The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (17 page)

I waved to Tanisha on the way to the ladies’ room to wash off the affection lavished on me by cats and dogs. Tanisha’s broad face dimpled and she waved back. Next to my brother, Tanisha is the best cook in the world.

Passing the counter where people can watch TV while they eat, I saw Squatty Knox, a high school algebra teacher who has blighted the lives of Siesta Key students since my parents’ time. Squatty earned his unflattering sobriquet because he was, well, squatty. Low to the ground, as Floridians say, which isn’t the same as short. It’s just squatty. When I was in his class listening to him drone on and on, I always tried not to blink because I knew if I blinked I’d never get my eyelids to come up again. I was also afraid I might fall into a coma and tumble out of my chair, which would have caught his attention and made him call on me to solve some algebra problem. I couldn’t have solved an algebra problem if he’d set my feet on fire. I did the best I could to stare straight ahead without blinking, which made my eyeballs so dry that it’s a wonder flies didn’t settle on them.

Like everybody else at the diner counter, Squatty was staring at the TV the same way I once stared at him. He seemed mesmerized by footage of Briana in different designer clothes, at different fashion shows. An offscreen male voice identified each place, each designer, each season—“Paris, for Yves St. Laurent, the 2008 spring collection; Rome, the 2010 fall show, for Chanel; Vienna, for Versace…”

I walked on by, wondering at which show Briana had met a Serbian gangster who’d gone to prison for smuggling heroin in a shipment of fake Gucci watches. Aside from the fact that drug dealing and counterfeiting were crimes, they were crass acts, not the kind of thing a discriminating woman would admire.

I spruced up in the ladies’ room, and when I left, Squatty was still engrossed in the TV screen, this time showing footage of Cupcake in action on the football field. All the other people perched on stools at the counter seemed equally fascinated. They seemed to be attached to the screen by invisible IV lines, getting infusions of painkillers by watching images of people whose lives seemed more interesting or more rewarding or more bizarre than their own.

At my regular booth, Judy had already put my coffee on the table. As I slid onto the bench seat, she appeared beside me with my regular breakfast along with the not-regular special plate of bacon. For a second there, inhaling the siren scent of fried hog fat, I drifted off to my own personal nirvana. Some people escape pain through watching TV, some through smelling bacon.

Judy said, “Everybody’s talking about the killing at that football player’s house.”

She waited a moment to see if I’d take the bait, then raised an eyebrow a fraction when I got busy buttering my biscuit.

She said, “You’re not talking, huh?”

“I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

“Except you were there when it happened.”

“I was outside the house. I didn’t see a thing.”

She studied my face and got a worried look. “Well, that’s good. Maybe now that the hunk is gone you won’t be getting mixed up in murders anymore. I sure hope so.”

I sipped coffee. She topped off the mug and waited. I salted and peppered my eggs. She sighed and went away. For some odd reason, I felt like crying. When an old friend pumps you for information and at the same time is concerned about you, it’s a little bit like having a caring mother quiz you about the questionable kids you’re hanging out with. Not that I ever had a mother who did that.

The bacon helped calm me. I nibbled its salty, crispy, tranquilizing, artery-clogging goodness and considered all the weird things that had happened, especially the weird thing that had turned me into a helpless victim of violence. It isn’t in my nature to be a victim. I fight back, I stand up for myself, I don’t let myself be used—but violent men had got away with disabling me while they ransacked my apartment. Instead of fighting back, I had lain there helpless as a dead snake, and I was still helpless because I didn’t know who they were. Standing up for myself against those unknown men would be like fighting fog. If I hadn’t had the bacon, I would have got really depressed.

I was so blissed out on bacon that I didn’t see Ethan until he was standing by my booth.

“Are you expecting another homicide investigator?”

I laughed. “No, not today.”

He slid into the booth and waved to Judy, who trotted like a pony to bring him coffee.

She said, “Tanisha’s scrambling your eggs. I’ll bring them right out.”

