Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (26 page)

She looked up at me with puzzled eyes. “There wasn’t much blood. That surprised me. And it wasn’t like his head was blown open or anything. It was just a neat little hole in his forehead.”

I didn’t offer any explanations, so after a pause she went on.

“I knew he was dead, and I knew the men trying to get Victor’s business had done it. There wasn’t anything I could do about him being dead, and if I called the cops and reported it, they would come investigating Victor’s
business. I thought they might take the money or the house, the cars and boats, maybe all of it. So I went to see Harry, and we came up with the idea of a kidnapping. See, if Victor was kidnapped, it wouldn’t look odd that he’d disappeared, and nobody would know how he’d made his money. So Harry brought his boat around to the gazebo and we tied Victor’s ankles to an anchor and then Harry took him out to deep water and dropped him overboard. Then he went home and waited until late that night and called me and left that message.”

“And you came to see me.”

“Yeah. You were cool to help me, Dixie.”

“After I took the money to the gazebo and you drove me home, you went back to the gazebo and got the money, didn’t you?”

She looked proud of herself. “It wasn’t really money. It was phone books.”

I felt like banging my head on Harry’s walls. There hadn’t been anybody watching me from a boat when I walked down that dark path to the gazebo. There hadn’t been any money in the duff el bag. I had been a total dope.

I said, “Why the press conference?”

She looked surprised at the question. “That’s what people
do,
Dixie. Rich people, I mean. When a rich person’s been kidnapped, the family calls a press conference.”

I said, “They’ve identified Harry’s voice on the ransom call.”

“I know. I feel bad about that.”

“Do you understand? It means they think he kidnapped Victor.”

“Well, they can’t
prove
he did it. He doesn’t have a record or anything. I don’t think he’ll have to serve time.”

My hands itched to smack her. I took a deep breath and decided to come at her from another angle.

“You said Victor’s killer was one of his rivals. You must have some idea who he was.”

She shook her head. “It could have been a lot of people. See, some big shot from Colombia contacted them all and said he was coming here this week. He’s going to put the entire North American operation in one broker’s hands, so people are coming from all over the place to find out who the main guy will be. Victor expected it to be him. I think some other broker killed him to keep him from going to that meeting.”

It made my head swim to hear Maureen speak of drug kingpins as brokers, but what she’d said made sense.

I said, “Did you hear a name for the guy coming from Colombia?”

“No, but Victor said he was one of Escobar’s people. I don’t know who Escobar is, but Victor said you don’t screw around with one of his men. He sounded pretty scared.”

I would have been scared too. Pablo Escobar was once the bad-ass head of the Medellín drug cartel in Colombia. He’s been dead over a decade, but his former associates still use his name to instill fear. One of Escobar’s men coming to Sarasota would send an earthquake through the drug world.

“You have to tell them the truth.”

She shook her head like a four-year-old offered a bite of spinach. “I can’t do that, Dixie. That would get me in a
lot of trouble. You know, they might think I was Victor’s business partner or something.”

“If you don’t tell, I will.”

She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. Baby gophers probably look like that the first time they poke their noses out of the ground and see daylight.

I said, “Mo, I know about the script you wrote for Harry. You directed him to make that ransom call.”

Outraged, she said, “He told you about that?”

I pulled the note from my pocket. “I found it. I’m giving it to the police.”

It was stupid of me to wave it at her. Maureen was tall and long armed and quick. With a look of feral cunning, she snatched the note from my hand and ran out the cabin door with me hot behind her.

I
nstead of leaping to the dock and running away, Maureen rounded the corner of the cabin toward the aft deck and disappeared into the shadows. Like a kid, she probably thought she could escape by making herself invisible. That if she hid from me, I wouldn’t know where she was.

The rain had slackened to a fine mist, with steamy fog ghosting dark silhouettes of sleeping gulls and pelicans. Trembling with suppressed fury, I moved cautiously on the wet deck looking for her. Maureen had got away with using people all her life, and I was determined not to let her get away with framing Harry for kidnapping Victor. Maureen was taller than me by a good five inches, but I’d always been more athletic, and I had righteous outrage feeding me. When I found her, I knew I could overpower her.

