I don’t know why I called. The room had a permanently empty feeling, the same deadness I remembered in my mother’s room after she abandoned me and my brother.
I called a couple more times, just to confirm what I already knew. “Gilda? Are you here?”
I even trotted down the wide eastern corridor where a glass wall overlooked the courtyard. I pasted myself against the glass to look out at the oak tree and the landscaped lawn around it. Unless Gilda had scaled the tree and was hiding in its branches, she wasn’t in the courtyard. The east wing had only one door and it was open—Kurtz’s bedroom. I stepped inside and got a quick look at a big bed with black satin sheets. I called Gilda, but I knew she wasn’t there. Gilda had left the house, and every instinct told me she hadn’t left to run a quick errand. Gilda had run away, and she didn’t intend to be found.
A hallway on the south side of the house held a door with a double dead bolt lock, the kind you have to use a key to open from either side. A key was inside the lock, one of two on a wire ring, probably left there all the time because it’s a pain in the butt to always have to key open a door from the inside. I turned the key and opened the door to a narrow alcove at the far end of the row of garages. A sidewalk led to a utility area where garbage cans and recycle bins were located. Beyond the utility area, a wooden fence separated the Kurtz property from a bayside residential street. If Gilda’s intention had been to run away, she was probably halfway to Tampa by now, or at least halfway to the Sarasota airport.
I shut the door and stuck the key ring in my pocket to give to Kurtz. With all the people who would be in the house when Guidry found out Gilda was gone, it wasn’t a good idea to leave a key in a door, especially since I suspected the second key opened the precious wine room. I walked down the southern hallway, passed the wine room, and rounded the corner to the west wing where Kurtz and Guidry waited in front of the fireplace. Framed by the red glow of the fire, the two men could have been part of a medieval fresco of good and evil, with the iguana symbolizing a demon stretched on the hearth between them.
I said, “Lieutenant Guidry, could I speak to you for a moment?”
Both men gave me piercing looks that said secrecy wasn’t an option.
Guidry said, “What is it, Dixie?”
“The nurse isn’t in her room. She isn’t anywhere in the house. She’s gone.”
Like a collapsed marionette, Kurtz suddenly clutched his thighs and gave a strangled groan. It didn’t seem like the anguished cry of a man who’d lost a lover, more like a man who could not bear the implication of what he’d heard.
Guidry and I both rushed to support him.
Guidry said, “You know where his room is?”
I pointed toward the southern corridor. “It’s this way.”
In seconds, we had linked arms behind Kurtz’s emaciated back and under his thighs to make a fireman’s carry. Putting a suffering man to bed wasn’t the usual kind of thing a homicide detective did. Not the kind of thing I usually did, either. But Guidry and I were both professionals, and professionals rise to the occasion in a professional manner—no matter what the occasion is.
We went down the southern corridor to the east wing and Kurtz’s bedroom, where we turned sideways to maneuver him through the doorway. When we lowered him to a king-sized waterbed with rumpled black satin sheets, Kurtz seemed almost unconscious. With a heavy sigh, he stretched out on his back and held his arms close to his sides, as if he feared he might fly apart if he didn’t keep his limbs close.
Guidry and I exchanged uneasy looks. With one mind, we both looked at the bedside table, where a clutter of prescription bottles stood next to a stack of magazines and a framed photograph. Guidry picked up a bottle and read the label.
I picked up the photograph. With a kind of eerie inevitability, I saw it was a snapshot of Ken Kurtz—as he had been before he turned blue and ugly—with his arm slung over the shoulders of the woman I’d met earlier—the one with the bulldog named Ziggy. They were both laughing into the camera with the unmistakable look of two people deliriously in love.
SIX
Seeing the photograph of the woman I’d met that morning made my head feel like somebody was setting off rockets inside it. Guidry didn’t seem to notice. He shuffled through some more prescription bottles and then pushed them all into a clump.
“Mr. Kurtz, do you have your doctor’s number?”
Kurtz opened his eyes and glared at Guidry. Between rasping breaths, he said, “No! Absolutely … no doctors! Understand?”
“But—”
“I said … no! You do not … have my … permission to … call anybody.”
“Okay, no calls. Would any of these medications help you right now?”
“No … I just need … to rest … for a while.”
Guidry stood a moment looking down at him and then nodded. I knew what he was probably thinking. Kurtz lived in agony every minute of his life, and he was probably the best judge of when he’d reached his limit. In any case, Kurtz’s suffering wasn’t the kind that could be fixed by a doctor. It would take angels to do that. Or at least aboriginal shamans.
Very gently, I put the photograph of the woman back on the bedside table next to the medicine bottles and magazines. I was positive now that she had contrived to talk to me so she could make sure I was going to his house.
Was the woman somebody with old scores to settle? A former wife or old lover who had vindictive reasons to pull strings by getting the Irishman to call me? If that were so, why had she wanted me there? And what was the deal with calling her dog Ziggy? None of it made any sense, but I didn’t care. I had no intention of getting sucked into this weird situation. As soon as I was sure the iguana was okay, I was going to be out of there for good.
Guidry said, “Come on, Dixie.”
He was standing at the door and his voice had a tinge of impatience in it, as if he might have been standing there a few seconds longer than his grand eloquence thought was necessary, and that he was holding me responsible for the delay.
I gave him a What? look. I was there as a pet sitter, not a deputy under the jurisdiction of a homicide detective, and he didn’t have the authority to order me around like that.
On the other hand, I was in deep doo-doo already for not reporting the guard’s murder and for warning Kurtz to ditch his gun. I wasn’t the type of person to do either of those things. I was one of the good guys. Wasn’t I? I was on the side of the law. Wasn’t I?
As I moved to follow Guidry, it occurred to me that when I killed a man, I might have blurred my own line between good and evil. Maybe I wasn’t so solidly in the good-guy camp anymore. Maybe I was straddling the line.
Guidry said, “Show me the nurse’s room.”
I moved ahead of him and walked the rest of the way down the eastern corridor to Gilda’s room, glancing out the glass wall to the courtyard as I went. The plants still glistened with moisture from the rain, but except for the wet ground under the oak tree’s shade, all the shadows had been eaten up by thin sunshine.
At Gilda’s door, I stopped and took a deep breath.
Guidry said, “You okay, Dixie?”
Surprised, I looked up at him and pulled my shoulders back. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I can think of several reasons why you might not be. You’re allowed, you know.”
“Allowed what?”
“Normal emotions.”
For some fool reason, that made my eyes burn as if tiny little pinpricks were pushing against the undersides of my eyelids.
I pointed toward Gilda’s door. “That’s her room.”
As he went around me, Guidry put an arm around me and squeezed my shoulder, almost as if he did it unconsciously. Guidry wasn’t a shoulder-squeezing type of man, and I’m not the kind of woman who likes her shoulders squeezed. But his hand had been warm, and the touch had felt good. I watched his leather jacket move away and tried not to think about what it meant about me—that in the midst of all the bizarre things going on in this house, my main feeling was that I wished Guidry would touch me again.