Guidry didn’t look shocked, but I was. I couldn’t believe that a bottle of fifteen-hundred-dollar wine could taste a hundred and fifty times better than the ten-dollar-a-bottle stuff I drank.
Guidry said, “Anybody you know who might want your wine?”
“Until thirty minutes ago, Lieutenant, nobody even knew my wine existed.”
“Somebody has to sell it to you. Somebody has to put it on the shelves.”
“I order it flown in directly from the wineries. It’s delivered in unmarked crates, and I put it on the shelves myself.”
I thought, And Gilda knew it was there, just like she knew Ziggy was in there with it.
The man was not only blue and grotesquely ugly, he was a big liar.
Guidry said, “You know, under Florida law, it’s a felony offense to ship wine in from out of state.”
“Collector’s wine falls under a different code, Lieutenant.”
Guidry cocked an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t challenge it. I didn’t know diddly about Florida’s laws about wine shipments, but I would have bet good money that Kurtz was bluffing.
Guidry said, “When’s the last time the guard handled your iguana?”
Kurtz’s face twisted, either from a spasm or from extreme annoyance. “Nobody handles my iguana, Lieutenant. And so far as I know, the guard never even saw my iguana.”
“Never picked him up? Never had any contact with him?”
“As I said, Lieutenant, when I’m in pain, a lot can happen inside my house without my knowledge. My nurse may be able to give you more information about the guard’s contact with the iguana.”
I thought, Oh, sure, let Gilda take all the blame.
Honest to God, some men aren’t worth the money it would take to buy a rope to hang them. With each answer Kurtz gave, I was regretting more and more my impulsive advice to ditch the gun he’d worn under his robe.
Guidry said, “How long has your nurse worked for you?”
Kurtz’s eyes flicked up and to the right for a quick instant, a sure sign a person’s preparing to lie.
“I hired her just before I moved here four months ago from New York.”
“From an agency?”
“No, she also was independent.”
“You mind asking the nurse to come in here?”
For a second, Kurtz’s face betrayed how much effort it was taking to stand and talk. Asking him to make the long walk back to Gilda’s room was like asking somebody who’d just had abdominal surgery without anesthesia to sew up his own incision.
I said, “I’ll get her.”
I nipped across the living room without waiting for either man’s permission and headed through the dining room and kitchen toward Gilda’s room. I hadn’t much liked Gilda before, not because she was gorgeous but because she hadn’t been concerned about Ziggy. Now I felt sorry for her. The thought even crossed my mind that I should warn her, one woman to another, that Kurtz was playing dumb about a lot of things. Not being a total idiot, I let the thought cross without flagging it down. I had already created enough trouble for myself by that inane protective gesture toward Kurtz. That decision was going to cost me, and I didn’t want to add any more to it.
In Gilda’s open doorway, I came to an abrupt spine-tingling stop. The room was still and silent as a coffin, and the bed’s white cover was military smooth. An open doorway on the opposite side of the room showed a white-tiled bathroom, also empty and silent.
“Gilda?”
I don’t know why I called. The room had a permanently empty feeling, the same deadness I remembered in my mother’s room after she abandoned me and my brother.
I called a couple more times, just to confirm what I already knew. “Gilda? Are you here?”
I even trotted down the wide eastern corridor where a glass wall overlooked the courtyard. I pasted myself against the glass to look out at the oak tree and the landscaped lawn around it. Unless Gilda had scaled the tree and was hiding in its branches, she wasn’t in the courtyard. The east wing had only one door and it was open—Kurtz’s bedroom. I stepped inside and got a quick look at a big bed with black satin sheets. I called Gilda, but I knew she wasn’t there. Gilda had left the house, and every instinct told me she hadn’t left to run a quick errand. Gilda had run away, and she didn’t intend to be found.
