Mildly, I said, “I just came to tell you I’d found a good home for Leo. I thought you might want to know.”
“That cat? You think I care about that stupid cat?”
“He was your sister’s cat, so I thought you might.”
It didn’t seem like a good time to tell her that the Kitty Haven charged fifty dollars a day for boarding a cat. Legally, the charge should go to her sister’s estate. In reality, I would pay it.
Even allowing for the shock of learning that her sister had been brutally murdered, Celeste’s behavior was bizarre. She was not a stupid woman. If she were Laura’s legal heir, she surely knew she had a right to everything in her sister’s house, no matter when she returned to Dallas. But she must also know that the house was devoid of art and had extremely modest furnishings. Any valuables would be jewelry or furs, which Celeste had apparently already taken.
She said, “You think I’m a selfish bitch, don’t you? Both of you think that.”
Neither the locksmith nor I answered, at least not out loud.
With her face the color of new radishes, Celeste dived into her handbag and took out a leather wallet. As if she were thumbing out playing cards, she slipped some bills from the wallet and flung them at the locksmith.
“Here’s your money.”
The money fell to his feet and he left it there while he pulled a small paper packet from his pocket. “Here’s your key.”
She held it on her open palm. “Just one?”
“One comes with the lock change. You want more, you pay for more.”
Her head jerked backward, and in the next instant she spat at him and threw the key against his chest.
“Take your damn key and to hell with you!”
Brushing past me, she stomped to the Camry and got in with a loud door slam. When she pulled out, she came within inches of hitting both the truck and my Bronco on the street, and left with a loud revving of her engine. The locksmith waited until she was out of sight before he picked up two hundred-dollar bills at his feet.
He said, “That woman is a nut.”
I couldn’t disagree.
He said, “You want this key?”
I shook my head. “I’m just the pet sitter. I’ve got the cat that belonged to the woman that was killed here, that’s all.”
“She left a cat?”
“A Havana Brown. Beautiful cat. I’ve found him a good home.”
He handed me the key. “You might need something for the cat.”
I didn’t want the key, but I could see his quandary. He’d changed locks on the house and been paid for it, and he felt duty bound to leave the new key with somebody, even if the somebody was just me.
I said, “I’ll give it to Lieutenant Guidry. He’s handling the murder investigation.”
“Okay, that’ll work.”
He stuffed the bills Celeste had thrown at him into his pocket and went out to his truck. I followed him. I had been tired and sweaty and hungry before, now I was tired and sweaty and hungry and totally disgusted with Celeste Autrey.
The locksmith had been only half right. Celeste wasn’t just a nut, she was a vicious nut. She and Laura must have been two halves of one disturbed whole, but while Laura had been disturbed and sweet, Celeste had soaked up all the bitter.
30
My voice was hollow with weariness when I called Guidry.
I said, “I spoke to Celeste Autrey a few minutes ago. She was at Laura Halston’s house with the locksmith. Outside the house, actually, because she refused to pay for having the locks changed, so he refused to give her the new key. She finally threw money at him and he gave her the key, but she was so mad that there was only one key that she spit at him and threw it back. Then she left, and he gave the key to me. What do you want me to do with it?”
“She spit at him?”
“Like an adder.”
“Why’d the locksmith give you the key?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, Guidry. Probably because I was there and he was fed up with the whole business. He’d been paid for changing the locks and making the new key, so he wanted to be rid of it. Good thing Martin Freuland wasn’t there, he would have given it to him. Did you pick Freuland up?”
“Can’t pick a man up just for being outside a house, Dixie. I sent some deputies over to suggest to him that loitering outside a dead woman’s house could be construed as suspicious behavior, so he left.”
“What about Vaught? I’ve been thinking about him. The man’s hands are too clean. Freuland has more reason to want to kill Laura if she stole money from him, but Vaught’s hands look more surgical, like they’d know how to use a scalpel.”
The line was silent for a long moment, then Guidry’s voice came back almost as heavy with fatigue as mine.
“Dixie, I never told you Laura Halston was stabbed with a scalpel.”
My tired brain started gathering all the information it had collected to tell him that of course the killer had used a scalpel. For starters, there was her sadistic surgeon husband who threw scalpels at the ceiling for fun.
An icy trickle of reason slid down my neck, and my entire body went cold with shame. The husband had been one of Laura’s lies, and I was an idiot. Not only had I fallen for the lie when I first heard it, I’d continued to operate as if it were true even after I’d learned it wasn’t.
I said, “Oh.”
“Does anybody else know you have that key? Anybody besides the locksmith?”
“You do.”
“Don’t mention it to anybody, okay? I’m a little tied up right now, but I’ll call you later and pick it up.”
“Okay.”
He must have been surprised at my unaccustomed meekness, because he actually said “Goodbye” before he clicked off.
I sat there with my phone in hand and wondered how I could have been so stupid. But I knew the reason. Laura had been a master at pulling people into her fantasies. Unlike her sister’s, Laura’s dishonesty had been laced with warmth and generosity and humor. She’d made people want to believe her, and once they believed, they protected themselves from feeling like fools by continuing to believe.
For the first time, I felt a touch of sympathy for Martin Freuland, whose huge ego and lust for power would have made him a perfect mark for a woman of Laura’s talents. Even the town had been a perfect venue for her heist. A city in which the predominantly Hispanic residents throw a monthlong celebration every year in honor of George Washington is a world where fantasy rules. In such an atmosphere, it wouldn’t have seemed incongruous to Freuland to allow his lover access to his bank’s vault. After all, he believed in her. He believed she was mentor to the town’s debutantes, and he’d thought the model’s bag she carried on the day of the debutante ball was admirably philanthropic.
I wondered how long she had plotted and schemed before she carried her model’s bag into the bank vault and filled it with stacks of Freuland’s ill-gotten money. I wondered how long it had taken Freuland to realize he’d been had. It had been an almost perfect crime. He couldn’t charge her with theft because the money had been given to him as a payoff for taking deposits from drug dealers. All he could do was report her missing, which must have seemed something of a joke to the city’s police.
I doubted he had understood right away—or that he’d been willing to admit to himself—that what she’d done had been premeditated. Laura would have pulled him in as skillfully as she’d pulled me in. She would have made him believe she was in love with him, and even after she left he would have continued to believe it. More than likely, he had chosen to believe that Laura had put money in her model’s bag and driven to Dallas as a spur-of-the-moment thing, a momentary lapse of ordinary good sense.
I might have thought that too, but she had taken Leo with her. Leo had either been in her car when she went in the bank with her model’s bag, or she’d gone home and got him before she drove away. Laura had known exactly what she was doing when she took that money. Furthermore, she hadn’t been afraid of Freuland. Not then, and not when he found her and confronted her. She had walked away from him, and the flippant finger she’d shot him hadn’t looked the least big frightened.