Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

30

My voice was hollow with weariness when I called Guidry.

I said, “I spoke to Celeste Autrey a few minutes ago. She was at Laura Halston’s house with the locksmith. Outside the house, actually, because she refused to pay for having the locks changed, so he refused to give her the new key. She finally threw money at him and he gave her the key, but she was so mad that there was only one key that she spit at him and threw it back. Then she left, and he gave the key to me. What do you want me to do with it?”

“She spit at him?”

“Like an adder.”

“Why’d the locksmith give you the key?”

I sighed. “I don’t know, Guidry. Probably because I was there and he was fed up with the whole business. He’d been paid for changing the locks and making the new key, so he wanted to be rid of it. Good thing Martin Freuland wasn’t there, he would have given it to him. Did you pick Freuland up?”

“Can’t pick a man up just for being outside a house, Dixie. I sent some deputies over to suggest to him that loitering outside a dead woman’s house could be construed as suspicious behavior, so he left.”

“What about Vaught? I’ve been thinking about him. The man’s hands are too clean. Freuland has more reason to want to kill Laura if she stole money from him, but Vaught’s hands look more surgical, like they’d know how to use a scalpel.”

The line was silent for a long moment, then Guidry’s voice came back almost as heavy with fatigue as mine.

“Dixie, I never told you Laura Halston was stabbed with a scalpel.”

My tired brain started gathering all the information it had collected to tell him that of course the killer had used a scalpel. For starters, there was her sadistic surgeon husband who threw scalpels at the ceiling for fun.

An icy trickle of reason slid down my neck, and my entire body went cold with shame. The husband had been one of Laura’s lies, and I was an idiot. Not only had I fallen for the lie when I first heard it, I’d continued to operate as if it were true even after I’d learned it wasn’t.

I said, “Oh.”

“Does anybody else know you have that key? Anybody besides the locksmith?”

“You do.”

“Don’t mention it to anybody, okay? I’m a little tied up right now, but I’ll call you later and pick it up.”

“Okay.”

He must have been surprised at my unaccustomed meekness, because he actually said “Goodbye” before he clicked off.

I sat there with my phone in hand and wondered how I could have been so stupid. But I knew the reason. Laura had been a master at pulling people into her fantasies. Unlike her sister’s, Laura’s dishonesty had been laced with warmth and generosity and humor. She’d made people want to believe her, and once they believed, they protected themselves from feeling like fools by continuing to believe.

For the first time, I felt a touch of sympathy for Martin Freuland, whose huge ego and lust for power would have made him a perfect mark for a woman of Laura’s talents. Even the town had been a perfect venue for her heist. A city in which the predominantly Hispanic residents throw a monthlong celebration every year in honor of George Washington is a world where fantasy rules. In such an atmosphere, it wouldn’t have seemed incongruous to Freuland to allow his lover access to his bank’s vault. After all, he believed in her. He believed she was mentor to the town’s debutantes, and he’d thought the model’s bag she carried on the day of the debutante ball was admirably philanthropic.

I wondered how long she had plotted and schemed before she carried her model’s bag into the bank vault and filled it with stacks of Freuland’s ill-gotten money. I wondered how long it had taken Freuland to realize he’d been had. It had been an almost perfect crime. He couldn’t charge her with theft because the money had been given to him as a payoff for taking deposits from drug dealers. All he could do was report her missing, which must have seemed something of a joke to the city’s police.

I doubted he had understood right away—or that he’d been willing to admit to himself—that what she’d done had been premeditated. Laura would have pulled him in as skillfully as she’d pulled me in. She would have made him believe she was in love with him, and even after she left he would have continued to believe it. More than likely, he had chosen to believe that Laura had put money in her model’s bag and driven to Dallas as a spur-of-the-moment thing, a momentary lapse of ordinary good sense.

