Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery Read online

  I led a reluctant Mazie down the sidewalk closer to Laura’s house. I didn’t see any signs of life, but that didn’t mean Laura wasn’t home. She could be inside reading the morning paper and Leo could have run out when she went outside to get it. She could be in the shower, not realizing that Leo was loose. Or she could be on the jogging trail, completely unaware that Leo had slipped out when she opened the door.

  Mazie pulled on the leash, wanting to go home. I hesitated a moment, torn between wanting to let Laura know her cat was outside, and knowing Mazie was right. I was on her time, not Leo’s. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I had seen Leo. It could have been some other dark cat with a long tail.

  Telling myself Leo would eventually come home—if it had been Leo—I led Mazie back to her house. Pete was waiting outside the front door like an anxious father.

  I handed Mazie’s leash off to him and said, “I think I saw Laura Halston’s cat while Mazie and I were walking. He runs out every time he sees an open door.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess he’s a nature cat. Doesn’t like living inside.”

  “That’s how I’d be if I were a cat. I’d join the circus again, be on the move all the time.”

  “Are there circus cats?”

  “Well, sure, lions and tigers. A few people have got domestic cats to do some tricks, jump through hoops, that kind of thing, but cats don’t have a strong desire to please people like good circus animals have. Cats are liable to get bored in the middle of an act and just flat quit.”

  “I think I’ll go next door and tell Laura, just in case it was Leo. He might have gone out when Laura opened the door to go running.”

  “She ran real early this morning. I took Mazie outside to pee, and I saw her run across the street to the jogging trail.”

  “I’m not even sure it was Leo.”

  “A bobcat, maybe. People see bobcats in their yards all the time. Bobcats and panthers were here first, poor things.”

  I didn’t think it had been a bobcat I’d seen. I was almost positive it had been Leo.

  I left the Bronco in Mazie’s driveway and walked to Laura’s house, peering all around as I went in case Leo had returned to his own yard. As soon as I started up Laura’s walk, I saw that her front door was ajar. When I got closer, I saw Leo in the corner of the small porch. He was gnawing on one of his paws as if something was stuck between his toes. I wasn’t surprised that he’d come home. Cats have an unerring sense of direction, and they usually return soon enough when they’ve run away.

  Cats are also skittish, and Leo might streak away if I approached him. I knelt on the walk and talked softly to him.

  “Hey, Leo, remember me? Would you let me pick you up?”

  He paused in his paw cleaning, tilted his ears toward me, and then went back to cleaning his foot. He seemed to be telling me that he wasn’t unfriendly, but to not take him for granted.

  I looked toward the door again. If I ignored Leo and rang the doorbell, he might take offense at my nearness and run away. The smart thing would be to call Laura and tell her he was out and let her handle him. Keeping an eye on him, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed information, then remembered that Laura’s landline number was in her parents’ name and she hadn’t given me her cell number. I put the phone back in my pocket and got to my feet.

  Leo turned his attention to another paw, going at it with a determined intensity. Whatever his feet had picked up on his dash to freedom was something he didn’t want to keep. Watching him from the corner of my eye, I took a few cautious steps toward the door and realized my heart was pounding much harder than the situation warranted. I told myself a cat had got out through a door accidentally left ajar, that’s all there was to it.

  But I knew Leo had been outside now long enough for Laura to have missed him. I knew there was something terribly wrong about that open door. And above all else, I knew what Laura’s husband had said to her the day before. He had told her he would see that she paid for what she’d done.

  While I debated what to do next, Leo stopped gnawing at his toes and watched me. Old deputy habits made me scrutinize the door facing for signs of forced entry. I didn’t see any, but when I looked more closely at the landing, I made out several small dark brown circles.

  I don’t know why it had taken me so long to see them. Perhaps I had known all along they were there and denied them. Whatever the reason, they told me why Leo was so busily cleaning the pads of his paws.

  13

  I took the phone back out and called 911. A deep male voice answered, one of those molasses tones that make you feel like weeping with relief because you’ve found somebody with broad shoulders you can fling yourself against. It took several tries to get my voice to work, and then it came out sounding like something fired from an old rusty cannon.

  I said, “I have reason to believe a woman has been attacked in her home. I’m outside the door now, but I’m afraid I’ll disturb evidence if I go in. I’m an ex-deputy.”

  I felt it was important to say I was an ex-deputy, as if that would make me sound more credible.

  The man said, “Why do you think there’s been an attack?”

  “I overheard the woman’s husband threaten her yesterday, and now her front door is open a few inches and her cat’s outside. The cat has left a trail of bloody paw prints from the house.”

  He took the address, Laura’s name, and my name.

  He said, “Somebody will be there shortly.”

  I could imagine him calling it in: “Crazy woman thinks another woman has been attacked because her cat’s outside and she imagines she sees bloody paw prints. Go check it out.”

  I sat down on the walk and waited. Leo waited. Leo yawned and stretched, then continued grooming a leg. The house was quiet and calm. The yard was quiet and calm. I was the only thing not calm, but it was very possible that I was a paranoid case. It was very possible that I’d been involved in so many crimes in the last year that I’d come to expect the worst even in innocuous situations.

