Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

“Hey, Leo, remember me? Would you let me pick you up?”

He paused in his paw cleaning, tilted his ears toward me, and then went back to cleaning his foot. He seemed to be telling me that he wasn’t unfriendly, but to not take him for granted.

I looked toward the door again. If I ignored Leo and rang the doorbell, he might take offense at my nearness and run away. The smart thing would be to call Laura and tell her he was out and let her handle him. Keeping an eye on him, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed information, then remembered that Laura’s landline number was in her parents’ name and she hadn’t given me her cell number. I put the phone back in my pocket and got to my feet.

Leo turned his attention to another paw, going at it with a determined intensity. Whatever his feet had picked up on his dash to freedom was something he didn’t want to keep. Watching him from the corner of my eye, I took a few cautious steps toward the door and realized my heart was pounding much harder than the situation warranted. I told myself a cat had got out through a door accidentally left ajar, that’s all there was to it.

But I knew Leo had been outside now long enough for Laura to have missed him. I knew there was something terribly wrong about that open door. And above all else, I knew what Laura’s husband had said to her the day before. He had told her he would see that she paid for what she’d done.

While I debated what to do next, Leo stopped gnawing at his toes and watched me. Old deputy habits made me scrutinize the door facing for signs of forced entry. I didn’t see any, but when I looked more closely at the landing, I made out several small dark brown circles.

I don’t know why it had taken me so long to see them. Perhaps I had known all along they were there and denied them. Whatever the reason, they told me why Leo was so busily cleaning the pads of his paws.

13

Itook the phone back out and called 911. A deep male voice answered, one of those molasses tones that make you feel like weeping with relief because you’ve found somebody with broad shoulders you can fling yourself against. It took several tries to get my voice to work, and then it came out sounding like something fired from an old rusty cannon.

I said, “I have reason to believe a woman has been attacked in her home. I’m outside the door now, but I’m afraid I’ll disturb evidence if I go in. I’m an ex-deputy.”

I felt it was important to say I was an ex-deputy, as if that would make me sound more credible.

The man said, “Why do you think there’s been an attack?”

“I overheard the woman’s husband threaten her yesterday, and now her front door is open a few inches and her cat’s outside. The cat has left a trail of bloody paw prints from the house.”

He took the address, Laura’s name, and my name.

He said, “Somebody will be there shortly.”

I could imagine him calling it in: “Crazy woman thinks another woman has been attacked because her cat’s outside and she imagines she sees bloody paw prints. Go check it out.”

I sat down on the walk and waited. Leo waited. Leo yawned and stretched, then continued grooming a leg. The house was quiet and calm. The yard was quiet and calm. I was the only thing not calm, but it was very possible that I was a paranoid case. It was very possible that I’d been involved in so many crimes in the last year that I’d come to expect the worst even in innocuous situations.

One of those ear worm things started in my head again, Randy Newman singing “I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.”

After what seemed eons, a green-and-white deputy’s car pulled into the driveway and Deputy Jesse Morgan got out. The fact that a sworn deputy had come instead of one of the Community Policing officers meant the dispatcher had taken my call seriously, but I did an inward groan. Morgan and I have met over a couple of dead bodies, and I think he sees me as somebody whose presence spells trouble. He may be right.

I stood up to meet him, and it seemed to me that his stride faltered a bit when he recognized me. From the top of his close-cropped hair to the hem of his dark-green deputy pants, Morgan was crisp and all business. The only thing about him that hinted of a life outside law enforcement was the discreet diamond stud in one ear-lobe.

With his eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, I had to go by his lean cheeks and firm lips to tell what he thought, and he wasn’t giving anything away.

He stopped a few feet away and rocked back a bit on his heels. “Miz Hemingway.”

I said, “I know how this seems, but I’m concerned about the woman in this house. I saw her cat run across the street about an hour ago. I think the cat ran out when somebody went in.” I pointed toward the dark round circles. “Those are paw prints.”

Morgan’s head tilted a fraction of an inch toward me, either in acknowledgment of my powers of deduction or because he thought it was a good idea to be polite to a crazy woman.

As he moved past me toward the door, I said, “Don’t scare the cat away.”

He stopped and turned his head toward Leo. “Tell you what, Miz Hemingway, why don’t you go pick the cat up, and then I’ll go in the house.”

I didn’t like the careful way he said it, as if he were humoring somebody who might fly apart at any moment. Still, he had a point. Cautiously, I moved forward and stooped to pick Leo up. As if to show Morgan what an overanxious idiot I was, Leo went limp as a sack of jelly.

Avoiding the paw prints, Morgan zigzagged to the door, rang the doorbell, and rapped on the glass. “Sheriff’s Department!”

Silence.

He rang again, rapped on the doorjamb, and called louder. “Sheriff’s Department!”

He did that three times, each time louder, then used the back of his knuckles to push the door open. “Miz Halston? Sheriff’s Department!”

He walked inside out of my view, but I could hear him calling to Laura and identifying himself. I carried Leo to the end of the driveway and stood by the street waiting. I already knew what Morgan would find.

In a few minutes, he stepped outside with his phone to his ear. His face had gone several shades paler. He paused to talk, and I heard the word stabbed . The word confirmed what I’d been expecting. Call it intuition or hunch or simply the fact that I knew Laura’s husband was a sadist with scalpels, I knew Laura had been murdered and that the killer had stabbed her to death.

Morgan clicked the phone closed and put it back on his belt. Then he walked to the corner of the house, leaned over with one hand on the wall, and very efficiently threw up.

I had firsthand knowledge of some of the gruesome things Morgan had seen, but I’d never seen him lose his poise. Morgan was an experienced law enforcement officer, and law enforcement officers become inured to scenes that would turn a normal person’s stomach. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth, then slowly turned toward me. I could feel his eyes on me behind his dark shades, and I knew he was debating how much to tell me. His chest rose in a deep breath, and he came down the driveway.

I said, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“The crime-scene guys will want to talk to you.”

I said, “I’m going to put Leo in my car.”

Woodenly, I walked to my Bronco in the driveway at Mazie’s house and put Leo in a cardboard cat carrier. Lowering all the car windows, I left him there and went back to Laura’s house. As I got there, a sheriff’s car pulled to the curb and Sergeant Woodrow Owens got out. When he saw me, his face registered pleasure, dismay, and sadness all at one time.

Sergeant Owens is a tall laconic African American who had been my immediate superior when I was a deputy. There’s not a finer man in the world, or a smarter one. He was smart enough to tell me I was too crazy to carry a gun for the department after Todd and Christy were killed. Actually, what he’d said was, “Dixie, you’re way too fucked up to be a deputy.”