Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

She smiled at Sergeant Owens, revealing even white teeth like the dentist uses as the ideal when he’s telling you it’s time to bleach yours. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sergeant Owens suck in his skinny stomach and straighten his sloping shoulders. I could only imagine what other male responses he was having.

Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, the pet sitter is here.”

He said it so smoothly that anybody would have thought he gave a gnat’s ass that I had arrived. He was up to something, I just didn’t know what.

She looked at me with a harder expression in her eyes than she’d shown Sergeant Owens.

“I do not understand.” She spoke with an accent—not Caribbean, not French, not South American, but something I couldn’t place—and enunciated each syllable carefully, the way people do when English isn’t their first language.

Sergeant Owens said, “The pet sitter that Mr. Kurtz hired. She’s here to do her job. So if you’ll just show her the …”

He turned to me with a look that said Help me out here, so I said, “Iguana.”

She drew back a bit as if I had threatened her, and her big eyes got even wider. Considering that a murder had been committed not fifty feet away, I wasn’t surprised that she was jumpy. What surprised me was that she seemed suddenly scared of me.

“But no, he did not. Is impossible. No. He did not call.”

I decided her accent was fake and opened my mouth to tell her how I felt about being called a liar. Sergeant Owens wrapped his bony hand around my arm and squeezed. His face was as bland as buttermilk, but his grip said Watch your mouth, Dixie —words he’d said more than once when I was a deputy.

He said, “Ma’am, I’d like to talk to Miz Hemingway for a minute. We’ll be back.”

He steered me down the walk to the front of the garage. The look on his face approached excitement, or at least what passed for excitement for Sergeant Owens.

He said, “Okay, Dixie, this is good. Let’s move on this. Something funny is going on in that house, but I don’t have any valid reason to get a search warrant. Go in there and look the place over. I’ll square it with Lieutenant Guidry when he gets here.”

My heart did a little blip, either because Guidry would be the homicide detective on the case or because Sergeant Owens still had faith in my deputy skills, even though I hadn’t worn a badge in almost four years.

“Is that woman Mrs. Kurtz?”

“No, she’s Kurtz’s nurse. Or at least she says she is. She claims Kurtz is sick in bed, too drugged up to talk to me. See if you can find him.”

Without waiting for me to agree, he lurched back down the path with my arm still clamped in his big hand. The gorgeous woman was still in the open doorway, but now she looked as if she had remembered the influence she had on men and was ready to use it.

Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Is Gilda.”

He waited a beat for a last name and then smiled toothily. “Well, Gilda, I have to ask you to let Miz Hemingway come in and do her job.”

She shook her head so hard her trailing curls flew around her shoulders. “I say to you Mr. Kurtz no ask nobody to come. He no call nobody. Is impossible.”

She pronounced his name Meester Koots, and I decided the accent was too consistent to be phony.

Sergeant Owens gave her a loose-lipped grin and played the kind of dumb that only a really smart cop can play.

“Well, Gilda, I guess this time he did something by himself, now, didn’t he? He must be feeling stronger, is what I’d say, so good for him. Now Miz Hemingway is just going to go in and make sure the whatchamacallit is okay. She won’t get in your way, will you, Miz Hemingway?”

He gave me a little shove while he talked, and Nurse Beauty was forced to step out of the way. Up close, she had a funny medicinal smell, sort of like the iodine my grandmother used to swear was the only thing that really killed germs dead. I walked fast into the living room, half expecting her to tackle me from behind. Instead, she slammed the door as hard as she could, I suppose to show her annoyance.

The room was even more impersonal than it had seemed through the glass. No Christmas stuff, no Hanukkah stuff. No flowers or plants, no books or magazines, no decorative objects, no framed snapshots. It looked as if a furniture company had delivered a truckload of expensive contemporary furniture one day and nobody had looked at it since. Except for the fire in the fireplace, the room had all the warmth of a morgue.

Over my shoulder, I said, “Where will I find Ziggy, ma’am?”

“Who?”

“Ziggy. That’s the iguana’s name, isn’t it?”

“Oh. I don’t … I don’t know.”

I stopped and turned, but she was looking off to the side with an apprehensive nervousness. Sergeant Owens was right. Something odd was going on, because she definitely didn’t want me inside the house.

I said, “He hasn’t been moved to a warm place?”

She gave a vague wave of her latex-gloved hand. “I do not know about animal.”

At temperatures lower than 60 degrees, iguanas begin to shut down. If they get too cold for very long, they die. Our temperature had been in the fifties for two or three nights.

A dragging sound came from around the corner, like the sound of tough iguana skin sliding across hard tile.

The nurse stiffened and raised her head, her topaz eyes darting side to side as if searching for a place to hide. Now I understood why Kurtz had wanted somebody else to feed his iguana. Some people are terrified of all reptiles, even the ones with four legs, and Kurtz’s nurse must be one of them.

I watched the floor, waiting for the first show of green lizard skin. What appeared was a man’s foot in heavy socks and slippers. When he came into full view, I felt an internal shudder of revulsion. I think I may actually have gasped. A haggard man, he wore a red plaid bathrobe loosely tied so that a lot of chest and lower leg were exposed, along with continent-shaped scars that glowed like abalone shell. His skin was a mottled plum-blue color that reminded me of a cadaver’s blood-puddled epidermis, and it was contorted by active minute contractions as if randomly jerked by internal wires. It gave his visage the quivering look of water’s surface when it’s being dimpled by fine rain droplets.

When I looked into his eyes, I saw such agony that I almost gasped again.

Involuntarily, I said, “I’m sorry.”

His voice was raspy and wheezing. “Yes, so am I.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. It’s a common reaction when people see me for the first time, a kind of kneejerk horror that such ugliness has a mind and a beating heart.”

“Actually, I meant I’m sorry you’re in so much pain.”

“Perhaps you can share your pity another time. For now, tell me who you are and what you’re doing in my house.”

Gilda said, “I say to her no, but policeman say I must let her in.”

He raised pain-glazed eyes to her. “Policeman?”

“Ramón has been in accident. Is hurt.”

I was getting fed up with her delicate twitchiness.

I said, “If Ramón was the guard, he wasn’t hurt, he was murdered. I’m here because a man who said his name was Ken Kurtz called me last night and asked me to come today and feed his iguana. My name is Dixie Hemingway. I’m a professional pet sitter.”

Both he and the nurse had gone very still, and for a second his bizarre skin seemed to pale.

In a guttural rasp, he said, “Don’t take me for a fool! Who sent you?”

I’d have traded six weeks of my life right then for a badge or a gun or at least a name tag that gave me a deputy’s authority. Since I didn’t have any kind of authority at all, I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.