The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (12 page)

It’s unusual for a law enforcement officer to invite witnesses to get chummy, but I had been so intrigued by his eyes and the way he pronounced his name that I didn’t notice he hadn’t shown me any creds. I just sat there with greasy steam rising from my fries and made nice with Sarasota’s new homicide detective who had probably been born in some other country and who’d sort of been introduced to me by Sergeant Owens. I even felt a bit bountiful about it, the native putting the newbie at ease. If I noticed that his voice had an edge of agate hardness, I put it down to the fact that he was, after all, a homicide detective.

He said, “Why don’t you just tell me what happened yesterday. All of it.”

I was so nervous about my secret meeting with Briana that I talked like somebody hacking at brush with a machete, slashing words right and left, telling him every detail of what I had done at the Trillin house, what Briana had said, what Cupcake had said when I called, going on nonstop and hoping he would be so impressed with all the facts I gave him that he wouldn’t ask what had happened between me and Briana after I left the Trillins’ house.

When I finished the part about taking Elvis and Lucy to the Kitty Haven, he nodded gravely and stayed quiet. Judy swished by to take my empty plate and refill our coffee mugs.

Steven said, “Now tell me the rest.”

“That’s it.”

He made a slicing motion with the edge of his palm, and I stopped with an unspoken word still hanging on my bottom lip.

“Ms. Hemingway, cut the crap. We know you were in contact with Briana, and in case you don’t know it, that makes you an accessory to a crime.”

My mind was still so caught up in the power of words that it trotted after the word “accessory.” I had been reduced to something like a handbag or a belt. A scarf, maybe, an accessory to smarten up something plain and dowdy. But I knew he didn’t mean that kind of accessory. He meant the kind that can cause you to end up doing jail time.

My face went hot, and I took a sip of coffee to stall for time. “She was following me in traffic, and at a red light she ran to my car and asked if she could talk to me. I told her to meet me at the pavilion.”

“Where you provided her with breakfast.”

I tried to smile fetchingly. “Wow, you’ve done your homework!”

He didn’t return the smile. “Tell me what the woman said to you.”

“She said she didn’t kill the woman. She said she went to the bedroom to get dressed and the woman was dead on the living room floor when she came out.”

“What else did she tell you?”

I swallowed. I knew enough about criminal investigations to know that sometimes a detail that seems completely unrelated can be the key to solving a crime. But I also knew that telling this cop that Briana claimed to be an old friend of Cupcake’s would put Cupcake in an untenable position. Cupcake’s reputation and career could be ruined if cops started checking Briana’s story, and I was almost positive she had lied.

I said, “This is something nobody knows. I’m embarrassed to tell it, but it may be important.”

He waited, and it seemed to me that a light sparked in his dark eyes.

“I know where Briana lives. She leases a house in Oleander Acres.”

His eyes never seemed to blink.

He said, “How do you know that?”

“Well, that’s the embarrassing part. I saw her car on the street, and I followed it. She drives a white Jag convertible, and I saw it go by. A man was driving it. He went to a house, and I stopped across the street to look at the house. A neighbor came out to see why I was loitering there—it’s a private street, and I guess they’re careful about strangers—and she told me that some French people live in the house. Briana’s from Switzerland, you know. I think they speak French.”

He still hadn’t blinked. “Ms. Hemingway, if you have any information about this case that you’ve held back, this is the time to tell me.”

My head shake was more like an attack of palsy than denial. “I’m sure you already know that I led Briana to an attorney. Not a defense attorney, but an attorney who’s a friend of mine. He contacted a defense attorney for her.”

I heard myself babbling and prayed that I would shut up soon.

I said, “That’s the last I saw of her. Sergeant Owens said the defense attorney went with her when she turned herself in.”

I thought that was clever of me, to bring Owens into the conversation. Sort of like reminding this guy that I was one of the good guys, a former deputy, a woman on his side of the law.

He gazed at me a moment longer, then slid from the booth and stood up.

He said, “I’ll talk to you again.”

