The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (8 page)

Morning and afternoon, my first pet stop is at Tom Hale’s condo on Midnight Pass Road. Tom is a CPA whose life went off on a different road than he’d intended when a wall of door displays fell on him at a home improvement store and crushed his spine. Life is like that. One moment you can be strolling down an aisle in a store admiring doorknobs, and the next moment you’re not who you used to be but somebody totally different.

After his agony and fear and fury had got sorted out, Tom faced life as a paraplegic without a CPA office, a wife, or children. Well, he still had children, but his ex-wife had taken them and most of his settlement money to another state. But Tom’s not one to sit around feeling sorry for himself, so he started over in a wheelchair. Instead of doing CPA work in a fancy office, he does it at his kitchen table. He adopted a greyhound racing dog, who had also been given up by the world as useless, and named him Billy Elliot.

Some retired greyhounds are happy to leave their racing days behind them, but not Billy Elliot. He needs a good twenty minutes of all-out running twice a day, so Tom and I do a trade-off. I run with Billy, and Tom handles my taxes and anything that has to do with money.

I took the mirrored elevator to Tom’s floor, knocked lightly on his door to let him and Billy know I was there, and let myself in with my key. Tom yelled hello from the kitchen, and Billy met me in the foyer grinning and wagging his tail in absolute ecstasy. I love that about dogs. They don’t stand back and make you work at being friends with them, they’re your best friend the minute they see you.

I got Billy Elliot’s leash from the closet and went to stand in the kitchen doorway. Tom had his laptop computer open on the table, and he looked up at me with a friendly grin. Not as friendly as Billy Elliot’s, but friendly. If Tom were a dog, he’d be a standard poodle. He has short curly black hair, round black eyes, and a round face. When he’s working, he wears round glasses with black rims that make him look a little bit like a grown-up Harry Potter.

Tom’s on his computer a lot. I suppose he researches things for business. Maybe he also e-mails and tweets and chats and blogs, I don’t know. I’m the only person in the western hemisphere who doesn’t do any of those things, and I don’t ever intend to. But occasionally I need the kind of information that computer-savvy people can get in a trice—whatever a trice is—and when I do, I throw myself on Tom’s mercy.

I said, “You know that football player named Cupcake Trillin?”

“I know somebody got killed in his house this morning.”

Bad news really travels fast.

“I’ve just been wondering, you know, where he’s from. Could you look that up?”

Tom gave me a calculating look, probably the way he scans a list of numbers when he suspects some of them are wrong. “He’s from Louisiana.”

Sports fans always know where sports stars came from. They may not know where their best friends grew up, but they know all the statistics about their favorite athletes.

“Yeah, but
where
in Louisiana? Like where did he go to high school?”

Flat voiced, Tom said, “You want to know where Cupcake Trillin went to high school.”

“I just wondered.”

“I don’t mind looking it up, but you know him. Why don’t you just ask him?”

Billy Elliot had come to sniff at the backs of my knees, a not-so-subtle reminder that he and I had some running to do.

I slapped Billy’s leash against my open palm. “The Trillins won’t be home until tomorrow night. You know how it is when you start wondering about something and you want to know
right then
or you’ll never get it out of your mind. Like the name of a movie star that you can’t remember.”

Tom gave me a long hard look. He obviously thought I had some other reason for asking, but he was too polite to say so. “I’ll do a search while you and Billy run.”

Billy Elliot shoved his head against my thigh, and I bent and snapped his leash on his collar. Tom watched me the entire time. I could feel question marks pelting me, but I led Billy out of the apartment without giving Tom any excuses for wanting to know where Cupcake had gone to high school. I figured I’d take it one step at a time.

Tom’s condo building has a parking lot with a green oval in the middle. Cars park around the perimeter of the oval, and the blacktop driving area makes a perfect track for Billy Elliot to pretend he’s back chasing a mechanical rabbit while humans in the stands cheer and wave and slosh beer on one another. He’s very considerate of the fact that I’m two-legged and therefore slow. On the first lap he takes it easy, or at least runs at a pace he considers easy. I gallop along behind him and try not to wheeze. But by the third or fourth lap he’s decided that the blonde behind him has had plenty of warm-up time. He stretches his body out and goes for broke while I sort of leap and lurch to keep up with him. When we’re done, he’s grinning and whipping his tail in pure joy, and I’m a sweaty, red-faced, quivering blob.

