Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter Page 8

  He kept looking at me, waiting for something else.

  I smiled. “That’s all, Phillip.”

  Judy came with a coffeepot in one hand and my breakfast in the other.

  Phillip said, “If it’s not too much trouble, I think I’d like some pancakes.”

  “No trouble at all. You want bacon or sausage with them?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Which?”

  “I guess both.”

  Nothing stimulates your appetite like finding out you’re not hopelessly doomed after all.

  I tucked into my eggs for a while, and he rhythmically tapped his fingers on the table. His hand span was probably twice as wide as my two hands laid side by side.

  Across the aisle, the little boy said, “Look, Mama! A moon!”

  He was holding up a triangle of toast with a bite mark in its center. The shape did look a little moonlike. He was a smart kid, noticing something like that so young.

  With her cheeks swelled with hunks of sausage, his mother said, “Schtop playing wif your food.”

  His face fell and he bent his head back to his cereal.

  Phillip said, “The police came and talked to my mom and dad and me about that murder.”

  “They’re not police,” I said. “They’re from the Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Oh. Well, they asked if we’d seen anything over there, or if we’d heard anything.”

  “Did you?”

  He blushed, shifted in his seat, and looked out the window. “Not really.”

  Judy swished to the table with a plate of pancakes and another plate piled high with bacon and sausages. “More apple juice?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  She sped off to get his juice while I eyed his bacon and thought about what “Not really” meant.

  Judy came back with another glass of juice and poured more coffee in my cup. “Anything else?”

  “We’re fine,” I said.

  Across the aisle, the woman said, “You eat every bite of that. You wanted it, you eat it. I’m not paying for shit you don’t eat.”

  “Poor kid,” said Judy, and moved on with her coffeepot.

  “Phillip, do you know Ms. Doerring very well?”

  “Nnnn-nnnn.” He shook his head with his mouth full of pancake. I sipped coffee and watched him chew. He had put all the sausage on his plate but none of the bacon.

  He swallowed and said, “My dad’s helped her with some things, but I’ve never even talked to her.”

  I said, “Do you mind if I take one of your pieces of bacon? I don’t usually eat bacon, but that looks so good…”

  “Oh, sure! Sure! That’s fine!” It was like taking candy from a baby.

  Perfume companies ought to bottle the smell of crisp bacon. Forget pheromones. I’ll bet a woman with a little spot of bacon grease behind her ears would attract every male within a five-mile radius. Taking little bitty bites to make it last longer, I said, “What kind of things?”

  It took him a minute to pick up where we’d left off. “Plumbing and stuff.”

  “She calls him to do things like that?”

  He chewed awhile and considered how to answer. “She doesn’t exactly call him. A few times her garage door has been open when he came home and she was out there, you know. I guess he saw her and went over to see if she needed any help.”

  No matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine Marilee Doerring out in her garage getting down a plunger to unstop her toilet or searching for a washer to fix a dripping faucet.

  “That’s nice of him.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both ate silently for a while, him taking huge forkfuls of food and me fighting down the rage I felt at the memory of Carl Winnick devoting an hour of radio time to say that Christy would not have been killed if I had been home where I was supposed to be instead of out acting like a man in a deputy’s uniform. He had even objected to the department giving me widow’s benefits, saying taxpayers shouldn’t have to reward me for being a bad wife and mother.

  I studied Phillip’s face and reminded myself that the kid wasn’t his father. The kid wasn’t anything like his father. There was no reason to blame the kid because his father was an arrogant idiot.

  I said, “I got the impression from your mom that she doesn’t like Ms. Doerring much.”

  “My mom thinks she’s a slut,” he said. “She probably is.”

  The easy way he said it took me by such surprise that I choked on a swig of coffee. While I coughed and sputtered and fanned my face with my napkin, Phillip grinned. “Bet you didn’t think I knew that.”

