I didn’t know which one of us he meant, but nobody calls me that and gets away with it. In her crib by the door, the baby raised her head and began to cry. Priscilla ran on tiptoe to pick her up. She stood swaying back and forth with the baby against her thin chest, looking at me over the baby’s head with big frightened eyes.
A key scraped in the lock, and I shot Priscilla an astonished glare.
He has a key?
She looked embarrassed, as if it had just struck her that locking the door against somebody with a key wasn’t a good way to keep him out. I sprang to my feet and pulled the gun from my pocket, holding it down and behind me. The doorknob turned and the door rammed forward, pulling the night latch from its mooring as if it were a hair.
The man who stomped through the doorway was a lot younger than I’d expected, maybe not even twenty, with a body big and hard as a refrigerator, a near-shaved head, and beady blue eyes lit with the fevered determination of a shallow mind. The floppy stuffed toy dangling from one hand was an incongruous touch, like a flower tucked behind a rhino’s ear.
“What the fuck, Priscilla? What’s this cunt doing here?”
This time I knew for sure he meant me.
Priscilla began to cry, curving over the baby like a turtle shell protecting its soft part.
He pivoted toward her with one arm raised, and she cowered like a whipped dog.
I yelled, “Don’t you touch her!”
He whirled to glower at me. “Priscilla knows better than to argue with me. She’s going to go get in the truck and wait. And then you and me are gonna have a little talk, and I’ll show you what I do when cunts mess with my family.”
Okay, that was two times I was certain he meant me.
I raised my gun and took a shooter’s stance, feet spread, both arms straight out, the man’s chest in my sights.
I said, “Priscilla isn’t going anywhere with you, and you’re leaving now. You’re going out that door and you’re getting in your big tall pickup and you’re driving away.”
“Yeah? Who’s gonna make me?”
I moved the barrel of the gun a little bit, aimed at the staghorn fern in its mossy basket on the landing behind him, and fired a round that whizzed past his left ear. The plant exploded and bits of plant and moss struck the back of his neck.
I said, “That would be me.”
T
he cocky grin left Gabe’s face, and his little eyes darted right and left like a cornered rat.
“Listen, cunt—”
“Listen yourself, you muscle-bound Neanderthal. That’s the last time you’re calling me that.”
I moved the gun to sight his head. Priscilla screamed, the baby screamed, and Gabe Marks threw the stuffed toy at Priscilla and ran down the stairs. As scream echoes bounced around the silent room, a car door slammed downstairs and an engine roared out of the driveway.
Priscilla sobbed softly against the baby’s head. I backed up on wobbly legs and sat down on the bed. I laid the gun down beside me and put both hands on my thighs because there was a distinct possibility that I might fly apart, that my limbs might go shooting off like the thick fronds of the staghorn fern I’d shot. Adrenaline hit, and I began to shake.
A stern voice in my head said,
Would you really have killed him?
The scary thing was that I didn’t know the answer. By some quirk of genetics, a particular coordination of eye, hand, timing, and instinctive skill, I am an excellent shot. At the Police Academy, I always won the top marksmanship awards. In any exercise with paper targets at a shooting range, I always laid all my bullets in the spots where I intended them to go: the middle of the forehead or the center of the heart. Everyone who has ever shot with me has
been awed and amused by my skill with a gun. Awed because they can’t match it, and amused because I’m the least likely to ever actually kill anybody.
If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that we pay one way or another for everything we do, that every action brings a reaction. The way I see it, this means that killing somebody on purpose is bound to bring really bad things into your life. And yet I had almost blown a man away.
Not wholly because he was threatening Priscilla either, but because he’d called me a cunt.
It was another unpleasant discovery about myself.
Through the open door, we heard more footsteps coming up the stairs: light, quick steps. Pete appeared on the landing, taking in the demolished fern and the open door, his forehead creased with so much anxiety that his eyebrows were almost floating.
“I met Gabe’s truck leaving. Are you okay?”
For answer, Priscilla kept crying and I kept shaking.
Pete said, “I had to go inside the bank, so it took longer.” He looked around the room. “Where’s your luggage ?”
Priscilla sniffled and pointed to the black garbage sack. “I don’t have a suitcase.”
He stooped to pick it up, twirled it to make a neck, and tied it. “We’ll pick up something on the way.”
I said, “Where are you going?”
