Just then the door of the trailer swung open and a little towheaded boy appeared. He hopped up on a pogo stick and maneuvered down the two short steps into the yard with confident ease, even though he couldn’t have been much older than seven or eight. I remembered Tanisha’s sister, Diva, had moved in with her recently and was babysitting during the day to make extra money.
When the little boy noticed me, he raised one hand and gave me a quick wave, looking much like a cowboy on a bronco bull. Luckily the yard was carpeted with a thick bed of lush green grass, so I figured if he fell it would be a nice soft landing.
Just past that trailer the asphalt ended abruptly and turned into a dusty narrow road with wheel ruts down the middle. It led about a hundred feet through a stand of pines, eventually widening into a weedy clearing where there was a sky-blue trailer shaped like a boxcar. It was faded, with what looked like coffee stains spilling down its corrugated metal siding.
I inched the Bronco forward a bit, just parallel to a sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY, and whispered to myself, “What in the world am I doing here?”
A voice in my head said, Nothing good. Turn around.
I ignored it. Putting aside for the moment that my mask-wearing assailant was probably a figment of my imagination, if it turned out there was even the slightest connection between that and the fact that Levi hadn’t finished his paper deliveries that morning, I’d never have been able to forgive myself if I didn’t at least make sure he was okay.
The closer I got to the trailer, the more certain I was that this was the right place. There was a sad stack of old tires about five feet high in the middle of the weedy yard, and parked at a forty-five-degree angle between that and the trailer, its front bumper practically touching the front door, was Levi’s dark brown Buick LeSabre convertible.
I breathed a sigh of relief as I pulled over to the side of the yard and shut the engine. At least he’d made it home, which meant I could rule out some of the other possible scenarios I’d come up with since I’d left the diner: that shortly after he’d pulled away from my driveway that morning, Levi had been run off the road, tied up, and thrown off the bridge into the bay, or he’d been locked in a basement chamber somewhere, all to keep him from coming forward as a witness after the Kellers returned from their vacation in Italy to find my lifeless body in their laundry room.
Like I said, my imagination can get a little unruly sometimes.
I dropped my keys down into the Bronco’s center console and stepped out into the weedy yard. The sun was in her full midday glory now, and the heat bouncing off the front of the trailer made me feel like I’d walked into a giant rotisserie oven. To the right of the front door was a single window about four feet square, covered with a flimsy sheet of plastic held to the casing with a double-wide framing of gray duct tape. A lime-green fitted bedsheet was tacked up behind the glass, blocking the view inside except for one spot in the lower left corner where the sheet was balled up in a knot. As I squeezed myself around the front of the LeSabre and climbed up the few steps to knock on the front door, I had the distinct feeling I was being watched.
“Excuse me, can I help you?”
I spun around to find a squat, pasty-faced woman in her early twenties, with crispy, dyed-red hair and puffy eyes, looking up at me with her head cocked snottily to one side.
“Oh, hi,” I blustered. “I didn’t hear you come up.”
“No kidding. This is private property, you know.”
“Yeah, sorry. I was just looking for Levi.”
She gave me a once-over. “Oh, yeah? What do you want with him?”
“Well, it’s a little weird. He was parked outside my house when I was leaving for work.”
“Oh, he was, was he?”
She was wearing flip-flops and a grubby white button-down with a black silhouette of Mickey Mouse across the front, buttoned all the way up to her neck. It was either a nightgown or an extremely large man’s dress shirt, because it fell halfway down her bare legs.
I said, “Yeah, so I just wanted to know if maybe he’d seen anything unusual.”
“What’s the matter. Can’t you read?”
“Excuse me?”
Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “The sign clearly says NO TRESPASSING.”
I thought about saying that, actually, the sign clearly said PRIVATE PROPERTY, but I doubted it would win me any points. Instead I nodded. “Oh, I know. I just need to talk to Levi. This is his place, right?”
“So, you’re a friend of Levi’s?”
As she said “friend,” she held her hands up and made little fat quotation marks in the air with her pudgy fingers.
“Well, not exactly. But—”
“Uh-huh. You’re the girl that was here last night. What’s the matter, forget your panties?”
I sighed. This wasn’t going well at all. I stepped forward with my hand out and said, “Hey, I think maybe we’re getting off to a bad start. I’m Dixie Hemingway.”
Her upper lip curled into what at first I thought was a smile but turned out to be a sarcastic snarl. She stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “Bitch, I don’t know you. You’re trespassing on my neighborhood and my man, so you better get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”
For a split second I thought about leaping off the steps and pummeling this fire-hydrant-shaped Sasquatch of a woman into the ground, but luckily I managed to control myself. I took a deep breath and gave her as pleasant a smile as I could muster.
I said, “Okay, there’s no need to call the cops.”
“I’ll call the cops if I want to. This is America. I got free speech.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I understand that, but the cops probably have more important things to deal with. I just need to talk to Levi for one second and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
Given the state of the chemically altered mess on top of her head, it was all I could do to keep myself from holding my fingers up and putting air quotes around the word hair, but the woman’s cheeks were turning beet-red as it was, plus every once in a while I do actually manage to conduct myself with a modicum of composure.
