy socks and slippers. When he came into full view, I felt an internal shudder of revulsion. I think I may actually have gasped. A haggard man, he wore a red plaid bathrobe loosely tie
d so that a lot of chest and lower leg were exposed, along with continent-shaped scars that glowed like abalone shell. His skin was a mottled plum-blue color that reminded me of a cadaver’s blood-puddled epidermis, and it was contorted by active minute contractions as if randomly jerked by internal wires. It gave his visage the quivering look of water’s surface when it’s being dimpled by fine rain droplets.
When I looked into his eyes, I saw such agony that I almost gasped again.
Involuntarily, I said, “I’m sorry.”
His voice was raspy and wheezing. “Yes, so am I.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. It’s a common reaction when people see me for the first time, a kind of kneejerk horror that such ugliness has a mind and a beating heart.”
“Actually, I meant I’m sorry you’re in so much pain.”
“Perhaps you can share your pity another time. For now, tell me who you are and what you’re doing in my house.”
Gilda said, “I say to her no, but policeman say I must let her in.”
He raised pain-glazed eyes to her. “Policeman?”
“Ramón has been in accident. Is hurt.”
I was getting fed up with her delicate twitchiness.
I said, “If Ramón was the guard, he wasn’t hurt, he was murdered. I’m here because a man who said his name was Ken Kurtz called me last night and asked me to come today and feed his iguana. My name is Dixie Hemingway. I’m a professional pet sitter.”
Both he and the nurse had gone very still, and for a second his bizarre skin seemed to pale.
In a guttural rasp, he said, “Don’t take me for a fool! Who sent you?”
I’d have traded six weeks of my life right then for a badge or a gun or at least a name tag that gave me a deputy’s authority. Since I didn’t have any kind of authority at all, I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.
“What is it with you people? I know you’ve had a bad experience here, but that’s no reason to be so damned rude. I was asked to do a job, and I’m here to do it. Now, do you want me to feed Ziggy or not?”
“Who?”
For a wild second, I thought this all might be a matter of mistaken identity or wrong iguana, since neither Kurtz nor his nurse seemed to know the iguana of the house by name.
I said, “The man who called said his iguana’s name was Ziggy. He said that was very important.”
Kurtz closed his eyes for a long moment, and I could see his chest rising and falling with deep breaths. The eddies under his skin twitched like living things trying to escape the light. When he opened his eyes, he seemed to have come to a conclusion that left him infinitely sad.
He said, “What else did he tell you?”
“He said Ziggy wasn’t in a cage, and that he liked yellow squash.”
He straightened his back, squared his shoulders, and lifted his neck. His hands came together at his waist to cinch his belt tighter. He was still grotesque, but now he was grotesque with pride.
He said, “I am Ken Kurtz, and I did not call you.”
Sounding desperate, Gilda said, “I say to her you no call.”
He ignored her. His eyes seemed to be piercing my skull, looking inside my brain, sifting all the information in it and coming up without the answer he wanted.
I said, “Do you have an iguana?”
“I do.”
“Is his name Ziggy?”
He hesitated. “You could say that.”
“Then somebody who knows you called me. Pretty funny that somebody would ask me to come here today, and then your guard gets shot in the head.”
His chest rose again in a long sigh and I mentally kicked myself. I shouldn’t have told him how the guard had been killed. I should have waited to see if he already knew that.
I said, “It’s cold outside. If Ziggy is in the courtyard, he should be brought indoors.”
He frowned and looked hard at Gilda. “The iguana is outside?”
Gilda’s delicate color had gone flour white, and she looked genuinely terrified. Ken Kurtz apparently wasn’t the kind of employer to cross. His mouth gashed and he made a sound of such rage that the nurse and I both backed up a couple of steps. It occurred to me that he might be even crazier than I was.
FOUR
Gilda made motions with her hands like circling fish, then abruptly darted from the room.
Trying to sound more confident than I was, I said, “I noticed you have a big oak tree in your courtyard. Ziggy’s probably up there. If you’ll point me toward the kitchen, I’ll see if I can coax him down with food.”
Mutely, he pointed in the same direction Gilda had run, and I went down a hall to a kitchen that made me think of a hospital. White ceramic tile was everywhere—on the floor, on the wall between cabinets and countertops, and on the countertops themselves. Large squares of shiny ceramic linked by nurse-white grout and surrounded by nurse-white cupboards, nurse-white walls, and nurse-white appliances. Not a spot of color intruded. Even the dish towels folded next to the white porcelain sink were bright white. A magnolia would have looked dingy in all that stark whiteness.
