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

21

After a long nap, I went to my closet-office and listened to messages while I stepped into fresh underwear and cargo shorts. None of the messages were urgent, so after I pulled on a fresh T and laced up clean Keds, I went downstairs to visit with Michael and Ella. At that time of day the air on the key leans heavy on your back, draping its sweaty arms over your shoulders in a dazed torpor. Songbirds were hidden away having a siesta, and only a few seabirds wheeled in the sky. On the shore, some sleep-deprived gulls and terns made stubborn footprints in the sand.

In the kitchen, Michael was bent over a tray of meatballs he’d just taken out of the oven, and Ella was on her preferred perch on a stool at the butcher-block island. They both gave me I love you messages when I came in, Ella by blinking her eyes slowly, and Michael by offering me a meatball on a toothpick.

He said, “Wait, there’s stuff to dip it in.”

He plopped a spoonful of something creamy white into a small bowl and shoved it toward me. “See how you like that.”

I rolled the meatball in the dip and took a bite. “Yum. What is it?”

“Mostly ground turkey and sesame seeds, with some spices. The dip is just mayonnaise and Dijon mustard and horse radish.”

“Are you taking them all to the firehouse?” I sounded like a four-year-old about to whine.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave some here. By the way, Paco and I are going out to dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“How’s the kid?”

“He’s good, they’ve moved him to a room.”

He gave me a quick sideways look, but he didn’t ask anything else about Jeffrey.

Luckily, he didn’t even think to ask anything about Laura’s murder. If I’d told him that I’d been asking questions about it, his sad look would have changed to one that said Have you lost your mind? I protected him by not volunteering any information. He already had enough worry and anxiety from being in a partnership with an undercover cop, he didn’t need to worry about his sister too. Also, I didn’t want to listen to him yell at me.

I ate another meatball, then washed my hands at the sink and took Ella out on the deck to groom her. I had just put the final stroke on her when Guidry’s dark Blazer rolled around the curve.

Damn! Why couldn’t he have given me some notice before he came? If I’d known, I could have slicked on a bit of lip gloss and run a brush through my hair. At least I was clean. Half the time when I see Guidry I’ve just thrown up on myself or I’m covered with dog drool and cat hair.

I hustled Ella inside and said, “I’ll be back later.”

Ignoring Michael’s questioning look, I scooted out without telling him Guidry was outside.

I met Guidry coming toward the deck. He was carrying a manila envelope. He looked dead serious. He nodded to me, formal as a funeral director. Something about the grim look in his eyes made my fingers fold into my palm.

He said, “I need to talk to you.” His voice had an unusual strained sound, as if he wished he weren’t saying what he was saying.

I said, “Let’s go upstairs,” and led the way.

On my porch, he tossed the envelope on the glass-topped table and took one of the chairs. “I want you to look at these.”

I searched his face for meaning, but he wouldn’t return my look. Suddenly dry-mouthed, I sank into a chair and watched him open the envelope.

He pulled out a couple of photographs and slid them across the table to me. They were mug shots of a man I recognized immediately—the wide jaw, the arrogant tilt of the head, the self-assured look in the eyes. Even in police custody, he had exuded raw power.

I said, “That’s the man I saw with Laura. That’s her husband.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

He put the photograph back in the envelope and tapped his fingers on the tabletop as if he were drumming out ideas.

He said, “Since her sister will tell you anyway, I’ll give you this much. That man is Martin Freuland. He’s the president of a bank in Laredo, Texas, where Laura Halston worked as a teller.”

I shook my head like a stunned boxer. “She didn’t mention that when she told me about leaving her husband. She must have gone to Laredo for a few weeks and then come here.”

“She didn’t have a husband, Dixie. Her sister says she never married, and there is no Dr. Reginald Halston. Not in any state.”

“I could have remembered the name wrong. He was a surgeon, played college football. He told her he would kill her if she left him. She didn’t want his craziness to infect their child.”

“There was no child, Dixie.”

“But—”

“She wasn’t pregnant. Laura Halston lied to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Her sister says she lived in Laredo for several years and worked in Freuland’s bank. We’ve corroborated that. We’ve even nailed down the exact date she left Laredo. That’s the one thing everybody is sure of when they talk about Laura Halston, that she left Laredo, Texas, on February twenty-second.”

Stupidly, I felt like a betrayed child. Laura had lied about living in Dallas. She’d lied about being married to a Dallas surgeon. She’d lied about being pregnant. Apparently the only thing she hadn’t lied about was having a sister.

I’d been so sure that Laura and I had made a true connection, like soul sisters finding each other in the midst of a jungle. But if what Guidry said was true, I’d been a naïve fool. Laura had simply been acting a role, and I had obligingly played her audience.

