Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

by Blaize Clement

  “I’m not going to work for you anymore, Dixie. I can’t take another case like this one.”

  I couldn’t blame him. He’d expected a calm week or two, and he’d had emotional chaos.

  I said, “I’m sorry it’s been so trying.” “I’ve been thinking about that cat. What’s going to happen to him?”

  “Celeste has given me authority to find a home for him. She’s going back to Dallas and she doesn’t want him.”

  “Could I take him? I think we’d get along just fine.”

  I smiled to myself. Pete would probably play saxophone for him.

  In the interest of full disclosure, I said, “He has a long tail that he leaves in doorways. You’d have to be careful that he didn’t trip you.”

  “Honey, I’ve worked with circus monkeys that had tails so long they could wrap them around your waist. They were always leaving their tails looped around too, that’s just their sense of humor. That’s not a problem for me.”

  “Then you’ve got yourself a Havana Brown named Leo. As soon as you’re ready for him, I’ll bring him to you.”

  “Do you think it would be okay if I changed his name? I worked with a guy named Leo one time, and he was a bad apple.”

  I laughed. “A lot of cats start out with one name and end up with another. Leo’s first name was Cohiba.”

  “Well, that’s dumb. I was thinking more of Percy. Like P-U-R-R-C. I always kind of wanted a cat named Purr-C, spell it like that.”

  We didn’t talk much after that, both of us caught in our own thoughts.

  Back on Siesta Key, I drove to Mazie’s house to drop Pete off so he could clean the house, wash his sheets, and generally erase all signs that he’d been there. Home owners are glad to have somebody watching things when they’re gone, but they don’t want reminders of you when they return.

  I was tired and sticky and unshowered, and my eyes felt like boiled tomatoes. I was also hungry. Nevertheless, it was time for my afternoon rounds.

  Before Pete got out of the Bronco, he said, “Do you think you could get that cat today?”

  I stared at him. “Today?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking, that cat hates being cooped up, that’s why he runs away so much. So he must really hate being in a cat hotel, all squeezed in a tiny little room. If I were him, I’d want to get out of that hotel and move to a new house.”

  Pete lives in an old Florida cracker house tucked away on one of Siesta Key’s tree-lined streets. It has a front porch where a tranquil cat could sit and watch the world go by, and a quiet garden where a contented cat could have fun chasing butterflies and birds. Leo had been neither tranquil nor contented at Laura’s house, but now that I knew more about the fireworks that had been going off inside her mind, I had a feeling he might have a personality change when he was with Pete.

  I said, “When I’ve finished with my last call, I’ll go to the Kitty Haven and get Leo and bring him here.”

  “Purr-C, not Leo.”

  He looked toward Laura’s driveway and frowned. “Who’s that next door?”

  I looked too and did a silent groan. The locksmith’s truck was at the curb, and Celeste’s rented Camry was in the driveway.

  I said, “That’s the car Celeste drove.”

  We both stared at the Camry.

  Pete said, “Maybe now’s the time to ask her about me taking the cat.”

  “We don’t need her permission for you to take Leo. She’s given me authority to find a home for him. It’s none of her business who gives him that home.”

  Pete lifted one of his woolly eyebrows at my snarkiness. “Whatever you think.”

  I sighed. “I just don’t want to talk to the woman.”

  “Don’t blame you, but maybe she’s not such a pain in the patootie when things are going okay. It must have been a terrible thing for her to have to identify her sister’s body.”

  I knew he was right. Of all people, I should have been more sympathetic to Celeste Autrey. I had been the one who had gone apeshit in front of a bank of cameras at Todd and Christy’s funeral, and I had been the one who had been fueled by consuming rage for a long time after their deaths. I hadn’t been such a sweet person either, and I didn’t have any business being so judgmental about Celeste’s attitude.

  I said, “I’ll talk to her, but I’m not going to mention who’s taking Leo.”

  Pete patted my shoulder. “You’re a good girl, Dixie.”

