The Cat Sitter's Cradle

19

Kenny had laced his fingers behind his neck and was staring up at the ceiling. I had about a million questions for him, but if what he had just said was true, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of pain he must have been in. He had lost his father at a tender age, and then his mother to suicide, and now he had lost his father all over again. I knew what it was like to be young and lose a parent, but this was something completely out of my league.

Softly, I said, “Kenny, I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “That picture was in the first letter I ever got from him. At first he said he was my uncle. He said he’d read about my mother and he just wanted to know if I was okay. So I wrote him back, even though I knew something wasn’t right. Nobody had ever mentioned I had an uncle. Eventually I started to figure it out, and he finally admitted who he was. It turned out he had planned his escape for months. The day he disappeared, he drove to the beach in the morning like he always did. He made sure he got there bright and early so nobody would see him. He parked his car and went down to the water. He left his shirt and sandals in the sand, but this time he took a change of clothes, wrapped up in a plastic bag and covered with tape. Then he walked out into the water a couple feet deep and trekked three miles up the coast, staying in the water and off the beach the whole time. When he figured he’d gone far enough, he came up on the beach, put on dry clothes, and hitchhiked out of town. He traveled all over the country for a couple of years, doing odd jobs and fooling around with girls. Finally he wound up here in Sarasota, got married, and never left again.”

Ethan said, “Wow. That’s heavy.”

Kenny laughed sadly and shook his head. “I know. It’s crazy.”

“So, why did he get in touch with you?”

He shrugged. “Guilt. He felt guilty, and he wanted to make it up to me somehow.”

We sat there for a few moments in silence. I wanted to believe him, as far-fetched as his story was, but there was still one thing I didn’t understand. I was almost afraid to ask, because I didn’t think I was going to like the answer.

I said, “Kenny, why did you come to Siesta Key?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to see him. I wanted to know who he was. I … I wanted to know why. Why did he leave us? I wanted him to look me in the face and explain it, man to man. I mean, I get it—he wanted to run away. Everybody feels like that once in a while, right? But how could he just leave his family like that? I felt like I couldn’t go on with my life until I had an answer. So one day I just packed up my truck and drove down here. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going.”

“But how did you find him?”

“It was easy. The return address on his letters was always the same—a post office box in Siesta Key. There’s only one post office here. So I just hung out in the parking lot until I saw somebody that looked familiar, and then I followed him home.”

He picked up the photo and slipped it back into his breast pocket. “At first he had written that he lived like a bum, slept on the beach, jumped from job to job, didn’t have any friends. But eventually he admitted that was a lie, too. Turned out he was filthy rich and he wanted to make it up to me. He said his stepkids were worthless and I could have it all. It was too late to change what he had done, but at least he could set me up for life. He wanted to buy me a house and everything.”

I frowned. “So that’s why you’re here.”

He shook his head. “No. No way. I didn’t come here to get rich.”

“Then why did you pretend to be a pool cleaner and work your way into his home?”

“I didn’t pretend. I was broke. I started cleaning pools because I didn’t have enough money to get back to California. So I made up some flyers saying I cleaned pools and could do odd jobs and started leaving them around town. One day this dude calls me up and asks if I can clean his pool, somebody had referred me. When he gave me his address I knew right away. It was Roy Harwick.”

I said, “And you never told him who you were?”

“No. I was going to. But things got a little complicated…”

“You mean Becca.”

Kenny’s face flushed red as he looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Becca.”

Ethan turned to me and whispered, “Who’s Becca?”

“Mr. Harwick’s daughter. She’s pregnant.”

He nodded. “Ah, of course.”

I could tell Ethan was getting a little impatient with the whole story, and to be honest so was I. Kenny must have wanted something more from the Harwicks. Why else would he come all this way and infiltrate himself into their home, not to mention their daughter?

“So when was the last time you saw your father?”

He looked down at the floor, struggling to keep his emotions under control. “It was at his house. The night before you found him.”

I shook my head. “No, Kenny. You’re lying. Mr. and Mrs. Harwick were in Tampa that night.”

He let out a little laugh. “Really? Well, as soon as he heard what I had to say, he came right back home, didn’t he?”

For the first time I could feel his anger, not just at Mr. Harwick but at the world. I think I would probably have felt the same. If he was telling the truth, his father’s selfishness had triggered a chain of events that led to his mother’s suicide. He had already grieved away his childhood over the drowning of his father, and now it looked like he was going to have to do it all over again.

I said, “What did you say to him?”

“When he answered the phone I said, ‘Mr. Harwick, my name isn’t Kenny. It’s Daniel. Daniel Imperiori. I’m your son.’”

The human brain is such an amazing thing. It’s constantly absorbing new things and adapting and changing. Scientists have even proven that a person’s intelligence isn’t some static constant, like an IQ number, but something that can be improved just by giving it the right combination of food, rest, and exercise. It’s like a kitten—but kittens can be very predictable. I guarantee that if you wiggle the tip of a peacock feather in front of a kitten, some magical unseen force will immediately take over, and that kitten will pounce on that feather without a moment’s thought.

