Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (15 page)

“Enjoy,” she said.

I grabbed the giant-size coffee on the counter and headed for the door. “Thanks a lot,” I said. “See you.”

That’s the nice thing about living on the key. It’s small enough that when we say “See you,” we really mean it.

I drove half a block to the Crescent Beach parking lot, parked under some live oak trees, and jogged to the steps leading to the main pavilion. Ask anybody who lives on Siesta Key and we’ll proudly tell you that Crescent Beach was entered in the World Sand Challenge in 1987 and named the finest and whitest sand in the world. Heck, we’ll tell you even if you don’t ask. We’ll also tell you the sand is made of ancient quartz crystal, and that even when the temperature is hot enough to make your brain boil, the sand on Crescent Beach is still cool to your feet. Some people claim the beach has healing properties, and that Siesta Key is one of the energy centers of the planet. I don’t know if that’s true, but if you live on the key, even if you have surf at your front door like I do, you get a compulsion every now and then to go to Crescent Beach and scuff your bare feet in the sand.

I climbed the steps with my precious deli sack in one hand and coffee in the other, bypassing the vending machines and snack bar and going to a picnic table under the shade of a soaring roof. I put my coffee and deli bag on the table, swung my legs over the bench, and took a seat facing the ocean. Down on the white sand, broiling tourists were laid out like meat on a grill. A few children were splashing around in the waves while their parents sat under umbrellas and watched them.

Except for a young man at a table about ten feet from
me, I had the area to myself. He was swarthy and bearded, in dirty cutoffs and a floppy dress shirt with the cuffs suspiciously buttoned. With a faded bandanna tied over a mop of black curls and his eyes hidden behind dark reflective shades, he looked like a wanted poster for a Middle Eastern terrorist. He was staring out at the water and muttering to himself in the way of people who’ve stopping taking their medication, but he wasn’t speaking English, and I couldn’t tell if his foreign tongue was an actual language or one he’d invented for his personal world. A canvas bag sat on the pavement at his feet, most likely holding books or food or all his worldly possessions. Or a bomb.

I laid out my lunch like a priest preparing Communion. I unwrapped my sandwich and pickle and opened the chips, placing them at exactly the right spots. Placement of food is important. You don’t want the important stuff to be over on the side. The main stuff should be in the upper middle, with accompaniments to the side or slightly below. I’ve been known to rearrange a plate several times before I get the order just right. Eating in the right order is important, too. First a bite of the main stuff, then one of each of the side things in turn. If you take two bites of something in a row, you’ll screw up the whole rhythm. Not that I’m a control freak or anything.

I took a bite of sandwich and closed my eyes, making an
mmmmmmm
sound, like a baby nursing. There is nothing in the world as good as one of Anna’s turkey and pumpernickel sandwiches with tarragon mayonnaise. If there were a sandwich hall of fame, it would be in it.

A faint breeze moved the shadowed air, and a couple of black gulls sailed in and landed a few feet away to look hopefully at me. Not to be selfish, I left two little corners of bread for the gulls, tossing it as far away from me as I could so they would move away. They went for it with a
loud flutter of wings, and didn’t even notice that I also had a brownie. The young man took no notice of me or of the gulls, but continued to look fixedly at the ocean. I was glad he was ignoring me. I much prefer being ignored.

Just as I took the last bite of brownie and was ready to take the last sip of coffee—I plan these things so they work out like that—there was a commotion over in the snack bar area. A security guard trotted past my table to see what was happening, and the young man at the adjoining table got up to walk a few steps away from his table and stare. I half-turned on the bench to look, too, and met the gaze of the bald-headed man who had tried to attack me in the Crab House parking lot. A crowd of people pushed between us, but I was positive it was the same man.

A woman separated herself from a group of passing tourists and walked briskly to the young man’s table, where she swooped down and grabbed his canvas bag and walked away with it. The young man kept staring toward the dustup at the snack bar.

I jumped to my feet and yelled, “Hey!”