She squinted and tipped her chin at the trailer. “I’m sure he’s still too drunk to talk anyway, but that don’t matter because I’m gonna count to five and if you ain’t out of here by then, you’re gonna be sorry you ever met me.”
Before I could stop myself I said, “Believe me, I already am. But more than that, I’m sorry you’re so tortured.”
Her eyes widened as I turned on my toes and rapped on the front door of the trailer with four confident knocks. Actually I had planned on four, but I only made it to three because as I knocked it swung open. At the same time, I caught a glimpse of the woman’s shadow approaching from behind. For a split second, I considered the idea that I was about to receive my second beating of the day.
But something stopped her.
It was a man, flat on his stomach on the trailer’s pale blue linoleum floor. I couldn’t see all of him, just his naked legs. The rest was hidden behind the door and blocking it from opening completely. Something clenched shut at the top of my throat, and as I reached for the doorframe, I noticed the man’s toes were splayed out spastically and the pale white soles of his bare feet were facing up, perfectly still. He was lying in the center of a pool of blood that stretched almost the entire length and depth of the trailer.
Just before the woman screamed, I muttered under my breath, “Okay, you win. Call the cops.”
9
I never found out if my little fiery-headed friend had planned on giving me another beating or not, because after she screamed, the full weight of her body slammed into my back and pushed me forward into the trailer. Luckily my instincts kicked in and I grabbed on to both sides of the doorway and held on with all my might. That turned out to be just enough to keep us both from falling facedown in all that blood.
Sasquatch had taken one look at what was inside the trailer and conked out l
ike a light, and now she was draped piggyback over my shoulders. I managed to get over to the left against the doorjamb, then, holding myself upright with one shoulder and squeezing my other arm between us, I maneuvered around until I had her in a tight bear hug. As gently as possible, I slid down to the shallow steps in front of the door and leaned her heavy body up against the front bumper of Levi’s LeSabre.
The first thought that flashed across my mind was something like, Well, this is the story of my life, but I didn’t have much time to indulge in that.
The woman’s hot breath had left a moist spot on the side of my neck, and as I wiped it away with the back of my hand, her head plopped over and came to rest on the hood of Levi’s car. I reached out and pulled her shirt across her shoulder, scrunching it up under her cheek so her face wouldn’t get char-grilled on the hot metal. A few of the top buttons of her shirt popped open, and I saw a crudely drawn bluish black tattoo across the top of her chest, although I couldn’t tell what it was. Her eyes were closed and her jaw was slack, but there was a look of pained terror stuck on her face. For a moment, even though I had no idea what her story was, I felt sorry for her.
It’s funny how the mind works in a situation like this. Here I was, just inches from a lifeless body lying in a pool of blood, and yet my main concern was the safety of this unpleasant beast of a woman. While I fished my cell phone out of my pocket, I braced one arm against her shoulder and locked my elbow so she wouldn’t tip over and break her neck.
I flipped the phone open and gingerly dialed the numbers with my thumb.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
I leaned back and peered around the edge of the open door. The blood had seeped up against the toe kick of the doorframe and had already dried to a dark burgundy around the edges. The man’s face was turned toward me, as white as marble, his mouth slightly askew, his eyes wide open in frozen astonishment.
I said, “My name is Dixie Hemingway. I’m at Grand Pelican Commons. There’s been a murder.”
It was Levi Radcliff.
* * *
The quiet that develops in the presence of a dead body is like no other in the world. I could see straight down the dirt road to the main drag of Grand Pelican, where a group of kids had appeared with a couple of hula hoops and a basketball. They were mostly boys, probably around ten years old or so, but there were a few girls as well, all in bathing suits, shiny wet with their hair slicked flat, screaming and giggling the way kids do. I imagined they’d probably been playing with a garden hose to cool off.
At the edge of Levi’s dusty yard, there were three squirrels racing around in the brush at the foot of the pines and chattering at one another, and there was a loud whispering like the white noise of a broken radio coming from above as the pine needles shimmied in the steady breeze off the coast. None of that, however, could drown out the silence of the body lying not three feet away from me.
When Michael and I were little, Siesta Key was practically deserted compared to what it’s become in the past thirty years or so. Back then we could wander around for hours by ourselves. The entire island was as safe as our own front porch, and if you wanted a little excitement or drama, you were plumb out of luck.
But that didn’t stop me. I managed to get myself into trouble on a daily basis without even trying. If there was a hornet’s nest hidden in a tree, that was the tree I’d climb. If a fight broke out at school, I was the primary witness. If a newborn bird was pushed out of its nest, you could bet the farm I’d be standing nearby, and then I’d be saddled with the inevitable heartbreak of trying to keep it alive. My grandmother called it the Hemingway Curse, and I think it haunts me to this very day. Basically, if there’s a wrong place to be, I’ll be there, and if there’s a bad time for it, I’ll arrive promptly.
At almost the exact moment I hung up with 911, I heard the sirens start up from the north, thin and distant at first, so I knew the crew was probably coming from Sarasota Memorial. The operator had asked me all the standard questions: Was the victim stable? Was he conscious? Was he breathing? Was I able to perform CPR?
