I said, “I don’t know when Paco will be home.” I wasn’t going to divulge any information about Paco’s schedule, not even to another cop. If Guidry wanted to know when Paco would be home, he could ask Paco.
His gray eyes studied me for a moment, and then he nodded as if he’d answered his own unspoken question.
He said, “Okay. Call me if you learn anything.” He left without looking back.
I went to the French doors and locked them and lowered the hurricane shutters, leaving their accordion edges pointed outward so light could enter through the slits on the folds. It made my apartment seem like a treehouse with sunlight filtering through leafy branches. In the bedroom, an air-conditioning unit occupied a cut-out space high on the wall. Next to the ceiling were two horizontal panes of glass, four feet wide and four inches tall. They were for light, not ventilation. Nobody bigger than a lizard could squeeze through them.
I went in the bathroom and studied the jalousied glass window. To come through it, a person would have to remove the strips of glass from the frame one by one. If I was home, I was pretty sure I would hear that. I went back to the kitchen and ate a banana and looked at the window over the sink. Guidry was right. Somebody with a ladder could come through that window, and they wouldn’t make a lot of noise doing it. I needed an alarm in that window.
Grabbing the keys to Michael’s house, I went back to the French doors, opened them, and raised the hurricane shutters. With one hand in my pocket gripping the stock of my .38 and the other hand gripping Michael’s door key, I
scurried across the cypress deck to his back door. I felt like one of the little anole lizards that race around in the hot sun. I wouldn’t have been surprised if
my
throat had turned red and ballooned out. I let myself in the kitchen door and locked it behind me, then hurried for the stairway that led to the attic. There were zillions of our grandparents’ things stored in Michael’s attic. I was bound to find something I could use as an alarm.
Half an hour later, I was cobwebby and sweaty, but I’d found the perfect alarm to hang in my window, a rusty heart-shaped iron thing with two dozen little bells on it. It had once hung outside the kitchen door to let my grandmother know when somebody came or went. Just a touch caused all the bells to clatter with a racket loud enough to wake manatees a mile offshore.
I had also found an old trunk filled with clothes my mother had left behind. I opened the trunk and inhaled that odor peculiar to clothing that has lain dormant for a long time—a miasma of faint decay and near mold that seems to grow in the absence of a wearer. Everything inside was neatly folded. My mother hadn’t been the type to fold things haphazardly, even when she knew she’d never see them again. I pulled out a soft cotton cardigan, taupe with a thin horizontal stripe. It had been twenty-three years since she left, but I remembered that cardigan. Mother wore it with a linen skirt printed with gold sunflowers. Yes, there was the skirt, along with a linen dress in a similar print but with deeper tones. I’d never realized before how often my mother chose those colors, gold and rust and deep yellow. There was another cardigan in a pale beige, a loosely knit thing I didn’t remember.
I stacked everything on the floor and tried to remember the last time I’d seen my mother dressed in any of these clothes. Before she left us, she had started living in shapeless muumuus and terry scuffs. She would slide her feet across our sand-gritty floor, a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, her blond hair unkempt and straggly. Not at all the pretty woman she’d been, but a woman dissolved
by grief and anger over my father’s death. I felt a flash of recognition. I had been almost the same after Todd and Christy died, and for the same reason. Not just that they’d died, but the
way
they’d died. For the first time, I understood why my mother had left us. Loving people is too dangerous.
I put everything back in the trunk and closed it. Some day Michael and I would have to get rid of all the memories in the attic, but not today. Today I had to put up an alarm so a psychopathic killer couldn’t crawl in my kitchen window and murder me before I shot him. With the bell thing clattering with each painful step, I went back downstairs, out the back door, and across the deck to the stairs to my apartment. I detoured into the storage closet under the carport for some screw-in hooks that Michael or Paco had neatly stored in a glass jar on a shelf.
By the time I got upstairs and let myself in the French doors, my scraped knees were screaming. Groaning and cursing, I climbed on my kitchen counter and crouched in the sink to screw the hooks to the trim above the window. Then I hung the rusted bell thing on the hooks and climbed back down. It looked like shit, but nobody could come through that window without hitting the thing and setting off a noise like a herd of belled cows on the run.
