The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (15 page)

When Michael judged that enough time had passed, he went back to the grill and put Ella’s portion on a plate and set it on the floor—cats shouldn’t have anything with onion in it, so he hadn’t marinated it. She had already hopped to the deck floor with twitching whiskers, and attacked her chunk of beef with all the ferocity of a wild feline leaping on a small rodent in the woods. Cats love to pretend like that.

Michael picked up one of his knives that he keeps so sharp that I don’t like to even get close to them. He sliced the steak very thin and on the diagonal because it’s more tender that way. He piled several slices on our plates and moistened them with some of the marinade he’d heated on the grill. I added a scoop of scalloped potatoes from the casserole dish.

I had stopped thinking about Briana and the murder. I had stopped thinking about Guidry and Ethan. I had stopped thinking completely and simply let myself be.

Some moments are so perfect you wish you could freeze them forever. Right then, sitting under a pink-flushed sky and preparing to share a delicious meal with my big brother and Ella, was one of those moments.

13

While we ate, Michael filled me in on his last twenty-four-hour hitch. A fire had broken out in a mall restaurant kitchen during the night and threatened to spread to its neighbors. It had taken several hours to get it completely extinguished, then more time to get their equipment back on the truck. Then just as they got back to the station, another call had come in, for a residential fire. It had taken the rest of the night to get that put out and to make sure no sparks had drifted to the tinder-dry vegetation in a wooded area behind the house. Following that, there’d been a kitchen grease fire that had singed some cupboards before they got there.

Out of the blue, I said, “Michael, do you remember how Mom used to dress?”

His eyes narrowed. “I remember the times she was too drunk to
get
dressed.”

“I mean her sense of style. She had great taste, you have to give her that. Things like when to stop with the jewelry, or the handbag that matches the shoes. No matter how carelessly she might have seemed to choose what she wore, it was all carefully considered so nothing was done to excess and everything looked fresh and original. That takes an innate sense of style.”

“You think that makes up for everything else?”

I took a deep breath. Michael has more bitter memories of our mother than I do because he bore the brunt of her alcoholic carelessness.

“I talked to a dressmaker today who knew Mom when she was young. She said Mom was just desperate to get away from here.”

“Well, she got away.”

I could tell Michael was in no mood to talk about our mother and how she had deserted us. To tell the truth, I was surprised that I was having softer feelings toward a woman who had walked out on us when we were already reeling from the loss of our father. Of course, she had been reeling, too, from the loss of a husband.

Unlike my fashionable mother’s, my own wardrobe tended to consist of whatever was clean, comfortable, and available. I had always liked the idea that my mother would have wept if she’d known how little she had influenced me, but perhaps she had influenced me more than I realized. Who knows whether our choices are inspired by unconscious desires to emulate or to reject? I wanted to think that I was past adolescent rebellion, but it occurred to me that I might be as stuck in contrariness as my mother had been stuck in a backwater town with nobody to admire her taste in fashion except the snowy egrets and the steely-eyed herons.

I said, “Were you able to get any sleep after you came home?”

Michael’s face relaxed. “Some, but I’m beat. I’m going to bed early.”

I did an internal debate. I’m a grown woman, and I can come and go from my own apartment any time I please, thank you very much. But I’m also a member of a family, and if my car drives off at a time when I’m usually crawling in bed, I’ll cause unnecessary worry.

I said, “I’m going to meet the Trillins at the airport later tonight. Their house won’t be ready for them to sleep in until tomorrow, so I’m taking them to the Ritz.”

He chewed for a moment, and I could tell he had some questions, but he was too tired to ask them.

He said, “Must be a bad feeling to know somebody got killed in your house.”

That was all we said about it. After we finished eating and cleaning up, I kissed Michael and Ella good night and skipped upstairs with a clean conscience.

When I called Cupcake’s cell phone I expected to leave a message, but he answered. He and Jancey were in the Charlotte airport waiting for their connection to Sarasota. He sounded stunned, as if he’d just been hit upside the head with a two-by-four.

He said, “We’re watching the news about that woman in our house. I don’t understand any of it.”

