Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Read online

  Her smile flashed again. “Another dog?”

  “No, an iguana.”

  “Really? How interesting. But you’ve just heard about him? You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not yet. I’m on my way there now.”

  “Okay, that’s good. Well, see you later then.”

  She jerked on the bulldog’s leash and ran off in the direction she’d come. Halfway down the block, she stooped and picked the bulldog up and broke into a hard run. At the end of the block, she turned the corner and disappeared, and in a minute or two I saw a dark sedan drive from the direction she’d gone.

  The beagle and I continued our walk, but I felt uneasy. One of the cardinal rules of professional pet sitting is not to carry gossip from one client to another. I don’t tell one cat owner that somebody else’s cat vomited up decapitated lizard on a guest’s shoes. I don’t tell when somebody’s valuable stud dog failed in his studly duties when presented with a voluptuous bitch in heat. I keep all those things to myself, both because it’s confidential information and because I’m not the kind of person who runs around telling everything I know.

  But I had a nagging feeling that I had just betrayed a confidence in telling the woman that I was going to see an iguana named Ziggy. I also had a nagging feeling that she had been ever so deliberately mining me for information, and that I’d given her what she wanted. Even worse, in retrospect I was beginning to think our encounter hadn’t been an accident at all but that she’d been waiting for me to come out. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut about the coincidence of two pets named Ziggy. I felt as if I had given away an important secret.

  That was such a nutty, paranoid idea, I took it as evidence that I had lost some ground in the move toward complete sanity.

  Still, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t plotting against you.

  After I left the beagle’s house, I started retracing my way south, calling on cats. No matter what kind of pet it is, I always do a fast check to make sure they haven’t had any embarrassing accidents or done anything naughty to get attention, then I spend about thirty minutes concentrating on them as the unique individuals they are. I feed them, exercise them, groom them, and do whatever else they need to feel special. Pets are like people; their need to feel important is as great as their need for food and water. Before I leave, I turn on their favorite TV station. When I tell them goodbye, they always look happier than they did when I arrived. That may not seem like a great accomplishment to a lot of people, but I like knowing I’ve made somebody happier, even if the somebody has four legs.

  The exception was Muddy Cramer, who never seemed happy no matter what I did. Muddy’s full name was Mud Fence, because when he was found huddled in the Cramers’ backyard, Mark Cramer had declared him ugly as one. Muddy was a two- or three-year-old mixed breed shorthair whose tailless rump indicated an ancestor in the Manx family. He had a dull orange and black tortoiseshell coat, one of his ears had been partially chewed off, and his left eye squinted like a Caribbean pirate’s.

  Instead of showing gratitude for being rescued from the wild, Muddy seemed hell-bent to test his humans’ loyalty. He sprayed the curtains, upchucked on the carpet, and clawed the furniture. The Cramers loved him anyway, which proves that love is not only blind, it also can’t smell. I always carried my quart bottle of Anti-Icky-Poo spray to Muddy’s house to neutralize the urine odors, but it was an uphill battle.

  I left Muddy’s house feeling sad for both Muddy and his humans—and thinking there is nothing in the world that smells worse than male cat pee. The sky had darkened, and the rain clouds that had seemed hours away were moving in fast. Nuts. I still had several pets to call on, and if there was anything I didn’t need today, it was to get caught on my bike in a cold rain.

  Home was just a couple of miles away, so I headed that way to get the Bronco, but I was too late. In seconds, driving rain was slamming me hard, and passing cars were ever so slightly hydroplaning on the oil-slick asphalt. Terrific. I was not only soaked, I could be hit by a flying car.

  One of the sucky things about life is that your problems always begin with choices you make. Even worse, you usually know a bad choice when you make it, but you barrel on with it anyway. I had one of those moments when I came to a bricked driveway and saw a small guardhouse set well back from the street. We don’t have many private guardhouses on Siesta Key, so I knew this one was there to preserve the seclusion of somebody who was either very wealthy or very famous or both. I didn’t know the owner of that place. I didn’t know the guard working in the guardhouse, and private guardhouses aren’t known for being refuges for people caught in rainstorms. I knew all that. Nevertheless, I pedaled toward it. With luck, there would be a guard who would let me come inside and wait out the storm. If not, I thought I could at least huddle under its roof overhang until the rain stopped.

