The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (4 page)

A bell over the door announced my arrival, and Marge Preston bustled from the back surrounded by the same halo. Like her velvet chairs, Marge is plump and soft, and her fine white hair stands out around her face like cat whiskers.

I said, “Marge, I have a bit of an emergency here. There was an incident in their house and the police are there, so I had to get them out fast.”

As if she was accustomed to people bringing cats to her because “an incident” had happened in their home, Marge didn’t bat an eye.

I said, “Their owners are in Italy, but they’re going to come home as soon as they can. Their names are Elvis and Lucy.”

“The owners?”

“No, the cats. You can use my name as the owner.”

That got a raised eyebrow. “So their owner is somebody famous?”

I grinned. “Somebody anonymous.”

Marge knelt to open Lucy’s case, and Lucy raised her head to sniff at Marge’s fingertips.

I said, “Lucy makes friends a little faster than Elvis, but they’re both very sweet cats.”

Marge lifted both cats out and cradled one in each arm. They both went limp with trust. Marge brings that out in a cat.

She said, “Any special needs?”

“No, they’re easy. I’ll let you know when the owners will be back.”

I was already backing toward the front door, ready to hightail it to my other clients.

Marge said, “Take the carriers with you.”

Chastened, I came back to collect the carriers. I didn’t take time to fold them, just carried them out and tossed them in the back of the Bronco to use when I brought the cats home. Elvis had left his scrap of paper in his carrier, and I grinned to myself when I thought how put out he would be when he remembered it.

The delay at Cupcake’s house had thrown me an hour late. On an ordinary day, I get up at 4:00
A.M.
and see eight or nine pets, spending about thirty minutes at each house. With travel time and the occasional delay, my morning visits are usually over by nine or nine thirty, and by then I’m starved for breakfast and sleep. Now it was already close to eight o’clock, and I still had four pet visits to make, some with multiple pets in one house. On top of that, I would have to give an interview to a new homicide detective. It was going to be a long morning.

I didn’t realize I was being tailed until I left the second house of the four on my list. I had turned onto Midnight Pass Road, and a white Jaguar convertible I’d seen behind me earlier swung too close behind me. Convertibles aren’t good choices for tailing somebody. The woman driver was clearly visible. Her head was snugly wrapped in a printed scarf, and she wore huge dark shades, but she was definitely a woman. A pale woman with bright red lipstick. I couldn’t see her fingernails, but I would have bet good money that the hands with a death grip on the steering wheel had scarlet fingertips.

I said, “Oh, great! That’s just
terrific
!”

My first thought was that Briana had switched from stalking Cupcake to stalking me, which had a kind of sick glamour to it. My second thought was that Briana had just killed a woman in Cupcake’s house, which detracted a lot from the sick glamour.

Instinctively, my hand went to my cell phone to call Guidry and tell him the woman who’d murdered another woman in Cupcake Trillin’s house was following me. But then I remembered that Guidry had gone away. The murder wasn’t his problem, and neither was I.

The car in front of me stopped for a red light, and I oozed to a stop behind its bumper. The Jaguar jerked to a stop, and the driver threw open the door and ran toward the passenger door of the Bronco. I could have locked the door. To this day, I don’t know why I sat there like a dope and let Briana hurl herself into the seat beside me. She wore a thin white linen shirt hanging loose over slubby white linen pants, but she wasn’t naked under them. In fact, the lace bra under her shirt seemed designed to be seen. The bra probably had an Italian label and cost as much as my Bronco.

She seemed more afraid of me than I was of her.

“Please,” she said. “I need help. As Cupcake’s friend, I’m begging you.”

I said, “In the first place, you’re not Cupcake’s friend. You’re a stalker who broke into his house and killed somebody. In the second place, I’m a pet sitter, not somebody who can give you help.”

Her red lips pushed out in the way lips do when people are confused. “I meant
you
were Cupcake’s friend.”

“Well, that’s true. But I can’t help you.”

“You’re the only one who
can
help me! And I didn’t kill anybody! I know it looks that way, but I swear I didn’t do it!”