He walked down the aisle of booths, put down money at the cashier stand, and went out the door.

Judy came and stood beside me, watching through the glass door as he walked away.

She said, “You think you and that new cop are going to be as compatible as you were with the hunk?”

By “the hunk” she meant Guidry. She had a malicious grin and an even more malicious glint in her eyes.

I said, “That guy probably wasn’t compatible with his own mother. Not even in the womb.”

I didn’t add that the man I’d just talked to might be Guidry’s replacement, but he had a cold hardness that Guidry had never had. Guidry was tough, and when it came to getting facts he was unrelenting. But he had never looked at me with the unsympathetic eyes that Steven had. It gave me a bad taste in the mouth to consider how men like Steven dealt with people who withheld information from them.

11

I went out and sat in the Bronco and gave myself a good talking-to. I told myself that I was a citizen, and that I had a duty as a citizen to tell anything I knew that might help law enforcement agencies find the person who had killed a woman in Cupcake Trillin’s house while Briana was there.

I rebutted that Cupcake Trillin had been in Italy with his wife when the murder happened, and that he’d had absolutely nothing to do with it. Whether he had or had not known Briana when he was a kid was an extraneous detail that would not shed light on the identity of the killer.

I counterargued that it was important only because he claimed Briana was a complete stranger and that he had no idea why she had been stalking him. If that was a lie, then it could be a vital piece of information.

I snarled that Cupcake was on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic and wouldn’t be home until late that night. I could ask him for the truth when he came home, but in the meantime I had no way of finding out if he’d lied. Furthermore, if I told the investigators what Briana had told me, they would assume there was some nefarious connection between them, and they would be at the airport waiting for Cupcake when he got off the plane. Every reporter in town would already be there, and if they saw officers of the law meeting Cupcake, they would splash it all over the place. And, as Paco had said, no matter what the truth was, Cupcake’s reputation, his marriage, and his career could be seriously damaged by that kind of negative publicity.

I started the Bronco and backed out of my parking place. I wasn’t going to get in touch with the investigators and tell them what Briana had told me, but I didn’t feel good about it.

I needed advice. I knew Michael had been home since eight that morning, but I also knew what his advice would be: stay out of it, mind my own business, cooperate with the law. I needed advice from somebody who cared about me but could be objective. Somebody like Reba Chandler.

Reba is a retired psychology professor with an African grey parrot named Big Bubba that I sometimes take care of. Big Bubba is one of the smartest birds in the world, most likely because his human is one of the smartest women in the world. Bubba is arrogant about it, but Reba hides her smarts under a calm friendliness. You only know she’s way ahead of you when you try to feed her a line of baloney. She’ll nail you every time.

I found her and Big Bubba on their lanai. Big Bubba was in his cage slinging seed hulls through the bars and muttering to himself, and Reba was on a chaise with her feet up, a book in her lap, and a tall glass of iced tea on the table beside her. When I tapped on the screen door, she and Big Bubba raised their heads as if I were a welcome distraction. Big Bubba flapped his wings and squawked, and Reba put her book aside and offered me iced tea. I declined the tea, went to Big Bubba’s cage to give him a proper greeting, and then took a chair beside Reba.

She said, “I hear you were at the house where a murder happened.”

That’s Reba for you, she doesn’t circle around things.

I said, “I guess it’s all over the news.”

“Well, not
you
so much, but the model and the football player.”

I said, “Briana and Cupcake Trillin. I wanted to talk to you about them.”

“Yes?”

That
Yes?
is how shrinks open the door wide enough for you to drive through with a truckload of stuff you wouldn’t let anybody else see. She tilted her head a bit when she said it, a gesture she’d used with me since I was in high school. I had taken care of Big Bubba then, too, and gradually came to tell Reba every secret I had. She may be the reason I ended up with enough core strength to snap back to sanity after Todd and Christy were killed and I went seriously nuts.