  Bad choice number one. Or maybe it was number two or three. It’s always hard to trace back to the true start of things.

  As I drew closer, I could see the square window in the side of the guardhouse was open. Good. That meant a living person was inside, not a voice box manned from some other location.

  The main house was beyond a tall areca palm hedge, and that was good too, because if a kind guard befriended me, his employers wouldn’t be able to see.

  With my mouth half open to charm the guard into helping me, I rode under the roof’s overhang and looked through the open window. Then my mouth snapped shut and I jerked my bike to make a U-turn back to the street.

  No way was I getting involved in what I saw. No way was I going to have anything to do with it. The last time I’d seen something like that, I had ended up killing somebody before he killed me. Uh-uh, no way. I wasn’t doing it again.

  I think I may have actually spoken out loud to the rain. I think I may have actually said, “I don’t care! Somebody else can handle this! Not me!”

  The guard was sprawled in his chair with an ugly red welt running up his cheek and a contact bullet hole in his left temple. It could have been a suicide, but I had a bad feeling that somebody had pressed the barrel of a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.

  No matter how it had happened, the man was dead, dead, dead, and it didn’t make any difference how soon his death was reported, he was still going to be dead.

  At the end of the driveway, my conscience made me come to a guilty stop. Inside the hidden house, somebody might be looking down the barrel of a gun held by the person who’d shot the guard. Somebody’s life might be saved if I called 911 and reported what I’d seen.

  While I teetered between conscience and cowardice, a dark blue panel truck pulled into the driveway and sped toward the guardhouse. Within two nanoseconds, I was on Midnight Pass Road and pedaling like hell toward home, not minding the cold rain at all now, just glad that somebody else would see the murdered guard and call 911.

  As if to let me know that my decision to stop at the guardhouse had been not only stupid but unnecessary, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. By the time I got home, the sun was shining and all the clouds were moving toward the southeast. My brother was out on his deck, wiping water off the plank table. As I started up the stairs to my apartment he turned and yelled.

  “Anybody ever tell you not to play in the rain?”

  I gave him the finger and kept slogging up the stairs in my wet Keds.

  My brother is Michael. He’s two years older than me, which makes him thirty-four, and he’s been feeding me and taking care of me since I was two and our mother decided that the demands of motherhood—like putting food on the table and staying with her children—weren’t her favorite way to spend a life.

  Michael is a blond, blue-eyed firefighter with the Sarasota Fire Department, so good-looking that women tend to arch their backs like cats in heat in his presence. Fat lot of good it does them. He’s been with Paco for over twelve years, and they’re as committed to each other as the pope is to celibacy.

  Paco is al
so thirty-four, also a dreamboat that women vainly drool over. As dark and slim as Michael is broad and blond, he’s with the Sarasota County Special Forces Unit, which means he does undercover work, often in disguises that even I don’t recognize. Michael and Paco live next door in the frame house where Michael and I grew up with our grandparents after our parents left us. They’re my closest friends in the whole world. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m not sure I would have survived without them after Todd and Christy were killed.

  Using the remote to raise the hurricane shutters, I unlocked the French doors to my minuscule living room, left my wet Keds on the porch, and padded barefoot over the Mexican tile to the bathroom, shedding clothes as I went. My apartment is small—living roomkitchen with a one-person eating bar, bedroom barely big enough for a single bed and dresser, tiny bathroom next to a narrow laundry room with stacked appliances. But I have a large closet with a desk on one side and my T-shirts and shorts stacked on shelves on the other side. I like the fact that my living space is spare and utilitarian without any unnecessary color or life. It suits me just fine.

  Or at least it used to. Lately I’d been feeling a tad cramped.