Now that I had an alarm, I took a long warm shower because standing under hot water was the only time I didn’t hurt. I was afraid to nap outside in the hammock now, so I turned on the air conditioner in my bedroom and fell naked onto my bed. I woke so chilled and achy from the AC that I took another warm shower. At this rate, I might dissolve soon, like drowned soap.
I pulled on a terry-cloth robe and padded to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the water boiled, I tapped the iron bell thing over the sink and grimly listened to the wild clanking sound. Yep, that would wake me, no question about it. When the teakettle whistled, I poured boiling water over a drab tea bag. I drank it while I looked through the makeshift alarm at the treetops outside the window.
I thought about what Guidry had said, that I was using grief to keep the world away. I thought about my mother running away after my father died. I’d always thought she deserted Michael and me because she was too shallow to do the hard thing and raise us alone. I’d always thought I had more courage, more character, more depth. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe my prolonged mourning was really a revolving fear, a hamster wheel I ran on because I didn’t have the courage to move forward. My mother had run away physically. Maybe I had run away emotionally. The question was, What could I do about it? The answer was, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.
With that decided, I went down the hall to the closet and got dressed for my afternoon pet visits.
I carried my .38 by my side as I went downstairs to the Bronco. I could see a few rain-blue clouds out in the Gulf headed toward shore, but the sun was fiercely hot. A pelican dozed in the carport’s shade, along with a couple of great blue herons and an entire chorus of egrets. They all turned their heads to look at me with eyes dulled by afternoon heat, too listless even to flap a feather of alarm when I started the engine.
Michael and Paco were still gone.
My Bronco still had bird shit on it.
Somebody still wanted to kill me.
A
t the Sea Breeze, Tom Hale opened his door before I knocked, his round black eyes peering up anxiously through wire-rimmed glasses. Billy Elliot stood beside Tom’s wheelchair looking a little subdued, probably because Tom was so grim. Tom spun his wheelchair out of the way and motioned me inside.
“Tell me what happened this morning, Dixie.”
I tried giving him a blank look, but he wasn’t having it.
“Everybody in the building knows somebody tried to run you down in the parking lot. Who was it?”
“If I knew, he’d be behind bars by now. It was somebody in one of those pickups with huge tires. Not anybody who lives in the Sea Breeze.”
“He drove straight at you?”
Suddenly cold, I crossed my arms over my chest. “I threw Billy Elliot’s leash aside, Tom. He wasn’t close to me.”
“Good God, Dixie, I wasn’t worried about that!”
We both looked quickly at Billy Elliot to make sure he hadn’t taken offense, but he was smiling with his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
I said, “I guess you heard about Conrad Ferrelli getting murdered.”
“Yeah, it’s all over the news.”
“I was there. I was walking a dog, and I saw Conrad’s car drive away real fast. At the time I thought it was Conrad, but now I know it was his killer.”
“You saw him?”
“No, but he probably thinks I did.”
Tom raised an eyebrow.
“I waved at him, Tom. I even yelled Hey.”
“Shit, Dixie.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“You think the guy in the truck was the one who killed Ferrelli?”
“Who else? Somebody wants me dead, Tom.”
We stared at each other for a minute while the words bounced off the walls. They sounded melodramatic, but they were true.
Tom said, “Look, I can take Billy Elliot for a walk myself. I don’t want you taking that risk again.”
“No way, Tom. I’m not letting that son-of-a-bitch make me change anything. I’ll run with Billy Elliot, and I’ll walk every other dog in my care. I’ll go on about my business same as always. I’ll just do it a lot more carefully.”
“You carrying?”
I patted the gun in my shorts pocket. “You bet, and I’m a damn good shot. I got a first-place marksmanship award at the Police Academy.”
“Yeah, you’re tough.”
“Damn right.”
I grabbed Billy Elliot’s leash, snapped it on his collar, and quick-stepped to the elevator, wishing I felt as tough as I talked. Billy Elliot and I both stopped and looked both ways before we stepped into the parking lot. I wondered if Tom had given Billy Elliot a lecture about how to behave when in the company of a woman who might get herself run over.
Except for my scraped knees complaining, our run was no different than usual. When I took Billy Elliot back upstairs, Tom was in the kitchen busy with his accounting work and merely shouted good-bye. We were both doing a good job of pretending everything was normal.
