Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (8 page)

I waited for the end of the story, and when neither of them volunteered it, I said, “And was it a success?”

“She never woke up. They had to transfer her to a hospital in St. Pete, and she was there for three months before she finally died. Dr. Coffey said she was just too frail to survive. Poor thing, and she never even knew she had anything wrong with her heart. All she knew about was her diabetes.”

“Almost the same thing happened to Mr. Folsom, remember? He seemed fine too, just complained of emphysema from smoking before he knew better. And then,
boom, Dr. Coffey found four of his arteries blocked and had to do bypass surgery on him. He didn’t wake up, either, but he didn’t suffer as long as Mary did. He passed away just a few days after the surgery.”

They both fixed me with eyes frightened and resigned, while little warning bells went off in my head.

I said, “Dr. Coffey must be awfully busy.”

“Oh, he is! At least one person a week from here has a bypass, and that’s just the people living here.”

“It must be awfully hard for their families, having them die so suddenly like that.”

They nodded, but with a look of some disturbed confusion. “Actually, none of them has had a family. They’ve all been alone.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

While the valet retrieved my car, I calculated Dr. Coffey’s income from bypass surgeries. The going rate was around $150,000 per artery, so a triple bypass could bring him a cool half million. If he did just two of those a week, the million dollars Marilee had conned Coffey out of would be only a week’s income. In light of the fact that she had bought her grandmother an apartment that probably cost at least a half million, and in light of the fact that it sounded like some of his patients hadn’t needed the surgery anyway, it didn’t seem so bad for Marilee to have taken advantage of him.

I drove south on Tamiami Trail, passing Marina Jack, where a few cotton-ball clouds were reflected in the glassy blue water, and naked masts of sailboats stood sentinel around yachts sleeping in the sun. A million questions were running through my mind. Why did Cora say Harrison Frazier had ruined Marilee’s life? If Marilee
knew Frazier, had she had her keys changed to keep him out? And where the hell was Marilee, anyway?

When I got back home, I put a Patsy Cline CD in the player, and Patsy and I sang together while I took the sheets off my bed and gathered up more laundry to put on top of the stuff in the washing machine. I added detergent to the wash and turned it on, and while the washer filled, Patsy and I sang another song. I got out the Swiffer and punched a clean cloth into its head, and Patsy and I sang some more while the machine started chugging. The thing about Patsy is that she kept it clean and simple. Nothing oily or mysterious. The world would be a better place if everybody thought like Patsy.

One minute I was running the Swiffer and singing with Patsy, and the next minute I was yelling
“Oh shit!”
and running to open the washer. The laundry was twisted and bloated under murky water, looking like the slimy fetuses of some horrible monster. I jammed my arm in and yanked up Ts and towels, Keds and shorts until I hauled up my khaki cargo shorts with the flapped pockets. I spread them over the washer’s agitator head to hang in sodden folds while I fumbled the Velcro flap open and fished out Marilee’s letters that I’d taken from her hall table.

Making moaning noises, I laid each wet, ink-smeared envelope on top of the dryer. I imagined myself explaining to Marilee that I’d had good intentions about mailing the stuff, but just, you know, forgot. I imagined myself telling Marilee that I would pay her IRS fine for being late. Then I started getting mad and imagined myself saying, “You didn’t actually tell me to mail it, you know. You went off and left it, and a lot of people wouldn’t even have noticed it. It’s really not fair to expect
me
to pay the penalty!”

I went to the kitchen for paper towels and blotted as
much water from each envelope as I could, but they were all a sorry sight. Some of them had more or less disintegrated over the checks and invoices they held. I recognized the familiar Florida Light and Power envelope, and also Verizon and Teco, but not the others. One bedraggled check was made out to a pool-cleaning service, but the ink was too blurred to make out the name, and another check was stapled to an invoice from a home-security company. The check was a loss, but the print on the soggy invoice was clear enough to see that it was for $785, for the installation of a Centurion wall safe.

“Huh,” I said brilliantly. Marilee must have had something she deemed important enough to hide in a wall safe. Something she wanted to keep close at hand instead of in a safe-deposit box at the bank. Perhaps the person who had trashed Marilee’s bedroom had been looking for whatever it was.

