Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

I didn’t notice Guidry’s car parked by Michael’s deck until I came out of the carport and started up the stairs to my apartment. He was on my porch, sitting at the round table looking out at the Gulf. As usual, he looked like an Italian playboy.

I said, “Why haven’t you returned my call?”

“I saw you at the Gutierrez funeral. I was surprised you were there.”

I dropped my shoulder bag on the table and heard a metallic clink that reminded me I hadn’t returned Ken Kurtz’s keys. Damn.

I sat down opposite Guidry. “I wanted to support Paloma.”

“Paloma?”

“Mrs. Gutierrez.”

“You know the guard’s wife?”

“I went to see her and talked to her and her brother. His name is Jochim. I trimmed her kitten’s claws too. She was going to have them surgically removed, but now I don’t think she will. It’s a cute little calico.”

Guidry pressed his fingertips to his closed eyelids. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that will make you stop talking to people, is there?”

“Not really.”

“What the hell kind of breed is a calico?”

“It’s not a breed, it’s a coloring. It happens every now and then in every breed. It’s when a kitten has three distinct colors. If it’s a true calico the colors are pure white, inky black, and bright orange. If it’s a diluted calico, the colors will be pale and creamy. Paloma’s kitten is a true calico. It’s really cute.”

I heard the wistful note in my voice and shut up.

“This is why you called me? To tell me about a cute kitten?”

I narrowed my eyes at the smug bastard and considered exactly how much to tell him. I had promised Tony not to tell about meeting with Jochim, but I figured my meeting with Paloma was fair game.

I said, “Paloma told me a man brought her a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He told her it was insurance money. Then he told her Ramón would have wanted her to use it to go home to Mexico. I think they’ll leave soon.”

“She never told me that.”

I shrugged. We both knew people told me a lot more than they told him.

He said, “Did she get the man’s name?”

“No, and I don’t imagine he left a card. She said he was a skinny Anglo, but that’s all she remembered. Today at the funeral, I saw a skinny man in a suit outside on the sidewalk. He looked familiar somehow, but I couldn’t place him. Maybe that was the skinny Anglo who gave Paloma money.”

“She still have the money?”

“Jochim took it to the bank to put in a safe deposit box.”

Guidry reached inside his thin leather jacket and pulled out a notepad. He flipped some pages and said, “That would be Jochim Manuel Torres?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know his full name.”

“He’s a small-time hood, part of a ring selling stolen cars, mostly to illegal aliens.”

That answered the question of whether Jochim was as naive as his sister. What he was doing was a particularly cruel trick in which a stolen car is sold to a person with bad credit. The buyer agrees to pay exorbitant interest because it’s the only way to get wheels, and he doesn’t get title to the car until final payment. The title is a fake, so if he ever manages to pay the thing off, he’s driving a stolen car with a false title.

“Paloma said Jochim has been influenced by bad friends. She thinks he will get a new start with the insurance money, said they might start their own business in Mexico.”

Guidry raised an eyebrow, but put his notepad back in his jacket without saying what he thought about Paloma’s plans.

I hesitated, then went ahead and said it. “I also saw Jessica Ballantyne at the funeral. She ran away when she saw me and I lost her.”

“Did you give Kurtz the message?”

“I did. He said they worked together on a secret project for the government. They were to create a virus that would jump from animals to humans. For espionage purposes, he said. But a tsunami hit and all the researchers drowned. He thought Jessica Ballantyne drowned with them. He seemed genuinely shocked to hear she’s alive.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said the packages that Gilda took from the refrigerator were vials of antidote for whatever his condition is. But he was lying.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know, Guidry, I can just tell when people lie. Probably because I had to know when my mother was lying when I was a kid. It’s something I developed to protect myself.”

I doubted that Guidry’s mother had ever lied to him. He probably had a perfect mother who was always there for him, a beautiful mother who let servants do all the hard work so she could be pleasantly, lovingly available to her son.

“Guidry, what about the ballistics test?”

“Inconclusive. They don’t have a bullet, they don’t have a casing. The best they can do is give an educated guess that the bullet was a thirty-eight caliber.”

I shivered. The absence of a casing could mean the killer had used a revolver or a single-shot rifle. But a thirty-eight caliber was more likely a semiautomatic with an attached brass-catcher—the way of a hired gun. Or somebody had collected the casing and pocketed it.

“Am I still your prime suspect?”

“Dixie, I know you didn’t kill Gutierrez. Everybody except our new hotshot DA knows you didn’t kill Gutierrez. If it should go to trial, it would all be circumstantial evidence. Don’t worry about it.”

It has been my experience that when people say, “Don’t worry about it,” worrying about it is exactly what you should be doing.

People are convicted of murder every day on circumstantial evidence. Half the people on death row have been found guilty because of circumstantial evidence, and a lot of them are innocent. I knew that. Guidry knew that. God knew that, and unless the new DA was an imbecile, she knew that.

I said, “I’m not feeling very good, Guidry. I’m going inside.”

He stood up while I raised the shutters with the remote. I unlocked the French doors and turned to tell him good night. The next thing I knew he was enfolding me in a tight hug and I was snuggling into it like a puppy searching for a warm nipple.

Against the top of my head, he said, “I’m sorry, Dixie. You deserve a lot better than this.”

I didn’t say anything, just stood there for a long time clinging to him while my eyes leaked all over my face. Guidry took a deep breath and tilted my chin up and kissed me. A gentle, sweet kiss that made me tremble for something more, that made my lips open with an urgent hunger. He ran his hands down my back to my butt and pulled me closer, and the kiss deepened just long enough to leave me gasping when he stopped.

“Good night, Dixie.”

He left me standing there and took the stairs two at a time. Then he got into his car and pulled out without looking back at me.

Weakly, I stepping into my living room and dropped to the sofa. My mouth still vibrated from the kiss, as if my lips had been touched with an electric charge and all the taste buds of my tongue had been inflamed. Guidry’s taste was still with me, a clean, healthy, liquid taste, a little salty, a little tart. I covered my face with both hands and let out a small moan that was half whimper of despair and half satisfaction.

I had crossed a line from which there was no turning back, and I wasn’t at all sure I knew what the hell I was going to do about it.

TWENTY-FOUR

When the alarm went off at 4 A.M. Saturday morning, I came awake with the gluey memory that I was having supper with Ethan that night, that it would probably get sexy, and that I was still a suspect in the murder of Ramón Gutierrez. I weighed about three hundred tons as I went down the hall to the bathroom. After I’d brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face, I was almost surprised that my reflection in the mirror over the sink looked normal. I twisted my hair into a scrunchy and slogged to the office-closet to pull on underpants, shorts, and a T-shirt. Laced up clean white Keds, grabbed my shoulder bag and all my pet-sitting stuff, and squared my shoulders. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Dixie Hemingway is going forth into the world to act the part of premier pet sitter. She may feel like shit, she may have a few loose cogs in her machinery, but by God nobody can say she doesn’t do her job!