Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

The crowd murmured approvingly, and several people seemed ready to go cast somebody into a lake of fire right then.

I leaned out my window. “Excuse me, I need to drive through here.”

A woman in a shiny black dress glared at me and waved her sign, but a man at the side called, “Let the car through!”

The people parted to let me pass, but they all gave me hellfire looks.

I parked in front of the garages and walked down the palm-screened path to the front door. When I reached the expanse of living room windows, something felt wrong, and it took a second to realize that it was the distance from the garage door. Now that I knew the wine room was behind the first garage, I had unconsciously stepped off the length of an average garage and added the ten feet or so of the wine room’s depth, which should have put me at the beginning of the living room’s glass wall. Instead, it was a good fifteen feet farther ahead. Ken Kurtz evidently had a garage about forty feet deep. Maybe he kept a stretch limo or a yacht in there.

A helicopter flew over with a droning whap-whap! sound, and I wondered if there were surveillance cameras in it pointed at me. I thought about waving up at them, but the thought was only for my own entertainment. A little sick humor to jolly me along.

The living room wasn’t lit, but through the glass wall I could see flames leaping in the fireplace. It was almost eighty degrees outside, and he had a fire. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. Ken Kurtz seemed almost as cold-blooded as Ziggy. While I waited for him to come to the door, I remembered there had been a basket of firewood by the fireplace. Fire must be important to Kurtz.

His shadowy form moved past the window toward the door faster than he had moved before. Perhaps all the excitement of the guard’s murder and Gilda’s disappearance had given him a spurt of new energy. Or maybe it was the food I’d brought him from Anna’s. Maybe real food had cured the guy, the way menudo had cured my concussion.

He opened the door in the same bedraggled bathrobe he’d worn before and stepped aside to let me in without speaking. The house was like an oven.

I said, “Hello, Mr. Kurtz.”

I didn’t see any point in telling him his house was being picketed by religious fanatics. The man had enough problems without knowing that.

Ziggy had left the dry sauna and was running up and down the corridors. Iguanas only poop once every three or four days, and from the hint of desperation in his scurrying, I had a feeling this was the day.

I said, “It’s eighty degrees outside. Shall I put Ziggy out?”

Kurtz flapped his blue hands. “Take him out. He needs the fresh air.”

I opened one of the sliders to the courtyard and went to Ziggy’s side. Kurtz seemed to lose interest and shuffled down the corridor toward the living room. Keeping a wary eye on Ziggy’s tail, I got ready to slip my arms under his body and grab his legs to lift him. But he stuck out his tongue and tasted fresh air from the open slider and scampered out, heading straight for a clump of hibiscus bushes.

Remembering that my grandfather’s iguana had also preferred to poop on the roots of hibiscus, I grinned and went to the hospital-white kitchen to gather Ziggy’s fruits and vegetables for the day. Most of the leftovers from Anna’s were still in the fridge, so Kurtz wasn’t in danger of starving. For Ziggy, I sliced zucchini and yellow squash, bananas and pineapple, added romaine and swiss chard, and carried them outside in a big wooden bowl.

I said, “Hey, Zig, I brought you some goodies.”

With an extra-satisfied smile on his face, he bobbed his head and sniffed me with his tongue. He was beginning to associate me with food, so I smelled good to him.

I knelt to set the bowl on the ground, and Ziggy raised himself on his front legs and flicked out his tongue to smell it. That’s when I saw the telltale evidence of an indwelling tunneled catheter low on his chest wall—not like Kurtz’s ordinary PICC line that any good nurse can insert, but one like my grandfather had in the months before he died—the kind that is surgically inserted directly into the large vein that enters the heart.

Somebody had been giving Ziggy transfusions or withdrawing blood, and on a regular basis. But why? And what was the connection to the catheter in Kurtz’s arm?

The implications made me dizzy, but so did everything else in this weird house.

I left Ziggy eating his dinner and went looking for Kurtz. He was in the wine room, moving slowly down the line of bottles as if he were taking inventory. In the eerie red light, his bluish skin looked faintly puce.

He said, “Did you feed the iguana?”

It was another moment when I had a choice. I could keep my mouth shut and walk out the front door and go home. Or I could open my big mouth and then walk out the front door and go home.

I said, “I promised Jessica Ballantyne that I’d give you this message— Ziggy is no longer an option. You must act now .”

I turned and almost made it across the living room before Kurtz shouted at me. “Dixie! For the love of God, please!”

Sap that I am, I turned to look back at him. In the red-lit door to the wine room, he stood with both arms pressed overhead against the door frame. With his arms raised like that, his bathrobe sleeves had drooped over his sinewy arms, exposing the gauze dressing on the inside of one elbow.

“Jessie’s alive?”

“She said you abandoned her.”

He pulled his arms down and sagged against the doorway. “How does she look?”

“As opposed to what? She looked okay to me, but then I don’t know her from Adam’s off ox, so I really can’t say if she looked unusually good or not. All I know is that somebody she called they are tapping your phone and that you’re in danger. She’s the one who set the fire last night, at which time, by the way, somebody hit me on the head and gave me a concussion. So thank you very much for involving me in your life, Mr. Kurtz. So far it’s been a real pleasure.”

“Jessie was here last night?”

“She said you ran out on her, that you left her to die. Evidently she loves you anyway, because she wants to warn you about them, whoever they are.”

“I wouldn’t have left her there! I thought she was dead. They said she was dead.”

“Would these they be the same they who are watching you now?”

He wiped his hand against his face. “Jesus. I have to see her.”

“I don’t think so. From what she said, she can get in a whole lot of trouble from them if they find out she’s trying to help you.”

“Of course. Good God.”

I said, “Okay, I’ve delivered the message, and I’ve told you everything she told me. That’s all I’m going to do. It’s all I can do. You people have used me sixteen ways from Thursday, and I’m going home now and leave you to whatever it is that you’re doing. There’s just one thing—I saw the catheter in Ziggy. If you’re hurting him, I won’t be so nice and cooperative. You understand?”

He gestured toward the chairs in front of the fireplace. “Please, I’d like to explain.”

Okay, now we were getting somewhere. I dropped into a chair and waited until Kurtz had shuffled to a chair across from me. The fireplace was unpleasantly warm, but in its flickering amber light Kurtz didn’t look so sick.

He said, “Not that it makes what I’m going to tell you any more palatable but I’m a veterinary microbiologist and pathologist with a long list of degrees and appointments.”

I raised an eyebrow, meaning What the heck does that have to do with anything?

“I just want you to know that I’m not a mad scientist, never have been.”