The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (7 page)

As I climbed the stairs to the porch, I used the remote to raise the metal hurricane shutters on my apartment’s French doors. The doors are the only entry to my apartment, so the shutters double as security bars. Since our place sits off the beaten track in secluded privacy, we have to think about things like that. The porch has a deep roof and runs the length of the apartment. Two ceiling fans are there to move the air when I sit outside, and a hammock is strung in one corner in case I want to fall into it. There’s also a glass-topped table with two chairs where I can sit and look out at sailboats in the Gulf.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw Ella Fitzgerald inside looking through the glass on the door. Ella is a true calico Persian mix, meaning she’s part Persian and that her fur has distinct red, black, and white blocks of color. She’s named for Ella Fitzgerald because she makes funny scatting sounds. Officially, Ella was a gift to me, but she’d had the same flutter-lash reaction to Michael and Paco that most females have, so she’s more theirs than mine now. I groom her and take care of her when they’re on duty, but she considers Michael’s kitchen her real home. Pretty smart of her, too.

I opened the French doors and picked Ella up and smooched the top of her head.

She said, “Thrrrrrppp!”

I walked through my minuscule living room into my equally minuscule bedroom and threw my shoulder bag on the bed.

I said, “You’re right, I’m late. I had a little problem this morning.”

She smiled at me and nosed at my chin. There is just nothing in the world like a cat wanting to kiss your chin to make you feel that the world may turn out okay after all.

I put her on the bed beside my bag and started peeling off my clothes. I pushed my shorts down and said, “You won’t believe this, but somebody got murdered in Cupcake Trillin’s house, and it happened while I was there.”

She did her
thrrpp!
thing.

While I fought my sleeveless T-shirt over my head, I muffled, “A woman was in the house.”

Ella turned her head to follow the arc of the shirt as it sailed onto the bed.

I stepped out of my bikini underpants. “Not the woman who was killed, but another woman.”

I twisted my bra around to the front and unhooked it. “She’s a famous model named Briana. She has always told the press that she’s from Switzerland, but she lied.”

I shook my bra at Ella. “Cupcake claims he doesn’t know her, but she says they went to school together. Do you have any idea what Jancey will do if she finds out Cupcake lied about knowing Briana?”

Ella’s eyes rounded in alarm. “Nik!”

“Boy, you got that right! She will be pissed nine ways from Thursday, and she’ll have every right to be. I don’t know why he lied. It doesn’t make any sense.”

I kicked off my Keds and gathered up all my clothes and padded naked to the washer and dryer in the hall alcove. I shoved everything in and added detergent.

I muttered, “Briana says she doesn’t know who the dead woman was, but I’m not sure if that’s the truth.” Still muttering, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As soon as water splashed on me, I shut up and enjoyed.

Personally, I think water was one of God’s best jobs. He gets five stars for trees, too, and no question that sunshine was way up there as an accomplishment. Animals, too, even reptiles, which I don’t personally care for but have nothing against as a race. He sort of slipped a little bit on creating humans, but I suppose in his infinite wisdom he had good reason for making some of them complete asses. But water is so wonderful that if God hadn’t created it I’d have tried to do it myself. I can feel like fifteen different kinds of crap and go stand under a warm shower and by the time I get out I’ll be thinking things aren’t really so bad after all. It’s as if all my negative thoughts turned into skin cells that got washed off by the blessed water.

By the time I got out of the shower, I had decided that Briana had probably lied about knowing Cupcake. They had never been delinquent kids together, never stolen things from people’s houses. They probably hadn’t even grown up in the same town. I sort of thought she might have been telling the truth about killing an uncle who had molested her, though. Her eyes had taken on a dull aching look when she’d told it that looked like she was remembering a true event. And if she’d killed somebody when she was still a teenager, she might find it easy to kill somebody now.

I patted myself dry, pulled a comb through my wet hair, shrugged on a terrycloth robe, and stuffed my damp towel in the washer with my clothes. I turned on the washer and joined Ella on my bed. I was asleep before the washer had begun its chugging.

