Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery Read online

  Pete is tall, slim, silver-haired, and handsome in the way men who are bright and curious remain all their lives. He retired a few years ago, but he still does gigs in hospices and children’s hospitals. He has woolly caterpillar eyebrows that he waggles for emphasis, and the softest heart in the western hemisphere.

  Three suitcases already stood in the foyer, lined up by size like Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear luggage. Pete set his on the opposite side of the foyer.

  He said, “I brought my saxophone. I hope that’s okay.”

  Hal said, “I didn’t know you played saxophone.”

  “Sure. That’s how I started in the circus. I was in the band, but clowning paid better and was more fun. I just play for my own pleasure now.”

  “Pete, you’re a man of many talents.”

  Pete grinned and did that thing with his eyebrows.

  Gillis knelt beside Jeffrey. “Honey, you remember Pete? He’s going to stay here with Mazie and keep her company until we come home.”

  Pete said, “Hi, pal.”

  Jeffrey smiled but looked confused.

  Pete said, “Want a clown nose like mine?”

  Jeffrey shook his head and covered his nose with his hand.

  Hal said, “We have to go now.”

  Gillis knelt beside Jeffrey while Hal picked up their luggage.

  Too hesitantly, Gillis said, “It’s time for the trip I told you about. Remember I told you?”

  Jeffrey stiffened and reached for Mazie, already resisting what was to come.

  Gillis said, “Mazie’s staying here. Remember?”

  Jeffrey burst into hysterical shrieks and flung himself flat against the floor. “I want Mazie to come too!”

  Gillis was pale with tension. As Jeffrey’s fists churned, Mazie got to her feet and nuzzled his neck. It took me a moment to realize she did it intentionally to forestall a tantrum. Or a seizure. Jeffrey’s rigid body relaxed and his cries reduced to a low droning.

  Like a man inspired, Pete knelt beside his cases and in seconds held a gleaming saxophone to his lips. Soft sweet music rose above Jeffrey’s cries, and in a minute or two Jeffrey stopped crying and looked toward Pete. Even Mazie took her eyes off Jeffrey for a moment to look at him. I remembered Pete telling me once that circus bands had always played to distract audiences when something unpleasant happened, like an aerialist or ropewalker falling.

  Gillis gathered Jeffrey into her arms and stood up. Intrigued by the music, Jeffrey put a thumb in his mouth and stared at Pete. Jeffrey’s eyes were dull and flat. I doubted he fully realized what was happening, which is probably the only good side effect of children’s medication. Mazie began walking in erratic circles around Gillis, who looked as if she might break down at any moment.

  Hal murmured, “Mazie hasn’t left Jeffrey’s side more than a few minutes in all the time she’s been with him.”

  I got Mazie’s leash and snapped it on her collar.

  “Come on, Mazie, let’s go for a walk!”

  Because she was a good dog trained to obey commands, she reluctantly followed me outside and allowed herself to be led to the sidewalk. I took her in the opposite direction that her family would take. She looked over her shoulder several times, obviously confused about the turn of events, but we had rounded a curve when I heard Hal’s car drive away, so Mazie didn’t see them leave. If I had it to do over again, I might not handle Jeffrey’s departure that way, but at the time it seemed the right thing to do.

  When I thought it was safe, I led Mazie back home. At the driveway, the woman I’d met that morning trotted by, her tank top dark in spots with jogging perspiration. When she saw me, she stopped and came forward with her hand out.

  She said, “I’m Laura Halston. I should have introduced myself this morning. I was a total shrew, wasn’t I?”

  Her teeth were milk white, with a little inverted V at the bottom of the two upper centrals that was too perfect—one of those subtle signs that tell you a person has given a lot of money to a cosmetic dentist.

  I gave her my name again and tried not to stare. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who went slack-jawed just because another person had more than an average share of good looks. A lot more.

  She said, “Do you run?”

  “Run?”

  “For exercise.”

