Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

“Spell the name. And the address? Okay, dust the car for prints and run them through IAFIS. Top priority. Like in the next hour.”

He pronounced IAFIS as if it were one word, but anybody who’s ever been in law enforcement is familiar with the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAFIS has a database of close to fifty million subjects in its criminal master file, and its computers hum twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, screening ten-point prints electronically submitted by law enforcement agencies. Not too long ago, it could take weeks to get a positive match to a print. Now they can spit back identifications of ten-point prints—the ones taken of every finger—within two hours if they’re criminal prints and twenty-four hours if they’re civil prints.

Latent prints—the ones lifted at a crime scene—are not so easy to match. They’re analyzed and classified and fed into the network, and then all possible matches are returned. It’s up to the investigators to decide which, if any, most closely resembles the known ten-point print. If the latents are clear and complete, an identification is fairly certain. If they’re fuzzy or incomplete, it can be like making a decision based on tea leaves.

I could hear squawking sounds from the other end of the line. Guidry didn’t look impressed.

“Then you’d better get on it,” he said. “Time is fleeting.”

He hung up, shed his leather jacket, and draped it over the back of my bar stool. Then he moved around my kitchen in search of coffee and cups, his chest looking broad and strong in his black turtleneck.

I leaned my head back and wondered if I had ever heard a normal human being say Time is fleeting before. I decided I hadn’t. Like everything else Guidry did, it had a slightly foreign flavor. At least he hadn’t said it in a foreign language, which he probably spoke several of, including the French he’d once spoken to me when he called me a liar. But he’d said it softly, and not in a mean way.

With my head pounding like a son-of-a-bitch, I sat there quiet as a mouse and wished he would talk French to me again. Not that I would know what he was saying, I just wanted to hear it.

I had dozed off when he jostled my shoulder and set a cup of coffee on the table next to me. He took a seat on the sofa across from me.

“Drink up. The caffeine may help your headache.”

With a start, I said, “I have to call Joe and Maria!”

“Who?”

Struggling to get to my feet, I said, “Joe and Maria. I have to call them and ask them to take care of my pets tomorrow.”

Joe and Maria Molina have a housecleaning service on the key, and a lot of their clients are the same as mine. Our paths cross a lot and we give each other a hand when it’s needed.

Guidry pushed me back in the chair. “You stay put. I’ll bring the phone.”

Right there in front of me, he picked up my shoulder bag—which he’d slung on the sofa—and plunged his hand in it as if he weren’t committing a major offense. Without even a smidgen of embarrassment at having gone in my purse again without my permission, he handed my cell phone to me, sat down on the sofa, and picked up his coffee. I would have glared at him, but it made my head hurt worse to wrinkle my forehead.

Feeling like I should press the button gently since it was so late, I hit the speed-dial for Joe and Maria, and waited dully until Joe’s sleep-addled voice answered.

Without going into detail, I told him I wasn’t going to be able to keep my morning appointments and asked if he and Maria could cover for me.

Joe didn’t even hesitate. “Sure, Dixie. Which houses?”

Leaving out Billy Elliot, I named them one by one while Joe mentally ran down his own list of places where he had keys or entrance codes.

“Okay, okay, okay, no problem. You want us to see to them in the afternoon too?”

I told him I would be okay for the afternoon visits and got off the phone before he woke up enough to ask what was wrong. Then I called Tom Hale, imagining him lying in bed with his new lady love.

When he answered, I said, “Tom, I can’t explain now, but I won’t be there in the morning. Can your friend run with Billy Elliot?”

Groggily, and with a little affronted burr, he said, “I guess so, Dixie.”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll explain when I see you tomorrow afternoon.”

I didn’t even say goodbye, just closed the phone and laid it on the table, noting as I did that my hand was shaking. Across from me, Guidry’s gray eyes were studying me as if I were a fingerprint.

“Guidry, what about the fire? Was Kurtz hurt?”

“It wasn’t in the house, it was outside. Some kind of chemical fire, I think.”

“In the courtyard?”

“No, behind the house entirely, on the east side.”

That would make it behind Ken Kurtz’s bedroom, behind the gym where Ziggy was.

I said, “Chemicals that could have blown up?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t spoken to the fire marshal yet.”

“Guidry, you told me once that you’d been married. Did you love your wife?”

It’s just amazing the things a person’s mouth will say when they least expect it.

Surprised, Guidry put his cup down and rotated it on the coffee table, looking at the wet circles it was leaving as if they held the answer to my question.

“I loved her when we married, and I didn’t love her when we divorced.”

“Why not?”

A shadow flickered across his face. “We had both changed a lot, taken on different ideas. I didn’t like hers and she didn’t like mine.”

For a moment there was pain in his eyes like a hurt animal’s—raw and astonished.

He took a deep breath. “It all blew up when I found out she was having an affair with my best friend. I hated them both for a while, but I got over it.”

“You forgave them?”

“It wasn’t a matter of forgiveness, I just decided to stop reliving it every day. Every time I remembered it, I felt the same pain and anger all over again. So I let it go. It’s done, over, in the past. If I go around resenting it, I keep it in the present.”

I understood what he meant. That’s why I’ve forgiven the old man who smashed his car into Todd and Christy in the supermarket parking lot and killed them. Forgiveness may be the most self-serving of all emotions because you do it for yourself, not for the one forgiven.

I said, “I’m sorry I asked. It’s none of my business.”

He gave me a keen look. “Maybe it is. You ready to start loving again?”

I leaned my huge head back against the chair and closed my burning eyes. “You sound like Tom Hale.”

“Who?”

“A guy. He says love is a choice people make.”

“Well, you sure as hell can’t love if you choose not to.”

I opened my eyelids a tiny bit and looked at him through the slit. I was tempted to say, How can I help holding dear the memory of my first marriage? but I knew that wasn’t the issue. Nobody expected me to forget Todd.

The issue, plain and simple, was that Guidry was a cop. I didn’t know if I could bear loving another man who left home every day with a chance of being gunned down by some jerk whose judgment had been stolen by fear or greed or drugs. On the other hand, it takes a particular kind of courage to go out every day to do a job that can get you killed, especially when half the population hates or fears you, and I was drawn to that kind of bravery.

But did I choose to love a cop, when there might be another man I could also love?

THIRTEEN

Guidry’s cell phone rang, startling me so that I slopped coffee on my already stained mohair.

He answered while he walked to the kitchen to get me paper towels. When he handed them to me, his face had taken on his cop look—flinty-eyed, cool, objective—not the open face he’d had a few moments before. He went back to the bar and took notes while the person on the other end of the line talked. Then he spoke briefly and low and hung up. When he came back to the sofa, he was all cop.