I might have thought that too, but she had taken Leo with her. Leo had either been in her car when she went in the bank with her model’s bag, or she’d gone home and got him before she drove away. Laura had known exactly what she was doing when she took that money. Furthermore, she hadn’t been afraid of Freuland. Not then, and not when he found her and confronted her. She had walked away from him, and the flippant finger she’d shot him hadn’t looked the least big frightened.

Had she underestimated his capacity for violence? Perhaps she went too far when she reported his illicit dealings with his drug-dealer depositors. Perhaps he would have forgiven her for stealing his money, or at least not killed her for it, but killed her for being disloyal to him.

On the other hand, maybe he hadn’t been the killer at all. Maybe the creepy nurse Vaught had killed her because she’d rejected him. His sickness was a desire to control, to humiliate, to create terror in helpless victims. The police suspected he’d smothered elderly people in nursing homes, but he could have committed other kinds of murders that nobody knew about. Homeless people, children, mentally ill people, unwary women are killed every day and the killers are never found. Frederick Vaught could be a shadow killer who’d gotten away with crimes simply because he chose helpless victims in private places.

With that gloomy thought, I backed out of Mazie’s driveway and headed for Tom Hale’s condo. I was a pet sitter, and it was time for my afternoon rounds, beginning as always with Billy Elliot.

When I let myself into Tom’s condo, he and Billy Elliot took their eyes off the TV and looked up at me with mild welcome. Then they both widened their eyes a bit, and it seemed to me that Billy Elliot’s nostrils pinched together. I know for sure he pulled his head back a bit.

I said, “I look like hell, don’t I?”

Tom said, “Maybe not hell. More like heck. Why are you so . . . ah . . .”

“Sweaty. The word is sweaty, Tom, plus rumpled, plus hairy, plus I don’t know what-all.”

“Yep, that would be the word. So why are you?”

I sighed and lowered my rump to the arm of the sofa. “Pete Madeira and I drove to St. Pete this morning and took Mazie to see Jeffrey.”

Tom’s face was blank, so I dragged an explanation from my basket of words.

“Mazie is a seizure-assistance dog. Jeffrey is a little boy who just had brain surgery to stop his seizures. Mazie was becoming too despondent away from him, so we took her to the hospital. Which means that I didn’t get to go home and take a shower or nap. Well, I napped a little in the hospital in a chair, but it’s not the same.”

“She’s one of those dogs that signal a person when they’re about to have a seizure?”

“No, that’s a seizure-alert dog. Jeffrey’s too little to have that kind of dog. Mazie’s a seizure-assistance dog, which is different. She doesn’t alert him to a seizure, but she stays close to him when his balance is off from the medication, and she distracts him when he’s unhappy and frustrated.”

“Dogs are so great.”

I got Billy Elliot’s leash and led him into the hall and to the elevator, where he moved as far from me as he could get.

I said, “If you hadn’t had a bath lately, you wouldn’t smell so hot either.”

He pretended not to understand, but when we got to the parking lot, he ran at a slower speed than usual, which I appreciated. By the time I got him back upstairs, I’d made up my mind to go home and take a quick shower. When dogs make a point of standing upwind from you, it’s time to attend to your personal grooming.

My apartment is only about half a mile from Tom’s condo building, so if I hurried, I could shower and change clothes without losing more than half an hour. I didn’t even try to avoid alarming the parakeets when I tore down my curving drive, just let them have hysterics in the air. They like to do that, so I didn’t feel bad.

Paco’s car was in the carport, but his Harley was gone, which meant that he was out impersonating some road-calloused biker, which meant that some drug dealer or gang leader was under scrutiny. I took the stairs two at a time, using my remote to raise the aluminum shutters as I went. Inside, the apartment was fusty and warm, but I didn’t turn on the AC because I’d only be there a short while. Peeling clothes off as I went toward the bathroom, I felt a renewed energy just from anticipation of a shower. Next to telephones and Tampax, warm water piped to a shower has to be the greatest invention of modern man.

I didn’t indulge myself, just stayed in long enough to scrub down one side and up the other, letting the water fall hard on my hair but not actually shampooing it. Well, I may have run a teensy bit of shampoo through it and rinsed it out, but it wasn’t a true shampoo with huge lather or anything, and I only used a dollop of conditioner so it wouldn’t fan out from my head like a sunflower.

