Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Twenty-Five

I drove half a block to the Crescent Beach parking lot, parked under some live oak trees, and jogged to the steps leading to the main pavilion. Ask anybody who lives on Siesta Key and we’ll proudly tell you that Crescent Beach was entered in the World Sand Challenge in 1987 and named the finest and whitest sand in the world. Heck, we’ll tell you even if you don’t ask. We’ll also tell you the sand is made of ancient quartz crystal, and that even when the temperature is hot enough to make your brain boil, the sand on Crescent Beach is still cool to your feet. Some people claim the beach has healing properties, and that Siesta Key is one of the energy centers of the planet. I don’t know if that’s true, but if you live on the key, even if you have surf at your front door like I do, you get a compulsion every now and then to go to Crescent Beach and scuff your bare feet in the sand.

I climbed the steps with my precious deli sack in one hand and coffee in the other, bypassing the vending machines and snack bar and going to a picnic table under the shade of a soaring roof. I put my coffee and deli bag on the table, swung my legs over the bench, and took a seat facing the ocean. Down on the white sand, broiling tourists were laid out like meat on a grill. A few children were splashing around in the waves while their parents sat under umbrellas and watched them.

Except for a young man at a table about ten feet from me, I had the area to myself. He was swarthy and bearded, in dirty cutoffs and a floppy dress shirt with the cuffs suspiciously buttoned. With a faded bandanna tied over a mop of black curls and his eyes hidden behind dark reflective shades, he looked like a wanted poster for a Middle Eastern terrorist. He was staring out at the water and muttering to himself in the way of people who’ve stopping taking their medication, but he wasn’t speaking English, and I couldn’t tell if his foreign tongue was an actual language or one he’d invented for his personal world. A canvas bag sat on the pavement at his feet, most likely holding books or food or all his worldly possessions. Or a bomb.

I laid out my lunch like a priest preparing Communion. I unwrapped my sandwich and pickle and opened the chips, placing them at exactly the right spots. Placement of food is important. You don’t want the important stuff to be over on the side. The main stuff should be in the upper middle, with accompaniments to the side or slightly below. I’ve been known to rearrange a plate several times before I get the order just right. Eating in the right order is important, too. First a bite of the main stuff, then one of each of the side things in turn. If you take two bites of something in a row, you’ll screw up the whole rhythm. Not that I’m a control freak or anything.

I took a bite of sandwich and closed my eyes, making an mmmmmmm sound, like a baby nursing. There is nothing in the world as good as one of Anna’s turkey and pumpernickel sandwiches with tarragon mayonnaise. If there were a sandwich hall of fame, it would be in it.

A faint breeze moved the shadowed air, and a couple of black gulls sailed in and landed a few feet away to look hopefully at me. Not to be selfish, I left two little corners of bread for the gulls, tossing it as far away from me as I could so they would move away. They went for it with a loud flutter of wings, and didn’t even notice that I also had a brownie. The young man took no notice of me or of the gulls, but continued to look fixedly at the ocean. I was glad he was ignoring me. I much prefer being ignored.

Just as I took the last bite of brownie and was ready to take the last sip of coffee—I plan these things so they work out like that—there was a commotion over in the snack bar area. A security guard trotted past my table to see what was happening, and the young man at the adjoining table got up to walk a few steps away from his table and stare. I half-turned on the bench to look, too, and met the gaze of the bald-headed man who had tried to attack me in the Crab House parking lot. A crowd of people pushed between us, but I was positive it was the same man.

A woman separated herself from a group of passing tourists and walked briskly to the young man’s table, where she swooped down and grabbed his canvas bag and walked away with it. The young man kept staring toward the dustup at the snack bar.

I jumped to my feet and yelled, “Hey!”

The woman broke into a run and disappeared down the steps to the parking lot. The security guard had been swallowed up by the crowd in the snack bar, so I stepped over the bench, ready to chase after the woman.

Without looking toward me, the young man stretched his arm out at shoulder level. His hand was clenched in a fist, with the first two fingers stabbing a stern V. Then he turned and walked rapidly away, going toward the beach.

I stopped and turned my gaze back to my own table. Trying to act as if nothing had happened, I gathered up my lunch refuse and carried it to a trash bin. The young man who seemed out of touch with reality was Paco, and he was telling me to butt the hell out. He had just made a drop in a drug sting, and I had almost ruined it.

Whatever had happened over in the snack bar area had apparently been resolved, and the crowd there began to drift away. The bald-headed man had disappeared, and I was left wondering if I had imagined him. Maybe the stress of everything that had happened was making me see danger where there wasn’t any. Paco was moving along the edge of the shore, most likely headed toward one of the beach accesses where his Harley would be parked.

I walked to the steps leading to the parking lot and started down, my thoughts swirling with visions of Phillip’s beaten face, the bald-headed thug, and the drug sting I’d just witnessed. I was tired. I wanted to go home and take a shower and crawl in bed and let this excess of reality recede a little bit.

On the way home, I swung onto Marilee’s street. Jake Anderson, the trauma-scene cleanup guy I had called, was in the driveway next to his big white van with a bio-hazard icon on its side. He and a couple of other men in blue haz-mat suits were just loading their equipment into the truck. They had taken off their headgear but still wore vinyl gloves to their elbows.

I pulled up behind them and stuck my head out the window. Jake grinned and pulled his gloves off and tossed them into the back of the truck.

“All done, Dixie. It’ll smell like cherry syrup for a while, but you can go in.”

“Okay to take a cat in?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Jake.”

