Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (11 page)

Morgan tilted his head toward the Sea Breeze. “Is the body in there?”

I pointed across the street. “No, it’s in the woods behind that gate. It’s Marilee Doerring. That’s the woman whose house the other body was in. Animals have been at her, but I recognized her.”

I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.

Flat-voiced, he said, “What were you doing in the woods?”

I could feel my face getting hot. “After you left, I saw some hair hanging on a key lime branch. I went back there to check it out.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave me that slow, level look again. “Can you show me the body?”

“I can show you where to find it, but I’m not going back there again.”

He looked down at me with the same coolly appraising eyes and then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We walked across the street and down the stretch of road to the gate. I pointed to the hair on the lime tree. “Somebody must have been carrying her body around the end of the gate and her hair got caught in the thorns.”

“Don’t touch it,” he said. “Did you touch it?”

“Of course I didn’t touch it!” That felt better. Anger always makes me feel stronger.

I said, “Just climb over the gate and walk straight back. I’ll wait for you, but I need to get to my animals, so don’t take too long.”

He gave me another level look and climbed over the gate. His legs under his dark green shorts were muscular and tan. He walked like a man who was at home in the woods, pushing through the branches without any tensing or awkwardness. He disappeared from view and I waited, imagining him pushing through the next branches and seeing Marilee the same way I’d seen her. When he stepped back through the branches, he was calling for a crime-scene unit. He rang off, put the phone back in its holder on his belt, and fixed me with a penetrating look.

“You’ll be available later?”

“Sure. I just have to see to my animals first, and then I’d like to go home and soak in Clorox for a while.”

He grinned. He had a nice grin, he should have done it more often. “Where will you be after you soak in Clorox?”

I sighed. “I’ll be wherever Lieutenant Guidry wants me to be.”

I gave him my cell phone number again so they could get in touch with me. When I left him, he was climbing over the gate again to guard the body until the CSU people arrived.

For the rest of the morning, images of Phillip’s beaten body and Marilee’s mutilated body sprawled on the musky ground alternated in my head. I kept remembering how Rufus had barked at the wooded area every time we went walking. I should have known he was trying to tell me something. Dogs can smell dead bodies from a distance, even bodies that have been buried in shallow graves. If I had investigated the first time he barked, if I had told Guidry about Rufus barking, if, if, if…

Death has a way of forcing us to look at the ultimate
question that hovers just below our consciousness. That pitiful body in the woods was no longer Marilee’s home. It was just rapidly decaying flesh, no more human than a fish carcass rotting at the edge of the sea. So where was Marilee? Where was the mind that had informed her body when its heart beat?

When Todd and Christy died, an astonishing number of people said stupid things like “They’re with Jesus now,” as if Jesus was making Christy’s breakfast in the morning and brushing her hair into a ponytail, or that Jesus and Todd were hanging out together and watching old movies on TV. I didn’t want them to be with Jesus, I wanted them to be with me. I hoped nobody would say inane things like that to Cora Mathers. Oh God, had anybody told Cora Mathers that Marilee was dead? It would be terrible for her if she learned of it on the news, but I didn’t know if Guidry even knew that Cora existed.

I called Guidry and left a message about Cora on his voice mail, giving him her address and phone number. The Sheriff’s Department has a Victim Assistance Unit staffed by the kind of people who know how to help you through those first few days when you keep thinking it’s all a nightmare that you’ll wake from any minute now but you don’t.

When I thought about Phillip, I couldn’t keep from empathizing with the pain his parents would feel when they saw him. They were bigoted idiots, but they loved their son. Maybe this awful thing would make them realize how much they loved him, and maybe when they learned the truth about why he had been out that morning, they would be so grateful he was alive that they would let all the other crap go.

The big question, of course, was why Phillip had been beaten. Oh, I knew well enough that ignorant young men who are so horrified and ashamed of their own homosexual urges go out gay bashing just for the hell of it. People
who are filled with self-loathing need to find a target for their hatred, and now that lynching black men has become socially unacceptable, hurting gay men has taken its place. But the timing of Phillip’s attack made me suspicious. It seemed almost too coincidental that he’d been attacked right after he’d told me about seeing a woman leave Marilee’s house on Friday morning. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his attack had more to do with what he knew about a murder than because he was gay.

At eight o’clock, I called Guidry again and left a message for him to call me. At nine I called the hospital and asked about Phillip. The receptionist said there was no patient by that name at the hospital. They were either shielding him from publicity or he wasn’t in the system yet. At ten, I called again and got the same answer. I called Guidry again. He wasn’t available, so I left my name and number again.

