Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Sixteen

While I ate, I watched boats bobbing at the dock and idly listened to bits and pieces of conversation from neighboring tables. I learned that somebody named Tony was a real bitch and a half, and that somebody named Grace had finally gotten the money she had married for when her husband’s rich and ancient mother died. Grace, they said, was hell-bent to move back east where people would be impressed with their new wealth, but the husband was refusing to give up his golf and tennis life just to hobnob with some snooty New Englanders. Poor Grace. All that money and no place to flaunt it.

It was almost eleven o’clock when I ate the last morsel. I put some bills on the table before the waiter came back, adding a hefty tip to make up for being churlish earlier, and stood up and started inside. The waiter saw me leaving and scurried over with a questioning look.

I said, “I’m going to sit at the bar and listen to the piano player.”

He looked over my shoulder at the money on the table and smiled. “No prob,” he said. “The pianist should be here any minute.”

“You know him?”

“Just to speak to. Seems like a real nice guy.”

“He is.”

“Oh, he’s a friend of yours?”

I smiled, suddenly feeling proud to know Phillip. “Yeah, he’s a friend.”

Inside, only a few people were at the bar. All men, and all with the appraising look of people who realized the evening was growing old and if they hoped to hook up with somebody, they’d better do it soon. None of them gave me a glance. I took the stool at the end near the bandstand and ordered another margarita.

The bartender grinned when he set it in front of me. “This will be your third, right?”

“Counting the one I didn’t drink.”

“That guy, what an asshole! What’d he think, anyway?”

“Maybe that works for him sometimes.”

“Not with a woman like you. He shoulda known that.”

Behind me, Phillip’s voice said, “Miz Hemingway?”

I spun around, to see him standing there looking at me in disbelief, as if I were a genie he had conjured up from a bottle. Up this close, I could see the black flocked jacket he wore had been made for a much larger man. He looked like a little boy dressed up in his father’s suit coat.

“Gosh, you snuck up on me, Phillip!”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t, I just didn’t see you come in.”

“I came in the back.”

“Can you talk a few minutes before you start playing?”

He grinned nervously, and I wanted to hug him. He was all wrists and ears and cheekbones, too ill at ease to know how to handle this unexpected moment.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go sit at a table for a minute. You want something to drink?”

He shook his head, then licked dry lips and nodded. The bartender, who had been silently watching us, filled a glass with club soda and handed it to him.

“Okay,” I said briskly, and walked the length of the bar to a tiny two-top in the back corner. Phillip trailed along behind me carrying his club soda, and we both dropped into chairs like falling rocks.

He still seemed nonplussed that I was there, so I leaned toward him and said, “You left a message on my machine that you wanted to talk to me.”

“Oh. Yeah. That. Well, see, I got to thinking and all…you know, about what happened next door. You know, how the policeman asked if I’d seen anything?”

“Uh-huh. And did you see something?”

“Well, that’s just it. I mean, I should have told him, but my mother was there and I didn’t want her to know I’d been outside at that time, you know. But the cops probably should know…I thought maybe you could tell that detective guy.”

I could tell this would take all night if I didn’t prompt him. “Okay, what did you see that you didn’t want to talk about in front of your mother?”

A deep port-wine blush rose from his throat and suffused his face. “It was when I was coming home Friday morning. I was crossing behind Miz Doerring’s house and I saw a woman come out of her house and get in a car in the driveway. A black Miata. The car swung in the driveway, the woman came out of the house and got in, and it drove off. I thought it was Miz Doerring, but now I’m thinking maybe it was somebody else. You know, like the killer.”

I waited, but he seemed unable to continue. I said, “Could you see the driver?”

Phillip’s flush deepened. “The top was up, so I couldn’t see. I just saw the woman.”

I took a sip of my drink and pretended not to notice his discomfort. “And you could see her well enough to think it was Marilee Doerring?”

He looked down at his plate, and for a moment I thought he might cry. “Not really. I guess I didn’t really look good. It could have been her or it could have been some other woman.”

He averted his eyes and his throat bobbled in a nervous swallow. I tried to put myself in his place, a kid coming home after an evening that had to be kept secret from his parents and seeing a woman he thought was a neighbor get into a car and drive away.

“Did the woman see you?”

He bobbled his head in a staccato motion I took to be an affirmative nod. “I think maybe she did. She looked over her shoulder toward where I was and it seemed like she jerked a little bit—you know, like she was surprised or scared or something.”

“And then what?”

He looked directly at me for the first time. “Then she got in the car and left.”

Carefully, I said, “What time do you think this was?”

“I don’t want to get anybody else mixed up in this.”

“I’m not asking you where you’d been or who you’d been with, just what time you saw a woman leaving Marilee Doerring’s house.”

“It was a little after four.”

I remembered the flash of movement in the woods that morning when I was walking Rufus. That had been around 4:30.

“Did you see me that morning?”

He blinked at me. “You? No, ma’am, I didn’t see you.”

Poor kid, he was obviously terrified, and with good reason. If the woman he saw thought he could identify her, he could be in a lot more trouble than his family finding out how he spent his nights.

“Phillip, if we’re going to be friends, you have to do something for me.”

“What?”

“You have to stop calling me ‘ma’am.’ And my name is Dixie, not Ms. Hemingway. Got that?”

He gave me a weak smile. “Okay.”

“You were right to tell me about the woman, and it’s something Lieutenant Guidry needs to know. I’ll tell him what you saw, and he’ll probably want to talk to you again. If he does, don’t be scared. I’ll tell him to be sure and talk to you in private, and he’s not going to repeat anything you say to your parents or to anybody else. He’s a nice guy, you can trust him.”

“Okay.”