I am both blessed and cursed with an uncanny ability to tell when a person is lying. I don’t know if it’s some genetic trait or the fact that I had an alcoholic mother who lied as skillfully as she put on lipstick. Whatever the reason, I’m sort of a flesh-and-blood lie detector machine, and I didn’t think Briana was lying. I thought she was a complete kook, a neurotic bundle of fantasies, an immature woman crammed with silly dreams, but I didn’t believe she was a killer.

The light turned green, and cars behind me began to honk. Briana opened the Bronco’s door and got out, but turned back with a pleading look that would have melted a steel beam. My mind whirled with ideas, each of which I rejected before it was completed.

I said, “Look, I have to take care of some pets. I’ll be finished in about an hour and a half. Meet me at the pavilion at Siesta Beach.”

She half-sobbed, “Thank you!” and slammed the door shut.

As I drove on, I watched in the rearview mirror as she sprinted to the Jaguar. My hands were calm on the steering wheel, but my brain was in utter chaos. It screamed that I was the dumbest, weirdest, craziest person in the universe. It hollered that I should call Sergeant Owens and tell him where Briana was. It thundered that talking to Briana was a form of betrayal. A betrayal of the faith Sergeant Owens had in me, of the faith Cupcake and Jancey had in me, of the faith
I
had in me. Everything it said was true.

I told myself I should have nothing to do with the situation. The homicide detective handling the case might not have Guidry’s sharp intelligence, but my sole responsibility was to see that Elvis and Lucy were cared for. I should pick up the phone and call Sergeant Owens and not even think about keeping my promise to Briana to talk to her.

But the entire time I was telling myself all that, I was remembering a time in my own life when I had teetered on the edge of insanity. I had never been so crazy that I’d become delusional like Briana, but perhaps whatever had happened in Cupcake’s house had snapped her back to normal and she was scrambling to claw her way back to the real world. When I had been crazy, kind people had offered me the hand I needed to get back to myself. Briana had reached out to me, and it seemed to me that it would be hypocritical to turn her down since I had once been in such need of help myself.

While I had that internal debate with myself, I continued driving without calling Sergeant Owens. As if I was being moved by forces outside myself. As if it wasn’t my choice to cross a line from which there would be no return.

Funny how we can play games with ourselves like that.

4

On ordinary days, I have breakfast at the Village Diner after I’ve finished my morning rounds. But this wasn’t an ordinary day. This was a day when I’d stupidly made an appointment with a famous model who was a prime murder suspect. Nevertheless, I was famished, so I crossed the north bridge to the mainland and hurried into Morton’s Gourmet Market, where the sandwich guy is nice enough to custom-make my favorite sandwich in all the world: baked turkey breast on pumpernickel bread with fresh tarragon mayonnaise.

While he stacked layers of turkey on dark bread, I filled a large to-go cup with coffee and went to the bakery department and asked for a fruit tartlet. As the bakery woman handed over the tartlet in its little see-through box, she said, “Anything else?”

I shook my head, then wondered if Briana had eaten breakfast. It’s a curse I have. Like my brother, I want to make sure nobody in the world goes hungry. Unlike him, I don’t want to cook for people, I just want to see them eat.

I said, “Um, make that two tartlets.”

I filled another big cup with coffee and went back to the sandwich counter, where my turkey on pumpernickel waited.

I said, “I need another one, please. And two large pickles.”

The sandwich guy turned to build another one, and I snagged two bags of chips from a rack. I was now doubly wrong. I was not only guilty of planning a secret meeting with a woman wanted for murder, I intended to feed her.

A sweet-faced woman stepped to the deli counter between two little girls, each gripping one of her hands as if she were a maypole. Identical twins, the girls looked to be about six years old, the age Christy would have been if she’d lived. I had a momentary hardening of veins and muscles and lungs, an involuntary blend of rage and yearning and jealousy that this woman had two children and I had none.

The sandwich man said, “Looks like you need something to carry all that in.”

While I forced myself back to sensibility, he went to some other part of the store and came back with a neat cardboard tray big enough for sandwich cartons, tartlet cartons, and chips, with cutouts for the two coffees.