A hallway on the south side of the house held a door with a double dead bolt lock, the kind you have to use a key to open from either side. A key was inside the lock, one of two on a wire ring, probably left there all the time because it’s a pain in the butt to always have to key open a door from the inside. I turned the key and opened the door to a narrow alcove at the far end of the row of garages. A sidewalk led to a utility area where garbage cans and recycle bins were located. Beyond the utility area, a wooden fence separated the Kurtz property from a bayside residential street. If Gilda’s intention had been to run away, she was probably halfway to Tampa by now, or at least halfway to the Sarasota airport.
I shut the door and stuck the key ring in my pocket to give to Kurtz. With all the people who would be in the house when Guidry found out Gilda was gone, it wasn’t a good idea to leave a key in a door, especially since I suspected the second key opened the precious wine room. I walked down the southern hallway, passed the wine room, and rounded the corner to the west wing where Kurtz and Guidry waited in front of the fireplace. Framed by the red glow of the fire, the two men could have been part of a medieval fresco of good and evil, with the iguana symbolizing a demon stretched on the hearth between them.
I said, “Lieutenant Guidry, could I speak to you for a moment?”
Both men gave me piercing looks that said secrecy wasn’t an option.
Guidry said, “What is it, Dixie?”
“The nurse isn’t in her room. She isn’t anywhere in the house. She’s gone.”
Like a collapsed marionette, Kurtz suddenly clutched his thighs and gave a strangled groan. It didn’t seem like the anguished cry of a man who’d lost a lover, more like a man who could not bear the implication of what he’d heard.
Guidry and I both rushed to support him.
Guidry said, “You know where his room is?”
I pointed toward the southern corridor. “It’s this way.”
In seconds, we had linked arms behind Kurtz’s emaciated back and under his thighs to make a fireman’s carry. Putting a suffering man to bed wasn’t the usual kind of thing a homicide detective did. Not the kind of thing I usually did, either. But Guidry and I were both professionals, and professionals rise to the occasion in a professional manner—no matter what the occasion is.
We went down the southern corridor to the east wing and Kurtz’s bedroom, where we turned sideways to maneuver him through the doorway. When we lowered him to a king-sized waterbed with rumpled black satin sheets, Kurtz seemed almost unconscious. With a heavy sigh, he stretched out on his back and held his arms close to his sides, as if he feared he might fly apart if he didn’t keep his limbs close.
Guidry and I exchanged uneasy looks. With one mind, we both looked at the bedside table, where a clutter of prescription bottles stood next to a stack of magazines and a framed photograph. Guidry picked up a bottle and read the label.
I picked up the photograph. With a kind of eerie inevitability, I saw it was a snapshot of Ken Kurtz—as he had been before he turned blue and ugly—with his arm slung over the shoulders of the woman I’d met earlier—the one with the bulldog named Ziggy. They were both laughing into the camera with the unmistakable look of two people deliriously in love.
SIX
Seeing the photograph of the woman I’d met that morning made my head feel like somebody was setting off rockets inside it. Guidry didn’t seem to notice. He shuffled through some more prescription bottles and then pushed them all into a clump.
“Mr. Kurtz, do you have your doctor’s number?”
Kurtz opened his eyes and glared at Guidry. Between rasping breaths, he said, “No! Absolutely … no doctors! Under
stand?”
“But—”
“I said … no! You do not … have my … permission to … call anybody.”
“Okay, no calls. Would any of these medications help you right now?”
“No … I just need … to rest … for a while.”
Guidry stood a moment looking down at him and then nodded. I knew what he was probably thinking. Kurtz lived in agony every minute of his life, and he was probably the best judge of when he’d reached his limit. In any case, Kurtz’s suffering wasn’t the kind that could be fixed by a doctor. It would take angels to do that. Or at least aboriginal shamans.
Very gently, I put the photograph of the woman back on the bedside table next to the medicine bottles and magazines. I was positive now that she had contrived to talk to me so she could make sure I was going to his house.
Was the woman somebody with old scores to settle? A former wife or old lover who had vindictive reasons to pull strings by getting the Irishman to call me? If that were so, why had she wanted me there? And what was the deal with calling her dog Ziggy? None of it made any sense, but I didn’t care. I had no intention of getting sucked into this weird situation. As soon as I was sure the iguana was okay, I was going to be out of there for good.
