I said, “Stevie, you’re exhausted. Turn off the phones and take a nap.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the sink, looking ten years older than she had when she opened the door to me and Guidry two days before. When she opened her eyes, they were swimming in tears.
“You’ll come back this afternoon and walk Reggie?”
“You bet. I’ll see you then.”
She walked me to the door and gave me a quick hug good-bye. I’ve always wished I had hugged her back more tightly before I left.
W
hen I pulled into Mame’s driveway, I saw her behind the glass watching for me. She was almost her old frisky self. I couldn’t say the same for myself. Before I brushed her, I clipped her leash on her collar and limped with her into the backyard and let her squat in the bahia grass and amble around on the pea-gravel path. Lifting her to the table to brush her made me groan. Good thing she only weighed eleven pounds. Another ounce would have killed my ribs.
I gave her fresh water and a half cup of senior kibble and left feeling optimistic about her. She was a tough little dog. She was going to be fine.
I was so hungry I was ready to eat the upholstery in my car, but this was Wednesday, the day I skipped breakfast at the Village Diner and drove over the bridge to the Bayfront Village to take Cora Mathers to her weekly hairdresser’s appointment. Cora was the grandmother of a former client who’d got herself murdered on my watch, and I felt responsible for her. Also, I liked her. Cora had survived more tragedies than most people even see on TV, and she still got up every day with a childlike hope that it was going to be good.
Bayfront Village is an upscale assisted-living condominium. Designed by architects who couldn’t decide between neoclassical, art deco, or Mediterranean, it has the befuddled look of a staid matron cast as an ingenue in a
musical comedy. I pulled under the portico, put my gun in the glove box, and told the valet I was going in to get Cora.
He grinned. “Bet she’s in that senior sex class.”
“Excuse me?”
“Some lady is teaching about senior sex this morning. I’ll bet Miz Mathers is in there with the rest of them.”
I ignored his leer and went through the glass doors to the lobby. Inside, the air wasn’t much cooler, but a lot of elders sitting in the hyper-decorated conversational area wore sweaters. I didn’t see Cora, but there was an easel outside a meeting room with a hand-lettered sign announcing TANTRIC SEX FOR SENIORS.
I ducked around the easel and stuck my head in the door. A hefty woman in a loose caftan stood beside a table holding a headless and armless sculpture of a woman cut off at mid-thigh. The woman had pendulous breasts and a bulging pudenda as big as a manatee’s head. The sculpture, not the teacher. Maybe the teacher too. Who could tell with that loose thing she was wearing?
About a dozen white-haired women and three men sat in folding chairs in front of her. Two of the men were asleep with their chins sagging on their chests, and the other one had taken his hearing aid out and was fiddling with it. The women all sat on the edge of their seats in rapt attention.
The teacher said, “In Eastern cultures, she is worshiped as the Great Mother, the Eternal Feminine. She has many names, and she lives inside every woman.”
She stroked a finger down the cleft of the statue’s vulva. “This is called the
yoni
. In the temples, worshipers stroke the Great Mother’s
yoni
in reverence for the life it represents. This is a sacred spot on your bodies, ladies. Whether he knows it or not, when a man touches a woman’s
yoni
, he is worshiping the Great Mother.”
Pink blushes rose to white hairlines as women remembered times their
yonis
had been worshiped. To tell the truth, I felt a little pink myself.
The class ended, the teacher wrapped the sculpture in a sheet, and everybody straggled out.
As they passed me, the man with the malfunctioning hearing aid shouted to his wife, “Did I miss anything?”
She yelled, “I’m a Great Mother.”
He smiled. “Of course you are, dear.”
Cora saw me and waved. Cora would have to stand on tiptoe to reach five feet, and soaking wet she wouldn’t have weighed eighty pounds. She wore a bright bird-printed shirt made for a much larger woman, over red pleated shorts that stopped an inch above her little freckled knees.
She said, “They’re teaching us about sex. I thought I already knew all about it, but I guess I didn’t.”
I steered her outside to the Bronco and helped her into the passenger side. The valet grinned and nodded in a rather slimy way, pleased that Cora had been where he said I would find her. I ignored him and ran around to the driver’s side and eased the Bronco down the brick drive, careful not to ram anybody pushing their walkers to the front door.
She said, “I guess it’s never too late.”