  “Well, I run with a greyhound twice a day. That’s plenty exercise.”

  “I run every morning. It’s the only thing I’m disciplined about.”

  She said it with pride, and stuck out a foot in its expensive running shoe to emphasize that she was serious about running.

  Then she put her hands on her knees and leaned toward Mazie. “Hi, Mazie. How’re you doing, girl?”

  I was once again struck by all her contradictions. She was gorgeous but she didn’t seem stuck up about it, she was sensitive to animals, she seemed to say every thought that drifted across her cortex, and she took little-girl pride in the fact that she ran. I liked that.

  Mazie tried to be friendly, but she kept looking over her shoulder toward her house. If I hadn’t been so taken with Laura Halston, I might have been more sensitive to Mazie’s confusion. She knew something was different in her world, and she didn’t know why.

  As it was, Laura and I said some more innocuous things, nothing of any importance, and she trotted away while I took Mazie back inside the house.

  That’s all there was to it. There was absolutely no way I could have known that my chance meeting with Laura Halston would one day haunt me, or that knowing her would ultimately make me question myself in a way I’d never done before.

  2

  Most people, when they hear about any key in Florida, think Florida Keys, but the Florida Keys are about six hours south of us, damn near to Cuba. They’re just a string of barrier islands too, so I don’t know why they get to be called the Florida Keys, as if they’re the state’s licensed keys, but that’s how it is. Life’s like that. Half the things people take for granted don’t make a lick of sense.

  To get technical about it, we’re roughly fifty-five miles south of Tampa and two hundred fifty-five miles northwest of Miami. We have around seven thousand full-time residents, but during “season” from November to April, our numbers swell to around twenty-four thousand. We lose some of our laid-back panache then, but anybody who manages to be a grouch while living on Siesta Key really has to work at it.

  Siesta Key has one main street, Midnight Pass Road, which runs eight miles from the key’s southern tip to the northern end. We have two other sort-of-major streets, one arcing around Siesta Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and the other running through the Village, which loosely passes as our business district. We’re connected to Sarasota by two drawbridges, and a favorite topic of conversation is the amount of time lost waiting for a drawbridge to come down after it rises to let a boat go through. We like to talk about lost time; it makes us feel as if we’re as rushed and busy as New Yorkers or Chicagoans. The truth is that most of us don’t really need to rush anywhere, we just like the high of pretending to.

  Wild rabbits play tag on the cool white sands of our beaches. Gulls, terns, plovers, pelicans, egrets, herons, ibis, spoonbills, storks, and cranes busily search for food along the shore, and dolphins and manatees play in the warm waters of the Intracoastal Waterway, Sarasota Bay, Roberts Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico. Inside the key itself, there are almost fifty miles of canals and waterways lined with palms, mossy oaks, cedars, mangroves, and sea grapes. We also have balmy days, white crystalline sand beaches, brilliant flowers, and every tropical plant and bird and butterfly you can imagine. I’ve lived here all my life, and I wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else.

  Some days, if I’m lucky, I don’t run into a single human being until at least nine o’clock, when I stop at the Village Diner for breakfast. It isn’t that I don’t like people or need them. It’s just that I sometimes go a little nuts over certain behaviors in certain people, and then I’m not responsible
for what I do. I don’t have that problem with animals. Animals always have sensible reasons for whatever they do. People, on the other hand, do stupid things that cause other people to die.

  Since it was April, a faint scent of cocoa butter hung in the air from late spring break kids splayed out on the beach. Most schools take spring break in March, but no matter when they come, the kids mostly stay on or around the beach, broiling during the day and partying at night. Unless they get too loud at night, the locals take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them.

  The day being Sunday, traffic was light on worker trucks and delivery vans but heavy on churchgoing cars. Personally, I feel a lot closer to God when I’m at the beach watching a sunset than I’ve ever felt inside a church. When I was little, I got the Sunday school God mixed up with the grandfather in Heidi, so for a long time I imagined God surrounded by long-eared goats and greeting people in heaven with hunks of goat cheese he’d toasted over an open fire. I liked that about him.

