Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

Twenty-Six

Ray said, “I was just telling her nobody from here would have hurt Phil.”

I said, “I think Phil leaves here with somebody who takes him home. I’d like to talk to whoever that is. He may have seen somebody in the area yesterday morning.”

Dennis got the impassive look that people take on when they have information they don’t want to divulge.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not a cop. I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m just Phil’s friend, and whatever this person told me would just be between him and me.”

Dennis and the waiter exchanged a wary look. I completely understood their reluctance. Phillip and his unknown friend were gay. Phillip was still in the closet, and the other man might be, as well. To give me the man’s name was not only to involve him in a crime, but to out him. Given the level of hysterical homophobia that still exists in this country, with its coy “Don’t ask, don’t tell” silliness, no ethical or responsible person would do that.

Dennis said, “Tell you what I’ll do, if I see somebody I think might have given Phil a ride, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him. If he knows anything, he can give you a call. How’s that?”

His voice was smooth and friendly, but I knew he would close me out if I pushed. That’s all I was going to get.

I stood up and put my hand on his arm. “Thanks. I appreciate that Phil’s a good kid, and I’m really upset about this.”

Ray whipped out an order pad and I wrote my name and business phone number on the back of a slip.

I nodded goodbye to them and started for the door. Behind me, Dennis called out, “Hey, I just remembered something. You know that bald-headed guy that tried to hit on you the other night? He was back last night, and he asked about you.”

I turned and stared at him. “About me?”

“Yeah. He wanted to know if you came here often. I told him I didn’t know you.”

“Did he know my name?”

Dennis grinned. “He just called you the blonde bitch.”

“That guy’s bad news. He chased me in the parking lot that night. I barely got in my car in time.”

“You call the cops?”

“No. I just went home. I guess I should have.”

“Damn right you should have. I’ll pass the word about him.”

I started to leave again, then turned back. “Does he come here often?”

“Never saw him before that night when you were here.”

“When he came back, did he try to hit on any other woman?”

“Not that I noticed. He stayed at the bar by himself, left when we closed.”

“Okay. I just wondered.”

I went outside and got back in the Bronco, wondering why the man had picked me out to try to pick up. Or stalk.

I finally left the whoosh of traffic and drove under a blessed quiet canopy of green oak branches to my apartment. When I rounded the last curve, I saw Paco in front of the carport. Still in disguise, he was holding a man to the ground with one hand while he held a phone to his ear with the other.

I pulled into the carport and got out.

Paco snapped his phone closed and flashed a white grin up at me. “Got a friend of yours here, Dixie.”

The man was face down with his hands cuffed behind him. His head was smooth and shiny as a dolphin’s, and his piggy black eyes were spitting venom.

I said, “He’s been following me. He chased me at the Crab House the other night and he was at the beach this morning.”

Paco took one of the man’s ears and twisted it. “How come you’re following the lady, pendejo?”

“Fuck you, asshole!”

“Don’t you wish.”

Paco got to his feet and put one foot on the man’s butt to hold him down. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, amigo. The lady used to be a deputy, and she’s still got a lot of friends in the department, and they’re gonna be real mad when they find out you’ve been stalking her. They may decide to dump you in the surf and let the sand crabs crawl in your eyes.”

Any other time, I would have enjoyed listening to Paco pretend to be a zonked-out bum who had no connection to law enforcement, but I hadn’t had a shower all day and I knew company was coming.

I said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and took a two-minute shower. Just as I was pulling on underpants, I heard tires crunching the shelled driveway. I shimmied into a short skirt and T, stepped into sandals, ran lipstick over my mouth, and sprinted for the French doors.

Downstairs, Paco stood on one side of the downed man, and Lieutenant Guidry stood on the other. Guidry said, “Dixie, I’d like you to meet Bull Banks, a freelance thug who’ll do anything for a buck. He was recently released from one of our penal hotels for beating up an elderly couple.”

Paco said, “I was just asking him nicely to tell us who hired him to attack the kid.”

Bull said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kid?”

Guidry said, “Bull, it’s not like it was when you started your career. Now we’ve got all kinds of technologies. When we get DNA results from what we found on Phillip Winnick, I think we’ll find that you’re our man.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You gotta have hair or something for a DNA test.”

“Oh, we can use lots of things. Little skin cells from your fists maybe.”

“Fists! Ha, that’s a good one.”

“Oh yeah, we got good skin cells from your knuckles, Bull. Little knuckle cells were all over the kid’s face.”

“Didn’t use my fists!”

Guidry and Paco exchanged looks and grinned. Just at the instant I realized they knew each other, Bull Banks realized he’d just made a tactical error.

“You can’t prove a fucking thing! Anyway, the kid’s a goddamn queer!”

My head exploded, and the next thing I knew, I was on top of Bull Banks like a rodeo cowgirl, using his ears to slam his face in the sand and yelling words at him that would have made my grandmother ground me for a year. I didn’t know how long I’d been on him, but Bull was howling and sputtering and choking from all the sand in his mouth and nose and eyes. From the looks of his face, I’d been at him long enough to cause him some serious discomfort.

