Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (13 page)

It was every woman’s nightmare, to be killed at home in her most vulnerable moment.

Guidry said, “Dixie? You all right?”

I said, “Sunday night, there was a noise outside the living room window. A cracking sound, like wood snapping. We thought it was a squirrel knocking a limb against the house, but it could have been somebody outside, somebody waiting for me to leave.”

He touched my shoulder lightly. “You couldn’t have prevented this, Dixie.”

“I want to help find the person who did this. If her husband did it, I want him caught and put away for life.”

Guidry’s gray eyes were too steady. He was keeping something from me.

I said, “Has anybody talked to the husband yet?”

“We have somebody working on that.” His voice was too careful.

“What about her family?”

Guidry started maneuvering me to the front door. “Her sister arrived late yesterday and identified the body. She’s at the Ritz.”

I would have expected her sister to stay at a less expensive hotel, but for all I knew the sister was loaded.

I said, “I should let her know where Leo is.”

“Leo?”

“Laura’s cat. I took him to the Kitty Haven. I could pick him up for her when she’s ready.”

Guidry said, “She’ll come to the house after Bill Sullivan has finished up here.”

Bill Sullivan is a trauma cleaner who has the gruesome job of sanitizing crime scenes. Blood and body wastes contain bacteria that can cause disease. Carpet and tile often have to be replaced, walls have to be scrubbed and possibly repainted. Since Laura had been killed in her shower, the drain would have to be sterilized.

At the door, I said, “What’s her last name? So I can call her about Leo.”

“Last name’s Autrey, but I wouldn’t call her today. It was an ordeal for her to identify her sister’s body.”

“Of course.”

Without making it too obvious that he was getting rid of me, Guidry had skillfully got me outside. It was just as well. I didn’t have any other information to give him, and I needed to get out of that house.

He said, “Thanks, Dixie. I know that was hard for you.”

“It wasn’t hard for me.”

“Okay. Thanks anyway.”

I didn’t answer. Something was going on that he wasn’t telling me. As I slogged back to the Bronco and drove away, I reminded myself that I wasn’t a part of the investigation and that Guidry had no obligation to tell me anything. But I had the distinct feeling that there was more to his reticence than the mere fact that it was none of my business. For some reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I thought Guidry was concealing information because he thought it would hurt me to know it.

20

I
was so famished by the time I got to the diner that I felt bared-teeth feral, as if my growling stomach was giving the world fair warning that I was about to pounce on something and kill it.

Judy took one look at me, poured coffee, and scurried away to make sure Tanisha knew the she-wolf had arrived. She must have filched somebody else’s order, because I’d barely finished the first mug of coffee when she brought my food. Nobody talked to me, which was just as well. When I’d thrown enough food down to my monster, I perked up and gave Tanisha a friendly wave. From behind the kitchen’s pass-through counter, her wide face dimpled as she winked at me. It’s good to have friends like Tanisha. They know your nasty disposition is really hunger, so they feed you.

I left money on the table for Judy, with an extra tip for having to put up with my crankiness, and slumped out to the Bronco. Now that I’d eaten, I needed a nap bad.

Driving slowly behind a motorcycle driven by a shirtless spring break guy with a sunburned young woman plastered to his back, I suppressed a yawn as I drove past the Lyon’s Mane. Then a little alarm in my head jerked me awake, and I swerved into a parking space. I wanted to know what Ruby and Maurice knew about Gorgon.

When I went in the salon, Ruby was at the front desk with Baby in tow, and she gave me a dazzling smile.

I said, “I think I may need some conditioner.”

She and Baby looked hard at my hair, and she reached to a glass shelf and got a fancy-looking bottle. When I scrabbled for money, she shook her head.

“It’s on the house. Next time you come in, we’ll charge you out the wazoo, but right now you’re still getting rewards for rescuing Baby.”

I laughed and tucked the bottle under my arm.

“Ruby, when I was in here before, a man named Gorgon came in. Maurice said he was a friend of Laura Halston’s. Do you happen to know anything about him?”

“I know Laura was murdered.”

“What about Gorgon?”