  When I got older, my best friends were Hillary Danes and Rebecca Stein, and they made God seem a lot less friendly. Hillary was Catholic, and God made it his personal business to forbid her to see certain movies. My grandmother forbade me to see most of the same movies, but that didn’t seem as awesome as God doing it. Then, when we all started our periods, God declared Rebecca a woman responsible for her own actions. That really steamed me. My grandmother sort of did the same thing, but Rebecca got to do a Bat Mitzvah and all I got was lunch at an expensive restaurant on the bay.

  While we ate crab salads, my grandmother said, “Is there anything you want to ask me about periods?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. They showed the girls a movie at school.”

  “What about how women get pregnant? You know how that works?”

  “The sperm hits the egg and it divides and turns into a baby.”

  “And you know how the sperm gets to the egg? The man-and-woman business?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, that’s good. I guess if your mother were here she would explain it in more detail, but my generation didn’t talk about those things much. The main thing is that boys would have sex with a snake if it laid still, so don’t think it means they love you if they want to have sex with you, not even if they say they do. And don’t get any romantic notions about what fun it would be to have a cute little baby, either. It’s not like playing with dolls.”

  I said, “Hillary said the priest told her mom she’d go to hell if she took pills not to have another baby, but she does anyway.”

  “Huh! If priests were the ones having babies, they’d be guzzling those pills by the handful.”

  We’d had strawberry sundaes for dessert, and that had been the end of my Presbyterian Bat Mitzvah. Since then, God and I have given each other respectful space.

  That morning, I headed for breakfast at the Village Diner where I’m such a regular that the minute she sees me, Tanisha, the cook, automatically starts making two eggs over easy with extra-crisp home fries and a biscuit. Tanisha’s a friend I only see at the diner. She and I half solved a crime one time by putting two and two together. Judy, the waitress who knows me almost as well as my brother does, grabs a coffeepot and has a full mug ready for me by the time I sit down.

  Before I headed for the ladies’ room to wash off dog spit and cat hair, I grabbed a Herald-Tribune from a stack by the door and dropped it at my usual booth, sort of marking my territory. Not that I’m particular about where I sit. It’s just that I don’t like to mess up our routine by sitting at a different booth. It’s an efficiency thing.

  Sure enough, the coffee was ready and waiting when I came out, and I gulped half of it before I was good and settled. Judy was a couple of booths down taking somebody’s order, but she had her coffeepot with her. When she headed toward the kitchen, she paused long enough to top off my coffee with the calm air of an old friend who knows exactly what you like.

  Judy’s tall and sharp-boned, with golden-brown hair, caramel-colored eyes, and a scattering of topaz freckles over a thin pointed nose. If she had long flapping ears, she would look a lot like a beagle. She’s loyal like a beagle too. If she likes you, it’s because she’s decided you’re worth her trouble even though you’re probably going to royally screw up your life. We have never met anyplace except the diner, but I know every detail about all the no-good men who have broken her heart, and she knows about Todd and Christy.

  Both our lives had been fairly calm lately. I’d had a bad patch around Christmas, not only because it was Christmas and my third year without Todd and Christy, but because there’d been a murder involving one of my clients and I’d ended up being involved in the investigation. Around the same time, Judy had been about to let a loser move in with her lock, stock, and gun rack, but she’d had an attack of clear judgment and dumped him. We both had a new flinty glint in our eyes, because by God we were survivors. Like loggerhead turtles that drag themselves onto our beaches every year to dig nests and lay eggs that may be destroyed by morning, Judy and I keep going on.

  I said, “Tell Tanisha to give me some bacon too.”

  She waggled her eyebrows because I rarely allow myself bacon even though I love it beyond reason.

  She said, “You celebrating something?”

  “Nope, just feel like bacon.”

  “I thought maybe you and that hunky detective had finally done the deed and you were rewarding yourself.”

