The Cat Sitter's Whiskers (7 page)

After I wolfed down my breakfast, including two scrumptious pieces of Tanisha's world-famous, lip-smacking bacon, I took a cup of coffee out to the bench on the sidewalk just outside the front door and slipped my phone out of my pocket. I had no idea what I was doing or what I hoped to accomplish, but that's never stopped me before.

“Hello, and thank you for calling the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
. If you're a new customer, press one. If you're calling to cancel your subscription, press two. If you plan on being out of town and would like to stop delivery, press three. If you didn't receive your paper today, press four.”

The woman on the recording had a smooth, silky voice. I pulled the phone away from my ear and pressed four.

“Thank you. You have chosen to report a problem with your delivery. Please enter the telephone number associated with your account, beginning with the area code.”

“Oh, shoot.”

I tried my best to remember the diner's telephone number, but after I punched it in, the voice said, “I'm sorry. I don't recognize that number. Please enter the number associated with…”

I hung up and sighed. There was no point going on. First of all, the chances of getting an actual human being on the phone were pretty slim, plus I didn't think my silky-toned friend would ever say,
Press five if you think your paperboy may be in danger.

Just then Judy popped her head out the front door. “Any luck?”

“No, I couldn't get a connection with a real person.”

“Ha. Story of my life.” She stepped out and leaned her hip against the bench, squinting into the sun. “Tanisha says he lives in her neighborhood.”

“Who, Levi?”

“Yep.”

“Where does she live again?”

“Grand Pelican Commons. She walks her dog past his place every night, so she said she could stop by and check on him when she gets off here.”

“Grand Pelican Commons. Isn't that the trailer park across the bay?”

She tipped her chin up. “I think the preferred term is ‘mobile home community.'”

That was all I needed. I stood up and gave her a quick thumbs-up. “Perfect! Then I'm off the hook. I was starting to think I was overreacting anyway.”

She nodded. “Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first time.”

“And just because a few people are missing their newspapers doesn't mean diddly.”

“Nope. Doesn't mean a thing, and Tanisha said he's kind of wild anyway. Probably up late partying and just called in sick or something.”

I passed her my coffee cup and pulled my bike out of the rack next to the bench. “Well, if your paper ever shows up let me know.”

“Yes, ma'am. And if you faint while you're on that bike and veer into traffic and get your head busted open like an overripe watermelon, be sure to give me a call.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on my way to Dr. Dunlop's now.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. I'll stop by on my way home.”

“Good girl. Let me know what he says.”

“Okay. And tell Tanisha I said thanks.”

She swung open the door to the diner but stopped it with her foot. “For what?”

“For checking in on Levi. What do you think?”

Her eyes narrowed as I pedaled off, and I could feel her watching me all the way down to the end of the block.

*   *   *

This time of year, when the sun hangs just a few feet over your shoulders and the heat feels like it has weight to it, anybody with a lick of sense stays indoors in the middle of the day. If they absolutely have to go outside, it's only for as long as it takes to walk from their air-conditioned house to their air-conditioned car, and then they park as close as possible to the front door of their air-conditioned destination. It's only the tourists who don't know any better.

I reminded myself of that as I pedaled through the throngs of heat-soaked vacationers wandering around the center of town: gaggles of teenagers in flip-flops and Ray-Ban sunglasses with candy-striped towels like sarongs around their waists, hand-holding gray-haired couples with blissful smiles and dabs of chalk-white sunblock on their noses and ears, parents with kids in tow all happily negotiating their melting ice-cream cones, and young lovers without kids in tow happily negotiating their four-wheeled beer coolers down to the beach to work on their tans.

It was like riding through an obstacle course, but as soon as I got down to the end of the Village, the crowds thinned out and I was able to pick up speed. By the time I got home I was drenched in sweat. Normally I would have gone right upstairs to my apartment, taken a nice long shower, and collapsed in bed for a quick nap before I was out again for my afternoon rounds, but not this time. I rolled into the carport, leaned my bike under the steps, and hopped right into my Bronco.

With the air conditioner on blast, I took Midnight Pass all the way up to Stickney Point, where I hung a right and crossed over the bridge to the mainland. Then I headed down Tamiami Trail, past the clusters of thrift shops and burger stands and streetside fruit vendors, all the way down to Old Wharf Way, which isn't easy to find because it's often confused with New Wharf Way a mile or two farther south, but also because the road sign got knocked down in a storm almost a decade ago and no one's ever bothered to put it back up.

You have to know where you're going to find Grand Pelican Commons.

 

8

I'm not one of those psycho lunatics who wanders around in a deranged fog of insanity, following every random impulse that pops into her head or listening to imaginary voices from God knows where. I am fully cognizant of my occasional lapses in judgment, and furthermore I know there were any number of things I should have been doing instead of driving around looking for Levi, but as I made my way down Old Wharf, I couldn't stop thinking about something that had happened almost twenty years earlier.

Back then, the school day started at 8:15, so my alarm was set to wake me up every morning at exactly 7:00 a.m. I'd roll out of bed and stumble downstairs to find my grandfather sitting at the breakfast table in his blue-jean overalls and plaid work shirt, his reading glasses perched on his nose, Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, and a piping-hot mug of coffee at his side. My grandmother would still be rustling around upstairs, but he would already have read through more than half of the morning newspaper, including the funnies.

It always made me think of Levi, who was probably about fourteen and had been delivering the paper for a couple of years by then, and how early he must have had to get up to deliver those newspapers on time. Just the idea of it made me want to crawl back in bed and hide under the covers. At that age I couldn't imagine anything more inhumane than making a teenager rise before the sun, but here Levi was doing it every day, every week, fifty-two weeks a year.

