Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

Nineteen

I slept in the porch hammock until almost three o’clock, and woke up feeling dehydrated but less fragmented. I’m always relieved and grateful to find myself sane when I wake up, because for a long time I wasn’t. For the first year after Todd and Christy were killed, I was a mess. Too tired to breathe, with every cell in my body bruised and aching. My nose ran for an entire year, and I barely had the energy to wipe it. I slept whole days, and when I was awake, I stared at the TV without changing stations. Just watched whatever was on, because I couldn’t absorb words anyway. I didn’t dress or bathe. Didn’t answer the phone. I would go for days without eating and then have a giant pizza delivered and eat it all at one sitting.

Michael and Paco tried to get me to eat, to get out of my house, to wake up, but I couldn’t. I just flat couldn’t. Then one day in the spring, when Todd and Christy had been gone a full year, I caught sight of myself in the bedroom mirror and stopped cold. I looked awful. I looked unhealthy. I looked like a wraith. If Todd could have seen me, he would have said, “For God’s sake, Dixie, what good is this doing?” If Christy could have seen me, she would have been afraid of me, I looked that scary.

That was a turning point. I got myself and my house cleaned up and went out and got my hair cut. I sold the house where I’d been so happy with Todd and Christy, and got rid of all the furniture. I donated Christy’s toys to Goodwill, except for her favorite, a purple Tickle Me Elmo, who now sits on the pillows of my bed, fat and silly. When I look at his goofy face, I hear Christy’s laughter spilling out like silver coins. I suppose I will keep Elmo with me forever. More than Christy’s photos, and even more than my memories of her, Elmo keeps her close and keeps me sane. Mostly.

For a while, I thought I might like to move away from the key and all its memories, but Michael and Paco talked me into taking the apartment over the carport, and I’m glad they did. This is where my heart is. It’s where I belong. Now occasional rips in the fabric of reality come when I least expect them. I can be going along minding my own business, attending to responsibilities, bathing and dressing and feeding myself like a normal person, and then one day I’ll see Todd walking down the sidewalk ahead of me. I’ll know it’s him, the same way I recognize my own reflection in a mirror. It’s his hair, his shoulders, his long legs. I know his walk, the way he swings his arms a little off rhythm with his steps. I’ll open my mouth to shout to him, my heart flowering with a burst of pure joy, and then he changes into somebody else—a man I don’t know at all, a man totally unlike Todd, and I am weak-kneed and dizzy with disappointment and fear.

It has been three years. I am long past the time grief experts allow for normal grieving. Mine is pathological, they say, and it’s time I got over it. They don’t explain how to do that. They merely look at me with tight lips and annoyed eyes and tell me I have to. I would if I could, believe me, because every time it happens, I fear that next time I won’t realize it’s a delusion and that I’ll actually rush up to a stranger and throw my arms around him and take comfort in his foreign smells, his alien substance. If that ever happens, I may never return.

I drank a bunch of water and called the hospital again, and this time they gave me the nurses’ station on Phillip’s floor. A harried nurse told me he was “resting comfortably”—whatever that meant—and got off the phone before I could ask if I could see him. I called Guidry again and left another message for him to call me on my cell, then I ate a little tub of yogurt from the fridge while I stood on the porch and looked out at the glittering waves in the Gulf and told myself everything would work out all right. Phillip would recover from his injuries, Guidry would find whoever killed Marilee and Frazier, and I would find a good home for Ghost. Life would go on, and so would I.

After I took a shower and put on fresh shorts and T and Keds, I went to my office–closet and took care of business, entering records on my file cards and returning calls. A man had left a message asking me to take care of his python, and I called him up and gave him the name of another pet-sitter, one who isn’t squeamish about feeding live mice to reptiles. Somebody else wanted to know if I knew how to hatch eggs laid by a dove on their front lawn, and I gave them the number of the Pelican Man. I figured anybody who has devoted his life to rescuing injured pelicans must know how to hatch dove eggs. When I’d gotten my books in order and all my invoices ready, I got in the Bronco and drove to the Kitty Haven to visit Ghost.

He was in one of Marge’s private rooms, which is to say he was in a cubicle about three feet wide, six feet deep, and eight feet tall, with a sleeping basket, a scratching post, padded shelves at several levels, and a kitty door low in the back to his private toilet. A screened door across the front had a hinged insert to allow the attendants to move food and water in and out without letting Ghost escape. It was an ingenious setup, but it was still a cell, and he knew it.