I woke up a little chilled from the air conditioner set in the wall above my bed. I sat up and stretched, which made Ella sit up and open her mouth wide in a yawn. I jammed the wet laundry into the dryer and padded to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Ella leaped daintily to the floor and followed me. My galley kitchen is separated from my living room by a one-person bar. The kitchen is so small I can stand in one spot and reach just about everything, which made it possible to fill a teakettle with water and drop a tea bag in a mug without thinking about it. Instead, I thought about Cupcake and Jancey and Briana and the murdered woman.

When the water boiled, I poured it over a tea bag. While it steeped, I stared at it as if I might find truths in the darkening water. I didn’t. When I judged the color to be tea, I fished out the soggy bag and tossed it in the trash can under the sink, then ambled to my office-closet, where I conduct the bookkeeping part of my business. On the way, I flipped on the CD player and put on some nerve-soothing guitar by Segovia.

When my grandfather built the garage apartment, he was constrained by the existing boundaries of the carport, so it’s understandable that the rooms would be small squares laid out in a straight line, with a narrow central hall where he put an alcove for the washer and dryer. But he must have miscalculated somehow and ended up with extra space he hadn’t expected, because the closet is extravagantly roomy. A desk for record keeping sits on one wall, and the opposite wall is filled with shelves for my folded tees, shorts, jeans, underwear, and a few sweaters. My scanty collection of dresses and skirts hangs on the end wall across from a mirrored wall between two pocket doors.

I put my tea on the desk, and Ella jumped onto the desktop. She knows the routine as well as I do. Music plays, she bends the tip of her tail to the beat, and I return phone calls from clients, handle whatever business needs handling, and record my client visits.

I’m very meticulous about keeping records of my pet visits. I note every visit, what I did there, and anything out of the ordinary that I found. Usually that means something like a cat sneezing or a bird looking droopy on its perch, not a half-naked woman parading around in the homeowner’s big shirt. Definitely not a woman with her throat slit. Nevertheless, I had to make some record of my visit to Cupcake Trillin’s house, so I wrote:
Intruder present, called 911. Officers found homicide victim. Cats taken to Kitty Haven until house is clear for their return.

I thought that covered the situation very nicely. Except for the part about the intruder having stalked Cupcake and him lying about knowing her.

When I finished the clerical duties, Segovia was still playing, and I couldn’t find any excuse to kill more time. Feeling defensive before he even answered, I called Sergeant Owens. Even after being away from the department almost four years, I remembered his number by heart.

Caller ID told him it was me, so he was already ready for my question when he picked up his phone. Without even saying hello, he said, “The suspect turned herself in about an hour ago, Dixie. Came in with her attorney. I’m sure the investigating officer will want to talk to you, but it’s just a formality.”

He sounded defensive, too, as if he’d expected me to ask him why the heck his new homicide detective hadn’t contacted me so he could follow the dots in tracing what had happened that morning. Guidry would have questioned me within minutes of arriving at the scene. Their new guy must be a lot slower.

It was at that moment that I should have said, “Oh, by the way, I just happen to have spent about an hour with the suspect before she turned herself in. She told me she’s known Cupcake Trillin practically her whole life. I’m sure she’s lying, because Cupcake wouldn’t lie about knowing a famous model who’s been stalking him. I mean, why would he?”

I didn’t say that for a whole bunch of reasons, the main one being that even though I wasn’t a deputy anymore, Owens would have my head on a platter if he knew I’d talked to Briana while officers were looking for her. Another big reason was that Cupcake was my friend, and I’m loyal to my friends, even when I have the teensiest suspicion one of them may have lied to me. Which, no matter how much I told myself it was Briana who had lied about knowing Cupcake, I sort of did.

So for those reasons plus a few more, I kept my mouth shut about seeing Briana and taking her to Ethan’s office. Like a kid with sugar on her cheeks hoping nobody will guess she’s been snitching cookies, I figured Briana might keep quiet about me and maybe nobody would ever know.

Instead, I said, “When will the investigators be done with the house? I’ll need to call the crime-scene cleaners before I can take the cats back home.”