  One of those ear worm things started in my head again, Randy Newman singing “I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.”

  After what seemed eons, a green-and-white deputy’s car pulled into the driveway and Deputy Jesse Morgan got out. The fact that a sworn deputy had come instead of one of the Community Policing officers meant the dispatcher had taken my call seriously, but I did an inward groan. Morgan and I have met over a couple of dead bodies, and I think he sees me as somebody whose presence spells trouble. He may be right.

  I stood up to meet him, and it seemed to me that his stride faltered a bit when he recognized me. From the top of his close-cropped hair to the hem of his dark-green deputy pants, Morgan was crisp and all business. The only thing about him that hinted of a life outside law enforcement was the discreet diamond stud in one ear-lobe.

  With his eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, I had to go by his lean cheeks and firm lips to tell what he thought, and he wasn’t giving anything away.

  He stopped a few feet away and rocked back a bit on his heels. “Miz Hemingway.”

  I said, “I know how this seems, but I’m concerned about the woman in this house. I saw her cat run across the street about an hour ago. I think the cat ran out when somebody went in.” I pointed toward the dark round circles. “Those are paw prints.”

  Morgan’s head tilted a fraction of an inch toward me, either in acknowledgment of my powers of deduction or because he thought it was a good idea to be polite to a crazy woman.

  As he moved past me toward the door, I said, “Don’t scare the cat away.”

  He stopped and turned his head toward Leo. “Tell you what, Miz Hemingway, why don’t you go pick the cat up, and then I’ll go in the house.”

  I didn’t like the careful way he said it, as if he were humoring somebody who might fly apart at any moment. Still, he had a point. Cautiously, I moved forward and stooped to pick Leo up. As if to show Morgan what an overanxious idiot I was, Leo went
limp as a sack of jelly.

  Avoiding the paw prints, Morgan zigzagged to the door, rang the doorbell, and rapped on the glass. “Sheriff’s Department!”

  Silence.

  He rang again, rapped on the doorjamb, and called louder. “Sheriff’s Department!”

  He did that three times, each time louder, then used the back of his knuckles to push the door open. “Miz Halston? Sheriff’s Department!”

  He walked inside out of my view, but I could hear him calling to Laura and identifying himself. I carried Leo to the end of the driveway and stood by the street waiting. I already knew what Morgan would find.

  In a few minutes, he stepped outside with his phone to his ear. His face had gone several shades paler. He paused to talk, and I heard the word stabbed. The word confirmed what I’d been expecting. Call it intuition or hunch or simply the fact that I knew Laura’s husband was a sadist with scalpels, I knew Laura had been murdered and that the killer had stabbed her to death.

  Morgan clicked the phone closed and put it back on his belt. Then he walked to the corner of the house, leaned over with one hand on the wall, and very efficiently threw up.

  I had firsthand knowledge of some of the gruesome things Morgan had seen, but I’d never seen him lose his poise. Morgan was an experienced law enforcement officer, and law enforcement officers become inured to scenes that would turn a normal person’s stomach. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth, then slowly turned toward me. I could feel his eyes on me behind his dark shades, and I knew he was debating how much to tell me. His chest rose in a deep breath, and he came down the driveway.

  I said, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “The crime-scene guys will want to talk to you.”

  I said, “I’m going to put Leo in my car.”

  Woodenly, I walked to my Bronco in the driveway at Mazie’s house and put Leo in a cardboard cat carrier. Lowering all the car windows, I left him there and went back to Laura’s house. As I got there, a sheriff’s car pulled to the curb and Sergeant Woodrow Owens got out. When he saw me, his face registered pleasure, dismay, and sadness all at one time.

  Sergeant Owens is a tall laconic African American who had been my immediate superior when I was a deputy. There’s not a finer man in the world, or a smarter one. He was smart enough to tell me I was too crazy to carry a gun for the department after Todd and Christy were killed. Actually, what he’d said was, “Dixie, you’re way too fucked up to be a deputy.”

  That’s how smart he was.

  Now he said, “Damn, girl, I was hoping you’d stopped attracting dead bodies.”

  “Me too.”

  He flapped a bony hand at me and went past me to confer in low tones with Morgan. They both went inside the house for a few minutes, and when they came out Sergeant Owens held his mouth clamped in a straight line. Morgan studiously held his head with his chin tilted up, as if he’d decided never to look at the floor again.

  While Morgan went to his car and got out yellow crime-scene tape and began stretching it around the perimeter of the yard, Owens whipped out his phone. He spoke in clipped tones for a while, then closed it and walked back to me.

  “What’s the story?”

  “The woman who lives here is Laura Halston. I don’t know her well, but I had dinner with her night before last, and she told me she’d left her husband. He’s a sadistic surgeon, used to carve her up with scalpels. They lived in Dallas, and she ran away and came here. Then he found her.”

  “She told you he’d found her?”

  My face got warm. “I happened to overhear them talking yesterday. I was putting a turtle out by the lake, and they were on the other side of the hibiscus hedge that runs along the street. He told her he would make her pay for what she’d done. She walked away from him, and he drove off.”