This time I knew he had planned his breakfast time to coincide with mine. It made me feel proud and scared at the same time. Ethan wasn’t the kind of man to indulge in casual flings. If he went after a woman, he was serious about it. He also wasn’t the kind of man to let a woman jerk him around. If I made a commitment to him, I’d damn well have to keep it or there’d be some high drama. Not that I didn’t keep commitments, but I wasn’t sure anymore how
long
I could promise anything to anybody.

He gestured toward the TV over the counter, where voices still gushed the same old words, and diners still hung off their stools absorbing every stale word as if it were new and fresh.

“The murder in the Trillin house seems to have taken over every minute of the news.”

I shrugged. “A famous model broke into a famous athlete’s house, and then some mystery woman was killed in the house. If you were a reporter and you had a choice of talking about that or talking about a new downtown parking lot, which would you choose?”

He grinned. “I can’t imagine myself a reporter.”

“That’s because you make things happen. Reporters tell about things somebody else has made happen.”

“That’s probably an oversimplification, but true.”

“I know a psychologist who says we’re all addicted to drugs our bodies manufacture in response to experiences we have. Even our thoughts create drugs we get addicted to.”

“Psychoneuroimmunology.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what it’s called. Means that chemicals infuse every cell in our bodies in response to our emotions, and those chemicals affect our health. Happy thoughts create healing chemicals, hateful thoughts create toxic chemicals.”

Judy whirled to the booth and settled his plate in front of him. She poured more coffee in both our mugs, waggled her eyebrows at me, and whirled away.

It doesn’t take a man long to eat scrambled eggs and dry toast. While he ate, I watched him and felt stupider by the moment.

I said, “Am I the only person who doesn’t know about psycho-whatever?”

He laughed. “No, and you’ll be glad to know that it was a woman who discovered there’s no time lapse between emotions and the chemicals they produce. Dr. Candace Pert, very brilliant woman. She says our bodies are our subconscious minds.”

I sighed. “You’re too smart for me, Ethan. I’m a pet sitter. I only have two years of community college.”

He ate the last bite of tomato and tossed his paper napkin into his plate. “Nobody in the world knows everything. You’re ignorant about some things I know about. I’m ignorant about some things you know about. Being ignorant about particular things doesn’t mean we’re stupid. Stupid people can’t learn anything new. You and I can learn if we’re exposed to the things we’re ignorant about.”

“Do you want to go out with me?”

I hadn’t expected to say that, it just came out.

Ethan reached across the table and touched my hand. “You know I do.”

“I have to tell Guidry. I’d feel dishonest to see you and not tell him.”

“I understand that.”

I said, “I think all my cells are being flooded with nice chemicals right now.”

He laughed and got to his feet. “Let me know when you’re ready to move forward.”

He left money on the table for Judy and left the diner. Judy came and stood beside me with curiosity radiating from her like heat from a stove, but she didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t volunteer any information.

I was too dazed by what had just happened to be able to talk. Without planning to, I had in one quick instant made a decision about my future with Guidry and acted on it. It was a decision I didn’t like, a decision that I didn’t want to make, but one that had to be made. In a way, I was grateful to Guidry for letting me be the one to make it.

I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and slid out of the booth.

In the parking lot, ignorance of car repair had finally won out, and a cluster of men watched other men load the red Porsche onto a flatbed tow truck. The owner of the Porsche had the anguished face of a man watching his child go off to war. Nobody noticed me get in the Bronco, nobody saw me drive away. I was invisible in plain sight, the way Tom Hale had said Briana’s criminal friend had been until he was arrested.

The Kitty Haven is just around the corner from the diner, so I was there in no time to get Elvis and Lucy. I carried their cardboard carriers inside and helped Marge settle Elvis into the one with his scrap of paper still in it and Lucy into the other. I paid Marge, put the receipt in my pocket to give Cupcake and Jancey, and lugged the carriers out to the Bronco. As if she realized she was going home, Lucy poked a paw through the air holes and made excited noises. Elvis was quiet. Probably sniffing his paper to make sure nobody else had played with it since he left it.

