Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

“Uh-hunh. And you carried the iguana out?”

“Yes, and his tail was dragging.”

Kurtz seemed to understand for the first time what was going on. “You’re talking about footprints, right? Ms. Hemingway may have disturbed footprints?”

“And the iguana’s tail,” said Guidry. “Don’t forget the dragging tail.”

I said, “Oh, please!” and then saw Guidry’s quick warning look that said, Just once, Dixie, try to keep your mouth shut.

He had some reason for wanting Kurtz to think I’d obliterated footprints in the wine room. It was possible I had, but ceramic tile isn’t likely to yield good prints unless there was mud or blood on the shoes. Besides, it was more likely that whoever had put Ziggy in the room had simply deposited him inside the doorway. But since I’d blown it by blabbing about the dead guard, not to mention warning Kurtz to get rid of the gun, I figured I owed Guidry a bit of silence, so I went back to the hearth and stood next to Ziggy.

“Where did your guard come from?”

“I believe he was a Mexican national.”

“I mean what agency supplied him.”

“He was an independent.”

“You hired him personally?”

“No, my nurse hired him.”

“She vet him first?”

“I suppose. I haven’t been able to attend to those kinds of details for a while.”

Guidry said, “Did the guard spend time inside the house?”

Kurtz hesitated for just a fraction of a second too long. “Not to my knowledge, Lieutenant.”

“But he may have come inside without your knowledge?”

“Sometimes I don’t come out of my room for days at a time. On those occasions, I am not aware of anything in the rest of the house.”

“You said your nurse was a good friend of the guard’s?”

“I believe she was, yes.”

“Any particular reason why you think that?”

Kurtz raised a hand to his face as if he hoped to calm the contracting areas under his skin. “It was just a general impression I had.”

“Do you think they were friends before your nurse hired him?”

“No.”

“The wine, is it drinking wine or investment wine?”

“Both.”

Trust Guidry to think of wine as an investment. He was so secretive that I hadn’t yet got the full story on him, but no man dresses like Guidry or handles himself like Guidry unless he’s got a pedigree a mile long. About the only thing I knew about him was that he came from New Orleans and wasn’t Italian. Also, he had called me a liar one time in French. That wasn’t a lot to go on, and I didn’t care anyway because it was none of my business, but he probably grew up in a mansion with well-stocked wine cellars and trusted old servants who lugged the stuff up the stairs and opened it. He probably wouldn’t be caught dead drinking the supermarket stuff I bought.

He said, “Anything valuable enough for somebody to kill to get to it?”

“What a man will kill for, Lieutenant, is highly subjective, but I have a couple of cases of 1998 Pétrus that sells for about fourteen-fifty a bottle. I suppose a collector might murderously covet it. I also have a case of 1997 Romanée-Conti, somewhere over fifteen hundred a bottle, and quite a lot of Château Latour, some 1990, some 1993, some 1994. The Latour is cheaper, about seven or eight hundred a bottle.”

Guidry didn’t look shocked, but I was. I couldn’t believe that a bottle of fifteen-hundred-dollar wine could taste a hundred and fifty times better than the ten-dollar-a-bottle stuff I drank.

Guidry said, “Anybody you know who might want your wine?”

“Until thirty minutes ago, Lieutenant, nobody even knew my wine existed.”

“Somebody has to sell it to you. Somebody has to put it on the shelves.”

“I order it flown in directly from the wineries. It’s delivered in unmarked crates, and I put it on the shelves myself.”

I thought, And Gilda knew it was there, just like she knew Ziggy was in there with it.

The man was not only blue and grotesquely ugly, he was a big liar.

Guidry said, “You know, under Florida law, it’s a felony offense to ship wine in from out of state.”

“Collector’s wine falls under a different code, Lieutenant.”

Guidry cocked an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t challenge it. I didn’t know diddly about Florida’s laws about wine shipments, but I would have bet good money that Kurtz was bluffing.

Guidry said, “When’s the last time the guard handled your iguana?”

Kurtz’s face twisted, either from a spasm or from extreme annoyance. “Nobody handles my iguana, Lieutenant. And so far as I know, the guard never even saw my iguana.”

“Never picked him up? Never had any contact with him?”

“As I said, Lieutenant, when I’m in pain, a lot can happen inside my house without my knowledge. My nurse may be able to give you more information about the guard’s contact with the iguana.”

I thought, Oh, sure, let Gilda take all the blame .

Honest to God, some men aren’t worth the money it would take to buy a rope to hang them. With each answer Kurtz gave, I was regretting more and more my impulsive advice to ditch the gun he’d worn under his robe.

Guidry said, “How long has your nurse worked for you?”

Kurtz’s eyes flicked up and to the right for a quick instant, a sure sign a person’s preparing to lie.

“I hired her just before I moved here four months ago from New York.”

“From an agency?”

“No, she also was independent.”

“You mind asking the nurse to come in here?”

For a second, Kurtz’s face betrayed how much effort it was taking to stand and talk. Asking him to make the long walk back to Gilda’s room was like asking somebody who’d just had abdominal surgery without anesthesia to sew up his own incision.

I said, “I’ll get her.”

I nipped across the living room without waiting for either man’s permission and headed through the dining room and kitchen toward Gilda’s room. I hadn’t much liked Gilda before, not because she was gorgeous but because she hadn’t been concerned about Ziggy. Now I felt sorry for her. The thought even crossed my mind that I should warn her, one woman to another, that Kurtz was playing dumb about a lot of things. Not being a total idiot, I let the thought cross without flagging it down. I had already created enough trouble for myself by that inane protective gesture toward Kurtz. That decision was going to cost me, and I didn’t want to add any more to it.

In Gilda’s open doorway, I came to an abrupt spine-tingling stop. The room was still and silent as a coffin, and the bed’s white cover was military smooth. An open doorway on the opposite side of the room showed a white-tiled bathroom, also empty and silent.

“Gilda?”

I don’t know why I called. The room had a permanently empty feeling, the same deadness I remembered in my mother’s room after she abandoned me and my brother.

I called a couple more times, just to confirm what I already knew. “Gilda? Are you here?”

I even trotted down the wide eastern corridor where a glass wall overlooked the courtyard. I pasted myself against the glass to look out at the oak tree and the landscaped lawn around it. Unless Gilda had scaled the tree and was hiding in its branches, she wasn’t in the courtyard. The east wing had only one door and it was open—Kurtz’s bedroom. I stepped inside and got a quick look at a big bed with black satin sheets. I called Gilda, but I knew she wasn’t there. Gilda had left the house, and every instinct told me she hadn’t left to run a quick errand. Gilda had run away, and she didn’t intend to be found.

A hallway on the south side of the house held a door with a double dead bolt lock, the kind you have to use a key to open from either side. A key was inside the lock, one of two on a wire ring, probably left there all the time because it’s a pain in the butt to always have to key open a door from the inside. I turned the key and opened the door to a narrow alcove at the far end of the row of garages. A sidewalk led to a utility area where garbage cans and recycle bins were located. Beyond the utility area, a wooden fence separated the Kurtz property from a bayside residential street. If Gilda’s intention had been to run away, she was probably halfway to Tampa by now, or at least halfway to the Sarasota airport.