I said, “We have to talk. I’m going to meet you in the terminal when you get off the plane. There will probably be a ton of reporters in the arrival area, so we’ll skip baggage claim and leave by the front entrance.”

“We checked all our bags.”

“You can send somebody to get your luggage tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Shock and confusion had made him docile.

I told him I would give him and Jancey all the information I had when we were together, and ended the call. All I had to do now was get dressed in something more appropriate for traipsing through an airport and make the forty-five-minute drive to SRQ.

In case the bridge was up that connects the Key to the mainland, I left early. I wore white linen slacks and a fitted black knit top, espadrilles, and a coral beaded bracelet. I had on lipstick and looked like somebody who knew what the heck she was doing. I slung a slouchy bag over my shoulder, held the remote in one hand so I could lower the shutters as I went down the stairs, and stepped out on the porch.

I never saw what hit me.

Pain slashed clear through to my bones, a screaming, shattering assault that made me want to paint myself blue and take away all that red. Several figures brushed past me, and male voices muttered in a foreign language. Footsteps thudded, running room to room in my apartment. Something dropped on the floor and broke, and a voice was raised in a guttural sound that had to be a curse. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. I may have moaned, but I think not, because even taking a breath sent agony through my body. I don’t know how long I lay on the porch floor. I think I drifted in and out of consciousness. The men left. I knew that. I sensed more than saw them file down the stairs and fade into the darkness under the trees lining the meandering lane from the street. I inched my hand along the porch searching for something, I’m not sure what. I suppose I had some innate instinct that told me to find a cell phone and press buttons even though I couldn’t speak. Ages passed, and the pain drained away as suddenly as it had come, but it left a moldy taste in the back of my throat, a grated-cheese feeling like summer gone bad.

Gasping, I pulled myself to a sitting position and leaned against the porch wall. I ran my hands over my legs, felt each arm, ran my fingers through my hair looking for blood or a bump, shrugged my shoulders against the wall to find a sore spot. I found nothing. Even my ribs seemed unbruised. My attackers had been skilled at inflicting agonizing pain that leaves no physical trace. Like people whose profession is torture that can be denied. My guess was that they’d used a sap on me, along with an asp baton. A sap is a flat, leather, figure-eight-shaped weapon, its larger end filled with buckshot. You can hit a strong man on the back of the shoulder in just the right spot with a sap and he’ll be out of commission and nauseated for several minutes. Hit him on the side of his thigh at the right nerve point with an asp baton and he’ll be paralyzed for a while.

Gingerly, I pushed myself upright. I sidestepped to the door and looked into my apartment. It had been ransacked. Whoever had attacked me had expected to find something valuable there. I doubted that a group of men would attack me for the few items I own. An old TV, a microwave, and a clock-radio were slim pickings, but I had no idea what else they could have come for.

Michael’s house was dark. The only sound was the chirping of tree frogs and the swish of surf on the beach.

While I groped for a decision about whether to wake Michael, call 911, or both, my purse made a trilling noise. I jumped like a spooked rabbit. It trilled again and I realized it was my cell phone. I knelt and pawed through my purse and grabbed the phone. The caller ID said
TRILLIN.

My voice quavered when I answered.

Cupcake said, “We’re waiting. Where are you?”

I said, “Somebody jumped me when I came out of my apartment. Several men, I think. Knocked me unconscious, mostly. They went through my apartment looking for something, then they left. I’m still on the porch. Still shaky. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“My God, Dixie. Did you call the police?”

“Not yet.” A thought hit me, and I felt even shakier. “Cupcake, this may have something to do with what happened at your house. Has anybody spotted you at the airport?”

“We left the US Airways terminal and we’re sitting in the Delta terminal. It’s empty and nobody’s at the gate.”

“You need to get out of there without being seen.”

“I’ll take care of it. What’s your address?” He was beginning to sound more like himself, a sensible, take-charge kind of guy.

I gave him directions and went inside. I didn’t close the shutters. I didn’t expect the men to return.

My apartment was a mess.