I looked at my watch. “Giorgio will wait for you.”
“I meant for sex. Been a long time since I had sex, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll give it another try.”
It had been a long time since I’d had sex too, and I didn’t want to talk about it.
She said, “I’m gonna have Georgie do my hair different.”
Her hairdresser’s name was Giorgio, and her hair stuck out around her face in wisps that seemed God-ordained to me, but if Cora wanted a new look, she ought to get one.
An hour later, Cora’s white wisps had been converted to lavender wisps, and my nails had smooth cuticles and were buffed so they shone like abalone shells. To celebrate, we went to the Oasis on Siesta Drive for lunch. The waitress didn’t seem put off by my bruises or the cat hairs clinging to my khaki shorts, and since it was off-season we had our choice of tables.
We both ordered the daily special, and while we waited Cora leaned over to peer at my face.
“Who hit you?”
“Nobody, I fell.”
“That’s what I always told people too. I’d say I fell or ran into a cabinet door.”
“I really did fall, Cora. This morning.”
“You shouldn’t let a man hit you. I always told Marilee that, but I guess she didn’t listen.”
There were so many misconceptions in that sentence I didn’t know how to begin to answer it. Marilee had been her granddaughter who was murdered, but it hadn’t been by a man who hit her, and no man had ever hit me. I was saved by the waitress bringing our food. Another good thing about summer, chefs all over town are waiting with poised food for the natives. Not like during season, when they can let money go to their heads and forget who really loves them.
The luncheon special was a crab cake atop a black bean cake atop an artichoke heart, the whole business wrapped in crispy thin phyllo and sitting on a bed of watercress and chopped tomato, all of it drizzled with silky gorgonzola cream. I took a greedy bite and decided that if I ever decided to have an affair, or just an afternoon quickie, it would be with the Oasis chef.
Cora looked doubtfully at her plate and patted her neon hair.
She said, “You think this makes me look younger?”
It really made her look like a lavender Easter chick, but I nodded vigorously. “Takes twenty years off.”
“Is that all? I’d like to take off thirty or forty, but I guess looking sixty-eight ain’t bad.”
I said, “What would you do if you were thirty or forty years younger?”
She pursed her lips and studied my bruised cheek again. “You mean your age? Well, being young ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
She inched forward in her chair so her chin was closer to her plate, her lavender frizz catching the overhead light and casting rainbows on the white tablecloth.
“You take me, for example. I have a lot more fun now than I did when I was young.’Course I have a lot easier time of it now. Marilee saw to that, God rest her sweet soul. I guess if I was poor now like I was when I was young, I wouldn’t like being old any better than I liked being young.”
She took a bite of crab cake and chewed thoughtfully. “Now if I had me a man,” she said, “that would make it even better. I never had money and a man at the same time.”
I said, “There are plenty of widowed men at Bayfront Village. Why don’t you snag one of them?”
“They’re all too old to do it. I don’t see any reason to get a man that can’t do it, do you? Hilda Johnson took up with one of them old men, and he took some of that stuff that makes a man’s tallywhacker hard. His never got soft again, at least not for several days. Hilda was pretty excited about it at first, but then he commenced complaining that it hurt and she finally let him call an ambulance. I don’t know how the doctors got his thing soft again, but he’s kept it to himself ever since. We don’t know if he’s embarrassed or just afraid of Hilda.”
I took a big swallow of water to hide my grin, and Cora leaned forward and lowered her voice.
“Some of the women at Bayfront are getting them little vibrating things. Gladys Majors has a whole catalog full of them. One of them is so little it fits on the end of your finger. Uses a little battery like for a hearing aid. You know, you could sit right there in your living room and blow your brains out with that thing and nobody would ever know.”
I swallowed wrong and had a coughing fit so bad the waitress came to see if I wanted her to thump my back. I waved her away, croaking that I was just fine, because a thump on the back would have probably caused me to faint from pain.
To change the subject, I said, “Cora, have you ever known any circus people?”
“Sure, lots of them. Ringling used to be a good place to work. We had a neighbor in Bradenton had something to
do with the elephants. Dyer. His name was Dyer. Had a sneaky boy named Quenton that was sweet on Marilee, but she never had anything to do with him.”
As I remembered, every male in Florida had been sweet on Marilee.
Cora said, “Why’re you interested in circus people?”