Feeling cut off from the world, I pedaled home through church traffic. At the Summerhouse, I pulled my bike to a stop to allow a wedding party to spill over the walk. The bride and groom were young and laughing, the bride radiant in miles of lace and tulle, the groom tall and gallant, all the wedding guests gazing after them with the bedazzled smiles that wedding guests always have—hoping this union would live up to the fairy-tale wedding promises of happy ever after but knowing full well that nobody really lives happily ever after, not even beautiful young people who are truly in love.

One of the bridesmaids saw me waiting and gave me a little shrug and smile, meaning “I’m sorry you’re inconvenienced.” I smiled back and shook my head slightly, meaning, “It’s okay.”

When the walk cleared, I pedaled on, grinning a little bit at how we two-legged animals aren’t so different from the four-legged kind. If that bridesmaid and I had been
dogs, we would have wagged our tails and sniffed each other’s butts to communicate our friendly feelings. Instead, we wagged our heads and smiled.

Michael’s car was parked under the carport with its trunk open, showing about a zillion paper bags from Sam’s Club. That meant he had made his weekly run to stock up on food for us and for the firehouse. Michael loves Sam’s the way women love shoe stores, and he buys as if he’s preparing for marauding invaders who will cut off every supply of sustenance.

I got a couple of bags out of the trunk and started to the house with them and met Michael coming out. When he saw me, the grin on his face faded and he gave me a look that can only come from a big brother who bathed in the same tub and peed in front of you for the first years of your lives together. “What’s wrong?”

For a second, I felt like bawling. “You know the kid we saw at the Crab House Friday night? The one who lives next door to where the man got killed? He was beaten up this morning, really bad.”

Michael gathered up bags from the trunk and slammed the lid closed. “How’d you hear about it?”

“I found him. He was in the bushes there on Midnight Pass where the old road goes into the woods. I called nine one one and they sent an ambulance.”

“Poor kid. Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know yet. But there’s more. After the deputy left, I noticed some hair on a lime tree, and I went into the woods there where that old road is, you know, and Marilee Doerring’s body was in there.”

Then I did bawl. Just stood there with a bag of groceries in each arm and cried like a baby. “Animals had been at her, Michael.”

“Good God. That’s awful. Come in the house, I’ve got coffee on.”

I trailed behind him with the bags, and we both deposited our loads on the kitchen counters. The house Michael and I grew up in is pretty much the way it was when we came to live in it, except for the kitchen. Michael and Paco knocked out a wall where a baywindowed breakfast room used to be, so it’s a lot bigger and sunnier now. They also installed commercial ovens and a Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. A butcher-block island sits in the middle of the floor, with a salad sink on one side and an eating bar on the other.

Michael heaved a spiral-sliced ham from one of the bags and set it aside, then made short work of stowing the other stuff away, while I splashed water on my face at the sink and mostly got in the way. He slit the wrapper on the ham and motioned me to the bar.

“Pour us some coffee,” he said.

While I got out mugs, he deftly peeled off several slices of ham and threw them on the big griddle between the rows of burners on the stove. I carried two mugs of steaming coffee to the bar while Michael got eggs from the refrigerator and cracked a bunch of them one-handed into a mixing bowl. The ham on the griddle was sending up clouds of damp steam and beginning to smell divine.

He said, “Why do you think the kid was beat up?”

I shrugged. “Either the obvious reason or because he saw the murderer leaving Marilee Doerring’s house Friday morning.”

He stopped whisking eggs and looked hard at me. “How do you know that?”

“He told me last night. I ate dinner at the Crab House and talked to him before he started playing. He said a woman left Marilee’s house around four o’clock and got in a black Miata that had just pulled into the driveway. He thinks she saw him watching.”

Michael turned the ham slices and got butter and a slab
of Parmesan cheese from the refrigerator. “Have you told the detective?”

I watched his serrated knife cutting thick slices of sourdough bread. “I’ve left several messages for him to call me, but I haven’t heard from him.”

He threw a wad of butter on the griddle, smeared it into a big puddle, and flopped the slices of bread in it.

I got up and held out two plates, and he flipped ham slices on both of them. I said, “I knew all along that Marilee wouldn’t have left her hair dryer behind like that.”

Michael grunted and put another glob of butter on the griddle next to the frying bread. As soon as he turned the beaten egg into it, he sliced transparent shards of Parmesan on top and started lifting and turning it with a spatula. All that golden brown fried bread and dark red ham and bright yellow eggs was making my taste buds itch. I got forks and knives and hurried to pour more coffee to replace what I’d drunk.