15

All the way to the Trillins’ house, the phone call I would have to make to Guidry rode in the car with me like a little gray cloud. It was still with me when I pulled into the Trillins’ driveway and got the cat carriers from the Bronco. Jancey saw me from the living room window and opened the front door before I rang.

She said, “Good timing! We just this minute got here.”

She had an odd expression on her face—a normal reaction to returning to a house where a crime-scene cleanup team had removed all the familiar odors. Like other animals, humans rely on their sense of smell as well as their vision and hearing to recognize places and people. Take away the smell of your own home and it will seem alien.

In the living room, Cupcake was looking around like a tourist visiting a house of some historical figure.

I couldn’t keep from looking toward the spot on the floor where the dead woman had lain. The cleanup guys had done an excellent job. Nobody would have guessed the floor had been awash with blood a few days before. If Jancey and Cupcake noticed the absence of a rug that had lain on the tile, they didn’t mention it.

I set the cat carriers on the floor and knelt to open them. Each cat leaped out, Elvis carrying his beloved crumpled paper. Their ears flattened when they smelled the neutral air, and they both went hyper for a few minutes, racing around the room, leaping on furniture, generally acting like wild cats. Also a natural reaction to the absence of familiar odors in a familiar place.

After they had thrown enough of their own cells around to feel at home, they reverted to their sweet selves. Lucy rubbed her cheek against Jancey’s leg to deposit scent cells on her, and Elvis trotted confidently toward the media room, still carrying his precious paper. Having marked her territory with cheek glands, Lucy made a chirping noise and galloped after her brother.

Cupcake said, “Dixie, Sergeant Owens said for us to go through the house when we got home and make a note of anything changed or missing. You’d better come with us. You’d know if anything was moved after we left.”

I suspected they just wanted somebody else with them when they went through the house for the first time, but I would have felt the same way. We moved room to room, Cupcake and Jancey studying every piece of furniture, every picture, every curio. In the bathrooms, they stared at the towels and soaps as if they suspected them of being different than the ones they’d left there. In the kitchen, Jancey even pulled out drawers and looked inside them while Cupcake examined the interior of the refrigerator.

By the time we headed down the hall to the master bedroom, they seemed anxious in a different way. Personally, I was a wreck. I kept remembering the shirt Briana had worn the first time I saw her. I could imagine her tossing it on the bed and leaving it there for Jancey to find.

Jancey said, “If that bitch slept in our bed, I’m getting a new one tomorrow.”

The shirt wasn’t on the bed or on either of the two chairs in the room. The white silk duvet on the bed was smooth, too, and the artfully piled pillows showed no sign of having been dented by another woman’s head.

But a pair of black sneakers sat in the middle of the duvet. The sneakers looked brand-new. Each shoe had the stark white Nike swoosh. Each was roughly the size of a loaf of bread.

For a moment, we all stared at the shoes without speaking.

Jancey said, “Cupcake?”

He said, “I didn’t leave them there.”

They looked at me, and I shook my head.

They strode to the bed and each picked up a shoe. They turned those Nikes over, examined their insides, pulled their tongues out, sniffed them, and then turned them over again and repeated each step.

Jancey said, “They’re eighteen double-E’s.”

Cupcake nodded. “My size.”

“Are you sure you didn’t get them just before we left and put them here?”

“I didn’t buy these shoes. I didn’t leave them here.”

They turned to me again, and I shook my head again.

I said, “I always make a fast pass through the house when I’m here just in case a cat has done something I need to clean up. Those shoes weren’t here the last time I was in this room.”

Cupcake said, “That would be the day before that crazy woman broke in.”

“Right.”

Jancey said, “Cupcake, how does that Briana person know what size shoe you wear?”

“How the hell would I know, Jancey? I keep telling you, I don’t know her!”

Jancey said, “You shouldn’t wear those things. They could have radiation or flesh-eating bacteria on them that could kill you. Maybe you should give them to the police.”

Cupcake looked like he might cry any minute, just from confusion.

In my head, over and over, I heard Briana telling about breaking into houses with Cupcake:
Cupcake mostly did it so he could get a pair of Nikes.