Guidry said, “Come on, Dixie.”
He was standing at the door and his voice had a tinge of impatience in it, as if he might have been standing there a few seconds longer than his grand eloquence thought was necessary, and that he was holding me responsible for the delay.
I gave him a What? look. I was there as a pet sitter, not a deputy under the jurisdiction of a homicide detective, and he didn’t have the authority to order me around like that.
On the other hand, I was in deep doo-doo already for not reporting the guard’s murder and for warning Kurtz to ditch his gun. I wasn’t the type of person to do either of those things. I was one of the good guys. Wasn’t I? I was on the side of the law. Wasn’t I?
As I moved to follow Guidry, it occurred to me that when I killed a man, I might have blurred my own line between good and evil. Maybe I wasn’t so solidly in the good-guy camp anymore. Maybe I was straddling the line.
Guidry said, “Show me the nurse’s room.”
I moved ahead of him and walked the rest of the way down the eastern corridor to Gilda’s room, glancing out the glass wall to the courtyard as I went. The plants still glistened with moisture from the rain, but except for the wet ground under the oak tree’s shade, all the shadows had been eaten up by thin sunshine.
At Gilda’s door, I stopped and took a deep breath.
Guidry said, “You okay, Dixie?”
Surprised, I looked up at him and pulled my shoulders back. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I can think of several reasons why you might not be. You’re allowed, you know.”
“Allowed what?”
“Normal emotions.”
For some fool reason, that made my eyes burn as if tiny little pinpricks were pushing against the undersides of my eyelids.
I pointed toward Gilda’s door. “That’s her room.”
As he went around me, Guidry put an arm around me and squeezed my shoulder, almost as if he did it unconsciously. Guidry wasn’t a shoulder-squeezing type of man, and I’m not the kind of woman who likes her shoulders squeezed. But his hand had been warm, and the touch had felt good. I watched his leather jacket move away and tried not to think about what it meant about me—that in the midst of all the bizarre things going on in this house, my main feeling was that I wished Guidry would touch me again.
Making my voice as cool as possible, I said, “If you don’t need me, I’ll go check on the iguana.”
I scooted through the kitchen and dining room to the living room. Ziggy was still on the fireplace hearth, but he had raised his head and pushed his body up a little on his muscular forelegs. His Granny Smith color was returning, especially on the side close to the fire, and when he saw me he inflated his dewlap so he looked twice as wide. An iguana with a widely inflated dewlap looks alarming, like a miniature dragon about to breathe fire and brimstone. If I hadn’t known iguanas, I would have found him scary. As it was, I stopped walking so he wouldn’t get spooked and leave the warmth of the fire.
It takes about thirty minutes for a healthy iguana who has closed down on account of cold temperature to get back to normal. Ziggy was close to normal, but his household wasn’t. Unless Gilda showed up with some plausible explanation for leaving, Kurtz and Ziggy were going to be here by themselves. Considering the shape Kurtz was in, it was a toss-up as to which of the two was less capable of taking care of the other. If Gilda’s disappearance was as suspicious as I thought it was, there would be investigators in the house looking for evidence that would link her to the guard’s murder.
I wasn’t going to get involved, but I was a professional, and professionalism meant I had to find a place to put Ziggy so he would stay warm and still be out of the way.
I also had to feed him, which made me think of the odd packages stacked on the refrigerator shelves. I went back to Gilda’s room, where Guidry was squatting on the floor in front of an opened cabinet in her bathroom.
Without looking at me, he said, “Tell me about the nurse. What’s she like?”
“Beautiful redhead, late twenties, early thirties. She has an accent I couldn’t place, sort of an island rhythm but more like French pronunciation. Her English isn’t very good, and she smelled like iodine.”
He closed the cabinet door and stood up. “Iodine?”
