Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery Page 3

  When I drove into the four-slot carport, they both looked up and watched me park. It made me itchy to see them looking at me with such studied speculation. I knew that look.

  I got out of the Bronco and glared at them. “Don’t even think about it!”

  Michael said, “Come on, Dixie, it’s good exercise.”

  Paco said, “Yeah, climbing up and down a ladder would firm your butt.”

  I said, “My butt is firm enough, and I get plenty of exercise walking dogs. Which I’ve been doing since four o’clock, and I’m beat.”

  I shaded my eyes and looked at the half-painted house. If we’d had our druthers, the house would have been built of cypress and left unpainted to weather pale gray, but cypress hadn’t been an option when our grandparents ordered the house from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The new color was the same as it has been since our grandfather put the first coat of paint on it, the cerulean blue of the water in the Gulf on a clear sunshiny day. It takes about six months for salt breezes to scour it pale, so painting is an annual job.

  But not mine.

  I am firmly of the conviction that house painting is man’s work, like assembly-line drilling or sperm donation—things that require rote repetitious movements.

  I said, “Looks good!” which made Michael and Paco beam like little kids getting a gold star on their paper. Men are like puppies, they’re easily distracted by compliments.

  3

  My apartment rides above a four-slot carport next to the frame house where my brother and I went to live with our grandparents when Michael was eleven and I was nine. Our firefighter father had been killed a couple of years before while saving somebody else’s children, and our mother had just up and left one day.

  We didn’t see her again until we were grown and she came to our grandfather’s funeral. Oddly, she had her suitcase with her. She left it in the chapel vestibule before she came down the aisle and took a seat on the front row. Michael and I were across the aisle, and until the minister looked pointedly at her, we didn’t notice her. I turned my head to see what he was so taken with and met my mother’s gaze. Her face was awash with tears, but otherwise she looked exactly as I remembered her when she’d left seventeen years before.

  I squeezed Michael’s hand and he leaned around me to see her. We all smiled automatically and uncertainly, as if it were the socially acceptable thing to do but we weren’t sure it was the honest thing to do. My mother pursed her lips in a mimed kiss across the aisle, the way she had always done as she left our bedroom after tucking us in, and I was suddenly shaken with sobs for all the kisses lost, all the love withdrawn, all the pain that could never be forgotten.

  After the funeral service, we were all awkward with one another. Our grandmother had died the year before, and it didn’t take long to figure out that our mother had returned not out of grief at her father’s passing but out of a greedy hope that she had inherited the beachfront property he’d bought when he was a young man and land on the key was cheap. As soon as Michael set her straight about who now owned the place, she took her suitcase and left again.

  Her brief visit hadn’t changed anything. When she left, we didn’t know where she went and she didn’t make any effort to stay in touch, not even when the next loss threatened to pull me under to dark oblivion. I don’t think of her much anymore. Or at least I try not to.

  Pushing the remote to raise metal hurricane shutters, I climbed the stairs to the covered porch that runs the length of my apartment. The porch has a small glass-topped table, two ice-cream chairs, ceiling fans to stir the air, and a hammock in one corner for napping and daydreaming. French doors open to a minuscule living room furnished with my grandmother’s green flower-printed love seat and easy chair. A one-person bar separates the living room from a narrow galley kitchen, where a window lets in light over the sink and allows a view of treetops. The bedroom is barely big enough for a single bed pushed against one wall, a nightstand, and a dresser holding a photograph of my husband and child. In the photograph, Todd is thirty and Christy is three. If they had lived, Todd would be thirty-three now, same as I am, and Christy would be six.

  One day I will be forty, fifty, sixty, perhaps ninety or a hundred, but Todd will remain thirty and Christy will always be three. I imagine them in a different universe, eternally the same age they were when they were killed.

