The Cat Sitter's Cradle

26

After meeting with Detective McKenzie, I waited in the sleeping cabin below the main deck on Kenny’s houseboat. I had situated myself in a musty old armchair next to Kenny’s bed. The cabin was completely dark except for the glow from the fire I’d built in a small wood-burning stove in the corner and a faint patch of light spilling in under the cabin door from a lantern on the dock. There was a small kitchenette next to the stove, and lined up along the countertop was a row of canned tuna and several bags of dried pasta.

Hung about the walls were various coils of rope, fishing rods, maps, hooks, and bags of shells. There was a battery-operated radio hanging by a string tied around its broken antenna, and there was a huge, yellowing map of the Gulf. Tacked in the middle of it was an old photo of a young couple, a man and a woman, sitting in a swinging porch chair. The caption read, “On the patio with Danny holding Tiger.” There was a little boy sitting on the man’s lap, and he was beaming at the camera. Cradled in his arms like a baby was an orange tabby kitten.

I took a deep breath and reached into my backpack. Pulling out the business card that August had given me the day I met him at the Harwick house, I thought about how cocky and sure of himself he had been. I’m sure he fantasized that if he ever got a call from me, it would be a booty call. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined the call I was about to make.

I punched his number into my cell phone. When he answered, his voice croaked and his words were a little slurred. He was either half asleep or drunk or both.

I said, “August, it’s Dixie Hemingway. I’m sorry to call so late, but I thought your mother would want to know. I think I’ve figured out who’s responsible for your stepfather’s death.”

That woke him up. He said, “Excuse me?”

“I know, I’m sure it’s a shock. I found a package of letters that your stepfather wrote. They were stashed away in your mother’s fish tank. I’ve hidden them on Kenny Newman’s boat at Hoppie’s Restaurant. It’s the last place he’d ever think to look for them. In the morning, I’ll turn them over to the police.”

There was a moment of silence. I could hear the wheels spinning in his head.

He said, “That’s interesting. So, you read the letters?”

I said, “Yeah. I did.”

“And what did they say?”

I said, “August, I really can’t tell you. I don’t think it would be right. Once the police have the letters, I’m sure they’ll be very happy to explain everything to you.”

There was a long silence. “Okay. Well, I’ll be sure and tell my mother right away.”

I said, “You do that. I think she’d definitely want to be woken up for this.”

“That’s not a problem. She doesn’t really sleep anymore.”

I nodded. I could tell by the sound of his voice that he wasn’t making that part up. “Well, now you can tell her she’ll be able to rest soon.”

He said, “I will,” and the line went dead.

The bay was calm when I had first arrived, but now the wind had picked up a bit and the houseboat was rolling gently back and forth. I could hear the water lapping up against the sides of the boat, and occasionally a deep, creaking moan rose up from the hull as it nudged up against the edge of the pier. A couple of iron pots hanging from hooks over the wood-burning stove were tapping into one another with sullen, metallic clunks like a retarded cuckoo clock.

The fire had died down, so I got up quickly and threw in a few more pieces of driftwood and crumpled-up newspaper from a pile that Kenny kept next to the cabin door. I wanted to keep it burning.

As I sat back down in the chair, a slow rain began. I could hear it tapping on the metal roof. It started with just a few drops here and there but gradually grew to a steady hiss, like quiet static on a radio. There were two small round windows on both the port and starboard walls, and a flash of headlights moved from one to the other, lighting up the inside of the cabin briefly. I couldn’t hear anything but the rain, so I wasn’t sure if a car had gone by on the road or if someone had just pulled into the parking lot alongside the dock.

My stomach tightened into a knot, and thoughts were bouncing around inside my head like balls in a pinball machine, but I told myself to keep calm. I took a deep breath and allowed my eyes to close for a moment. I tried to imagine my gentle, babbling brook with all its polished pebbles and butterflies flitting about. I tried to see the steps leading down to the water and the flowers gently swaying in the breeze, but then the unmistakable sound of footsteps coming down the dock broke through the soft hum of the rain, and my eyes shot open.

When the boat tilted slowly to the starboard side there was no doubt. Someone had stepped on board.

My heart started to pound so hard that for a moment I thought I might have a heart attack. I heard footsteps moving slowly across the upper deck as I glanced over at the port side window, but all I could see were tiny reflections of light in the falling rain.

The footsteps stopped for a moment but then crossed directly over my head. There was another pause, and then I knew someone was slowly descending the steps. A shadow appeared in the narrow strip of light under the cabin door directly in front of me.

I moved my hand to the side and slid it down between the cushions of the armchair. It came to rest on the barrel of my Smith & Wesson .38 pistol. I could feel its cold, hard steel on the tips of my fingers.

Closing my eyes again, I took a deep breath. This wasn’t exactly the craziest thing I had ever done, but it was definitely right up there in the top ten. For some reason, though, I felt okay. I thought to myself, No matter what happens, I’ve done the right thing.

I heard the cabin door swing open, and I raised my eyes.

Standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light shining down from the dock, was Mrs. Harwick.

She didn’t see me at first. She fumbled around in the outer pocket of her shoulder bag and then pulled out a small yellow flashlight. When she flicked it on, the light pointed directly at my face. She jumped back, and her hand flew up to her mouth, stifling a scream.

I said, “Mrs. Harwick, it’s Dixie.”

“Oh God! Dixie, you scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

I said, “I brought the letters here to hide them. Didn’t August tell you?”

She put her hand over her heart and tried to regain her breath. “He did. That’s why I’m here.”

“But I told August I would give them to the police in the morning.”

She said, “I know, Dixie, but I came to get them. When the police read those letters, they’ll know why Kenny Newman killed my husband. He wanted revenge, and he wanted money. But I’m worried about you. They already think you and Kenny are lovers. They’ll think you were involved somehow, and I don’t want that. I should hand them over myself.”

I said, “You think it was Kenny?”

She nodded. “I do. I’m sure of it.”

I leaned over and pulled the package out of my backpack and handed it to her.

She held it to her chest. “I’m going to take this to the police right now. The sooner they have it, the better. In the meantime, you should go home. You look like you could use a drink, and it’s late. I don’t think we’re safe here.”

As she turned I said, “Mrs. Harwick. Do you want me to bring Charlotte back home now?”

“Oh, Dixie, I’m really not much of a cat person. Maybe your cat kennel could find a good home for her?”

I nodded mutely. I had more or less expected her to say that, but it still made me a little sad to hear it out loud. Charlotte had really been Mr. Harwick’s cat.

She turned toward the steps, but I stopped her again. “And you knew your husband was Kenny’s father?”

She sighed and looked back at me. “I did. He never told me, but I figured it out long ago.”

I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest, and for a second I worried she would actually hear it. I said, “I remember something you told me the first time we ever met. We had walked out to my car, and you were telling me about checking the water in the fish tank. Do you remember? You said fish seem like such strong creatures, but given just the slightest chemical imbalance, they can wind up dead at the bottom of the tank.”

She had an exasperated look on her face. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because when I found that little plastic bottle of butorphanol, which I’m sure has your fingerprints on it, I wondered if you hadn’t planned on killing your husband for a long time.”

Her eyes turned to narrow slits. “How dare you. How dare you accuse me of such a thing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You found your son’s supply of butorphanol, and you took some of it. That’s what he meant when he accused Becca of stealing something from his room.”

Mrs. Harwick leaned against the doorway of the cabin, and I was reminded of that first day I met her, when she stood with her arm on the back of her neck in the doorway of the living room and looked so beautiful and elegant.

“Oh, my,” she said. “You’re such a smart girl, aren’t you? And then what happened?”

I could feel myself trembling, but I held on to the arms of the chair. I didn’t want her to see how terrified I was. “I think Mr. Harwick did tell you he was Kenny’s father. In fact, I think he even told you he was going home to meet with Kenny the night he died, and I think you went home with him. You must have hid upstairs and listened. You heard their entire conversation. You heard your husband say he wanted to give his fortune to Kenny. You heard him say his stepchildren were useless. Then, after Kenny left, you came downstairs and had a drink with your husband. I imagine you might have been arguing about Kenny. At some point, when he wasn’t looking, you poured that vial of butorphanol into his glass.”

Mrs. Harwick laughed incredulously. “This is ridiculous. What are you even saying?”

“Butorphanol is a narcotic. It acts very quickly. You must have led your husband out to the lanai. Once the drug took effect, either he fell into the pool or you rolled him in.”

“And why in the world would I do that?”

“Because you didn’t want to share his money. Because you were looking out for your own children.”

She shook her head. “You stupid woman. I was in Tampa that night.”

I said, “That’s what I thought, too, until I saw that receipt, the one in the bag with the butorphanol. The receipt was for seventy-nine dollars, which is probably about what a taxi would cost from Sarasota to Tampa.”

She shook her head. “You’re crazy. You have no idea what happened.”

I kept my voice level. “Mrs. Harwick, the taxi driver wrote an address on that receipt. I recognized it from the files your husband gave me with your contact information. It was the address of the hotel you stayed at with your husband in Tampa. 1146 Del Rio Way.”

A smile played across her lips. “You certainly have it all figured out, don’t you?”

I said, “No, not everything. There’s some kind of code written at the bottom of the receipt. It says ‘230A1P.’ I didn’t know what that meant at first, but I knew it wouldn’t be too hard for the police to talk to the taxi company and get their records, especially since it’s all computerized these days. If I was a taxi driver, I think I’d definitely remember driving a beautiful older woman from Sarasota to Tampa in the middle of the night. Say around 2:30 A.M., and I think ‘1P’ stands for ‘one passenger.’”

She put her hand on the clasp of her shoulder bag, and I immediately had the feeling that August wasn’t the only one in the family that carried a gun.

She said, “Dixie, I’m afraid you’re going to be very sorry you ever met me.”

