“That’s nice of him.”
“Yeah.”
We both ate silently for a while, him taking huge forkfuls of food and me fighting down the rage I felt at the memory of Carl Winnick devoting an hour of radio time to say that Christy would not have been killed if I had been home where I was supposed to be instead of out acting like a man in a deputy’s uniform. He had even objected to the department giving me widow’s benefits, saying taxpayers shouldn’t have to reward me for being a bad wife and mother.
I studied Phillip’s face and reminded myself that the kid wasn’t his father. The kid wasn’t anything like his father. There was no reason to blame the kid because his father was an arrogant idiot.
I said, “I got the impression from your mom that she doesn’t like Ms. Doerring much.”
“My mom thinks she’s a slut,” he said. “She probably is.”
The easy way he said it took me by such surprise that I choked on a swig of coffee. While I coughed and sputtered and fanned my face with my napkin, Phillip grinned. “Bet you didn’t think I knew that.”
I was beginning to like this kid a lot. After four years of college away from his parents, he would probably be as smooth as his dad, but he wouldn’t be a phony. This kid was the real deal.
The woman across the aisle stood up and yanked her dress down over her folds of fat. “Come on,” she said, “we don’t have all day.”
I watched the little boy slide off the seat and follow his mother to the cashier’s stand.
I pulled bills from my backpack and laid them on the table. “My cats await,” I said. “I’ll probably see you around.”
Phillip’s mouth was full, and he smiled up at me with a tiny slick of syrup on his chin. I resisted the urge to spit on a napkin and wipe it off, and headed for the front door. The woman was at the cashier stand counting out change and snarling at the little boy. Outside, I stopped and put my foot up on a railing separating the parking spaces from the walk. I untied and retied my shoe while I waited for the little boy and his mother to come out.
The door opened and the woman put her hand between his little shoulder blades and shoved him forward. “Goddamn it! Go on!”
In about two nanoseconds, I spun away from the railing and pinned her to the diner’s stucco wall with my forearm across her throat. “You have a beautiful child, lady, and he deserves a lot better than you. You either start being nicer to him or I swear to God I’ll see that he’s taken away from you and given to somebody who’ll love him.”
All the rage had left her face. She was afraid, and she had every right to be. Something hit my ankle, hard, and I looked down. The little boy was glaring up at me, ready to kick me again.
“Leave my mama alone!”
I stepped away from her and she grabbed her throat with both hands as if she was afraid it had a hole in it. The diner door opened and a family came out—mother, father, three pre-adolescent kids. They flowed around us without paying us much attention, the father teasing one of the kids and the others laughing the way close families do at their private jokes. They moved down the sidewalk to their minivan and got in, still laughing and talking.
The woman was watching me with frightened eyes. The little boy had moved to hug her leg and she had a hand on top of his head.
“Okay,” I said, “that’s all.”
I walked briskly down the sidewalk and around the corner to my car. My hands were shaking so much I barely managed to get the door unlocked. I put my head on the steering wheel and waited for the adrenaline tremors to leave. I felt sick. I felt ashamed. Sergeant Owens had been right about me. I wasn’t ready to deal with people yet.
Maybe I never will be.
Eleven
After I got myself together and saw to the other cats, I drove to one of the ritzy streets coiling around the edge of Roberts Bay to see Shuga Reasnor. Half-hidden behind a cluster of royal palms, her house was a behemoth of glistening white stucco shaped in a wide V, its upjutting wings giving it the look of an albino frigate bird in flight.
In the circular driveway, I got out of the Bronco and pulled my shorts out of my crotch before I climbed three wide stone steps to the entrance. The front door was a thick slab of glass that allowed a view all the way through the house to the lanai. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the pool would be damn near Olympic in size and either equipped with every accessory known to man or built with a cascading waterfall. Or both. I rang the bell, a brass plate the size of a turkey platter, and stood looking up at the glass door while I waited. If that sucker broke as you walked through it, a shard could slice your head right off.
Through the glass wall at the back of the house, a woman moved into view out on the lanai. She came through the slider and walked toward me, giving me a thorough examination as she came.
“Are you Dixie? Sorry it took me so long, I was watering plants on the lanai. Come on in.”
Shuga was tanning-booth brown, with the kind of long blond hair that you get only by being fifteen years old or paying a bundle for extensions. Her skin was smooth and taut like a fifteen-year-old’s, too, and her body was trim and youthful. She was wearing a short black tank top and low-rider white jeans that showed her flat belly and smooth swirl of navel. Only her knowing eyes and corded hands gave away her age, which I estimated as somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Barefoot, she led the way into her living room, her feet leaving faint damp prints on the black tile. Outside the sliding glass doors, a water hose lay coiled like a green anaconda in the midst of a jungle of potted plants.
Swooping over a coffee table the size of my bed, she plucked a cigarette out of a nicotine bouquet stuck in a crystal holder, and waved her hand at me in a gesture that managed to invite me to smoke and to sit at the same time. Her fingernails were like Porsche fenders, sleek and curved and bright red. I shook my head at the cigarette offer and lowered my butt to a curved sofa covered in a rose-colored linen. Like Shuga, the room was beautifully done, but it had a hint of street toughness that no amount of cosmetics or money could overcome.
She got right to the point. “I wasn’t entirely truthful over the phone. I don’t want to talk about the damn cat, it’s Marilee I’m worried about. The detective talked to me, so I know about that man in her house. That what’s-his-name person. But that’s all he would tell me. You know how the police are, they won’t tell you a thing, even if you’re a person’s best friend. You work there, you’re bound to know more than the police do.”
She said the last with a pasted-on smile, as if she had suddenly remembered that she needed something from me and ought to be sucking up.
“I don’t exactly work there,” I said. “I just stop in twice a day to take care of the cat.”
“And you don’t know where she went?”
“No, that’s why I called you. She didn’t leave a number where she could be reached.”
“The detective said she was going to be gone a week.”
She gave me a pointed look with one raised eyebrow, as if it was my turn. I stayed silent. If she wanted me to play coy guessing games, I wasn’t playing.
She sighed and blew out a stream of smoke. “What I want to know is how they can be sure she left town. Has anybody checked to make sure?”
I thought of the hair dryer left on her bathroom countertop. “Do you have any reason to think she didn’t?”
She took another hit from the cigarette and looked out at the plants on the lanai, as if hoping to find inspiration out there. Abruptly, she dropped into a chair and gave me a hard stare. “I might, but Marilee would kill me if I told anybody.”