Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

I said, “You’ll note that it’s clean and oiled. It hasn’t been fired.”

“I don’t want to press the point, Dixie, but the gun could have been cleaned and oiled since this morning.”

I slapped the counter and glared at him. “Guidry, this is nuts!”

“What was nuts was leaving the scene of a crime and pretending you didn’t know anything about it.”

I couldn’t argue about that. I said, “My grandmother always said that wisdom came from knowing that every decision we make carries a consequence. I made a bad decision.”

“That may be the understatement of the century.”

“Guidry, tell me the truth. Do you really think I could have killed that guard?”

“The truth? The truth is that I have a better chance of winning the lottery than I have of finding the shooter.”

The room seemed to grow dimmer for a second as it dawned on me that in the absence of an arrest of the real killer, I would look like a tasty suspect to a DA hungry to assure the public that all killers were speedily caught and executed.

When I was growing up, Sarasota was essentially lily white and essentially North American. Even Canadian snowbirds were considered foreigners. But as airfares from Europe got cheaper and European vacation spots more expensive, Florida became salted with temporary visitors from all over the world. Now criminal investigators have to think international. A serial rapist may follow an MO known to police in the Netherlands but not here. A burglar may leave a calling card familiar to French gendarmes but not to Sarasota law-enforcement officers. A tourist can commit a crime in Sarasota and be back home in Europe before the Forensics Department has had time to evaluate all their findings. Now when murders are committed, every homicide investigator has a secret fear that the perpetrator is halfway around the world laughing at him. The guard’s killer could be safely across the Atlantic while the DA focused on me.

I said, “Kurtz was carrying a gun when I got there this morning. He had it in a fanny holster under his bathrobe. Looked like a backup gun a law-enforcement officer might carry.”

“For Kurtz to kill that guard, somebody would have had to carry him out to the guardhouse.”

“He lied when he said nobody knew about the wine room. The nurse knew about it, because she’s the one who told me Ziggy was in there.”

Guidry waved his fingers back and forth to show how insignificant my blabbing was.

“Dixie, can you account for your time this morning? Did anybody see you during the hours before the guard was found dead?”

I swallowed against a lump in my throat. “There was a woman, Guidry. She was out walking a miniature bulldog and she stopped me this morning. There was something odd about her. She said her dog’s name was Ziggy, and she seemed relieved when I said I was going to see an iguana named Ziggy. She ran off and got in a car and drove away fast. The whole thing seemed phony somehow.”

“Dixie, that’s not—”

“Her picture was on the table beside Ken Kurtz’s bed. He denied it, but I’m positive it’s the same woman.”

“What do you mean, he denied it?”

I licked lips that had suddenly gone bone dry. “I asked him about her. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

TEN

Guidry’s pupils contracted into little pinpoints, like a man about to jump up and ward off the devil. Half the people in Southwest Florida believe in a literal Satan, so for all I knew he might have caught the devil-believing bug, like catching chicken pox.

He said, “What’re you doing, running your own investigation?”

“It may be an investigation to you, but it’s my life ! I’m the one who got tricked into going to that house. I’m the one the woman accosted. I’m the one somebody’s using, and I have a right to know who’s doing it and why.”

“I’ll agree that somebody tricked you into the house, but all that other stuff is your imagination—the woman didn’t accost you, it doesn’t mean a thing that her dog has the same name as the iguana, and the odds of her being the same woman in Kurtz’s photograph are about a quadrillion-to-one.”

“The photo was on his table when we carried him into the bedroom, and then later it was gone. He hid it.

Why would he do that unless he didn’t want anybody to see it?”

“I can think of a million reasons why a man might not want people to see whose photo he keeps beside his bed. The point is that you’re there as a pet sitter, not as an investigator. If you see something you think is relevant, tell me about it, don’t go blundering around asking questions. Furthermore, don’t withhold information, any information, and don’t put groceries in a refrigerator that may be an important part of a homicide investigation.”

Uh-oh. I’d forgotten about putting Ziggy’s veggies in the refrigerator.

Guidry’s voice had got louder with each word, and by the time he ended his face had gone from an appetizing peachy color to a rather unhealthy rose.

In a little-bitty voice, I said, “Okay.” Under the circumstances, that seemed like the best thing to do.

Visibly, he got control of himself. “I don’t know what it is about you, but you always seem to pop up whenever something really weird is going on.”

“So you agree the whole Kurtz thing is weird.”

He slid my gun in his jacket pocket and headed toward my French doors. “I don’t see how it could get any weirder.”

He didn’t even say goodbye, just left me wishing he hadn’t said that it couldn’t get any weirder. Call me superstitious, but I think it’s a big mistake to challenge the universe to pull out all its weird possibilities. That’s like declaring what you will not do, will not accept, or will not believe, ever, so long as you live, amen. Like parents who say about their baby boy, “No son of mine will ever have a motorcycle,” are bound to look up one day and see him wearing a bug-eating grin with a biker chick glued to his road-calloused buns. You have to be careful about what you set into motion with what you say.

I went into my office-closet to check on messages. All but one were from people wanting to know my rates. I took their numbers to call back. The other was from Ethan Crane. Ethan’s an attorney, but he’s more interested in getting justice than in getting rich, so I don’t hold that against him. I’d first met him when he handled the estate of a cat I was responsible for. Later, he took over the management of a foundation set up by a man whose murder indirectly led to my killing somebody. I don’t hold that against him either.

Ethan is also one of the handsomest men I’ve ever seen in my life, and the second man I’d recently realized I was attracted to. In a sexual sort of way, I mean. In a holy-smokes-he’s-hot kind of way.

Which was all very confusing because all my pores had only recently commenced salivating whenever I was around Guidry, so what the heck was I doing feeling sexual toward Ethan Crane? It was like my body had been without sex or romance for so long it had lost its ability to make choices.

Ethan’s message was short and to the point. “Hi, Dixie, Ethan Crane here. Say, I was driving down Midnight Pass Road this morning and saw your Bronco in a driveway where there were a bunch of sheriff’s cars and a crime scene tape. I hope everything is okay with you. I think about you a lot. Could we have dinner one evening? Give me a call, okay?”

There’s a lot to be said for having dinner with a man who isn’t mad at you, so I punched in his private number. He picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Hi, Dixie, how are you?”

Damn, I always forget about caller ID. Knowing he’d known it was me before he answered made me stutter a little bit.