Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Twenty-Eight

Greg and I promised to stay in touch, and I left him staring out at Sarasota Bay. For the next couple of hours, I was too busy with my afternoon pet visits to think about everything that had happened. To tell the truth, I was on sensory overload. I couldn’t take in much more. The wonder was that I had been able to withstand as much as I had. I took it as a good sign. I must have gotten stronger without even knowing it.

It was almost sunset when I got to Tom Hale’s apartment and ran with Billy Elliot. When we got back upstairs and I took his leash off, I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table where Tom was pushing buttons on a calculator and writing numbers on a form of some kind. He gave me a puzzled look over his glasses, and then laid down his pen.

“What’s wrong, Dixie?”

“Tom, did you know that Marilee Doerring had a living trust that left her house to her cat?”

He did one of those blinking head jerks that people do when they hear something shocking, and then he laughed.

“I didn’t know it, but I’m not surprised. She had a kind heart.”

“You were her CPA. How come you didn’t know that?”

“Because it had nothing to do with how she paid taxes.”

I picked up a pencil on the table and studied it intently. Nice point. No teeth marks.

I said, “She made me trustee.”

“Why is it that I don’t think you’re happy about that?”

“Because it sucks, that’s why. I don’t want that responsibility, Tom. I don’t want the house, I don’t want the car, I don’t want the cat. I don’t think it’s fair that she could just dump it on me without my permission.”

I sounded a lot like Shuga Reasnor, but it was how I felt.

“Being trustee doesn’t mean you have to take care of the cat personally. You can hire somebody else to do it. There must be a thousand people right here in Sarasota who would jump at the chance to move into that house and take care of the cat for you. Hell, if I didn’t think Billy Elliott would be jealous, I’d do it.”

Hearing that affected my brain like I’d just had a slug of double-caffeine coffee.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. You’re only responsible for seeing that her wishes are carried out. You don’t have to take on each responsibility personally.”

“Will you take care of all the financial stuff for me?”

“Sure. You decide what you want to do and how you want it done, and I’ll take care of it. I’ll pay myself a fee from the estate. I’d recommend that you sell that Ferrari right away. I can handle that for you.”

I was feeling better and better. Maybe Marilee hadn’t played a dirty trick on me after all. Except that a lot of people would consider having the trust a huge bonanza for me. A lot of people might also think I had known about the trust all along. A lot of people might consider it a motive for murder.

When I left Tom, I drove to Bayfront Village. The woman at the front desk saw me when I came in the door and immediately picked up the phone to call Cora. Cora must have answered on the first ring, because the woman waved me on before I got to her desk.

“She’s waiting for you,” she chirped, as if my visit were a magnificent gift. I suppose in a retirement home, all visitors are considered a magnificent gift.

Cora had opened her door a crack again, and I rapped on it with my knuckles and pushed it open. No lights were burning, and the apartment had the dreary look of space where sunlight had recently withdrawn its warmth. Cora was sitting in a wing-back chair by the glass doors to the sunporch, still in her nightgown, her wispy white hair sticking up in the gloom like apparitional floss. I switched on a lamp and sat down in a chair at an angle to her. Neither of us said anything for several minutes, just sat there in the half-lit room and breathed in and out.

After a while, Cora sighed. “They say God never gives us more than we can handle, but sometimes I think God has overestimated what I can take.”

I said, “Have you eaten anything since this morning?”

She looked startled, as if the idea itself was foreign. “Well, hon, I don’t remember if I did or not.”

I got up and went in the little kitchen, switching on fluorescent lights that made harsh reflections on the white countertops. I found a can of vegetable soup, and while it heated, I made a pot of tea and got out cups and saucers for two. I poured the soup into a pretty blue pottery bowl, added crackers and butter, and carried the supper tray to the living room.

Cora eyed the tray with a flicker of interest. “There’s a TV tray behind the sofa there,” she said. I put the tray down on a lamp table and looked behind the sofa, where a wooden TV tray was folded flat. I pulled it out and set it up in front of Cora’s chair, put a napkin in her lap, and arranged her meager meal.

“You’d make a good waitress,” she said.

I poured myself a cup of tea and sat down and watched her take a few tentative spoonfuls.

“It’s good,” she said. “I didn’t think I was hungry, but I guess I am.”

For a few minutes, the only sound was the click of spoon against bowl and Cora’s faint slurping noises. She ate the entire bowl of soup and several buttered crackers before she pronounced herself full.

I removed the TV tray and poured us both another cup of tea. Her color was better now and her eyes had lost some of their stunned dullness.

I said, “Cora, do you know an attorney named Ethan Crane?”

“Well, I did, Dixie, but Ethan’s been gone now for a good while, a year maybe. Did you know him, too?”

“No, but his grandson called me today and asked me to stop by his office. It seems he has taken over Mr. Crane’s practice. His name is also Ethan Crane. Do you know the grandson?”

“No, I can’t say as I do. He’s taken over Ethan’s practice?”