I thanked him profusely, smiled at the cute little girls, and carried the tray to the Bronco filled with admiration for the unsung people who recognize homely needs and fill them with clever inventions like carry-out trays.

It’s only a quick scoot from Morton’s across the bridge and around to Siesta Beach. As I carried the clever cardboard tray and its goodies up the steps to the pavilion area, I realized that I didn’t really expect Briana to meet me there. She might be crazy, but she would expect me to be smart enough to alert the sheriff’s department about our meeting. Even if she had figured out that I was dumb enough not to call them, she would have realized by now that she had mistaken Cupcake’s cat sitter for a person with his importance and power. She would know I couldn’t do a thing for her.

Realizing that was a big relief. I could relax under the shade of the pavilion roof and have breakfast in solitude. I would eat one of the turkey sandwiches and drink one of the coffees, and if I wanted more coffee I could drink Briana’s. I would eat my tartlet and save the other for later. And when I left, I would offer Briana’s sandwich and chips to some young person who looked hungry and broke. I was not only going to enjoy a meal at the beach, I would have the pleasure of giving away food. I was Lady Bountiful in cat-hairy shorts.

A woman at one of the tables waved to me. I stopped with the little cardboard tray clutched close to my chest and peered at her. She had removed the scarf from around her head and stuffed all her red hair up under a big floppy white hat. She still wore the huge dark shades, and her lips were still bright red. She stood up and walked toward me. She moved with that sharp-shouldered, flat-assed, pointy-toed, pelvic-bone thrust that runway models use. Anybody watching her walk would know her purpose in life was to make very expensive clothes look tantalizingly desirable to very rich women.

I never felt so dowdy and fleshy in my life.

I frowned sternly at her. “Sit down! Don’t attract attention.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

She stylishly scurried back to her table while I clumped after her with my stupid cardboard tray pressed against my low-class bosom.

She didn’t even look around for law enforcement officers when I sat down across from her. She was either the most naive woman in the world or so arrogantly sure of herself that she assumed I wouldn’t have given her away.

I said, “I brought you a sandwich and coffee.”

Her red lips pursed as if she had to think about what to say. “I suppose I should eat.”

I nodded vigorously and handed over her sandwich.

“Look, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by talking to me, but you have to know you’re going to be arrested.”

Her hand was fish-belly white, with long boneless fingers. Her red nails picked at the wrapper on the sandwich and peeled it away as delicately as a cat separating what it will eat from what it disdains.

She said, “I don’t think Cupcake will have me arrested. He’s too sweet to want me in jail.”

I whipped the wrapper off my own sandwich and took a big bite. I chewed slowly, looking at her as if she were a skinny white shark that had just washed up on the beach.

I swallowed. I took a swig of coffee. She was still uncovering the mystery of her sandwich.

I said, “It’s not so much what Cupcake wants done about you. There’s the little matter of a murdered woman. The law gets pretty worked up about murder. They’ll want to know what happened in Cupcake’s house, how that woman’s throat got cut.”

Briana finished folding the wrapper back from her sandwich. She raised it to her red lips and took little rabbit nibbles at it. Her teeth were so chalk white, I almost expected them to crumble to powder from the pressure.

She said, “I’ll just explain to them that I don’t know. After you left, I knew people would come to make me leave the house, so I went to the master bedroom and changed clothes. When I came out, a bleeding woman was lying on the living room floor. I was afraid, and I ran out the back door.”

Jancey was going to be really steamed that Briana had used their bedroom.

I said, “That’s your story?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Briana, nobody in the world will believe that.”

“They will if you help me convince them.”

I chewed some more and told myself to keep my voice down, not to yell at her, not to stand up and shout, “Are you completely nuts?” because in fact she was completely nuts, and it wouldn’t change anything to point it out to her.

I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into the Trillins’ house?”

She waved a languid hand. “Oh, that was easy. I have a little handheld electronic gizmo that can disengage selected zones of the security system without alerting the security company. I blocked the zone that regulates the scanners outside the back sliding patio door. All I had to do was pick the lock. Took about ten seconds.”