The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas Page 9

  But when I considered all the international attention the murder had attracted, I could understand why the sheriff’s department might be reluctant to share details with the world. Especially if they were afraid their new homicide detective wasn’t up to the job.

  I called the crime-scene cleanup guy, who said the timing was great because his team could start work immediately.

  I said, “When can the owners come home?”

  “Depends on whether we have to replace the tile. If the tile’s not contaminated, they could come back tonight. If it was me, I’d wait until tomorrow morning to let the odor of ozone and germicide spray dissipate.”

  “They have cats.”

  “Cats for sure will hate the smell. And, like I said, I won’t know until I see it if we’ll have to replace the tile. Check with me this afternoon and I’ll be able to tell you more.”

  My next call was to the Ritz-Carlton, where I booked a suite for Cupcake and Jancey. Making hotel reservations for clients isn’t my job as a pet sitter, but in this case I did it for the same reason I’d taken Elvis and Lucy to the Kitty Haven—I knew Cupcake and Jancey were too shocked and stressed to make arrangements for themselves.

  At about nine forty-five, I pulled my Bronco into the Village Diner’s parking strip. None of the other cars there looked like the unmarked sedans driven by Sarasota County detectives. Inside the diner, I waved to Judy, the waitress who’s been there forever, and headed for the ladies’ room. I knew Judy would alert Tanisha, the diner’s cook, that I was there, and that Tanisha would get on my regular order and have it ready by the time I took a seat in my regular booth. Like I said, I’m so predictable it’s downright pathetic.

  I took a little extra time in the ladies’ room. In addition to washing off all noticeable cat hair, I splashed water on my face, combed my hair, and redid the ponytail. I slicked on lip gloss, too, and eyed myself with extra care to make sure I looked presentable. I looked okay. With my Scandinavian ancestors, I have a kind of blue-eyed, blond, Jennifer-Aniston-girl-next-door-look. Not a raving beauty, but okay.

  Judy had already poured a mug of coffee for me, and she set my breakfast down as I slid into my booth. Judy is tall and angular, with hazel eyes that hide hurt under defiance. She’s one of my best friends, but we never go to movies or talk on the phone or do any of the things most friends do. Instead, we give each other little bits of gossip and an occasional intimacy at the diner. I know all about the good-for-nothing men who’ve taken advantage of her over the years, and she knows about Todd and Christy dying and about Guidry leaving. Judy thought I was an idiot for letting Guidry leave without me, and she thought it was her duty as a friend to point out my idiocy every chance she got.

  She said, “Missed you yesterday.”

  I said, “Yeah, I had to be somewhere else.”

  She waited for more, but I just gave her a big smile.

  I said, “Just so you won’t think I’m having a wild love life if you see me with a man, I’m supposed to meet a detective here this morning.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You getting mixed up in another murder?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just a formality. I was in the neighborhood. That kind of thing.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’ll watch, and if a cop comes in, I’ll send him to you.”

  She swayed her hips more than necessary as she walked away, sort of telling me she thought a wild love life would be better than an in-the-neighborhood kind of talk with a new detective.

  Almost every day of my life, I have the same breakfast—two eggs over easy, extra-crispy home fries, and a biscuit. Tanisha does the best biscuits in the world. I was buttering my biscuit when Ethan Crane walked in the diner door. With his tall, wide-shouldered body in a dark pinstripe suit, stark black hair brushing the collar of a pale lavender shirt, he could have been on the cover of a romance novel. Maybe it was just because I liked to believe it was so, but the way his dark eyebrows rose in surprise when he saw me looked phony, the way people pretend to be surprised when friends jump out and yell, “Surprise!” when they’ve known all along that a surprise party was planned for them.

  The estrogen level in the diner rose like fog as he walked toward me. My knife slipped so I sort of buttered my thumb instead of my biscuit. A woman across the aisle froze with her mouth open and her fork poised in midair with cheese grits dripping off it. Behind his back, Judy fanned herself with a menu.

  Ethan has that effect on women.

  He said, “Can I join you?”

  Trying very hard to be cool, I gestured with my buttery hand toward the booth seat. “Of course.”

  He slid into the booth, and Judy was beside him in an instant with a mug and coffeepot. If he’d asked, she would have run to the kitchen and brewed up a fresh batch that instant.

  He said, “I’ll have my regular.”

  Judy shot me a smug smile that said she knew what his regular was and I didn’t.

  I said, “I didn’t know you came here often.”

  “Every day. But usually a lot earlier.”

  “Oh.”

  I wondered if I was the reason he had come later that day. Had he known that my schedule brought me there around ten, and purposefully delayed his own breakfast so it coincided with mine?

  He said, “Talked to any wanted criminals today?”

  “That was nice of you to get her an attorney. I understand she turned herself in.”

  “How do you manage to get involved with people like her? Do you have some kind of magnet?”

  Judy skidded to his side and put down his breakfast. Tanisha is fast, but not that fast. Judy must have stolen an order intended for somebody else. Scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, unbuttered rye toast. The white smile he gave her sent her into a near swoon that she covered by topping his coffee.