  I stood in a hot shower until my skin was rosy all over, but it didn’t make me feel normal. Instead, I felt more and more disappointed in myself. I might not be a deputy anymore, but I was a human being, and it had been wrong to run from the scene of a murder. Maybe the driver of the panel truck had done the same thing. Maybe he had cut and run too, and the guard was still sprawled in his chair with that strange angry weal on his cheek and a bullet hole in his temple.

  Avoiding my eyes in the bathroom mirror, I screwed my damp hair into a ponytail. Then I padded to the kitchen and put on water to make tea. While I waited for the kettle to boil, I put a Patsy Cline CD on the player. Sometimes I listen to Roy Orbison and sometimes to Ella, but mostly I listen to Patsy because she never lets me down. I can feel like buzzards are roosting in my brain, and Patsy’s straight-at-you, tell-it-like-it-is, love-wasted transparency makes me feel like the world isn’t such a bad place after all.

  I carried my tea to my combination office-closet, where I pulled on clean underwear, a pair of faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and fresh Keds. Then I sat down at the desk and pretended to be businesslike. I checked the answering machine, but it was still too early in the morning for business calls. I squared up some pieces of paper. Then I went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth again, even though I’d done it earlier at four o’clock. It didn’t sweeten the nasty taste of guilt in my mouth. Even with Patsy Cline belting out lyrics designed to make life seem simple, right now mine seemed more complicated than I could handle.

  In my head, I heard a voice quoting the Bible—or maybe it was Shakespeare—“Let the dead bury the dead,” which doesn’t make any sense at all when you think of it, but then nothing was making much sense right then, least of all me.

  I still had a couple of cats and the iguana to take care of, so I grabbed my backpack, went out the French doors, and clattered down the stairs while the remote lowered the storm shutters behind me.

  Michael stuck his head out his kitchen door and yelled, “Want some breakfast?”

  Michael cooks the way other people breathe; it’s a necessary rhythm to his life. If the world were poised for a direct hit from a meteor, Michael would probably ladle out soup. Since he’s one of the world’s best chefs, a lot of doomed people would line up to get it and feel a lot more cheerful about their prospects.

  Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the chance to have one of Michael’s breakfasts, but I didn’t want him scrutinizing me this morning. He had been almost as traumatized as I was by the things that happened after I found the last dead man. If he learned I’d found another one, he was liable to insist that I get another line of work. One that didn’t have so many corpses in it.

  I said, “No, thanks. I just came home to get the Bronco. I’ve still got two cats and an iguana.”

  His face brightened. “No kidding? An iguana?”

  “Yep. Haven’t met him yet.”

  We grinned at each other with one of those coded memory-smiles that siblings have. Our grandfather had brought home a near-dead baby iguana when Michael was about twelve, and we had helped give it round-the-clock antibiotics sold for chickens—iguanas and chickens, having evolved from the same reptilian ancestor, have identical respiratory and digestive systems. By the time the baby iguana had gone from sick black to healthy green, Michael and I were both enchanted with it. For reasons that now escape me, we named it Bobby.

  My grandmother never took to Bobby the way the rest of us did, and when he grew to be about four feet long, she banished him from the house. He lived the rest of his life in the trees, just coming down to nibble on the hibiscus and eat fruits and vegetables we left out for him. Except for a time when he sacrificed his tail to some unknown predator, his life was peaceful. His tail grew back darker and shorter than the original, but he seemed quite happy. He lived over ten years and died during an unexpected freeze that wiped out Florida’s citrus crop. When he died, our grandfather wept. Neither Michael nor I had ever seen our grandfather shed a tear before, and his grief over an iguana’s death had been as sobering as losing Bobby.

  In the carport, a couple of great blue herons were sitting on the hood of my Bronco, where they’d taken shelter from the rain. Down on the shore, black gulls were putting on an aerialist show a few feet above the waves, while a few snowy egrets ignored them and made fresh tracks in the sand as they gathered up sand crabs washed in by the rain. I shooed the herons away and pulled the Bronco out of the carport onto the drive that winds to Midnight Pass Road. I told myself I wasn’t going to think about the dead guard again, but I knew I was lying.