His mother always chauffeured him around town in her old Dodge minivan, with Levi sitting in the back and pitching the papers out the open hatch like the professional baseball player we all thought he'd be one day. I remembered one morning her van wouldn't start. She had accidentally left the headlights on the night before and the battery had drained out dead as a doornail.

Levi didn't give up. Instead of calling up his boss at the
Herald-Tribune
and saying he wouldn't be able to deliver the papers that day, he got on the phone and rounded up a group of his friends from the baseball team. They all got dressed and came over with their wagons in tow, loaded them up with newspapers, and zigzagged all over the island on foot, each with his own portion of Levi's delivery route. If your address was on Levi's list, you got your paper.

Well, it was all anybody talked about for days. They might not have gotten their papers as early as usual, but not a single person with a subscription to the
Herald-Tribune
went without that day, and the following Sunday they published a whole spread of letters to the editor from the community, including one from the mayor of Sarasota, thanking “the Radcliff boy” for his can-do spirit, his hard work, and most of all, his dependability.

It was that famous dependability I was thinking about as I turned onto the main drag of Grand Pelican Commons. The Radcliff boy was older now, and yes, he'd been through some hard times if the rumors of drinking and partying were to be believed, but I couldn't think of a single day in the past twenty years that the morning paper hadn't shown up on time.

Of course, as soon as I started checking all the driveways for Levi's car, I started wondering what I was getting myself into. It wasn't that I didn't think I could figure out which trailer was his—Grand Pelican Commons isn't exactly a sprawling metropolis—but once I figured out where he lived, what in the world was I planning on saying if I found him?

Oh, hi. Remember me? Your first sort-of-girlfriend? I just wanted to make sure you were okay because some people didn't get their papers this morning and there was a lunatic attacking people with a she-Buddha … either that or I fainted and had a really weird dream. By the way, were you outside my driveway this morning? Did you happen to notice any burglars or art thieves hanging around?

I hadn't been in this part of the city for years. In high school, Michael had taken trombone lessons from a matronly ex-Navy machinist who lived in an Airstream trailer with about twenty pet canaries. While she and Michael practiced what sounded to me like a whale's funeral, I would keep the canaries company and my grandmother would work on her crossword puzzles in the car. Back then, everything was brand-new and meticulously maintained, but now I barely recognized the ramshackle collection of trailer homes and lean-to sheds that dotted the street.

There were a few trailers hanging on to better days, though. One was freshly painted, with rows of begonias on either side of a winding stone path that stretched from the curb to the front steps, and I wondered if maybe that one wasn't Tanisha's. There was an impressive vegetable garden on the trailer hitch side, with vines of climbing tomatoes scrambling up a trellis and cascading over into the yard, and the front door had an oval sign hanging next to it with bright orange lettering, but from this distance I couldn't quite make out what it said.

Just then the door of the trailer swung open and a little towheaded boy appeared. He hopped up on a pogo stick and maneuvered down the two short steps into the yard with confident ease, even though he couldn't have been much older than seven or eight. I remembered Tanisha's sister, Diva, had moved in with her recently and was babysitting during the day to make extra money.

When the little boy noticed me, he raised one hand and gave me a quick wave, looking much like a cowboy on a bronco bull. Luckily the yard was carpeted with a thick bed of lush green grass, so I figured if he fell it would be a nice soft landing.

Just past that trailer the asphalt ended abruptly and turned into a dusty narrow road with wheel ruts down the middle. It led about a hundred feet through a stand of pines, eventually widening into a weedy clearing where there was a sky-blue trailer shaped like a boxcar. It was faded, with what looked like coffee stains spilling down its corrugated metal siding.

I inched the Bronco forward a bit, just parallel to a sign that read
PRIVATE PROPERTY
, and whispered to myself, “What in the world am I doing here?”

A voice in my head said,
Nothing good. Turn around.

I ignored it. Putting aside for the moment that my mask-wearing assailant was probably a figment of my imagination, if it turned out there was even the slightest connection between that and the fact that Levi hadn't finished his paper deliveries that morning, I'd never have been able to forgive myself if I didn't at least make sure he was okay.

The closer I got to the trailer, the more certain I was that this was the right place. There was a sad stack of old tires about five feet high in the middle of the weedy yard, and parked at a forty-five-degree angle between that and the trailer, its front bumper practically touching the front door, was Levi's dark brown Buick LeSabre convertible.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I pulled over to the side of the yard and shut the engine. At least he'd made it home, which meant I could rule out some of the other possible scenarios I'd come up with since I'd left the diner: that shortly after he'd pulled away from my driveway that morning, Levi had been run off the road, tied up, and thrown off the bridge into the bay, or he'd been locked in a basement chamber somewhere, all to keep him from coming forward as a witness after the Kellers returned from their vacation in Italy to find my lifeless body in their laundry room.

Like I said, my imagination can get a little unruly sometimes.

I dropped my keys down into the Bronco's center console and stepped out into the weedy yard. The sun was in her full midday glory now, and the heat bouncing off the front of the trailer made me feel like I'd walked into a giant rotisserie oven. To the right of the front door was a single window about four feet square, covered with a flimsy sheet of plastic held to the casing with a double-wide framing of gray duct tape. A lime-green fitted bedsheet was tacked up behind the glass, blocking the view inside except for one spot in the lower left corner where the sheet was balled up in a knot. As I squeezed myself around the front of the LeSabre and climbed up the few steps to knock on the front door, I had the distinct feeling I was being watched.

“Excuse me, can I help you?”

I spun around to find a squat, pasty-faced woman in her early twenties, with crispy, dyed-red hair and puffy eyes, looking up at me with her head cocked snottily to one side.

“Oh, hi,” I blustered. “I didn't hear you come up.”

“No kidding. This is private property, you know.”

“Yeah, sorry. I was just looking for Levi.”