Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 14 - Murder in a Casbah of Cats (11 page)

Puzzled, Henry replied, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Fenster replied, “what were you doing out there?”

“Oh. I was in the cabana draining water so the pool wouldn’t overflow. I saw Boudreaux with his flashlight out in the rain. So,” he added with a shrug, “I went to see what was going on.”

I glanced sidelong at Henry. Something was wrong. He had appeared on my right, which was west. The pool and cabana were back east.

Before the lieutenant could ask Gadrate, she spoke up. “Me, I see the light from the second floor and go out the side door to see what the problem be.”

Pursing his lips, Fenster thanked everyone and announced a unit would be on the grounds at the scene. “And please do not interfere with them.” He paused, glanced at Karla, and said with a hint of gentle sarcasm, “And now, Miss Simpson, you can have your breakfast.”

I glanced sidelong at the others. I wasn’t the only one hiding a smirk.

As we rose to leave, I noticed what appeared to be a trace of mud in front of the hearth. I followed the lieutenant out to his cruiser.

He glanced at the grounds where the body had been found. “By the way. Guzman got it with his own knife.”

I grimaced. “Bad enough to catch a shiv, but it sort of adds insult to injury when it’s your own.”

Fenster shrugged. “Maybe so. Be seeing you, Boudreaux.”

“Hope not, Lieutenant.”

Back in the library a few minutes later, I knelt by the hearth, ran my finger through the thin strip of mud, and stared at my fingertip.

Where had this come from? We were sitting on the couch and in the chairs. The lieutenant never stepped off the carpet. In the middle of my gut, I knew something was not as it seemed. There was the poker lying on the hearth, Hercules with water on him, and now mud on the floor.

“What are you doing, Boudreaux, praying?”

I looked around into the smiling face of Dutch Weiman. Quickly, I wiped up the trace of mud remaining. “Hey, Dutch. No, just tying my shoe. How you doing?” I hurried to him, extending my hand. He was trim and tanned, looking more like fifty than sixty-six. He was wearing a suit and tie, his typical
dress every day of his career. “Jeez, you’re sure not getting any prettier.”

“You’re one to talk with that knot on your head.” He took my hand in a bear grip. “What happened? You get fresh with the wrong person?”

“Not quite.”

“Saw Fenster outside. Some bald-headed guy let me in.”

“That was Henry, the butler.”

Dutch lowered his voice. “The guy didn’t look like he had any hair at all—anywhere.”

“Well, I see you haven’t lost your keen powers of observation.”

He narrowed his eyes and told me where to go.

We both laughed.

He indicated the Band-Aid on my forehead. “Looks like you got a rough job around here.”

“No.” I laid a finger on the knot. “Ran into a low-hanging limb, believe it or not.”

“Still the klutz, huh?”

“You know how it is.”

I took him into the kitchen for coffee and some of Edna’s doughnuts. Gadrate and Henry had gone about their business, but I introduced him to Edna and Karla.

Pausing over her breakfast of fruit and juice, Karla asked. “Are you here about the murder last night?”

Dutch arched a questioning eyebrow at me.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said and turned to Karla. “No. I told you I was a curious guy. Well, I couldn’t get the story of your grandfather out of my head, so I called Dutch here. You won’t remember him, but he headed up the investigation of your grandfather’s death. I figured he could fill in some of my questions.
Who knows? I might write a book about it and make you my heroine.”

She blushed. “I bet.”

He smacked his lips over the doughnuts. “Edna, I’ll come up with the money for a doughnut shop if you’ll go to work for me. We’ll make a fortune off these delicious little things.”

She blushed. “Go on. You’re just saying that.”

He grew serious. “I’ll always remember that case.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I always had the feeling the key to the whole thing was right in front of me, but every time I reached for it, the answer slipped away. I can’t prove it, but I know in my heart Bill Collins killed the old—I mean, Mr. Watkins.”