It’s kind of the same with the human brain. It can be pretty predictable, too. As a cop, I learned to recognize certain signals that people give off when they’re being less than honest. For example, if you’re making something up that’s not true, nine times out of ten your eyes will wander to the right without your even knowing it. But if you’re telling the truth, trying to remember something that actually happened, most of the time your eyes will wander to the left. As Kenny remembered his conversation with Mr. Harwick, I noticed his eyes. He wasn’t lying.

“What was his reaction when you told him who you were?”

“Nothing at first. I started to think he was going to hang up on me. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’ I told him I wanted to talk and that it couldn’t wait, so he said to meet him at his house that night. He was whispering, so I knew he didn’t want Mrs. Harwick to know about it.”

“What time did you meet him?”

“Late. When I left it was almost midnight.”

His words hung in the air. I knew Ethan and I were both silently thinking the same thing: And where exactly was Mr. Harwick when you left?

He looked from me to Ethan and then back again. “Look. I didn’t kill him. I know what you must think, but it’s not like I planned it to happen this way. I admit—it was totally cool to be able to watch him, to be right there under his nose. But once I saw what kind of person he was, the way he treated people, the way he made his money, I didn’t want anything to do with him. I was sorry I ever met him. Dixie, you have to believe me.”

I said, “I understand, but you’re going to have a tough time convincing the police of that. Mr. Harwick was a very wealthy man. You show up, his only living son, the abandoned heir to his fortune, and then all of a sudden he’s found dead in the bottom of a swimming pool and you were the last person to see him. It’s a little hard to believe you wouldn’t want all that money.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said, too. But I’m not stupid. I know what Sonnebrook is, and I don’t want anything to do with that crap. I told him he could take his money and rot in hell—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath.

I glanced over at Ethan, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Kenny regained himself and said, “So that’s why I gave him everything.”

“Gave him what?”

“A big envelope with all the letters he sent me. All the letters where he admitted he was my father, where he said he wanted to leave everything to me. All of it. There were even checks he sent me that I never cashed. The only thing I kept was this photo, just to remind me of what could have been. He said he didn’t care. He could still leave his money to me and I couldn’t stop him. I said, ‘If there’s anything I learned from you, it’s how to disappear. So good luck with that.’ Then I left.”

I said, “Okay. Kenny, or Daniel … what am I supposed to call you?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Just call me Kenny. I’m used to it now.”

“You’re going to leave here, and you’re going straight to the police. I’ll back your story up. If you tell them everything you’ve told us, they’ll believe you.”

Kenny nodded. “You have to promise me one thing, though. That message I left on your machine. When I said I was about to do something big, I was talking about leaving town. I was going to leave those letters, say good-bye to Becca, and disappear.”

“It’s okay. I figured that out.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. If the police get ahold of that tape, they’ll think it’s a confession. They’ll think I planned it all along. They can’t ever hear it.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I believed everything he had told us, or at least, I believed he believed everything he had told us. I believed his father had disappeared in the ocean when he was a child. I believed his mother had committed suicide on the beach where his father had disappeared a decade earlier. I think I even believed that his father was in fact Mr. Harwick. Still, there was a rage in Kenny, bubbling just beneath the surface, that I had never seen before. I couldn’t be sure that even he was aware of the kind of power that rage might have over him—the kind of power that could make him capable of murder.

Ethan cleared his throat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Okay, this is where I come in. As an attorney, I can tell you without a doubt that you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you try to hide anything from the police. I’m sure Dixie would love to make that promise to you right now, but you’ve got to face the facts: If the detectives don’t already have a record of every phone call you made in the days leading up to the murder, they soon will. They’ll see right through it. You’ll just be digging yourself in a hole that you can’t get out of.”

Kenny looked at me, and I tried to reassure him with a smile and a nod, but inside I was thinking, Yeah. What he said.

* * *

By the time Ethan and I watched Kenny descend the stairs down to the driveway and disappear into the night, it was just after 4:00 A.M., my normal rise and shine. I looked up at the moon and said a little prayer of thanks to the powers that be for giving me the forethought to ask Pete Madeira to cover my pet visits for the morning. We stepped back inside and shut the French doors. I looked at Ethan and he looked at me, and we both let out a huge sigh of relief.

I said, “Well, there’s not much point in you going home now. The sun will be up soon.”

He collapsed onto the couch. “I have to be at work in a few hours, and we still have to get your car.”

“But it’s Saturday. You still have to go to work?”

“Yep. Unfortunately.”

“Well, I can bike into town later and get my car, so don’t worry about that.” I sat down on the edge of the coffee table and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For getting you involved in all this.”

He grinned. “Dixie, how long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know. A long time.”

He reached out and pulled me toward him. “Yeah. Long enough for me to know better.”