The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (5 page)

Her voice had gone brisk and sure of itself. I didn’t know if what she described was possible, but she sure sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

“What about the entrance gate? What about the walls around the whole place?”

She smiled. “Parked my Jag out of sight on the other side of the wall, climbed up and clipped the razor ribbon hidden under the vines, pushed it aside, tossed a plastic ladder over, and came over. I hid the ladder behind the vines so I could climb back up. The wall where I cut the wire is behind some trees, and nobody pays any attention to a woman jogging early in the morning.”

My hand holding my sandwich sank to the table. This woman was not a dithery nut. She was an accomplished break-in artist, a calculating scaler of razor-topped walls, a woman with wire clippers and experience at slipping into places impassible to everybody else.

“I take it this isn’t your first breaking-and-entering job.”

That smile again, cool and sure of itself. “Hardly.”

“You supplement your modeling income with a little theft on the side?”

This time she actually chuckled, as if she found me drolly amusing. “I go in people’s houses, but I don’t steal anything. I just like to get a look at other people’s private lives. You might say it’s a hobby, like stamp collecting or softball.”

“Okay, so you didn’t break into Cupcake’s house to steal. What was your reason? Why were you stalking him?”

Her smug smile died. “Is that what he thinks? That I was
stalking
him?”

I couldn’t keep my mouth from saying it anymore. “Are you
nuts
? Of course that’s what he thinks!”

Her red mouth turned down at the corners. It trembled. She raised her fingers to her lips to comfort them. A tear trickled down her cheek from behind the dark shades. Her shoulders sagged as if a great weight had been laid on them.

“I thought he would understand. Of all the people in the world, I trusted Cupcake to understand.”

My own shoulders went a few inches lower, too. Whatever the woman carried around in her disturbed head sent out heavy, oppressive waves.

I said, “Here’s the deal, Briana. A woman was murdered inside the home of Cupcake and Jancey Trillin. You were in the house at the time the woman was killed. Now you say you have a history of breaking and entering. If you think I’m going to be moved by some sentimental crap about your mystical connection with Cupcake, you underestimate my intelligence. Unless you have a credible explanation for what happened—other than ‘she was already dead when I walked in on her’—I’m out of here and you’re on your own.”

Her head raised, and I could feel anger in the eyes behind the sunshades. But she must have heard reality in what I’d said, because she sighed and pushed her sandwich aside as if she were clearing the deck to get down to business.

“I’ve known Cupcake Trillin practically all my life. We lived in a little parish in Louisiana where half the population is below the poverty line. Women marry in their teens, have a passel of babies by the time they’re twenty, fry up fish their men catch in the bayous, grow old fast from worry and work. Men, especially black men, work in sugarcane fields the same way Appalachian men work in coal mines. It’s what their fathers and grandfathers have always done, and unless they’re extra smart or extra talented, it’s what they’ll do, too.”

Her voice trembled, and she took a sip of coffee.

“I make it sound as if it was all grim, but I have good memories, too. Like the man who came to our back door twice a week selling fresh fish from an ice-filled box on the back of his truck. He sold shrimp, too, right off the boats. At certain times of the year, he had crawfish, and my folks would order fifty pounds and have a party. They boiled the crawfish in huge pots with lots of cayenne pepper thrown in to make the crayfish spit out the sand. All their friends would gather in the backyard, and we’d suck meat from crawfish tails and drink cold beer.”

I made a get-on-with-it motion, and her pale skin flushed pink.

“Cupcake and I were the odd ones in our families. We didn’t fit in, didn’t want the same things they wanted for us. It was the same way in school. We were smarter than most everybody else, including the teachers. And we laughed at things the other kids thought were holy and important. Nobody else wanted us, so we sort of drifted together.”

“You were friends?”

“More than friends.”

“Lovers?”

That faint blush again. “We weren’t like that. We just sort of dared each other to go beyond what the world expected and then supported each other while we did it.”

She let a beat go by as if she were watching images float by inside her head.

She said, “I would have followed the devil himself if he’d offered me a chance to get out of that little town.” She stopped and flashed an ironic smile. “Perhaps I did.”

