The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (3 page)

He said, “Dixie? What’s the story?”

“I’m cat sitting for Mr. and Mrs. Trillin.”

Before he could ask what I knew he would ask, I said, “Yes, that’s Cupcake Trillin. His wife is Jancey Trillin. They’re in Italy. I went inside the house and found a woman named Briana in there. She claimed to be Cupcake’s wife, but I knew that wasn’t true, and she seemed mentally unhinged, so I came outside and called Cupcake to make sure she didn’t have permission to be in his house. He said he’d never heard of her, so I called nine-one-one, and Deputy Morgan came with another deputy named Beene from Community Policing. They went inside and found the woman dead. I saw blood, so she was either shot or stabbed. I didn’t hear a gunshot while I waited.”

“Where are the deputies now?”

Just as he asked, Morgan and Beene rounded the far corner of the house. When they saw the cars and officers, they broke into a trot and joined me and Owens.

Morgan said, “We checked all the outside doors and windows. Didn’t see any sign of forcible entry.”

Owens turned to the gathered deputies and EMTs and tilted his head toward the house. “Let’s go in.”

I said, “Don’t let the cats out.”

Every head turned to give me an incredulous gape.

I shrugged. “Sorry, but my job is to take care of the two cats in the house. If you’d like, I can take them to a boarding place so they won’t be in your way.”

They all exchanged looks, imagining going about their jobs while two cats climbed over a dead body and tracked through blood.

Owens said, “Okay, come in and get them.”

I said, “I’ll get carrying cases,” and loped off to the Bronco for two folding cardboard cat carriers.

The officers waited until I was in line, then moved forward with Owens in the lead. He and the EMTs went straight to the woman’s body, while the other deputies fanned out to search the house. I pretended to look for cats behind the sofas and chairs, but I was pretty sure that I would find Elvis and Lucy in the media room in their overhead runway or at the top of their fancy climbing tree. If they’d been scared by strangers in the house, they would have climbed the tree for safety. If they hadn’t even known strangers were there, they would be up the tree anyway because it was their favorite place.

Owens stood up from his stooped position over the woman’s body. “Dixie, can you identify her?”

“I’ve only seen her once.”

“That’s more than anybody else has seen her. Just take a look and tell us if she’s the same woman who introduced herself as … what did you say her name was?”

“Briana. Officer Beene has heard of her. She’s a famous model, just uses the one name.”

“Okay, is this dead woman the same woman who said her name was Briana?”

The EMTs stood up and backed away so I could get a clear view, and I crossed the room. Suddenly shy in the presence of death, I looked at the body before I looked at her face. Something seemed wrong. The woman had a stocky build, for one thing, not long and limber the way Briana had been. She was no longer nude under a big printed shirt but wore utilitarian khaki slacks and a bloodstained white shirt. She wore shoes as well, sensible low-heeled and laced-up leather. Not the kind of clothes I expected a famous model to wear. When I let my gaze travel upward, I saw dark, short-cropped hair. I did not allow myself to linger over the grinning slit in the woman’s throat.

I felt off balance, as if somebody was playing a trick on me.

I said, “That’s not the woman who was here earlier.”

Owens said, “You sure?”

“Positive. Briana was thin and had long red hair. It’s not the same woman. I’ve never seen this woman before.”

I dared to scan her body again. Her arms were flung out as if she’d been trying to catch herself as she fell. Her hands were tanned, with square palms and sturdy fingers.

I said, “Briana had very white skin. Like it never was in the sun.”

Owens ran his own plate-sized hand over his face. “Damn.”

We all stood for a moment out of an unspoken need to put a space in the time between acknowledging death and attending to it. I moved first.

“Is it okay if I go through the house to get the cats?”

The sergeant’s skinny chest rose, taking in air before he moved on to the grisly business at hand. “Don’t touch anything. If you see anything you haven’t seen before, let me know.”