All the envelopes were business size except one pale blue square of heavy linen-woven stock. The dark blue ink of the address had run badly and the flap had come unstuck, but the thickness of the envelope seemed to have kept the paper inside relatively dry. I raised the flap all the way, just to see how wet the letter inside was, just to see if it might be salvageable. Well, okay, I raised it to see if I could see anything written on it. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did.

Marilee’s handwriting was round and girlish, with little hearts dotting the
i
’s. The sentence at the top of the opening in the envelope said, “I can’t wait to see you!”

Carefully, I extracted the damp letter from the envelope and gingerly carried it to the kitchen and laid it out on paper towels. It was two pages long, and I laid each page out as precisely and clinically as a pharmacist laying out prescription pills. So long as I focused on drying these moist sheets, I could ignore the fact that I was tampering with the U.S. mail, violating Marilee’s privacy, interfer
ing with a homicide investigation, and generally sticking my nose into things that were none of my business.

I left the pages drying and went back to the washer and restarted it, then finished Swiffering and dusting and plumping up the cushions on the living room furniture. I have one chair in my living room. It matches a rattan love seat with dark green linen cushions patterned with bright red and yellow flowers of a purely artistic species. Originally, both love seat and chair sat in my grandmother’s little private parlor off the bedroom she shared with my grandfather. The idea had been that she could retreat there when she wanted privacy or just to get away from the noise of a man and two children—the two children being me and Michael. But she never found time for privacy, so the furniture stayed like new. When I moved into the apartment over the carport, I appropriated it for myself. Like my grandmother, however, I’m not very good at just sitting, so when I die, my living room furniture may still be as good as new. But of course I won’t have a granddaughter to inherit it. Unless Michael and Paco adopt a child, there won’t be any relative to inherit anything. We’ll all just die without leaving a trace, like sculptured sand people obliterated by the tide.

By the time I put clean sheets on my bed and cleaned the bathroom, the wash was ready to go in the dryer. I tossed it all in and turned it on, then went to the kitchen to check on the letter. Most of the ink was too blurred to read, but I took it to the porch and sat down at the table.

The next paragraph was blurred, then some clear lines: “You have a right to know all the truth, not just part of it. Honey, please don’t feel bad about keeping it a secret that—”

That was the only legible bit except for “I can’t wait to see you!”

I read those few lines over and over, and each time I had to blink hard to keep from crying. Obviously, Marilee had given birth to a daughter when she was only fifteen, and evidently she had found her. Finding a daughter you gave up at birth would be like having a dead child returned to you, a fulfillment of the heart’s deepest yearning.

I leaned back in my chair and looked out at the sea. Sunshine sparked diamonds off the glittering waves. In the distance, triangular sails moved slowly along the horizon. A few shorebirds were leaving tracks down on the sand. A snowy egret, perched on one leg on a mooring post, was blissfully turned the wrong way to the breeze so his feathers could ruffle. From the rooftop, a pelican sailed to the edge of the shore and gulped something from the lapping water. No matter what happens in the world, the ocean keeps rolling. It’s the one thing you can depend on.

I went inside and got an apple from the fridge and went back to the porch and watched the waves rolling in while I ate it. I thought about calling Guidry and telling him about the letter, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to explain about reading it, and it might not have anything to do with Harrison Frazier’s murder. I thought about what Shuga Reasnor had said about Marilee having a secret, and this was probably it.

I was beginning to feel very protective toward Marilee Doerring. I didn’t want to give her secret away unless it became absolutely necessary. I’m a real pushover for people who are good to their pets and their grandmothers and the babies they gave up when they were fifteen.

I threw the apple core down to a congregation of black gulls and went inside to get my things for the afternoon pet visits. I locked the French doors when I left, even though any dedicated intruder could easily burst through them. I drove down the tree-lined lane to the street, where a vacationing couple on the sidewalk paused to let me pass. The woman was short and round and sun-pinked, with a mass of curly brown hair sticking out in all directions from a tennis cap. She wore flower-printed shorts and a yellow spandex bandeau stretched over breasts as big as honeydews. Her arms were held out chest-high like chicken wings, with wrist weights attached like cuffs. As I drove by, she marched in place with her arms swinging and her cheeks puffed out while she energetically whooshed air in and out. Her husband was almost two heads taller, and he was ambling along behind her with his hands in his shorts pockets. They were so cute that I waved at them as I turned onto Midnight Pass Road. The husband waved back, but the wife gave me a startled look and resumed her power walking.