I crept around a group of deck chairs, but she wasn’t behind them. I peered behind a pile of coiled ropes and under a table lashed to the deck. She wasn’t there. There
was only one other place she could be. I stopped at the tower of Harry’s crab traps. They made a perfect shield for a woman who thought she had the right to use old friends for her own selfish purposes.

I went still as a mongoose, waiting for her to give herself away.

After several silent minutes, the brim of her pink rain hat rose from behind the stack, then her big apprehensive eyes looked over its top at me.

By then I was a volcano ready to blow. All my anger and frustration and disappointment gathered into a bellow that would have traveled five miles in the jungle.

“DID YOU MISS ME?”

She recoiled as if I had put a bullet in her head, and pushed the stack of traps toward me. More furious with every moment, I caught the upper trap in both hands as it fell. I heaved it at her, and she made a noise like a squeaking mouse as she ducked away. She was afraid of me now. For the first time since she’d known me, she was seeing the side of me that had faced down evil and won, a side of me that had killed a man.

Made clumsy by fear and the mist-slick deck, she tried to run, but one of her pink vinyl boots crashed into the escape hole in one of the traps she’d knocked over. Flailing the air for balance, she grunted and kicked her leg as if she would shake it off, but it’s not that easy to disengage your foot from a crab trap. Especially if you don’t know the size and shape of the exit. Especially if you don’t know you have to line your foot up exactly with the hole to extract it. Especially if you’re being attacked by a she-devil from hell.

Lowering my voice to a normal level, I said, “Harry’s been loyal to you for as long as he’s known you. I won’t let you hurt him any more than you already have.”

Her mouth thinned, and I saw her mother’s face. “Oh, you’re so high and mighty! Always thinking you’re smarter than everybody else, better than everybody else. In high school it was always, ‘Don’t sleep with boys, Mo, you’ll get pregnant. Don’t smoke dope, Mo, it’ll make you a loser.’ Well, look who’s the loser now. I’ve got a big house and lots of money, and you’re a pet sitter with a dead husband and a dead baby.”

To this day I don’t know why I moved toward her the way I did. To tell the truth, I don’t remember
intending
anything, I simply surged forward. She shrieked and hobbled backward, eyes wide and scared. Awkwardly dragging the crab trap on one foot, she hit the low railing, lost her balance, and shrieked again. Her vinyl raincoat was slippery and the railing was wet. In a blink, she toppled over the railing and vanished into the rain-darkened water.

My anger evaporated. Now I was guilt stricken and horrified. Maureen had never been a strong swimmer. Neither was I. We were more at home on the beach than in the water. I ran to the forward deck and looked desperately for help. Not a soul. I ran back to the place where Maureen had gone over and looked into the water. The bay isn’t deep, but Maureen was panicked and she had a heavy crab trap attached to one foot. She could easily become disoriented and not know which way was up.

People underwater for more than three minutes lose consciousness. After five minutes, their brains suffer permanent damage from lack of oxygen. I tried to estimate
how long Maureen had been underwater. Half a minute, at least. Maybe more.

Shit!

Old deputy training made me put my cellphone in a protected spot out of the rain before I stepped over the railing. As I dropped into the dark water, I heard a man’s shout and the barking of a dog.

My foot touched something, and I kicked away to come down beside it. My fingers felt Maureen’s slick raincoat. After a jolt of fear when I thought I might be touching a shark, I moved forward to get a grip on her slippery arm. Maureen slewed toward me, clutching at my floating hair. Drowning people don’t cooperate with their rescuers. They don’t go limp and allow themselves to be lifted to the surface. Instead, they go wild with panic. They claw at their saviors, they try to climb them to reach air. Now we were both in danger of drowning. Maureen was weighted down by a crab trap, and I was weighted by Maureen.

As I struggled free of her, my body realized the danger I was in and made my throat close to keep water from going into my lungs. I had only been down a short time, but the smothering need to breathe sent me into the same blind terror Maureen felt.

