“What’s the real reason you want me to stop?”
“We’re looking for a psychopathic slasher. Killers like that don’t need a lot of reason to go after another victim. I don’t want you to attract his attention.”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to go into all the reasons why fear wasn’t a good deterrent to keep me from looking for Laura’s killer. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Guidry to know that I was more afraid of fear than I was of a killer.
I took a deep breath and stood up. “I have pets waiting for me.”
He nodded and followed me down the steps. Downstairs, we got into our respective vehicles and gave each other sober waves before we started our engines. Guidry went first, easing his car around the meandering lane and causing the parakeets to do their usual paranoid panic. I followed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands like an old woman afraid of losing control.
22
I weighed about two tons when I slogged into the downstairs lobby at the Sea Breeze. As I went in, the elevator door opened and Tom Hale’s girlfriend came out. She was mincing along on red high heels and carrying a cardboard box so big she had to peer around its side to look ahead. Since she had her hands full, I turned back to open the door for her.
She stopped and gave me a defiant look. “I know what you’re going to say, but women have to put themselves first. If we don’t, who will?”
“Excuse me?”
“I need a man who can protect me. Look at what happened to that woman over in Fish Hawk Lagoon! Somebody came in her house and killed her in the shower. That could’ve been me, and Tom couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”
I looked from her flaming face to the box in her hands. “Are you saying you’re leaving Tom because a woman you’ve never met got killed?”
“I’m saying a woman needs a man to protect her. Every woman, not just me.”
I said, “That’s pure bullshit. You’re just using that as an excuse to leave Tom.”
“You’re so crazy about him, why don’t you move in with him?”
I considered saying that Tom and I were good friends, but that we had no sexual attraction. Not because Tom was in a wheelchair, but because we just didn’t. I considered saying that Tom deserved a woman who wasn’t shallow and vapid, and that I was glad she was leaving him. But saying those things would have taken more energy than she was worth. Besides, I had become so sane and well-balanced that I no longer leaped to tell idiots they were idiots. Instead, I only said one teensy thing.
I said, “Lady, I sure hope you’ve been spayed. It would be a damn shame for you to reproduce.”
She snorted and pranced out on her red high heels, leaving me wishing I hadn’t regained so much sane self-control. A year ago, I might have gone bananas and pulled out all her flat-ironed hair. As it was, I had let the bitch walk away with all her hairs intact.
Upstairs, I tapped on Tom’s condo door and then used my key. He and Billy Elliot were in the living room, and they both gave me doleful looks when I went in.
I said, “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t tell me you’re actually sad the bitch has gone! Puh-leeze!”
They both looked startled, but Billy Elliot began to grin with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
Tom said, “When your husband was alive, did you feel safer?”
“Of course.”
“You thought he could protect you.”
“It wasn’t that I thought he would protect me, it was just that there were two of us. Even if we were miles apart, there were still two of us, and I always knew if I got in a jam, I could call Todd and he would help me. That made me feel safer.”
“Frannie couldn’t rely on me like that.”
“How come?”
He looked down at his paralyzed legs. “You know.”
“Oh, big doo-doo! She could rely on you for lots of things. You solve problems for people every day. You know things, you have information, you know how to get things done. Women don’t need a bodyguard, they need somebody with good sense to help them solve problems. Frannie’s a poisonous toad. Just get over it.”
Peering up at me with narrowed eyes, Tom gnawed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. Then he grinned.
“I just remembered a movie I saw one time where this guy rubbed a lamp and got a genie that fulfilled his every wish. He wanted a pile of money, boom, he had unlimited supplies. He wanted a fancy hotel suite, boom, he was in it. He wanted two or three women, boom, they were there. He wanted drugs and booze and every kind of sex he could think of, boom, he got it all. Anything he wanted, he got. Man, he was beside himself. He’d found nirvana, heaven, the Garden of Eden. Then after a while it started to get old, you know? And he thought he’d leave for a while and spend some time alone. But he couldn’t. He was locked in that room with those sluts and the drugs and the booze and the unlimited supply of money. And he realized he was in hell.”
“Your point being?”
“At first I thought Frannie was the answer to my dreams. Sexy, good-looking, great in bed, everything a man wants. But for the last few weeks I’ve been in hell.”
“Well, there you go.”
“I guess the moral is to be careful what you ask for.”
I patted his shoulder. “If I meet a genie, I’ll remember that.”
I was already reviewing my list of women who were better than Frannie. I figured I’d give Tom a few weeks to get over her, and then play matchmaker.
Billy Elliot and I went downstairs and did our run, and both of us felt happier when we came back upstairs. Tom seemed to have recovered his equilibrium too.
He said, “Speaking of the woman who was murdered, what’s going on with that?”
Apparently, he and Frannie had done a lot of speaking about Laura’s murder, because I hadn’t mentioned it.
I said, “I don’t think I told you that I’d had dinner with her. I really liked her. I thought we would become good friends.”
“I didn’t realize this was a personal loss for you.”
“It turns out she lied to me about a lot of things. I thought she was one kind of person, but she turned out to be something else.”
“Like Frannie.”
“In a way.”
“Disillusionment sucks, doesn’t it?”
“It looks like Laura hurt some people.”
“Including you.”
“She didn’t hurt me. I barely knew her.”
“Uh-huh, and I still have two good legs, and nobody ever broke my heart and left me.”
A slight sea breeze moved in to wave palm fronds as I left Tom’s place, and my disposition lightened. Funny how the weather seems to have an organic connection to humans and animals. A drop in pressure brings aching joints and pain in old injuries, spring’s explosion of new green stirs a surge of adolescent hormones, and winter’s snow makes people pack up and move to Florida.
I had to spend extra time on my afternoon rounds on account of a recent magazine-shredding binge by twin-mitted Ragdolls named Annie and Bess. Ragdolls are large long-haired cats who fall limp in your arms when you pick them up. Then they look up at you with such a sweet expression in their deep blue eyes that you’re instantly a goner. Annie and Bess were blue colorpoints with white chins, mittens, and boots. They were loving and gentle, but they knew they were the mistresses of the manor and that I was their servant, so they weren’t the least apologetic about flinging paper dandruff all over the house. They watched with bored disinterest while I vacuumed it up, and when I suggested that it might have been a better use of their time to watch the birds outside their window than to tear up a magazine, they merely flipped their tails. In their former lives, they had probably been opera divas.
After they had eaten and I had washed their dishes and put out fresh water, we ran around on the lanai for a few minutes playing jump-for-the-peacock-feather until we were all winded. Then I took them inside, kissed them goodbye, and headed to the Village to get Cora’s muumuu. Not that she needed the dress right that minute, but I didn’t like to think of her by herself, hobbling around on that sore ankle. I didn’t even look across the street toward Ethan’s office when I got it. Well, I may have let my eyes slide that direction, but I didn’t really look.