The Graysons hadn’t called, so I went first to their house. One of their three garage doors was up and Sam Grayson was standing beside the driver’s side of his BMW. Sam was a sexy, seventyish Cary Grant look-alike with a high forehead and silver hair cut in an almost military burr. Tall and lean, he moved with a loose-limbed grace that always made me wish I could dance with him just once.

I parked behind one of the closed doors so he could back out, but he walked out to meet me. “We forgot to call you, didn’t we?”

I said, “Welcome home. How was your trip?”

“Oh, it was great. Just great. We got to spend time with our daughter and the grandkids, and we’ve got enough snapshots to bore our friends for months.”

“That’s true friendship.”

“Yeah. Come on in and say hello to Libby.”

We went up the front walk and he opened the door and stood aside. Rufus came galloping to kiss my knees, and Libby Grayson came from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. As beautiful as Sam was handsome, Libby had shoulder-length silver hair and brilliant blue eyes that sparkled with intelligence and good humor. Together, they looked like the couples in retirement community ads—the ones who are so fit and sexy, they make you wish you were that old so you could look so good.

“Oh, Dixie, I’m sorry I didn’t call! Oh well, it gives us a chance to thank you for taking such good care of Rufus. Look how he loves you! I’ll bet he didn’t even miss us.”

I leaned down to stroke Rufus, wishing he wouldn’t act so happy to see me.

Libby said, “Sam, pay Dixie.”

He took the bill from her and read it, then got out his wallet.

While he counted out twenties, Rufus trotted over and sat next to Libby and smiled at me, as if he understood it wasn’t polite to two-time her to her face.

I said, “I love the new carousel horse.”

Sam handed me a neat stack of twenties and said, “He’s a rare one. Made of cast iron instead of the lighter stuff. You wouldn’t believe what a project it was to get him mounted on that brass pole!”

Libby said, “He’s so heavy, the brass pole had to be lined with galvanized steel. First we had to find a brass pole that was exactly one and a quarter inches in diameter, because the holes in the horse are one and a half inches. Then we had to find galvanized-steel pipe the right diameter to fit inside the brass pipe. It took
weeks
of phone calls!”

Rufus yawned and trotted away toward the kitchen. I
knew just how he felt. This was way more information than I needed about pipes, but they were getting such a kick out of telling it that I tried to look interested.

Sam said, “We hired a guy to cut the pipes and fit them together. He had to drill a hole through them and attach the horse. When he fitted them into the brass plates on the floor and ceiling, it was like watching brain surgery. If he’d cut either pipe a quarter inch too short or too long, we’d have been back to square one.”

I started edging toward the door. “Well, I’d better run. Oh, by the way, somebody left some books for you in the chest.”

We all said our goodbyes, and as I backed out of the driveway, Sam was leaning over the chest digging out all the accumulated newspapers. I wondered if he and Libby would actually read them or toss them in the trash. My bet was that they would trash them. Who needs so much news?

At Tom Hale’s condo, I found Tom reading in his wheelchair and Billy Elliot lying on the floor with his head propped on Tom’s feet. Both man and dog looked up at me when I walked in. As if we were in the middle of a conversation, Tom said, “Dixie, do you know what a fewterer is?”

“It sounds like something dirty.”

“In medieval days, a fewterer was the keeper and handler of the greyhounds.”

“So you’re a fewterer?”

“I guess you’re one, too, Dixie. We’re two fewterers.”

“Well, that was always my ambition, Tom, to be a fucking fewterer.”

I got Billy Elliot’s leash and he and I went downstairs to run. As I ran down the edge of the parking lot behind him, a dark Blazer pulled to my side and eased along with me. I looked over and saw Lieutenant Guidry eyeing me with that calm level look that only cops have. I could have
been jogging along stark naked and he probably wouldn’t have changed expression. I pointed to the building’s front door, and he nodded and pulled away, making a U-turn and parking by the entrance.