Michael topped the ham slices with scrambled eggs, flopped the fried bread on the side, and slid the plates onto the bar. We sat side by side and dug in, neither of us speaking until we’d finished eating. Then Michael got up and refilled our coffee mugs and sat down with a sigh.

“I wish you weren’t involved in this, Dixie.”

“I wish I weren’t, too, but maybe I’m supposed to be. Maybe this is how I’m supposed to start getting my life back together.”

“How? By finding dead people and a kid beaten up?”

“Guidry said something yesterday that may be true. He said I couldn’t hide forever. I can’t, you know? I have to come out some time and start living again.”

“Hell of a way to come out.”

“This morning when I was coming home, there was a wedding party just leaving the Summerhouse. The bride and groom were so happy and young, you know? Just
looking at them made me wish I could turn back the clock and be that innocent again.”

“Feeling jealous?”

“I guess so, a little.”

“Of what, that they were happy and young, or that they were in love?”

“Don’t start that, Michael.”

He raised his hands, all innocence. “Start what? I just asked a question.”

I got up and carried our plates to the sink and rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. Michael came behind me and squeezed my shoulders.

“Go take a nap,” he said. “You look like shit.”

I turned and hugged him hard, my love for him a shining sun in my heart.

I slept in the porch hammock until almost three o’clock, and woke up feeling dehydrated but less fragmented. I’m always relieved and grateful to find myself sane when I wake up, because for a long time I wasn’t. For the first year after Todd and Christy were killed, I was a mess. Too tired to breathe, with every cell in my body bruised and aching. My nose ran for an entire year, and I barely had the energy to wipe it. I slept whole days, and when I was awake, I stared at the TV without changing stations. Just watched whatever was on, because I couldn’t absorb words anyway. I didn’t dress or bathe. Didn’t answer the phone. I would go for days without eating and then have a giant pizza delivered and eat it all at one sitting.

Michael and Paco tried to get me to eat, to get out of my house, to wake up, but I couldn’t. I just flat couldn’t. Then one day in the spring, when Todd and Christy had been gone a full year, I caught sight of myself in the bedroom mirror and stopped cold. I looked awful. I looked unhealthy. I looked like a wraith. If Todd could have seen me, he would have said, “For God’s sake, Dixie, what good is this doing?” If Christy could have seen me, she would have been afraid of me, I looked that scary.

That was a turning point. I got myself and my house cleaned up and went out and got my hair cut. I sold the house where I’d been so happy with Todd and Christy, and got rid of all the furniture. I donated Christy’s toys to
Goodwill, except for her favorite, a purple Tickle Me Elmo, who now sits on the pillows of my bed, fat and silly. When I look at his goofy face, I hear Christy’s laughter spilling out like silver coins. I suppose I will keep Elmo with me forever. More than Christy’s photos, and even more than my memories of her, Elmo keeps her close and keeps me sane. Mostly.

For a while, I thought I might like to move away from the key and all its memories, but Michael and Paco talked me into taking the apartment over the carport, and I’m glad they did. This is where my heart is. It’s where I belong. Now occasional rips in the fabric of reality come when I least expect them. I can be going along minding my own business, attending to responsibilities, bathing and dressing and feeding myself like a normal person, and then one day I’ll see Todd walking down the sidewalk ahead of me. I’ll know it’s him, the same way I recognize my own reflection in a mirror. It’s his hair, his shoulders, his long legs. I know his walk, the way he swings his arms a little off rhythm with his steps. I’ll open my mouth to shout to him, my heart flowering with a burst of pure joy, and then he changes into somebody else—a man I don’t know at all, a man totally unlike Todd, and I am weak-kneed and dizzy with disappointment and fear.

It has been three years. I am long past the time grief experts allow for normal grieving. Mine is pathological, they say, and it’s time I got over it. They don’t explain how to do that. They merely look at me with tight lips and annoyed eyes and tell me I
have
to. I would if I could, believe me, because every time it happens, I fear that next time I won’t realize it’s a delusion and that I’ll actually rush up to a stranger and throw my arms around him and take comfort in his foreign smells, his alien substance. If that ever happens, I may never return.

I drank a bunch of water and called the hospital again,
and this time they gave me the nurses’ station on Phillip’s floor. A harried nurse told me he was “resting comfortably”—whatever that meant—and got off the phone before I could ask if I could see him. I called Guidry again and left another message for him to call me on my cell, then I ate a little tub of yogurt from the fridge while I stood on the porch and looked out at the glittering waves in the Gulf and told myself everything would work out all right. Phillip would recover from his injuries, Guidry would find whoever killed Marilee and Frazier, and I would find a good home for Ghost. Life would go on, and so would I.