I looked at the eyeball-sized emerald on her hand and thought that the devil was certainly generous.

She said, “Cupcake escaped because he was an outstanding athlete. I escaped by leaving my family and everything I knew, and I’ve never been back.”

“You just left? Just like that?”

Her lips tightened. “Sorry. The truth doesn’t come easily. I’ve lied so much about my family I’ve almost come to believe my own lies. My official bio says I was orphaned in a little village in Switzerland when my parents were killed in an avalanche, but a kind couple adopted me and brought me to the United States. Minnesota, to be exact. I say I grew up on a remote farm and that my adoptive parents home-schooled me until I was eighteen and then I left home with their blessings. The truth is I was born in Louisiana on the fork of the Mississippi River to a couple who never went beyond grade school and had about six teeth between them. My white-trash uncle molested me from the time I was six. I killed him when I was sixteen. Shot him through the head with a double-barreled shotgun my father used for killing rattlesnakes. Then I took off. Worked as a maid for a while, turned some tricks, and then got discovered by a modeling agency.”

Her voice had the gritty underpinning of harsh truth.

I said, “You left out the part about breaking into people’s houses.”

She took a deep breath. “That’s how Cupcake and I got the money for books and shoes, clothes, haircuts, things we couldn’t have had otherwise.” With a sly smile, she said, “Cupcake mostly did it so he could buy a pair of Nikes.”

My jaw dropped. Cupcake was the most honest man I knew.

She grinned. “We were very young then. And we never took anything truly valuable. We wouldn’t have recognized anything valuable anyway, and the fence we took things to insisted that we stick to small things that he could sell easily.”

“That’s how you learned to break through security systems?”

“No, that came later. Cupcake didn’t have anything to do with that. I learned all that on my own.”

I could feel my cheeks firm up, the way a face does when it’s trying not to show shock or disgust.

She said, “After I left the parish, I never had any contact with Cupcake, but I followed his career. He was the only person in my life I could depend on to always be kind to me.”

“So you showed your appreciation by coming here and breaking into his house?”

Her lips trembled. “You can’t know what it’s like to be famous. To be
Briana
. Everybody in the world wants something from me. I haven’t lived my own life for a long time. I’ve lived for agents, accountants, photographers, designers, reporters, all those people sucking my breath out of my body. I started remembering what it was like when it was just me and Cupcake against the world. I didn’t really think I could make that happen, but I wanted to be close to him, just absorb some of his kindness and calm. I knew he was away from home at the camp he runs for kids. I didn’t think it would hurt anybody if I borrowed his life for a while. Until you walked in, I was like a kid playing house. I guess I took it too far.”

She was right in thinking that Cupcake’s plans had been to spend time at the kids’ camp. That had been reported in the news, and I didn’t correct her about where he’d really been.

I had a feeling that Briana had left out a lot of her history, but I believed parts of what she’d told me. Fame is hard for anybody to handle, even mature people with firm philosophies. For a poor, uneducated, sexually molested small-town girl who’d had to use every wile and wit she had to escape a life of grinding poverty, it would have been a crushing assault.

Nevertheless, she had not explained the dead woman in Cupcake’s house—and the more I listened to her, the farther I crawled into a dark tunnel that had no exit.

5

I said, “Okay, I’ll buy the reason you were in Cupcake’s house. Now tell me about the woman.”

She leaned closer to me. “I swear to you I don’t know who she was. I’m telling the truth about finding her dead on the floor when I came back from the bedroom.”

“And you just bolted and ran?”

She hesitated. “I took time to restore the security system after I was away from the back door.” Her voice had risen an octave.

With great deliberation, I took my tartlet from its little clear box and took a bite. I studied her face while I chewed. Her face went pink while I washed the tartlet bite down with coffee.

I said, “You’re lying.”

“I swear it’s the truth.”

“Considering your track record when it comes to truth, I’m not moved.”

