Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

14

At the Bronco, Leo was peering out the air holes in the cardboard carrier and making piteous noises. I leaned in the window and said, “It’s okay, Leo.”

My mouth said that, but my feet knew it was a huge lie, and the next thing I knew I was kicking the bejesus out of my front tire, all my rage and horror banging in useless fury.

Behind me, Pete said, “Dixie? What’s wrong?”

A surge of adrenaline brought teeth-rattling shakes, and I turned around to lean against the Bronco with my knees stiffened and my elbows braced on the car. Pete had Mazie on her leash, and both man and dog were taking in the fact that Leo was crying in the car, and that Laura’s yard was marked by yellow crime-scene tape.

An ambulance and several marked and unmarked sheriff’s cars passed by, slowing to a crawl in front of Laura’s house and then oozing to parking places by the curb. I knew what the criminalists would do. They would post a Contamination Sheet by the front door to record every person who entered and left the house. Then they would photograph the interior of Laura’s house, dust for latent prints, and look for shoe tracks, for fibers, for hair, for anything that might point to the identity of the person or persons who had killed her. Outside, they would walk shoulder to shoulder around the area looking for anything a killer might have dropped.

Pete said, “Something’s happened to that woman, hasn’t it?”

Still shuddering, I bobbed my head up and down.

Inside the Bronco, Leo made a long wailing noise. Mazie whimpered and trotted toward the sound, moving her tail back and forth in a nervous show of sympathy.

I waited until a final tremor released me, then said the thing that had to be said.

“Laura’s been killed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I said, “I’m going to take Leo to Kitty Haven until Laura’s family comes.”

I put my hand on the door handle and then turned to him. “Pete, what time was it that you saw Laura?”

“Oh, it was early. Around five, probably. I get up early, you know, and once I’m up Mazie is up, so we went outside for a few minutes. That lady came down the driveway over there and ran across the street. Just sort of squeezed through the hibiscus there where the running path is.”

It was now close to eleven, which meant Laura had been killed within the last five or six hours. The killer could have got inside Laura’s house while she was running and killed her when she came back. Then he must have left the door open as he ran away, and Leo got outside.

I pulled the car door open, and Mazie trotted over to look up toward the cat carrier where Leo was still crying. Service dogs are trained from puppyhood to live amicably with other household pets, so Mazie was free of cat prejudice.

With the same sympathetic concern that Mazie had, Pete said, “Why don’t you leave the cat with me and Mazie? We can take care of him, and I’m sure Hal and Gillis would want to help out a neighbor.”

I opened the Bronco door and got in. “I’d need their permission, and this is not the time to ask for it.”

His shoulders dropped with the reminder of Jeffrey.

While he and Mazie watched me with identical expressions of sadness, I started the engine and backed out of the driveway. As I drove away, I looked toward Guidry’s Blazer in front of Laura’s house. I reminded myself to tell him what time Pete had seen Laura. On TV, medical examiners can tell exactly what time a person died. In real life, nailing down a time of death usually becomes somewhere between the time a person was seen alive and the time she was found dead.

Leo was quiet on the way to the Kitty Haven. Maybe he was soothed by the car’s movement, or maybe he was just relieved to get away from the gruesome scene inside his house.

A yellow frame house with sparkling white shutters and a front porch that begs for a swing, Kitty Haven is owned by Marge Preston, a round white-haired woman who speaks English and Cat with equal fluency. Inside, the décor is a comforting blend of a grandmother’s house and a brothel, with lots of burgundy velour, lace curtains, and crocheted tablecloths. Several slack cats were draped on windowsills and plump chair backs in the waiting room. When I carried Leo in, they all looked at me as if I were the most interesting specimen of humanity they’d ever seen.

When I lifted Leo from the carrier, Marge said, “Oh, what a beauty! You don’t see many of those.”

“His name’s Leo. There’s been a death in his family, and he needs a place to stay until relatives come.”

Marge took him from me and then looked suspiciously at the paw pad he raised.

I said, “He needs a bath too.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yeah.”

I left Marge telling Leo that he was safe and beautiful. Marge knows that even when you’ve stepped in blood, it makes you feel better to be told you’re safe and beautiful.

Heavy with the lethargy that follows a prolonged surge of adrenaline, I drove south like a homing pigeon. At the tree-lined lane leading to my apartment, I turned in with hope tensing my stomach. When I rounded the last bend and saw my brother’s car in the carport, I let out a sigh of relief. Michael usually spends his off-hours fishing or cooking, so his car meant he was home cooking. As he had been doing all my life, Michael would see that I held together.

Before I faced him, I slogged upstairs to my apartment’s porch and fell into the hammock. I kept remembering Laura’s husband saying he would see that she paid for what she’d done. She had said he was abusive and mentally unbalanced, but what he’d done went way over being unbalanced. He had to be a raving psychopath to have killed his wife just because she wanted a divorce.