I didn’t tell her the investigation into the murder had taken a weird turn. That was law enforcement business, a line I wouldn’t cross even with Reba. But the personal stuff was fair game. Personal stuff as in my own confusion about the story Briana had told about her history with Cupcake.

I said, “Briana’s official story is that she’s from Switzerland, and that her parents were killed in an accident when she was a child. Then a nice American couple adopted her and took her to a remote rural area in Minnesota where they home-schooled her. In other words, no school records, no neighbors to remember. She used to refuse to give her last name to avoid embarrassing those alleged adoptive parents, but now she says they’ve died.”

Reba listened closely. Big Bubba had stopped muttering to himself, and I felt as if he was listening, too.

I said, “I won’t go into how it happened, but yesterday I met with Briana at the beach pavilion, and she told an entirely different story. She said she was from the same little Louisiana town as Cupcake Trillin, and that they had been good friends when they were kids. Not ordinary good friends, but kids that broke into houses together and stole things. Petty stuff, but enough to sell for cash. She says she left there when she was sixteen, and that she’s never seen Cupcake again. Except when she stalked him.”

I leaned back in my chair. That was it. That was all I could tell. And I sounded like an idiot for telling it.

Reba said, “You don’t like being lied to.”

For some stupid reason, my eyes smarted as if tears were trying to break through.

I said, “I’m just trying to understand why a woman who became internationally famous would be stupid enough to stalk a man and break into his house.”

“Sounds like the woman is determined to undermine her own success, doesn’t it? She had a hard childhood, escaped privation, became rich and famous, and then ruined it all in a particularly public way. It’s hard to watch somebody self-destruct that way.”

I wondered if she thought I was guilty of the same self-destruction. Was she implying that I was ruining my life by not moving to New Orleans with Guidry?

I said, “Why would she do that?”

She shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. “She’s older now, so she requires more drugs to get the same high.”

Disappointed, I shook my head. “I don’t think she does drugs.”

“We all do drugs, Dixie. We’re all drug addicts. Some of us are addicted to prescription drugs or street drugs, the rest of us are addicted to drugs we manufacture inside our own bodies. We like to believe our actions are based on logic or need, but in reality we’re all ruled by our individual addictions.”

My face must have shown that I didn’t know what the heck she was talking about. She pulled her knees up and hugged them.

“Okay, a quick course in psychochemistry. Every emotion a person has creates a chemical in the brain that is instantly in every cell of the body. Each emotion creates a specific chemical. Opiates, depressants, sedatives, dopamine, we create them all.”

She peered at me. “You’re with me so far?”

“I think so, but—”

“No matter what it is, if we get a continuous supply of a chemical, our bodies will become addicted to it.”

She stretched her legs out and waited a beat for me to catch up.

“Now imagine a child who grows up in a situation that causes her constant anxiety. Maybe there’s not enough to eat, or maybe there’s abuse. Whatever it is, constant anxiety means a constant supply of chemicals created by anxiety. The result is a child addicted to those chemicals. As she grows older, her circumstances may change, but the addiction to anxiety drugs will remain. To get the drugs, she will put herself into situations guaranteed to make her uneasy, or she’ll interpret neutral events as threatening. However she does it, it’s to ensure that her anxiety drugs continue.”

I could imagine that child. I had known people who seemed to stir up unnecessary problems for themselves. Maybe I did it myself.

Reba said, “If that same child is praised for excelling at something, she’ll also become addicted to the chemical that comes with the feeling of success. With those two addictions, she’ll do everything she can to succeed in life so she can get more of the success drug, but no matter how successful she is, she’ll create ways to feel anxious so she can get the anxiety drug.”

Her eyes had taken on a new spark. It occurred to me that Reba was probably addicted to the chemicals she created while she was teaching.

She said, “Skydivers get addicted to the endorphins that come from free-falling, soldiers in combat get addicted to the chemicals created by episodes of intense danger, retirees feel lost without the old adrenaline rush of competition. It isn’t the
behavior
that’s addictive, it’s the drugs created by the emotions that accompany the behavior.”

I said, “That’s kind of sad.”