  I was beginning to like this kid a lot. After four years of college away from his parents, he would probably be as smooth as his dad, but he wouldn’t be a phony. This kid was the real deal.

  The woman across the aisle stood up and yanked her dress down over her folds of fat. “Come on,” she said, “we don’t have all day.”

  I watched the little boy slide off the seat and follow his mother to the cashier’s stand.

  I pulled bills from my backpack and laid them on the table. “My cats await,” I said. “I’ll probably see you around.”

  Phillip’s mouth was full, and he smiled up at me with a tiny slick of syrup on his chin. I resisted the urge to spit on a napkin and wipe it off, and headed for the front door. The woman was at the cashier stand counting out change and snarling at the little boy. Outside, I stopped and put my foot up on a railing separating the parking spaces from the walk. I untied and retied my shoe while I waited for the little boy and his mother to come out.

  The door opened and the woman put her hand between his little shoulder blades and shoved him forward. “Goddamn it! Go on!”

  In about two nanoseconds, I spun away from the railing and pinned her to the diner’s stucco wall with my forearm across her throat. “You have a beautiful child, lady, and he deserves a lot better than you. You either start being nicer to him or I swear to God I’ll see that he’s taken away from you and given to somebody who’ll love him.”

  All the rage had left her face. She was afraid, and she had every right to be. Something hit my ankle, hard, and I looked down. The little boy was glaring up at me, ready to kick me again.

  “Leave my mama alone!”

  I stepped away from her and she grabbed her throat with both hands as if she was afraid it had a hole in it. The diner door opened and a family came out—mother, father, three pre-adolescent kids. They flowed around us without paying us much attention, the father teasing one of the kids and the others laughing the way close families do at their private jokes. They moved down the sidewalk to their minivan and got in, still laughing and talking.

  The woman was watching me with frightened eyes. The little boy had moved to hug her leg and she had a hand on top of his head.

  “Okay,” I said, “that’s all.”

  I walked briskly down the sidewalk and around the corner to my car. My hands were shaking so much I barely managed to get the door unlocked. I put my head on the steering wheel and waited for the adrenaline tremors to leave. I felt sick. I felt ashamed. Sergeant Owens had been right about me. I wasn’t ready to deal with people yet.

  Maybe I never will be.

  Eleven

  After I got myself together and saw to the other cats, I drove to one of the ritzy streets coiling around the edge of Roberts Bay to see Shuga Reasnor. Half-hidden behind a cluster of royal palms, her house was a behemoth of glistening white stucco shaped in a wide V, its upjutting wings giving it the look of an albino frigate bird in flight.

  In the circular driveway, I got out of the Bronco and pulled my shorts out of my crotch before I climbed three wide stone steps to the entrance. The front door was a thick slab of glass that allowed a view all the way through the house to the lanai. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the pool would be damn near Olympic in size and either equipped with every accessory known to man or built with a cascading waterfall. Or both. I rang the
bell, a brass plate the size of a turkey platter, and stood looking up at the glass door while I waited. If that sucker broke as you walked through it, a shard could slice your head right off.

  Through the glass wall at the back of the house, a woman moved into view out on the lanai. She came through the slider and walked toward me, giving me a thorough examination as she came.

  “Are you Dixie? Sorry it took me so long, I was watering plants on the lanai. Come on in.”

  Shuga was tanning-booth brown, with the kind of long blond hair that you get only by being fifteen years old or paying a bundle for extensions. Her skin was smooth and taut like a fifteen-year-old’s, too, and her body was trim and youthful. She was wearing a short black tank top and low-rider white jeans that showed her flat belly and smooth swirl of navel. Only her knowing eyes and corded hands gave away her age, which I estimated as somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Barefoot, she led the way into her living room, her feet leaving faint damp prints on the black tile. Outside the sliding glass doors, a water hose lay coiled like a green anaconda in the midst of a jungle of potted plants.