In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. A woman with messy blond hair and wide astonished eyes stared back. I lathered my hands with germicidal soap for a long time, as if they had been contaminated by fear bacteria. I combed my hair. I brushed at spots of porch dust on my white linen pants. I felt as if I were tidying up after a dream that had been very disturbing but not real. Not the least bit real, because I had no bruises or scratches to show for it. Just messy hair and trembling hands.

I left the bathroom, got a broom and dustpan, and swept up a broken teapot in the kitchen. The kitchen wastebasket had been emptied on the floor, so I swept that trash up, too, and put it back in the basket along with shards of broken teapot. I went through every room picking up things that had been thrown on the floor. The desk drawer in my office-closet had been upended on the desktop, a jumble of paper clips, pens, packages of file cards and Post-its. My record book where I keep information about all my pet clients lay open and facedown with its pages ruffled as if somebody had thrown it in disgust.

The men who had attacked me had been pros at inflicting untraceable pain, but they’d been in such a desperate frenzy when they’d searched my place that they’d overlooked the only two places that might have yielded something valuable. It almost seemed as if they had taken their cue from movie sets with trashed apartment scenes—things tossed on the floor and the obligatory broken pottery, but nothing that couldn’t be set right. They hadn’t noticed that one of the tiles in my office-closet floor is removable. If they had, they would have found a safe where I keep a will and a few pieces of my grandmother’s jewelry. They hadn’t pulled my bed away from the wall, either. If they had, they would have found the hidden drawer built into its dark side where I keep the personal guns my husband and I used when we were deputies.

It was close to eleven o’clock when I heard the growl of a car engine downstairs. I went outside and leaned over the porch railing. The sky had darkened to dark purple, and a half-moon bathed the world in silver light. In its glow, I watched Cupcake and Jancey get out of a nondescript sedan. They moved heavily, as if the weight of gravity had pushed them closer to the earth.

I called, “Up here!”

Jancey led the way, both of them looking up at me with concerned faces. Jancey looked drawn and stiff. Cupcake’s eyes were full of red road maps. The first time I met Cupcake, I’d thought he was the scariest-looking man I’d ever seen, but his habitual scowl was a protective shield to hide the sweetest, tenderest heart in the world. That tender heart was housed in a body roughly the size and color of an upended shiny black Volkswagen. A Volkswagen with the whitest teeth and the cutest smile I’d ever seen on anybody over the age of two.

I said, “Rough trip?”

Cupcake said, “A couple across the aisle had a baby that cried practically the entire way.”

Jancey said, “Twenty-two hours is a long time to sit, even with layovers when we could stretch our legs.”

Jancey was almost as tall as Cupcake, smart as a whip, and pretty the way Michelle Obama is pretty, with a natural elegance and warmth that can’t be faked. She handled Cupcake the way a mother cat handles her kittens. Gently but firmly.

We did a kind of group hug there on my porch, with lots of shoulder patting.

I said, “What happened at the airport?”

Cupcake grinned, flashing the dimples that turned his face into a cherub’s. “I just explained to a brother skycap that I needed to get out without cameras following me. He took us down some back hallways to an employee parking lot and gave me his car keys. I told him I’d get the car back to him tomorrow.”

He sounded as if that was a perfectly reasonable thing for a skycap to have done. I guess if you’re a famous athlete, you expect favors like that.

I motioned them inside. “The guys who hit me also broke my only teapot, but I can make individual mugs in the microwave.”

Jancey said, “I’ll help you.”

Cupcake said, “I’d rather have a beer if you have one.”

He sank his wide bulk onto the love seat and looked around my spartan apartment while Jancey and I made two mugs of tea and opened a bottle of Corona.

I said, “Did you eat on the plane?”

Jancey shook her head. “We planned to eat when we got home.”

“Oh, Jancey, I’m sorry!”

I opened my minuscule freezer and peered in at a frost-encrusted box of enchiladas. She visibly shuddered.

I closed the freezer, got out some halfway decent cheeses from the refrigerator, and made a hurried plate of cheese and crackers and sliced apple. Michael would have been able to give them a satisfying meal. I gave them cheese and crackers.