“I’m taking Priscilla and the baby to the airport, where they’re taking a flight to see a lady I met several years ago at the Mooseberger Clown Camp. She’s a hospice clown too, and she’s got a spare room where Priscilla and the baby can stay for a while.”
Priscilla said, “What about Josephine?”
He shook his head impatiently. “I’ll explain to Josephine. If you’ve got pay coming, I’ll send it to you. Now come on, let’s get the hell out of here before Gabe comes back.”
He seemed to notice the gun lying beside me for the first time. “Did you
shoot
at him?”
Priscilla and I exchanged a quick furtive glance. I didn’t want Pete to know I’d fired a shot past Gabe’s head. Only a nut would do something like that.
I grabbed the gun and shoved it in my pocket. “Pete, if I’d shot at him, he wouldn’t have been able to drive away.”
He let out a relieved breath and motioned me up. “Come on, come on, let’s go!”
We began to straggle out, Pete with the black garbage bag over his shoulder like a cheap Santa Claus and Priscilla close behind with the damp baby clasped to her meager bosom. At the door, she turned to scuttle back and scoop up the stuffed toy Gabe had thrown, then hurried out with a quick guilty look at me. I pulled the door closed and clumped down the stairs to the driveway, where Pete practically shoved Priscilla into a black Ford Taurus. He waved good-bye before he got in and started the engine. I waited until he backed out and then pulled out behind him.
At the end of the street, where it connected to Midnight Pass Road, we turned in opposite directions, Pete toward the Sarasota airport, me toward home to explain to Michael and Paco where I’d disappeared and why.
Like a bad conscience, my cell phone rang while I was rehearsing what I’d say. Expecting it to be Michael, I gulped and answered it without looking at the caller ID.
Guidry said, “Dixie, I’m on my way to the ME’s office to get the autopsy report on Stevie Ferrelli. I’d like you to go with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you knew her and I didn’t. Because you know things about the Ferrelli circus connection that I don’t. Because the photograph on her body may have an importance that you understand. And because you may hear something that will fit with some cockamamie thing you’ve heard from one of your pet owners that will be just the key I need. You seem to have an uncanny way of collecting vital information, so I want you there.”
“You want to say please?”
“Please. Ten minutes, Sarasota Memorial.”
He clicked off without saying good-bye. While I dialed Michael’s number, I muttered evil things about homicide detectives who use their authority to snag innocent civilians into helping them solve crimes, but to tell the truth I was flattered. Now my phone’s screen showed only one little battery, and it was all but jumping up and down and screaming that it needed charging. I sent the demanding little critter a silent promise that I would plug it in as soon as I got home.
Michael answered on the second ring. “Where are you, Dixie?”
“I’m sorry, Michael. I thought I’d be home before now. I had to run an errand and it took longer than I expected, you know how that is, and then Guidry called and wants to see me in ten minutes. I’m on my way to meet him at the hospital. So I’m safe. Okay?”
I’ve seen anorexics move food around on their plate like that, doing it fast and stirring one thing into another thing to cover the fact that they’re not really eating anything.
Michael made a little grunting sound that said he knew I was throwing words around to cover up what I had really been doing, but he couldn’t argue with the idea that I would be safe with Guidry. I promised I’d call him after the meeting, and continued over the north bridge toward the hospital on Tamiami Trail. I parked in the visitor’s lot and put the .38 in my glove box before I got out of the Bronco.
Guidry was waiting for me in the lobby, looking like an Italian tourist in a dark gray open-collared shirt, dark slacks, and an unstructured linen jacket the color of sea grass. Actually, he looked like an Italian gangster. A rich Italian gangster. For the millionth time, I wondered what his background was and why he was working as a homicide detective.
He nodded a greeting and touched the small of my back in a kind of unspoken take-charge gesture, man showing woman the way, man being the leader, woman trotting along as she is directed. I should have hated it, but I sort of liked the touch of his hand. Jesus, I was a mess.
In the Medical Examiner’s office, we sat for a few minutes in a sterile waiting room. I looked around and thought about the number of people who had sat in these plastic chairs waiting to identify a loved one. At least I had been spared that when Todd and Christy were killed. Todd’s lieutenant did it for me, and the ME’s report to me had been mercifully brief. Massive head injuries had killed Christie. A crushed chest had killed Todd. Death becomes outrageously impersonal when it has come by accident. Reports take on an objective distance that is absent when death has been deliberately inflicted.
Guidry pulled a copy of a photograph from his pocket and handed it to me.
