The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

4

On ordinary days, I have breakfast at the Village Diner after I’ve finished my morning rounds. But this wasn’t an ordinary day. This was a day when I’d stupidly made an appointment with a famous model who was a prime murder suspect. Nevertheless, I was famished, so I crossed the north bridge to the mainland and hurried into Morton’s Gourmet Market, where the sandwich guy is nice enough to custom-make my favorite sandwich in all the world: baked turkey breast on pumpernickel bread with fresh tarragon mayonnaise.

While he stacked layers of turkey on dark bread, I filled a large to-go cup with coffee and went to the bakery department and asked for a fruit tartlet. As the bakery woman handed over the tartlet in its little see-through box, she said, “Anything else?”

I shook my head, then wondered if Briana had eaten breakfast. It’s a curse I have. Like my brother, I want to make sure nobody in the world goes hungry. Unlike him, I don’t want to cook for people, I just want to see them eat.

I said, “Um, make that two tartlets.”

I filled another big cup with coffee and went back to the sandwich counter, where my turkey on pumpernickel waited.

I said, “I need another one, please. And two large pickles.”

The sandwich guy turned to build another one, and I snagged two bags of chips from a rack. I was now doubly wrong. I was not only guilty of planning a secret meeting with a woman wanted for murder, I intended to feed her.

A sweet-faced woman stepped to the deli counter between two little girls, each gripping one of her hands as if she were a maypole. Identical twins, the girls looked to be about six years old, the age Christy would have been if she’d lived. I had a momentary hardening of veins and muscles and lungs, an involuntary blend of rage and yearning and jealousy that this woman had two children and I had none.

The sandwich man said, “Looks like you need something to carry all that in.”

While I forced myself back to sensibility, he went to some other part of the store and came back with a neat cardboard tray big enough for sandwich cartons, tartlet cartons, and chips, with cutouts for the two coffees.

I thanked him profusely, smiled at the cute little girls, and carried the tray to the Bronco filled with admiration for the unsung people who recognize homely needs and fill them with clever inventions like carry-out trays.

It’s only a quick scoot from Morton’s across the bridge and around to Siesta Beach. As I carried the clever cardboard tray and its goodies up the steps to the pavilion area, I realized that I didn’t really expect Briana to meet me there. She might be crazy, but she would expect me to be smart enough to alert the sheriff’s department about our meeting. Even if she had figured out that I was dumb enough not to call them, she would have realized by now that she had mistaken Cupcake’s cat sitter for a person with his importance and power. She would know I couldn’t do a thing for her.

Realizing that was a big relief. I could relax under the shade of the pavilion roof and have breakfast in solitude. I would eat one of the turkey sandwiches and drink one of the coffees, and if I wanted more coffee I could drink Briana’s. I would eat my tartlet and save the other for later. And when I left, I would offer Briana’s sandwich and chips to some young person who looked hungry and broke. I was not only going to enjoy a meal at the beach, I would have the pleasure of giving away food. I was Lady Bountiful in cat-hairy shorts.

A woman at one of the tables waved to me. I stopped with the little cardboard tray clutched close to my chest and peered at her. She had removed the scarf from around her head and stuffed all her red hair up under a big floppy white hat. She still wore the huge dark shades, and her lips were still bright red. She stood up and walked toward me. She moved with that sharp-shouldered, flat-assed, pointy-toed, pelvic-bone thrust that runway models use. Anybody watching her walk would know her purpose in life was to make very expensive clothes look tantalizingly desirable to very rich women.

I never felt so dowdy and fleshy in my life.

I frowned sternly at her. “Sit down! Don’t attract attention.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

She stylishly scurried back to her table while I clumped after her with my stupid cardboard tray pressed against my low-class bosom.

She didn’t even look around for law enforcement officers when I sat down across from her. She was either the most naive woman in the world or so arrogantly sure of herself that she assumed I wouldn’t have given her away.

I said, “I brought you a sandwich and coffee.”

Her red lips pursed as if she had to think about what to say. “I suppose I should eat.”

I nodded vigorously and handed over her sandwich.

“Look, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by talking to me, but you have to know you’re going to be arrested.”

Her hand was fish-belly white, with long boneless fingers. Her red nails picked at the wrapper on the sandwich and peeled it away as delicately as a cat separating what it will eat from what it disdains.

She said, “I don’t think Cupcake will have me arrested. He’s too sweet to want me in jail.”