“Oh, I met a man whose father was a clown, and that got me thinking about it.”
“That fellow Dyer had to shoot an elephant one time. It went crazy or something, and he shot it with a gun that had drugs in it. He said it ran a few steps and then just keeled over dead. He felt bad about it, but you can’t have a crazy elephant running around trampling people.”
We were both subdued after that, thinking about what it would be like to shoot an elephant with enough drugs to kill it.
As we were leaving, I held the door open while Cora inched her way over the threshold. Noontime traffic zipped past on the street beyond the parking lot. A dark blue pickup raised up on tall tires drove past, and I jerked to attention. It sped south, toward the curve and the north bridge to Siesta Key.
Cora stood on tiptoe to see what I was looking at. She said, “How do they get in those things? Do they have to use a ladder? Silly things, you ask me. Look like they’d be dangerous.”
As I stepped off the curb to help Cora down, pain from my bruised ribs shot through my torso. “They’re damn dangerous.”
After I took Cora back to Bayfront Village, I wanted more than anything to go home and take a nap, but I stopped at the market to pick up staples: fruit and yogurt and cheese and Cherry Garcia ice cream. In the ten-items-or-less line, I read the headlines on idiot magazines while I waited behind a man who had at least twenty items. When it was my turn, the checker rolled everything over her scanner and stuffed it in a plastic bag.
When I handed her money, she said, “If I eat ice cream,
it just runs right through me. Takes about fifteen minutes, and out it goes.”
Not knowing how to respond to that fascinating information, I said, “No kidding?”
She counted out my change. “Yep, I have a problem with fat. It’s in one end and out the other, whoosh!”
She demonstrated, shoving both hands down her sides. The man in line behind me suddenly wheeled his cart backward and went to another checker.
She gave me a friendly smile. “Have a nice day.”
The automatic doors sighed me through, and I crossed the parking lot carrying my fatty ice cream and watching for speeding blind people or pickups on monster tires. Life is treacherous.
W
hen I made the last turn on the twisty drive leading to my place from Midnight Pass Road, I saw that neither Michael nor Paco was home. I also saw a dark Blazer parked at the side of the carport. Guidry was in it, sitting like a meditating Buddha with the windows rolled down.
I said, “Shit.”
I pulled into my slot, took the gun from the glove box and jammed it in my pocket, got out of the car, and opened the back to loop plastic grocery bags over my wrists. Guidry ambled around the corner like a tourist coming to watch the pagans do their worship rites to heathen gods. He had on a linen jacket the color of white asparagus, pale olive pants, and a darker olive knit shirt. He looked cool and unhurried. His bare toes in his expensive leather sandals looked clean and manicured. His gray eyes were calm and alert. I hated his guts.
He said, “Can I help you with those?”
I said, “I’ve got them.” I didn’t sound very gracious, but then I didn’t feel very gracious.
He followed me up my stairs and waited while I unlocked the French doors. I didn’t invite him in, but he came in anyway and took the one stool at my so-called breakfast bar, casting a speculative eye at my bare white walls. I tossed ice cream in the freezer and dumped fruit in a basket and finally looked directly at him.
He said, “Want to tell me how you got those bruises?”
“I fell.”
“Uh-hunh. Would that have been around four-thirty this morning? In the Sea Breeze parking lot?”
My face went hot and I felt my lower lip creep forward like a four-year-old’s.
He said, “We got a nine-one-one call this morning from a woman in the Sea Breeze who said she got up to go to the bathroom and saw a truck try to run a woman down in the parking lot. She said it looked like it rolled right over her. She watched the woman get up, and then she went back to bed and waited until daylight to report it. She said the truck was already gone and she didn’t want to bother anybody so early, but she thought we ought to know. She said the woman had a greyhound with her. If memory serves, you go running with a greyhound at the Sea Breeze every morning.”
I got a bottle of water from the refrigerator and opened it. Then I relented and got another one out and handed it to Guidry. While he unscrewed the cap on his, I stood on my side of the bar and took a long pull at mine. After he had chugged down half a bottle—he must have been hotter than he looked—I gave him a surly glare.
“Okay, somebody tried to run me down in the Sea Breeze parking lot this morning. They drove a pickup jacked up on huge tires, and the only reason I’m not dead is that I threw myself under it before it hit me.”