  I rolled my eyes to show I thought she was too silly to even answer. She grinned and sashayed away with her coffeepot, every line of her saying she thought she was clever to say she thought I’d finally decided to lose my self-imposed second virginity.

  She wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I didn’t want to talk about it.

  While I waited for her to come back with my breakfast, I scanned the front page of the paper, skimming over the usual boring stuff. Some Washington senator had been caught soliciting sex from a kid on the internet, a lobbyist had been caught paying a huge bribe to another senator in exchange for preferential treatment to his employer, and a local man had caught a pregnant shark and all its babies had died. The fisherman was photographed standing proudly beside the hanging shark. He missed his calling. He should have been in Washington.

  Judy plopped down my breakfast plates and splashed more coffee in my mug.

  She said, “You hear that?”

  I raised my head. “What?”

  “The quiet. They’ve almost all gone.”

  I nodded. “I’ve been seeing car transports.”

  We both got almost misty-eyed at the thought. We year-rounders on the key mark our lives by the arrival and departure of the seasonal residents. In the fall, when we see auto transports hauling snowbirds’ cars into town, sandhill cranes returning from Canada, and an occasional magnificent frigatebird soaring high overhead, we know the seasonals are on their way and we brace ourselves. In the spring, when all the migratory signs are reversed, we let out a big sigh of relief. Not that we don’t like our seasonals, or that we don’t appreciate what they do for our economy. But having them descend on us every year is like having beloved relatives come for long annual visits—we count them as blessings, but we’re still glad to see them go.

  Judy left, and I turned my full attention to breakfast. If I were on death row facing execution, I would ask for breakfast as my last meal. Of course, I’d want it prepared by Tanisha, with eggs cooked so the whites were firm and the yolk quivery, with a rasher of bacon laid out like little crisp brown slats without a trace of icky white bubbles, and a puffed-up flaky biscuit served so hot that butter melted into it at the touch. And coffee. Lots of hot black coffee.

  While I ate, I looked at the Sudoku puzzle in the paper, but it made my brain ache a little bit, so I finally pushed the paper aside. I had been up since four o’clock, and I needed a shower and a nap and some time to myself. When I’d scarfed down every last crumb, I put down money for Judy, waved goodbye to Tanisha, and dragged my weary self out t
o the Bronco.

  Parakeets and songbirds fluttered up like smoke signals as I eased the Bronco between pines, oaks, palms, and sea grape lining my meandering Gulf-side driveway. On the shore, the day’s first high tide was rolling in, and a crowd of seabirds was loudly arguing over its catered delicacies.

  Rounding the last curve in the drive, I saw Michael and Paco beside the carport washing out paintbrushes. They usually take Michael’s boat out on their days off, but they’d decided to paint their house and my apartment before the weather got too hot. Both of them wore brief cutoffs that revealed acres of firm sun-tanned flesh. They were sweat-shimmery topless, with folded bandannas tied around their foreheads as sweatbands. Half the women on Siesta Key would have paid big bucks for front-row tickets to see them like that—the same women who pray every night that a miracle actually can happen to convert a gay man to straight.

  A firefighter like our father, Michael is big and blond and broad, with a piercing blue gaze that turns women into blithering idiots. Like me, Michael has our inherited Nordic coloring. Paco, on the other hand, can pass for almost every dark-haired, dark-eyed nationality under the sun, which comes in handy since he’s with the Special Investigative Bureau—better known as SIB—of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. He’s actually fourth-generation Greek-American, with the surname Pakodopoulos—too much of a mouthful for the kids he grew up with in Chicago so they nicknamed him Paco, and it stuck. He’s slim and deeply tanned, so handsome it makes your toes curl and so smart it’s sometimes unnerving. He mostly does undercover stuff, mostly in disguise, and mostly so dangerous that Michael and I don’t even want to think about it. They’ve been a couple for almost thirteen years now, so Paco is my brother-in-love. He’s also my second-best friend in all the world.