  The air was humid and stale, and I flipped the switch to turn on the air-conditioning unit set high on the bedroom wall. On the way to the shower, I tossed my clothes and white Keds in the stacked washer/dryer in an alcove in the hall outside my tiny bathroom. With the morning’s fatigue and cat hair washed off, I fell naked into bed and slept a couple of hours, then padded barefoot to my closet. The closet is the most spacious room in the apartment, big enough to serve as an office as well. A desk sits against one wall, and shelves for my shorts and T-shirts and Keds fill the opposite side. Between them, on the back wall, there’s a floor-to-ceiling mirror and a short rack of listless dresses and skirts reaching toward the floor like banyan rootlets hoping to acquire greater purpose.

  I pulled on clean shorts and a knit top and went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water from the fridge. I wanted cookies, but I didn’t have any. I switched on the CD player to fill the apartment with Patsy Cline’s voice—there’s something about Patsy’s steady tumtee-tum-tee, tumtee-tum-tee rhythm that helps organize my brain—and went back to the closet-office to take care of the business side of pet sitting.

  I’m very meticulous about keeping records and sharing them with pet owners. I list times I arrived and left, what I did while I was there, and anything out of the ordinary that I noticed. It can be important to know exactly what date I felt a tiny lump under a cat’s skin, or when I noted that a dog’s eyes were pained or dull. I keep a record of everything, maybe more than I need to, but it makes me feel better to know I’m doing the very best job I possibly can.

  When I finished, I still wanted cookies and I still didn’t have any. A furtive peek over the porch railing revealed that Michael and Paco had put away the painting supplies, and Michael’s car was gone. Which meant they had gone off on some errand. Which meant they wouldn’t know if I snuck down to their kitchen and stole cookies. Not that they’d care, but it was sort of exciting to think I could get away with something they didn’t know about.

  Michael always has cookies, cookies that he personally makes in his big commercial oven, cookies that are so good you have to be strict with yourself or you’ll whimper when you eat them. I was out like a flash, thumping down the stairs to go filch some of his cookies.

  Michael is the cook of the family. He’s also the cook at the firehouse. If he could, he would travel the world cooking for anybody who was hungry or lonely or downtrodden. He would cook for happy people too, but it gives him a great sense of satisfaction to feed needy people, and if he thinks their lives are improved because of it, that absolutely makes his day.

  Except for Ella Fitzgerald, Michael and Paco’s kitchen was empty. Ella is a true Persian-mix calico—meaning she has some Persian in her ancestry and her coat has distinct blocks of black, white, and red—and she makes funny scatting sounds like Ella Fitzgerald. Left on my porch by a woman departing the country, Ella had liked me well enough, but the first time she sniffed the air in Michael’s kitchen, she knew she’d found her true love. Lots of human females feel that way about Michael too. Fat lot of good it does them.

  When I came in, Ella jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. I knelt to stroke her hair and kiss her nose.

  She said, “Thrrripp!”

  I said, “I totally agree.”

  She trotted beside my feet when I went to inspect the cookie jar. Just as I’d expected, it was full of freshly baked cookies. Coconut and chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin. I made a small stack on a paper napkin while Ella flipped the tip of her tail and watched me. Cats have too much dignity to beg for table goodies like
dogs do. They just give you unblinking stares until you break down and give them something.

  I got a couple of kitty treats from her special canister with the design of a cat on the front and added them to my stack. Then I scooped Ella up in one arm and pushed through the kitchen door to the wooden deck and the beckoning redwood chaise. With Ella happily sitting on my stomach, we both munched our treats while the surf made gurgling noises at the shore and seabirds swooped and called to one another above us.

  Ella finished her treats, licked her paws, and stretched out to purr, her warmth comforting against my body. All my cookies were gone too, and for a little while I closed my eyes and enjoyed the aftertaste of cookies, the warmth of a kitty on my tummy, the fresh clean scent of the sea, and the familiar sound of seabirds circling overhead. There was a time when I was numb to moments of pleasure like that, so I was not only floating on a tide of bliss, but aware that I was. I suppose we have to experience the loss of pleasure to truly appreciate it when it comes back.

