He waved to the people stretched across the driveway.
“Let her pass.”
He said it with such authority that they sulkily moved to the edge of the driveway, where they looked mournfully at me as I drove through. But I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I was too shaken by what I’d seen on the man’s wrist. What kind of religious fanatic wears an ultra-thin Movado wristwatch? Now that I thought of it, I realized he’d had manicured nails too. I had a feeling I’d just talked to one of Jessica Ballantyne’s FBI agents in disguise.
When Kurtz answered the door, he was almost as nasty to me as the phony monk had been.
He grunted and flapped his hand toward the kitchen. “Just take care of the iguana’s food, please. I’m busy now.”
I squeezed my lips shut before my tongue managed to tell him what I thought about his attitude, and watched his back move through the darkened living room toward the open door to the wine room. The dim red light in the room reminded me of my dream and of how frightened I’d been of Kurtz. He didn’t seem threatening now, just rude.
It took me all of three minutes to slice banana and yellow squash and zucchini and mix it with some chard and romaine leaves for Ziggy, another two minutes to take it out to him. I didn’t look to see if Kurtz had any leftovers to eat. I didn’t tell him goodbye, either, just got in the Bronco and zipped out. As I passed the marchers, I didn’t see the man I’d talked to. Maybe he’d become bored with the whole thing and gone home. Or maybe he was making a report to Jessica Ballantyne.
It was past sunset when I got home. A congregation of snowy egrets and great blue herons had gathered on the beach to pick at goodies washed ashore on slow-rolling wavelets. Seagulls circled overhead, making rude noises to announce their prior claim to beach flotsam. On the horizon, sailboats glided toward harbor bathed in the fading amber glow of a submerged sun. My dejection had lifted on the way home, and now I felt oddly expectant, as if I were waiting for a signal of some kind. I even scanned the sea the way wives of old whalers probably watched for some clue that the long and harrowing wait was over and their men were coming home to them safe and sound.
I didn’t notice Guidry’s car parked by Michael’s deck until I came out of the carport and started up the stairs to my apartment. He was on my porch, sitting at the round table looking out at the Gulf. As usual, he looked like an Italian playboy.
I said, “Why haven’t you returned my call?”
“I saw you at the Gutierrez funeral. I was surprised you were there.”
I dropped my shoulder bag on the table and heard a metallic clink that reminded me I hadn’t returned Ken Kurtz’s keys. Damn.
I sat down opposite Guidry. “I wanted to support Paloma.”
“Paloma?”
“Mrs. Gutierrez.”
“You know the guard’s wife?”
“I went to see her and talked to her and her brother. His name is Jochim. I trimmed her kitten’s claws too. She was going to have them surgically removed, but now I don’t think she will. It’s a cute little calico.”
Guidry pressed his fingertips to his closed eyelids. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that will make you stop talking to people, is there?”
“Not really.”
“What the hell kind of breed is a calico?”
“It’s not a breed, it’s a coloring. It happens every now and then in every breed. It’s when a kitten has three distinct colors. If it’s a true calico the colors are pure white, inky black, and bright orange. If it’s a diluted calico, the colors will be pale and creamy. Paloma’s kitten is a true calico. It’s really cute.”
I heard the wistful note in my voice and shut up.
“This is why you called me? To tell me about a cute kitten?”
I narrowed my eyes at the smug bastard and considered exactly how much to tell him. I had promised Tony not to tell about meeting with Jochim, but I figured my meeting with Paloma was fair game.
I said, “Paloma told me a man brought her a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He told her it was insurance money. Then he told her Ramón would have wanted her to use it to go home to Mexico. I think they’ll leave soon.”
“She never told me that.”
I shrugged. We both knew people told me a lot more than they told him.
He said, “Did she get the man’s name?”
“No, and I don’t imagine he left a card. She said he was a skinny Anglo, but that’s all she remembered. Today at the funeral, I saw a skinny man in a suit outside on the sidewalk. He looked familiar somehow, but I couldn’t place him. Maybe that was the skinny Anglo who gave Paloma money.”
“She still have the money?”
“Jochim took it to the bank to put in a safe deposit box.”
Guidry reached inside his thin leather jacket and pulled out a notepad. He flipped some pages and said, “That would be Jochim Manuel Torres?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know his full name.”
“He’s a small-time hood, part of a ring selling stolen cars, mostly to illegal aliens.”
That answered the question of whether Jochim was as naive as his sister. What he was doing was a particularly cruel trick in which a stolen car is sold to a person with bad credit. The buyer agrees to pay exorbitant interest because it’s the only way to get wheels, and he doesn’t get title to the car until final payment. The title is a fake, so if he ever manages to pay the thing off, he’s driving a stolen car with a false title.
“Paloma said Jochim has been influenced by bad friends. She thinks he will get a new start with the insurance money, said they might start their own business in Mexico.”
Guidry raised an eyebrow, but put his notepad back in his jacket without saying what he thought about Paloma’s plans.
I hesitated, then went ahead and said it. “I also saw Jessica Ballantyne at the funeral. She ran away when she saw me and I lost her.”
“Did you give Kurtz the message?”
“I did. He said they worked together on a secret project for the government. They were to create a virus that would jump from animals to humans. For espionage purposes, he said. But a tsunami hit and all the researchers drowned. He thought Jessica Ballantyne drowned with them. He seemed genuinely shocked to hear she’s alive.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said the packages that Gilda took from the refrigerator were vials of antidote for whatever his condition is. But he was lying.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know, Guidry, I can just tell when people lie. Probably because I had to know when my mother was lying when I was a kid. It’s something I developed to protect myself.”
I doubted that Guidry’s mother had ever lied to him. He probably had a perfect mother who was always there for him, a beautiful mother who let servants do all the hard work so she could be pleasantly, lovingly available to her son.
“Guidry, what about the ballistics test?”
“Inconclusive. They don’t have a bullet, they don’t have a casing. The best they can do is give an educated guess that the bullet was a thirty-eight caliber.”
I shivered. The absence of a casing could mean the killer had used a revolver or a single-shot rifle. But a thirty-eight caliber was more likely a semiautomatic with an attached brass-catcher—the way of a hired gun. Or somebody had collected the casing and pocketed it.
“Am I still your prime suspect?”
“Dixie, I know you didn’t kill Gutierrez. Everybody except our new hotshot DA knows you didn’t kill Gutierrez. If it should go to trial, it would all be circumstantial evidence. Don’t worry about it.”
It has been my experience that when people say, “Don’t worry about it,” worrying about it is exactly what you should be doing.