With a little jolt, I remembered the man who’d called and come to her door while I was there, the one she’d met at the emergency room when she twisted her knee. He’d sounded like a nutcase too, and I’d forgotten about him when I talked to Sergeant Owens. Then another jolt hit. Damn, I’d forgotten about the man who’d come in the Lyon’s Mane too, the one Maurice had said was after Laura. If she’d turned him down, his obsessive lust might have turned homicidal. I didn’t know if he was as crazy as Laura’s husband, but I knew he’d looked capable of brutal murder.

Tears came in a sudden torrent, not only from shock and sadness over the murder of a woman I’d liked a lot but from a deep reservoir of unspeakable fear that lies deep in every woman’s heart. No matter how much equality we gain with our brains, our street smarts, and our ability to handle weapons, the fact remains that we are physically weaker than men. Furthermore, we belong to a species that does unspeakable things to one another. Until that changes, we will be vulnerable, and every woman knows it.

Laura Halston had been an intelligent, healthy, able-bodied woman who had taken every precaution to stay safe. And yet somebody a lot bigger, stronger, and more brutal had come into her house and killed her.

Was it somebody she knew? Somebody she had opened the door to? I kept going over what little I knew, gnawing on the details. A hunt might already be on for her Laura’s surgeon husband, the well-known Dr. Reginald Halston that she called Martin. I wondered how he would feel when he learned that Laura had been pregnant with his child when he killed her.

Then I reminded myself that I couldn’t be sure her husband was the killer. Except I was.

When I finally went searching for Michael, I found him in his kitchen, engulfed in clouds of aromatic steam coming from several big pots on the commercial range. He had an apron the size of a tablecloth wrapped around his broad torso, and a look of beatific joy on his handsome face. When he’s on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse. When he’s not on duty, Michael cooks for the firehouse as well as for me and Paco. He has enough soups and stews stored in his freezer to feed all of Sarasota County.

When I came in, Ella Fitzgerald jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. After I smooched the top of her head, she hopped back on her stool and licked her paws like a bimbo too involved with her manicure to pay attention to the little people.

Michael said, “What’s wrong?”

“You remember the woman I told you about? Laura Halston? She was murdered this morning. They didn’t tell me how, but I think she was stabbed to death. I took her cat to Kitty Haven.”

Michael laid down his stirring spoon and came close, looking down at me with worried eyes.

“Oh, hell, Dixie. Oh, sugar, I’m sorry.”

I leaned into him, and he wrapped me in a bear hug, squeezing me as if he could shut out every hurtful thing. Then he held my shoulders in both hands and looked hard at me.

“You haven’t had anything to eat this morning, have you?”

“Michael, I can’t eat, I’m too upset.”

“You’ve been up since four, and it’s nearly noon. Sit.”

Michael is of the firm conviction that ninety-five percent of all wars and social ills would be wiped out if everybody ate a substantial breakfast.

While he whirled into action, I poured myself a mug of coffee from the electric pot on the counter. I drank half of it in one long gulp before I dropped onto a bar stool. Beside me, Ella had decided her nails met her standards and was dreamily staring at Michael with the same love-dazed look that a lot of females get when they see him.

Michael went back and forth between the Sub-Zero refrigerator and the giant range like Godzilla stomping over cities, and before I had finished my coffee he slid a bowl of white stuff in front of me and handed me a spoon.

“Down the hatch, kid.”

I took a tentative bite and felt my neck muscles relax. Fragrant white rice stirred into light cream, flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg, with a thin drizzle of maple syrup looped over the top. Soft and creamy. No chunks of anything that required serious chewing, no sharp surprises, no intellectual demands. Just smooth, uncomplicated nourishment that went down easy and warmed my heart.

Ella looked at my rice and made a little pleading sound, but Michael shook his head sternly. “Rice isn’t good for you, and you’ve already had a shrimp.”

Ella meekly flipped the tip of her tail. Nobody argues with Michael, not even Ella.

I nodded toward the steaming pots on the stove. “What’re you making?”

“Gumbo with shrimp and crab. Rice to serve it over.”

“Okra?”

“Don’t be afraid of okra, Dixie, it’s a respectable vegetable.”

“It’s slimy.”

“Lots of good stuff is slimy.”

He turned to waggle his eyebrows at me in a mock-lewd parody, but his eyes remained worried.

“Dixie, I hope you’re not going to get involved in another murder investigation. I don’t think I can go through that again.”

“This one doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“You knew the dead woman. You’re taking care of her cat. That involves you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know anything other than what I’ve already told Sergeant Owens.”

“Which doesn’t answer my question.”

I carried my empty bowl and cup to the sink and rinsed them before I put them in the dishwasher.

I said, “Thanks for breakfast.”

“Uh-huh.”

Michael’s forehead was wrinkled with worry, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would relieve his mind.

No way was I staying out of this murder investigation. What had happened to Laura could have happened to me or to any other woman. I was going to do everything I could to see that Laura Halston’s killer was caught and put away forever.