He didn’t need to tell me that. It was just something to say to reestablish his authority. I nodded and headed down the hall to look for Elvis and Lucy. My head was buzzing with questions. I knew the assumption would be that Briana had killed the woman, but it takes brute strength to cut another person’s throat. Strength and stature. You have to be tall enough to stand behind a person and pull a knife across their throat with enough force to slice their jugular. Briana had been taller than me, but not much, and she had seemed too soft-boned to make the hard slashing motion it would take to cut deeply into another person’s throat. But if Briana hadn’t killed the woman on the living room floor, who had? And whether she had or not, where was Briana now?

The Trillins’ media room is a movie lover’s dream come true—a six-foot screen, plush theater seats, a sound system probably better than the local movie theaters’. The room is also a cat’s dream come true. Cupcake and Jancey had designed an intricate overhead system of enclosed tunnels near the ceiling, with lower wide tracks for racing. The tracks led to a tall climbing tree with several branches where the cats could sit and dream or watch movies with their humans. The tree had sisal posts for scratching, padded platforms for sleeping, cubbyholes for hiding, and hanging toys for batting with paws.

I stood under the tree, assembled the folding cat carriers, and sprinkled bonita flake treats in the bottoms.

“Elvis, Lucy, are you up there?”

A soft nicking sound answered, and Lucy’s white nose poked through the round hole of one of the condos. Lucy was naturally friendly, but I knew she was more interested in the scent of bonita flakes than in me.

I said, “Hi, sweetheart! Come on down.”

After a few more nicking sounds, she oozed out and cantilevered down the tree into my arms. We nuzzled each other until she was purring, and then I lowered her into a carrier and closed it. She made a whirring sound of minor outrage, but Lucy wasn’t one to carp about things she couldn’t control. I wish I were more like Lucy.

Getting Elvis down took more persuasion. When he finally peered out of the fat tube he was stretched in, I had to stifle a giggle because he had the edge of a crumpled slip of paper in his mouth. Elvis had a fetish about narrow strips of paper that he could easily hold in his mouth. If Cupcake or Jancey tossed a Post-it note or a sales receipt in a wastebasket, Elvis would nab it. If we saw Elvis sitting low with his paws tucked under his chest, we knew he was hiding a slip of paper. He didn’t chew it, he just hoarded it, crumpled it, and carried it around in his mouth. I always suspected that he had a stash of papers somewhere that would never be found.

Lucy gave some plaintive bleats that brought Elvis all the way out of his tube.

I said, “Come on down, sweetie.”

He blinked at me, sniffed at the scent of bonita flakes, and came down carefully, clutching the tree with all four legs like a possum lowering itself, with a long strip of paper gripped in his teeth. When he was arm high, I lifted him into my arms and told him how wonderful he was, then put him into the other carrier and closed it. I felt like a meanie for tricking the cats, but that’s life. Sooner or later, we all get lured by enticing treats and then find ourselves stuck in situations we can’t get out of.

At least Elvis still had his precious paper.

3

I made it to the living room just as a team of criminalists outfitted in paper booties and protective smocks came in the front door. They stopped and looked at me with question marks on their faces while I stood there with a cat carrier hanging from each hand like a statue of Cat Lady Justice.

Owens said, “This is Dixie Hemingway. She’s a pet sitter. She’s going to get the cats out of the way while we work.”

As if that cleared
that
up, they all nodded and pulled on latex gloves in preparation for measuring and photographing and probing and all the other things that criminalists do. They would take the temperature of the dead woman’s liver to establish how long she’d been dead. They would look for stray hairs or fibers on her skin, her clothing, and the floor. They would scan for footprints and fingerprints, trace the arc of blood spatters and blood flow. They would draw an outline of her body on the floor and photograph it from every angle before they bagged her hands, zipped her into a body bag, and took her to the morgue for a more thorough examination.

Acutely conscious of my unbootied Keds and my unlatexed hands, I mutely circled around them. The cats had gone silent, too. With their keen olfactory sense, they could smell blood through the cardboard of their carriers and had gone into defensive positions with their ears laid back and their backs arched.

At the door, Sergeant Owens caught up with me and spoke in a lowered voice. I didn’t know if he spoke quietly out of respect for the dead or because he didn’t want the others to hear what he said.

“Dixie, I don’t know which detective is going to be handling this, but he’ll want to talk to you. Where will you be after you get rid of the cats?”