Like all Abyssinians, Ghost had a muscular body and the slender head and almond eyes characteristic of cats that originated in Asia. Abys are a highly intelligent breed, and once an Aby falls in love with you, it’s one of the most loyal animals in the world. Ghost had been with Marilee since he was twelve weeks old, and as far as he was concerned, she was his everything. I took him into the visitors’ room and brushed him and played Chase the Peacock Feather with him, but both of us were off our game. I finally sat down cross-legged on the floor in a dejected heap, and Ghost climbed into my lap and curled himself between my legs. Without his charm-trimmed velvet collar, he looked even more forlorn and orphaned.

I ran my fingertips over his ticked silver fur and said, “Things are bad, Ghost. Really bad. Marilee’s not coming back, and Phillip has been beaten up. Maybe to scare him so he won’t tell all he knows about what happened at your house. You know what it is, don’t you? You know who he saw that morning.”

He sighed and closed his eyes and laid his chin on my knee, as if he were worn-out from the heaviness of knowledge he couldn’t express. He had known all along that Marilee was dead. As an eyewitness to two grisly murders, he could identify the killer or killers of both Marilee and Harrison Frazier. He just couldn’t do it in words.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure you have a good home.”

He opened his eyes and gave me a look of hurt accusation, and I couldn’t blame him. This had happened on my watch, and I had let him down.

I slipped him some kitty treats when I left, and promised him I would come back and get him as soon as Lieutenant Guidry said I could. Even with Marilee dead, there was no reason he couldn’t stay in his own home until I could find him another one. He gave me a glum look and whirled his head to the base of his tail and gnawed at it. I wasn’t sure what that meant in cat language, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t something nice.

Just as I was getting in the Bronco to make the rest of my afternoon visits, my cell rang—Guidry finally returning my calls.

I said, “Phillip Winnick saw a woman leave Marilee Doerring’s house about four o’clock Friday morning. He says she got in a black Miata and drove off. He didn’t tell you before because he doesn’t want his parents to know he was out of the house at that hour.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“I saw him at the Crab House last night and he told me then. But there’s more. Did you know I found him beaten up this morning?”

“Yeah, I know.”

I didn’t ask him if he knew about Marilee. Of course he knew.

I said, “I think somebody didn’t want him to tell what he saw.”

Guidry was silent for a moment, and I could almost hear his brain digesting what I’d told him, along with its implications.

He said, “Can you meet me at Sarasota Memorial in the next ten minutes?”

Before I could stammer out an answer, he said, “In the main lobby,” and hung up.

I stared at my phone for a few seconds, then flipped it closed and started the Bronco. Guidry always seemed to be one step ahead of me, and I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or hated it.

At the hospital, I left the Bronco for a valet to park, then hurried past a group of hospital personnel out on the sidewalk for a cigarette break. As I veered round them, they all gave me the defiantly sullen looks that smokers have acquired. Wide automatic glass doors slid open for me, and I went through to the lobby, my eyes searching for a man who looked too rich and well dressed to be a homicide detective. A hand touched my arm and Guidry said, “He’s on the fifth floor.”

He steered me to the wall of elevator doors, and when one opened and vomited a gaggle of glassy-eyed people, we took their place. Some other people got on with us, and we all stood tensely silent as the elevator began its smooth upward glide. Guidry and I stood at the back, not speaking or touching as some people got off and other people got on at every floor.

Finally, Guidry said, “This is our floor.”

He touched the small of my back with his fingertips, and I moved forward. A glass wall on our right showed a large waiting room where people were sitting staring straight ahead, each of them caught in a timeless worry.

I followed him down the hall to the ICU wing, where glassed cubicles were arranged in a circle around a busy nurses’ station. A uniformed deputy sat in a straight wooden chair outside Phillip’s cubicle. Phillip’s bed was slightly elevated so his face was visible. It looked like a cut of raw meat. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose was bandaged, and his cheeks were wider than his head. A ventilator’s blue accordion hose was taped inside his mouth, and an IV stand stood beside his bed. A couple of machines that looked like apartment-sized washer–dryer combinations stood behind him. Tubes snaked from them and disappeared under the sheet covering him.

I made a choking sound and covered my mouth.

“He looks a lot worse than he is,” Guidry said. “He has some broken ribs and a broken nose, but his lungs weren’t punctured and he only has a moderate concussion. He’ll have a headache for a while, but nothing vital is damaged.”

“His mother must be going crazy to see him like this.”

“Actually, she hasn’t tried to see him, and Carl Winnick keeps calling to warn us not to leak anything about the attack to the media. Says it’s a liberal conspiracy to push an agenda of a perverted lifestyle and ruin his reputation.”

I felt a little sick.

Guidry took my arm and said, “Let’s go find a place where we can talk.”