“You get plates? See the driver?”
“It was too dark. I didn’t have time. He went out on Midnight Pass Road toward the bridge.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“What for, Guidry? I didn’t know who it was, I didn’t have any proof, and it was probably halfway to Myakka City by the time I quit shaking.”
“You shook?”
“Damn right I shook.”
“First time I ever heard you admit you could be scared.”
“The point is, Guidry, the point is that Conrad Ferrelli’s
killer thinks I can identify him, and somebody tried to kill me this morning.”
“Could be coincidence.”
“Yeah, like the moon and tides.”
“You have any idea who it could be?”
“I think it’s Denton Ferrelli. He’s a slimy guy. Everybody says he’s a jerk.”
“You want me to arrest Denton Ferrelli because he’s a jerk?”
“I just think you should look into him very carefully.”
Guidry got up from the stool and ambled into the living room area, looking around as if he were at an art gallery. “I expected you to live with a menagerie, but you don’t even have a goldfish.”
“My life works better without anybody depending on me.”
“Any
body
?”
“Like a pet, I mean.”
“You don’t have any pictures on your walls either. No plants, not even a pot of ivy. You don’t seem the type to live like an ascetic.”
“What the hell does my apartment have to do with somebody trying to kill me?”
He shrugged. “I’m just trying to figure you out.”
“Somebody’s trying to kill me, Guidry. Figure that out.”
He turned and gave me a long look, his gray eyes momentarily softening before they grew analytical again.
“You know what I think?”
“No, Guidry, what do you think?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Dixie, I respect what you’ve been through, and I respect your feelings. But I think the time comes when grief becomes protective coloration to keep people away.”
Fury rose in my throat. “What do you know about it, Guidry? What do you know about losing somebody?”
“I don’t know about it, Dixie. I probably never will, because I don’t think I have it in me to care so much about somebody that I would feel the kind of loss you feel. But
you do. You know what it’s like to love that much. You’ve done it, so you know you can do it again. But as long as you hide behind grief, you’ll never have to. You can stay safely outside it, live in a sterile cave, wrap yourself in pain every night instead of a man’s arms.”
My eyelids stung, and I wanted to leave him speechless while I made an indignant exit. But it’s hard to leave in high dudgeon when it’s your own apartment. Besides, I had a sneaking suspicion he was right.
Guidry said, “Relax. I’ve said all I’m going to say about it. It’s just something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
Once again, Guidry had left me feeling out of control. I hate that. Not that I want to be the one always in control. I just hate it when I’m not.
I said, “You’ve never said how Conrad died.”
“Correct.”
“I need to know. If the same person wants me dead, I need to know how he killed Conrad.”
“What makes you so sure it was a man?”
“Come on, Guidry.”
He walked back to the breakfast bar and leaned his elbows on it. For the first time since I’d known him, a river of emotions flowed over his face.
“He died of a massive injection of succinylcholine chloride shot into his right buttock. It’s a neuromuscular paralysant. It paralyzes the lungs, so lung surgeons use it while they have a patient on a ventilator.”
The words trickled through my brain like ice water. “And without a ventilator?”
“Suffocation. Heart failure. Death.”
I said, “How long?” and was surprised to hear that I was whispering.
He swallowed. “The drug gets to the diaphragm within seconds of injection. Death is within five minutes, give or take.”
I thought of Conrad, lying on the ground unable to breathe.
“Was he unconscious?”
“He was fully conscious until he died. It’s a particularly sadistic way to kill a person.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“It took the ME awhile to be sure. They had to run tissue spectrographs. They found enough of the drug in his tissues to kill an elephant, and I mean that literally. Until it was declared too inhumane, it’s what they used in Africa to cull elephant herds. They flew over in helicopters and shot the elephants with dart guns.”
“Did the ME give you a time of death?”
“She can’t be sure, Dixie, you know that. But judging from lividity and rigor, she thinks Ferrelli hadn’t been dead more than a couple of hours when you found him. That puts his murder no earlier than four-thirty. That fits with what Stevie Ferrelli says, that Conrad usually left about six to run with the dog on the beach.”
“Where was Denton Ferrelli then?”