  For the next hour, I concentrated on feeding and grooming the two cats on my schedule. I played chase-the-peacock-feather with each of them, and I cleaned their litter boxes. Before I left them, I turned on their TV sets—the wild-life channel, but with the sound muted—and made sure they had plenty of fresh water. They both gave me a couple of tail swishes to let me know they approved of my performance and then pretended to ignore me when I left. I love that about cats. They may be secretly gloating that they’ve made a human wait on them like they’re royalty, but they never lose their cool and actually show what they’re feeling. I wish I were more like a cat.

  When I finished grooming the second cat, I checked the iguana’s address again and headed north, looking for the number. For private houses, street numbers are rare along that stretch of Midnight Pass Road. The general attitude is that nobody has any business going to a person’s house if they don’t already know where they live anyway, so why post street numbers just for the curious?

  When I drove past the mansion with the dead guard in the guardhouse, I allowed my head to turn and look down the drive. Two ambulances, three green-and-white sheriff’s cars, and a Medical Examiner’s van were parked along the edge of the drive. At least I could stop worrying that the murdered guard was still alone in there.

  A block or so later, I saw a street number and realized I’d passed the iguana’s house. I pulled into a condo parking lot and doubled back, driving slowly while I tried to find another house number. At the driveway to the guardhouse, the Bronco sort of turned itself in, and I sat staring at the crime scene cars while a horrible realization trickled into my brain.

  My new iguana client lived in the house where the guard had been shot in the head.

  THREE

  I parked behind the sheriff’s vehicles and crawled out of the Bronco like a possum slinking out of a tree. The last thing I wanted was to explain to the crime-scene people why I was there.

  Sergeant Woodrow Owens saw me first. A pained expression crossed his face, and he put his hand over his eyes for a moment like he hoped I was an apparition that would go away. Sergeant Owens is a tall, loose-jointed, sad-eyed African American who, if he were a dog, would be a basset hound. He was my commanding officer when I was a d
eputy. When Todd and Christy were killed and everybody else expected me to get my act together and come back to work, it was Sergeant Owens who finally had the grit to tell me the honest truth—I was way too fucked up to carry a gun for the county. I’ve always respected him for coming right out and saying it and not pussyfooting around. There’s something reassuring about having your own emotional instability recognized and authenticated. Once that’s done, you can get on with the business of getting through life without the added stress of trying to fake normal.

  He said, “Dixie, I’m almost afraid to ask why you’re here.”

  I said, “I have a pet client in this house.”

  “You know Kurtz?”

  “Who?”

  “Ken Kurtz, the man who lives here.”

  So that was his name. Not Curtis, like I’d written when we talked.

  “Never met him, but he called last night and asked me to come today and feed his iguana.”

  I glanced at the yellow crime-scene tape around the guardhouse and tried to look innocent. “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody shot the guard.”

  “Anybody else hurt?”

  “Just the guard.”

  Well, that was a relief.

  Sergeant Owens said, “When Kurtz called you, did he say where he was?”

  “New York. He said he’d be home today.”

  “You get a number?”

  I felt myself redden. Heck, I hadn’t even got the man’s name right.

  “He hung up before I could, and the ID thing said NUMBER UNAVAILABLE.”

  “Okay, come with me.”

  He went loping off down the driveway toward the areca palm hedge so fast I had to trot to keep up with him. Beyond the hedge, the driveway curved and widened to a four-car garage. At first I thought the garage formed one wing of an L-shaped single-story house, but then I realized the house was built around a courtyard with a tall oak tree in its center. Sergeant Owens made a sharp right angle and walked down a long paved path between the privacy hedge and the side wall of the garage. We passed an expanse of clear glass and stopped at double doors painted glossy lipstick red. I had seen so much Christmas stuff that morning that I caught myself thinking a tasteful pinecone wreath would have looked good on the red door, but it was bare.