After Billy Elliot, I only had three other dogs on my list. I walked two of them and then took care of the cats and birds and rabbits before I headed north on Midnight Pass
Road for Secret Cove. My mind kept going back to the driver of that truck. At the turn into Secret Cove, my car took over and kept going straight to the dogleg at Higel Avenue. City planners like to keep people on their toes by having streets change identity, so Higel makes a sharp right and becomes Siesta Drive, which goes over the north bridge to the mainland, where it becomes Bay before it crosses Tamiami Trail and becomes Bee Ridge.
I passed Video Renaissance and the tae kwon do studio on Bee Ridge, and turned left on a street of old frame houses where rusted sedans and dented pickups sat in driveways. I parked in front of a big garage with an open bay door and got out, shading my eyes to look inside the darker recess of the garage. Several collectors’ cars sat in half-finished states, and I could hear the whining sound of something grinding on metal at the back of the shop.
Birdlegs Stephenson came out, wiping his hands on a rag and grinning ear to ear. I hadn’t seen Birdlegs in several years, but he was still as skinny as ever, brown hair pulled back in a ducktail, long legs in faded holey jeans, his thin torso covered by a stained Bucs sweatshirt with the neck and sleeves cut out.
In high school, Birdlegs sat in front of me in algebra and fed me answers to stupid test questions like how long will it take a train to travel to Chicago if its smoke is blowing back at thirty miles per hour. Like there are still trains with smoke. That’s how I learned to read papers on somebody else’s desk without appearing to move my eyes. The trick is to tilt your chin upward and let your eyelids droop to half mast. That makes you look as if you’re deep in thought, but in reality you’re staring ahead and down, and if somebody just happens to casually move his test paper to the side of his desk, you can see what he did to solve that idiotic question. If Birdlegs hadn’t let me cheat off his papers, I would have written
Who
cares? and never would have graduated high school.
He said, “Hey, Dixie, long time no see!”
“How’re you doing, Birdlegs?”
“Can’t complain, how about yourself?”
“Somebody in a hyped-up pickup on huge tires tried to run me down, and I want to find out who it was.”
He raised his eyebrows and lowered his eyelids to look down at me, much the same way I used to look down at his test papers.
“What do you mean, they tried to run you down?”
“I mean I was running in a parking lot and they tried to hit me.”
“Some of those guys put those things up so high they can’t see the ground. Maybe they didn’t know you were there.”
“Trust me, Birdlegs, they knew I was there.”
“Jesus, what’d you do?”
“Hit the ground and let it roll over me.”
“Good God.”
“That’s how I felt about it.”
“Did you see what make the truck was?”
“It was too dark to see anything.”
“What size tires did it have?”
I held my hand flat beside my waist. “About this high.”
He measured the distance to the ground with squinted eyes. “Probably forty-twos, maybe more. Tires that big aren’t safe.”
“Is that what they call a Monster?”
He laughed. “No, Monsters are up on about sixty-six-inch tires. You won’t see any Monsters in a parking lot, just at fairs jumping over cars. What about the rack and pinion?”
“I don’t know anything about racks or pinions, Birdlegs.”
“Probably moved it,” he mused. “Tires that big, they’d have to. Bet they used a chassis and a lift kit both. Boy, that’s dangerous. Center of gravity that high and no good coil-over suspension system, that thing’d turn over if it hit a piece of gravel.”
“Tough titty if it turns over, Birdlegs. It’s the danger to me I’m worried about.”
“I haven’t heard anybody say tough titty in fifteen years, Dixie. Not since high school.”
“I haven’t matured much.”
“I like that in a person.”
“So do you know anybody who drives a rig like that?”
“Do I look like a redneck to you? Most of those guys are young, feeling their oats, makes them feel big to sit up high looking down on people. Then they get wives and babies and have to come down to earth. Take off the big tires and be like everybody else.”
“This one tried to kill me, Birdlegs. You’ll forgive me if I don’t get misty-eyed over his lost dreams.”
He laughed. “Sorry. I guess I was talking more about myself. Remembering what it was like to do things that dumb. Most of those old boys are okay, though. Just because they drive those dumb high-risers doesn’t make them killers. Tell you what. I’ll ask around, see if anybody I know has any idea who it might have been.”
“I’d appreciate it, Birdlegs.”