“Dixie, when I was a kid in New Jersey, one of our neighbors talked about a man we knew. Next day, the neighbor got shot in the head. Killed dead. You understand what I’m saying?”

Even the conditioner in the bottle understood what she was saying.

I said, “Lieutenant Guidry is the homicide detective investigating Laura’s murder. If anybody had any information that might help catch the killer, they could make an anonymous phone call.”

“Honey, with caller ID, no phone call is anonymous anymore. And anyway, I don’t have any information.”

I thanked her for the free conditioner and left. I didn’t believe she didn’t have any information, but I fully understood why she didn’t want to talk to me about Gorgon. I felt jazzed. I was on a roll. Through my own cunning I had verified that Mr. Gorgon was indeed as thuggish as he looked. I hadn’t exactly got his mafia ties or anything to connect him to Laura’s murder, but at least I had done
something
, which seemed a hell of a lot more than Guidry had done. At the rate things were going, I might have to go out and find Laura’s husband myself.

Cora’s neatly folded muumuu was in the passenger seat, so since I was near the tailor shop, I decided to drop the dress off before I went home. The shop was in a part of Siesta Key’s business district so old the stucco on the buildings could have been applied by one of de Soto’s men in the 1540s. It was purely coincidental that it was across the street from Ethan Crane’s office. I wasn’t even thinking of Ethan when I chose it.

Okay, maybe it crossed my mind a tiny bit. Maybe it zipped across without calling attention to itself, but that’s all.

The tailor promised to chop off at least two feet of Cora’s muumuu and have it hemmed by midafternoon, and I came out fully intending to get in the Bronco and drive straight home. But my eyes crossed the street and stood at the entry to Ethan’s building, and that caused my feet to stop.

My eyes stayed across the street, and after a second my feet said, Shoot, we’re going too.

The next thing I knew I was opening the door with its flaking gilt sign that said ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Then I was standing in the dingy vestibule looking up at stairs that had been trod by so many feet they sagged in the middle.

All that venerable decay and wear would make people expect an old man in the upstairs office, but the sign on the door had been put there by Ethan’s grandfather, and most of the feet that had climbed the stairs had been to the elder—now deceased—Ethan Crane. The present and very much alive Ethan Crane was in an office at the top of those stairs.

I told myself I could still go out the door and cross the street and drive home, and Ethan would never know I had been there.

I ignored myself and climbed the stairs, because if I didn’t do it then I might never do it at all, which seemed a terrible waste of something. A chance to rekindle a chemistry that had been there from the first time Ethan and I had met, maybe. Or just a chance to remain friends with a great guy.

From the top of the stairs, I could see Ethan moving around in his office. His suit jacket hung on a coat rack, neatly fitted on a coat hanger, but his tie was close at the neck and the sleeves of his blue and white pinstripe shirt were held in place by silver cuff links. I like people who take their work seriously, and Ethan was a professional, head to toe. Ethan was a lot of things, head to toe, things I shouldn’t have been thinking about.

Ethan claims to be one-quarter Seminole, and his high cheekbones and straight black hair do indeed look Native American. He’d got a haircut since I’d last seen him. Instead of falling halfway to his shoulders, his hair was neatly trimmed above his ears.

He has damn nice ears.

He saw me and stopped moving, just stood with a law book in his hand and watched me walk toward him. My knee joints felt weird, as if they’d forgotten what their function was and needed conscious direction. I stopped in the doorway and tried to think of something intelligent to say.

Instead, I said, “I’m sorry I never knew your grandfather.”

As if it were a perfectly reasonable opening remark, Ethan said, “My grandfather almost single-handedly kept Siesta Key from going the way Longboat and Bird have gone. He wanted Siesta to be for real people.”

I said, “I hate to burst your bubble, Ethan, but real estate on Siesta is no steal.”

“I didn’t say he wanted Siesta for
poor
people, I said
real
people. Big difference. Real people don’t barricade themselves in mega-mansions.”

I said, “That isn’t what I came to talk about.”

He quirked one thick black eyebrow, which caused my tongue to have an out-of-body experience in which it leaped across space and licked the eyebrow’s arched peak.

I said, “I mean . . . I wanted to, you know . . . just say hello, and tell you . . . .”

