Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

26

The breeze was brisk and smelled of rain when I went out the next morning, and the curdled sky was not so tall. A few agitated gulls flapped above the waves, and on the beach a clawing surf tried to escape the pulsing sea. I stood on my porch a moment to inhale the salty day, then thumped down the stairs to the carport. Seabirds slept on every car, no doubt thinking themselves smart to get a pregame seat before the clouds burst.

At Tom Hale’s dark apartment, I slipped in quickly and hustled Billy Elliot out with a minimum of smooching. At least between Billy and me. A faint scent of perfume in the air made me think Tom had an overnight guest again, so there may have been other smooching.

In the parking lot, security lamps cast wide pools of light on the oval track where Billy and I ran, but the sky was too overcast to let any dawning light through. We both looked up frequently. Billy probably hoped he’d get to sprint through a warm shower, I hoped the rain would hold off until Billy and I had finished our run. Besides Ruthie and Big Bubba, my other clients for the day were seven cats—including two pairs—and a ferret. I would inevitably end up trailing cat hair. I hoped it wouldn’t be stuck to wet clothes.

After Billy and I had made it around the last loop, and he had raised his leg one more time to announce to all the subsequent dogs on the track that he was still the number one honcho, we skipped back into the lobby. A jelly-bottomed woman in skin-tight lycra leggings popped out of the elevator before we got to it. She had slept-on hair and a bright-eyed Yorkie on a leash. The Yorkie was the size of a Hostess Sno Ball and was dancing with excitement. The woman looked as if she hadn’t been awake more than two minutes.

Billy Elliot looked down at the Yorkie with keen interest.

As the woman opened the lobby door to go out, she said, “I’ve gotta house break this puppy.”

She sounded as if she thought she needed to explain why she was going out before sunup looking like an un-made bed and leading a dog. Obviously a first-time dog owner.

As we got in the elevator, Billy Elliot looked over his shoulder for one last glimpse of the Yorkie—as if he wished he had one for himself. Whether we have two legs or four, I suppose we all want a companion of our own kind.

Back in Tom’s apartment, the kitchen light was on and I could smell coffee brewing. I looked toward the kitchen but didn’t see Tom, so I hugged Billy Elliot goodbye and slipped out. This time I was almost sure Tom had company. I’m not sure what it is, but people make impressions on the air so that even if you can’t see them, you know they’re there. I just hoped this woman was better than Tom’s last girlfriend. Not that it was any of my business, but Tom deserves the best.

The sky remained overcast and rain threatening for the rest of the morning. At every stop, I expected raindrops. I made a record fast stop to give Ruthie her next-to-last pill, and goosed the Bronco toward Big Bubba’s.

It still hadn’t rained when I got to his house. I hurried up the stairs, removed his night cover, and opened his cage door. I gave him an anxious once-over to make sure he hadn’t gone bird nuts from boredom, but all his feathers were intact and shiny. He cocked his head and regarded me with the same scrutiny I was giving him, except I used both eyes.

He said, “Did you miss me?” Not angrily, just conversationally.

I said, “For breakfast this morning, may I suggest our best imported banana? It’s served with toasted Cheerios and prime sunflower seeds on a bed of organic millet.”

He said, “Get that man!” Then he laughed like a demented Santa Claus.

In the kitchen, I got his banana and some sliced apple. When I went back to the sunroom, he was sitting atop his cage looking toward the lanai. With no sun, the lanai probably didn’t look very appealing to him.

I said, “It’s cloudy today, with a ninety percent chance of rain. Temperatures will be in the high eighties. There are no major traffic problems.”

He said, “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

I considered trying to persuade him to play on his exercise wheel, but I knew he’d rather watch dew evaporate. I unlocked the lanai slider and opened it so he could go out in the humid air.

I said, “While you’re at the gym, I’ll clean your house and put out your breakfast. Would you care for a news update?”

He waddled across the slider track to the lanai while I switched on the TV to a drug commercial featuring several lovely women wearing bedsheets tastefully pulled above their bosoms. A soothing female voice-over listed the consequences of taking the drug being advertised—blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, death—while the women in the sheets smiled benignly, bizarrely separate from the doublespeak.

The ad was replaced by local news people who were still covering kidnapping and murder.

An earnest woman with close-set eyes said, “Mrs. Salazar has not returned calls, and there have been no reported breaks in the case. A spokesperson for the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department said the homicide investigation is ongoing.”

The newswoman didn’t say anything about Harry Henry being the person who’d made the ransom call to Maureen. I didn’t know what that meant, but I was oddly pleased, as if it might all have been a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity that had been cleared up.