  As he walked to the house he gave me a backward jaunty wave, and for a minute I wasn’t seeing his tall elegant frame but Laura’s body, flipping Martin a backward finger as she left him. Martin had said he’d been furious at Laura, but that he wouldn’t have hurt her. But from what I’d seen of Martin Freuland, he would say anything that served his purposes and do anything he thought he could get away with.

  29

  Ieased out of the driveway, drove the short distance to Laura’s house, and pulled behind the locksmith’s truck at the curb. As I walked up the driveway, I saw Celeste and the locksmith in front of Laura’s front door, and from the way they were glaring at each other, it didn’t seem like a friendly meeting. When Celeste saw me, color rose in her face and her eyebrows drew together in a furious frown.

  “Oh, this is perfect! The pet sitter has come to join the party! I suppose the Sheriff’s Department sent out a special invitation to you. Did they give you a key to the house too? They won’t give me one, but they’ll give one to anybody who lives in this godforsaken dump! I couldn’t even go through my sister’s house by myself, had to have a deputy watch while I got her jewelry and some of her clothes. She was my sister, you know, and we were close—even with all I had to put up with, we were close. I didn’t take anything she wouldn’t want me to have. Not that I don’t have nice things of my own, because I do, but there’s no point in leaving these things here. In any civilized town, the neighbors would have helped me carry things, but not here. Here the cops keep the keys to my sister’s house from me.”

  The locksmith heaved a huge sigh. “Ma’am, as I’ve told you probably a hundred times now, the cops aren’t keeping the keys from you, I am. You can have the keys as soon as you pay me for changing the locks. You’re the one who ordered the change, you’re the one who has to pay for it. As soon as you pay me, I’ll give you the new keys.”

  “I’m not paying you for something I have the right to have. It’s my sister’s house. I had the right to have her locks changed.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but I have the right to be paid for changing them. You’ve made three appointments to get the keys, and you missed all of them. Now you want the keys for free. Sorry, not gonna happen.”

  Whirling to me, Celeste said, “And exactly what is your purpose here?”

  Mildly, I said, “I just came to tell you I’d found a good home for Leo. I thought you might want to know.”

  “That cat? You think I care about that stupid cat?”

  “He was your sister’s cat, so I thought you might.”

  It didn’t seem like a good time to tell her that the Kitty Haven charged fifty dollars a day for boarding a cat. Legally, the charge should go to her sister’s estate. In reality, I would pay it.

  Even allowing for the shock of learning that her sister had been brutally murdered, Celeste’s behavior was bizarre. She was not a stupid woman. If she were Laura’s legal heir, she surely knew she had a right to everything in her sister’s house, no matter when she returned to Dallas. But she must also know that the house was devoid of art and had extremely modest furnishings. Any valuables would be jewelry or furs, which Celeste had apparently already taken.

  She said, “You think I’m a selfish bitch, don’t you? Both of you think that.”

  Neither the locksmith nor I answered, at least not out loud.

  With her face the color of new radishes, Celeste dived into her handbag and took out a leather wallet. As if she were thumbing out playing cards, she slipped some bills from the wallet and flung them at the locksmith.
/>   “Here’s your money.”

  The money fell to his feet and he left it there while he pulled a small paper packet from his pocket. “Here’s your key.”

  She held it on her open palm. “Just one?”

  “One comes with the lock change. You want more, you pay for more.”

  Her head jerked backward, and in the next instant she spat at him and threw the key against his chest.

  “Take your damn key and to hell with you!”

  Brushing past me, she stomped to the Camry and got in with a loud door slam. When she pulled out, she came within inches of hitting both the truck and my Bronco on the street, and left with a loud revving of her engine. The locksmith waited until she was out of sight before he picked up two hundred-dollar bills at his feet.

  He said, “That woman is a nut.”

  I couldn’t disagree.

  He said, “You want this key?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just the pet sitter. I’ve got the cat that belonged to the woman that was killed here, that’s all.”