  Swooping over a coffee table the size of my bed, she plucked a cigarette out of a nicotine bouquet stuck in a crystal holder, and waved her hand at me in a gesture that managed to invite me to smoke and to sit at the same time. Her fingernails were like Porsche fenders, sleek and curved and bright red. I shook my head at the cigarette offer and lowered my butt to a curved sofa covered in a rose-colored linen. Like Shuga, the room was beautifully done, but it had a hint of street toughness that no amount of cosmetics or money could overcome.

  She got right to the point. “I wasn’t entirely truthful over the phone. I don’t want to talk about the damn cat, it’s Marilee I’m worried about. The detective talked to me, so I know about that man in her house. That what’s-his-name person. But that’s all he would tell me. You know how the police are, they won’t tell you a thing, even if you’re a person’s best friend. You work there, you’re bound to know more than the police do.”

  She said the last with a pasted-on smile, as if she had suddenly remembered that she needed something from me and ought to be sucking up.

  “I don’t exactly work there,” I said. “I just stop in twice a day to take care of the cat.”

  “And you don’t know where she went?”

  “No, that’s why I called you. She didn’t leave a number where she could be reached.”

  “The detective said she was going to be gone a week.”

  She gave me a pointed look with one raised eyebrow, as if it was my turn. I stayed silent. If she wanted me to play coy guessing games, I wasn’t playing.

  She sighed and blew out a stream of smoke. “What I want to know is how they can be sure she left town. Has anybody checked to make sure?”

  I thought of the hair dryer left on her bathroom countertop. “Do you have any reason to think she didn’t?”

  She took another hit from the cigarette and looked out at the plants on the lanai, as if hoping to find inspiration out there. Abruptly, she dropped into a chair and gave me a hard stare. “I might, but Marilee would kill me if I told anybody.”

  “Miss Reasnor, if you know something that bears on a crime, you should tell the detective.”

  “Call me Shuga,” she said throatily. The seductive way she said it was well practiced.

  I gave her a level stare and her mouth twisted impatiently. “People have secrets,” she said. “Everybody has secrets. You probably have secrets.” She slitted her eyes and peered at me as if assessing what kind of secrets I had.

  “And you’re afraid Marilee will be mad at you if you tell one of her secrets.”

  “Hell yes. Wouldn’t you be mad if your best friend told one of your secrets?”

  I shrugged and stood up. I didn’t have time for this. “Don’t tell it, then.”

  She crossed her legs and swung her foot like an agitated cat swinging its tail. “I made a phone call last night to the place where she might have been going. She wasn’t there.”

  I sat back down. “I thought you said you didn’t know where she was going.”

  “I didn’t know there had been a murder when you asked me.”

  “And you lied to the detective after you knew.”

  “I’m not sure that’s where she was going. It wasn’t like she had told me she was going there.”

  Her leg swung faster, and she sucked so hard on the cigarette, it almost disappeared into ash. Then she slapped her free foot on the floor and leaned forward and looked hard at me.

  “It’s damn funny. It’s just damn funny. The murder’s all over the news, why hasn’t she called?”

  To tell the truth, I’d been wondering that myself.

  I said, “If you’re really concerned about her, you should give the investigators all the information you have.”

  She leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray that already had several lipstick-tipped butts in it. She lit another cigarette, and this time her hands were shaking. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I really will think about it. You won’t tell them what I said, will you? I mean, I don’t know that’s where she was going.”

  I stood up to go. “Not unless I think I have to. I can’t promise I won’t.”

  She nodded, and for a moment her face looked as old as her hands.

  I pushed through the great glass door and went down the steps to the Bronco, conscious all the way of Shuga Reasnor’s eyes watching me. I was sure of two things—she had been hoping to use me, and she had been lying through her teeth. I just didn’t know what she had lied about.