“Do you know who this is?”
It was a slim dark-haired young man, late teens or early twenties. He wore tennis whites and had a tennis racket slung over his shoulder and a shy smile on his face. I studied the features closely, thinking it might be somebody I’d known in high school.
“He looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him. Who is it?”
“Nobody knows. That’s the picture that was on Stevie Ferrelli’s body.”
I looked at the photo again. Stevie’s killer must have shown it to her just before he killed her.
“He looks a little like Stevie. Maybe it was her brother.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. A brother who met with some tragedy that would hurt Stevie to remember.”
“Did you show it to Denton?”
“He didn’t know who it was. Or at least he claimed he didn’t. His wife didn’t know either.”
“What about Stevie’s relatives?”
“So far as we know, there aren’t any. She seems to have no background, no history. Denton Ferrelli says Conrad married her in Europe, but he doesn’t know where she came from.”
“She told me they were at Yale together.”
“She could still have come from Europe.”
“She didn’t have an accent.”
A shadow crossed his eyes. “A lot of foreigners speak fluent English.”
I couldn’t believe Denton Ferrelli wouldn’t know where his sister-in-law came from, but the Medical Examiner stepped to the door then and called us into her office, and Guidry put the photo back in his pocket. A tall Cuban-American woman, Dr. Corazon’s almond eyes were shaded with fatigue as she motioned us to chairs in front of her desk. She ran a slim hand over cropped silver hair as we got ourselves seated.
Without any preamble, she said, “Stevie Ferrelli started life as a male.”
Guidry leaned forward. “You mean she—”
“I mean she had sex-change surgery.”
I said, “But she was so feminine.”
Dr. Corazon gave me a look that dripped battery acid. “Probably why she didn’t like having a penis.”
Guidry shook his head slightly, like clearing his ears, and that seemed to annoy the doctor.
“Look, in the beginning there’s no difference between boy babies and girl babies. They have the same mound of cells that will become sex organs. If the embryo gets a supply of androgen, those cells will form a penis and testicles. If it doesn’t, the cells will form vagina and vulva. But it’s all the same tissue. If nature has made a mistake and sent androgen to an embryo that grows up to be a woman in every other sense, it’s a simple thing to rectify. Make an incision down the seam of the penis, take out the meatus, sew it back up and invert the empty casing into the peritoneal cavity to form a vagina. Attach the glans for a clitoris, snip out the testes, tuck the edges of the testicular sac under, and—voilà—you have vaginal lips. For all practical purposes, there’s no difference between a surgically corrected woman and one born that way.”
Guidry had tightly crossed his legs while she talked, and his forehead had a glassy sheen. His voice went up an octave too. “For all practical purposes?”
“For sexual intercourse, for sexual pleasure. Stevie Ferrelli couldn’t have children, but in every other way she was a woman.”
Guidry turned to me. “Did you know this?”
I shook my head. “I had no idea.”
Dr. Corazon said, “In terms of a homicide investigation, it has no bearing whatsoever. Stevie Ferrelli was the wife of Conrad Ferrelli. She died early in the morning, probably between five and six A.M. She died of respiratory failure the same way her husband did. There was no indication of sexual assault. It took less time to pinpoint the cause because we were ready for it this time. Somebody gave her a massive shot of succinylcholine, also known as suxamethonium chloride. Trade name Scoline.”
She turned to me and said, “You’ve probably heard of it as curare.”
I didn’t know why she thought I needed that explanation, but she was right. I’d heard of curare but not those other names.
She said, “We found the same needle puncture in her gluteus that her husband had. Spectrographic analysis found four hundred milligrams of the drug in her tissue. That’s exactly the same amount found in Conrad Ferrelli. To give you an idea of how much that is, the amount of Scoline used to temporarily paralyze lungs during surgical procedures is one milligram for every kilogram of body weight, somewhere around fifty milligrams. The amount of succinylcholine in either of the Ferrellis’ tissues would have paralyzed a thousand-pound animal.”
I said, “Why do you say animal? I mean, why animal instead of person?”
She nodded at me as if I were a student who had asked a smart question. “Because the drug in large amounts like that is sometimes used to restrain animals during transfer or medical treatment.”
“Like elephants?”
“Most veterinarians don’t use succinylcholine with elephants anymore because it’s so cruel. About the only time
it’s used with animals now is for restraining crocodiles and alligators during capture.”
“Could it have been in a dart instead of a hypodermic needle?”