The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (10 page)

Paco said, “I set the temperature, the thing dinged, so I already put the pan in the oven. I tossed the salad, too.” Paco’s one culinary expertise is that he makes a great olive oil and lemon juice salad dressing.

We high-fived.

I went to the wall of ovens and peered through the glass door of the top one. A square casserole dish sat on the rack.

“How much longer does it have to cook?”

“Uh, I think it’s been in around five minutes.”

“You didn’t set the timer?”

He looked uncertain. “He didn’t mention setting a timer.”

Paco goes out every day disguised as a criminal of the worst kind. He infiltrates gangs and wrestles killers to the ground. He’s a tough, experienced cop, and other tough, experienced cops trust him with their lives. But when it comes to heating a casserole in an oven, he has to have written instructions.

I said, “That’s okay, we’ll just watch for it to bubble and turn brown. What is it?”

He shrugged. “I only know there’s grated cheese on top.”

I smiled thanks at him. I just hate it when somebody knows something before I do.

While we waited for the cheese to bubble, Paco opened the wine and splashed some in two glasses. I made note of the fact that he was having wine for dinner because it meant he wasn’t on duty that night. In his line of work, Paco’s life depends on keeping a clear head and quick reflexes, so he’s scrupulous about avoiding alcohol before going off to deal with the scum of the world. I didn’t mention it though. When you love somebody whose everyday duties could kill them, you don’t let them see that you worry about them. You just quietly pay attention to tiny details, like fatigue shadows under their eyes and the fact that they drink wine with dinner instead of water or tea.

When we judged the cheese on the casserole sufficiently bubbling and brown, Paco manfully pulled on a pair of Michael’s oven mitts and rescued the pan from the oven. I leaped to put a trivet on the butcher block, and he set the casserole down with a triumphant flourish.

I said, “Yaaay!”

Ella waved her tail and gazed at Paco with undisguised adoration.

He switched the oven control to
OFF
, and we both took seats at the island.

Paco picked up a big serving spoon and approached the casserole like a bomb-squad cop getting ready to inspect a ticking package. He plopped big servings on each of our plates, and we both leaned over them and said, “Mmmm.”

Michael probably should have left instructions on how to dish it up, because it turned out to be seafood crepes under a creamy, cheesy, white sauce, and the crepes didn’t end up intact on our plates. I doubt that Paco noticed that, and I didn’t care. It was a perfect dinner for two people worn out by honest work that put them up against some people whose work was far from honest.

For several minutes, we didn’t make any sounds except moans of appreciation. Then Paco got a second helping and looked at me with renewed energy.

He said, “I know what happened today at Trillin’s house.”

That didn’t surprise me. More than likely, every deputy in Sarasota County knew all the particulars about the murdered woman in Cupcake’s house, just like everybody in town knew that a famous model named Briana had been there.

I scraped the last bite from my plate and took a sip of wine. “What you don’t know is that Briana followed me when I left. She wanted to talk to me, asked for my help. I don’t know if I did the right thing or not, but I met with her at the beach pavilion, and I led her to Ethan’s office. He took her to the defense attorney who went with her to turn herself in.”

Paco’s gaze was steady. If Michael had been home, he would have had steam coming from his ears when he heard what I’d done. Paco is calmer. Not less protective of me, just calmer about it.

He said, “Did she kill the woman?”

“She says she didn’t, but her story is weak. She claims she went to change her clothes after I left—which really means put on some clothes, because she was damn near naked when I went in Cupcake’s house to take care of the cats. She says when she went back to the living room the woman was on the floor dead. She says she doesn’t know who the woman was, doesn’t know who came in and killed her.”

“The investigating team said the security company has no record of her entering or leaving the front gate or the house.”

So Paco not only knew what had happened at Cupcake’s house, he knew some inside details. I let that slide without comment, but I noted it because Paco is a special investigator, not a homicide detective.

I said, “If Briana is telling the truth, she’s an accomplished thief. She told me she has an electronic gizmo that disables security systems for the few seconds it takes to go through them. Her story is that she left the house, climbed a ladder she’d conveniently hidden in those vines on the walls around Hidden Shores, got in her Jaguar parked out of sight on the other side, and waited until she saw me drive through the security gates.”

