Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

TWENTY-SEVEN

Kurtz wasn’t wearing his tatty old plaid robe. Instead, he was dressed like a man ready for traveling, in dark trousers and a blue-and-white striped shirt, with tasseled loafers on his bare feet. The blue in his shirt was eerily similar to the blue of his skin. Both blue hands bore angry red welts across their backs.

Ignoring Gilda’s gun, he walked to the stainless table holding the pile of vials. He picked up a vial and waved it at her.

“Stupid cow! Did you think I would let you take the work I’ve sacrificed my life for?”

Gilda’s face twisted, and she mimed spitting on the floor. “Pah! No sacrifice! Is all for money!”

“Speaking of money, which pharmaceutical firm is financing you?”

Again, Gilda made a spitting motion. “I work for my people, for the men and women and children on my island.”

Holding the vial out on his open palm, Kurtz stepped closer to her. “Then you’re even stupider than I thought.

What did you plan to do, take these vials home and pass them out on the street?”

She looked from his face to the vial.

I was hoping she would spit again, this time for real, but instead she looked distracted. She actually gestured with her gun as she talked, like a teacher holding a pointer.

“I take them to health department. My government will take them to laboratory … they will know what to do with them.”

Showing a lot more energy and strength than I’d seen before, Ken Kurtz moved another step closer to her, and I knew that in the next moment he planned to take her gun. I wasn’t so sure I liked what I thought he might do once he had it. Gilda might be a thief and she might have tried to hire a hit man to kill Kurtz, but I sort of liked her team better than his.

I said, “I hate to burst all your bubbles, but an FBI team has this house under surveillance and you’ll both be arrested.”

Ken Kurtz settled the vial in the cooler and looked up at me with a smug smile. “That’s like telling Jonas Salk that his parking meter has expired so his polio vaccine is lost to the world. You have no idea how important my work is.”

“Sure I do. You’ve developed a vaccine for bird flu.”

Both their jaws dropped in such identical gapes of shock that it was almost funny.

I pointed at a whirling centrifuge. “I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know how you make a vaccine, but I know virus-extracting machines can separate a virus from blood and concentrate it.”

His eyes narrowed in paranoid suspicion. “Only another scientist would guess at a vaccine for avian flu.”

“Oh, please! You don’t have to be a scientist to know that iguanas and chickens have identical respiratory and digestive systems. When an iguana is sick, you give it bird tonic. If you transferred a bird virus to an iguana, the virus would weaken because the iguana is a cold-blooded animal, but the iguana would essentially become a vaccine-producer.”

Kurtz stared at me with a look of surprised respect, sort of like a dog looks at a human after the human makes barking sounds.

I spread my hands, palms up. “Once you know how, I imagine it’s rather easy. You’ve infected Ziggy with avian flu, he has produced antibodies, and now you’re drawing blood from him to spin them out in your vaccine-making machines.”

Sounding like somebody who had always wanted to talk about his work to an equal, Kurtz said, “In the beginning, I tried to use silver nitrate to attenuate the virus. It went much faster when I conceived of using iguana blood instead.”

I looked at the welts on Kurtz’s hands and knew he had planned to draw blood from Ziggy that night. That had been the purpose of putting him in the wine room, to shut him down so he could draw blood without being whipped or scratched. I also knew that when Ken Kurtz was between bouts of debilitation, he was a lot stronger than anybody had imagined possible—strong enough to pick Ziggy up and carry him to the wine room, strong enough to walk out to the guardhouse and shoot Ramón in the head while he slept.

I said, “I don’t understand why you killed Ramón.”

A flicker of surprise moved across his cheeks. “How did you know?”

“Until this minute, I didn’t. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense. What I don’t understand is why you did it.”

“He saw the lab. He would have talked.”

Gilda said, “You killed Ramón?”

“It was your fault. You opened the door from the wine room to the lab while he was still in the wine room. He saw through the door.”

“Bastard!”

I didn’t know which one disgusted me more, Kurtz for always blaming somebody else for what he did or Gilda for trying to rise to his level of sliminess. From the fury and pain in Gilda’s eyes, I had a feeling that Paloma’s suspicions about her husband and Gilda might be true.

She backed up a step from Kurtz, got a firmer grip on her gun, and glared at me as if I had been a partner in the crime.

I said, “Some people are damn disappointing.”

She waved the gun side to side. “Now you will both go into living room. I will walk behind. If you run away, I will kill you.”

She might not have been capable of murder before, but I believed her. Gilda had crossed over her own drawn line, and now she wasn’t simply furious and determined, she was full of fine reckless vengeance.

Stepping smartly in my high heels, I clacked through the wine room. Drawn to the living room’s warmth and light, Ziggy had moved closer to the door that Kurtz had left open. Careful to stay far enough away to avoid his tail or his claws, I circled around him and stepped through the doorway. Kurtz and Gilda must have followed my lead, because they both got past him without being lashed or clawed.

When I reached the fireplace, Gilda called out, “Stop.”

Beside me, Kurtz bent to the basket of wood on the hearth. At first I thought he hoped to fling a log at Gilda and knock the gun from her hand, but instead he carefully arranged kindling and fresh logs on the smoldering fragments to reignite them.

Scientific minds have screwy priorities.

Gilda had a wild-eyed grip on her gun, but I could tell from the way she held it that any shots she got off would be poorly aimed—not that a random bullet isn’t as destructive as an aimed one, especially if it hits you. It seemed to me that the situation required somebody with a cool head. Unfortunately, the best we had was me.

I said, “Gilda, the police are looking for you because they think you may have killed Ramón. Once they know you didn’t, they’ll have no interest in you. But you’re in Florida where the death penalty is alive and well, so if you kill either Ken Kurtz or me, you’re a dead woman.”

I didn’t think it necessary to point out that Guidry might arrest her for conspiring to kill Kurtz.

Still looking unfazed by her big gun, Kurtz said, “Gilda, do you really believe you can simply pack up the vaccine and walk away from here? Dixie’s telling the truth about the FBI. The minute you go out the door with the vaccine, they’ll take it.”

He sounded so certain that for a moment I believed him. Maybe the FBI really was out there somewhere in the darkness watching us, maybe they were picking up our conversation on remote speakers. If they were, Ken Kurtz would surely be arrested for industrial espionage and for murder.

If Gilda believed him, it only fueled her anger. “Yes, they will take vaccine and let you go free! They will say I killed Ramón, that I am evil one. They will kill me and make you a hero.”

Something uncoiled in my chest, and as I looked at that raving woman with the oversized gun and the outrageous imagination, I knew she might speak the truth. I also knew that I was the expendable one, the fly in the ointment that nobody would miss. It wouldn’t be hard to frame Gilda as Ramón’s killer. And if they killed me, they could easily say Kurtz had shot me after I’d broken into his house.

The galling thing was that a lot of people, including Guidry, wouldn’t have trouble believing I had broken into Kurtz’s house. The fact that I actually had broken in didn’t make it any easier to like the idea of people thinking I had.