The woman broke into a run and disappeared down the steps to the parking lot. The security guard had been swallowed up by the crowd in the snack bar, so I stepped over the bench, ready to chase after the woman.

Without looking toward me, the young man stretched his arm out at shoulder level. His hand was clenched in a fist, with the first two fingers stabbing a stern V. Then he turned and walked rapidly away, going toward the beach.

I stopped and turned my gaze back to my own table. Trying to act as if nothing had happened, I gathered up my lunch refuse and carried it to a trash bin. The young man who seemed out of touch with reality was Paco, and he was telling me to butt the hell out. He had just made a drop in a drug sting, and I had almost ruined it.

Whatever had happened over in the snack bar area had apparently been resolved, and the crowd there began to drift away. The bald-headed man had disappeared, and I was left wondering if I had imagined him. Maybe the stress of everything that had happened was making me see danger where there wasn’t any. Paco was moving along the edge of the shore, most likely headed toward one of the beach accesses where his Harley would be parked.

I walked to the steps leading to the parking lot and started down, my thoughts swirling with visions of Phillip’s beaten face, the bald-headed thug, and the drug sting I’d just witnessed. I was tired. I wanted to go home and take a shower and crawl in bed and let this excess of reality recede a little bit.

On the way home, I swung onto Marilee’s street. Jake Anderson, the trauma-scene cleanup guy I had called, was in the driveway next to his big white van with a bio-hazard icon on its side. He and a couple of other men in blue haz-mat suits were just loading their equipment into the truck. They had taken off their headgear but still wore vinyl gloves to their elbows.

I pulled up behind them and stuck my head out the window. Jake grinned and pulled his gloves off and tossed them into the back of the truck.

“All done, Dixie. It’ll smell like cherry syrup for a while, but you can go in.”

“Okay to take a cat in?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Jake.”

I backed out, knowing the house had been cleaned and sanitized the same way operating rooms are cleaned. Ghost might not like the lingering odor of ozone or the final deodorant fog, but he would be safe from any biological pathogens that are the natural aftereffects of a
murder. I turned the corner onto Midnight Pass Road, and at the Graysons’ street I saw Sam and Rufus out at their mailbox. I turned and drove to the curb beside them and parked. Sam looked up from a stack of mail with a questioning look, then smiled.

I got out and squatted beside Rufus and exchanged kisses while Sam looked on like an indulgent father.

When I stood up, I said, “Sam, I hope you and Libby haven’t lost faith in me because of the things Carl Winnick has been saying.”

“Oh good grief, Dixie, of course not! You know, Libby and I were just talking this morning about that, and we think he’s off his rocker. His wife drinks, you know. She and Libby belong to the same Great Books club, where they talk about Virginia Woolf or somebody, and she says Olga Winnick has always had a nip or two before they meet. Her husband’s on the radio yapping about how wholesome he is, and his wife’s a lush.”

“I guess you know about their son being attacked.”

Sam shook his head. “It makes me sick that I didn’t know the boy was lying out there when that man ran by. I thought he’d been trying to break in somebody’s house. I never dreamed he had just attacked somebody.”

“The detective told me Rufus may have saved Phillip’s life.”

Sam leaned to scratch Rufus behind the ears. “You hear that, boy? You’re a hero.”

Rufus wagged his tail and grinned modestly, basking in the pride Sam and I were lavishing on him.

I said, “Sam, before you and Libby left last week, did you put a piece of brass pipe at the curb for trash pickup?”

“Yeah, a piece left over after they got the carousel horse up. Why?”

“The cook at the Village Diner works part-time for
somebody on this street, or at least she did until last week. She said that she picked up a piece of brass pipe in somebody’s trash last Thursday night.”

“There was a piece of galvanized steel, too, the pipe they used for lining the brass.”

“She didn’t mention that, but she said a man drove into the driveway and took the brass pipe away from her. He was pretty nasty about it, and she’s hurt and angry. Do you have any idea who he might have been?”

“Drove in
this
driveway?”

“That’s what she said. She said he drove a black sports car, but she didn’t know who he was.”

