Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

FOUR

Gilda made motions with her hands like circling fish, then abruptly darted from the room.

Trying to sound more confident than I was, I said, “I noticed you have a big oak tree in your courtyard. Ziggy’s probably up there. If you’ll point me toward the kitchen, I’ll see if I can coax him down with food.”

Mutely, he pointed in the same direction Gilda had run, and I went down a hall to a kitchen that made me think of a hospital. White ceramic tile was everywhere—on the floor, on the wall between cabinets and countertops, and on the countertops themselves. Large squares of shiny ceramic linked by nurse-white grout and surrounded by nurse-white cupboards, nurse-white walls, and nurse-white appliances. Not a spot of color intruded. Even the dish towels folded next to the white porcelain sink were bright white. A magnolia would have looked dingy in all that stark whiteness.

Feeling like a large dirty germ, I clumped to the big white refrigerator and pulled the door open. These people didn’t have color anywhere. No jars of purple jelly, no bottles of red ketchup, no green pickles. Nothing but stacks of packages neatly wrapped in white butcher paper, their corners and edges as squared as Christmas gift-wrapping. There was the same odd odor of iodine too. With my skin goose-bumping, either from the refrigerator’s cold air or the weirdness of its contents, I pulled out one of the lower vegetable drawers. No squash. No romaine. No vegetables of any kind. It was full of white packages too, all with that funny iodine smell.

I suddenly remembered that in some parts of the world, iguanas are slaughtered and eaten. Feeling slightly nauseated, I closed the refrigerator door and went looking for the nurse.

In the hallway, I heard the sound of theatrical sobbing. I followed the sound to a room as laboratory white as the kitchen. White walls, white draperies, white carpet, white painted furniture. Still wearing her surgical gloves, Gilda was face down on a double bed covered with a stark-white matelassé spread.

Oh, this was terrific. An impostor had hired me to take care of an iguana that wasn’t his. A guard hired to protect the iguana’s actual owner had been killed, and the iguana was possibly in the refrigerator in little white packages. To make this my really lucky day, the owner’s nurse was an incredibly beautiful flake. She might possibly be a murderous flake, guilty of killing both the guard and the iguana.

Since the house wrapped around a central courtyard, the layout was a bit disorienting. The four garages were on the south side, and the long living room with its huge fireplace took up the central part of the west wing. The dining room, kitchen, and Gilda’s room were the north wing. I could see, at a right angle to Gilda’s room, a long hallway running down the east side. Ken Kurtz’s bedroom was either there or in a south wing between the garages and the courtyard. I wondered if he and Gilda had something other than a patient-nurse relationship. Not that I was judging. If they were lovers, Gilda wouldn’t be the first beautiful woman to cozy up to a repulsive rich employer, nor would he be the first repulsive man to feel so grateful to have a beautiful woman in his bed that he’d give her anything she wanted.

I said, “Gilda, are those packages in the refrigerator iguana steaks?”

She raised a tearstained face and glared at me. “Who kill Ramón? How kill him? When? Why the policeman not tell me Ramón is dead?”

Even though she seemed too dramatic to be real, it occurred to me for the first time that she truly might not have known the guard was dead. Sergeant Owens might not have told her there had been a murder on the other side of the row of areca palms that separated the house from the guardhouse. Perhaps he had been waiting for Guidry to do it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done it either. Perhaps I had done something that would cause Guidry to want to wring my neck.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I said, “I’m just a pet sitter, Gilda. I take care of animals. I don’t know the answers to those questions.”

“And I am nurse. I take care Mr. Kurtz. I don’t know about animal.”

“Okay, so taking care of the iguana isn’t your job. Just tell me what’s happened to him. Did somebody kill him?”

She buried her face in the bed and made some more sounds of racking sobs, but this time they seemed even more contrived. I had the feeling she was stalling for time while she thought up an answer.

The scraping sound of Ken Kurtz’s approaching footsteps made Gilda raise her head. As if she wanted to get the words out before Kurtz got to her door, she blurted out, “Is not dead. Is in wine room.”

I’ve stopped being surprised at the things rich people have in their houses. Poor people count themselves lucky to have running water and flush toilets. Middle-class people have living rooms and dining rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, bathrooms and closets. Rich people have things like ballrooms and movie rooms in their house. They have fitness centers that rival Gold’s gyms, along with game rooms and bowling alleys. Ken Kurtz apparently had a wine cellar, which, given the fact that you hit water if you dig three feet under Siesta Key’s sandy soil, meant he had a ground-level room dedicated to the storage of wines.

