Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

Michael’s pie was delicious—puff pastry, overlapping slices of ripe tomato, dark green basil leaves scattered over the top, good Italian olive oil drizzled on with a sure hand, and a light touch of garlic—exactly the light supper I needed after all the heavy information I’d digested. I ate it while I watched the sun slide down the sky and slip below the sea, sending out shimmering banners of gold and cerise.

The egret flew away with a great flapping of wings, and I sat in the draining light and thought about Laura Halston’s life. And about her death.

If what her nutcase sister had said was true, Laura had been treated as a sex object from the moment she was born. Used and abused by her father, envied and shunned by her mother and sister, and ultimately left alone when her parents died. At seventeen, no longer able to command large fees for being a beautiful child, she’d had to create a world for herself with no tools except her beauty.

It was hard to condemn her for using sexual seduction to keep from feeling helpless. That’s what she’d been programmed to do—it may have been the only thing she knew how to do. I wondered if she had loved Martin, the bank president, or if, as Reba had said, she had never loved anybody because she’d never been loved. I had heard Martin tell her she owed him, but he hadn’t said what she owed him. Was it love? Had Martin loved her and she had rejected him? Could he have been the one who got satisfaction from seeing her terror as he repeatedly stabbed her?

When I’d had dinner with her, Laura had spoken of Celeste as if the two were close, but Celeste had seemed contemptuous of her sister. Had that been grief talking? Old bitter rancor that had never been expressed when Laura was alive that was now boiling over? Or perhaps Laura had been playing a role for me when she spoke of her sister as if they were friends.

Guidry had said Celeste claimed Laura was the one who had reported Martin to the federal authorities for handling buffer accounts for drug dealers. How did Celeste know that? If Laura had told her, wouldn’t that point to a closeness between them? And what had Celeste meant when she said Laura had stolen from Martin? Stolen what?

I thought of Frederick, the nurse, and groaned. Was he just a sick man who preyed on the elderly, or had he been so enraptured by Laura’s beauty when they met in the ER that he became obsessed with her and killed her? If Celeste was to be believed, Laura would never have given an out-of-work nurse a moment of her time because he had nothing she would have wanted. But what about Gorgon, the thuggish guy I’d seen at the Lyon’s Mane? He probably had gobs of money, and he would have been a challenge to a woman who liked to seduce and control. If, in fact, that’s what Laura had liked to do, which nobody knew for sure.

I kept thinking about what Reba had said about their childhood experiences causing Laura and her sister to get kinks in their personalities. But there are millions of people who’ve been abused as children who don’t grow up to be liars and thieves, so what makes one person transcend damage done to her as a child, and another lets it become the central core of who she is?

When our father died, Michael was nine and I was seven. While I drew into a knot of miserable guilt, Michael had spent several months hitting or kicking things. His grades plunged and he went around with a ferocious scowl on his face. Our mother had been too stunned to deal with him, but our grandfather had finally come up with the perfect solution. He got a big football tackle bag and hung it from a tree limb in our backyard. Then he had a talk with Michael about anger. Basically, he told him that anger is a normal emotion and that hitting stuff is a normal action, but that hitting a tackle bag was a lot smarter than hitting walls. Then he gave Michael a pair of boxing gloves and let him be.

After a while, I got so used to hearing Michael thump that tackle bag that I took to hitting it myself, only I used a stick to whack at it. I even saw our mother slam her fist into it a few times. Now I wondered what would have happened to Michael’s fury if he hadn’t had that bag to hit. Maybe all that frustrated rage would have congealed and turned him into a criminal instead of a courageous fireman.

It was too much to think about. I went to the kitchen to put away my empty plate and wineglass, and dragged myself to bed. It was only eight-thirty, but my mind had gone blank. I couldn’t think anymore about what had happened.

I woke with a start, chasing remnants of a dream that escaped before my eyes were open. My bedside clock said it was quarter to four, time to get up and do my thing. I stretched and yawned, enjoying the rare feeling of being fully rested. Then I remembered why I’d gone to bed so early. Laura Halston had been murdered, and I had learned things about her that I wished I didn’t know.

I swung my feet to the floor and realized I’d slept in my clothes. I usually shower first thing when I get home at night, but last night I’d slept in my hairy clothes. Yuk. With the extra few minutes I had, I took a quick shower and shampooed my hair. Toweling my hair, I padded naked to my closet-office and pulled on underpants and shorts and a lightweight long-sleeved knit shirt. I even wore a bra. Pets don’t care if your boobs bounce or sag or swing or just lie there, but with all the stuff going on, I thought I might have to deal with men before the morning was over. Men are not as evolved as pets, they are easily distracted by loose bosoms.

I pulled my damp hair into a ponytail, used my remote to raise the hurricane shutters on my French doors, and went out to face the day. A couple of snowy egrets asleep on my porch railing watched me warily as I walked by, but it was too early for them, so they didn’t fly away. The sea air smelled of salt and life, the sky was that peculiar creamy pre-dawn color, and the sea glimmered silver white. Down on the beach, a few early gulls waded in the surf’s thin foam and searched for goodies. A pelican was asleep on the hood of my Bronco, and a great blue heron dozed on Michael’s car. They both took off with a loud thrumming when I got in the Bronco. Maybe they knew what the morning would bring.

25

Tom Hale’s condo was dark when I let myself in. Billy Elliot was waiting for me in the foyer and we kissed hello, with a lot of panting and tail wagging on his part. I snapped his leash on his collar, and we trotted out with our knees pumping like majorettes rehearsing for a parade.

The lobby downstairs was empty, with that gloomy feel that a place gets when it’s used to lots of traffic and finds itself deserted. Billy Elliot’s toenails made skittering sounds on the marble floor and his leash jingled merrily, sort of livening up the joint. We blew through the double doors and started our usual jog toward the big oval track made by the parked cars in the front lot. Just as we got to the end of the walk and stepped onto the asphalt, a whale-shouldered man stepped from behind a tall stand of cascading firecracker plants.

I jumped and gave a little whoop! that immediately changed to a friendly half-laugh, the way people do when they’ve been startled but they don’t want the startler to feel guilty about scaring them half to death. In the next instant, my heart clattered because the man didn’t look friendly at all. In fact, he looked menacing. He also looked like one of the mug shots Guidry had shown me—the one of Frederick Vaught, the elder-smothering nurse. If I’d had any doubts, they evaporated when he spoke.

“Dixie Hemingway, I presume. The ailurophile.”

I scrambled for the meaning of the word and, thanks to high school Latin, came up with cat lover . He had eyes like peeled grapes, and they were bulging down at me with glistening venom.