The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas Page 5

  He took both my hands in his. “Dixie. It’s good to see you.”

  To my utter surprise, I felt tears sting my eyelids, and for a second I couldn’t get my tongue to work.

  He said, “I hear you have an emergency. What can I do for you?”

  Oh, yeah. I was there for Briana, not to rekindle an old lust.

  I nodded toward Briana, who had removed her big hat so her red hair tumbled over her shoulders. She had removed her dark glasses, too. Her eyes were tawny, like a lion’s.

  “The emergency is actually hers. She’s a prime suspect in a murder. I know it will be better if she has an attorney when she turns herself in.”

  “I’m not a criminal lawyer.”

  As if she’d heard a musical cue, Briana stepped forward with her hand out, elegant and assured as all hell. “Thank you so much for seeing me, Ethan. I’m Briana.”

  Ethan quirked an eyebrow again.

  I said, “Briana only uses the one name, like Cher. She’s a famous model.”

  In Briana’s aura, I felt dumpy and used up, like the mother of a homecoming queen.

  Ethan took a deep breath, and I knew he was feeling that I only thought of him as someone to solve a problem or provide sensible direction. That wasn’t true. I thought of him in plenty of other ways that I didn’t want him to guess, but I understood why he’d think that.

  He gestured toward the chairs facing his desk. “Tell me the situation.”

  Briana and I took seats, but it was Briana’s situation, and I waited for her to talk.

  She said, “This is difficult.”

  Neither Ethan nor I said anything to make it easier, so she straightened her back and tilted herself slightly forward toward Ethan as if to make her words more intimate.

  “The truth is that I went into a house without the owner’s permission. I knew he and his wife were away, and I went in and walked around inside his house. I should not have done that, but I did not steal anything, and I had no motive except to be in the home of a man I’d known when I was very young. While I was there, Dixie came into the house.”

  She turned and looked at me with those yellow-brown eyes. “I suppose Dixie has a key.” The inflection said she wasn’t at all sure I had a key, and that perhaps I’d broken in the same way she had.

  I spoke to Ethan. “I’m taking care of the cats in the house. The house, by the way, belongs to Cupcake Trillin. He’s an—”

  Ethan completed my sentence, as if everybody in the world, not just sports fans, knew who Cupcake was. “Inside linebacker for the Bucs.”

  He digested that bit of information and nodded for Briana to continue.

  “Dixie left, and I knew she would call the police, so I ran to the bedroom and got dressed.” She allowed herself a faint smile. “I was more or less nude when Dixie came in.” The invitation to Ethan was almost spoken: Imagine me naked!

  Ethan’s face didn’t change. His dark eyes were flat. Briana looked down at her twisted hands as if she were unaccustomed to getting no response from a man.

  In a rush, she said, “When I went back to the living room, a woman was on the floor. Her throat had been cut and blood was gushing out. Blood was all over her, all over the floor, it was terrible. I was terrified. I ran. I didn’t see anybody else, but somebody else had to be there. I ran out of the house. I ran to my car. I waited out of sight until I saw Dixie’s car leave the gate into the neighborhood, then I followed her. I knew I would be a suspect. I didn’t know what to do. Reporters will want to talk to me, photographers, everything I’ve been trying to escape. Dixie stopped at a light, and I got out and ran to her car and begged her to help me. She was an angel. She met me and I told her my story and she believed me.”

  Ethan’s eyes flicked to me, and my face went hot.

  “She left out a good bit of the story, but I believed enough of it to advise her to get a lawyer and turn herself in.”

  He said, “Good advice.”

  Briana said, “Can you keep this out of the press? It will be hell if it hits the news!”

  Ethan raised that eyebrow. “A murder in the home of a famous athlete?”

  She said, “I meant about me.”

  Ethan leaned toward her, but not in the intimate way she’d tilted herself toward him. His was more like a ship’s prow aiming at a curl of froth thrown up by a sea wave.

  “I’m afraid you lost any right to anonymity the moment you broke into the Trillins’ house. You might as well get prepared to give some straight answers to solid questions. And you can begin by providing your last name.”

  “I didn’t kill that woman! I swear to God I didn’t kill that woman!”

  “And your last name is?”

  Briana’s lips squeezed together so tightly that her cheeks took on the creases she might have in half a century. Ethan studied her the way he would study a law book.

  He said, “Here’s the way the district attorney is going to see this case: You’re a celebrity whose fame comes solely from modeling designer clothes. You don’t have any other talents, but you think your fame gives you special privileges. You broke into a house while the owners were away. Someone authorized to be there came in the house, found you, and pulled out her phone to call the police. You hit her over the head and knocked her out. You knew she would wake up and the world would know what you’d done, so you slit her throat. Then you ran.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Refusing to give your last name is not only a silly bit of celebrity branding, it means you’re so certain of your privileged status that you expect to smile prettily, flirt a little bit, and skip back to your glamorous world. But Briana, my dear, it’s not going to be that way. You’re in for the fight of your life, and if you’re planning on playing it cute and coy, you’ll lose.”

  I felt as if a boxcar filled with ice had just been dumped on me. Ethan’s description of what might have happened seemed so plausible that I was amazed I hadn’t seen it like that myself. I had been so focused on the idea of a killer cutting the woman’s throat from behind that I hadn’t realized she could have been unconscious and stretched on the floor. Briana was certainly big enough and strong enough to have squatted beside her and slit her throat.

  Briana’s hands gripped the mahogany arms of her chair so tightly her knuckles gleamed like white bone. With visible effort, she parted her lips and said, “Weiland.”

  Ethan said, “Spelling?”

  She spelled it with a sound of weariness. “W-E-I-L-A-N-D.”

  Ethan said, “And you’re from?”

  I felt like raising my hand and saying, “I know! I know!” because I knew she came from the same little swampy Louisiana town that Cupcake was from.

  She said, “Switzerland. My parents were killed when I was a child. I was adopted by Americans from Minnesota. They’re also dead.”

  She didn’t look at me. She was cool as a Popsicle. She sounded as if she absolutely believed every word she said, the same way she had sounded when she’d told me she was Cupcake’s wife. The woman was either so crazy she believed every lie she told, or she was an Oscar-level actor. Or both.

  Ethan took a slim leather directory from his desk drawer and flipped through it looking for a number. When he found it, he punched it into his phone. While the call went through, he got up and walked out of the office. We couldn’t hear his conversation, but I knew he was calling a defense attorney.

  Briana’s head was high, and she still hadn’t looked at me.

  She said, “When you talk to Cupcake, please tell him I’m very, very sorry.”

  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 alrea
dy 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 somebod
y 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.