I backed out, knowing the house had been cleaned and sanitized the same way operating rooms are cleaned. Ghost might not like the lingering odor of ozone or the final deodorant fog, but he would be safe from any biological pathogens that are the natural aftereffects of a murder. I turned the corner onto Midnight Pass Road, and at the Graysons’ street I saw Sam and Rufus out at their mailbox. I turned and drove to the curb beside them and parked. Sam looked up from a stack of mail with a questioning look, then smiled.

I got out and squatted beside Rufus and exchanged kisses while Sam looked on like an indulgent father.

When I stood up, I said, “Sam, I hope you and Libby haven’t lost faith in me because of the things Carl Winnick has been saying.”

“Oh good grief, Dixie, of course not! You know, Libby and I were just talking this morning about that, and we think he’s off his rocker. His wife drinks, you know. She and Libby belong to the same Great Books club, where they talk about Virginia Woolf or somebody, and she says Olga Winnick has always had a nip or two before they meet. Her husband’s on the radio yapping about how wholesome he is, and his wife’s a lush.”

“I guess you know about their son being attacked.”

Sam shook his head. “It makes me sick that I didn’t know the boy was lying out there when that man ran by. I thought he’d been trying to break in somebody’s house. I never dreamed he had just attacked somebody.”

“The detective told me Rufus may have saved Phillip’s life.”

Sam leaned to scratch Rufus behind the ears. “You hear that, boy? You’re a hero.”

Rufus wagged his tail and grinned modestly, basking in the pride Sam and I were lavishing on him.

I said, “Sam, before you and Libby left last week, did you put a piece of brass pipe at the curb for trash pickup?”

“Yeah, a piece left over after they got the carousel horse up. Why?”

“The cook at the Village Diner works part-time for somebody on this street, or at least she did until last week. She said that she picked up a piece of brass pipe in somebody’s trash last Thursday night.”

“There was a piece of galvanized steel, too, the pipe they used for lining the brass.”

“She didn’t mention that, but she said a man drove into the driveway and took the brass pipe away from her. He was pretty nasty about it, and she’s hurt and angry. Do you have any idea who he might have been?”

“Drove in this driveway?”

“That’s what she said. She said he drove a black sports car, but she didn’t know who he was.”

“I don’t know anybody who would have done that, Dixie.”

“Do you know anybody who drives a black Miata?”

“I don’t think so. Can’t think of anybody.” Sam was standing like a soldier at attention. “Does this have anything to do with that killing? Do you think that’s what the killer used? My brass pipe?”

“I don’t know, Sam. It just seems odd for somebody to make a big scene over a piece of pipe that was left at the curb for trash pickup one night, and then the next morning a dead man is found in a neighbor’s house with his head bashed in.”

Sam winced. “God, that must have been awful for you, Dixie, finding that body.”

Apparently, he didn’t know I’d found Marilee, too.

I said, “Not as bad as finding Phillip beaten up. That was the worst.”

I gave Rufus another hug and got back in the Bronco. “I’ll see you, Sam.”

He and Rufus watched me drive away, both of them with sad expressions on their faces.

At the meandering driveway to my place, I started to make the turn and then straightened the wheel and drove straight ahead. There was one more thing I had to do before I went home.

The Crab House doesn’t open until five o’clock, so there were only a few cars at the far end of the lot, probably belonging to cooks or staff. I parked by the front door and crunched over loose oyster shell. The door was locked, and when I rapped on it, a young Latino with liquid black eyes and a scraggly attempt at a goatee opened it a crack and peered out.

“We’re not open,” he said.

“I know, I’m here to see your manager. One of your employees has been badly hurt.”

His eyes rounded and he looked uncertainly over his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t know what to do about me, or if he meant he hadn’t understood what I’d said.

“I have to come in,” I said.

He shrugged and opened the door wider, stepping aside with a shy smile as I passed him. A slight blond man in the waiters’ uniform of black trousers and white shirt was putting little vases of flowers on the tables. He saw me and stopped what he was doing, looking at me with a question on his face.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you the manager?”

“He’s not here right now. Did you want to apply for a job?”

“No, I wanted to tell him—you—something.”

I walked closer to him and saw a name tag reading RAY. I said, “Ray, Phillip Winnick was beaten up Sunday morning on his way home.”

“Who?”

“Phillip, the young man who plays piano.”

“Oh my God! Phil?”

“I found him near his house early yesterday morning. He was in pretty bad shape. He’s in the hospital now.”

He sat down at a table and stared up at me, the implications of what I was telling him playing over his face.

I took a chair across from him and said, “Do you know who Phil leaves with when you close?”

His face tightened and he shook his head. “Nobody here would have done that. Nobody who knows Phil would have done that. Everybody who knows him likes him.”

“I’m not suggesting that the person he leaves with was the one who beat him up. I’d just like to talk to him, find out if he saw anybody around when he dropped Phil off.”

The door opened and the bartender from Saturday night walked in, going straight to the bar and beginning to set out bottles and glasses. He was a tall, bookish-looking man with rimless round glasses and a frieze of short beard around his cheeks and chin. Except for shirtsleeves that bulged with muscles, he reminded me of a chemistry teacher I’d had in high school setting out Bunsen burners and vials of smelly chemicals.

Ray got up and went over to the bar and spoke quietly to him. The bartender turned and looked at me with a frown, then recognized me. He put down the towel he was using to polish a wineglass and came over to shake my hand.

“I remember you,” he said. “You’re Phil’s friend. I’m Dennis.”

“Dixie Hemingway, Dennis. The reason I’m here is that Phil’s been beaten up. I want to find out who did it.”