“Gee, the woman is all heart.”
“Will you take him?”
“I’m not a cat shelter, Guidry, but I’ll find a home for him.”
“Good. Ms. Autrey says she’s going back to Dallas late today.”
“So soon?”
“She’s already gone through her sister’s house and collected the valuables she wanted. I guess she doesn’t have any more reason to stay.”
“What about Laura? What about her sister’s body?”
“The ME won’t release it until the criminal investigation is completed. I assume Ms. Autrey will make arrangements with a funeral home before she leaves.”
That only meant Celeste would pay the cost of a cremation or a burial and then go home. There would be no memorial service or funeral for her sister, but since Laura had only been in Sarasota a few weeks, maybe that was sensible. But if there were one, I would go, and Maurice and Ruby probably would go too. Also Gorgon, with his diamond rings. Certainly Frederick Vaught would show up and be mournful. It would be a dismal service, but it seemed to me that Laura deserved something to mark the fact that she had lived.
As I reached for the doorknob to go inside Mazie’s house, I realized that Celeste Autrey had to have been the person who’d talked about me to Freuland. She had probably described me, perhaps described my vehicle as well, so that he immediately knew who I was. It seemed strange that Celeste would buddy up to Freuland since she thought he’d killed her sister, but Celeste was cold enough to sleep on an ice mattress and think it was cozy.
Pete had left the front door unlocked again, but when I went in and saw his face, any lecture I might have given him evaporated. His eyebrows were nearly at his hairline, and his expression was one I remembered Michael wearing as a teenager—defiant and determined and hopeful all at once. I guess men don’t ever lose those traits, even in their eighties.
Mazie stood beside him, and it seemed to me that she had the same look. Per my instructions, she was wearing her blue Service Dog vest with its embroidered medical caduceus symbol.
Pete said, “We should have done this sooner.”
I said, “We couldn’t do it before now. No hospital in the world will allow a dog in ICU, not even a service dog, so we had to wait until Jeffrey was in a room. Even then, we had to have permission. From Hal and Gillis, from Jeffrey’s doctor, probably from the hospital.”
“You did all that?”
“I got Hal’s permission. He’s taking care of the rest of it.”
I wasn’t absolutely sure he could take care of the rest of it, but I was absolutely sure that somehow, some way, Pete and I were taking Mazie in to see Jeffrey.
Pete’s smile split his handsome face, and he actually gave a little hop of joy, like a boy. He said, “Then let’s go!”
He was practically out the door before he got the words out of his mouth, rushing to the Bronco and getting Mazie secured in a travel crate in the back. We made sure she had water in her bowl, put down rolled towels to protect her from sliding in the crate, and got ourselves in the front.
I took one last look toward Laura’s driveway as we backed out, but I couldn’t see through the trees. If Martin was still there, I hoped the sheriff’s deputies came in time to catch him.
27
As I got in the driver’s seat, Pete scurried to the passenger side. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I go to the hospital all the time and do clowning skits for the kids. They all know me there. We won’t have any problem.”
“Uh-huh.”
St. Petersburg is about an hour from Sarasota via I-75 north, then over to I-275 and the Skyway Bridge. Before we got to the I-75 on-ramp, Pete said, “Do you mind if I get something to eat? I was too worried to eat before.”
I swung into a drive-through lane at McDonald’s and waited while he studied the menu.
He said, “I’ll have a Quarter Pounder with cheese and fries. And a large Coke. And a pie thing. Apple.”
Happiness always perks up my appetite too. I decided to get one of the apple pie things.
I only ate when we were stopped at traffic lights, but the apple pie was gone by the time we hit the interstate. Pete was almost as fast with his burger and fries. After we had done our boa constrictor acts, we rode along in thoughtful silence.
On that stretch of highway, more than half the vehicles were trucks—semis, panels, pickups, or big trucks with hoists and cranes or some other special equipment. Southwest Florida has been under constant construction ever since the new kind of retirees came—no longer in mobile homes but with wads of money from the dot-com boom or hefty executive payouts from bankrupt companies. New highways have been laid, new buildings erected, old buildings remodeled, all work done by men who drive trucks.
As we met them, passed them, and were passed by them, my mind went off on a little naughty thought trip about those truck drivers. It’s what minds do when they’re not strictly disciplined. Especially female minds. I mean, let’s face it, construction workers, pool men, landscapers, all those outdoor guys have incredibly firm butts that you don’t see on other men. They also have pelvises that move when they walk. Men who sit at desks all day have flat butts and walk just by bending their knees—their hips don’t move at all. It makes a woman imagine the difference in their respective lovemaking abilities, and the truck drivers come off best.
I mused on those high-minded thoughts all the way to the exit to I-275. Then, as we headed toward the Skyway Bridge, my mind drifted to the memory of Ethan Crane’s butt, which was fantastic. Better than Guidry’s, to tell the truth, and Ethan sat at a desk all day.
While my mind was wandering down that guilty little avenue, Pete’s had different priorities. To get my attention, he made a big to-do of wadding up his pie sleeve and stowing it neatly in the McDonald’s bag with his used napkins and empty Coke cup.
He said, “That detective came back again. He asked if I was sure it was Tuesday morning I saw that lady crossing the street, and not the day before. I’ve already told him it probably wasn’t Laura after all, and now he wants to know when I saw some completely other lady. Dumb shit must think I’m too old to know what day it is.”
“That’s odd.”
“Nah, lots of people think you lose your marbles once you pass about ten years older than they are. If they’re sixty, they think seventy is old. If they’re seventy, they think eighty is old. Personally, I know people in their thirties that are older than me.”
“It’s odd that Guidry questioned you about when you saw some other woman crossing the street.”
We rode along for a while and I said, “You’re positive it wasn’t Laura?”
“I wasn’t up close, if that’s what you mean. I thought it was her, but I guess it wasn’t.”
“Did she see you?”
“She didn’t wave if she did. It was so early, she probably didn’t think anybody else was out.”
The first time I’d met Laura, she’d gone running after nine o’clock. I’d got the impression that she always ran around that time, but I could have been wrong. Lots of runners get up as early as I do and get their exercising done before the sun is up.
After we passed through the tollbooths on the way to St. Petersburg, Pete’s brow furrowed and his eyebrows began to climb even higher, and I knew the reality of what we were doing had hit him the same way it did me. We both knew there was no absolute guarantee that Hal had been able to get all the necessary permissions for Mazie to go to Jeffrey’s hospital room. Jeffrey was a child. He had just had brain surgery. Mazie was a dog. Some people would think her presence in his room so soon after surgery could be a health risk.
Besides that apprehension, I had other reasons to be tense, reasons that increased the closer we got to the golden girders of the Skyway Bridge. It’s silly, I know, but I don’t like leaving solid ground. I especially don’t like the gigantic roller-coaster feel of the Skyway. By the time we got there and the Bronco’s nose began to point toward the sky, I gripped the wheel with both hands. Call it phobia, call it my need to control, but if that sucker collapsed, cars would drop like boulders.