Paco sat for a moment without speaking, his dark eyes staring at nothing. I knew he was imagining what I’d described, processing it, and comparing its plausibility against what he knew of available technology.

“She’s saying she went in Trillin’s house to rob it?”

I pinched the stem of my wineglass, shifting it a fraction of an inch to and fro on the butcher block while a contest went on between my loyalty to my friend Cupcake and my trust in Paco’s wisdom and discretion.

“She says she just wanted to get close to him.”

“Creepy.”

“Paco, there’s something really weird about the connection between Cupcake and Briana. He claims he never heard of her, but she told me she and Cupcake grew up in the same little town outside New Orleans. She said they were both poor and broke into houses to steal minor things they sold. She says she ran away from home when she was sixteen after she killed an uncle who’d been molesting her.”

Paco’s face wore the expression of somebody who had heard every story in the world and only believed half of them.

I said, “She told a different story to Ethan, the same line she gives the press about being from Switzerland.”

“Which one of those stories do you believe?”

I said, “I don’t know what to believe. I asked Tom Hale to look up Cupcake on the computer. He did go to school in a little town near New Orleans. He got a football scholarship to Tulane and then went pro. Tom didn’t find records of Briana in the same town, but she could be telling the truth. But why would Cupcake lie about knowing her?”

“That’s easy. The press loves to pile on a sports hero who turns out to have clay feet. Cupcake Trillin is known for being an honest guy who does a lot of philanthropic work to benefit poor kids. If he went public about being a delinquent kid who broke into people’s houses with a girl who killed a man and then went on to be an internationally famous model, he’d either be made an idealized example of a bad kid who turned himself around, or he’d be roasted on a spit as a hypocrite. In either case, his face would be on every tabloid in the country. His entire past, his family, his friends, his every move would be scrutinized and posted on all the voyeur Internet sites.”

“Voyeur sites?”

He smiled tightly. “We used to call people who had an unhealthy interest in other people’s private business window-peepers. Now we call them social networkers. If they got a hint that Cupcake Trillin had a past with the supermodel named Briana, they’d dig into it with long spoons.”

“If he lied, he lied to his wife, too.”

“The best lies are consistent.”

“When she finds out, she’ll be hurt.”

“That’s not your problem, Dixie. And if you’re feeling hurt yourself because he lied to you, get over it. The man has to protect himself. Just because you’re friends doesn’t mean that he owes you absolute honesty about his entire life.”

He sounded so emphatic that I wondered if Paco had some secrets himself. Maybe everybody does.

He said, “While you were in Trillin’s house this morning, did you notice anything out of place? Anything that looked disturbed?”

He saw my surprise at the question and shook his head as if he were reprimanding himself. “Never mind.”

When an undercover cop who knows more than he’s supposed to know about a murder investigation asks you a direct question and then says, “Never mind,” you mind plenty. You wonder what the heck he really wants to know.

He said, “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest level of trust, how much credence do you give to Briana’s claim that she didn’t know the murdered woman?”

I took a deep breath and thought of the way Briana’s voice had sounded, how her eyes had shifted as she talked. “I’d give it a four.”

“How about the claim that she didn’t know who came in and killed the woman?”

“I’d give that a two.”

“Do you think she did the killing herself?”

“I didn’t at first because the killer would have had to be taller than Briana to slit a woman’s throat from behind. But as Ethan Crane pointed out the woman could have been knocked unconscious and lying on the floor when she was killed.”

I waited for Paco to tell me what the coroner’s report had been, because I was sure he knew. But he grasped the stem of his wineglass much the same way I had pinched mine, and studied the glass while he tilted the contents side to side.

He said, “This is bad business, Dixie. Stay out of it. You’ve done your civic duty by getting Briana to turn herself in. That was good of you. Now drop it.”