A form suddenly moved against me, and two arms wrapped around me and tugged me upward. In seconds, my head was above water and I was coughing and gagging. I heard other men’s voices shouting and the thunder of footsteps on the dock. Somebody boosted me toward the deck where strong hands hauled me onto the boards.

I crawled to the cabin wall and leaned against it while
Harry pulled Maureen out of the water. She was crying and gagging, and she’d lost her pink hat. Harry stretched her on the deck, gently eased the crab trap off her foot, and carried her into the cabin.

A man squatted beside me. He said, “Good thing Harry saw you jump in and ran for help. Your friend’s going to be okay.”

I said, “She’s not my friend.”

Hef came to my side and nuzzled my neck, which made me burst into tears and bury my face in his wet fur. After a while, Harry came back and there was some genial backslapping as he thanked the men who had helped save Maureen and me.

The men left, and Harry put his hands under my arms and lifted me upright. He didn’t even breathe hard when he did it. Harry was strong.

He said, “Are you okay?”

Through my tears, I nodded. I was still wheezing and weak-kneed, but more upset than harmed.

He said, “Come on, let’s get you inside so you can dry out.”

I knelt to snag my phone from its protected spot and let Harry lead me inside the cabin. Hef followed me with his tail wagging. Mo had taken off her shiny raincoat and boots and was sitting on Harry’s bed wrapped in a big towel. When I came in, she gave me a murderous look.

Harry brought me towels and led me to a chair.

I said, “You saved our lives. Thank you.”

He grinned and shrugged. “I’m more at home in water than you two. What happened?”

Maureen said, “Dixie pushed me overboard. I nearly drowned.”

I looked from her to Harry. I’d never thought either of them was perfect, but then who is? When you’re young, you’re more prone to overlook friends’ faults and forgive their weaknesses because you know you’re all still cooking and nobody’s done. But we were adults now. All three of us had been in life’s oven long enough to rise to our greatest heights.

I said, “I found the script Mo wrote for you to read when you made the fake ransom call. She took it from me and ran to the deck. I chased her and her foot got caught in a crab trap and she fell overboard.”

Harry said, “I saw you jump in after her. Hef and I were coming home and I saw you. I yelled for help, and those other guys came running.”

He didn’t seem to get the implication of my knowing about the note and the fake ransom call.

I said, “Maureen told me that Victor was already dead when you tied the anchor to him and took him out to the inlet.”

The corners of his lips tucked in, so I thought I might be connecting.

I said, “Unless Maureen comes clean and tells how Victor’s drug-running rival killed him, you’ll probably be charged with both kidnapping and murder.”

He looked quizzically at me. Then he turned and looked at Maureen.

He said, “Mo, are you saying you
didn’t
kill your old man? I mean,
for real
you didn’t kill him?”

She glared at him. “I
told
you I didn’t kill him!”

“I thought you just said that ’cause you didn’t want me to know. That’s the only reason I helped you.”

Now it was my turn to finally get it. Harry had thought all along that Maureen had killed Victor. To protect her from a murder investigation, he’d agreed to make the fake ransom call. And on the theory that nobody could prove she’d killed him if his body was never found, Harry had taken Victor’s corpse out in a boat and dumped him overboard. The poor guy had done it all to protect Maureen.

Maureen didn’t share my sympathy for him.

She shrugged. “That’s your problem, Harry. I
told
you. And that note Dixie found is in the water. Nobody will ever see it, and nobody can prove it ever existed. Anyway, you’re the one who made the fake kidnapping call, not me.”

Harry’s face registered shocked pain. “You told me to!”

She said, “That’s just your word against mine, Harry. Nobody will believe you.”

I had forgotten that Harry could be quick when he needed to be. He was at her side in a nanosecond, leaning over her with one big hand gripping her arm.

He said, “You’d do that to me?”

Drawing her neck back, she swung her other arm up and slapped the air under his face. “Get your hands off me! Who the hell do you think you are? You’re nobody!”

Harry flinched as if she had managed to hit him. Over her head, his eyes sought mine and sent me a look of sad acceptance. I had the feeling that Harry was more disappointed in Maureen for her hateful words than he was for her greed or dishonesty.