Paco pried my hands off Bull’s ears, and Guidry hooked an arm under my waist and lifted me up. Guidry was grinning, and when they stood me on my feet, he kept one arm around me to keep me from falling on Bull again. I kicked Bull in the ribs and yelled, “Who paid you to beat him up? You tell me who, or so help me God, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat!”

It felt so good to kick him that I kept doing it.

Bull yelled, “Stop it, bitch!”

Guidry said, “Now Bull, that’s not a nice way to talk to a lady, especially when she’s going to press charges against you for stalking her. When they add that to attacking the Winnick kid, you’ll get the ‘three times and you’re out’ life sentence. If you’re nice to Ms. Hemingway, she might be persuaded to forget about the fact you’ve been stalking her.”

Paco said, “The way you’re protecting him, you must be a good friend of whoever hired you.”

I turned at the sound of a marked squad car scrunching over the shell toward us. A uniformed deputy got out and took in the scene. When I turned my head back, Paco had disappeared.

Guidry spoke to the deputy. “This is Mr. Bull Banks. He needs to be Mirandized and taken in for the assault of Phillip Winnick.”

The deputy nodded and hauled Bull to his feet. Guidry touched the small of my back with his fingertips and said, “Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

Feeling more surreal by the moment, I climbed the stairs ahead of Guidry. At the porch, he turned the umbrella in the table so it shaded us from the midday sun. “Sit down, and I’ll get us something to drink.”

I sat as if I were a guest and he was the one who lived in my apartment. He went inside as if he owned the place, and in a minute he came out carrying two bottles of water from my fridge. He sat down in the chair opposite me, unscrewed the cap on his water, and took a long drink. When he put the bottle on the table, his eyes were calm and expectant.

I said, “Do you think Bull killed Frazier and Marilee?”

“We’ll look into where Bull was Thursday night, but I doubt he’s our man. Not that Bull couldn’t be bought to do it, I just don’t think he did.”

“He’s the man who was at the Crab House Saturday night before I talked to Phillip, the one who chased me in the parking lot. This afternoon, he was watching me at the pavilion at Crescent Beach. He must have left about the same time I did, but I stopped by Marilee’s house and the Graysons’ on the way home, so he got here first. I think he was here yesterday, too. Somebody broke into my brother’s house and then into my apartment upstairs. They left sandy footprints, and whoever it was drove a car down the drive.”

“Any idea why he’s stalking you?”

“He could have seen me talking to Phillip, I guess. I thought he’d left, but he could have come back without me seeing him. If the woman Phillip saw knew he was watching her, and if Bull had anything to do with killing Frazier and Marilee, he may have followed Phillip to the Crab House, intending to kill him. Then he saw Phillip talking to me and guessed he was telling me about the woman, so he decided he had to kill me, too.”

“If he was going to kill you, why didn’t he kill Phillip?”

“Because Rufus sensed what was going on and barked. That scared him away. Do you know what kind of car he drives? Is it a black Miata?”

“Bull might drive a stolen Miata, but he doesn’t own a car.”

“He must have had a car that night, because he probably waited in the Crab House parking lot and followed Phillip when he left. Then he followed him again when his lover drove him to that spot and let him out of the car.”

Guidry rotated his water bottle on the table. “That’s where your theory breaks down, Dixie. Bull’s the type who would beat the kid up just because he’s gay. It may not have anything at all to do with the murders.”

“Then why was he after me?”

“You turned him down at the bar, and you chatted up a gay guy. In Bull’s world, that’s plenty of reason to hurt you.”

“Guidry, you know Sam Grayson? The man whose dog barked and scared Bull away when he was beating Phillip? The dog’s name is Rufus. Well, Sam put a piece of brass pipe at the curb before he left town last Thursday night for the trash people to pick up Friday morning. A little piece about two feet long. Tanisha saw it when she was walking to the bus stop, and she picked it up.”

“Tanisha?”

“The cook at the Village Diner. She’d been cooking for somebody on the Graysons’ street, and she saw the pipe and got it. She said a man drove in the Graysons’ driveway and took it away from her, sort of accusing her of stealing it. And he drove a black car that may have been a Miata.”

For a second, Guidry looked like he needed to put his head between his knees and take deep breaths.

“And you think…”

“Maybe that was Bull. Maybe he used the pipe to kill Frazier and Marilee.”

“He got inspired when he saw the pipe and decided to go kill somebody with it?”

“You have to admit it’s a strange coincidence.”

“Somebody had to have a damn good reason for killing Harrison Frazier and Marilee Doerring, and unless we turn up some compelling evidence, I don’t think Bull Banks had anything to gain by their deaths.”

“Somebody could have hired him.”

“Yeah, but who?”

“Shuga Reasnor said Gerald Coffey wouldn’t kill them himself, but that he might hire somebody.”