  I watched him cut into a tomato slice. He ate in the European way, both hands working knife and fork, fork tines turned down, spearing a bite of tomato and sort of stacking egg on the back of his fork before lifting it to his mouth. If I ate like that, I’d probably stab myself in the eye.

  I said, “I don’t try to attract people like Briana. It just happens. She was in the Trillins’ house when I went in to take care of their cats, and then she followed me.”

  “You didn’t have to talk to her.”

  I shoveled up some of my own egg in the American way. I speared a bite of fried potato. I chewed, I swallowed. He waited.

  “I felt sorry for her.”

  His eyes were like dark pools of double chocolate fudge, warm enough to bathe nude in.

  He said, “I hear that Guidry left.”

  I had an almost irresistible urge to make it clear that Guidry hadn’t left me, he’d just left Sarasota.

  “He was offered a job in New Orleans that he couldn’t refuse.”

  Ethan nodded. His long fingers broke a triangle of rye toast in half and left both halves on his plate.

  “Are you going to follow him?”

  I swallowed. I hated that question.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You know how sometimes you know something is wrong for you even if everything about it seems right? I just knew I couldn’t leave my home.”

  He leaned back in the booth. “That’s why I’m here. I practiced law for a while in Colorado, but the white sand and the seabirds of Florida kept calling to me. When my grandfather died and left me his practice, I didn’t think twice about it. This is where I belong.”

  “Do you miss anybody in Colorado?”

  “Sure. Friends, colleagues. A woman.”

  “Ah.”

  “She felt the same way about mountains and snow that I felt about surf and sea.”

  “But now you’re with somebody else.”

  “I was, but that didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  That was such a lie!

  I was glad it hadn’t worked out, but I felt guilty because I was glad. Anyway,
the fact that he was free didn’t mean anything would happen between us.

  He said, “Dixie—”

  Before he could finish what he planned to say, I saw the new detective come into the diner. I knew he was a cop the minute I saw him, and probably half the other people in the diner knew it, too. Cops have an alert, watchful look, as if they can swivel their eyeballs and see through the backs of their skulls. The cop standing at the front of the diner scanning the booths also had the spine and shoulders of a career military man, that easy erectness that comes from vertebrae getting the habit of stacking themselves with the least effort.

  I said, “Uh-oh, here’s the new homicide detective who took Guidry’s place. I’m supposed to meet him here.”

  Ethan turned to look at the man. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  I could have offered to introduce them, but it would have been awkward for all of us. The homicide cop was there as part of an investigation into a murder that Briana might have committed, and Ethan had found a defense attorney for her.

  Owens must have given him a description of me, because he started toward me as Ethan left. The two men met in the aisle and gave each other the dismissive once-overs that men do. The homicide guy was lean but not skinny, and I judged him to be midforties. He had that two-day-old beard thing going, along with dark shades and a thin leather bomber jacket. Dark hair cut short and growing gray, skin that was acquainted with sunshine but didn’t live in it. Firm mouth that probably had to remind itself to smile.

  He stopped beside my booth and gave me a curt nod. “Ms. Hemingway?”

  “That’s me.”

  I flipped my palm toward the other side of the booth in an invitation to sit, and he slid into the bench seat opposite me. Judy was instantly at his side to gather up Ethan’s plate and mug.

  “Coffee, sir?”

  “Please.”

  We waited until she wiped off the tabletop and returned with a mug and coffeepot.

  Without asking, she topped mine off, too.

  The cop said, “Nothing else for me, thanks.”

  Judy gave him a megawatt smile, knocking herself out to be charming to the new cop in town, then went away still doing that extra hip-swinging thing.

  He said, “My name is Steven.” He said his name with a hint of an accent, almost Stefan.

  He removed his dark glasses and looked gravely at me. He had green eyes, which somehow surprised me. You don’t often see truly green eyes. I wondered if he wore colored contacts.

  It’s unusual for a law enforcement officer to invite witnesses to get chummy, but I had been so intrigued by his eyes and the way he pronounced his name that I didn’t notice he hadn’t shown me any creds. I just sat there with greasy steam rising from my fries and made nice with Sarasota’s new homicide detective who had probably been born in some other country and who’d sort of been introduced to me by Sergeant Owens. I even felt a bit bountiful about it, the native putting the newbie at ease. If I noticed that his voice had an edge of agate hardness, I put it down to the fact that he was, after all, a homicide detective.

  He said, “Why don’t you just tell me what happened yesterday. All of it.”

  I was so nervous about my secret meeting with Briana that I talked like somebody hacking at brush with a machete, slashing words right and left, telling him every detail of what I had done at the Trillin house, what Briana had said, what Cupcake had said when I called, going on nonstop and hoping he would be so impressed with all the facts I gave him that he wouldn’t ask what had happened between me and Briana after I left the Trillins’ house.

  When I finished the part about taking Elvis and Lucy to the Kitty Haven, he nodded gravely and stayed quiet. Judy swished by to take my empty plate and refill our coffee mugs.

  Steven said, “Now tell me the rest.”

  “That’s it.”

