Sergeant Owens spoke to me first. Owens is a skinny fifty-something African-American a foot taller than me, which makes him about six three. He has a long face and droopy eyes like a basset hound. His slow and easy facade masks a lightning-quick mind. More than one person who thought it would be easy to put one over on Sergeant Owens has found themselves in deep doo-doo. I served in his unit, and I speak from experience.
Maybe he already knew I was the one who had called in the report, because he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He put out his hand, cordial as if we were in a receiving line, and said, “How are you, Dixie?”
“Except for this little blip on my horizon,” I said, “I’m just fine.”
The last time I’d seen Sergeant Owens, he hadn’t asked me how I was, he’d told me. What he’d actually said was, “You’re totally fucked up, Dixie. No way are you ready to go back to work.” You have to respect a man who can look you in the eye and tell you that.
Deputy Morgan said, “Miz Hemingway was just asking me if it would be okay for her to take care of some other pets and then go home and get her car before she talks to anybody. There was a cat in the house, and she took it next door. She has to come back and get it and take it someplace else.”
Sergeant Owens narrowed his eyes in the exact same look that Ghost had given me from Mrs. Winnick’s lanai. Both of them seemed to have expected better of me.
“How long do you think you’ll be?”
“Two and a half hours, tops.”
“Okay, see you then.”
Another crime scene-unit was oozing down the street looking for a place to park when I pedaled away. I was an hour behind schedule, and I felt guilty about it, as if the cats waiting for me were looking at their clocks and tapping their paws. I also felt a bit of envy for the quickened adrenaline all the people at the crime scene were having. I don’t care how gruesome and disgusting it is, crime is a lot more fascinating than cleaning litter boxes.
Four
It was almost nine o’clock when I finished seeing to the other pets, and I had a no-caffeine-yet headache and slippery armpits. I pedaled home, tossed my dirty clothes in the washer to run later, and jumped in the shower. My hair is the drip-dry kind that I can pull back in a ponytail and forget, so all I had to do to make myself presentable was slather on sunscreen and roll transparent color on my mouth. I love the sun, but I tend to fry when I’m in it, so I pretty much keep the Beaver 43 people in business. I put on clean khaki shorts and a sleeveless knit top, this time with a bra, and in less than fifteen minutes, I was in my Bronco and headed back up Midnight Pass Road. The leather seats were already hot on the backs of my thighs, but a blast from the AC cooled my face and left my nipples pleasantly puckered.
I drove north on Midnight Pass Road to Marilee’s street and parked at the curb. A second crime-scene unit had arrived, along with trucks from all the local media. A few neighbors and curious onlookers had gathered outside to stare and talk, and reporters from NBC, ABC, CBS, Blab, and Fox were interviewing anybody who would talk to them. Crime-scene tape was stretched across the front entrance, and a contamination sheet had been posted by the front door for everybody to sign as they entered and left.
When I walked up the drive, Deputy Jesse Morgan was outside keeping the curious at bay, and Sergeant Owens was just coming out of the house. He saw me and did a U-turn, flapping his hand at me in a gesture that I took to mean “Wait here.”
In a moment, he came out with a man in dark pleated trousers and an unlined teal linen jacket with the sleeves casually pushed up. Open-collared white knit shirt. Leather sandals. Smooth bronze tan, like somebody who spent a lot of time on the tennis courts or polo grounds. At first I thought they had found a rich Italian relative of Marilee’s, but Owens said, “Dixie, this is Detective Guidry of CIB. He’ll be handling the case.”
Guidry stepped close and held out his hand. He had a nice handshake, firm and dry. His face was sober edging onto stern, but laugh lines fanned from the corners of his eyes, and his mouth had twin parentheses at the sides. A beaky nose and dark hair cut short, with beginnings of silver showing at the temples and above the ears.
Before he could speak, I said, “I hate to ask you to wait some more, but I’m really worried about the cat. I left it next door and I told the woman I’d come get it in a couple of hours. It’ll take me about ten minutes to run it over to the day-care place. Is that okay?”
He said, “You found the body a little before six this morning, right?”
“Around then.”
“Have you had breakfast?”
“No, and I’m about ready to start gnawing on my arm.”
He grinned. “Why don’t you take the cat wherever it has to go and we’ll eat while we talk?”
I could have kissed him. We agreed to meet in fifteen minutes at the Village Diner and then he and Sergeant Owens went back inside the house. I went to the back of my Bronco and unfolded a cardboard cat-carrying case. I put a folded towel on its floor and loped to the Winnicks’, where a black Mercedes now sat in the driveway. The front door flew open before I got to it, and a dark-haired man in a powder blue suit came storming out with an infuriated scowl on his face.
He stopped when he saw me, and I could almost see the deliberate muscle-by-muscle transition as he got himself under control. His shoulders and chest were broad as a linebacker’s, but his short legs made him eye-to-eye with me. His face was familiar, the kind you see on billboards and flyers during campaigns for local elections, but I couldn’t place it.
“Good morning,” he said. He reached to shake my hand, revealing a raw scratch running diagonally across the back of his right wrist. His eyes were a little too close together for my taste, and if he’d ever had a sweet mouth like his son, it had gotten narrowed into one that seemed to have forgotten how to make a sincere smile.
I gave him the tips of my fingers to shake, and he enfolded them in a hot meaty hand. “I’m Dr. Win. I understand there’s some kind of problem next door.”
I flinched. I knew that voice, and I knew that name. Carl Winnick was a radio psychologist beloved by people who felt they’d been cheated out of their deserved special place by single mothers, minorities, homosexuals, and feminists. He daily filled the airwaves with ranting diatribes about how public schools were teaching sex perversion to eight-year-olds, how white men were losing their jobs to illegal immigrants, and how working women were causing children to become drug addicts. He was best known for fighting to keep alive an idiotic Florida law that required unmarried mothers giving up their babies for adoption to run newspaper ads giving their names and the dates and places where they’d had sexual intercourse. Three years before, he had added me to the list of people he considered a threat to his definition of a family.
He had left the door open, and Olga Winnick stepped forward to grip its edge, as if she had to hold on to something to keep from falling. Her face was wet with tears, and her mouth was open in a rictus of despair.
I said, “I just came to pick up the cat.”
He gave a false hearty laugh. “Oh, yes! The cat! Mustn’t forget the cat!”
He rushed past me and got in the Mercedes and started the engine. For some reason, I imagined his fingers shaking when he turned the key. As he backed out of the driveway, he gave me a side-to-side wave like a beauty queen in a parade.
Mrs. Winnick was still hanging on to the edge of the door, mournfully watching her husband’s departure the way a loyal dog watches her master drive away.