  “She left a cat?”

  “A Havana Brown. Beautiful cat. I’ve found him a good home.”

  He handed me the key. “You might need something for the cat.”

  I didn’t want the key, but I could see his quandary. He’d changed locks on the house and been paid for it, and he felt duty bound to leave the new key with somebody, even if the somebody was just me.

  I said, “I’ll give it to Lieutenant Guidry. He’s handling the murder investigation.”

  “Okay, that’ll work.”

  He stuffed the bills Celeste had thrown at him into his pocket and went out to his truck. I followed him. I had been tired and sweaty and hungry before, now I was tired and sweaty and hungry and totally disgusted with Celeste Autrey.

  The locksmith had been only half right. Celeste wasn’t just a nut, she was a vicious nut. She and Laura must have been two halves of one disturbed whole, but while Laura had been disturbed and sweet, Celeste had soaked up all the bitter.

  30

  My voice was hollow with weariness when I called Guidry.

  I said, “I spoke to Celeste Autrey a few minutes ago. She was at Laura Halston’s house with the locksmith. Outside the house, actually, because she refused to pay for having the locks changed, so he refused to give her the new key. She finally threw money at him and he gave her the key, but she was so mad that there was only one key that she spit at him and threw it back. Then she left, and he gave the key to me. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “She spit at him?”

  “Like an adder.”

  “Why’d the locksmith give you the key?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know, Guidry. Probably because I was there and he was fed up with the whole business. He’d been paid for changing the locks and making the new key, so he wanted to be rid of it. Good thing Martin Freuland wasn’t there, he would have given it to him. Did you pick Freuland up?”

  “Can’t pick a man up just for being outside a house, Dixie. I sent some deputies over to suggest to him that loitering outside a dead woman’s house could be construed as suspicious behavior, so he left.”

  “What about Vaught? I’ve been thinking about him. The man’s hands are too clean. Freuland has more reason to want to kill Laura if she stole money from him, but Vaught’s hands look more surgical, like they’d know how to use a scalpel.”

  The line was silent for a long moment, then Guidry’s voice came back almost as heavy with fatigue as mine.

  “Dixie, I never told you Laura Halston was stabbed with a scalpel.”

  My tired brain started gathering all the information it had collected to tell him that of course the killer had used a scalpel. For starters, there was her sadistic surgeon husband who threw scalpels at the ceiling for fun.

  An icy trickle of reason slid down my neck, and my entire body went cold with shame. The husband had been one of Laura’s lies, and I was an idiot. Not only had I fallen for the lie when I first heard it, I’d continued to operate as if it were true even after I’d learned it wasn’t.

  I said, “Oh.”

  “Does anybody else know you have that key? Anybody besides the locksmith?”

  “You do.”

  “Don’t mention it to anybody, okay? I’m a little tied up right now, but I’ll call you later and pick it up.”

  “Okay.”

  He must have been surprised at my unaccustomed meekness, because he actually said “Goodbye” before he clicked off.

  I sat there with my phone in hand and wondered how I could have been so stupid. But I knew the reason. Laura had been a master at pulling people into her fantasies. Unlike her sister’s, Laura’s dishonesty had been laced with warmth and generosity and humor. She’d made people want to believe her, and once they believed, they protected themselves from feeling like fools by continuing to believe.

  For the first time, I felt a touch of sympathy for Martin Freuland, whose huge ego and lust for power would have made him a perfect mark for a woman of Laura’s talents. Even the town had been a perfect venue for her heist. A city in which the predominantly Hispanic residents throw a monthlong celebration every year in honor of George Washington is a world where fantasy rules. In such an atmosphere, it wouldn’t have seemed incongruous to Freuland to allow his lover access to his bank’s vault. After all, he believed in her. He believed she was mentor to the town’s debutantes, and he’d thought the model’s bag she carried on the day of the debutante ball was admirably philanthropic.