Out of the shower, I ran a comb through my hair, brushed my teeth, smeared on some moisturizer with sun block, and ran a quick slick of lipstick over my mouth. As I ran to the office-closet still damp, I gathered my wet hair into a ponytail. It didn’t take five minutes to pull on underwear, clean shorts, a T, and lace up clean Keds. A new and better-smelling woman, I was halfway to the front door when I remembered the key to Laura’s house, and ran back to the bathroom to fish it out of the pocket in my dirty shorts.

As I raced back toward the front door, a very large man dressed head to toe in black loomed in the doorway between my bedroom and living room. Except for his eyes and lips, his head and face were entirely covered by a dark ski mask, and he wore leather driving gloves on his hammy hands.

I came to a thudding halt with about a million thoughts running through my mind. One was that in my haste I’d left the front door unlocked and the shutters up. So much for the lecture I’d given Pete about keeping doors locked because a killer was loose. The other was that my .38 was six feet away in its special case inside a secret drawer on the wall side of my bed.

Through a slit in the mask thin as a mushroom gill, he said, “No doubt my presence is unwelcome, but it would behoove you to eschew any thoughts of escape. I assure you I have taken every precaution to complete the task for which I came.”

Oh, Jesus, it was Frederick Vaught.

There have been a few times in my life when some wisdom I didn’t know I had takes over. This was one of them.

With a nervous giggle, I said, “Oh, my gosh! You scared me half to death! Richard put you up to this, didn’t he? I swear, that boy will do anything for a practical joke. When he gets here, I’m sure the two of you will have a big laugh at how high I jumped.”

The eyes outlined by the ski mask’s holes wavered slightly.

I said, “For a minute there, I thought you were Richard, all dressed up to scare me. But he’s bigger than you. And excuse me for saying it, but he’s in better shape too. Probably from his wrestling. Or maybe it’s just that he climbs utility poles all day. Being a lineman builds muscles.”

Vaught’s eyes shifted with uncertainty. I didn’t blame him. I was almost beginning to believe in a lineman named Richard myself.

Tilting my head to one side, I said, “If I were you, I’d take the mask off now. A joke is a joke, but Richard’s a good friend of my brother’s, and my brother will be royally pissed if he thinks you overdid it making like the bogeyman with his little sister. I mean, my brother has a sense of humor as good as anybody’s, but he’s not going to think this is funny.”

Vaught gave a quick look over his shoulder and then fled through the living room and out the open front door. I already had my cell phone out and was punching 911 when I heard a car door slam. I sprinted to close the French doors and lower the shutters as the operator answered.

Crisply, I gave her my name and the address. Crisply, I told her an intruder wearing a ski mask had come into my apartment. Crisply, I told her he had already left the scene, and I promised I would remain there until officers came to investigate. I was calm, cool, collected. It was amazing.

While I waited, I went to the bedroom and pulled my bed from the wall. I opened the drawer built into my bed and looked at the guns nestled in their specially built niches. I no longer have the SigSauers issued by the Sheriff’s Department because they had to be returned when Todd was killed and I was put on indefinite leave. But I have Todd’s old backup guns and my own. I took my favorite, a Smith & Wesson .38, from its niche. I dropped five rounds into the cylinder and another five in a Speed Loader to put in my pocket. My hands were trembling, a peculiarity I noted from what seemed a far distance, as if I were watching somebody’s hands on a movie screen.

The doorbell rang, and I marched to the front door to peer through a slit in the hurricane shutters. I wasn’t taking any chances. I was cool. Deputy Jesse Morgan stood on the other side of the door, his diamond stud glinting in the afternoon sunlight. His face was as impassive as ever.

I raised the shutters and opened the French door. I said, “Deputy Morgan, we have to stop meeting like this.”

Then I burst into convulsive sobs. I don’t know which of us was more surprised.