All I could do was hang my head between my knees, shaking slightly and muttering, “No,” over and over again while she went down the list. It’s standard procedure to dispatch an ambulance crew no matter what, even if the person reporting the victim is one hundred percent certain there’s no hope. As fragile as the human body is, it’s also amazingly resilient, and even in cases where every organ in a person’s body has ground to a stop—the lungs, the heart, even the brain—with the right equipment and a little luck, a skilled emergency crew can work miracles.
But I knew, in Levi’s case, it was hopeless.
The massive pool of blood was bad enough, but the way its edges had dried meant he’d been lying there for at least a few hours. The back of his legs had taken on a milky translucence, while gravity had drawn what little blood was left down toward the floor, turning the front of his legs a pale eggplant-purple, something that only happens after a body has long stopped. His knees were pressed into the hard tile floor, and there were rings of white skin where the blood couldn’t reach without the will of his heart to force it there.
Before the 911 operator had hung up, telling me to stay where I was and not to touch anything, she had asked if I was alone. I said yes, which of course wasn’t true, but it might as well have been. Sasquatch was still propped up against Levi’s car. She’d been snoring quietly the whole time, but as the sirens grew closer they must have roused her, because she raised her head abruptly and looked around with glazed, frightened eyes.
I tried to give her a comforting smile. “It’s okay. The police are almost here.”
She blinked a couple of times and frowned, and then, before I could say anything else, she looked down at the pool of blood in the open doorway behind me and her gaze traveled to Levi’s legs.
“No…”
Her eyes widened as she pushed herself up onto the car and shook her head from side to side. “No. No. No…”
I said, “It’s okay, try not to panic.”
She climbed over the side of the hood and slid down to the ground, her eyes glued to Levi’s body the whole time, but now she looked directly at me.
Her voice was trembling. “What happened?”
“I called 911 right away. They’re almost here.”
Just then, an ambulance came around the corner of Old Wharf Way and headed through the trailer park toward us. The woman looked over her shoulder and then back at me, and for a moment I thought I saw something flash in her eyes, something subtle … It was triumph.
She shook her head as she pushed herself off the ground and backed away.
I said, “Hold on. You should wait—”
But she wouldn’t let me finish. The next thing I knew she was running across the yard, shrieking at the top of her lungs and windmilling her arms at the emergency crew like she was some kind of innocent damsel in distress and they were her only hope of survival. As the ambulance slowed to a stop in front of her, she fell to the ground in the middle of the road and crawled forward a few more feet on her hands and knees, sobbing, her head flailing violently up and down, her screams piercing the air.
10
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Bronco with my sunglasses on and my legs tucked up under me. The sun was still glaring down like a blowtorch, but that wasn’t why I was wearing glasses. I needed something to hide behind.
The group of kids playing in the street had moved closer and were standing in a huddle at the head of the dirt road, watching with quiet faces, and I noticed the little blond-headed boy with the pogo stick beyond them. He was by himself, standing on his toes in the grass at the edge of his yard like he was afraid to step into the street. The squirrels had retreated into the treetops to view the proceedings from a safer distance.
It hadn’t taken long before practically the entire dirt road leading up to Levi’s trailer was filled with a line of emergency response vehicles with all the
ir lights flashing. The ambulance had pulled in just behind Levi’s car, but the two sheriff’s cruisers had parked just shy of the yard, probably to minimize the possibility of disturbing potential evidence. A couple of unmarked sedans had appeared moments later and were idling behind the cruisers.
Two of the deputies led Sasquatch over to the side, and another officer—he must have been new to the force, because I didn’t recognize him—was standing a few feet to the left of the Bronco, pretending not to watch me. I couldn’t help but notice he’d situated himself where he could see my hands. I was probably just being paranoid, but I got the distinct feeling he’d been told to watch out for any sudden movements.
Standing on the bottom step of Levi’s trailer, surveying the scene, was a tall lanky man with dark skin and sad, drooping eyes—Sergeant Woodrow Owens. He stood there quietly for a few moments, and then turned and motioned to one of the officers to join him. After they spoke, the deputy nodded and pointed in my direction, but Owens didn’t look over.
I sank down in my seat and sighed. Sergeant Owens had been my commanding officer when I was on the force. After Todd and Christy were killed, while everyone else at the station was waiting for me to pull out of the depths and return to my old self again, it was Owens who had called me into his office and dismissed me from service. It hadn’t surprised me one bit. We both knew I was too fragile, too unstable, too “fucked up” (his words, not mine) to continue in any capacity as a sheriff’s deputy.
There was a fly skating along the inside of the windshield, buzzing back and forth in a vain attempt to escape to the outside. The Bronco was broiling hot, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the AC. The idea of starting the engine and letting it idle while less than a hundred feet away the officers were inspecting the scene of a murder felt wrong, so I had the windows on both sides of the car rolled down all the way. That didn’t seem to help the fly one bit, though. He just kept skittering from side to side, convinced he was trapped and that the only way out was forward.
The Cat Sitter's Whiskers Page 6