“I’m not getting
rid
of them, I’m taking them to the Kitty Haven. That’s a boardinghouse for cats. After that I’ll be at other cats’ houses up and down the Key. You have my cell phone number. Call me when you need me.”

He considered that and nodded. Maybe I imagined it, but the look he gave me seemed to find my availability downright sad.

I maneuvered myself and the cat carriers through the foyer and out the front door. Deputies had strung yellow police tape around the perimeter of the house and placed a Contamination Sheet on the front door. Every person who entered or exited the house had to sign the sheet and enter the time, so I put the boxes down and signed. It seemed very important at the moment to make it clear that I might be just a pet sitter, but I knew how to conduct myself at a murder scene.

The moment lost some of its drama when I remembered the green-and-whites parked behind my Bronco in the driveway. By the time I’d sweet-talked deputies into moving them so I could leave the scene, I had pulled myself together and stopped feeling like people who solved crimes were more important than people who cleaned litter boxes.

On the way to the Kitty Haven, Elvis and Lucy found their voices and sang to me. Lucy was a coloratura soprano, Elvis was a countertenor. By the time we arrived at the Kitty Haven, I felt as if I’d listened to an entire kitty opera in which two captive royals told the world how maligned they were. Thinking about what was ahead for me and for Cupcake and Jancey made me want to join my own voice to their caterwauling.

I wished Guidry were the detective who was going to be investigating the murder, and not just because I missed him. A new homicide detective who didn’t know me would simply look at the fact that I’d been the last person to go into Cupcake’s house before the dead woman was found, so I would definitely be given some thought as a suspect. A homicide investigator who’d slept with me would have questioned me, but he’d be less likely to believe I’d had anything to do with the murder.

The thought of the media frenzy the murder would cause made me cringe. When I thought of how newspaper and television reporters would dredge up all the other times I’d been in the news, I felt like throwing up.

It would be even worse for Cupcake and Jancey. The time between reports that a woman had been murdered in their house while they were in Italy and the moment when somebody questioned if Cupcake or Jancey had hired the killer would be about three nanoseconds. The same media that fawns over a famous athlete or movie star will turn on him like rabid wolves if there’s a crime involving one of his friends or somebody in his family. Sweet adoration does a U-turn and becomes sour contempt, and all the voices once raised to cheer a star will shriek for that same star’s execution. It almost seems as if hidden blood lust is the fuel that creates the cult-worship of the famous. Life might very quickly become a nightmare for Cupcake and Jancey.

And for me.

Siesta Key is eight miles long, north to south. Midnight Pass Road runs end to end, with residential streets looping and winding away from it. Our so-called business district is near the north end of the key where the island bulges to allow greater density. We call that area “the village,” as if the restaurants, salons, boutiques, tourist gift shops, and real estate offices aren’t a part of the rest of the Key. Siesta Beach stretches along the southern perimeter of the village on Beach Road, and when you drive along there you have to watch for tourists wearing bikinis, straw hats, and bemused smiles crossing against traffic to get to the beach. I think the seaside ions get to them and make them a little loopy.

The Kitty Haven is on Avenida del Mare, about a block off Beach Road, in an old Florida-style frame house. With its sun yellow paint, shiny white hurricane shutters, and white wicker chairs on the deep front porch, it always makes me nostalgic for a time when people sat on porches and chatted over a glass of lemonade.

I parked in the driveway outlined by green and white liriope and lifted the cat carriers out. The cats were poking their noses against the holes in the carriers to sniff the air. I sniffed it a little bit, too. The Kitty Haven’s yard is filled with cedar chips interspersed with circles of palm clusters and palmettos, so it smells like the inside of a cedar chest. I carried both cat carriers to the front porch, opened the front door, quickly set one carrier inside, then maneuvered myself and the other carrier in while keeping a sharp eye out for a cat who might decide to streak out while the door was open.

All the guest cats at Kitty Haven have private apartments in the back, but the owner’s cats loll on windowsills and drape themselves on overstuffed chairs in the front room. All the furniture is wine red velvet, which always makes me feel as if I’ve stepped into a bordello in an Old West movie. The cat hair on the velvet gives it a kind of halo effect.