“That’s what he said. He had a living trust that his grandfather had drawn up for Marilee. Do you know about that?”

She frowned. “A living what?”

“A trust. It’s a kind of will. According to the younger Mr. Crane, Marilee had two trusts, one for you and this other one that he talked to me about. Do you know about the trust she set up for you?”

“Oh my, yes, I know all about it. I have a copy of it. It’s personal, dear, so I won’t tell you what’s in it, but I won’t ever have to worry about running out of money.”

Her face crumpled and she sobbed quietly with her hands over her face. I waited, knowing that tears would come like that for a while, just spring out when she least expected them, as if there were a well of tears inside her that had to pour out on their own time. When she was cried out, I got up and got Kleenex for her from the bathroom and sat back down.

“Cora, the trust that Mr. Crane wanted to talk to me about was different from the one Marilee had for you. This one was for her cat.”

Cora stared at me wide-eyed. “Her cat?”

“The cat that I take care of when Marilee leaves town. His name is Ghost. She made this trust about a year ago, right after I started taking care of him. I didn’t know anything about it until Mr. Crane told me, but she put her house and car and everything in her house in this trust.”

Cora looked as if she was about to smile. “For her cat?”

I nodded. “For her cat. And she named me the trustee.”

Cora put her head back against the chair and laughed. Then she looked at me. “This is the truth? Marilee left her house and car to her cat?”

“It’s the truth.”

She laughed again, a girlish laugh of pure delight. “That’s Marilee,” she said. “Lord, that girl was always dragging home every stray cat she saw. She wanted to give a home to all of them, and some of them didn’t even want a home, they’d rather be roaming the alleys. But no, she couldn’t stand it, she had to take care of all of them.”

“It’s an awful lot of money, Cora.”

“Well, don’t worry about it, hon. Marilee must have trusted you to take good care of her cat or she wouldn’t have named you that whatchacallit.”

“Under the terms of the trust, when the cat dies, all the money that’s left goes to me.”

“And it should. Cats live a long time. You ought to get paid for all that time.”

“But I don’t want it, and I’ll get somebody else to take care of Ghost.”

She smiled at me with a new sparkle in her eyes. “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to figure out what to do with it when the time comes. And by that time, you might want it.”

“This doesn’t bother you?”

“Land no, it don’t bother me one bit. It tickles me, is what it does. You know, Marilee was a good girl. Lots of people might look at her with all the money she made and think she was something else, but she was a good girl, and her leaving all that to her cat just proves that she was. Now when I think of my baby, I won’t be thinking of how she ended her last minutes on this earth, I’ll be thinking that up to the very end, she was a little girl wanting to take care of all the cats in the world. A generous, loving little girl. That was my Marilee.”

I leaned over and patted her veined hand. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cora.”

“I guess that’s true. We never had much, but I always gave what I had.”

Carefully, I said, “For such a young woman, Marilee acquired quite a lot.”

She nodded proudly. “She did, that’s a fact. Marilee always had a head for figures. When she started getting the money from the Fraziers, she wasn’t old enough to take care of it herself, and Lord knows I didn’t know how to handle that much money. We wanted to get away from the Fraziers, so we moved here and she went all by herself to Ethan Crane and got herself declared a grown-up. I don’t remember what he called it, but I signed some papers and he had her something-or-other removed through the court.”

“Disabilities of nonage.”

“I guess so. Anyway, after that she could handle all that money by herself, and she did right well. She bought us a house first off, a nice little frame house in Bradenton, and then we went out and bought everything new. New refrigerator and new stove and new beds and mattresses. Oh my, we had a time doing that. First time either one of us had ever had a whole houseful of new things. She spent over half of the first money she got on the house and furniture and a new car for herself and one for me. But the money was going to keep coming in, every year, you know, so Marilee would sit up every night studying about how to invest it.”

I did a bit of fast calculation of what half of a quarter of a million dollars invested twenty years ago would be worth today at 10 percent compounded interest, and my head got swimmy. If the same amount was invested every year for twenty years, the total value would be more than I could count. Even accounting for Marilee’s expensive lifestyle, she had made herself an extremely wealthy woman.

Cora was watching me figure it out. “When I die,” she said, “all the money she made goes to help other poor girls get an education or start their own businesses. Ethan Crane set it up that way for her.”

“I never realized,” I said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Marilee never forgot where she came from, or how hard it was for us before the money. I kept working for a couple of years, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and so I finally quit. It was about time, too, my ankles were going real bad. I haven’t worked a lick since, and Marilee’s always taken good care of me. She was a good girl.”

Feeling chastened and slightly guilty, I got up and washed the supper dishes. I wondered if I would have been half as responsible as Marilee had been if I had started getting a quarter of a million dollars every year when I was sixteen. Marilee continued to surprise me.

On my way home, I turned on impulse and drove around the curve to Marilee’s house. A white Jaguar sat in her driveway, and I pulled up behind it and got out. When I rounded the corner of the garage, I saw Shuga Reasnor at the front door, trying to unlock it. She looked around at me with a dark expression of frustration and resentment.