After I took a shower and put on fresh shorts and T and Keds, I went to my office–closet and took care of business, entering records on my file cards and returning calls. A man had left a message asking me to take care of his python, and I called him up and gave him the name of another pet-sitter, one who isn’t squeamish about feeding live mice to reptiles. Somebody else wanted to know if I knew how to hatch eggs laid by a dove on their front lawn, and I gave them the number of the Pelican Man. I figured anybody who has devoted his life to rescuing injured pelicans must know how to hatch dove eggs. When I’d gotten my books in order and all my invoices ready, I got in the Bronco and drove to the Kitty Haven to visit Ghost.

He was in one of Marge’s private rooms, which is to say he was in a cubicle about three feet wide, six feet deep, and eight feet tall, with a sleeping basket, a scratching post, padded shelves at several levels, and a kitty door low in the back to his private toilet. A screened door across the front had a hinged insert to allow the attendants to move food and water in and out without letting Ghost escape. It was an ingenious setup, but it was still a cell, and he knew it.

Like all Abyssinians, Ghost had a muscular body and the slender head and almond eyes characteristic of cats that originated in Asia. Abys are a highly intelligent breed, and once an Aby falls in love with you, it’s one of the most loyal animals in the world. Ghost had been with Marilee since he was twelve weeks old, and as far as he was concerned, she was his everything. I took him into the visitors’ room and brushed him and played Chase the Peacock Feather with him, but both of us were off our game. I finally sat down cross-legged on the floor in a dejected heap, and Ghost climbed into my lap and curled himself between my legs. Without his charm-trimmed velvet collar, he looked even more forlorn and orphaned.

I ran my fingertips over his ticked silver fur and said, “Things are bad, Ghost. Really bad. Marilee’s not coming back, and Phillip has been beaten up. Maybe to scare him so he won’t tell all he knows about what happened at your house. You know what it is, don’t you? You know who he saw that morning.”

He sighed and closed his eyes and laid his chin on my knee, as if he were worn-out from the heaviness of knowledge he couldn’t express. He had known all along that Marilee was dead. As an eyewitness to two grisly murders, he could identify the killer or killers of both Marilee and Harrison Frazier. He just couldn’t do it in words.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure you have a good home.”

He opened his eyes and gave me a look of hurt accusation, and I couldn’t blame him. This had happened on my watch, and I had let him down.

I slipped him some kitty treats when I left, and promised him I would come back and get him as soon as Lieutenant Guidry said I could. Even with Marilee dead, there was no reason he couldn’t stay in his own home until I could find
him another one. He gave me a glum look and whirled his head to the base of his tail and gnawed at it. I wasn’t sure what that meant in cat language, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t something nice.

Just as I was getting in the Bronco to make the rest of my afternoon visits, my cell rang—Guidry finally returning my calls.

I said, “Phillip Winnick saw a woman leave Marilee Doerring’s house about four o’clock Friday morning. He says she got in a black Miata and drove off. He didn’t tell you before because he doesn’t want his parents to know he was out of the house at that hour.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“I saw him at the Crab House last night and he told me then. But there’s more. Did you know I found him beaten up this morning?”

“Yeah, I know.”

I didn’t ask him if he knew about Marilee. Of course he knew.

I said, “I think somebody didn’t want him to tell what he saw.”

Guidry was silent for a moment, and I could almost hear his brain digesting what I’d told him, along with its implications.

He said, “Can you meet me at Sarasota Memorial in the next ten minutes?”

Before I could stammer out an answer, he said, “In the main lobby,” and hung up.

I stared at my phone for a few seconds, then flipped it closed and started the Bronco. Guidry always seemed to be one step ahead of me, and I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or hated it.

At the hospital, I left the Bronco for a valet to park, then hurried past a group of hospital personnel out on the sidewalk for a cigarette break. As I veered round them,
they all gave me the defiantly sullen looks that smokers have acquired. Wide automatic glass doors slid open for me, and I went through to the lobby, my eyes searching for a man who looked too rich and well dressed to be a homicide detective. A hand touched my arm and Guidry said, “He’s on the fifth floor.”

He steered me to the wall of elevator doors, and when one opened and vomited a gaggle of glassy-eyed people, we took their place. Some other people got on with us, and we all stood tensely silent as the elevator began its smooth upward glide. Guidry and I stood at the back, not speaking or touching as some people got off and other people got on at every floor.

