Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 14 - Murder in a Casbah of Cats Read Online Free PDF

washed his bite down with another gulp of tea. “Way I was brought up. Respect them what you work for. Miz Watkins is a fine woman. Maybe kinda odd, but her heart’s in the right place. She’s the one what wanted to bring the two nieces to live here.” He nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir. She’s a good and decent person.” He paused. “And the others here, they’re good folks too. Henry, he’s a fine man. Kinda hard to get to know, I suppose you’ve noticed.”
    “Yeah. I’ve noticed.”
    “His folks was them flower children of the sixties. Henry grew up like that. Edna, she come here when Miz Watkins was fifteen. She’s kinda like a second mother to Miz Watkins.”
    “Second mother?”
    He shot me a furtive look. “Mr. and Miz Watkins, Skylar’s momma and papa, they was nice folks, but they was rich. Skylar always had a chaperone, you know? A nanny. When Edna came, the girl just kinda flocked to her. Edna was the one that Skylar went to when the old man was killed. Her mother died a couple of years later.”
    “I heard about that.”
    “Yep. Hard on the girl so soon after her daddy was murdered.” He shook his head. “Terrible thing. Real bad around here for a mighty long spell. I really liked that old man. He treated me like—well, like I was something better than just a gardener. You know what I mean?”
    I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I picked up a hint of resentment in his voice. “Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with being a gardener. My grandfather was a farmer.”
    “I know, but people are funny that way.”
    “Never did find the killer, huh?”
    “Nope! Cops hounded an old boy by the name of Bill Collins. He’d paid Mr. Watkins a lot of visits. Nobody never really knew why. Sometimes they argued, but the night the old man was murdered, Collins had hisself a solid alibi.”
    His words piqued my curiosity. “What happened?”
    Another delivery van pulled up behind the mansion. The logo said it was from Phelan Landscaping.
    Frank glanced at his watch. “Uh-oh. There’s the fertilizer. Time to get back to work.”
    I spotted the deliveryman unloading bags of fertilizer into the garage. “Need any help?”
    “Naw. Thanks. Willy yonder loads them into my small trailer that I hook up to my John Deere, and I haul them back to the storage shed.” He pointed to a trim little cottage at the back of the grounds. Beside the cottage was a storage shed twice the size of the neat bungalow. “That’s my place. Come on down after supper, and I’ll tell you about that night…” He paused, and with a sly twinkle in his eyes, said, “I’ve got a half-full bottle of peach vodka to help us along.”
    As I headed back to the mansion, Frank unhooked the gang mower, and the tractor roared to life. I watched as the old gardener pulled into the garage and reappeared moments later pulling a small trailer with four bags of fertilizer.
    A general myth is that cats can’t be trained. I have a neighbor on Payton-Gin Road who puts up her cats every night in a roomy kennel behind her house. As soon as she walks out the back door around five or six o’clock, the six of them fall into line behind and, like the children of Hamelin, follow her into the kennel.
    It was the same at the mansion. Around six that evening, I noticed a stream of cats of all sizes and shapes heading upstairs. Feeding time, I guessed. Still bored, I followed them upstairs, standing in the open door as each went to a bowl, the side of each imprinted with a name.
    Gadrate was busy filling each bowl.
    “They all got their own bowl, huh?”
    Bent over, she looked at me from under her arm. “They got ’em, but they don’t use them all the time.” Straightening up, she gave me a crooked grin. “Cats, they do what they want.”
    “You have family over in Morgan City?”
    “Some,” she replied, going to the next bowl. Without looking at me, she said, “Mama and Papa, they be dead, ten years now. Brother and sister