  It was almost time to make my afternoon rounds, so I finally roused Ella and stood up to go inside. I stopped when a dark blue Blazer crunched down the lane and stopped next to the carport.

  Oh, noodles, it was Lieutenant Guidry.

  If Michael and Paco came home and found him here, Michael would have a cow. Just the sight of Guidry reminded Michael of all the times I’d been in mortal danger because of some murder investigation I’d got myself involved in.

  As Lieutenant Guidry of the Sarasota County’s Homicide Investigative Unit got out and started toward me, I tried to convince myself that Michael’s distaste for Guidry was the only reason my heart had started jiggling.

  Guidry is fortyish, with skin eternally bronzed, dark short-cropped hair showing a little silver at the sides, gray eyes bracketed by fine lines, a beaky nose, and lips that are never indecisive. As always, he looked as if he had come from a fashion shoot rather than a crime scene. Woven leather sandals, pleated linen trousers the color of wet clay, a dark gray shirt, and an unstructured linen jacket in an expensive shade of wine red. No tie, but something told me he’d recently worn one and removed it. Oh, man, he’d probably gone to church that morning. Probably had rosary beads in his pocket.

  Feeling very heathenish, I noted how his jacket hung from his square shoulders without any pretension, but somehow it managed to look like something an Italian count would slip on before he went out to inspect his estate. From the elegance of his wardrobe and the casual ease with which he wore it, I knew he had grown up with money. A lot of money. But Guidry’s past was none of my business, and I had no intention of ever asking him about it.

  Still, I wondered for the millionth time what his background was. What was it that made him walk with such aristocratic confidence? What was it that made him wear the kind of clothes you see in films where Italian playboys are hanging out in sidewalk bistros on the Riviera? All I knew about the man had been dropped in bits and pieces that I’d collected like a starry-eyed groupie. I knew he was from New Orleans and that he’d been a cop there, but New Orleans cops are probably no more elegant than cops in any other city.

  I knew he’d been married once, but if being married turned men into model look-alikes the world wouldn’t be so full of fat slobs.

  He had spoken French to me once. Actually, I had thought he was speaking Italian, but he had laughed and said, “Italian is one of the few things I’m not.” That’s all I knew about him.

  Except that he was a terrific kisser. Oh, yes he was.

  For reasons that neither of us ever intended or wanted, Guidry and I had been drawn together by some grisly murders. We had also been drawn together by chemistry. Neither of us had ever intended that either.

  Our chemistry had resulted in one kiss that had left me feeling like a volcano that had spewed out a few hot rocks but was still gathering steam to blow sky high. That had happened around three months ago, right before Christmas. Thirteen and a half weeks ago, to be exact. Not that I’d been counting, or that I’d been disappointed that I hadn’t seen him since Christmas Eve, because I wasn’t.

  I didn’t any longer feel that being attracted to another man made me disloyal to my dead husband. I’d got over that. But I had a lot of reservations about falling in love with another cop. Too many people had died and left me, and it seemed to me that I might be better off with a man who had a nice safe desk job. Somebody like Ethan Crane, for example, an attorney who had also kissed me and set off some hot tremors.

  But both Guidry and Ethan must have had as many doubts as I had, because after a few weeks of eluded opportunity—sometimes mine and sometimes theirs—they had all but disappeared from my horizon.

  Guidry stopped in front of me, and for a second we scanned each other’s faces as if we were using visual Braille.

  He said, “Enjoying the fresh air?”

  My head bobbed up and down like one of those fool dogs that people put in their back car windows. For some reason, I always become incoherent around Guidry.

  He said, “Ah, I just wanted to ask you . . . uh, the thing is, somebody donated tickets to the sheriff’s office for a shindig Saturday night. A black-tie thing . . . there’ll be dinner . . . some kind of entertainment too, I think . . . it’s a fund-raiser for the Humane Society—you know, the animal people. I should go, you know, as a member of the department, and I know you like that kind of thing. The animals, I mean, so I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”

  Ella must have been as astonished as I was to hear Guidry lose his usual cool smoothness because she sat up in my arms and studied him. Guidry narrowed his eyes as if he wasn’t accustomed to a cat’s scrutiny.