I whipped the wrapper off my own sandwich and took a big bite. I chewed slowly, looking at her as if she were a skinny white shark that had just washed up on the beach.

I swallowed. I took a swig of coffee. She was still uncovering the mystery of her sandwich.

I said, “It’s not so much what Cupcake wants done about you. There’s the little matter of a murdered woman. The law gets pretty worked up about murder. They’ll want to know what happened in Cupcake’s house, how that woman’s throat got cut.”

Briana finished folding the wrapper back from her sandwich. She raised it to her red lips and took little rabbit nibbles at it. Her teeth were so chalk white, I almost expected them to crumble to powder from the pressure.

She said, “I’ll just explain to them that I don’t know. After you left, I knew people would come to make me leave the house, so I went to the master bedroom and changed clothes. When I came out, a bleeding woman was lying on the living room floor. I was afraid, and I ran out the back door.”

Jancey was going to be really steamed that Briana had used their bedroom.

I said, “That’s your story?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Briana, nobody in the world will believe that.”

“They will if you help me convince them.”

I chewed some more and told myself to keep my voice down, not to yell at her, not to stand up and shout, “Are you completely nuts?” because in fact she was completely nuts, and it wouldn’t change anything to point it out to her.

I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into the Trillins’ house?”

She waved a languid hand. “Oh, that was easy. I have a little handheld electronic gizmo that can disengage selected zones of the security system without alerting the security company. I blocked the zone that regulates the scanners outside the back sliding patio door. All I had to do was pick the lock. Took about ten seconds.”

Her voice had gone brisk and sure of itself. I didn’t know if what she described was possible, but she sure sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

“What about the entrance gate? What about the walls around the whole place?”

She smiled. “Parked my Jag out of sight on the other side of the wall, climbed up and clipped the razor ribbon hidden under the vines, pushed it aside, tossed a plastic ladder over, and came over. I hid the ladder behind the vines so I could climb back up. The wall where I cut the wire is behind some trees, and nobody pays any attention to a woman jogging early in the morning.”

My hand holding my sandwich sank to the table. This woman was not a dithery nut. She was an accomplished break-in artist, a calculating scaler of razor-topped walls, a woman with wire clippers and experience at slipping into places impassible to everybody else.

“I take it this isn’t your first breaking-and-entering job.”

That smile again, cool and sure of itself. “Hardly.”

“You supplement your modeling income with a little theft on the side?”

This time she actually chuckled, as if she found me drolly amusing. “I go in people’s houses, but I don’t steal anything. I just like to get a look at other people’s private lives. You might say it’s a hobby, like stamp collecting or softball.”

“Okay, so you didn’t break into Cupcake’s house to steal. What was your reason? Why were you stalking him?”

Her smug smile died. “Is that what he thinks? That I was stalking him?”

I couldn’t keep my mouth from saying it anymore. “Are you nuts? Of course that’s what he thinks!”

Her red mouth turned down at the corners. It trembled. She raised her fingers to her lips to comfort them. A tear trickled down her cheek from behind the dark shades. Her shoulders sagged as if a great weight had been laid on them.

“I thought he would understand. Of all the people in the world, I trusted Cupcake to understand.”

My own shoulders went a few inches lower, too. Whatever the woman carried around in her disturbed head sent out heavy, oppressive waves.

I said, “Here’s the deal, Briana. A woman was murdered inside the home of Cupcake and Jancey Trillin. You were in the house at the time the woman was killed. Now you say you have a history of breaking and entering. If you think I’m going to be moved by some sentimental crap about your mystical connection with Cupcake, you underestimate my intelligence. Unless you have a credible explanation for what happened—other than ‘she was already dead when I walked in on her’—I’m out of here and you’re on your own.”

Her head raised, and I could feel anger in the eyes behind the sunshades. But she must have heard reality in what I’d said, because she sighed and pushed her sandwich aside as if she were clearing the deck to get down to business.

“I’ve known Cupcake Trillin practically all my life. We lived in a little parish in Louisiana where half the population is below the poverty line. Women marry in their teens, have a passel of babies by the time they’re twenty, fry up fish their men catch in the bayous, grow old fast from worry and work. Men, especially black men, work in sugarcane fields the same way Appalachian men work in coal mines. It’s what their fathers and grandfathers have always done, and unless they’re extra smart or extra talented, it’s what they’ll do, too.”

Her voice trembled, and she took a sip of coffee.