Finally, Guidry said, “This is our floor.”

He touched the small of my back with his fingertips, and I moved forward. A glass wall on our right showed a large waiting room where people were sitting staring straight ahead, each of them caught in a timeless worry.

I followed him down the hall to the ICU wing, where glassed cubicles were arranged in a circle around a busy nurses’ station. A uniformed deputy sat in a straight wooden chair outside Phillip’s cubicle. Phillip’s bed was slightly elevated so his face was visible. It looked like a cut of raw meat. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose was bandaged, and his cheeks were wider than his head. A ventilator’s blue accordion hose was taped inside his mouth, and an IV stand stood beside his bed. A couple of machines that looked like apartment-sized washer–dryer combinations stood behind him. Tubes snaked from them and disappeared under the sheet covering him.

I made a choking sound and covered my mouth.

“He looks a lot worse than he is,” Guidry said. “He has some broken ribs and a broken nose, but his lungs weren’t punctured and he only has a moderate concussion. He’ll have a headache for a while, but nothing vital is damaged.”

“His mother must be going crazy to see him like this.”

“Actually, she hasn’t tried to see him, and Carl Winnick keeps calling to warn us not to leak anything about the attack to the media. Says it’s a liberal conspiracy to push an agenda of a perverted lifestyle and ruin his reputation.”

I felt a little sick.

Guidry took my arm and said, “Let’s go find a place where we can talk.”

I got myself under control as we left the ICU unit and walked down the wide hall. Guidry tilted his chin toward a small waiting area where some overstuffed chairs were pulled around a coffee table. “Go sit down,” he said. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

He went into the glassed room where a coffee urn had been set up for visitors, and I went to sit in the waiting area. In a minute, he came out carrying two Styrofoam cups with plastic stirrers jutting from them. He set them on the coffee table and pulled out a handful of sugar packets and tiny creamers from his pocket.

“I couldn’t remember if you took anything in yours,” he said.

I shook my head. “I drink it black.”

He sat down in the chair opposite me. “This morning, a call came in a little after five o’clock from a man named Sam Grayson. He had been out walking his dog, headed toward Midnight Pass Road, and he had let the dog off his leash. The dog started barking and then took off in the other direction, chasing a man running behind the houses, headed toward the bay. Mr. Grayson managed to call the dog off, but he called nine one one to report a prowler in the area.”

“I know that dog.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. A deputy went out, but the man had disappeared and everything looked quiet. Then
your call about the Winnick boy came in. More than likely, his attack was what the dog had been barking at. He may have saved the boy’s life.”

“Good old Rufus! Did Sam get a good look at the man?”

“No. It was dark, and the guy was half-hidden by trees. He thinks he was bald, but I don’t know if he’d be able to identify him if he saw him again.”

“Last night at the Crab House, a man with a bald head chased me in the parking lot. I barely got in my car before he got to me.”

Guidry leaned back and looked hard at me, assessing me the way dogs do when they smell something new. “Was this before or after the Winnick boy told you about seeing a woman leave the Doerring house?”

“After. He tried to hit on me at the bar before I talked to Phillip. Sent me a drink and then got huffy when I refused it. I’d know him if I saw him again.”

I put my coffee back on the table and leaned forward. “Phillip crawls out his bedroom window after his parents are asleep, and walks to the Crab House and plays piano until it closes at one. He probably goes home with somebody from there, but I don’t know who, then he goes home and crawls back in the window again in the morning. My guess is that somebody drives him to that spot on Midnight Pass Road, and then he walks alongside the woods to his house. Whoever attacked him must have known his routine and waited for him.”

Guidry was watching me closely, putting together all the pieces. “His parents know he’s gay?”

“I don’t think so.
He
doesn’t think so, and he’s scared to death they’ll find out. When I got to him this morning, he said one thing before he passed out. He said, ‘Please don’t tell my mother.’”

“Shit. Poor kid.”

“Yeah. He’s leaving for Juilliard in August, and I suppose he’s gotten more careless as the time grows nearer that he can be open.”

“I’m not letting anybody talk to him until I can question him, and that includes his parents. I think I’d like you to be there when I ask him about the woman he saw. If he’s up to it, I’d like to do it tomorrow morning.”

I hesitated, wondering what Guidry’s real reason was, but knowing that Phillip would be less nervous if I were there.

“Okay.”

“Is there anything else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know anything else you haven’t told me?”

“Nothing except that I found Marilee’s body this morning in the woods. I’m sure you already know that.”