“I don’t know anybody who would have done that, Dixie.”

“Do you know anybody who drives a black Miata?”

“I don’t think so. Can’t think of anybody.” Sam was standing like a soldier at attention. “Does this have anything to do with that killing? Do you think that’s what the killer used? My brass pipe?”

“I don’t know, Sam. It just seems odd for somebody to make a big scene over a piece of pipe that was left at the curb for trash pickup one night, and then the next morning a dead man is found in a neighbor’s house with his head bashed in.”

Sam winced. “God, that must have been awful for you, Dixie, finding that body.”

Apparently, he didn’t know I’d found Marilee, too.

I said, “Not as bad as finding Phillip beaten up. That was the worst.”

I gave Rufus another hug and got back in the Bronco. “I’ll see you, Sam.”

He and Rufus watched me drive away, both of them with sad expressions on their faces.

At the meandering driveway to my place, I started to make the turn and then straightened the wheel and drove
straight ahead. There was one more thing I had to do before I went home.

The Crab House doesn’t open until five o’clock, so there were only a few cars at the far end of the lot, probably belonging to cooks or staff. I parked by the front door and crunched over loose oyster shell. The door was locked, and when I rapped on it, a young Latino with liquid black eyes and a scraggly attempt at a goatee opened it a crack and peered out.

“We’re not open,” he said.

“I know, I’m here to see your manager. One of your employees has been badly hurt.”

His eyes rounded and he looked uncertainly over his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t know what to do about me, or if he meant he hadn’t understood what I’d said.

“I have to come in,” I said.

He shrugged and opened the door wider, stepping aside with a shy smile as I passed him. A slight blond man in the waiters’ uniform of black trousers and white shirt was putting little vases of flowers on the tables. He saw me and stopped what he was doing, looking at me with a question on his face.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you the manager?”

“He’s not here right now. Did you want to apply for a job?”

“No, I wanted to tell him—you—something.”

I walked closer to him and saw a name tag reading
RAY
. I said, “Ray, Phillip Winnick was beaten up Sunday morning on his way home.”

“Who?”

“Phillip, the young man who plays piano.”

“Oh my God! Phil?”

“I found him near his house early yesterday morning. He was in pretty bad shape. He’s in the hospital now.”

He sat down at a table and stared up at me, the implications of what I was telling him playing over his face.

I took a chair across from him and said, “Do you know who Phil leaves with when you close?”

His face tightened and he shook his head. “Nobody here would have done that. Nobody who knows Phil would have done that. Everybody who knows him likes him.”

“I’m not suggesting that the person he leaves with was the one who beat him up. I’d just like to talk to him, find out if he saw anybody around when he dropped Phil off.”

The door opened and the bartender from Saturday night walked in, going straight to the bar and beginning to set out bottles and glasses. He was a tall, bookish-looking man with rimless round glasses and a frieze of short beard around his cheeks and chin. Except for shirtsleeves that bulged with muscles, he reminded me of a chemistry teacher I’d had in high school setting out Bunsen burners and vials of smelly chemicals.

Ray got up and went over to the bar and spoke quietly to him. The bartender turned and looked at me with a frown, then recognized me. He put down the towel he was using to polish a wineglass and came over to shake my hand.

“I remember you,” he said. “You’re Phil’s friend. I’m Dennis.”

“Dixie Hemingway, Dennis. The reason I’m here is that Phil’s been beaten up. I want to find out who did it.”

Ray said, “I was just telling her nobody from here would have hurt Phil.”

I said, “I think Phil leaves here with somebody who takes him home. I’d like to talk to whoever that is. He may have seen somebody in the area yesterday morning.”

Dennis got the impassive look that people take on when they have information they don’t want to divulge.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not a cop. I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m just Phil’s friend, and whatever this person told me would just be between him and me.”

