Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

I shut the door and stuck the key ring in my pocket to give to Kurtz. With all the people who would be in the house when Guidry found out Gilda was gone, it wasn’t a good idea to leave a key in a door, especially since I suspected the second key opened the precious wine room. I walked down the southern hallway, passed the wine room, and rounded the corner to the west wing where Kurtz and Guidry waited in front of the fireplace. Framed by the red glow of the fire, the two men could have been part of a medieval fresco of good and evil, with the iguana symbolizing a demon stretched on the hearth between them.

I said, “Lieutenant Guidry, could I speak to you for a moment?”

Both men gave me piercing looks that said secrecy wasn’t an option.

Guidry said, “What is it, Dixie?”

“The nurse isn’t in her room. She isn’t anywhere in the house. She’s gone.”

Like a collapsed marionette, Kurtz suddenly clutched his thighs and gave a strangled groan. It didn’t seem like the anguished cry of a man who’d lost a lover, more like a man who could not bear the implication of what he’d heard.

Guidry and I both rushed to support him.

Guidry said, “You know where his room is?”

I pointed toward the southern corridor. “It’s this way.”

In seconds, we had linked arms behind Kurtz’s emaciated back and under his thighs to make a fireman’s carry. Putting a suffering man to bed wasn’t the usual kind of thing a homicide detective did. Not the kind of thing I usually did, either. But Guidry and I were both professionals, and professionals rise to the occasion in a professional manner—no matter what the occasion is.

We went down the southern corridor to the east wing and Kurtz’s bedroom, where we turned sideways to maneuver him through the doorway. When we lowered him to a king-sized waterbed with rumpled black satin sheets, Kurtz seemed almost unconscious. With a heavy sigh, he stretched out on his back and held his arms close to his sides, as if he feared he might fly apart if he didn’t keep his limbs close.

Guidry and I exchanged uneasy looks. With one mind, we both looked at the bedside table, where a clutter of prescription bottles stood next to a stack of magazines and a framed photograph. Guidry picked up a bottle and read the label.

I picked up the photograph. With a kind of eerie inevitability, I saw it was a snapshot of Ken Kurtz—as he had been before he turned blue and ugly—with his arm slung over the shoulders of the woman I’d met earlier—the one with the bulldog named Ziggy. They were both laughing into the camera with the unmistakable look of two people deliriously in love.

SIX

Seeing the photograph of the woman I’d met that morning made my head feel like somebody was setting off rockets inside it. Guidry didn’t seem to notice. He shuffled through some more prescription bottles and then pushed them all into a clump.

“Mr. Kurtz, do you have your doctor’s number?”

Kurtz opened his eyes and glared at Guidry. Between rasping breaths, he said, “No! Absolutely … no doctors! Understand?”

“But—”

“I said … no! You do not … have my … permission to … call anybody.”

“Okay, no calls. Would any of these medications help you right now?”

“No … I just need … to rest … for a while.”

Guidry stood a moment looking down at him and then nodded. I knew what he was probably thinking. Kurtz lived in agony every minute of his life, and he was probably the best judge of when he’d reached his limit. In any case, Kurtz’s suffering wasn’t the kind that could be fixed by a doctor. It would take angels to do that. Or at least aboriginal shamans.

Very gently, I put the photograph of the woman back on the bedside table next to the medicine bottles and magazines. I was positive now that she had contrived to talk to me so she could make sure I was going to his house.

Was the woman somebody with old scores to settle? A former wife or old lover who had vindictive reasons to pull strings by getting the Irishman to call me? If that were so, why had she wanted me there? And what was the deal with calling her dog Ziggy? None of it made any sense, but I didn’t care. I had no intention of getting sucked into this weird situation. As soon as I was sure the iguana was okay, I was going to be out of there for good.

Guidry said, “Come on, Dixie.”

He was standing at the door and his voice had a tinge of impatience in it, as if he might have been standing there a few seconds longer than his grand eloquence thought was necessary, and that he was holding me responsible for the delay.

I gave him a What? look. I was there as a pet sitter, not a deputy under the jurisdiction of a homicide detective, and he didn’t have the authority to order me around like that.

On the other hand, I was in deep doo-doo already for not reporting the guard’s murder and for warning Kurtz to ditch his gun. I wasn’t the type of person to do either of those things. I was one of the good guys. Wasn’t I? I was on the side of the law. Wasn’t I?

As I moved to follow Guidry, it occurred to me that when I killed a man, I might have blurred my own line between good and evil. Maybe I wasn’t so solidly in the good-guy camp anymore. Maybe I was straddling the line.

Guidry said, “Show me the nurse’s room.”

I moved ahead of him and walked the rest of the way down the eastern corridor to Gilda’s room, glancing out the glass wall to the courtyard as I went. The plants still glistened with moisture from the rain, but except for the wet ground under the oak tree’s shade, all the shadows had been eaten up by thin sunshine.

At Gilda’s door, I stopped and took a deep breath.

Guidry said, “You okay, Dixie?”

Surprised, I looked up at him and pulled my shoulders back. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I can think of several reasons why you might not be. You’re allowed, you know.”

“Allowed what?”

“Normal emotions.”

For some fool reason, that made my eyes burn as if tiny little pinpricks were pushing against the undersides of my eyelids.

I pointed toward Gilda’s door. “That’s her room.”

As he went around me, Guidry put an arm around me and squeezed my shoulder, almost as if he did it unconsciously. Guidry wasn’t a shoulder-squeezing type of man, and I’m not the kind of woman who likes her shoulders squeezed. But his hand had been warm, and the touch had felt good. I watched his leather jacket move away and tried not to think about what it meant about me—that in the midst of all the bizarre things going on in this house, my main feeling was that I wished Guidry would touch me again.

Making my voice as cool as possible, I said, “If you don’t need me, I’ll go check on the iguana.”

I scooted through the kitchen and dining room to the living room. Ziggy was still on the fireplace hearth, but he had raised his head and pushed his body up a little on his muscular forelegs. His Granny Smith color was returning, especially on the side close to the fire, and when he saw me he inflated his dewlap so he looked twice as wide. An iguana with a widely inflated dewlap looks alarming, like a miniature dragon about to breathe fire and brimstone. If I hadn’t known iguanas, I would have found him scary. As it was, I stopped walking so he wouldn’t get spooked and leave the warmth of the fire.

It takes about thirty minutes for a healthy iguana who has closed down on account of cold temperature to get back to normal. Ziggy was close to normal, but his household wasn’t. Unless Gilda showed up with some plausible explanation for leaving, Kurtz and Ziggy were going to be here by themselves. Considering the shape Kurtz was in, it was a toss-up as to which of the two was less capable of taking care of the other. If Gilda’s disappearance was as suspicious as I thought it was, there would be investigators in the house looking for evidence that would link her to the guard’s murder.