I said, “Mrs. Harwick, you should know that when I heard your car drive up just now, I called the police. They’ll be here any minute.”

She was still holding the packet to her chest. She glanced around the room. I wondered if she wasn’t thinking about running, but then she casually reached over and dropped the packet into the wood-burning stove. The flames leaped up around it, and the cabin filled with the smell of burning plastic.

She turned to me calmly and said, “When the police arrive, I’m going to tell them that you and your lover, Kenny Newman, called me here tonight to blackmail me. I’m going to tell them that you first tried to blackmail my husband. You threatened to expose his true identity. When he wouldn’t cooperate, you drugged him and pushed him into the pool. I’ll tell them you told me to take a taxi back to Tampa or you’d kill me, too, and that if I ever breathed a word of what happened that night, you’d kill both my children.”

She drew a metal poker out of the wood bin and stirred the ashen remains of the packet around in the red-hot embers. “Roy was good at making money, but he wasn’t a very smart man. If anyone ever found out that he had faked his own death, he would have gone to jail for insurance fraud and tax evasion. He would have lost his position at Sonnebrook, not to mention his stock, and my family would have been left with nothing. But apart from all that, Roy wasn’t a very good person. I think you figured that out pretty quickly. So yes, you’re right.”

She laid the poker down on top of the stove and turned to me. Her eyes were sparkling like two black marbles, and her lips curled into a smile. “I killed him. Of course, without this packet, it’s just your word against mine. And I do wonder who the police will believe. Me, the grieving widow of one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the country? Or you, a small-town litter-box cleaner, who got kicked off the police force for mental instability.”

I said, “Mrs. Harwick, I don’t need that packet.”

She leaned forward slightly. “And why is that, sweetheart?”

“Because I took everything out of it before you got here. That one was just stuffed with old newspapers.”

Her face went white.

Shadows rose up behind her, and as she turned, Detective McKenzie and two deputies moved swiftly down the steps with their guns drawn and pointed directly at her.

McKenzie said, “Mrs. Harwick, that’s good enough. Please drop your bag and raise your hands over your head.”

Deputy Morgan moved into the room with his gun still fixed on Mrs. Harwick as she lowered her purse down to the ground. He glanced at me. “You okay?”

I felt dizzy, like someone had just hit me in the head with a frying pan. “Yeah—but I think she has a gun in that purse.”

Detective McKenzie said, “Mrs. Harwick, you’re under arrest for the murder of Roy Harwick.”

* * *

By the time I came up out of the boat, Mrs. Harwick had already been read her Miranda rights and taken away. The whole area around Hoppie’s was surrounded with police cars, and the parking lot looked like it had been turned into a disco of flashing red and blue lights. Except instead of dance music, there was only the sound of crickets, which had woken up when the rain stopped, and the chatter from the police radio in Detective McKenzie’s unmarked sedan.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Bronco, waiting for the adrenaline that had been coursing through my bloodstream for the last hour to subside. It had left me feeling like a bowl of mush, and I wondered if that wasn’t what a porcupine fish feels like after it’s spent a couple of hours all blown up and spiny. All I wanted to do was go home, have that drink Mrs. Harwick suggested, and crawl into my bed.

Detective McKenzie came up to the window and said, “I’ll need you to make a statement about everything, but I think it can wait until tomorrow. Will you be okay?”

I said, “I’ll be fine, but I am worried about one thing. I’m afraid of what August will do when he finds out what’s happened to his mother.”

She nodded. “Dixie, I should probably tell you—the special investigative team conducted a sting operation at August’s hotel tonight. They picked him up for smuggling endangered species into the country and selling them illegally. One of his couriers has agreed to testify against him, so I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that young man for a long time.”

I nodded. No wonder Paco had been so quiet whenever the Harwicks came up. He’d been in the middle of an investigation into August’s smuggling operation.

Meekly, I said, “Do you by any chance know the name of that courier?”

She smiled. “Dixie. You know I can’t tell you that.”

I did, but I also didn’t need her to tell me. I had a pretty good idea who it was.

She stuck her hand in the window and shook mine firmly. “Thank you for what you did tonight. Do you need someone to follow you home?”

“No, I don’t have that far to go. My place is just up the road.”

She nodded curtly and started to turn away, then stopped herself. “You know, people talk about you down at the station. They wonder why you keep getting involved in things like this, why you would put yourself through this kind of danger. They say it’s crazy. But I think I know why.”

I blinked dumbly at her. I hoped she would share it with me, because I had no earthly idea.

She said, “It’s not fair how you lost your family. Believe me, I have an idea of what that feels like. So, I get it. I just wanted to tell you that.”

She turned and walked away. I sat there for a few moments. I wasn’t completely sure what the heck she was talking about, but it did dawn on me that seeing someone punished for wrongfully ending someone else’s life felt good.

Really good.

I picked up my phone and punched in Ethan’s number.

He answered on the second ring. “Umm, isn’t it a little late?”

I said, “Remember tonight when you said to call if I needed you?”

“Yeah?”

I said, “I need you.”