The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives (17 page)

“Well … I was skipping.”

She raised one eyebrow. “You were skipping?”

I nodded. “Or running. Sort of half skipping, half running. I was kind of excited about the book and Mr. Hoskins, and I was in a hurry to get home and take a shower.”

She looked away. “After the butcher locked his front door, how long do you think it would have taken him to get to the alley?”

“His shop’s not that big. I’d say ten to fifteen seconds tops.”

Without pausing she said, “So from the moment you left the store to the moment the butcher saw a station wagon speed away in the alley, a period of roughly thirty-five seconds elapsed?”

I said, “Um…”

“So your theory is that someone watched the front of the store until they thought it was empty, and then they went around to the alley, broke in the back door, grabbed Mr. Hoskins, and then ferried him into a waiting car … in thirty-five seconds.”

I should have known. McKenzie seemed to get some kind of perverse pleasure in letting me know what an utter moron I was whenever she got the chance.

Well, that was it. I decided I’d had just about all I could take of her games, and besides I still had work to do. I threw my hands up and shrugged. “Well, the only other way it makes sense is if they did it while I was in the store, in which case I would have been in on the whole thing. Did you ever think of that?”

I turned to find her watching me. There was a look in her eye, a hard gleam, and I knew right away: That’s exactly what she was thinking. Suddenly it felt like I was fixed in the sight of a shotgun, or more precisely a magnifying glass.

I gulped and said, “Oh.”

We sat in silence for a while, both of us staring straight ahead, McKenzie with her hands folded neatly in her lap and me with my mouth hanging slightly open.

On the tennis court in front of us was a tall, gangly young man with copper red hair and long arms giving a tennis lesson to a group of children, seven- or eight-year-olds, all holding their pint-sized tennis rackets in front of them at ninety-degree angles to their little bodies.

They were all watching the young man intently and copying his every move. When he bent his knees slightly and swung his racket to the right, they all immediately did the same. When he swung his racket to the left, they quickly followed suit. Every once in a while he would pause a bit, flash the kids a mischievous grin, and then let his racket fall to the ground with a clatter. All the kids would look wide-eyed at each other for a couple of seconds and then let their rackets fall, too, bursting into fits of happy giggling.

I looked at McKenzie out of the corner of my eye. There was absolutely no way she could possibly think I had anything to do with Mr. Hoskins’s disappearance or the blood on his front counter, or that I had seen something and was hiding it from her, but I knew she was considering the same thing I was—anybody else who saw that video would probably think otherwise.

The fact that I was the last person to be seen going in or out of the bookstore, coupled with the butcher seeing a suspicious car pull away from the back door immediately after seeing me basically run to my car … I’d suspect me, too, if I didn’t know better.

McKenzie interrupted my train of thought. “Is it possible, Dixie, that the woman in white was in the back room when you arrived?”

“Huh,” I said.

Suddenly an entirely different scenario opened up before my eyes. The woman in white wasn’t a customer. She was a friend, perhaps even more than a friend, perhaps even … a lover? It was a little hard imagining befuddled old Mr. Hoskins involved in a little early evening hanky-panky in the back of the store during business hours, but I had to admit it was possible. I remembered his hastily buttoned shirt and untied shoes. Maybe he wasn’t so befuddled after all. Maybe he was just rattled by my interruption.

“You said you heard a noise from the back room right before Mr. Hoskins appeared?”

I had completely forgotten. “Yeah. Like a thud.”

“And what do you think that could have been?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe they were on that couch, the one with the gold tassels. Maybe when they heard me Mr. Hoskins jumped up and bumped into something?”

McKenzie frowned. “On the couch?”

I shrugged slightly. “Well, I mean, it seems like if they were doing anything, you know … the couch would be the most comfortable place for it.”