“That same smell is in the refrigerator, too. That’s what I came back to tell you. The refrigerator doesn’t have any food in it. It’s filled with what looks like packages from a meat market, and there’s a strong smell of iodine.”
He was already moving past me toward the kitchen. I trailed behind him, wishing I could go get breakfast, wishing I hadn’t agreed to take this job in the first place.
I said, “I have to go to the market and buy vegetables for Ziggy.”
He stopped and frowned at me. “You call him Ziggy? You know him that well?”
“I don’t know him at all, but that’s his name.”
“Kurtz’s name is Ziggy?”
“No, the iguana’s name is Ziggy.”
“Oh.”
He shrugged and moved on toward the refrigerator.
That’s when I should have told him about the strange coincidence of the woman with the bulldog named Ziggy. And about the even stranger coincidence of the woman’s photograph being on Kurtz’s bedside table. But if I told him that, I’d have to tell him all the rest. I’d have to tell him that Kurtz had lied when he said nobody knew about the wine, because Gilda had known that Ziggy was in the wine room. Mostly, I’d have to tell him about the gun Kurtz had been wearing when I got there. And then I’d have to tell him I’d warned Kurtz to get rid of it before he talked to Guidry.
I wasn’t ready to do that. I told myself that half the population of Florida carries concealed guns, so it wasn’t unusual for Kurtz to have one. It wasn’t even unusual for a gun toter to be paranoid enough to wear it inside his own house. Furthermore, I hadn’t broken any laws when I advised Kurtz to get rid of his gun, I had simply suggested it might be a good idea not to meet a homicide detective while wearing it. It had been a friendly hint, nothing more. And so far as the woman in the photograph, maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it only looked a lot like the woman with the bulldog. And who’s to say it’s unusual for two pets in the same city to be named Ziggy? There are probably millions of pets named Ziggy, and several of them might live right there on Siesta Key. Mainly, I told myself I wasn’t getting involved in this case, so the sensible thing was to keep my mouth shut.
Guidry opened the refrigerator door and turned to look at me with raised eyebrows.
The refrigerator was completely empty. All the packages in their neat white wrappings were gone.
I said, “That’s odd. Gilda must have taken them with her when she left.”
/> “You think it was meat?”
“I don’t know what it was. It was packages like what you get from a meat market, you know, in that white butcher paper.”
“And it smelled like iodine?”
“That’s what it smelled like to me.”
“Dixie, tell me again why you’re here.”
“A man who said he was Ken Kurtz called me last night and asked me to come today to feed his iguana. He said he was delayed in New York, but that somebody would be here to let me in. He didn’t leave a telephone number, and my Caller ID didn’t register it, so I don’t know where he was calling from.”
“That’s all he said?”
“He said the iguana’s name was Ziggy and that he likes yellow squash.”
Guidry closed his eyes and mumbled something that sounded like Why me?
I said, “I have to find a place to put the iguana while your people are here. I’m going to go ask Mr. Kurtz.”
Guidry grunted, and I headed around the corner to the eastern corridor and Kurtz’s room. Kurtz was sitting up with his eyes closed, leaning back against a headboard lined with shelves of tomes I could tell weren’t light reading. The bottles of medicine were still on the bedside table. The photograph of the woman was gone, probably moved to the drawer in the table.
I said, “Mr. Kurtz? Is there someplace warm and safe where I can put Ziggy?”
He opened his eyes and gave me a level stare. “No place in the world is safe, Ms. Hemingway.”
“Probably not, but some places are less problematic than others, especially for an iguana.”
He tilted his head toward a closed door. “You can put him in the exercise room. It’s warm in there. It’s through the bathroom.”
I left the side of his black satin bed and opened the door to the bathroom. More white ceramic tile, more white bathroom fixtures, more white walls. Whoever planned this house must have had a fixation with hospitals. Another door stood open from the bathroom, and I went through into a fully equipped home gym, with a glass-enclosed dry sauna in one corner and a compact swim-in-place pool in the other. I checked the size of the sauna and decided it would do. Ziggy would be cramped in it but warm.
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Page 5