Oddly, he said, “I’m sorry, Dixie.”

My eyes burned and I looked away. “I hardly knew her.”

“But you believed in her. Losing faith in another person is almost worse than losing a friend.”

There was a shadow in his eyes that said he spoke from personal experience.

I said, “That man, Martin whoever, said he would make her pay for leaving him.”

Guidry tapped the tabletop a few more times. “According to her sister, Freuland and Laura were lovers, and she left him because he wouldn’t divorce his wife.”

“So he killed her.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Dixie. There’s more to this story than a love affair. Freuland is under federal investigation for helping drug traffickers launder money. They believe he handled buffer bank accounts for money that had been delivered in cash to currency exchanges in Mexico. They wired the money to his bank, and he took big payoffs for not reporting it. The feds got an anonymous tip about what he was doing, and the sister claims the tip came from Laura.”

I felt as if I were whirling through a wormhole in space. “He killed her because she reported him for laundering drug money?”

Dryly, Guidry said, “It could rile a man up to know he was going to spend the next twenty or thirty years of his life in jail.”

I searched Guidry’s face. He wasn’t telling the whole story. Laura’s killer hadn’t just stabbed her to death, he had also made ribbons of her face. Stabbing her was a crime of intense passion, an act of rabid vengeance that could have been motivated by fury. But slashing her face had brought a different kind of satisfaction to the killer. Slashing her face seemed more like a psychopath’s doing than an outraged banker. Not that a corrupt bank president couldn’t also be a psychopath, but it was a stretch.

Dully, I said, “Did you get my message about the man who was stalking her?”

He grunted. “I’m not even going to ask how you got that information. You must send out invisible taser beams that cause people to go into shock and tell you everything they know.”

Since I was still in shock myself, I let that pass.

Guidry shook out another photo sheet from his envelope and scooted it across the table. “Ever see this guy?”

It was another mug shot, this one of a puffy man with close-set eyes and marshmallow lips. He looked like the actor who would play an uptight high school principal or a holier-than-thou church youth director, the one who sucked all the fun out of life. In some shots, he wore rimless glasses that added to his professorial look.

I shook my head. “I don’t recognize him.”

Guidry got out his ever-present notepad and flipped through some pages.

“Name’s Frederick Vaught. He’s a nurse, or used to be until he lost his nursing license. He was charged with elder abuse after another nurse saw him holding a pillow over a patient’s face in a rehab center. The patient didn’t die, and there wasn’t enough hard evidence to convict him of attempted murder, so he got off by pleading no contest. He got five years’ probation, and had to do two hundred hours of community service. That’s how he wound up driving people at Bayfront. It was a volunteer position.”

“They let somebody like that drive people?”

“His driving record was okay, it was his nursing record that was faulty.”

Guidry did that finger-tapping thing again. “Your tip about him was a good one. The ER people remembered him as the driver who brought the Grayberg woman in. And Laura Halston was at the emergency room at the same time. You were right about that.”

Damn straight I’d been right about that. Even if I’d been wrong about a lot of other things.

He said, “Several patients under his care died under uncertain circumstances. They were all between eighty and ninety years old.”

I thought of how he’d told Ms. Grayberg she should have been smothered at her first infarct, and shuddered. If I hadn’t come around the curtain, would he have smothered her right then?

I said, “A nurse would know how to use a scalpel. Maybe he was a surgical nurse at one time.”

“Maybe.”

He met my gravelly stare and sighed. “As I’ve already said, don’t jump to conclusions.”

“But you will pick Vaught up?”

“Of course. If nothing else, he violated about a hundred rules of his probation by going to that nursing facility.”

I said, “I asked about that other guy, Gorgon, at the Lyon’s Mane. Ruby wouldn’t talk about him, but I’m sure he’s deep in organized crime.”

His gaze measured me for a moment. “Dixie, I would really, really appreciate it if you’d stop asking questions about this murder. That’s my job, not yours.”

His gray eyes were calm, but his eyelids flickered just enough to tell me he wasn’t being completely honest.

“What’s the real reason you want me to stop?”

“We’re looking for a psychopathic slasher. Killers like that don’t need a lot of reason to go after another victim. I don’t want you to attract his attention.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to go into all the reasons why fear wasn’t a good deterrent to keep me from looking for Laura’s killer. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Guidry to know that I was more afraid of fear than I was of a killer.

I took a deep breath and stood up. “I have pets waiting for me.”

He nodded and followed me down the steps. Downstairs, we got into our respective vehicles and gave each other sober waves before we started our engines. Guidry went first, easing his car around the meandering lane and causing the parakeets to do their usual paranoid panic. I followed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands like an old woman afraid of losing control.