The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (26 page)

“Dixie? I have to catch a flight back home. Are we okay?”

“You know what I’m scared of? I’m scared one day I’ll want to be with you and you’ll be settled down with some other woman and not want me.”

He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “I’ll always love you. Be happy.”

He left the room, pulling the door closed behind him. I watched his broad back and felt tears slip down my face. But I did not call him back.

I hit the morphine button again and let drugs carry me into oblivion.

23

At Briana’s memorial service, Cupcake pushed me in a wheelchair with a raised extension to hold my leg. It was a private ceremony that Cupcake had arranged and paid for. He and Jancey stood beside me near the open grave while a priest who had never met Briana mumbled words that might or might not have held meaning to her. There were no friends or family.

It was a brief service, with none of the melodrama that had attended Briana’s life. Instead, a biodegradable urn holding her ashes was lowered into a hole, Cupcake shoveled dirt from a waiting mound on it, and we all tossed a rose on the dirt.

I hadn’t liked Briana or respected her, but I admired her for overcoming deprivations I couldn’t even imagine.

As Cupcake trundled me across the bumpy cemetery grounds, I caught a glimpse of Steven leaning on a tombstone across the way.

When we’d all got settled in Cupcake’s car and were leaving the expanse of green grass interspersed by little white markers, Jancey said, “Cupcake, what will her marker say?”

“I told them to just put the name Briana Weiland and the date of her death. I don’t know her birth date.”

From my position stretched in the backseat, I said, “Do you think that was her real name?”

I saw Cupcake and Jancey exchange a look.

Cupcake said, “Her real name was Robbie Brasseaux.”

I felt like an idiot. I should have figured that out for myself.

“When did you know?”

“It was the Nikes. It took me a while to get it, but Robbie was the only person in the world who would have brought me those Nikes.”

My leg throbbed, and I wondered if I’d lost so much blood that I’d gone stupid.

I said, “But the Nikes were fakes.”

“That was the whole point.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked at me in his rearview mirror and grinned, dimples flashing. “You’re not supposed to. Robbie and I had a connection, I’m not sure what you’d call it, but we sort of saw things the same way, read the same things into movies and stories. I was a nut about Nikes, and Robbie teased me about it. When I took the money I got from robbing our first house and bought a pair of Nikes, it cracked Robbie up.” His face went sober. “Robbie used his share to buy food.”

“So—”

“So all these years later I come home and find a pair of Nikes in the middle of my bed. Nobody could have left them except my old white, skinny, redheaded friend Robbie Brasseaux, but Robbie hasn’t been in my house. Instead, a famous model named Briana has been there, and Briana was white, skinny, and had red hair. Which made her a fake because she was really Robbie. And that’s why Robbie left fake Nikes. It was a little joke he knew I’d get.”

“Why didn’t you tell Steven that Briana was Robbie?”

He took a deep breath. “I didn’t figure it was any of his business. Besides, Robbie had enough trouble in his life without people knowing he’d gone and got himself turned into a woman.”

Jancey nodded. She and Cupcake had apparently discussed the whole thing and she agreed with him that Briana’s real identity was nobody’s business.

I said, “Briana said she had killed her pedophile uncle when she was sixteen. She suspected that you had told a story about her hiding in the swamps that threw the police off while she ran away to New Orleans. Did you?”

A muscle worked in Cupcake’s jaw. “Robbie didn’t kill just his uncle, he killed his entire family. His drunken abusive uncle, his mean-as-a-wolverine aunt, and his three slack-jawed cousins who’d bragged about sodomizing him. Shot them while they slept. He did what he had to do to survive.”

I didn’t press him to tell me anything else.

Some loyalties are almost sacred. Some secrets are best left undisturbed.

ALSO BY BLAIZE CLEMENT

Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons

Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof

Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund

Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

THE CAT SITTER’S PAJAMAS.
Copyright © 2011 by Blaize Clement. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clement, Blaize.

         The cat sitter’s pajamas : a Dixie Hemingway mystery / Blaize Clement.—1st ed.

              p.   cm.

         e-ISBN 9781429951142

   1.  Hemingway, Dixie (Fictitious character)—Fiction.   2.  Women detectives—Florida—Fiction.   3.  Cats—Fiction.   4.  Sarasota (Fla.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

   PS3603.L463C44 2012

   813'.6—dc23                                              2011033143

First Edition: January 2012

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