  I am blessed and cursed with an excellent memory for the things people say and how they say them. It began when I was a kid and had to pay close attention to what my mother said so I could figure out which things were lies and which were the truth. It was the only way I could predict what was going to happen from one minute to the next, and even then it didn’t always work. I got better at it over time, and now it’s second nature to me, like having a builtin lie detector.

  I threaded my way through the serpentine streets, running through the entire conversation with Shuga, hearing her voice and its inflections. I passed the village and the fire station, driving on automatic, while my mind kept going over the meeting. Then I played it again, like rewinding a tape and starting all over. She had been nervous, but honest people can be nervous when they’re talking about things they don’t want to talk about, and her reluctance to betray a friend’s secret could account for her uneasiness.

  As I turned onto the shell-topped lane leading home, a black Harley-Davidson came roaring toward me. The driver had a bandanna tied over bushy black hair. A thick beard covered the bottom of his face and dark glasses hid his eyes. He wore a black leather vest and faded jeans. Black boots. I stopped at the side of the drive and let him go by, watching his right hand. As he passed, his first two fingers extended and then folded back around the handlebar.

  He sped out to Midnight Pass Road, and I drove on down the lane. The two fingers were the signal Paco and I had agreed on he’d use whenever he was working a case in disguise. Otherwise, I might have thought a serial killer was on the property.

  I started replaying the meeting again, but this time seeing it instead of hearing it. Seeing Shuga’s face, her swinging leg, her fingers stabbing out her cigarettes. Liars always give themselves away one way or another. Some liars sweat profusely, some raise their voices to a telltale falsetto, and some cut their eyes up and to the right, as if they’re seeing a vision of the story they’re inventing. I was dead sure Shuga Reasnor had been lying about something, but I hadn’t caught her giveaway sign.

  I pulled into the carport and sat with the motor running, staring straight ahead at the Gulf but blind to everything except the mental images in my head. Like watching a movie, I slowed it down to an almost frame-by-frame run, and then I had it. When Shuga spoke of the dead man, she had called him “that what’s-his-name person.” As s
he said it, she had cut her eyes for an instant toward the right edge of the ceiling, the way people do when they’re inventing a lie. Now that I had the sign, I realized even her words had been a giveaway. She had tried too hard to feign ignorance of the man’s name, when it was known to every Floridian who was halfway sentient. Shuga Reasnor knew Harrison Frazier. She either had a personal relationship with Harrison Frazier or she knew that Marilee did.

  A little voice in my head said, “No shit, Sherlock! You just figured that out?”

  I should have realized it from the beginning, the way Tom Hale had. I had been so focused on putting one foot in front of the other that I hadn’t given the details of the murder much thought. Now I felt the way Snow White must have after the Prince kissed her and brought her out of her coma. In a way, I had been in a coma for three years, and now I was beginning to wake up.

  I climbed the stairs to my porch and opened the French doors to let the sea breeze blow out all the morning’s stale air while I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I checked my answering machine, which had no messages, then went out to the porch and sank into the hammock.

  I thought about the aura of hard knowing that surrounded Shuga Reasnor, and about her opulent lifestyle. My guess was that she had gotten her money the hard way, either on her back sequentially or in a marriage bed to somebody who had conveniently died with no other heirs. For all I knew, Marilee might have gotten her money the same way.

  Had Marilee been present when somebody conked Harrison Frazier on the back of the head? Had she been there when somebody taped his face nose-down in Ghost’s water bowl? Maybe Marilee had been having an affair with him, and his wife followed him and killed him. If so, what had she done with Marilee? It could have been Marilee who killed him. He was big, but a woman can swing a baseball bat or golf club hard enough to knock a man out. But surely Marilee wouldn’t have been stupid enough to kill a man in her kitchen and leave him with his face taped inside her cat’s water bowl. Unless she’d counted on people thinking she wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that and therefore they’d think she had to be innocent. And where the hell was Marilee anyway? If she had killed him, she could be halfway around the world by this time. With all the money she had, she could buy a new identity, dye her hair, lay low, and she might never be found.