Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

The sandwich maker piled onion, lettuce, and tomato on my surfer, and topped the whole thing with Anna’s special sauce. As she sliced it in half, I held out my empty coffee cup.

“Give me a refill, please, and another surfer. Also another coffee, large. And some pickles and chips, two of each. Oh, and give me four cups of chicken soup, too. And a couple of brownies.”

Straight-faced, the woman said, “No salad?”

“Oh, yeah. One tuna and one garden. Ranch dressing.”

With bags of veggies for Ziggy in the backseat and deli bags from Anna’s in the front, I tore off for Kurtz’s house, where a Contamination Sheet had been posted on the front door while I was gone. Technically speaking, a Contamination Sheet is only posted at a crime scene, and in this case the crime scene was solely the guardhouse. The presence of the sheet meant the nurse’s disappearance had extended the range of investigation.

Through the window, I could see Guidry in the living room talking to some crime-scene techs. Looking at him gave me a fizzy feeling like my blood had turned to 7-Up. I signed in, noted the time, and opened the front door without ringing the bell. When I came in, Guidry looked up and I frowned at him.

I said, “I’m going back to feed the iguana.”

He nodded, already bored with anything having to do with my pet-sitting duties, and I nipped down the southern corridor to the east wing and Ken Kurtz’s room.

Propped on those black satin pillows, his blue skin gave him the look of a two-day decomposed corpse. Only the furrows of pain on his face and the neural chaos under his skin showed that he was alive. He was the most alone-looking human being I’d ever seen in my life.

I said, “I’ve brought food for Ziggy,” and hurried through the bathroom to the gym.

Wide awake and bright green now, Ziggy looked like a not-so-miniature dragon. Even the spikes down his spine seemed to stand taller now that he was warm. When he saw me, he puffed out his dewlap to its fullest extent and bobbed his head at me. Iguanas bob their heads just when they see something unfamiliar, but if I hadn’t known that he would have looked menacing.

I said, “Wow, I’ll bet you scare the hell out of a lot of people.”

I quickly knelt and put squash and romaine leaves in front of him, then nipped out so he could eat without the strain of trying to look dangerous.

Ken Kurtz was actually the scary, intimidating one, even though he still lay like a man half dead on his black satin bed.

Without any preamble, I set the bags of food on his bed and plopped myself down beside them.

“I brought you some food.”

He opened his eyes and watched me haul out containers.

“I don’t eat normal food. The nurse—”

“The nurse has flown the coop, and nobody else gives a hoot whether you eat or not. Since you won’t let Lieutenant Guidry call anybody, I’m your last hope.”

He groaned. I didn’t blame him. I’d hate to think I was my own last hope.

I took the lid off the container of soup and moved it around in the air to waft the scent to him. “It’s not like you don’t have choices. There’s a sandwich, with which you get chips and a pickle. There’s tuna salad. There’s a garden salad. And if all that’s too solid for you, there’s chicken soup.”

I made a lap tray out of a magazine, and put half a sandwich and a cup of soup on it. It seemed to me that his eyes got a little brighter, but maybe I was projecting.

I said, “There’s coffee too, and brownies.”

“I don’t drink coffee. The caffeine mixes with the toxins in my body.”

“And does what?”

He took a moment to consider. “I don’t know what the fuck it does, it’s just what the nurse always says.”

“Uh-hunh. So do you want it with cream and sugar?”

He managed a weak smile. “Black’s fine.”

He took a tentative bite of his sandwich, then leaned his head back against the pillows as if the effort had cost him.

I said, “Who do you think telephoned me and told me to come here?”

He leaned forward to sip chicken broth directly from the cup. “I don’t know who called you, Ms. Heming-way.”

“Dixie. Call me Dixie.”

He took another sip of soup and gazed at me. I had the strange feeling that he was waiting for me to ask a different question, and that if I asked the right one, he would answer it. It was senseless to probe for any answer at all, since every bit of information drew me deeper into a situation I didn’t intend to be in.

It seems to me there are two kinds of people in the world, those with little endurance for the inevitable pain in life and those who dig in their toes and survive, no matter what. In my darkest moments, even when I think there’s nothing to live for and no reason to go on, I remain a survivor. I could see the same hard determination in Kurtz’s agony-darkened eyes. I couldn’t even imagine the hell he’d gone through to cause him to end up as this pitiable figure who would frighten the toughest street thug, but whatever it was hadn’t made him stop struggling to live.

I said, “I heard you tell Lieutenant Guidry that Gilda came from New York, but she didn’t seem American to me.”

His mouth quirked in wry amusement. “She claims her original home was one of the spice islands—the Bandas—and that may be true. With her coloring she might have Dutch or Spanish ancestors who went there to buy cloves and nutmeg. Nevertheless, she’s an American citizen, and she’d been living in New York when she came to work for me.”

He sounded derisive, as if claiming to be from a spice island was a far-fetched idea, but I could easily imagine Gilda among nutmeg trees or bushes or vines or whatever nutmeg grows on. She would look a lot more natural in a sarong than in surgical scrubs, and I found it a bit suspicious that Kurtz downplayed her exotic beauty as if he hadn’t noticed it. I knew the man was sick, but only a dead man would be that oblivious.

I said, “The woman I met this morning had something to do with all this, didn’t she?”

Lord help me, I couldn’t seem to stop with the questions.

The smile left his eyes.

“Ms. Hemingway, you are far too nosy for your own good.”

Squeakily, I said, “You can call me Dixie. I’m not formal. And I know she’s the woman in the photo.”

“The woman in the photo died two years ago.”

“Then I met her twin this morning.”

“They say we all have an identical twin somewhere in the world. If that’s so, I pity the poor bastard who’s my double.”

A little stab at humor, I suppose, to get me off the subject of the woman.

“You lied to Lieutenant Guidry about the guard coming in the house. You also lied when you said nobody but you knew about the wine room.”

“And have you told Lieutenant Guidry that I lied?”

I felt my face flame, and I took a drink of coffee. “Not yet.”

“You won’t tell him.”

“Of course I will.”

“You won’t tell him I lied, and you won’t tell him that you warned me to get rid of my gun. And do you know why?”

Trapped, I stared at him while my heart hammered against my ribs. This man had a strange effect on me that I couldn’t explain.

Kurtz said, “You won’t tell because you’re like me, not like him.”

I swallowed the last bite of sandwich and crumpled the paper it had been wrapped in.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you act on instinct, not on intellect, and your instinct tells you to keep quiet about my lies.”

“My instinct also tells me you may be lying about a lot of things. Somebody chose me to come here, so I have a right to ask questions.”

“The less you know, Dixie, the safer you’ll be.”