“I make it sound as if it was all grim, but I have good memories, too. Like the man who came to our back door twice a week selling fresh fish from an ice-filled box on the back of his truck. He sold shrimp, too, right off the boats. At certain times of the year, he had crawfish, and my folks would order fifty pounds and have a party. They boiled the crawfish in huge pots with lots of cayenne pepper thrown in to make the crayfish spit out the sand. All their friends would gather in the backyard, and we’d suck meat from crawfish tails and drink cold beer.”

I made a get-on-with-it motion, and her pale skin flushed pink.

“Cupcake and I were the odd ones in our families. We didn’t fit in, didn’t want the same things they wanted for us. It was the same way in school. We were smarter than most everybody else, including the teachers. And we laughed at things the other kids thought were holy and important. Nobody else wanted us, so we sort of drifted together.”

“You were friends?”

“More than friends.”

“Lovers?”

That faint blush again. “We weren’t like that. We just sort of dared each other to go beyond what the world expected and then supported each other while we did it.”

She let a beat go by as if she were watching images float by inside her head.

She said, “I would have followed the devil himself if he’d offered me a chance to get out of that little town.” She stopped and flashed an ironic smile. “Perhaps I did.”

I looked at the eyeball-sized emerald on her hand and thought that the devil was certainly generous.

She said, “Cupcake escaped because he was an outstanding athlete. I escaped by leaving my family and everything I knew, and I’ve never been back.”

“You just left? Just like that?”

Her lips tightened. “Sorry. The truth doesn’t come easily. I’ve lied so much about my family I’ve almost come to believe my own lies. My official bio says I was orphaned in a little village in Switzerland when my parents were killed in an avalanche, but a kind couple adopted me and brought me to the United States. Minnesota, to be exact. I say I grew up on a remote farm and that my adoptive parents home-schooled me until I was eighteen and then I left home with their blessings. The truth is I was born in Louisiana on the fork of the Mississippi River to a couple who never went beyond grade school and had about six teeth between them. My white-trash uncle molested me from the time I was six. I killed him when I was sixteen. Shot him through the head with a double-barreled shotgun my father used for killing rattlesnakes. Then I took off. Worked as a maid for a while, turned some tricks, and then got discovered by a modeling agency.”

Her voice had the gritty underpinning of harsh truth.

I said, “You left out the part about breaking into people’s houses.”

She took a deep breath. “That’s how Cupcake and I got the money for books and shoes, clothes, haircuts, things we couldn’t have had otherwise.” With a sly smile, she said, “Cupcake mostly did it so he could buy a pair of Nikes.”

My jaw dropped. Cupcake was the most honest man I knew.

She grinned. “We were very young then. And we never took anything truly valuable. We wouldn’t have recognized anything valuable anyway, and the fence we took things to insisted that we stick to small things that he could sell easily.”

“That’s how you learned to break through security systems?”

“No, that came later. Cupcake didn’t have anything to do with that. I learned all that on my own.”

I could feel my cheeks firm up, the way a face does when it’s trying not to show shock or disgust.

She said, “After I left the parish, I never had any contact with Cupcake, but I followed his career. He was the only person in my life I could depend on to always be kind to me.”

“So you showed your appreciation by coming here and breaking into his house?”

Her lips trembled. “You can’t know what it’s like to be famous. To be Briana. Everybody in the world wants something from me. I haven’t lived my own life for a long time. I’ve lived for agents, accountants, photographers, designers, reporters, all those people sucking my breath out of my body. I started remembering what it was like when it was just me and Cupcake against the world. I didn’t really think I could make that happen, but I wanted to be close to him, just absorb some of his kindness and calm. I knew he was away from home at the camp he runs for kids. I didn’t think it would hurt anybody if I borrowed his life for a while. Until you walked in, I was like a kid playing house. I guess I took it too far.”

She was right in thinking that Cupcake’s plans had been to spend time at the kids’ camp. That had been reported in the news, and I didn’t correct her about where he’d really been.

I had a feeling that Briana had left out a lot of her history, but I believed parts of what she’d told me. Fame is hard for anybody to handle, even mature people with firm philosophies. For a poor, uneducated, sexually molested small-town girl who’d had to use every wile and wit she had to escape a life of grinding poverty, it would have been a crushing assault.

Nevertheless, she had not explained the dead woman in Cupcake’s house—and the more I listened to her, the farther I crawled into a dark tunnel that had no exit.