I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew they were fixed on me, waiting for me to dissect her lie. Only problem was, I didn’t know what her lie had been. Growing up with an alcoholic mother whose lies had slid all over the place, I’d learned early to detect the presence of an untruth in the midst of candor, but it was like a whiff of something gone bad in a refrigerator full of good food. You know something in there is spoiled, but you don’t know what it is. I still believed somebody else had killed the woman in Cupcake’s house, but either Briana had lied about not recognizing the woman or she had lied about when and how she’d run away from the house.

I said, “If you didn’t kill the woman, then somebody else was in the house while you were there.”

She shook her head too emphatically. “I was alone.”

“You think the woman slit her own throat? Disposed of the knife before she fell dead? Damned clever of her.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled in jerky bursts of air. “I meant I didn’t have a companion. Somebody else must have broken in while I was there, and I didn’t know about it.”

“If that had happened, the security company would have got an alarm and sent somebody to investigate. Nobody came.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

I finished my fruit tartlet and considered what to do next. I had to call Sergeant Owens. I had to call Cupcake and Jancey. I had to tell them that I’d talked to Briana without anybody’s permission. I fervently wished I’d never done it. In probing Briana’s story, I’d found out things about Cupcake that he probably didn’t want known. Even worse, I’d provided a dress rehearsal for the interrogation she’d get from the sheriff’s department. My questions had given Briana a heads-up on what the homicide detective—whoever that was going to be—would ask her. Because I had felt empathy for a woman I’d thought was deranged, I might have skewed a murder investigation.

She said, “Are you going to betray me?”

The question was so stark and direct that it took me by surprise. That may be one of the differences between people who have the drive and determination to be internationally famous and the rest of us. Along with the drive comes a loss of social subterfuge.

I said, “I’m not the only person who’s seen you. It’s inevitable that somebody will recognize you. But they won’t call the cops, they’ll call
USA Today
or Katie Couric. And when they do, you’ll be stuck knowing that somebody used you for their own gain, and it’ll make you even less willing to trust people.”

“Psychology so early in the morning. And from a pet sitter, no less.”

“Most people believe fashion models have the brains of a flea. Those same people belittle the intelligence of pet sitters.”

She colored. “I’m sorry. And you’re right. Every time I’m hurt I grow more paranoid.”

I said, “Do you have a lawyer?”

“Just one who handles contracts.”

“Do you know a defense lawyer?”

She shook her head, and even her hands turned paler. “Do you know one?”

I thought of Ethan Crane, and just the thought of him made me feel lighter. Suddenly moving with quick efficiency, I whipped out my cell phone and dialed Ethan’s number.

When his receptionist answered, I said, “Tell Mr. Crane that Dixie Hemingway has an emergency and will be at his office in five minutes.”

Doubtfully, she said, “I’ll tell him, but I’m not sure—”

All I’d wanted to know was whether Ethan was in, so I clicked her off and crammed our cups and sandwich leavings—Briana had barely touched her sandwich, and she didn’t even open her tartlet box—into the cardboard tray. Briana watched me get up and toss the tray into a trash bin, watched me walk back to our table.

I said, “I’m going to drive to the office of an attorney I know. If you choose to, you can follow me and go in with me and tell your story. If you choose not to, we’re done.”

I spun around and did a fast clip out of the pavilion and down the steps to the parking lot. I got in my Bronco while Briana made a white blur behind me charging to her Jaguar. The woman could move fast when she wanted to. I peeled out, and the Jag kept up. I was both glad and disappointed that she was sticking to me. It would go a lot better for her if she got a lawyer and turned herself in. It would go a lot better for me if she ditched me and ran.

I should be ashamed to admit it, but the reason my blood tingled on the way to Ethan Crane’s office wasn’t solely from guilty excitement at being on the sidelines of a murder investigation. My blood always tingled like that when I thought of Ethan. I hadn’t seen him for a good while, and then just briefly in the parking lot of the Village Diner, but Ethan and I had always set off lust sparks in each other. There had been a time when I’d had to make a decision about pursuing romantic possibilities with Ethan, but I had wanted Guidry’s slightly dangerous company more than Ethan’s reliable solidness.