Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

My fingers were gripping my Styrofoam cup so tightly, the coffee was shivering. Just the thought of being a suspect caused a slick of hot guilt to coat my throat.

“Guidry, I never laid eyes on Harrison Frazier before I found him dead.”

“I believe you, Dixie, but you have to admit that logic would put you at the top of the list of suspects.”

“Why do you believe me?”

“Motive, Dixie. You had opportunity, but I don’t think you had reason to kill anybody.”

He sounded like a professor lecturing a class of would-be homicide detectives. Or like somebody giving me a friendly hint of an effective defense to use in case I was arrested for murder.

Stiffly, I said, “This has been very interesting, Lieutenant, but I have to get back to work.”

When I got to the elevator, Guidry caught up with me.

“Can I ask you a favor? Would you tell Cora Mathers that Marilee is dead?”

I stared at him, ready to tell him that I was a pet-sitter, dammit, not a member of the Sheriff’s Department. But I knew why he wanted me to notify Cora. I had already made a connection with her, and she was more likely to give me information that might help the investigation.

“You owe me,” I said.

“Big time. And you’ll talk to her about Frazier’s relationship with Marilee?”

“Sure, Guidry. I’ll go tell a sweet old woman that her granddaughter’s body has been lying in the woods with animals eating her, and then I’ll ask her a lot of questions. Are you nuts?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Dixie.”

The elevator doors opened and I stepped in. “I’ll go see Cora,” I said. “That’s all I’m promising.”

He put his hands in his pockets and stood silently watching me until the elevator doors closed.

At the Sarasota Bayfront Village, the woman at the front desk called Cora’s apartment and told me to go on up. In the elevator, I tried to find the right words to say what had to be said, but there is no right way to tell somebody about death.

Cora was standing outside her door again, waving at me like a little girl excited to have company. “Did you come back for some more of my chocolate bread? I don’t have any fresh today, but yesterday’s is still good. It doesn’t have to be hot, you know. It’s good cold, too. I keep it in the refrigerator and just heat it up in the toaster oven. Sometimes I don’t even heat it, I just eat it cold.”

“I have something to tell you, Cora.”

“Well, come on in. You can tell me while we have some tea.”

She scuttled ahead of me, talking a mile a minute. “I don’t think there’s anything that don’t go down better with tea, do you? A lot of people here are drinking green tea. I never saw any green tea, did you? I just drink plain old brown tea. I don’t think I’d like to drink something green. Would be like drinking hot lime Jell-O. Yuk. Here, you sit down while I make us some brown tea. I’ve always got the kettle on, you know.”

I edged into one of the ice-cream chairs at her round table and watched her totter into the kitchen area. She turned up the heat under a steaming kettle and put teabags into a teapot, then clattered down cups and saucers while she continued to talk.

“A lot of people say they can’t sleep at night if they drink tea after noon, but it never hurt me none. I drink tea all day long and I sleep just fine. If I don’t, I get up and watch TV. Some of them shows are dirty, got people doing it right there in front of your face. You ask me, there’s some things people ought not do in front of other people, and that’s one of them. You ever see any of them dirty shows?”

I got up to get the tea tray and said, “I’ve seen some of them, but just for a few minutes. I don’t much like watching other people having sex.”

“Well, that’s how I feel, too. What good does it do you to watch? If I’m not going to do it, I sure don’t want to watch somebody else doing it. What did you want to tell me?”

She had caught me off guard, and when I looked at her, I realized she had been babbling because she was scared. I probably wore the same face that Sergeant Owens and Todd’s lieutenant had been wearing three years ago when they came to tell me about Todd and Christy. They didn’t have to say a word for me to know that my life was over.

I said, “I think you’d better sit down, Cora.”

I’ve seen greyhounds who have been pulled from the track to be destroyed, and their eyes had the same defeated look as Cora’s.

“Is it about Marilee?”

“Yes.”

“Has something happened to her?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I’m sorry, Cora. Yes, she is.”

Her face imperceptibly crumpled, its thin skin suddenly cracking into an infinity of tiny lines. But her blue eyes remained blazingly dry, and she straightened up in her chair.

“How did he kill her?”

“I don’t know, Cora. Her body was found this morning, but I don’t know how she died. She was in the woods behind her house. I suppose she was killed about the same time Harrison Frazier was killed.”

She closed her eyes at the image I had conjured, but mercifully didn’t ask who had found Marilee’s body or its condition. She was a sharp old lady, she probably knew the things that would happen to a body left lying in the woods for several days.

“I always knew he would be the end of her. I knew it from the first day.”

“They don’t know who killed her, Cora.”

“I know. It was Harrison Frazier. I knew he would.”

“Harrison Frazier was killed, too, Cora.”

“I know that, and I’m glad. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it, to be glad that another human being is dead, but I am. The world’s a better place without him, if you ask me. But it’s not a better place without Marilee.”

The tears came now, spilling down her ravaged face. She didn’t bow her head and she didn’t wipe the tears away. She cried defiantly, as if her weeping were an accusation.

I reached across the table and took both her hands. “Cora, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, don’t think this is the first time I’ve cried over what Harrison Frazier did to Marilee. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

“What did Frazier do, Cora?”

“Turned chicken, that’s what. His family thought Marilee wasn’t good enough for him, and he didn’t have the balls to stand up to them. That’s what hurt her the most. The way he let them drag her through the mud.”

“When did this happen, Cora?”

“Marilee was fifteen. I guess Harrison was just fifteen, too. Lord knows they weren’t either of them old enough to take on a baby. I don’t fault Harrison for that. But the way he acted later, that was the thing that just killed Marilee.”

“Are you talking about Marilee’s daughter?”

She sighed. “I’m not supposed to talk about her, but now I don’t guess it matters. It wasn’t right, what they did. I don’t care how much money they paid Marilee, it wasn’t right.”

“What who did?”

“The Fraziers. They wanted Marilee to put the baby out for adoption, and that was all right with me. I didn’t want Marilee to be tied down with a baby to raise and her just fifteen years old. I’d already been through that with her mother. If my daughter had given Marilee to some nice folks, Marilee might have been better off. I did the best I could for her, but I had all I could do to keep food on the table for us. If I had it to do over again, I’d have tried to get my daughter to let Marilee be adopted, and she wouldn’t have ended up hanging herself, God rest her sweet soul.”

My heart did a little slide. Cora Mathers had lost more than any woman should have to endure.