  As if I had a lot of pressing engagements, I said, “This coming Saturday?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I just got word about it, or I would have asked you sooner.”

  I said, “I love the work the Humane Society does.”

  Guidry passed the back of his hand across his forehead as if he’d suddenly suffered a pain. He tends to look like that when I talk about animals.

  He said, “That’s why I thought you might like to go to the dinner.”

  “Okay.”

  He looked relieved. “Pick you up about seven?”

  “Great.”

  “Well, okay, then.”

  We smiled at each other for a moment, both of us blinking a little bit because it was probably the first time in our acquaintance that we’d had an entire conversation—if you could call it that—that hadn’t revolved around a murder.

  He gave me a half wave and turned back to his car.

  I watched him walk away and then felt something with claws clutch my chest.

  I said, “Guidry, did you say black-tie?”

  He turned back. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  I was proud that my voice didn’t squeak. He got in his car, waved again, and backed out. I looked at Ella, and she looked at me. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that her eyes looked as alarmed as I felt. I had just accepted an invitation to a black-tie event that was to be held in six days. Which meant I had six days to go find something fancy to wear, because I sure as heck didn’t have anything in my closet.

  I took Ella back inside Michael’s kitchen and kissed her goodbye.

  I said, “I have to go see to my pets. And I have to buy some new clothes. You’re lucky, you can just wear the same fur all the time, but women have to wear special clothes for special occasions. Oh, God, shoes too. Okay, I’ll just do it. It’s really no problem. No, really, it’s not.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  I said, “Don’t tell Michael and Paco I stole cookies, okay?”

  She tilted her head back, looked solemnly into my eyes, and blinked twice, slowly. In cat language, that means I love you.

  Even so, she was probably planning to rat me out.

  4

  My afternoons are pretty much a repeat of my mornings, except I don’t groom any of the pets. Instead, I spend more time
playing with them or exercising them. My pet-sitting day ends around sunset, and it’s very satisfying to know that I’ve made several living beings happy that day. That I left their food bowls sparkling clean and fresh water in their water bowls. That I brushed them so their coats shined, and played with them until all our hearts were beating faster. That I kissed them goodbye and left them with their tails wagging or flipping or at least raised in a happy kind of way. That’s a heck of a lot more than any president, pope, prime minister, or potentate can say, and I wouldn’t switch places with any of them.

  Morning or afternoon, my first stop is always at Tom Hale’s condo. He lives in the Sea Breeze on the Gulf side of the key. Tom and I swap services. He handles my taxes and anything having to do with money, and I run twice a day with his greyhound, Billy Elliot.

  Tom has curly black hair that hugs his head like a poodle’s trim, and he wears round eyeglasses that give him a cute Harry Potter look. Until you look into his eyes. His eyes betray a time of intense suffering, a look that says he can endure whatever pain life sends, but hopes, oh God, that it won’t happen again.

  His transition came during a casual saunter down a lumber-and-door aisle in a home improvement store—one of those huge places that sells everything from flashlights to entire kitchens. To this day he doesn’t know what caused it, but there was an avalanche and his spine was crushed under tons of lumber. And that was just the beginning of the cataclysmic change. Within a couple of years, Tom had lost his CPA firm, his wife and children, and most of the money he’d got in a lawsuit against the store. About all he had left was Billy Elliot, a dog he had saved from the fate that befalls racing dogs who have quit winning. Billy Elliot returned the favor by saving Tom from utter loneliness and despair. Dogs are like that. Dogs don’t stop loving you when your luck turns sour.

  Tom had been pretty much of a hermit until last Christmas, when he had fallen in love with a woman named Frannie. Since then, he’d been looking more relaxed and a little heavier. Happiness seems to make men gain weight, while it makes women skinnier. Frannie was nice enough, but I suspected she wasn’t a dog person. I would never have told Tom, but the truth was I didn’t think she was good enough for him and Billy Elliot.