I was so proud of him for having the guts to confess what he’d seen that I didn’t check his story with my builtin lie detector.

We looked at each other for a second, sort of cementing a new friendship, and then he gave me a genuine smile. “I have to go play now. Are you going to stay for a while?”

“I’d love to, but it’s way past my bedtime.”

We got up and walked together down the aisle toward the piano. Before I left him, I turned and gave him a hug. “I’ll come back another night, when I can stay.”

He was blushing and smiling when he waved goodbye.

When I stepped outside, all the lights were out in the parking lot, the only illumination coming from a waning moon. Nobody else was around, and the spaces between the cars were black wells where anything could have been hiding. I stood a minute outside the door, wondering if I should go back inside and tell the manager about the lights, then decided to let it go. My footsteps made quick scrunching noises in the loose shell as I stepped across the dark lot toward my car.

Part of me was proud that Phillip had trusted me enough to confide in me. The other part was dismayed. Now I knew something that could get the kid in a lot of trouble. If he had seen the killer leaving Marilee’s house, he would most likely be called upon in the future to say so in public, bringing upon himself the full glare of media attention that would inevitably reveal that he was gay. He was a good kid, and I didn’t want to be the one who outed him. But I had to let Guidry know about the woman he’d seen.

A pair of egrets fluttered low over my head, making those guttural egret sounds that always remind me of somebody trying to cough up a popcorn husk. I turned my head to look over my shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that I was afraid. That’s the trouble with allowing yourself to start feeling emotions after you’ve been closed down for a long time. You can’t feel selectively. You have to let the whole gamut of feelings in, even fear.

As I started jogging toward my car, a form detached from the shadows and ran after me. I picked up my speed and ran like hell. Thanks to Billy Elliot, I had recent experience in covering ground fast. I beeped the car unlocked, tore the door open, and leaped inside, pulling the door shut and locking it a second before the man slammed a fist against the passenger window and pushed his face against the glass. Even with his nose and mouth mashed flat in a grotesque mask clearly intended to frighten me, I recognized the bullet-headed man from the bar. I threw the Bronco into reverse and whipped out of the parking space, almost hoping the man would be foolish enough to run after me so I could run him down. He didn’t. He ran behind the row of cars and ducked out of sight. I sat with the motor churning for a couple of minutes and then pulled out of the lot.

Driving north on Midnight Pass Road, I watched the rearview mirror for headlights in case the man was following. At the drive to my house, I passed it and drove straight ahead to the firehouse, where I backed into a parking place across the street. From where I sat, I could see all the traffic on Midnight Pass Road, and I could also see the firehouse where Michael was sleeping. Just knowing Michael was nearby made me feel calmer. Traffic was sparse, and after a while I decided I hadn’t been followed, so I drove home. Paco’s car was in the carport, but his Harley was gone, so I knew he was still on an undercover job. I ran up the stairs to my apartment two at a time.

Everything in the apartment seemed exactly as I had left it, but I still felt jittery. The malevolence of the man’s eyes looking at me through the passenger window weren’t what scared me. What had me feeling uneasy was that he had seemed so determined, as if he had a particular goal and I was it. I lowered the metal storm shutters, checked the answering machine, brushed my teeth, did a few turns around the apartment to work off my nervous energy, and finally went to bed with a million questions buzzing in my head.

If the woman Phillip saw had been Marilee, she would have been leaving Harrison Frazier dead in her house. Did that mean she had killed him? And if she had, who had been driving the car she got into? If it hadn’t been Marilee, who was it? It could have been Shuga Reasnor. She knew Harrison Frazier, and maybe she had some personal reason to kill him. Maybe she had lured Frazier to Marilee’s house on some pretext and killed him there. Maybe Marilee had a good alibi of where she was at the time Frazier was killed. Maybe she and Shuga had planned it together, thinking nobody would connect Shuga to the killing. I wondered if Shuga had an alibi for that night. I would ask Guidry when I talked to him.

I turned over and pounded my pillow and tried to go to sleep. It wasn’t my job to find Harrison Frazier’s killer. My job was to take care of Ghost. But who the hell had killed Frazier? Maybe his wife had followed him to Marilee’s house and conked him on the head and had somebody pick her up afterward in a black Miata. That didn’t seem very likely, though. And why did Marilee have her locks changed before she left town? It had to have been because somebody had a key to her house and she didn’t want that person to go in, but who? And why? Maybe she and Shuga Reasnor had had a falling-out and she was making sure Shuga couldn’t get in while she was gone. Maybe Dr. Coffey still had a key to her house from when they were engaged and she’d just gotten around to making sure he couldn’t use it. Maybe Coffey had hired a woman to go in and kill Harrison Frazier. No, that was dumb. Why would he do that? If he wanted anybody killed, it would be Marilee, not Frazier.

I turned on my back and took deep breaths. Why had that man in the parking lot been after me? Had he been so pissed off that I’d given him the cold shoulder that he’d waited out there for me all that time? Surely it wasn’t the first time he’d been turned down by a woman. Surely he wouldn’t have let something like that cause him to become so violent. Maybe he had been on something. Maybe he had snorted or shot up or ingested his drug du jour after he left the bar and got so high that he came back for lust revenge. Maybe it was just coincidence that he had chosen me, maybe he had just been there to go after any woman coming out alone.

My eyelids popped open. Oh shit, I should have called the Crab House and warned them that a psycho was loose in the parking lot. I should have told them to be sure no woman went out by herself. I turned over again and smacked the pillow. It was too late now, it was after two, and the Crab House was closed. But if somebody had been raped in that parking lot, it would be all my fault.

On that cheerful note, I finally drifted to restless sleep.