Being somewhere between poor and middle-class, the only thing I knew about wine cellars was that they were kept dark and at an even temperature. I wasn’t sure what the temperature was, but I knew it wasn’t warm enough for an iguana.

I moved away from Gilda’s door to meet Kurtz. Each step seemed to cost him dearly in strength and endurance, but he had the look of a man with a mission. He also had the look of a man who always did what he intended to do.

I said, “Where’s the wine room?”

His blue forehead furrowed suspiciously. “Why?”

“Gilda says Ziggy is in it.”

Laboriously, he did a U-turn and headed back toward the kitchen. I gave one last look at Gilda, who appeared to be deep in thought, and followed him. Seen from the back, Kurtz presented a different persona—partly because his shoulders were surprisingly broad for such an emaciated man and partly because I could make out the outline of a small handgun nestled in a holster above his buttocks under his plaid bathrobe. It looked an awful lot like the kind of backup that every law enforcement officer carries somewhere on his person.

As I followed his agonized shuffle through the kitchen and dining room, I went over all the possible reasons that a man who had a private guard outside his house would also wear a gun inside. It could have been because he was crazy paranoid—a definite possibility—or it could have been because whoever killed the guard had intended to kill Ken Kurtz, and Kurtz knew it. Something strange was definitely going on in this house, and whatever it was had to do with the reason somebody had called me about the iguana.

We turned the corner into the living room, the west wing of the house, where the fire in the humongous fireplace was still blazing away. This part of the house seemed to be the only place without a glass wall looking out at the courtyard. Instead, glass walls flanked the double front doors and looked out at the palm privacy hedge. Kurtz hobbled past the fireplace and I trailed behind, walking so slowly to match his pace that it made me feel off-balance. The fireplace must have had a fan arrangement to blow heated air into the room, because I felt a welcome warmth on my legs as I heel-toed past it. Even Kurtz seemed to relax a bit when he felt it, if you can call easing one arm down to his side relaxed. The arm had been doubled in front of him before, crossed over his stomach as if he needed it to hold his skin down.

At the far end of the living room, the southern end, we came to a closed door. Kurtz took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door while I calculated that it led to a windowless room behind the row of garages. Kurtz pulled the door open, revealing a dark, cavernous space. He fumbled for a moment for a light switch, but when he found it the room wasn’t much brighter than before. What light there was came from a red bulb like a photographer’s darkroom illumination. In its eerie light, towering shelves leaped into view, all lined up like library stacks, each stack full of dark bottles that gave off odd purplish glints. The walls were lined with shelves of wine too. Overall, I estimated the room at about ten feet deep and twenty feet long—approximately a third the size of my apartment.

In my supermarket, wines are set upright with stickers on the fronts of the shelves to let me know which ones are on sale for less than ten dollars—my favorite vintage. Kurtz’s wines were laid so their necks pointed down at an angle, and I was pretty sure the price of one bottle would be fifty times what I paid for mine.

I said, “What’s the temperature in there?”

“Fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit.”

Huh. Only a scientist or an intellectual show-off would have tacked on that “Fahrenheit,” and Kurtz didn’t strike me as a show-off.

“Can you turn on a brighter light?”

“Bright light isn’t good for the wine.”

Okay, maybe he was an intellectual show-off after all.

I said, “You don’t need to go in. I’ll find him.”

Kurtz looked slightly relieved. He probably hadn’t been looking forward to shuffling around between those stacks of wine bottles. I stepped into the room and stood a minute to get my bearings. The room wasn’t frigid, but I wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time in it. To an iguana, it would feel even colder. I turned to the right and moved along the outside wall, peering down each aisle between rows of shelves for the outline of a giant lizard. At the far end, I circled to the other side and walked straight along the long corridor to the stacks on the left side of the door. I found Ziggy with his head butted against the back wall and his long tail stretched out along the back corridor. He was immobile, with all his systems on hold. Poor guy didn’t even know where he was. Iguanas locate themselves in space not by the view through their regular eyes but by light entering a parietal eye at the base of their skull. That “third eye” sloughs off like a contact lens when they shed their skins. In the dull red light of the wine room, Ziggy’s navigational parietal eye was rendered useless.