My voice trailed off because I hadn’t actually had a plan, and because my tongue was still vibrating from its out-of-body moment.

He said, “I think I know what you wanted to tell me. Something like, ‘I really dig you, Ethan, but not enough to make any kind of commitment to getting to know you and seeing where it might take us.’ Is that about right?”

I opened my mouth to protest, and then snapped it shut. It was exactly right, and I felt like a high school tease.

Ethan pulled his desk chair out, laid the law book on the desk, and sat down. He put both hands behind his head and leaned back. His dark eyes were serious as a coming hurricane.

“Dixie, I’ve never asked you to make any kind of commitment to me, and I never will. But I’m not the kind of man to play footsie either. You’ve sent me a different message every time we’ve met, so now I’m not sure what you want. Hell, I’ve never been sure about anything with you.”

I sat down too, dropping into one of the old butt-sprung leather chairs facing the desk. The chair’s arms were darkened by thousands of palms that had gripped them. I rubbed my fingertips on one arm and looked at the mellow sheen of the big mahogany desk where Ethan’s grandfather had sat for so many years. Everything in the office, including the law books on the shelves that lined the room, were symbols of continuity, generation to generation. Ethan might look like a man on the prowl with his dark good looks and sure manner, but deep down he was a man of tradition and family values. Not the phony family–values of politicians who use the term as code for white, straight, and Christian, but true family values of honor and integrity and loyalty. A woman would be a fool to turn away from a man like Ethan.

I said, “I don’t know what I want either. I just know what I don’t want.”

He took his hands down and laced his fingers together on his desk. “So what is it that you don’t want, Dixie?”

My voice grew suddenly thick. “I don’t want to love a man and then lose him. Not again. Not ever again.”

Ethan studied my face for a long moment. “I never took you for a coward.”

Stung, my face went hot and I stood up so fast my head swam. “It’s easy for you to say that, Ethan, you’ve never lost anybody you loved.”

“How can you be so sure of that, Dixie? How do you know what I’ve lost?”

I couldn’t answer that. The truth was that I didn’t know much about Ethan’s past. I’d been so preoccupied with my own, I’d never asked.

He said, “It may sound trite, but it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And it’s cowardly to refuse to love for fear of losing. If everybody in the world operated that way, we would all live like isolated islands, never getting involved with anybody else. Is that how you want to spend your life?”

I looked away, and for a second my throat burned with threatened vomit, bile roiled from some dark ugly place I didn’t want to acknowledge.

Ethan’s voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dixie. I swore I’d never put pressure on you, and I just did.”

Through stiff lips, I said, “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, and I won’t do it again. And just for the record, that wasn’t a proposal or anything. I don’t know if we’re right for each other; maybe we’re not. But when you feel strong enough, I’d like to explore the possibility.”

And there it was, the
something
I thought it would be a shame to waste. It wasn’t chemistry or friendship that I might be wasting, it was the possibility of love.

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For things too numerous and screwy to go into.”

I turned my back and walked out with a determined stride.

As usual, I hoped my butt had looked good as I left. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s the truth.

I drove home wishing I hadn’t reacted the way I had, wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut. I talked far too much, and it was time to just shut the fuck up.

It was also time to quit stringing Ethan along. He deserved better. A lot better.

When I got home, I went to the closet-office and stared a long time at the black party dress hanging by itself as the closet’s featured attraction. The party shoes were parked in their fancy box in a separate spot too, and the dinky little purse hung on a hook like a trophy.

In just three days, I would slither into that new dress, step into those new shoes, and sling that little purse over my shoulder—with or without a condom inside like the saleswoman had recommended. At the party, I would probably dance with Guidry. In his arms, moving my feet close to his feet, my legs close to his legs, his hand on my back down low.

I groaned.

Guidry was a cop. Ethan was an attorney. Cops get killed a lot more often than attorneys. Ethan was one of the nicest, smartest, sexiest men in the universe, and my hormones stood up and tap-danced every time he was near. And yet I had walked away from Ethan, and I was going to the party with Guidry.

I groaned again, and went and stood a long time under the shower. I was still as stupid when I got out as I’d been when I got in.