“Have you had the damn locks changed?”

I shook my head, all innocence. “Doesn’t your key work?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it! You must have a key, let me in. I need to get some of my things.”

“I’m not authorized to let anybody in, Miss Reasnor.”

“Oh, bullshit! Who’s going to authorize you? Cora? The police? I have a right to go in and get my personal property before they send in some estate liquidator to haul everything off.”

“I’d have to make a list of everything you took and you’d have to sign a statement saying you took it. Otherwise, I can’t let you in.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! What difference does it make to you? It’s not your house.”

It didn’t seem the time to tell her the house now belonged to a cat.

I said, “I’m responsible for it, though, at least for the time being.”

She stretched her mouth into a semblance of a smile. “Look, it’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to me to get my things now. What do you say?”

“I say you’d better leave.”

“What’s the problem? You said Marilee left my name to call in an emergency.”

“An emergency involving her cat, not something you left in her house.”

“I’ll call Cora. She’ll let me in.”

“If Cora gives me permission to let you in, that’s fine. I just can’t do it on my own.”

She turned away from the door and clumped past me on her high heels. “Of all the stupid, idiotic, ignorant…”

I waited until she was in her Jag before I ambled past her to the Bronco and pulled out, backing up by the curb to let her exit the driveway and drive off in front of me. She gave me a murderous glare as she spun out and away. We both knew that she would come back, but only she knew why.

I waited until she’d had time to get onto Midnight Pass Road before I pulled back into the driveway. Marilee’s yard was freshly edged and the walk and driveway blown clean. Even after death, yards get maintained and pools get cleaned on Siesta Key. The Winnicks’ house was blank-faced and silent. I imagined Olga Winnick inside grieving the loss of innocence—either her son’s or her own.

Shuga obviously hadn’t known that Marilee’s locks had been changed, and that was surprising. If she’d always had a key to Marilee’s house, why hadn’t Marilee given her a new key when she had her locks changed? And why hadn’t she known about the change? That’s the kind of things that women tell their friends, but Marilee hadn’t told Shuga. Maybe Shuga had been the reason she’d had them changed. Maybe it was Shuga she didn’t want coming in her house while she was gone. But why? And why now, after being friends for so long?

Whatever it was that Shuga had hoped to get was something very important to her, and it seemed strange that she hadn’t said what it was, the way one woman would tell another. “I loaned her my best shirt and I want it back.” Or “I took a bracelet off the last time I was here and forgot it.” Instead, she had looked pinched and grim when I told her she’d have to reveal what she took and sign a statement listing everything. Shuga didn’t want anybody to know what she was taking from Marilee’s house. I wondered if this was the first time she had come looking for it, or if she had been the person who’d ransacked Marilee’s bedroom and closet.

Phillip had said the woman he’d seen had dark hair, but in the dark Shuga’s hair might have looked dark. Maybe Shuga had entered through the lanai and killed Frazier and Marilee, searched for whatever it was she wanted, and then left in a black Miata driven by an accomplice. But who was the accomplice? And who took Marilee’s body to the woods? Marilee was small, but Shuga didn’t seem muscular enough to carry her body that far.

I finally got out of the car and used my key to go inside. I flipped the switch to bathe the foyer in muted light, and sniffed at the cherry-scented air. I made a tour of the house, ending up in the kitchen, where I stayed clear of the spot where Frazier’s body had lain. It was the first time I’d ever been the first person in a house after the crime-scene cleaners, and I found the experience more disquieting than finding the dead body. Crime-scene cleaners remove not only spilled blood and body fluids but every living microbe, which leaves a house strangely absent of life. I had never realized before how invisible agents in our homes are constantly throwing off subtle scents and energies that create the essence of our interiors. Without them, a house is as impersonal as a tray of surgical instruments.

I went to the garage, where Marilee’s Ferrari took up half the space. The other half held a plastic garbage can, empty red and blue recycle bins, a stepladder, some stacked paint cans, and a few folding chairs propped against the wall. I knew the investigating team had thoroughly checked the car, but I opened the passenger door anyway. The Ferrari had creamy leather seats, so soft you could have made underwear from them. I ran my hand inside the storage pocket and under the seat. I opened the glove box and took out the sole content, a thin leather folder which held registration and insurance information. Otherwise, there was nothing. No maps, no sunglasses, no boxes of Kleenex or breath mints or leftover napkins from a fast-food drive-through. Not even a CD in the CD holder.

I opened the trunk and shined my penlight inside. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a speck of dust in it. I hadn’t learned a thing except that Marilee had been an extremely tidy woman who’d kept her car as fastidiously neat and clean as she’d kept her house and person. The remote control for the garage door was clipped to the sun visor, and I slipped it into my pocket. Before I went back in the house, I positioned the recycle bins and garbage can against the garage wall, next to the folding chairs and stepladder.