Something about his voice caused a little round ball to drop into a perfectly sized hole in my brain, like those puzzle games Michael and I played on long car trips when we were kids. If you tilted the boards exactly right, you could get every metal ball to settle into a hole. As if I had inadvertently tilted a puzzle board, I knew that Paco had information about the killing at Cupcake’s house that turned the homicide into a case of far greater import than a murder.

With his skill at disguise, Paco had got close to underworld kingpins, infiltrated treacherous white-supremacist groups, Middle Eastern terrorist groups, and local theft rings. Something about the murder in Cupcake’s house was important enough to bring Paco into its investigation. I didn’t believe it was because Cupcake was a famous football player or because Briana was a famous supermodel. The importance had to do with the identity of the murdered woman, and that was something Paco knew and was keeping to himself.

We had crossed some invisible line, and we both immediately drew back from it. I said something to lighten the mood, Paco laughed, and we got up and busied ourselves rinsing dishes, loading the dishwasher, putting away leftovers, all the homely things people do to ignore the elephant in the room.

Ella sat on her bar stool and observed us like a queen watching her subjects. When the kitchen was tidied up, I stretched to kiss Paco’s cheek, then bent to kiss the top of Ella’s head.

I said, “Thanks, Paco.”

“You’re welcome.”

He knew I wasn’t thanking him for dinner. I was thanking him for listening to my secret about talking to Briana. I knew he wouldn’t repeat it, not even to Michael. I was also thanking him for his advice about staying out of the murder investigation. It was good advice, and I intended to follow it. Mostly.

I went upstairs to my apartment wondering why the identity of a murdered woman would be kept a secret from the press. And why Paco would be involved in the investigation of the murder. I worried the idea for the rest of the evening, but when I fell asleep I was no closer to knowing the answer.

I dreamed that Cupcake and I went to a fancy restaurant where a sign was posted reading
NO RANCOR.
All the diners cut their eyes at it and tried to interpret its meaning without appearing ignorant. Cupcake finally braved the scorn of a haughty waiter and came right out and asked what the sign meant.

The waiter looked down his nose at him. “It means we’re out of rancor.”

Cupcake blinked. “Oh.”

The waiter went away, and I whispered, “What is rancor?”

“Some kind of salad green, I think. Grows wild.”

I said, “Oh yeah. I think my grandmother made rancor salad with chopped eggs and bacon. It had a bitter aftertaste.”

The waiter returned, and I said, “Tell me, is rancor a seasonal dish?”

The waiter sniffed. “We use hothouse rancor. It’s always in season, but our chef failed to get a supply today.”

Cupcake said, “What do you have in its place?”

He sneered, “Nothing takes the place of true rancor, sir.”

10

My alarm went off at 4:00
A.M.
the next morning, and I swam up from sleep trailing remnants of my dream. On my way to the bathroom, my thoughts shot to Briana on a narrow bunk in a jail cell. Splashing water on my face and twisting my hair into a ponytail, I wondered if Briana was awake, too. I imagined her pacing her cell or huddled on the floor in despair. While I got into cargo shorts and a tank top and fresh Keds, I imagined a cellmate who hated Briana because she was a raving beauty and plotted to scratch her eyes out. Outside on my porch, I decided I suffered from an overactive imagination. Besides, as Paco had pointed out, Briana wasn’t my problem.

I stopped for a minute to fill my lungs with the sea’s salty breath and get my bearings. It was my favorite time of day—that tentative period while the moon and stars negotiate with the sun, and the universe waits to see if the night’s rulers will gracefully exit and let a new day begin. A dull corrugated sea stretched toward a blurred horizon. On its surface, the reflection of retreating stars made winking lights like dying fireflies. Above it, a few desultory seabirds floated on high air currents. On the shore, a sleepy surf pretended to have every intention of getting its act together and making a bigger splash, but not just yet. I felt the same way.

Trailing my fingers on a stair railing damp with predawn dew, I went to the carport, where a trio of snowy egrets slept on the hood of my Bronco and a white pelican dozed on the roof. The pelican stretched his wings and smoothly sailed away when I opened the car door, but the egrets stayed put until I started the engine and their roosting place began to hum and vibrate. Even then they didn’t seem put out about having to move, they just politely flew away. Egrets are friendly optimists.