  He made a slicing motion with the edge of his palm, and I stopped with an unspoken word still hanging on my bottom lip.

  “Ms. Hemingway, cut the crap. We know you were in contact with Briana, and in case you don’t know it, that makes you an accessory to a crime.”

  My mind was still so caught up in the power of words that it trotted after the word “accessory.” I had been reduced to something like a handbag or a belt. A scarf, maybe, an accessory to smarten up something plain and dowdy. But I knew he didn’t mean that kind of accessory. He meant the kind that can cause you to end up doing jail time.

  My face went hot, and I took a sip of coffee to stall for time. “She was following me in traffic, and at a red light she ran to my car and asked if she could talk to me. I told her to meet me at the pavilion.”

  “Where you provided her with breakfast.”

  I tried to smile fetchingly. “Wow, you’ve done your homework!”

  He didn’t return the smile. “Tell me what the woman said to you.”

  “She said she didn’t kill the woman. She said she went to the bedroom to get dressed and the woman was dead on the living room floor when she came out.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  I swallowed. I knew enough about criminal investigations to know that sometimes a detail that seems completely unrelated can be the key to solving a crime. But I also knew that telling this cop that Briana claimed to be an old friend of Cupcake’s would put Cupcake in an untenable position. Cupcake’s reputation and career could be ruined if cops started checking Briana’s story, and I was almost positive she had lied.

  I said, “This is something nobody knows. I’m embarrassed to tell it, but it may be important.”

  He waited, and it seemed to me that a light sparked in his dark eyes.

  “I know where Briana lives. She leases a house in Oleander Acres.”

  His eyes never seemed to blink.

  He said, “How do you know that?”

  “Well, that’s the embarrassing part. I saw her car on the street, and I followed it. She drives a white Jag convertible, and I saw it go by. A man was driving it. He went to a house, and I stopped across the street to look at the house. A neighbor came out to see why I was loitering there—it’s a private street, and I guess they’re careful about strangers—and she told me that some French people live in the house. Briana’s from Switzerland, you know. I think they speak French.”

  He still hadn’t blinked. “Ms. Hemingway, if you have any information about this case that you’ve held back, this is the time to tell me.”

  My head shake was more like an attack of palsy than denial. “I’m sure you already know that I led Briana to an attorney. Not a defense attorney, but an attorney who’s a friend of mine. He contacted a defense attorney for her.”

  I heard myself babbling and prayed that I would shut up soon.

  I said, “That’s the last I saw of her. Sergeant Owens said the defense attorney went with her when she turned herself in.”

  I thought that was clever of me, to bring Owens into the conversation. Sort of like reminding this guy that I was one of the good guys, a former deputy, a woman on his side of the law.

  He gazed at me a moment longer, then slid from the booth and stood up.

  He said, “I’ll talk to you again.”

  He walked down the aisle of booths, put down money at the cashier stand, and went out the door.

  Judy came and stood beside me, watching through the glass door as he walked away.

  She said, “You think you and that new cop are going to be as compatible as you were with the hunk?”

  By “the hunk” she meant Guidry. She had a malicious grin and an even more malicious glint in her eyes.

  I said, “That guy probably wasn’t compatible with his own mother. Not even in the womb.”

  I didn’t add that the man I’d just talked to might be Guidry’s replacement, but he had a cold hardness that Guidry had never had. Guidry was tough, and when it came to getting facts he was unrelenting. But he had never looked at me with the unsympathetic eyes that Steven had. It gave me a bad taste in the mouth to
consider how men like Steven dealt with people who withheld information from them.

  11

  I went out and sat in the Bronco and gave myself a good talking-to. I told myself that I was a citizen, and that I had a duty as a citizen to tell anything I knew that might help law enforcement agencies find the person who had killed a woman in Cupcake Trillin’s house while Briana was there.

  I rebutted that Cupcake Trillin had been in Italy with his wife when the murder happened, and that he’d had absolutely nothing to do with it. Whether he had or had not known Briana when he was a kid was an extraneous detail that would not shed light on the identity of the killer.

  I counterargued that it was important only because he claimed Briana was a complete stranger and that he had no idea why she had been stalking him. If that was a lie, then it could be a vital piece of information.

  I snarled that Cupcake was on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic and wouldn’t be home until late that night. I could ask him for the truth when he came home, but in the meantime I had no way of finding out if he’d lied. Furthermore, if I told the investigators what Briana had told me, they would assume there was some nefarious connection between them, and they would be at the airport waiting for Cupcake when he got off the plane. Every reporter in town would already be there, and if they saw officers of the law meeting Cupcake, they would splash it all over the place. And, as Paco had said, no matter what the truth was, Cupcake’s reputation, his marriage, and his career could be seriously damaged by that kind of negative publicity.

  I started the Bronco and backed out of my parking place. I wasn’t going to get in touch with the investigators and tell them what Briana had told me, but I didn’t feel good about it.

  I needed advice. I knew Michael had been home since eight that morning, but I also knew what his advice would be: stay out of it, mind my own business, cooperate with the law. I needed advice from somebody who cared about me but could be objective. Somebody like Reba Chandler.