Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

Another thing about being a little bit off-center is that it robs you of your ability to justify things that are just flat wrong. Normal people come up with all kinds of political explanations and religious rationalizations and rose-colored social delusions when they’re confronted with things that shouldn’t be. Slightly loopy people can’t do that anymore. Like the kid compelled to blurt out that the emperor was naked as a jaybird, we can only see things as they are and tell things as they are.

The way I saw it, I had no choice but to go inside that house and find what I knew was there. I didn’t think past that, I just knew I had to do it.

Every sensible bone in my body told me to call Guidry and tell him what I’d figured out. Every experienced bone in my body said no judge would give him a search warrant to look for something that nobody knew existed except me, especially since I had nothing to go on except intuition and a knowledge of iguanas.

In the not-so-distant past, I would have gone home first and got a weapon, but I couldn’t do that now. Not just because Guidry hadn’t returned my .38, but because I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I killed anybody else.

I eased the Bronco around the curve in the driveway and parked in front of the garages. I was careful not to let the door make a loud click when I closed it and then covered the pavement as fast as I could to get between the long garage wall and the privacy hedge in front of the house. I wished I had spare Keds in the car. To keep my high heels from clacking, I had to walk almost on tiptoe.

When I reached the glass wall of the living room, I kept my pace steady, as if I had legitimate business there. Through the glass, the living room was in darkness but I could see a subdued glow in the great fireplace, as if Kurtz had left a fire burning and gone to bed. Okay, so far so good. I tippy-toed back down the walk and turned the corner to skitter past the row of closed garage doors. In the bright moonlight, I felt like the sky was shining a spotlight on me. If anybody was watching the house, they could surely see me.

Ducking into the narrow alcove to the side door, I fitted one of Kurtz’s keys into the lock and eased the door open. Once inside, I left the door slightly ajar in case I needed to make a hasty exit. I was banking on the second key being to the wine room. I looked down the southern corridor toward Kurtz’s bedroom, where everything was dark and silent. Creeping down the southern corridor past the wine room, I stuck my head around the corner and looked into the living room to verify that it was empty.

The room was quiet, the only sound the sighing and subtle crackling of white-hot logs in the fireplace. My guess was that a big fire had roared there about an hour ago, and without care it had dwindled to a hot memory of itself. I stopped for a minute and considered my options. The most sensible one was to retrace my steps, get in my Bronco, and drive home. But no matter how much my head told me to do that, my feet turned toward the wine room.

Holding my breath, I slipped the second key into the lock and turned the doorknob. Closing the door behind me, I flipped the light switch to fill the room with a ghostly red glow, and almost tripped over Ziggy. He was stretched on the floor just inside the door, and when he felt me he raised his tail and whipped it back and forth. I leaped out of the way, and he lowered his tail. Not because he couldn’t reach me, but because he was too weak to lash at me. In the chill of the wine room, Ziggy was closing down. His normal bright green had darkened to ripe avocado, which meant he hadn’t been in the room very long. My guess was that Kurtz had moved him to the wine room at about the same time he’d left the fire to burn itself down.

I whispered, “I’ll get you out of here later, Ziggy, but right now I have to find a secret door.”

I moved to the back of the room and began looking for a hidden control that would open a passage to the room that I knew lay between the wine room and the garage. I felt along the underside of every wine shelf and on each side of every supporting column, but I didn’t find anything. I was making my second sweep down the back wall of wine bottles when I tried pulling on the columns. One of the columns moved, and an entire section swung outward on invisible hinges.

With my breath trembling, I faced the dark recesses of the room I’d known I would find. A peculiar iodine odor permeated the room, the same smell I’d noticed on Gilda. I stepped inside and fumbled for a light switch.

Before I found it, I was caught in the beam of a blinding light. I gave a shocked yelp and covered my eyes. Of all the dumb ideas I’d ever had, this one was turning out to be a blue-ribbon prizewinner.

I put my hand up to shield my eyes. “Mr. Kurtz?”

No answer, just the ferocious light.

I decided the lack of shouting and yelling might be a good omen. Maybe Kurtz was so lonely there in the house by himself that he would overlook the fact that I’d broken in.

“Could you move the light? We could sit and talk awhile.”

The light held steady for a moment, then swung away to travel crazily over stark white walls and steel tables holding the kinds of things you expect to see in a research lab. Overhead fluorescents fluttered on to reveal a slight young man pointing a .44 Magnum at me. With a resigned sense of inevitability, I recognized him as the same man I’d seen watching Jessica at Ramón’s funeral.

I took a half step backward, watching his hand with the gun and thinking furiously. If I ran, he might shoot me in the back. If I didn’t run, he might trap me in the lab and kill me there.

In a soft trembling voice, he said, “You should not have come here. Now you have ruined everything.”

A cold serpent slithered up my spine.

She had cut her hair and dyed it dark, but the voice and accent were the same. Gilda had returned.

An insulated cooler like people take on picnics was open on one of the stainless tables, with an array of gauze-wrapped vials lying around it.

While I digested the fact that I had caught her in the midst of stealing vials from Kurtz’s lab, I could almost see her brain whirling to find the best way to dispose of me.

I said, “Since you don’t have any business here either, I don’t think it would be a real good idea for you to do anything that would wake Ken Kurtz.”

The only sign that she understood my meaning was a narrowing of her nostrils, as if she’d taken in a rush of unpleasant air.

I said, “Are you really a nurse?”

“I am very good nurse.”

I heard a hint of proud defensiveness and took heart. People who leap to defend themselves or their work aren’t thinking clearly. People who aren’t thinking clearly can sometimes be influenced. On the other hand, people who aren’t thinking clearly can also panic and blow a hole in your head.

I said, “Then you can clear up a mystery for me. Why does Kurtz have a PICC line in his arm?”

“Is for chelation, to take out metals that cause argyria.”

From the way she tossed out the medical word, she had to be a real nurse, maybe even a good one.

Seeing that I didn’t understand, she said, “Means blue skin.”

“I guess the chelation didn’t work, since he’s still blue.”

Her eyes flashed with a gleam of venom. “I tell him is chelation, is really silver nitrate. He is monster, he should have mark of monster.”

I felt a small twinge of sympathy for Kurtz, who hadn’t understood why his condition had worsened in the past few months. But things were looking up. Gilda obviously hated Kurtz, and if I could keep her hatred directed toward him, I might be able to convince her I was an ally.

I said, “I’ve been told that you hired somebody to kill Ken Kurtz. No woman would do that unless she was forced by extreme circumstances.”