I’m too smart to fall for drug company propaganda, but gullible as a goose when it comes to old friends.

I changed the station to PBS so Big Bubba wouldn’t get brainwashed by commercials, and left to go to Hetty’s house. The sky was the color of mold, and the air had stilled. Trees and flowers were motionless. Even songbirds seemed to be holding their breath waiting for the clouds to let go.

With rain looking more probable every minute, I pulled as far as I could into Hetty’s driveway so I wouldn’t have so far to sprint when I left. When I rang the bell, Hetty and Ben let me in so quickly I thought they might have been watching for me. Lamps were lit in the shadowy house. By tacit agreement, we didn’t move away from the front door, but stood in the foyer.

Hetty said, “Any word?”

“No. You?”

“Not a thing. She knows my number, Dixie. And I know she trusted me. She would call if she could.”

I could have called too. Or Hetty could have called me. I had stopped for the same reason she’d been waiting for me—we needed each other’s personal assurance that everything that could be done was being done.

I said, “I guess all we can do is wait.”

“Wait for what?”

I didn’t want to answer her. I was very afraid we were waiting for somebody to stumble on Jaz’s body.

Perhaps because she feared I might voice those thoughts, she said, “It’s going to storm any minute now.”

I opened the door and stepped outside. I said, “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

I trotted to the Bronco, and Hetty and Ben stood in the doorway and watched me back out. With the soft light behind them, they looked like the answer to a hopeless person’s prayers.

The Village Diner was almost deserted, and the people inside were craning their necks toward the windows while they ate at double time. Judy scooted to my booth with my coffee, and Tanisha waved at me from the kitchen pass-through to let me know she was on my breakfast.

Judy said, “It’s gonna come a real gully washer.”

“Looks like it.”

She said, “Dixie, did you know that kidnapped guy?”

“I went to school with his wife, but I only met him once or twice. Why?”

“Oh, they keep talking about it on the news, and they said the wife went to high school here, so I thought you might know them, all of you being natives.”

“He wasn’t from here.”

“They said Venezuela.”

“I think that’s right.”

“Something’s mighty fishy about that whole thing, Dixie. I hope that wife isn’t a good friend of yours because I’ll bet a million dollars she did it.”

I said, “You got a million dollars to pay me?”

“I’d have to pay it in installments, but I know I’m right.”

“I don’t know how she could kidnap her own husband. I mean, who would she be kidnapping him from? And then she’d have to pay herself off? I don’t think so.”

“Well, but see, what if she killed him and then got somebody else to dump him out of a boat? What if he was already dead when he drowned? They’re not saying exactly what killed him, have you noticed that? They say they won’t tell until they’ve done an autopsy. Why haven’t they done that yet?”

That’s the thing about being an ex-deputy. People think they can ask me questions about criminal investigations and that I’ll know the answers.

Tanisha dinged a bell to signal that my breakfast was ready, and Judy scooted away to get it. Good thing, because what she’d said made me feel like somebody had slapped me upside the head. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Could Maureen have killed Victor? I wondered if Guidry had already considered the possibility.

If she had, then the money I’d carried to the gazebo hadn’t gone to kidnappers at all, but back into Maureen’s safe, and Maureen had used me sixteen ways from Thursday.

The rains came just as Judy put my breakfast down. The air inside the diner seemed to drop a few degrees, and the muffled roar of falling rain shrank the space to a refuge.

I ate my breakfast without a single glance at the windows. My mind was too busy thinking about what Judy had said to pay attention to a storm. For sure she’d been right about Victor being already dead when he was thrown overboard, and as soon as the medical examiner did an autopsy, that would be public knowledge.

If it also became public knowledge that Harry Henry had made the ransom call, the world would assume that Harry had killed Victor Salazar and that he had a million dollars in ransom money stashed somewhere. If Maureen had killed Victor herself, would she let Harry take the rap? It was a dumb question. Of course she would. If Maureen had to name the one person in the entire world who deserved her greatest loyalty, she would name herself.

I didn’t linger over coffee, but left while the rain was still slanting down in opaque sheets. I was drenched by the time I got to the Bronco, and shivered when I started the motor and a blast of cold air came from the AC vents. I let the defogger run long enough to get rid of the moisture on the glass, started the wipers front and back, and eased into sparse traffic. I headed south toward home, but when I got to the turnoff to my lane, I kept going south.

I wanted to talk to Harry Henry again, and this time I wasn’t going to let him lie to me.