Owens said, “Check with me in the morning and I’ll know more about that. I’ve talked to Mr. Trillin. He and his wife will leave Parma for Rome a little after midnight our time. If they make all their connections, they’ll get to Sarasota around ten tomorrow night. Twenty-one damn hours in the air.”

I had never heard Owens profess so much interest in somebody’s travel plans. He was trying to divert my attention from the investigation.

I said, “Who is the homicide detective on the case?”

Curtly, he said, “I’ll know more about that tomorrow, too.”

He clicked off without saying good-bye, which left me staring at my phone. Owens is never a gushy guy, but he’s not rude. He didn’t want to talk about the homicide detective on this case. Guidry had waited until the department had hired his replacement before he left, but this was going to be a high-profile case, and my bet was that the new guy hadn’t worked out. The department was probably scrambling to find somebody with the experience to handle it.

I wished I knew if the murdered woman had been identified.

I wished I knew if Cupcake was lying about knowing Briana.

I wished I knew if Briana had told the truth about a mysterious person coming into the house and murdering the woman.

If Briana’s story was true, a vicious killer was on the loose.

7

Before it was time to go on my afternoon calls, my cell phone rang with the distinctive ring reserved for Michael, Paco, or Guidry. My heart did the same little tap dance it always did when I heard that ring, because I hoped it was Guidry. Guidry had left Sarasota in November, and at first he had called often. After almost six months, not so much.

I hoped he’d got over his disappointment that I’d stayed in Siesta Key. I hoped he didn’t miss me. I hoped he missed me and hurt every waking moment because I wasn’t there.

I wished I would quit missing him.

I was a mess.

The call wasn’t from Guidry. It was my brother, Michael.

He said, “I just heard a news report about a killing at Cupcake Trillin’s house. Aren’t you taking care of his cats?”

I gave him a quick rundown of what had happened, leaving out the part about talking to Briana and taking her to see Ethan Crane. Michael tends to get stressed when I get involved in things having to do with crime. He goes into burning buildings without the least hesitation, but murder investigations make him uneasy. Especially if I’m part of them.

He said, “The news report said the woman who did it turned herself in. Some big-name model, it sounded like.”

“If that’s what they’re reporting, they’ve got it wrong. She turned herself in because she knew they were looking for her, but she says somebody came in while she was in another room and killed the woman. She may be telling the truth.”

Michael’s voice grew suspicious. “How do you know what she’s saying?”

“I called Sergeant Owens.”

It was absolutely true that I had called Owens, so technically I wasn’t lying.

“According to the TV reporter, the judge denied bail for her because she broke into the Trillin house and because they think she was stalking Trillin. With her history, I guess they think she’ll run if they let her out.”

I didn’t think there was any question that Briana would definitely
want
to leave if she thought she could hide out and never be found. But since her face was so famous, leaving wasn’t really an option for her.

I was afraid I’d give away the fact that I knew Briana better than the TV reporter did if I talked to Michael any longer, so I told him I was on my way out the door for afternoon pet visits. I was
almost
on my way out, so it was only a small lie.

He said, “I’ll be home in the morning. Love you.”

“Love you.”

We always end our conversations like that. Both of us have plenty of reason to know that every day might be our last, so we don’t leave love unsaid.

I hurried to get dressed in my regulation khaki cargo shorts and sleeveless white tee. I slipped on fresh white Keds from the drying rack over the washer/dryer—I can’t stand shoes that smell like feet, so I go through a lot of Keds. Then I called the guy who does homicide cleanup.

I said, “I wanted to give you a heads-up about a cleaning job in Hidden Shores. So far as I know, there’s only one contaminated floor in one room. I’ll let you know when the criminalists are done there.”

“What kind of floor?”

“Tile.”

“What kind of tile? May have to replace it.”

“Expensive tile. The owners of the house are out of the country, but they’ll be home tomorrow night. If you have to replace the tile, they can give you the particulars.”

He thanked me for giving him a chance to plan ahead, and we said our good-byes. He didn’t ask the homeowners’ name, and I didn’t volunteer the information. He was a professional, he knew not to pry.