  I wondered how long she had plotted and schemed before she carried her model’s bag into the bank vault and filled it with stacks of Freuland’s ill-gotten money. I wondered how long it had taken Freuland to realize he’d been had. It had been an almost perfect crime. He couldn’t charge her with theft because the money had been given to him as a payoff for taking deposits from drug dealers. All he could do was report her missing, which must have seemed something of a joke to the city’s police.

  I doubted he had understood right away—or that he’d been willing to admit to himself—that what she’d done had been premeditated. Laura would have pulled him in as skillfully as she’d pulled me in. She would have made him believe she was in love with him, and even after she left he would have continued to believe it. More than likely, he had chosen to believe that Laura had put money in her model’s bag and driven to Dallas as a spur-of-the-moment thing, a momentary lapse of ordinary good sense.

  I might have thought that too, but she had taken Leo with her. Leo had either been in her car when she went in the bank with her model’s bag, or she’d gone home and got him before she drove away. Laura had known exactly what she was doing when she took that money. Furthermore, she hadn’t been afraid of Freuland. Not then, and not when he found her and confronted her. She had walked away from him, and the flippant finger she’d shot him hadn’t looked the least big frightened.

  Had she underestimated his capacity for violence? Perhaps she went too far when she reported his illicit dealings with his drug-dealer depositors. Perhaps he would have forgiven her for stealing his money, or at least not killed her for it, but killed her for being disloyal to him.

  On the other hand, maybe he hadn’t been the killer at all. Maybe the creepy nurse Vaught had killed her because she’d rejected him. His sickness was a desire to control, to humiliate, to create terror in helpless victims. The police suspected he’d smothered elderly people in nursing homes, but he could have committed other kinds of murders that nobody knew about. Homeless people, children, mentally ill people, unwary women are killed every day and the killers are never found. Frederick Vaught could be a shadow killer who’d gotten away with crimes simply because he chose helpless victims in private places.

  With that gloomy thought, I backed out of Mazie’s driveway and headed for Tom Hale’s condo. I was a pet sitter, and it was time for my afternoon rounds, beginning as always with Billy Elliot.

  When I let myself into Tom’s condo, he and Bill
y Elliot took their eyes off the TV and looked up at me with mild welcome. Then they both widened their eyes a bit, and it seemed to me that Billy Elliot’s nostrils pinched together. I know for sure he pulled his head back a bit.

  I said, “I look like hell, don’t I?”

  Tom said, “Maybe not hell. More like heck. Why are you so . . . ah . . .”

  “Sweaty. The word is sweaty, Tom, plus rumpled, plus hairy, plus I don’t know what-all.”

  “Yep, that would be the word. So why are you?”

  I sighed and lowered my rump to the arm of the sofa. “Pete Madeira and I drove to St. Pete this morning and took Mazie to see Jeffrey.”

  Tom’s face was blank, so I dragged an explanation from my basket of words.

  “Mazie is a seizure-assistance dog. Jeffrey is a little boy who just had brain surgery to stop his seizures. Mazie was becoming too despondent away from him, so we took her to the hospital. Which means that I didn’t get to go home and take a shower or nap. Well, I napped a little in the hospital in a chair, but it’s not the same.”

  “She’s one of those dogs that signal a person when they’re about to have a seizure?”

  “No, that’s a seizure-alert dog. Jeffrey’s too little to have that kind of dog. Mazie’s a seizure-assistance dog, which is different. She doesn’t alert him to a seizure, but she stays close to him when his balance is off from the medication, and she distracts him when he’s unhappy and frustrated.”

  “Dogs are so great.”

  I got Billy Elliot’s leash and led him into the hall and to the elevator, where he moved as far from me as he could get.

  I said, “If you hadn’t had a bath lately, you wouldn’t smell so hot either.”

  He pretended not to understand, but when we got to the parking lot, he ran at a slower speed than usual, which I appreciated. By the time I got him back upstairs, I’d made up my mind to go home and take a quick shower. When dogs make a point of standing upwind from you, it’s time to attend to your personal grooming.