  “You ever see him again?”

  “That’s the only time.”

  “Got a name for him?”

  “Dr. Reginald Halston. He’s a prominent doctor in Dallas.”

  He scribbled the name, and I said, “She called him Martin.”

  “When you were listening to them behind the trail?”

  I felt myself blush again. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, they just happened to come by while I was there.”

  “How do you know he was the husband?”

  “I heard her talking to him on the phone the night we had dinner. She called him Martin then, too.”

  “And she said he was her husband?”

  “She said he was her soon to be ex-husband.”

  “In Dallas.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “You know a next of kin to notify?”

  “Her parents live in Connecticut, but I don’t know their name. She mentioned a sister in Dallas named Celeste. She didn’t say a last name.”

  Owens deliberated a moment. “You know anybody else who could identify her body?”

  “Besides me?”

  “I think it would be better if it was somebody else, Dixie. You don’t need to see that.”

  My heart quivered. Morgan had upchucked at seeing Laura’s body, and now Owens wanted to protect me from seeing it.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s about as bad as it can get, Dixie.”

  It’s funny how your mind can split at times like that. One side of my brain recoiled from what was happening around me. The other side was cool as grass. The cool side knew investigators would look through Laura’s address books looking for names and numbers for her relatives. The cool side knew calls would be made, awful truths said, grim arrangements made.

  The cool side said, “I’ll take care of Leo until the house is cleaned up.”

  “Leo?”

  “Laura’s cat. I’ve put him in my car.”

  Owens gave me a slow look, then nodded. “Lieutenant Guidry will be handling the homicide investigation. He’ll want to talk to you.”

  As if on cue, Guidry’s dark Blazer pulled to a stop in the street, and Guidry got out and walked to us.

  Owens said, “Dixie knows the woman. She spent some time with her night before last.”

  I said, “I was only with her a few hours. She invited me for a glass of wine, and then we had dinner.”

  Owens flapped his notebook at Guidry. “The woman has a husband in Dallas. A surgeon. She told Dixie he was a sadist, used to scare her with scalpels. Dixie believes the man came here and found her. She saw the woman with a man she believes is the husband.”

  Guidry nodded, digesting the scant information without comment.

  I said, “She was a runner. Ran every morning. That’s how I met her. She’d opened the door to go running and Leo got out. Leo’s her cat. I’ve put him in my car.”

  Guidry’s face took on the pained look he always got when I mentioned pets, but neither man answered me.

  I said, “She wore serious running shoes. The expensive kind.”

  I studied their implacable faces for a moment and knew it was time to shut up.

  I said, “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

  As I turned away, Owens said, “Dixie? We don’t need to tell you not to divulge anything about the ex-husband and the scalpels.”

  Of course he didn’t. When word of the murder got out, the usual loonies would come forward to make false confessions. Guilty people would give false alibis. Citizens would call with leads and misguided information. The murder would be public knowledge, but the fact that Laura’s ex-husband was a surgeon who liked to play with scalpels was information that only the homicide investigators would know. And me.

  Without answering, I turned away and trudged back to the Bronco.

  14

  At the Bronco, Leo was peering out the air holes in the cardboard carrier and making piteous noises. I leaned in the window and said, “It’s okay, Leo.”

  My mouth said that, but my feet knew it was a huge lie, and the next thing I knew I was kicking the bejesus out of my front tire,
all my rage and horror banging in useless fury.

  Behind me, Pete said, “Dixie? What’s wrong?”

  A surge of adrenaline brought teeth-rattling shakes, and I turned around to lean against the Bronco with my knees stiffened and my elbows braced on the car. Pete had Mazie on her leash, and both man and dog were taking in the fact that Leo was crying in the car, and that Laura’s yard was marked by yellow crime-scene tape.

  An ambulance and several marked and unmarked sheriff’s cars passed by, slowing to a crawl in front of Laura’s house and then oozing to parking places by the curb. I knew what the criminalists would do. They would post a Contamination Sheet by the front door to record every person who entered and left the house. Then they would photograph the interior of Laura’s house, dust for latent prints, and look for shoe tracks, for fibers, for hair, for anything that might point to the identity of the person or persons who had killed her. Outside, they would walk shoulder to shoulder around the area looking for anything a killer might have dropped.

  Pete said, “Something’s happened to that woman, hasn’t it?”

  Still shuddering, I bobbed my head up and down.

  Inside the Bronco, Leo made a long wailing noise. Mazie whimpered and trotted toward the sound, moving her tail back and forth in a nervous show of sympathy.

  I waited until a final tremor released me, then said the thing that had to be said.

  “Laura’s been killed.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  I said, “I’m going to take Leo to Kitty Haven until Laura’s family comes.”

  I put my hand on the door handle and then turned to him. “Pete, what time was it that you saw Laura?”

  “Oh, it was early. Around five, probably. I get up early, you know, and once I’m up Mazie is up, so we went outside for a few minutes. That lady came down the driveway over there and ran across the street. Just sort of squeezed through the hibiscus there where the running path is.”