I said, “Hey, boy. You okay?”

It was a dumb question. Ziggy didn’t know I was there and didn’t care. More than likely, Ziggy didn’t know anything right then. He was totally tuned out, not just to what was going on outside himself but to what was going on inside too. If it hadn’t been for his sides moving in and out with each breath, I would have thought he was dead. Even so, he was still capable of instinctive response, and I knew from painful experience that picking up an iguana so that he doesn’t feel securely supported is a good way to make him panic and lash you with his powerful tail. Which won’t kill you, but it hurts like hell. I knelt by his side and slid one arm under his neck to get a good grip on his front leg and the other arm under his back end to grip his back leg. When I lifted him off the floor, I pulled him snug so he was not only supported on my arms but close against my body. Then I sidestepped down the outside corridor until I came to the aisle leading to the door.

Kurtz was still in the doorway, one hand leaning against the doorjamb as if he might collapse any minute. The sleeve of his bathrobe had fallen away to expose a gauze dressing on the inside of his elbow, like the dressing that covers an indwelling catheter for receiving medication or blood transfusions. Gilda might be a flake, but she apparently was a competent nurse.

When he saw me, he straightened up in a way that made me think of a military man snapping to attention. No doubt about it, Kurtz was either an ex-cop or an ex-serviceman of some sort. But what kind of cop or serviceman retires with enough money for Kurtz’s lifestyle?

When I sidled through the door, Kurtz looked down at Ziggy’s cold-darkened body and a flicker of something like anguish moved across his face. My mind flashed to the way my grandfather had cried when our pet iguana died. I’d always thought it was because he’d been grieved to lose Bobby, but now I realized he’d wept because he was disappointed in himself for not protecting Bobby from the cold. We humans who take on the care of pets are really setting tests for ourselves of how responsible and caring we can be. If we fail our pets, we fail the test.

I said, “He’s black because he’s cold. When he warms up, his normal color will come back.”

Kurtz made a rasping noise intended for a laugh. “Wish I could say the same for myself.”

With Ziggy’s side hard against my waist, I headed for the living room and the warmth of the fireplace. A basket filled with fireplace logs and kindling was at one side of the hearth, and a neat stack of large floor pillows sat at the other end. They invited people to sit on the floor and gaze into the fire and have a glass of wine, but I doubted that anybody in this house had ever sat on one. I kicked at the stack until I had enough pillows in front of the fire to make a soft bed for Ziggy, then gently lowered him and stretched his long tail out behind him. His eyelids were closed. He didn’t move. If somebody who didn’t know better had seen him, they would have thought he was a stone carving.

Kurtz had made it to the fire by this time. I heard him shuffle up and stop, but I didn’t look at him. I was busy watching Ziggy.

Kurtz said, “I think those pillows are made from antique Persian rugs.”

“Good, then they’re probably not synthetic. I don’t like synthetics around my pets.”

“What did you say your name was?”

I looked at him then. “It’s Dixie Hemingway.”

“Any relation to—?”

“No, and I don’t have any of his six-toed cats, either.”

“I guess you get asked that a lot.”

A form walked past the glass window, and I took a deep breath. I knew that form. Lieutenant Guidry had arrived and was about to ring the doorbell. Like a dog salivating to the ringing of a bell, various parts of my anatomy began to do all kinds of things, some of which are illegal in Republican states.

I had fairly recently come to realize that I had the hots for Guidry, and it scared me to death. I didn’t want to want a man, and certainly not another deputy. Todd had been the love of my life, and when he died I had laid away all thoughts of romance or love or sex or any of those things that most thirty-two-year-old women have at the forefront of their minds. But my body was telling me it had an entirely different agenda. My mind could make whatever plans suited its ideals, but my body wasn’t going along.

I said, “You might want to get rid of that gun before you talk to the homicide detective.”

May God strike me dead, I don’t know what possessed me to say that. Maybe it was a way to deny to myself that I was excited at seeing Guidry. Maybe it was because Kurtz had looked sad when he saw Ziggy’s dark color. Maybe it was the fact that the man was so ugly he would scare little children, and probably crazy to boot. I’ve always been a pushover for the underdog, and Ken Kurtz had way too many strikes against him for his own good. Whatever it was, I suddenly wanted to protect him the same way I wanted to protect Ziggy.