Dennis and the waiter exchanged a wary look. I completely understood their reluctance. Phillip and his unknown friend were gay. Phillip was still in the closet, and the other man might be, as well. To give me the man’s name was not only to involve him in a crime, but to out him. Given the level of hysterical homophobia that still exists in this country, with its coy “Don’t ask, don’t tell” silliness, no ethical or responsible person would do that.

Dennis said, “Tell you what I’ll do, if I see somebody I think might have given Phil a ride, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him. If he knows anything, he can give you a call. How’s that?”

His voice was smooth and friendly, but I knew he would close me out if I pushed. That’s all I was going to get.

I stood up and put my hand on his arm. “Thanks. I ap
preciate that Phil’s a good kid, and I’m really upset about this.”

Ray whipped out an order pad and I wrote my name and business phone number on the back of a slip.

I nodded goodbye to them and started for the door. Behind me, Dennis called out, “Hey, I just remembered something. You know that bald-headed guy that tried to hit on you the other night? He was back last night, and he asked about you.”

I turned and stared at him. “About me?”

“Yeah. He wanted to know if you came here often. I told him I didn’t know you.”

“Did he know my name?”

Dennis grinned. “He just called you the blonde bitch.”

“That guy’s bad news. He chased me in the parking lot that night. I barely got in my car in time.”

“You call the cops?”

“No. I just went home. I guess I should have.”

“Damn right you should have. I’ll pass the word about him.”

I started to leave again, then turned back. “Does he come here often?”

“Never saw him before that night when you were here.”

“When he came back, did he try to hit on any other woman?”

“Not that I noticed. He stayed at the bar by himself, left when we closed.”

“Okay. I just wondered.”

I went outside and got back in the Bronco, wondering why the man had picked me out to try to pick up. Or stalk.

I finally left the
whoosh
of traffic and drove under a blessed quiet canopy of green oak branches to my apartment. When I rounded the last curve, I saw Paco in front of the carport. Still in disguise, he was holding a man to
the ground with one hand while he held a phone to his ear with the other.

I pulled into the carport and got out.

Paco snapped his phone closed and flashed a white grin up at me. “Got a friend of yours here, Dixie.”

The man was face down with his hands cuffed behind him. His head was smooth and shiny as a dolphin’s, and his piggy black eyes were spitting venom.

I said, “He’s been following me. He chased me at the Crab House the other night and he was at the beach this morning.”

Paco took one of the man’s ears and twisted it. “How come you’re following the lady,
pendejo
?”

“Fuck you, asshole!”

“Don’t you wish.”

Paco got to his feet and put one foot on the man’s butt to hold him down. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, amigo. The lady used to be a deputy, and she’s still got a lot of friends in the department, and they’re gonna be real mad when they find out you’ve been stalking her. They may decide to dump you in the surf and let the sand crabs crawl in your eyes.”

Any other time, I would have enjoyed listening to Paco pretend to be a zonked-out bum who had no connection to law enforcement, but I hadn’t had a shower all day and I knew company was coming.

I said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and took a two-minute shower. Just as I was pulling on underpants, I heard tires crunching the shelled driveway. I shimmied into a short skirt and T, stepped into sandals, ran lipstick over my mouth, and sprinted for the French doors.

Downstairs, Paco stood on one side of the downed man, and Lieutenant Guidry stood on the other. Guidry said, “Dixie, I’d like you to meet Bull Banks, a freelance
thug who’ll do anything for a buck. He was recently released from one of our penal hotels for beating up an elderly couple.”

Paco said, “I was just asking him nicely to tell us who hired him to attack the kid.”

Bull said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kid?”

Guidry said, “Bull, it’s not like it was when you started your career. Now we’ve got all kinds of technologies. When we get DNA results from what we found on Phillip Winnick, I think we’ll find that you’re our man.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You gotta have hair or something for a DNA test.”

“Oh, we can use lots of things. Little skin cells from your fists maybe.”

“Fists! Ha, that’s a good one.”

“Oh yeah, we got good skin cells from your knuckles, Bull. Little knuckle cells were all over the kid’s face.”

“Didn’t use my fists!”

