Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

The man was face down with his hands cuffed behind him. His head was smooth and shiny as a dolphin’s, and his piggy black eyes were spitting venom.

I said, “He’s been following me. He chased me at the Crab House the other night and he was at the beach this morning.”

Paco took one of the man’s ears and twisted it. “How come you’re following the lady, pendejo ?”

“Fuck you, asshole!”

“Don’t you wish.”

Paco got to his feet and put one foot on the man’s butt to hold him down. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, amigo. The lady used to be a deputy, and she’s still got a lot of friends in the department, and they’re gonna be real mad when they find out you’ve been stalking her. They may decide to dump you in the surf and let the sand crabs crawl in your eyes.”

Any other time, I would have enjoyed listening to Paco pretend to be a zonked-out bum who had no connection to law enforcement, but I hadn’t had a shower all day and I knew company was coming.

I said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and took a two-minute shower. Just as I was pulling on underpants, I heard tires crunching the shelled driveway. I shimmied into a short skirt and T, stepped into sandals, ran lipstick over my mouth, and sprinted for the French doors.

Downstairs, Paco stood on one side of the downed man, and Lieutenant Guidry stood on the other. Guidry said, “Dixie, I’d like you to meet Bull Banks, a freelance thug who’ll do anything for a buck. He was recently released from one of our penal hotels for beating up an elderly couple.”

Paco said, “I was just asking him nicely to tell us who hired him to attack the kid.”

Bull said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kid?”

Guidry said, “Bull, it’s not like it was when you started your career. Now we’ve got all kinds of technologies. When we get DNA results from what we found on Phillip Winnick, I think we’ll find that you’re our man.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You gotta have hair or something for a DNA test.”

“Oh, we can use lots of things. Little skin cells from your fists maybe.”

“Fists! Ha, that’s a good one.”

“Oh yeah, we got good skin cells from your knuckles, Bull. Little knuckle cells were all over the kid’s face.”

“Didn’t use my fists!”

Guidry and Paco exchanged looks and grinned. Just at the instant I realized they knew each other, Bull Banks realized he’d just made a tactical error.

“You can’t prove a fucking thing! Anyway, the kid’s a goddamn queer!”

My head exploded, and the next thing I knew, I was on top of Bull Banks like a rodeo cowgirl, using his ears to slam his face in the sand and yelling words at him that would have made my grandmother ground me for a year. I didn’t know how long I’d been on him, but Bull was howling and sputtering and choking from all the sand in his mouth and nose and eyes. From the looks of his face, I’d been at him long enough to cause him some serious discomfort.

Paco pried my hands off Bull’s ears, and Guidry hooked an arm under my waist and lifted me up. Guidry was grinning, and when they stood me on my feet, he kept one arm around me to keep me from falling on Bull again. I kicked Bull in the ribs and yelled, “Who paid you to beat him up? You tell me who, or so help me God, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat!”

It felt so good to kick him that I kept doing it.

Bull yelled, “Stop it, bitch!”

Guidry said, “Now Bull, that’s not a nice way to talk to a lady, especially when she’s going to press charges against you for stalking her. When they add that to attacking the Winnick kid, you’ll get the ‘three times and you’re out’ life sentence. If you’re nice to Ms. Hemingway, she might be persuaded to forget about the fact you’ve been stalking her.”

Paco said, “The way you’re protecting him, you must be a good friend of whoever hired you.”

I turned at the sound of a marked squad car scrunching over the shell toward us. A uniformed deputy got out and took in the scene. When I turned my head back, Paco had disappeared.

Guidry spoke to the deputy. “This is Mr. Bull Banks. He needs to be Mirandized and taken in for the assault of Phillip Winnick.”

The deputy nodded and hauled Bull to his feet. Guidry touched the small of my back with his fingertips and said, “Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

Feeling more surreal by the moment, I climbed the stairs ahead of Guidry. At the porch, he turned the umbrella in the table so it shaded us from the midday sun. “Sit down, and I’ll get us something to drink.”

I sat as if I were a guest and he was the one who lived in my apartment. He went inside as if he owned the place, and in a minute he came out carrying two bottles of water from my fridge. He sat down in the chair opposite me, unscrewed the cap on his water, and took a long drink. When he put the bottle on the table, his eyes were calm and expectant.

I said, “Do you think Bull killed Frazier and Marilee?”

“We’ll look into where Bull was Thursday night, but I doubt he’s our man. Not that Bull couldn’t be bought to do it, I just don’t think he did.”

“He’s the man who was at the Crab House Saturday night before I talked to Phillip, the one who chased me in the parking lot. This afternoon, he was watching me at the pavilion at Crescent Beach. He must have left about the same time I did, but I stopped by Marilee’s house and the Graysons’ on the way home, so he got here first. I think he was here yesterday, too. Somebody broke into my brother’s house and then into my apartment upstairs. They left sandy footprints, and whoever it was drove a car down the drive.”

“Any idea why he’s stalking you?”

“He could have seen me talking to Phillip, I guess. I thought he’d left, but he could have come back without me seeing him. If the woman Phillip saw knew he was watching her, and if Bull had anything to do with killing Frazier and Marilee, he may have followed Phillip to the Crab House, intending to kill him. Then he saw Phillip talking to me and guessed he was telling me about the woman, so he decided he had to kill me, too.”

“If he was going to kill you, why didn’t he kill Phillip?”

“Because Rufus sensed what was going on and barked. That scared him away. Do you know what kind of car he drives? Is it a black Miata?”

“Bull might drive a stolen Miata, but he doesn’t own a car.”

“He must have had a car that night, because he probably waited in the Crab House parking lot and followed Phillip when he left. Then he followed him again when his lover drove him to that spot and let him out of the car.”

Guidry rotated his water bottle on the table. “That’s where your theory breaks down, Dixie. Bull’s the type who would beat the kid up just because he’s gay. It may not have anything at all to do with the murders.”

“Then why was he after me?”

“You turned him down at the bar, and you chatted up a gay guy. In Bull’s world, that’s plenty of reason to hurt you.”

“Guidry, you know Sam Grayson? The man whose dog barked and scared Bull away when he was beating Phillip? The dog’s name is Rufus. Well, Sam put a piece of brass pipe at the curb before he left town last Thursday night for the trash people to pick up Friday morning. A little piece about two feet long. Tanisha saw it when she was walking to the bus stop, and she picked it up.”

“Tanisha?”

“The cook at the Village Diner. She’d been cooking for somebody on the Graysons’ street, and she saw the pipe and got it. She said a man drove in the Graysons’ driveway and took it away from her, sort of accusing her of stealing it. And he drove a black car that may have been a Miata.”