I got myself under control as we left the ICU unit and walked down the wide hall. Guidry tilted his chin toward a small waiting area where some overstuffed chairs were pulled around a coffee table. “Go sit down,” he said. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

He went into the glassed room where a coffee urn had been set up for visitors, and I went to sit in the waiting area. In a minute, he came out carrying two Styrofoam cups with plastic stirrers jutting from them. He set them on the coffee table and pulled out a handful of sugar packets and tiny creamers from his pocket.

“I couldn’t remember if you took anything in yours,” he said.

I shook my head. “I drink it black.”

He sat down in the chair opposite me. “This morning, a call came in a little after five o’clock from a man named Sam Grayson. He had been out walking his dog, headed toward Midnight Pass Road, and he had let the dog off his leash. The dog started barking and then took off in the other direction, chasing a man running behind the houses, headed toward the bay. Mr. Grayson managed to call the dog off, but he called nine one one to report a prowler in the area.”

“I know that dog.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. A deputy went out, but the man had disappeared and everything looked quiet. Then your call about the Winnick boy came in. More than likely, his attack was what the dog had been barking at. He may have saved the boy’s life.”

“Good old Rufus! Did Sam get a good look at the man?”

“No. It was dark, and the guy was half-hidden by trees. He thinks he was bald, but I don’t know if he’d be able to identify him if he saw him again.”

“Last night at the Crab House, a man with a bald head chased me in the parking lot. I barely got in my car before he got to me.”

Guidry leaned back and looked hard at me, assessing me the way dogs do when they smell something new. “Was this before or after the Winnick boy told you about seeing a woman leave the Doerring house?”

“After. He tried to hit on me at the bar before I talked to Phillip. Sent me a drink and then got huffy when I refused it. I’d know him if I saw him again.”

I put my coffee back on the table and leaned forward. “Phillip crawls out his bedroom window after his parents are asleep, and walks to the Crab House and plays piano until it closes at one. He probably goes home with somebody from there, but I don’t know who, then he goes home and crawls back in the window again in the morning. My guess is that somebody drives him to that spot on Midnight Pass Road, and then he walks alongside the woods to his house. Whoever attacked him must have known his routine and waited for him.”

Guidry was watching me closely, putting together all the pieces. “His parents know he’s gay?”

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t think so, and he’s scared to death they’ll find out. When I got to him this morning, he said one thing before he passed out. He said, ‘Please don’t tell my mother.’”

“Shit. Poor kid.”

“Yeah. He’s leaving for Juilliard in August, and I suppose he’s gotten more careless as the time grows nearer that he can be open.”

“I’m not letting anybody talk to him until I can question him, and that includes his parents. I think I’d like you to be there when I ask him about the woman he saw. If he’s up to it, I’d like to do it tomorrow morning.”

I hesitated, wondering what Guidry’s real reason was, but knowing that Phillip would be less nervous if I were there.

“Okay.”

“Is there anything else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know anything else you haven’t told me?”

“Nothing except that I found Marilee’s body this morning in the woods. I’m sure you already know that.”

Guidry’s eyes were calm and expectant. I had a momentary flash of what it would be like to be his kid. He would be the kind of father you couldn’t lie to. You wouldn’t even try, because you would know he could see right through you.

I said, “Marilee’s grandmother lives at Bayfront Village. She’s a sweet lady, and whoever tells her about Marilee needs to be very careful with her. She knows who Frazier is. She said he ruined Marilee’s life, but she wouldn’t say what she meant by that.”

Guidry carefully put his coffee cup on the table. “When did you talk to the grandmother?”

“Yesterday. I went to see her because I thought she might know where Marilee was. She knew all about Frazier’s murder from the news, but she wouldn’t say what his relationship had been to Marilee.”

“You talk to her very long?”

“A little while. We had tea and some fresh chocolate bread she’d just made. She uses a bread maker Marilee gave her fifteen years ago. Marilee bought her the apartment she lives in, too, and Cora said Marilee came by to visit real often.”

For some reason, I wanted Guidry to know that Marilee hadn’t been just a gold-digging bimbo who got herself murdered and thrown in the woods. She had also been a loving granddaughter who bought her grandmother a bread-making machine and a nice apartment.

He gave me a lifted eyebrow. “You get around, Dixie.”

I thought about the letter I’d put in a folder in my desk—the letter Marilee had written to her daughter. I thought about the invoice for installing a wall safe in Marilee’s house. I even opened my mouth to tell Guidry about them, but instead I shrugged.

“It’s just that I find out things about people from taking care of their pets.”

His expression changed, and I suddenly felt chilled.

He said, “Dixie, how did you know that Marilee’s body was in the woods?”