She followed me across the living room, which was filled with people chatting and smoking and drinking cocktails. They stopped talking when they saw me, staring as if I were an alien who had just flown in.
As we left the room for the kitchen, I heard the woman who’d answered the door say, “Stevie insisted on her coming in. Don’t ask me why. You know how Stevie is.”
In the kitchen, Reggie was lying on the floor in front of the sink, sprawled on the tile as if he were cooling his belly. I knelt to feel his black nose and touch him all over again, searching for bumps or painful places. He was okay, just not frisky. Like Mame, he was dealing with the trauma of the morning in his own way.
I got his leash from its place in the pantry and took him out the back way, through the laundry room and breezeway and carport. I didn’t want Reggie to go near the place where Conrad had been killed, so we walked north, toward the place where the street loops. Lights were on in the houses we passed, but they were like the lights at Mame’s house—on timers to fool would-be burglars into thinking the owners hadn’t left town.
At the loop, we turned and retraced our way back to the Ferrelli house. Stevie must have been listening for us, because she came in the kitchen as soon as we got back. She leaned on the kitchen counter and watched me get out Reggie’s bowl and shake food into it. She watched Reggie fall on his kibble and chew enthusiastically. She seemed dazed, as if she were in someone else’s house watching someone else’s dog.
I said, “I’ll come in the morning and take him for a walk. Is there anything else I can do for you now?”
“Dixie, tell me what happened this morning. How did you find Conrad?”
“I was walking the Powells’ dog, their little dachshund, and she got away from me. She ran into the bushes by the road, and when I went in after her she was digging in a mound of leaves and pine needles. I saw that it was a body, and checked for a pulse. Then I called nine-one-one.”
I didn’t think she needed to know that her neighbor’s dog had pulled on Conrad’s dead hand.
“Did you try CPR? Did you do anything to save him?”
Her voice had risen to a shrill pitch, and she put both hands across her mouth as if to keep herself from screaming.
“Stevie, he had been dead for a while.”
“How could you be sure?”
“I used to be a deputy. I know how to tell if a person is dead.”
“The detective wouldn’t tell me how he was killed. He said there would have to be an autopsy. Don’t they know how he was killed?”
“They probably have a good idea, but that’s the procedure. Until there’s a formal autopsy, they can’t be absolutely sure what caused a death, so they wait.”
“They can surely see a bullet hole, can’t they?”
Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and I had the feeling she was about to spin out of control.
I said, “Stevie, do you have anything you can take? Something to get you through the next day or two?”
She laughed bitterly. “God, Dixie, everybody in my living room has brought their drug of choice for me. I don’t even take aspirin. I don’t want to be drugged.”
I could hear conversation from the living room. It sounded more like a business meeting than a gathering of the bereaved.
“Are those people in there family?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself.
“Conrad’s brother and his wife; she’s the one who answered the door. I’m not sure who those other people are. Somebody Conrad was doing business with, I think. His brother brought them.”
“Do you want them here?”
“Jesus, no. I just don’t know how to get rid of them.”
“Would you like me to do it?”
She looked hopeful. “Could you?”
“Wait here.”
I grabbed a tray from a custom-built slot and walked briskly to the living room, where I started gathering up overflowing ashtrays and half-finished drinks.
I said, “Mrs. Ferrelli needs to rest now. She asked me to tell you good night. She’ll be in touch tomorrow.”
They all stared up at me with sullen expressions of outrage and shock.
The woman who had opened the door said, “Who the hell are you to tell us to leave? You’re not Stevie’s family.”
I straightened from leaning over a table to pick up a crumpled napkin and gave her the look, the look that anybody who has ever been trained in law enforcement knows, the one that says, Don’t mess with me, bitch; don’t even think about it.
She flushed, and a tall bald man with sensual lips got up. Half of his hairless scalp was mottled with sun spots, the other half was covered with a livid birthmark that split his face in half.
“I think this is where I came in,” he said.
The bitterness in his voice seemed to come from old injustices, old pain, old anger. Everybody looked up at him with apprehensive faces, but his entire visage suddenly altered, going from brooding darkness to urbane smoothness. He crossed the room with a large hand held out to me, his thick lips drawn back in a patronizing smile.
“I’m Denton Ferrelli, Conrad’s brother. You’re the dog-sitter, aren’t you?”
He wore an expensive navy blue suit with the requisite white shirt and tie. Except for his bald head and the dark birthmark, he was like any well-educated rich man. But his voice was too icky-soft, like a scab that floats off in the bathwater, and either drugs or dislike for me had made his pupils contract to pinpricks.
Since both my hands were occupied with the tray, I ignored his proffered handshake.
“I’m Dixie Hemingway.”
“Good of you to take care of Stevie. The family appreciates it.”
My skin prickled at the slimy innuendo that Stevie was the dog I was there to take care of. He winked lazily, one maroon eyelid sliding over a milky yellow-green eye, giving his face the look of a heavy-lidded cobra. As he held my gaze, the tip of a fleshy gray tongue crept between his heavy lips and rapidly flicked back and forth. It was a peculiarly lewd gesture that left me feeling dirtied, as if he’d jacked off against me.
His expression hardened. “We’ll be going now. Because we choose to, dog-sitter, not because you’ve told us to.”
Everybody immediately got busy finding their purses or adjusting their crotches, depending on their sex, and generally working their way toward the front door. I stood with the tray full of cocktail glasses and watched them leave. The last person out was Denton Ferrelli. He turned before he closed the front door and did the lip-licking thing again. Denton Ferrelli might be a multimillionaire, but he was a crass bastard.
I opened the sliding glass doors to air out the smoke in the room, and took the tray into the kitchen. Stevie was standing exactly where I’d left her, with Reggie lying on her feet, pushing his body close against her ankles.
I said, “They’re gone. I told them you’d be in touch tomorrow.”
She buried her face in her hands and sobbed for a quick moment, as if she had an allotted amount of time for crying and didn’t want to waste it.
When she raised her head, her face was wet.
I said, “Have you eaten anything today?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
I suddenly realized what was missing from this house of mourning. In ordinary Florida neighborhoods, death automatically means neighbors bearing platters of fried chicken and bowls of potato salad. They bring deviled eggs and green Jell-O salad and red Jell-O salad and cookies and meat loaf. They bring it in a steady stream until the bereaved are inundated with gastronomic sympathy. Most of Stevie’s neighbors had left for the summer, and her relatives had brought drugs. The rich really are different from everybody else.
I pawed around in her refrigerator and found eggs and butter. She watched me beat a couple of eggs in a bowl, watched me scramble them in butter in a skillet, and obediently sat down at the bar when I put them on a plate. Neither of us talked. I gave her a fork and a napkin and poured her a glass of wine from a bottle in the refrigerator. While she ate, I ran water in the sink and squirted dishwashing liquid in it to make it bubble. I washed the skillet, bowl, and beater and turned around to look at her. She had polished off the scrambled eggs and was sipping her wine.