Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

“You said Dr. Coffey wouldn’t kill her himself but that he might hire somebody to do it. Who else had reason to kill Marilee?”

“I don’t know anybody who would kill her. I’m telling you the truth.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I let it go. “How did Marilee get involved with somebody like Harrison Frazier, anyway?”

“Cora was a cook at the grade-school cafeteria in Orlando. She barely made enough to scrape by, so she was always looking for ways to make money. The summer Marilee and I were fourteen, Cora got a job cooking at a ritzy camp for rich Baptist families outside Orlando. It was more of a resort than a camp, but it was supposed to be a way for families to have a clean, wholesome vacation with their kids and still give them a chance to swim and hike and hang out like normal kids. They let Cora bring Marilee and me with her, and we waited tables in the dining room. The rest of the time we were free to walk around the camp. If we were at the lake and one of the rich boys decided to come down and sit with us, we couldn’t do anything to stop them.”

“Harrison was one of those boys?”

“So far as Marilee was concerned, he was the only boy. She was nuts about him. If he’d asked her to drown herself in the lake, she would have jumped right in. She thought he was in love with her, the dumb dope, but I think he was more excited about the idea of easy sex. He was just fifteen, and she was probably his first. With all the things going on, it was easy for him to slip off to meet her, and neither of them knew jack shit about condoms or had any way to get any. By the time camp ended, Marilee was pregnant.”

She shook her head and stared at the floor for a moment, lost in the memory. “Harrison hadn’t even given her his address, but Cora tracked down his family and contacted them. She was smart enough to know they would pay for Marilee to go someplace and have the baby, but I don’t think she ever expected them to want it. Poor dumb Marilee thought Harrison would marry her.” She wiped away sudden moisture on her cheek and said, “What an idiot!”

“Did Harrison know how she felt?”

“Oh sure. Marilee never was good at keeping her feelings hidden, at least when it came to Harrison. She kept thinking one day he would leave his wife and marry her. Then their daughter turned eighteen, and Marilee got a letter from Harrison’s attorney saying there wouldn’t be any more money. It was like somebody had dropped a bomb on her.”

“How much had they been paying her?”

She gave me a tight grin, exhaling a cloud of smoke and curling the tip of her tongue to touch her upper lip like a smirking dragon. “A quarter mil a year.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow is right. They got her used to that kind of lifestyle, and then they expected her to go back to living in a trailer park?”

I had to agree that the idea of Marilee Doerring in a double-wide was a stretch of the imagination.

“She called Harrison when she got that letter. He said she’d had a free ride for eighteen years and now it was time she grew up.”

I could almost hear Harrison Frazier’s bitter voice speaking the words, the voice of a man who had been caught fooling around with trailer-park trash when he was fifteen and had been paying the price ever since, literally and figuratively.

“I heard she got some money from Dr. Coffey, too.”

“Yeah, but every cent went to buying that place for Cora and setting up a fund that will take care of her if she ever needs a nursing home. Cora worked her ass off raising Marilee, and Marilee never forgot it.”

“So when Frazier cut her off—”

“She went totally bonkers.”

“Is that when she got in touch with her daughter?”

Shuga leaned forward and jabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“She had a plan to get close to the girl and make the Fraziers squirm. Harrison has other kids, he wouldn’t want them to know he had raped Marilee when she was fifteen and got her pregnant.”

So much for the story Marilee had told Cora about her daughter finding her through an agency.

“She was going to say she was raped?”

Shuga nodded, her eyes bright with grim shrewdness. She wasn’t disappointed in Marilee the way I was. She understood how Marilee’s mind worked. She had pulled herself out of the same environment, told the same lies, created the same illusions, made the same place for herself in the world of money and possessions. She and Marilee had both played the hand nature had dealt them, the same way I had and everybody else does.

I stood up to go. “I have to find a home for Marilee’s cat, and I need your approval of whatever I do.”

“Hell, I don’t care what you do. If you’re thinking about sticking me with it, forget it.”

Shuga didn’t get up, and I didn’t say goodbye. I felt her eyes boring into my back as I went out the glass doors and got in the Bronco.

I drove down Roberts Point Road, pulled into a driveway, and dialed Guidry again. This time when he snapped “Guidry,” I said, “Dixie Hemingway” just as crisply.

“What have you got, Dixie?”