“He and his wife both say he left their home on Longboat Key about six o’clock. He drove to the Longboat Key Moorings where he docks his speedboat. He took the boat out for a spin around the bay, something he does every morning, and docked at about six forty-five. He walked over to the harborside golf course at the Longboat Key Golf Club, where he met three other men. They waited for the greenskeepers to finish up and teed off shortly after seven o’clock.”
I slitted my eyes like a hound on a fresh scent. “Who are these three other men?”
“Leo Brossi was one.”
“Aha!”
“Yeah, maybe. But the other two are okay, at least so far as we know. State Senator Wayne Black and a banker named Quenton Dyer.”
I had a feeling I’d heard that name before, but I couldn’t remember where.
I said, “They could be lying.”
“Over a dozen people saw them.”
“Denton could be lying about when he left home. He
could have got up early, driven to Siesta Key and killed Conrad, and still been on time for his golf game. It wouldn’t have taken long to cover the body with that loose mulch. And Denton’s that cold, he could do it and not break a sweat.”
“You saw Conrad Ferrelli’s car a little after six. Even if Denton and his wife are lying about the time he left home, Denton Ferrelli couldn’t have been driving the car you saw.”
“What about Brossi?”
He shook his head. “Brossi would kill his own grandmother for a buck, but Ferrelli’s murder was driven by an overwhelming rage. The lipstick on the mouth, the dead kitten. That’s motivated by hatred and revenge, not money.”
I suddenly heard Cora’s voice:
That fellow Dyer had to shoot an elephant one time. It went crazy or something, and he shot it with a gun that had drugs in it.
“You said the drug was shot into Conrad? Shot how?”
“The ME found a needle puncture.”
“Guidry, that man, Quenton Dyer, the one who played golf with Denton, the one you said was a lawyer—”
Guidry was nodding like one of those duck things that bob over a glass of water.
“Yes?”
“His father was with the Ringling Circus. He worked with elephants, and one time he had to kill one with a big shot of drugs. He did it with a gun.”
I leaned back and looked triumphantly at him.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Cora Mathers told me. You remember Cora? Marilee Doerring’s grandmother? When she lived in Bradenton, one of her neighbors was a man named Dyer. He worked for Ringling, doing something with the elephants, feeding them or training them, I don’t know what. He had a son named Quenton. It has to be the same man.”
“You think—”
“That must be how he and Denton Ferrelli met. They were both circus kids. And if Dyer’s father knew how to use drugs to kill elephants … .”
Guidry appeared to be chewing on the inside of his cheek, the first sign of uncertainty I’d ever seen in him.
“Quenton Dyer is an investment banker. He sits on the boards of half a dozen important businesses.”
“So?”
He sighed. “Okay. It does seem like more than coincidence. But the fact remains that both men were seen at the Longboat Key Golf Club at seven o’clock that morning, not too long after you saw Conrad’s car driving away.”
I slumped over the bar. If Denton Ferrelli wasn’t the killer, I didn’t know where else to look. And if I didn’t know who to be afraid of, the killer had a better chance at me.
Guidry reached out and ran the back of his fingers over my bruised cheek with a surprisingly gentle touch.
“Are you going to be here alone tonight?”
My heart did a little blip, a girlie kind of jump like women get when they’ve had a welcome proposition. I felt like slapping my own chest. I nodded, but I frowned too so he wouldn’t think I’d reacted the way I’d reacted.
He got up and headed for the front door. Then he turned and gave me a hesitant look.
“Look, I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I don’t want you to take this lightly either. It’s not a good idea for you to be here by yourself if a psychopathic killer has taken an interest in you.”
“I have a thirty-eight in my pocket. I have metal hurricane shutters that cover the French doors.”
He nodded toward the window over the kitchen sink. “Somebody could come through that window. You also have a bathroom window. I checked while I waited for you.”
“It would take a two-story ladder to get in those windows.”
“Or a one-story ladder set in a pickup raised on giant tires. A pickup is a convenient place to carry a ladder.”
“Guidry, I can’t live scared. I’ll keep my gun ready. I’ll keep the windows locked. I’ll be careful.”
“When will your brother be home?”
“He should be home any time now. He was on a twenty-four-hour shift that ended this morning at eight o’clock.”
“What about Paco?”
I let his slip of the tongue pass without saying “Ha!” Guidry and Paco kept up a pretense of not knowing each other, but I’d known all along they did. Guidry was homicide and Paco was undercover, but those guys all know one another.