I pushed back from the table. “Grab your coffee and another doughnut. Let’s go into the library.”

Karla looked up. “Can I go with you?”

I shrugged. “Fine with me.”

Dutch chimed in, “Help yourself.”

She downed the rest of her orange juice and hurried after us. Just then, her cell phone rang—or rather played some rap song. She answered and squealed, “Kevin! You’re back. I didn’t expect you so soon.”

I winked at Dutch. “No need to wait for her. Kevin’s back,” I said with a smirk.

Dutch stopped in the open door and surveyed the library. He shook his head. “Just like I remember.”

I walked ahead of him. “Tell me about that night.”

He poked the last of the doughnut between his lips. Licking his fingers, he studied the library. After a few moments, he sipped his coffee to wash the last of the pastry down. “It’s been a long time, but as I remember, we got the call around ten thirty or so. Not long before Christmas. It was a cold as a witch’s heart. I was freezing. Had a cold and chills were running up and down my
arms.” He snorted. “I can tell it now, but I did justice to a pint of Jim Beam that night.”

“I know the feeling.”

He nodded. “Yep. When I got here first thing I did was warm myself by the fire over there while the techs took their measurements and pictures. I’m not crazy about fireplaces, but that night I enjoyed this one.”

He wandered the library for the next ten minutes with me tagging along behind, listening eagerly as he related the events of that night fifteen years earlier. He paused at the couch and gestured to the floor in front of it. “This was where Watkins was. He’d been shot twice in the heart. According to some of those who got in here first, they could still smell the gunpowder.”

He shook his head, his tanned face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Couldn’t have been more than a minute. As I remember, they wasted a few seconds trying to find someone with the key. Looked everywhere, they claimed—the kitchen, laundry—but the butler and maid were somewhere else. I think someone found the butler upstairs, but by then they had busted the doors open.”

One of the most perplexing yet intriguing aspects of investigative work, whether law enforcement or PI, is that everyone views the same event from a different perspective.

He paused at a moose head mounted on the wall. “Let me show you how far we went trying to find out how that sucker made it out of here.” He pushed a chair under the head. Standing in it, he slid the bottom of the head a few inches to one side and peered at the paneling. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot. “If you look hard, you can see where we cut a small hole in the wall to insert a camera to see what was behind it.” He dipped his head toward the opposite wall. “Over there, we took out all the books and cut out part of the wall.”

“Find anything?”

“Just the wall to the next room.” He straightened the moose head and climbed down. “No luck,” he said, brushing his footprints from the chair.

I sat my empty cup on the coffee table and plopped down in a chair, where I could watch the doorway. “That’s pretty much what I heard from the lieutenant. And from the staff here.”

Dutch chuckled. “Old Pat Fenster. He was here last night, huh?

“Yep.” I proceeded to detail the events of the night. With a sly grin, I added, “You’ll never guess who the stiff was. Probably an old friend of yours.”

A frown wrinkled his forehead. “I hate guessing games.”

“Al Guzman.”

His eyes grew wide in disbelief. “Guzman? You’re kidding!”

“Nope.” I leaned forward. “And let me tell you what else is going on.” Succinctly, I told of the rock through my window; of chasing a figure that first night and running into a tree; of the fallen poker; of the mud in front of the hearth; of the wet cat; of the spiders; and finally, after the murder last night, how Lieutenant Fenster and I had chased a shadow into the hedges, where it vanished into thin air.

Dutch remarked, “I see things are still disappearing out here.”

I leaned back and crossed my arms. “So, what does the king of the Austin Police Department’s Detective Division think?”

He snorted. “You forget, I’m retired now. Things have changed.”

“Technology perhaps, but not good old common sense. These things are tied together somehow, Dutch. I feel it in my gut.”

He eyed me a few moments. “Did you tell Pat all this?” I cleared my throat. A sardonic sneer twisted his lips. “I thought
not. You best tell him, Tony. You know how us cops are about PIs that keep information from us.”