The slightest hint of a smile played across her lips, and then I thought of the blood on the countertop next to the register. I was still casting about for a reasonable explanation for everything, like a fish who refuses to accept she’s been hooked, but McKenzie didn’t seem convinced. She was watching the kids on the tennis court with a distant look in her eyes. They had all lined up in a row along one of the lines on the court, and now the tall red-haired man was handing a single tennis ball to each one of them.

I sighed. “You think that woman hid in the back of the store until I left and then murdered Mr. Hoskins, don’t you?”

I didn’t like saying it out loud like that. It meant giving up hope that Mr. Hoskins was alive and well, drinking sangria on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Her expression didn’t change. She leaned over and picked up her briefcase as she stood up. “Dixie, I think until we find a body, we can’t begin to know what happened.” She shook my hand with a wan smile. “Let me know if you remember anything else.”

I nodded as she turned and headed back for the sheriff’s building. When she got to the edge of the tennis court she turned and said, “Oh, and Dixie, if I were you I’d keep looking for that cat. I got the lab results back this morning. The blood on the countertop … it’s human.
Which
human, however, is still up in the air.”

*   *   *

On the way to my next appointment, I stopped at Vito’s Subs and got an Italian with extra hot peppers, and as I crossed back over the bridge to the Key, it was still sitting on the seat next to me, untouched.

What Detective McKenzie was suggesting had made every neuron in my head go to mush, and all the way down Higel my feeble brain did its best to wrap itself around it. I tried to imagine everything that had happened as if it were a painting hanging on the wall, and the picture it made was pretty clear. There was blood on the countertop,
human
blood. There was a missing person. There was a suspicious-looking figure dumping what might have been a body off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into the bay. Considering all that, it wasn’t too far-fetched to come to the conclusion that something had happened in Beezy’s Bookstore that night … something bad.

I guess I must have been distracted, because instead of taking the dogleg at Higel and shooting straight down to Midnight Pass, I took a left on Ocean Boulevard, which of course took me right by the bookstore. I’d like to think I didn’t do that on purpose, that what I really meant to do was get on with my day and forget about the whole bloody mess and let Detective McKenzie take care of it on her own.

But I’m not sure.

As I approached the bookstore, I slowed down and studied the front entrance. The police tape was gone, which meant the bookstore was officially no longer an active crime scene. I could see the display of books through the front window, and the stack of dictionaries on the side where Cosmo liked to nap.

I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. There was a
CLOSED
sign hanging in the window, and the lights were off. I wondered what the chances were that in the seven seconds the webcam’s view had been blocked by the waiter at Amber Jack’s, the woman in white had come out of the bookstore before I got there.

I looked at the door and tried to calculate how long it would take. I imagined someone pulling it open, exiting the store, and walking down the sidewalk.
One-one thousand, two-one thousand …
Then I stopped.

In the video, the woman had walked into the frame on the left-hand side just as I had, from the north. When she came out of the store, if she’d gone back in the same direction, it would have taken her much longer than seven seconds to leave the webcam’s view, and we would have seen her in the video as soon as the waiter moved out of the way. The angle of the camera didn’t provide as long a view going in the other direction. If the woman in white had turned south when she came out of the store, she would have disappeared out of frame in less than four seconds, giving her more than enough time to leave without being recorded.

That was one possibility. I pulled back out on the road and tried to imagine the other option, that she’d gone out the back door instead. Maybe she’d parked back there, or maybe she just felt like taking a tour of the alley … No. I’d been in that alley. There was no place to walk and no designated parking spots, and anyway it was filthy. No woman in her right mind would go walking around back there willingly.

The reason it mattered how the woman in white left the store, and the reason I was so distracted now, was that Detective McKenzie was suggesting something that sent a chill down my spine. Yes, the blood on the countertop was human, that was certain, but McKenzie had said “
which
human.” All this time I’d been asking myself, who could have murdered Mr. Hoskins? I’d missed another possibility altogether.

McKenzie was suggesting that if the woman in white had left the shop by the back door, it might very well mean that she was the murderer. On the other hand, it could just as easily mean she was the victim.

If that was true, sweet old Mr. Hoskins had a very good reason to disappear.