Guidry and Paco exchanged looks and grinned. Just at the instant I realized they knew each other, Bull Banks realized he’d just made a tactical error.

“You can’t prove a fucking thing! Anyway, the kid’s a goddamn queer!”

My head exploded, and the next thing I knew, I was on top of Bull Banks like a rodeo cowgirl, using his ears to slam his face in the sand and yelling words at him that would have made my grandmother ground me for a year. I didn’t know how long I’d been on him, but Bull was howling and sputtering and choking from all the sand in his mouth and nose and eyes. From the looks of his face, I’d been at him long enough to cause him some serious discomfort.

Paco pried my hands off Bull’s ears, and Guidry hooked an arm under my waist and lifted me up. Guidry was grin
ning, and when they stood me on my feet, he kept one arm around me to keep me from falling on Bull again. I kicked Bull in the ribs and yelled, “Who paid you to beat him up? You tell me who, or so help me God, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat!”

It felt so good to kick him that I kept doing it.

Bull yelled, “Stop it, bitch!”

Guidry said, “Now Bull, that’s not a nice way to talk to a lady, especially when she’s going to press charges against you for stalking her. When they add that to attacking the Winnick kid, you’ll get the ‘three times and you’re out’ life sentence. If you’re nice to Ms. Hemingway, she might be persuaded to forget about the fact you’ve been stalking her.”

Paco said, “The way you’re protecting him, you must be a good friend of whoever hired you.”

I turned at the sound of a marked squad car scrunching over the shell toward us. A uniformed deputy got out and took in the scene. When I turned my head back, Paco had disappeared.

Guidry spoke to the deputy. “This is Mr. Bull Banks. He needs to be Mirandized and taken in for the assault of Phillip Winnick.”

The deputy nodded and hauled Bull to his feet. Guidry touched the small of my back with his fingertips and said, “Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

Feeling more surreal by the moment, I climbed the stairs ahead of Guidry. At the porch, he turned the umbrella in the table so it shaded us from the midday sun. “Sit down, and I’ll get us something to drink.”

I sat as if I were a guest and he was the one who lived in my apartment. He went inside as if he owned the place, and in a minute he came out carrying two bottles of water from my fridge. He sat down in the chair opposite me, unscrewed the cap on his water, and took a long drink.
When he put the bottle on the table, his eyes were calm and expectant.

I said, “Do you think Bull killed Frazier and Marilee?”

“We’ll look into where Bull was Thursday night, but I doubt he’s our man. Not that Bull couldn’t be bought to do it, I just don’t think he did.”

“He’s the man who was at the Crab House Saturday night before I talked to Phillip, the one who chased me in the parking lot. This afternoon, he was watching me at the pavilion at Crescent Beach. He must have left about the same time I did, but I stopped by Marilee’s house and the Graysons’ on the way home, so he got here first. I think he was here yesterday, too. Somebody broke into my brother’s house and then into my apartment upstairs. They left sandy footprints, and whoever it was drove a car down the drive.”

“Any idea why he’s stalking you?”

“He could have seen me talking to Phillip, I guess. I thought he’d left, but he could have come back without me seeing him. If the woman Phillip saw knew he was watching her, and if Bull had anything to do with killing Frazier and Marilee, he may have followed Phillip to the Crab House, intending to kill him. Then he saw Phillip talking to me and guessed he was telling me about the woman, so he decided he had to kill me, too.”

“If he was going to kill you, why didn’t he kill Phillip?”

“Because Rufus sensed what was going on and barked. That scared him away. Do you know what kind of car he drives? Is it a black Miata?”

“Bull might drive a
stolen
Miata, but he doesn’t own a car.”

“He must have had a car that night, because he probably waited in the Crab House parking lot and followed
Phillip when he left. Then he followed him again when his lover drove him to that spot and let him out of the car.”

Guidry rotated his water bottle on the table. “That’s where your theory breaks down, Dixie. Bull’s the type who would beat the kid up just because he’s gay. It may not have anything at all to do with the murders.”

“Then why was he after me?”