Feeling like a large dirty germ, I clumped to the big white refrigerator and pulled the door open. These people didn’t have color anywhere. No jars of purple jelly, no bottles of red ketchup, no green pickles. Nothing but stacks of packages neatly wrapped in white butcher paper, their corners and edges as squared as Christmas gift-wrapping. There was the same odd odor of iodine too. With my skin goose-bumping, either from the refrigerator’s cold air or the weirdness of its contents, I pulled out one of the lower vegetable drawers. No squash. No romaine. No vegetables of any kind. It was full of white packages too, all with that funny iodine smell.
I suddenly remembered that in some parts of the world, iguanas are slaughtered and eaten. Feeling slightly nauseated, I closed the refrigerator door and went looking for the nurse.
In the hallway, I heard the sound of theatrical sobbing. I followed the sound to a room as laboratory white as the kitchen. White walls, white draperies, white carpet, white painted furniture. Still wearing her surgical gloves, Gilda was face down on a double bed covered with a stark-white matelassé spread.
Oh, this was terrific. An impostor had hired me to take care of an iguana that wasn’t his. A guard hired to protect the iguana’s actual owner had been killed, and the iguana was possibly in the refrigerator in little white packages. To make this my really lucky day, the owner’s nurse was an incredibly beautiful flake. She might possibly be a murderous flake, guilty of killing both the guard and the iguana.
Since the house wrapped around a central courtyard, the layout was a bit disorienting. The four garages were on the south side, and the long living room with its huge fireplace took up the central part of the west wing. The dining room, kitchen, and Gilda’s room were the north wing. I could see, at a right angle to Gilda’s room, a long hallway running down the east side. Ken Kurtz’s bedroom was either there or in a south wing between the garages and the courtyard. I wondered if he and Gilda had something other than a patient-nurse relationship. Not that I was judging. If they were lovers, Gilda wouldn’t be the first beautiful woman to cozy up to a repulsive rich employer, nor would he be the first repulsive man to feel so grateful to have a beautiful woman in his bed that he’d give her anything she wanted.
I said, “Gilda, are those packages in the refrigerator iguana steaks?”
She raised a tearstained face and glared at me. “Who kill Ramón? How kill him? When? Why the policeman not tell me Ramón is dead?”
Even though she seemed too dramatic to be real, it occurred to me for the first time that she truly might not have known the guard was dead. Sergeant Owens might not have told her there had been a murder on the other side of the row of areca palms that separated the house from the guardhouse. Perhaps he had been waiting for Guidry to do it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done it either. Perhaps I had done something that would cause Guidry to want to wring my neck.
We
ll, it wouldn’t be the first time.
I said, “I’m just a pet sitter, Gilda. I take care of animals. I don’t know the answers to those questions.”
“And I am nurse. I take care Mr. Kurtz. I don’t know about animal.”
“Okay, so taking care of the iguana isn’t your job. Just tell me what’s happened to him. Did somebody kill him?”
She buried her face in the bed and made some more sounds of racking sobs, but this time they seemed even more contrived. I had the feeling she was stalling for time while she thought up an answer.
The scraping sound of Ken Kurtz’s approaching footsteps made Gilda raise her head. As if she wanted to get the words out before Kurtz got to her door, she blurted out, “Is not dead. Is in wine room.”
I’ve stopped being surprised at the things rich people have in their houses. Poor people count themselves lucky to have running water and flush toilets. Middle-class people have living rooms and dining rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, bathrooms and closets. Rich people have things like ballrooms and movie rooms in their house. They have fitness centers that rival Gold’s gyms, along with game rooms and bowling alleys. Ken Kurtz apparently had a wine cellar, which, given the fact that you hit water if you dig three feet under Siesta Key’s sandy soil, meant he had a ground-level room dedicated to the storage of wines.
Being somewhere between poor and middle-class, the only thing I knew about wine cellars was that they were kept dark and at an even temperature. I wasn’t sure what the temperature was, but I knew it wasn’t warm enough for an iguana.
I moved away from Gilda’s door to meet Kurtz. Each step seemed to cost him dearly in strength and endurance, but he had the look of a man with a mission. He also had the look of a man who always did what he intended to do.
I said, “Where’s the wine room?”
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Page 3