16

As I made my way south toward the end of the Key, the sun was dead center in the sky and there were wavy lines of heat radiating off the asphalt up ahead. My mind was swimming. Could there have been something about Mr. Hoskins that I had overlooked? Something he was hiding? He had seemed so harmless and sweet, even grandfatherly.

Of course, the fact that I liked Mr. Hoskins should probably have been a little red flag. I don’t know why, but I seem to be drawn to people who give off a certain kind of energy, people who are just a little bit unhinged. I’m not sure if they’re the flame and I’m the moth or vice versa, but I do know one thing: People that are a little bonkers can be a lot of things, but they’re rarely boring. Unfortunately for me, there’s a very fine line between crazily interesting and interestingly crazy, and it occasionally gets me in trouble.

The point is, I had liked Mr. Hoskins right away. He just seemed to have a good soul. The idea that he might have been busily hiding a dead body in the back of the store while I browsed around the aisles made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It just wasn’t possible. It’s true that Mr. Hoskins had seemed a little eccentric and odd, but he certainly didn’t seem capable of that kind of evil, not to mention hoisting a deadweight over the railing of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

Then again, I know from firsthand experience that with a strong enough dose of adrenaline pumping through its veins, the human body is capable of almost anything.

I decided to make a quick stop at the drugstore across the street from the diner. Murderer or not, Mr. Hoskins had an agreement with me, and I felt like I’d let him down. The fact that he was wholly unaware of our agreement didn’t deter me in the least, and I had a plan to fix it. All I needed was some supplies: a pack of bright construction paper, some big markers, and a staple gun.

My plan was to put signs up all along Ocean Boulevard, and maybe all over the Key. I didn’t have a picture of Cosmo, but I felt as if I’d gotten a pretty good look at him, or at least good enough to come up with a fairly accurate description of his two main traits: big and orange. I didn’t much like the idea of putting up signs with my phone number for every loony-tune on the street to see, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice—I had to do everything in my power to find that cat.

I even considered calling Detective McKenzie and asking if she might consider getting me back in the bookstore to look for a picture of Cosmo I could use for the signs. Perhaps Mr. Hoskins had a photo in that desk in the back room, or failing that there might even be a pen-and-ink drawing of him hanging somewhere in the store.

Either way, I thought, how many big fluffy orange cats with white-tipped tails could there be running around Siesta Key? It’s a small island, and if it was possible that Butch the Butcher had seen him, the chances that someone else could have seen him too were pretty strong.

I decided once I found Cosmo, if Mr. Hoskins hadn’t turned up by then, I’d take him to the Kitty Haven, a cat kennel and rescue center run by my friend Marge. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that under these circumstances, Marge would take Cosmo in free of charge.

When I came out of the drugstore with all my goodies, I thought of one more thing I might try.

Gia was sitting behind her little window in the vet’s office. She had just hung up the phone and was writing something down in a notepad on her desk. There was only one person in the waiting room, except he was so big he took up at least three seats. A young man with muttonchops and a crew cut, he looked like he weighed at least three hundred pounds. I figured he was probably a linebacker for the Sarasota Thunder, our local football team, but lots of professional sports teams come to Sarasota for summer training, so he could have been from anywhere. His arms were as big around as my waist, and it took a couple of looks for me to realize that there was a tiny white Shih Tzu sitting primly on one of his gigantic knees.

Gia has dark cropped hair framing a cute gamine face with deep green eyes like a woodland nymph’s. When she looked up to find me standing in front of her window she said, “Oh my gosh, Dixie, what’s wrong?”

I said, “Shut the front door. Do I look that bad?”

She laughed. “Sorry. You just look pretty worried is all.”

“I guess I’m a little preoccupied. I have a friend who lost his cat a couple of nights ago. I was hoping if somebody saw him they might have called you.”

She shook her head. “Nobody’s called saying they
found
a cat, but tell me what he looks like and I’ll keep my ears open.”