Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

For a moment, nobody spoke. What do you say to an octogenarian who has just used his saxophone to put a murderous woman to sleep?

Guidry recovered first. “Good job, sir.”

To the deputies, he said, “Radio the EMTs to make sure that woman can’t get access to a knife.”

When he turned to me, he had a glint in his eyes that I couldn’t exactly define, but it looked a lot like admiration. Like Pete, I drew myself a little taller.

Strength is where you find it, and Pete and Leo and I had plenty of it.

34

When Guidry first saw me in my new black dress and my new high heels, he quirked an eyebrow. “You clean up good, Dixie. I like that neckline.”

A blush began somewhere south of my navel and traveled upward. Resisting the urge to grab the front of my dress and hoist it higher, I made an inarticulate gurgling sound that intended to be words and failed.

Guidry in evening clothes made me feel like a yokel at her first visit to an art museum. All men look dashing and sophisticated in black dinner jackets, but Guidry looked as if the style had been created for him. His trousers fell in that easy straight way that bespeaks fine fabric and expert cut, the jacket lay on his shoulders in a perfectly fitted caress, and the collar of his crisp white shirt rose like a tribute toward his firm jawline.

I was still in something of a daze from the hectic week. Pete and Purr-C were happily settled in Pete’s house, with Purr-C cozying up to Pete as if he’d been with him forever, and not seeming to remember any of his former names.

As Pete had predicted, Celeste had been unconscious for about an hour and then woke up howling mad in the county jail, where she would be held without bail.

Martin Freuland was also in the county jail, his arrogant personage the source of a hot tug of war between federal, Texas, and Florida lawmen. No matter who got him first, he would face a mountain of charges from the others, and it wasn’t likely that he would be a free man for a long, long time. Maybe never.

Frederick Vaught was still in the county jail too, but since he was only guilty of being weird, he would probably be released. He should have been incarcerated in a mental hospital, but since our society no longer protects the public from the insane, he would be back on the streets. At least until he commits a crime for which he can be locked up.

The Humane Society gala was held in the ballroom at Michael’s on East, an upscale restaurant and convention center tucked behind a shopping center on the Tamiami Trail. There was music, there were beautiful people, there was good food. Before we sat down to eat, there was a mingling hour, with cocktails.

Guidry raised his gaze from my chest and said, “You want a drink? They have cheap white wine, cheap red wine, and something in a punch bowl that I think is supposed to be Sangria.”

“White, please.”

He disappeared into the crowd, leaving me to continue chasing the same question that had been racing through my mind since Thursday night. How could I have liked Laura Halston so much? How could I have felt such a strong connection to her? Not just when I first met her, when she’d been bright and funny and warm and sympathetic, but after I’d learned that she was a liar and a thief. Even then, I’d felt empathy for her.

Millions of people fall under the spell of skilled con artists—that’s why they’re called artists —but my attraction to Laura had been more than a rube falling under the influence of a slick charmer. It hadn’t been sexual, that much I knew. I’d enjoyed her beauty, but I hadn’t wanted her in a sexual way. And while it was true that I was nostalgic for woman talk and woman confidences, that wasn’t the whole story, and I knew it.

I caught a glimpse of Guidry threading his way through the crowd with a wineglass in each hand, and in the next moment I had a clear-eyed look at myself. I’d been drawn to Laura Halston for the same reason I was drawn to Guidry. We each had come to it from different places and by different routes, but all three of us were attracted to the edge of danger.

It was a sobering thought, but not nearly so sobering as the knowledge that flirting with danger was an integral part of who I was, and I doubted that I would ever change.

Guidry emerged from the crowd and sauntered toward me, graceful, bright, funny, honorable, a great-kissing cop. I watched his approach with a sense of fascinated inevitability, knowing I was lost but unable to save myself.