Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

Even with that odd smile, her voice held so much acid that Pete’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, and Mazie edged closer to his side.

Pete said, “If you two will excuse us, Mazie and I will be on the lanai.”

Celeste dropped into a chair as if she intended to spend the rest of her life there. I perched on the arm of the sofa. I wasn’t sure why she was there, but I knew it wasn’t because she was concerned about Leo.

I said, “You think Martin Freuland killed Laura?”

“Of course he did. He found where she’d gone and he came here and killed her. I warned her. As soon as she told me he was here, I told her to leave, but she laughed at me. Laura thought she could twist every man around her finger. I don’t suppose anybody could blame her for thinking that. She started with our father and moved on to every man she ever met. It was a sickness she had, a weakness of character. I think she was born with it. But she went too far with Martin Freuland.”

I caught an odd note of satisfaction in her voice, as if she were glad Laura had got what was coming to her.

I said, “Laura told me she was married to a surgeon. She said she had gone to work for him as his receptionist and then married him.”

Her laughter spewed like ice cubes falling from a refrigerator’s icemaker. “She actually said that? Oh, she was good! That’s what I did, not Laura. My husband is a surgeon, and I’m the one who was his receptionist. But I’m not surprised she told you that. She was so jealous of me, she stole my life! She tried to steal my husband too, but he saw right through her. Not like most men—she had most men fooled. Men are stupid, you know, they’ll believe anything a woman tells them, and Laura knew all the right ego buttons to push. She was oversexed, I think. Maybe it was hormones or some extra chromosome thing. Whatever it was, she never thought of anything except sex.”

I thought back to our evening together. Two women sharing secrets have plenty of opportunities to talk about sex, but the topic hadn’t come up. Grief does strange things to people, but in Celeste’s case it seemed to have turned her into a vile disloyal gossip.

I said, “I didn’t know Laura well, but she seemed like a nice person to me. I can’t imagine her doing something so bad that it would cause a man to kill her.”

Her head snapped toward me, and in the movement a ray of light from a table lamp caught two thin wet trails on her cheeks. Her lips were still pulled back in a parody of a smile, but her eyes were leaking tears. Strangely, she seemed unaware of them.

“Let me set you straight about Laura. From the day she was born, she seduced every man she met, beginning with our father. I was four when she was born, and I don’t think Daddy ever looked at me again. Oh, she was cute, no doubt about it. I don’t dispute that. Every time we went out in public, strangers would stop us on the street to rave about how pretty she was. Right there in front of me, they’d go on and on about her looks, and she ate it up. I was cute too, plus being smart, but she hogged all the attention. It was a sickness of hers.”

She leaned forward and dropped her voice an octave, getting serious. “You know what someone said to me? They said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but your sister is a narcissist.’ That’s what they said, a narcissist. I’d never heard the word before, I had to look it up in the dictionary. It’s a mental illness, is what it is. Narcissists are selfish and controlling, just like Laura. They’re outrageous liars too, you can’t believe a thing they say, and they don’t care about anybody but themselves. They use you and use you and use you, and then they throw you away.”

Her voice had taken on a corrosive bitterness. “When Laura was eight, she made Daddy take her to a kid’s modeling agency. Oh, she knew the effect she had on men, she knew they’d want her. They did too, snapped her right up, and after that, the whole family lived on the money she made. Needless to say, all the photographers were men. Even then, she was using men to get what she wanted. We moved to a big house, my parents got new cars, and neither of them ever worked another day. Laura was their princess, like she’s been ever since.”

I clamped my teeth tight to keep from reminding her that Laura’s mutilated body lay in the county morgue no longer a princess. No longer anything.

She said, “Laura drew in every man she ever knew. Teachers, neighbors, every man around. She was just naturally seductive, even when she was little. She was a bad seed, depraved, no morals whatsoever. She even seduced Daddy. That’s how low she was.”

With tears glistening on her cheeks like snail trails, she peered at me to see how I was taking what she said. Increasingly willing to give her every opportunity to sink to her lowest self, I gave her my best I’m listening look.

“We were still young enough to sleep with our bedroom doors open. Laura’s room was directly across the hall, and there was a night-light in the hall in case we needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. One night I woke up and saw Daddy in my door. He was so big he blocked out all the light from the hall. He pulled my door shut, and then I heard Laura’s door close too. I knew she had got him to come in there, and I knew what was going on. Can you believe that? She was that depraved. After that he went in her room almost every night. She had him under her thumb but good.”

My stomach lurched. Celeste Autrey was not only viciously disloyal to her sister, she had a maggot-ridden mind.

“How old was Laura then?”

“Nine or ten. Our mother knew what she’d done, too. She turned hateful to Laura, really spiteful and mean, but Daddy was so much under her spell that he went out of his way to let us know that Laura could have anything she wanted.”

She gave a short bark of a laugh. “It backfired on her, though. It always does, doesn’t it? Like they say, what goes around comes around. Daddy managed Laura’s career, getting her modeling jobs, making sure she got attention, handled all her money. But he wasn’t very good at it, and when he and Mama were killed, Daddy had run up huge debts that he’d expected to pay with Laura’s earnings.”

“Your parents are dead?”

“Killed in a car wreck when I was in college and Laura was seventeen.”

So much for the story Laura had told about parents in Connecticut who owned her house.

With a hint of satisfaction, Celeste said, “By that time, Laura was past the adorable-kid stage, and the catalog ads and magazine cover jobs weren’t rolling in anymore.”

With a mental image of two young sisters left alone with a mountain of debt that one of them was expected to pay off by being beautiful, I did some figuring.

“You were twenty-one then, right?”

She colored. “The older one, the one who should have helped Laura out, is that what you mean? I suppose I could have, but I had to survive too. I wasn’t making much money, and I had rent to pay and car payments and clothes. I couldn’t afford to support her too.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that you should have.”

“Well, plenty of other people suggested it, and I know Laura thought I should. She’d always got whatever she wanted, so she couldn’t imagine somebody else not rushing to her side to take care of her.”

“What did she do?”

She shrugged. “She had high school friends who took her in, first one and then another until she graduated. Probably seduced all their fathers while she was at it. That’s what she did, seduced men. Every boyfriend I ever had, she took. I could have done the same thing to her, but I had morals. Not Laura. She never thought twice about seducing men. She still got some modeling jobs after high school, so it wasn’t like she was destitute. And anyway, I had my own problems. I had to support myself, and I had to do it with my brains.”