“Yeah, Dutch, I know, and believe me, I planned all along to tell him, but I wanted to bounce it off you first.”

“OK. First make sure there is not a logical explanation for any of the things that happened. The wet cat for example. Didn’t the maid say something about the cat’s water bowls?”

“Yeah. But she’d never actually seen the cat soak himself in the water bowl. And when I checked, I saw no water on the floor.” Dutch grimaced, and I added, “He might be the cat I saw outside. He could be the one that left the mud in front of the hearth and knocked over the poker.” I looked around and pointed to the tool set. “That poker.”

“Or it could have been whoever dumped the spiders on you.” He squatted by the tool set and examined the poker and its cradle. He struck the bottom of the poker gently, like a cat brushing it. The ornately decorated poker rocked back and forth, failing to fall.

Still squatting, he looked around at me. “Not much, Tony.”

“What about Guzman?”

He looked back at the fireplace, studying the fireback. “You ever notice this, the back of the firebox?”

“Yeah. Something, huh? That engraving couldn’t be cheap. Must be nice to have money to throw away like that.”

Using the poker, Dutch tapped the cast-iron fireback, then pushed on the corners. Grunting, he rose. His knees popped. He muttered as he replaced the poker. “The penalty of growing old.”

“Hey. Considering the alternative, I’ll take it.”

He drew a deep breath. “And now we have Al Guzman. And, Tony, old friend, Al Guzman is the one factor that gives substance to your belief all of this is tied together. The problem is, we’ve got
no bones to hang the flesh on.” He shrugged. “Simply put, until we can figure out what the blazes is going on here, we don’t have a starting point.”

“I’ve already put feelers out on Guzman and his running mates Corky Radison, Willy Morena, and Chippy Alberto with some of my sources as well as Danny O’Banion.”

“O’Banion, huh? That’s right. You two go way back.”

“Over twenty years.”

“Is it true O’Banion and Joe Basco are cousins?”

Joe Basco was the longtime crime boss in Louisiana who headquartered in New Orleans. “You heard that too, huh? No. Nothing to it.”

“Didn’t think so, but it made for interesting beer-table gossip, you know?”

I caught a flicker of movement from the side of my eye. I looked around, and Hercules stood in the open doorway staring at us. “That’s him,” I whispered to Dutch. “The cat that I was talking about. The one that is always getting wet.”

Just as Dutch turned to look at Hercules, the cat whirled about and vanished.

“You must’ve scared him,” I said.

“I noticed a couple of other cats running around this morning. How many does this old boy have?”

“Woman.”

“OK, old girl.”

I clucked my tongue. “You won’t think ‘old girl’ if you met her. Skylar Watkins is her name. She’s the daughter of the old man who was murdered in here. The young woman in the kitchen is her niece. Skylar adopted her and her sister after their parents were killed.”

“OK. How many does she have?”

“Nieces?”

He cursed. “Cats. How many does she have?”

“Twenty. Want to see their rooms?”

He held up his hands in defense. “Me and cats don’t mix, like oil and water.”

“Listen, Dutch, how about joining up with me on this? I’m curious enough to see how far I can go with it, but I can’t get out on the streets. I’ve got to stay here for the next week and a half.”

“Jeez, Tony, you’re as puzzling as the case you’re talking about. What are you doing here, and why can’t you get out?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard. I figured by now all of Austin knew.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

Drawing a deep breath to screw up my courage, I said, “Skylar Watkins hired our agency to look after her cats for two weeks while she goes on a cruise.”

He stared at me in disbelief. “You’re kidding me. A cat nanny?”

“Honest.”

“Two weeks?”

I knew what was coming. “Yeah.”

He looked me up and down a moment, allowing the information to soak in. With a click of his tongue and a disgusted shake of his head, he said, “You PIs will do anything for a buck, you know?”