Wicked Business

Gail Danko was second on the list. She lived in a small, bedraggled bungalow a half mile from Cassandra McGinty. A black Sentra was parked in the driveway. It was showing some rust and a few good-size dents. A gray cat sat on the roof, enjoying the afternoon sun.

“Danko is a nurse, but she’s off on sick leave,” Diesel said. “Divorced. No kids.”

He knocked on the door, the door opened, and a short, round woman with a big fluffy white cat under her arm and her foot in a cast looked out at us. “What?”

“I’m looking for Gail Danko,” Diesel said.

The woman’s eyes glazed over for a moment while she took Diesel in. “Mmmmm,” she said.

Diesel smiled at her. “Why is your cat wearing pants?”

“She’s a national champion, and she’s in heat. We’re going to breed her tomorrow.”

The cat on the car gave a loud YOWL and the national champion jumped out of Danko’s arms and shot out the door.

“Miss Snowball!” Danko shouted. “Help! Catch her! She can’t get pregnant from that alley cat!”

In a flash, Snowball was out of sight, running as fast as she could in her cat diaper, the gray cat close on her tail. Gail Danko stomped onto her little porch with her plaster-coated foot and single crutch, but she clearly wasn’t going to catch Snowball.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Danko. “Diesel will track Miss Snowball down. He’s good at this. He has special tracking skills.”

“I don’t track cats,” Diesel said.

“Of course you do,” I told him. “You have that whole energy sensitivity thing. That’s why you’re the bounty hunter.”

“I can find people.”

“Are you sure you can’t find cats? Have you ever tried to sniff one out?”

“No,” Diesel said, “but Miss Whatever shouldn’t be hard to find. Speaking from the male perspective, they’re probably just around the corner in the bushes, trying to get her pants off.”

He disappeared around the side of the building, and Danko and I stood waiting.

“What happened to your foot?” I asked her.

“Bunion surgery,” she said. “I’ve been sitting with the stupid thing elevated for two weeks, doing nothing but eating. I was struggling with my weight before the surgery, and now I’m totally fat. And if that isn’t bad enough, Miss Snowball’s going to get pregnant with that trailer-trash tomcat.” There was some god- awful screeching and howling, and Danko stumbled back and put her hand to her heart. “My baby!”

“It might not be so bad,” I said. “She could be faking it. I mean, who hasn’t faked it once or twice, right?”

A moment later, Diesel emerged from behind the house with Miss Snowball. The diaper was shredded but still attached, her fur was standing straight out, and her eyes were almost popped out of their sockets.

“Was that you screeching and howling?” I asked Diesel.

“Princess wasn’t happy with hotshot’s foreplay technique.” He handed Snowball over to Danko. “I hope the cat you’ve got coming tomorrow knows what he’s doing.”

“We wanted to ask you about Gilbert Reedy,” I said to Danko. “I believe you dated.”

“We met for coffee, but he started wheezing after five minutes. Turns out he’s allergic to cats.”

“Did he say anything interesting in those five minutes?” I asked her. “Did he mention a key?”

“No. He said on his form that he had the key to finding true love, but that was it. Hard to talk about keys and true love when you’re having an asthma attack.”

Diesel backtracked to Salem and parked in the lot of the public library. “Sharon Gordon is third on the list. She’s a librarian. Thirty-six years old. She lives with her mother. And her Facebook page says she likes Nora Roberts, s’mores, and penguins.”

“You can trust a woman who likes s’mores,” I said. “It’s the gooey factor.”

“Something to keep in mind.”

We entered the building and found Gordon shelving books in the children’s section. She was tall and slim, with brown hair pulled back in a clip at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a pale pink knit top, tan slacks, and flats.

She gasped when she turned and saw Diesel. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m used to seeing short people in this room.”

“We’d like to talk to you about Gilbert Reedy,” Diesel said.

“Are you police?”

Diesel picked a picture book about trucks off her cart and paged through it. “That’s a complicated question.”

Sharon pushed her cart forward and placed a book on a shelf. “I met Gilbert through a dating service. He said he was looking for true love.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “We went out a couple times, and I thought he liked me, and then this woman named Ann came along, and he got weird and dumped me.”

“Do you have a last name for her?”

“No. I don’t know anything about her.” She shelved another book. “I’ll tell you one thing, though-Gilbert Reedy was a very strange man. His area of expertise was Elizabethan England, but he was obsessed with an obscure poet from the nineteenth century. He had a little book of sonnets he could quote by heart. He was convinced it held the key to true love. Like it had mystical powers. And then one day last week, he called me up and said he didn’t need me anymore. That was the way he put it. He didn’t need me. Can you imagine? How am I supposed to interpret that? And he was babbling about Ann, Ann, Ann. And good triumphing over evil. And he should have seen it sooner.”

“What should he have seen sooner?” I asked her.

“He didn’t say. He was on a rant, making no sense. If it was anyone else, I’d think they were on drugs, but Gilbert Reedy wouldn’t have any idea where to get drugs. He was a total academic. It was almost like dating me was a science experiment.”

“Did he carry the book of sonnets with him?” Diesel asked. “Did you see it?”

“Yes. It was actually very wonderful. The sonnets were written by a man named Lovey, and the book cover was leather with hand-tooled almond blossoms scrawled across it. It reminded me of the Van Gogh painting. I did a little of my own research and found that Van Gogh and Lovey were contemporaries, so it’s possible Lovey copied the painting to decorate his book. Or it could just have been coincidence. The almond blossom has long been a symbol of hope. The book locked like a diary, and there was a little key that went with the book, but Gilbert never let me see the key. He said it was the last piece to the puzzle, and he kept it someplace safe.”

“What did he mean by the last piece to the puzzle?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” Gordon said. “He was always making statements like that and then jumping off to something else. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I kept going out with him. He was sort of a crackpot.”

“He read poetry to you, and he was searching for true love,” I said.

Gordon smiled and nodded. “Yes. He was a romantic crackpot.”

“Do you have any idea who might know something about the key and the puzzle?” I asked her. “Did he have any close relatives or friends that he might have spoken to?”

“I don’t think he had friends, and he didn’t talk about his relatives. He mentioned his grad student a lot. Julie. He was her thesis advisor. He thought she was smart. He might have confided in her. And of course there’s Ann.”

We left the library and returned to the SUV.

“You said Reedy had chosen four women from the dating service,” I said to Diesel. “Is Ann the fourth?”

“No. Deirdre Early is the fourth. She has a Boston address.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s almost four o’clock. Do you want to keep going with this?”

“Yeah. I’d like to poke around Harvard and see if I can find Reedy’s grad student. And then we can try to catch Early on our way home.”

Diesel tapped a number into his cell phone and asked for assistance in contacting Reedy’s grad student. “I’ll be