Bill Sullivan is a trauma cleaner who has the gruesome job of sanitizing crime scenes. Blood and body wastes contain bacteria that can cause disease. Carpet and tile often have to be replaced, walls have to be scrubbed and possibly repainted. Since Laura had been killed in her shower, the drain would have to be sterilized.
At the door, I said, “What’s her last name? So I can call her about Leo.”
“Last name’s Autrey, but I wouldn’t call her today. It was an ordeal for her to identify her sister’s body.”
“Of course.”
Without making it too obvious that he was getting rid of me, Guidry had skillfully got me outside. It was just as well. I didn’t have any other information to give him, and I needed to get out of that house.
He said, “Thanks, Dixie. I know that was hard for you.”
“It wasn’t hard for me.”
“Okay. Thanks anyway.”
I didn’t answer. Something was going on that he wasn’t telling me. As I slogged back to the Bronco and drove away, I reminded myself that I wasn’t a part of the investigation and that Guidry had no obligation to tell me anything. But I had the distinct feeling that there was more to his reticence than the mere fact that it was none of my business. For some reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I thought Guidry was concealing information because he thought it would hurt me to know it.
20
I was so famished by the time I got to the diner that I felt bared-teeth feral, as if my growling stomach was giving the world fair warning that I was about to pounce on something and kill it.
Judy took one look at me, poured coffee, and scurried away to make sure Tanisha knew the she-wolf had arrived. She must have filched somebody else’s order, because I’d barely finished the first mug of coffee when she brought my food. Nobody talked to me, which was just as well. When I’d thrown enough food down to my monster, I perked up and gave Tanisha a friendly wave. From behind the kitchen’s pass-through counter, her wide face dimpled as she winked at me. It’s good to have friends like Tanisha. They know your nasty disposition is really hunger, so they feed you.
I left money on the table for Judy, with an extra tip for having to put up with my crankiness, and slumped out to the Bronco. Now that I’d eaten, I needed a nap bad.
Driving slowly behind a motorcycle driven by a shirtless spring break guy with a sunburned young woman plastered to his back, I suppressed a yawn as I drove past the Lyon’s Mane. Then a little alarm in my head jerked me awake, and I swerved into a parking space. I wanted to know what Ruby and Maurice knew about Gorgon.
When I went in the salon, Ruby was at the front desk with Baby in tow, and she gave me a dazzling smile.
I said, “I think I may need some conditioner.”
She and Baby looked hard at my hair, and she reached to a glass shelf and got a fancy-looking bottle. When I scrabbled for money, she shook her head.
“It’s on the house. Next time you come in, we’ll charge you out the wazoo, but right now you’re still getting rewards for rescuing Baby.”
I laughed and tucked the bottle under my arm.
“Ruby, when I was in here before, a man named Gorgon came in. Maurice said he was a friend of Laura Halston’s. Do you happen to know anything about him?”
“I know Laura was murdered.”
“What about Gorgon?”
“Dixie, when I was a kid in New Jersey, one of our neighbors talked about a man we knew. Next day, the neighbor got shot in the head. Killed dead. You understand what I’m saying?”
Even the conditioner in the bottle understood what she was saying.
I said, “Lieutenant Guidry is the homicide detective investigating Laura’s murder. If anybody had any information that might help catch the killer, they could make an anonymous phone call.”
“Honey, with caller ID, no phone call is anonymous anymore. And anyway, I don’t have any information.”
I thanked her for the free conditioner and left. I didn’t believe she didn’t have any information, but I fully understood why she didn’t want to talk to me about Gorgon. I felt jazzed. I was on a roll. Through my own cunning I had verified that Mr. Gorgon was indeed as thuggish as he looked. I hadn’t exactly got his mafia ties or anything to connect him to Laura’s murder, but at least I had done something, which seemed a hell of a lot more than Guidry had done. At the rate things were going, I might have to go out and find Laura’s husband myself.
Cora’s neatly folded muumuu was in the passenger seat, so since I was near the tailor shop, I decided to drop the dress off before I went home. The shop was in a part of Siesta Key’s business district so old the stucco on the buildings could have been applied by one of de Soto’s men in the 1540s. It was purely coincidental that it was across the street from Ethan Crane’s office. I wasn’t even thinking of Ethan when I chose it.
Okay, maybe it crossed my mind a tiny bit. Maybe it zipped across without calling attention to itself, but that’s all.
The tailor promised to chop off at least two feet of Cora’s muumuu and have it hemmed by midafternoon, and I came out fully intending to get in the Bronco and drive straight home. But my eyes crossed the street and stood at the entry to Ethan’s building, and that caused my feet to stop.
My eyes stayed across the street, and after a second my feet said, Shoot, we’re going too.
The next thing I knew I was opening the door with its flaking gilt sign that said ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Then I was standing in the dingy vestibule looking up at stairs that had been trod by so many feet they sagged in the middle.
All that venerable decay and wear would make people expect an old man in the upstairs office, but the sign on the door had been put there by Ethan’s grandfather, and most of the feet that had climbed the stairs had been to the elder—now deceased—Ethan Crane. The present and very much alive Ethan Crane was in an office at the top of those stairs.
I told myself I could still go out the door and cross the street and drive home, and Ethan would never know I had been there.
I ignored myself and climbed the stairs, because if I didn’t do it then I might never do it at all, which seemed a terrible waste of something. A chance to rekindle a chemistry that had been there from the first time Ethan and I had met, maybe. Or just a chance to remain friends with a great guy.
From the top of the stairs, I could see Ethan moving around in his office. His suit jacket hung on a coat rack, neatly fitted on a coat hanger, but his tie was close at the neck and the sleeves of his blue and white pinstripe shirt were held in place by silver cuff links. I like people who take their work seriously, and Ethan was a professional, head to toe. Ethan was a lot of things, head to toe, things I shouldn’t have been thinking about.
Ethan claims to be one-quarter Seminole, and his high cheekbones and straight black hair do indeed look Native American. He’d got a haircut since I’d last seen him. Instead of falling halfway to his shoulders, his hair was neatly trimmed above his ears.
He has damn nice ears.
He saw me and stopped moving, just stood with a law book in his hand and watched me walk toward him. My knee joints felt weird, as if they’d forgotten what their function was and needed conscious direction. I stopped in the doorway and tried to think of something intelligent to say.
Instead, I said, “I’m sorry I never knew your grandfather.”
As if it were a perfectly reasonable opening remark, Ethan said, “My grandfather almost single-handedly kept Siesta Key from going the way Longboat and Bird have gone. He wanted Siesta to be for real people.”
I said, “I hate to burst your bubble, Ethan, but real estate on Siesta is no steal.”
“I didn’t say he wanted Siesta for poor people, I said real people. Big difference. Real people don’t barricade themselves in mega-mansions.”