The Cat Sitter's Whiskers

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.”

She gave me a once-over. “Oh, yeah? What do you want with him?”

“Well, it’s a little weird. He was parked outside my house when I was leaving for work.”

“Oh, he was, was he?”

She was wearing flip-flops and a grubby white button-down with a black silhouette of Mickey Mouse across the front, buttoned all the way up to her neck. It was either a nightgown or an extremely large man’s dress shirt, because it fell halfway down her bare legs.

I said, “Yeah, so I just wanted to know if maybe he’d seen anything unusual.”

“What’s the matter. Can’t you read?”

“Excuse me?”

Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “The sign clearly says NO TRESPASSING.”

I thought about saying that, actually, the sign clearly said PRIVATE PROPERTY, but I doubted it would win me any points. Instead I nodded. “Oh, I know. I just need to talk to Levi. This is his place, right?”

“So, you’re a friend of Levi’s?”

As she said “friend,” she held her hands up and made little fat quotation marks in the air with her pudgy fingers.

“Well, not exactly. But—”

“Uh-huh. You’re the girl that was here last night. What’s the matter, forget your panties?”

I sighed. This wasn’t going well at all. I stepped forward with my hand out and said, “Hey, I think maybe we’re getting off to a bad start. I’m Dixie Hemingway.”

Her upper lip curled into what at first I thought was a smile but turned out to be a sarcastic snarl. She stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “Bitch, I don’t know you. You’re trespassing on my neighborhood and my man, so you better get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

For a split second I thought about leaping off the steps and pummeling this fire-hydrant-shaped Sasquatch of a woman into the ground, but luckily I managed to control myself. I took a deep breath and gave her as pleasant a smile as I could muster.

I said, “Okay, there’s no need to call the cops.”

“I’ll call the cops if I want to. This is America. I got free speech.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I understand that, but the cops probably have more important things to deal with. I just need to talk to Levi for one second and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

Given the state of the chemically altered mess on top of her head, it was all I could do to keep myself from holding my fingers up and putting air quotes around the word hair, but the woman’s cheeks were turning beet-red as it was, plus every once in a while I do actually manage to conduct myself with a modicum of composure.

She squinted and tipped her chin at the trailer. “I’m sure he’s still too drunk to talk anyway, but that don’t matter because I’m gonna count to five and if you ain’t out of here by then, you’re gonna be sorry you ever met me.”

Before I could stop myself I said, “Believe me, I already am. But more than that, I’m sorry you’re so tortured.”

Her eyes widened as I turned on my toes and rapped on the front door of the trailer with four confident knocks. Actually I had planned on four, but I only made it to three because as I knocked it swung open. At the same time, I caught a glimpse of the woman’s shadow approaching from behind. For a split second, I considered the idea that I was about to receive my second beating of the day.

But something stopped her.

It was a man, flat on his stomach on the trailer’s pale blue linoleum floor. I couldn’t see all of him, just his naked legs. The rest was hidden behind the door and blocking it from opening completely. Something clenched shut at the top of my throat, and as I reached for the doorframe, I noticed the man’s toes were splayed out spastically and the pale white soles of his bare feet were facing up, perfectly still. He was lying in the center of a pool of blood that stretched almost the entire length and depth of the trailer.

Just before the woman screamed, I muttered under my breath, “Okay, you win. Call the cops.”