“That’s just gossip, Dixie.”

“Guidry, you didn’t just meet Paco for the first time today, did you?”

“Who?”

“Paco, the guy downstairs, the one who called your private line when he caught Bull Banks.”

“Is that his name? Nobody introduced us.”

The guileless look he gave me would have fooled the most confirmed cynic, but it didn’t fool me.

“Dixie, before you arrived at Marilee Doerring’s house and found Harrison Frazier, where had you been?”

My heart skipped a beat. “Why are you asking me that? Do you believe that crap Winnick is saying?”

“That’s irrelevant, Dixie. Where had you been?”

“I told you that before. I walked the Graysons’ dog about four-thirty, and then Billy Elliot, the greyhound at the Sea Breeze. After that, I went to a house to take care of a cat. Marilee’s was my second cat of the morning.”

My voice was tight and curt. I couldn’t believe Guidry was asking me for an alibi.

He said, “Any humans see you? Anybody who can verify that you were where you say you were?”

I could feel my jaws clenching and my hands making fists. If there’s anything I pride myself on, it’s honesty. Having my honesty questioned was like jabbing me with a sharp stick to see how much pain I could take.

“That’s the whole point of my work, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t be going to those houses if people were home. Tom Hale was home, but he was still in bed.”

“He lives where?”

“At the Sea Breeze, with Billy Elliot.”

“The greyhound.”

“Yeah.”

“Besides Tom Hale, nobody else saw you that morning?”

“I don’t know, Guidry, I guess somebody could have seen me, but I don’t know who.”

“Okay.”

I stared at him a moment, feeling a confused mixture of anger that he’d asked me for an alibi, and a rational understanding that he was just doing his job.

I said, “This has been really fun, Lieutenant, but I need to take a nap so I’ll be awake for my afternoon pet visits.”

He stood and handed me his empty water bottle. “Thanks for the refreshments.”

I watched him walk down my steps and then went inside and lowered the storm shutters against the glaring western sun. Amazingly, I was fairly calm. A year earlier, I might have curled up in a corner and sucked my thumb if in one ninety-six-hour period I’d found two murdered bodies, been accosted by a psycho in a parking lot, been vilified on radio by a radical hatemonger, stumbled on a kid I liked a lot who’d been badly beaten, and had a homicide detective question me as if I were a possible murder suspect. Now I was just pissed. A little jumpy, true, but mostly pissed.

It was true that I needed a nap, but first I went in my closet–office and checked my messages. One was from somebody named Ethan Crane, who claimed to be Marilee’s lawyer but was probably a reporter trying to trick me.

“I need to speak to you about Miss Doerring’s will,” he said. “Please call me as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. There was absolutely no reason why an attorney would need to talk to me about Marilee Doerring’s will, and reporters will stoop to anything to get an interview.

I went in the bedroom, kicked off my Keds, and fell on the bed, lying with my toes pointed toward the ceiling like a body in rigor mortis. I wanted to be in the hammock on the porch, but now I didn’t feel safe to sleep out there. Some creep like Bull Banks could sneak up the stairs and stand looking down at me sprawled out with my mouth open and drool running down my chin. A reporter could tiptoe upstairs and take photographs of me and run it with the caption “Is she a murderess being coddled by the Sheriff’s Department?”

I got up and looked up the name Ethan Crane in the phone book. There really was an attorney by that name. The phone number was the same, too, but that didn’t mean the call was legitimate.

I padded barefoot to the French doors and looked through the square glass panes. The sky was a clear and innocent blue. A young snowy egret stood one-legged on the porch railing, his yellow beak pointing upward and his raised foot invisible in his underfeathers. A soft breeze gently ruffled his fine feathers, and he seemed to be smiling. Why not? He didn’t have to worry about reporters or public opinion or homicidal thugs.

I went back to my office–closet and dialed Ethan Crane’s number. A receptionist answered in a nasal singsong: “Ethan Crane’s office.”

I gave my name and said, “I’m returning Mr. Crane’s call.”

She immediately put me through, which told me two things: She had been told to be on the lookout for my call and Ethan Crane wasn’t very busy.

His voice was a smooth burr. “Ms. Hemingway, thanks for calling. I’m sure you’re aware that Marilee Doerring is dead. We need to meet and discuss her will.”

“Why?”

“That’s what we need to discuss. I’d rather not get into it over the phone, but you are one of the principals named in the will.”

I shook my head like a boxer taking one punch too many. “Mr. Crane, I hardly knew Marilee Doerring. I take care of her cat when she goes out of town, but that’s my only involvement with her.”

“Can you come to my office?”

Still dazed, I said, “When?”

“How about right now?”

I still felt like I was being set up for something, but I told him I’d be there in fifteen minutes. To make myself feel more like a grown-up, I put on a white linen skirt with a toast-colored cropped top. I put on high-heeled sandals, too. If you’re going to match wits with a lawyer, you need to stand tall and stick your tits out.