“What’re you going to do if you find him? I mean, if you don’t have any proof, you can’t arrest him, can you?”
“I couldn’t arrest him even if I had proof, Birdlegs. I’m not a deputy anymore.”
He reddened, suddenly remembering. “Oh, hell, Dixie, I forgot what happened. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have mentioned it—”
“It’s okay. Tell me about that car over there.”
Relieved, he looked at the dreamy convertible I was pointing at. It had a glossy red body, black leather interior, lots of shiny chrome, and a sleek silver hood ornament.
“Ain’t that a beauty? That’s a Honda S-six hundred, 1964. Only a few hundred of them still around. Sweetest little car you ever saw. First car Honda mass-marketed. Fifty-seven horsepower engine and a top speed of ninety miles per hour.”
“You did all the work on it?”
“It was a rusted mess. Guy imported it from some place in South America. I’m gonna hate to see it go.”
“What does something like that sell for?”
“Restored like this, about twenty, twenty-five thousand.”
“Is that all? I’d think it would be a lot more.”
“Nah, they’re not in the big leagues, they’re just sweet little cars.”
“Who owns it?”
“Guy named Brossi. Leo Brossi. He collects vintage cars. Buys them and sells them.”
Carefully, I said, “Is he somebody I should have heard of?”
“Nah, he’s not anybody. Just rich. Owns a call center over on Fruitville.”
“Must be a successful call center.”
“Must be. I guess the no-call business hasn’t hurt those places much. They still call me anyway, and I’m on the no-call list. Who has time to report every one of them? They probably get away with it a lot.”
“Is Brossi going to pick the car up soon?”
“Yeah, it’s done.”
“Birdlegs, do you know a state senator named Wayne Black?”
“Sure, Dixie, I hang out with senators and governors and A-rab potentates all the time.”
“How about Quenton Dyer? He’s a banker.”
“Him neither.”
He was beginning to look toward the work he’d left, so I thanked him for his time and started to leave.
“Call me if you find out who might drive that raised truck, okay?”
“Sure thing, Dixie.”
I was tempted to tell him to call me when Leo Brossi came in to pick up his restored Honda S600. I was beginning to be very curious about Leo Brossi.
M
ame wasn’t waiting by the door when I got to her house. I found her in the kitchen sitting in front of her food bowl. I knelt beside her and stroked her head.
“Hey, Mame, sorry I’m late. I had to go see somebody about a car.”
She licked the inside of my arm and gave me a forgiving look.
All the kibble was gone, which was a good sign. At least she’d been eating. I washed her bowl and got out the big bag of senior kibble and put about a tablespoon in it in case she got hungry during the night. Then I picked her up and carried her to the lanai for a little play time. She didn’t seem inclined to play, though, so I sat down in a padded glider and held her in my lap, stroking her and gently rocking.
Lanais on Siesta Key are enclosed by screened cages shaped by black or white aluminum ribbing. The Powells’ cage had black ribs and soared two stories high, coming to a gazebolike point above the roof of the house. The swimming pool occupied the far side, and the inner side was protected from the elements by a wide overhang to which the cage was attached. Sitting under the sheltered roof and looking through the screen at the sky and trees and flowers was like being in a luxurious birdcage with a really big water dish.
Songbirds were calling to one another, and young red-shouldered hawks were wheeling above the palms. A line of enormous sunflowers stood at the back of the lot, their fuzzy green stalks twisted hopefully toward the declining sun. A squirrel suddenly raced up the lanai screen holding a sunflower big as a dinner plate. He held the stem in his teeth, with the flower head facing the lanai, so it looked as if the sunflower was zipping up the screen by itself. Mame and I went still and breathless until the moving sunflower disappeared over the roof, and then we looked at each other with wide-eyed amazement.
I said, “My gosh, did you see that?”
Mame didn’t answer, but her eyes were still bright with excitement when I told her good-bye. That racing sunflower had been a once-in-a-lifetime event for both of us.
My feet were dragging when I got out of the Bronco and went to Stevie’s front door. When she opened it, she looked as weary as I felt.
She said, “Thanks for coming by, Dixie.” But she didn’t move out of the doorway, and her voice was flat.
“Do you need me?”
She gave me an apologetic half smile. “Not really. I walked Reggie earlier, and I’m going to turn in early.”