The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

6

I left Ethan’s office feeling awful. He had made an afternoon appointment for Briana to see a defense attorney whose name I’d heard in connection with wealthy people who’d been accused of major crimes—the ones you instantly assume are guilty as hell but will walk because they have the money for a smart attorney. I didn’t know anymore what I thought of Briana’s guilt or innocence. One minute I believed she really had found the murdered woman already dead. The next moment I wasn’t so sure.

But that wasn’t what made me feel wretched.

The thing that made me feel as if some tarry monster were sucking at my breath was that I had sat quietly and let Briana protect Cupcake by telling her professional lie about being from Switzerland with conveniently dead Swiss parents and adoptive American parents. I hadn’t spoken up because I’d wanted to protect Cupcake, too.

Worse than that, the man I liked so much that I’d kept my mouth shut for him was also a liar. He had lied not only to me but to his wife. He had pretended to be completely at a loss to understand why Briana had been stalking him. He’d played the big innocent, when all the time he’d known Briana since he was a boy. He’d even broken into houses and stolen things with her. You can’t get much more intimate with another person than to commit a crime together. Even though they’d been kids at the time, that would have forged a guilty connection he wouldn’t have forgotten.

Knowing that Cupcake had lied about knowing Briana made me question him in a way I hated. I liked Cupcake more than most anybody I knew. I knew him to be loyal to his friends and levelheaded and fair, even with people who didn’t deserve fairness. He had the physique of a granite mountain and a scowly face guaranteed to scare people, but underneath all that hardness was a sentimental streak as sweet as the smile that had earned him the name Cupcake. He was one of my heroes, and I felt sick every time I remembered the colossal lie he’d told about knowing Briana. I felt even sicker at the fact that I would have to confront him with the lie. I hated to think what would happen when Jancey found out.

By the time I got home, I was exhausted not only from being up since 4:00 A.M. but from my own dark thoughts.

Siesta Key’s shape is a bit like a cigar with a bulge at the northern end. The Gulf of Mexico is to the west and Sarasota Bay to the east. I live in an apartment on the south end on the Gulf side. My apartment is above a four-slot carport at the end of a twisting shelled driveway lined with mossy oaks, pines, sea grape, and palms. A deck lies behind the carport, and the deck is attached to a frame house my grandparents bought from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. They raised my mother there, but she never loved the Key the way her parents did. She married a firefighter and had my brother and me, but she never loved us either. She left us after our dad died putting out a fire, and Michael and I moved into the house with our grandparents.

So many relatives from the North showed up every summer that my grandfather built the garage apartment as a guesthouse. Now it’s my home. I moved in after my husband and little girl were killed in a freak accident. Michael and his partner, Paco, had already moved into the house after our grandparents died, so now we’re all here in our own little private gulfside compound, secure in the sound of surf and sea gulls.

Except for Paco’s Harley, all the car slots were empty when I got home. Michael was on duty at the firehouse, and God knew where Paco was. Michael is a fireman like our dad was, so he works twenty-four/forty-eight—twenty-four-hour shifts with forty-eight-hour breaks. Paco is with the Sarasota County’s Special Investigative Bureau, so his work schedule depends on whatever undercover operation he’s in. Michael and I don’t ask him about his work. In the first place, he wouldn’t tell us. In the second place, it would make us worry if we knew, so we just don’t.

I eased my Bronco into its space and got out into steamy noontime heat. The parakeets had retreated into the shadows of treetops for a siesta. A few gulls trudged along the edge of the shoreline making halfhearted pecks at microscopic sea life in the frothy edges of the surf, but they looked as if they were ready for naps, too. All intelligent life in Florida naps in the middle of the day.

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.