“You turned him down at the bar, and you chatted up a gay guy. In Bull’s world, that’s plenty of reason to hurt you.”

“Guidry, you know Sam Grayson? The man whose dog barked and scared Bull away when he was beating Phillip? The dog’s name is Rufus. Well, Sam put a piece of brass pipe at the curb before he left town last Thursday night for the trash people to pick up Friday morning. A little piece about two feet long. Tanisha saw it when she was walking to the bus stop, and she picked it up.”

“Tanisha?”

“The cook at the Village Diner. She’d been cooking for somebody on the Graysons’ street, and she saw the pipe and got it. She said a man drove in the Graysons’ driveway and took it away from her, sort of accusing her of stealing it.
And
he drove a black car that may have been a Miata.”

For a second, Guidry looked like he needed to put his head between his knees and take deep breaths.

“And you think…”

“Maybe that was Bull. Maybe he used the pipe to kill Frazier and Marilee.”

“He got inspired when he saw the pipe and decided to go kill somebody with it?”

“You have to admit it’s a strange coincidence.”

“Somebody had to have a damn good reason for killing Harrison Frazier and Marilee Doerring, and un
less we turn up some compelling evidence, I don’t think Bull Banks had anything to gain by their deaths.”

“Somebody could have hired him.”

“Yeah, but who?”

“Shuga Reasnor said Gerald Coffey wouldn’t kill them himself, but that he might hire somebody.”

“That’s just gossip, Dixie.”

“Guidry, you didn’t just meet Paco for the first time today, did you?”

“Who?”

“Paco, the guy downstairs, the one who called your private line when he caught Bull Banks.”

“Is that his name? Nobody introduced us.”

The guileless look he gave me would have fooled the most confirmed cynic, but it didn’t fool me.

“Dixie, before you arrived at Marilee Doerring’s house and found Harrison Frazier, where had you been?”

My heart skipped a beat. “Why are you asking me that? Do you believe that crap Winnick is saying?”

“That’s irrelevant, Dixie. Where had you been?”

“I told you that before. I walked the Graysons’ dog about four-thirty, and then Billy Elliot, the greyhound at the Sea Breeze. After that, I went to a house to take care of a cat. Marilee’s was my second cat of the morning.”

My voice was tight and curt. I couldn’t believe Guidry was asking me for an alibi.

He said, “Any humans see you? Anybody who can verify that you were where you say you were?”

I could feel my jaws clenching and my hands making fists. If there’s anything I pride myself on, it’s honesty. Having my honesty questioned was like jabbing me with a sharp stick to see how much pain I could take.

“That’s the whole point of my work, Lieutenant. I
wouldn’t be going to those houses if people were home. Tom Hale was home, but he was still in bed.”

“He lives where?”

“At the Sea Breeze, with Billy Elliot.”

“The greyhound.”

“Yeah.”

“Besides Tom Hale, nobody else saw you that morning?”

“I don’t know, Guidry, I guess somebody could have seen me, but I don’t know who.”

“Okay.”

I stared at him a moment, feeling a confused mixture of anger that he’d asked me for an alibi, and a rational understanding that he was just doing his job.

I said, “This has been really fun, Lieutenant, but I need to take a nap so I’ll be awake for my afternoon pet visits.”

He stood and handed me his empty water bottle. “Thanks for the refreshments.”

I watched him walk down my steps and then went inside and lowered the storm shutters against the glaring western sun. Amazingly, I was fairly calm. A year earlier, I might have curled up in a corner and sucked my thumb if in one ninety-six-hour period I’d found two murdered bodies, been accosted by a psycho in a parking lot, been vilified on radio by a radical hatemonger, stumbled on a kid I liked a lot who’d been badly beaten, and had a homicide detective question me as if I were a possible murder suspect. Now I was just pissed. A little jumpy, true, but mostly pissed.

It was true that I needed a nap, but first I went in my closet–office and checked my messages. One was from somebody named Ethan Crane, who claimed to be Marilee’s lawyer but was probably a reporter trying to trick me.