On the way up in the mirrored elevator, I sagged against one wall and eyed my rumpled reflection. Even though Billy and I go through the same routine twice a day, I’m always impressed at the way he glories in the fact that he’s designed for speed. The animal kingdom has its natural athletes the same way humans do. And, like humans, if they’re not allowed to be what they were designed to be, they get depressed or mean.

At Tom’s apartment, I hung Billy’s leash on its hook in the foyer closet while Billy trotted to the kitchen to wag his tail at Tom by way of saying, “I had a really good time, Dad!”

I followed him, got a glass, filled it at the sink, and leaned on the counter while I drank it.

Tom tapped some keys on his computer to bring up a screen. “Cupcake Trillin’s birth name was Alvin. He’s from Thibodaux, Louisiana, which is the parish seat of Lafourche Parish. Has about fourteen thousand people and is about seventy-five miles southwest of New Orleans. Cupcake played for the Thibodaux High School Tigers and graduated in 2002. Got a sports scholarship to Tulane, played for the Green Wave, then signed with the Bucs right out of college.”

“The Green Wave?”

Tom looked up with pity. “That’s the Tulane football team.”

“Oh.”

I cleared my throat. “Uh, could you look up another name?”

Tom’s round eyes became oval, as if he knew the other name was the one I really was interested in.

“What name?”

“Weiland.” I spelled it for him.

“Got a first name?”

I cleared my throat again. It seemed to have acquired a lump.

“Briana.”

“As in the name of the model they say was in Cupcake Trillin’s house when somebody was murdered? The one they’re looking for?”

“She turned herself in. They’re not looking for her anymore.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It would be in that town where Cupcake is from.”

His fingers went into a holding pattern above the keys while he stared at me. “Are you saying they know each other?”

I erased the idea with the palm of my hand. “I just heard something about Briana being from that same town. I don’t know if it’s true. Even if it is, that doesn’t mean they know each other.”

Tom bent back to the computer keyboard but after a while shook his head.

“If I search for ‘Briana,’ I get a ton of articles. She was on the cover of
Vogue
and
Sports Illustrated
. Hung out with all the other big-name models. Looks like she’s partied with every rock star in the world, too, not to mention some prime ministers and a few kings. But I don’t find any mention of the name Weiland.”

He clicked on a link, read some text, and wrinkled his nose.

“She was tight with a Serbian gangster who was arrested for shipping heroin in a crate of counterfeit Gucci watches. He skipped off before his trial and went to a beach resort. Apparently hid out in plain sight for a long time. Took a false name, threw big parties for people like Briana, generally lived it up. Somebody tipped off the police and got a big reward. The guy got a four-year prison sentence, but another inmate killed him the first week.”

Tom looked at me over the tops of his glasses. He looked a bit like the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland.
“This babe is a piece of work.”

Briana hadn’t struck me as a woman who held many ethical values of any kind, so I wasn’t surprised that she had cozied up to a criminal. But my interests were a lot closer to home, like where Briana had grown up, and if she had known Cupcake when she was a kid.

I said, “I guess Briana’s not from Louisiana, then.”

“Wait, I’ll check Louisiana birth records.”

He tapped some more keys, leaned to read the screen, tapped more, wiggled the mouse thing more, and then shook his head.

I said, “So she lied.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe her birth was recorded under a different name.”

“But if she were from Cupcake’s town, wouldn’t the name come up in some way?”

“Search engines only go to words that are registered somewhere or have been in the news or have a record of previous searches. If she got a reward for something like perfect school attendance in junior high, a search engine wouldn’t catch that.”

Which meant I didn’t know more than I had before. Briana had said she’d lied about where she’d come from, but maybe she’d lied about lying. The only way I would find out for sure if she’d really known Cupcake when they were kids was to ask him. And since it really wasn’t any of my business, I’d have to decide if there was good reason to tell him what Briana had told me. Good reason other than satisfying my curiosity and giving Cupcake a chance to prove to me that he wasn’t a liar.

