Abuela Rosa pressed both hands to her bosom and sighed.
Joe said, “They can’t think you did that!”
Papa Tony got up from the table with his face set in hard, stern lines. He stalked toward the door with an angry set to his shoulders. At the door he turned to me.
“You know those cops, right? You tell them to look closer to home. Much closer to home.”
He left the room before I could ask him what he meant, but not before I caught a look passing between Joe and Maria.
I left the Molina house with a jar of menudo from Abuela Rosa and the knowledge that the Mexican community knew something about Ramón’s murder that they weren’t telling.
EIGHTEEN
Thanks to the menudo, my head was only doing a muffled roll when I got to the Kurtz house, not big bass drumming like before. Good thing, too, because a small sign-toting crowd was now gathered on the sidewalk. A few women were on their knees, eyes cast toward the sky, hands folded under their chins. Some others were blocking the driveway. I pulled to a stop and put down my window so I could ask them to move, but they were all concentrating on a man in a cowled brown robe who seemed to be giving a sermon.
He shouted, “It is written that a vial was poured upon the earth and there fell a grievous sore upon the man who had the mark of the beast. The Bible tells us that the one with the mark of the beast has a number, and his number is six hundred threescore and six. Six hundred sixty-six, brothers and sisters! The number of this house! And hear this, brethren, it is also written that the beast worked miracles that deceived them that worshipped his image, and they were all cast into a lake of fire.”
The crowd murmured approvingly, and several people seemed ready to go cast somebody into a lake of fire right then.
I leaned out my window. “Excuse me, I need to drive through here.”
A woman in a shiny black dress glared at me and waved her sign, but a man at the side called, “Let the car through!”
The people parted to let me pass, but they all gave me hellfire looks.
I parked in front of the garages and walked down the palm-screened path to the front door. When I reached the expanse of living room windows, something felt wrong, and it took a second to realize that it was the distance from the garage door. Now that I knew the wine room was behind the first garage, I had unconsciously stepped off the length of an average garage and added the ten feet or so of the wine room’s depth, which should have put me at the beginning of the living room’s glass wall. Instead, it was a good fifteen feet farther ahead. Ken Kurtz evidently had a garage about forty feet deep. Maybe he kept a stretch limo or a yacht in there.
A helicopter flew over with a droning whap-whap! sound, and I wondered if there were surveillance cameras in it pointed at me. I thought about waving up at them, but the thought was only for my own entertainment. A little sick humor to jolly me along.
The living room wasn’t lit, but through the glass wall I could see flames leaping in the fireplace. It was almost eighty degrees outside, and he had a fire. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. Ken Kurtz seemed almost as cold-blooded as Ziggy. While I waited for him to come to the door, I remembered there had been a basket of firewood by the fireplace. Fire must be important to Kurtz.
His shadowy form moved past the window toward the door faster than he had moved before. Perhaps all the excitement of the guard’s murder and Gilda’s disappearance had given him a spurt of new energy. Or maybe it was the food I’d brought him from Anna’s. Maybe real food had cured the guy, the way menudo had cured my concussion.
He opened the door in the same bedraggled bathrobe he’d worn before and stepped aside to let me in without speaking. The house was like an oven.
I said, “Hello, Mr. Kurtz.”
I didn’t see any point in telling him his house was being picketed by religious fanatics. The man had enough problems without knowing that.
Ziggy had left the dry sauna and was running up and down the corridors. Iguanas only poop once every three or four days, and from the hint of desperation in his scurrying, I had a feeling this was the day.
I said, “It’s eighty degrees outside. Shall I put Ziggy out?”
Kurtz flapped his blue hands. “Take him out. He needs the fresh air.”
I opened one of the sliders to the courtyard and went to Ziggy’s side. Kurtz seemed to lose interest and shuffled down the corridor toward the living room. Keeping a wary eye on Ziggy’s tail, I got ready to slip my arms under his body and grab his legs to lift him. But he stuck out his tongue and tasted fresh air from the open slider and scampered out, heading straight for a clump of hibiscus bushes.
Remembering that my grandfather’s iguana had also preferred to poop on the roots of hibiscus, I grinned and went to the hospital-white kitchen to gather Ziggy’s fruits and vegetables for the day. Most of the leftovers from Anna’s were still in the fridge, so Kurtz wasn’t in danger of starving. For Ziggy, I sliced zucchini and yellow squash, bananas and pineapple, added romaine and swiss chard, and carried them outside in a big wooden bowl.
I said, “Hey, Zig, I brought you some goodies.”
With an extra-satisfied smile on his face, he bobbed his head and sniffed me with his tongue. He was beginning to associate me with food, so I smelled good to him.
I knelt to set the bowl on the ground, and Ziggy raised himself on his front legs and flicked out his tongue to smell it. That’s when I saw the telltale evidence of an indwelling tunneled catheter low on his chest wall—not like Kurtz’s ordinary PICC line that any good nurse can insert, but one like my grandfather had in the months before he died—the kind that is surgically inserted directly into the large vein that enters the heart.
Somebody had been giving Ziggy transfusions or withdrawing blood, and on a regular basis. But why? And what was the connection to the catheter in Kurtz’s arm?
The implications made me dizzy, but so did everything else in this weird house.
I left Ziggy eating his dinner and went looking for Kurtz. He was in the wine room, moving slowly down the line of bottles as if he were taking inventory. In the eerie red light, his bluish skin looked faintly puce.
He said, “Did you feed the iguana?”
It was another moment when I had a choice. I could keep my mouth shut and walk out the front door and go home. Or I could open my big mouth and then walk out the front door and go home.
I said, “I promised Jessica Ballantyne that I’d give you this message—Ziggy is no longer an option. You must act now.”
I turned and almost made it across the living room before Kurtz shouted at me. “Dixie! For the love of God, please!”
Sap that I am, I turned to look back at him. In the red-lit door to the wine room, he stood with both arms pressed overhead against the door frame. With his arms raised like that, his bathrobe sleeves had drooped over his sinewy arms, exposing the gauze dressing on the inside of one elbow.
“Jessie’s alive?”
“She said you abandoned her.”
He pulled his arms down and sagged against the doorway. “How does she look?”
“As opposed to what? She looked okay to me, but then I don’t know her from Adam’s off ox, so I really can’t say if she looked unusually good or not. All I know is that somebody she called they are tapping your phone and that you’re in danger. She’s the one who set the fire last night, at which time, by the way, somebody hit me on the head and gave me a concussion. So thank you very much for involving me in your life, Mr. Kurtz. So far it’s been a real pleasure.”