I thanked Tom and left him looking suspicious and puzzled. I felt the same way, just not about myself.

Back on Midnight Pass Road, I headed north. My next client was about a mile away on the Gulf side, so I got into the left turning lane and waited for a break in traffic. A white Jag convertible with a male driver whizzed by in the southbound lane. The Jag was the same model as the Jag Briana drove.

Now here’s the thing about having been a law enforcement officer. For the rest of your life, you notice the numbers on license plates. Some area of your brain registers them and retains them even when you don’t consciously intend to. I could see the Jag’s license plate in my rearview mirror, and the plate was the same as Briana’s. The light changed, but instead of turning left, I made a U-turn and followed the Jag.

Call me nosy, but I wanted to know who was driving Briana’s car.

8

So many tourists come to the Key that we locals are accustomed to driving behind cars that stop at every intersection while the drivers peer down a tree-lined lane that might or might not be the one they’re looking for. But the driver of the Jag sailed on as if he was familiar with the terrain and knew exactly where he was going. Near the southern Bay side of the Key, the Jag whipped a fast left turn that sent shell dust flying from under his wheels. I followed him onto a lane where big estates and small villas kept company among palms and live oaks and sea grape. The Jag pulled into one of the curvy driveways leading to a stucco two-story, neither mansion nor modest villa. I drove straight ahead, watching the driver in my rearview mirror. He got out of the car, hurried in a measured trot to the front door, and opened it without knocking or ringing a bell.

I slowed the Bronco to a crawl and stopped at the curb. I felt stupid. What had I expected, that the driver would get out and hold up a sign for me that told me his name and his relationship with Briana? He had entered the house as if he lived there, which told me nothing. He had left Briana’s car in the driveway, so he wasn’t afraid he’d be caught out for driving it.

I sat and considered my options. I could call Ethan and ask him if he knew who had Briana’s car, and why. But if I did that, Ethan would know that I was sticking my nose into a place where it definitely had no business being stuck. Besides, he might not know the answer. He had introduced Briana to her defense attorney, but that was his only involvement in the case. Unlike me, Ethan minded his own business.

The other option was that I could be like Ethan. I could drive away, take care of my pet clients, wait like the rest of the world to find out if Briana had killed the woman in Cupcake’s house or if some phantom killer had come in the house while Briana was getting dressed. I could stop thinking about Briana’s lies and secrets. I could stop thinking about Cupcake’s lies and secrets. I could concentrate on my own lies and secrets.

A sharp tapping on my window made my head jerk around so fast I heard my neck pop. A broad-faced woman with frizzy lavender hair was looking in at me with a smirky smile that said she found my presence rude and disrespectful and that she was looking forward to telling me so.

I stretched my lips in a pretend smile and lowered the window.

She said, “This is a private street. Are you lost?”

I said, “I’m, um, I’m looking for a lost cat.”

Her gaze became a shade less haughty. A lost person didn’t get her respect, but a lost cat did. “What kind of lost cat?”

My mind zipped to the place where big fat falsehoods live. There was a large yellow cat there.

“He’s yellow. And white. Big. Longhair. Looks like a Dreamsicle.”

For a second, her face fell at some secret disappointment. Then she waved her arm in an excited arc.

“Well, what do you know about that! He’s in my house! I was going to run an ad about him! Come on in!”

That’s the trouble with lying. Sometimes your lies rise up and smile at you and there’s nothing you can do except take their hand and pretend you’re friends.

Feeling like an idiot, I slunk out of the Bronco and followed the lavender-haired woman up her driveway to her villa. She was built like a sweet potato, with the retired Floridian woman’s pull-on white knit pants and loose top. Her right foot must have been sore, because she tilted a bit to the left. With a genuinely nice smile, she held the front door open, and I dragged my own feet inside. It was a typical single retiree’s villa: open floor plan with a bar separating the kitchen from the living area, lots of glass to let in the sun, creamy white tile floor, rattan furniture with creamy white linen cushions, creamy white walls hung with big splashy watercolors of sailboats on blue water under blue skies. A big white and yellow long-haired cat was draped over the top of a chair. He looked extremely contented.