The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (9 page)

A Pomeranian with electric white hair trotted to sniff my Keds.

The woman said, “Don’t mind Snowball, she won’t bite.”

I smiled down at Snowball, who delicately licked my ankle.

The woman said, “The cat just showed up at my door a few days ago. I’ve been calling him Cecil. He looks like a Cecil, don’t you think? He’s a funny duck. He steals shiny things out of wastebaskets. Foil, or those lids on frozen dinners that are shiny on one side. I can’t put a single shiny thing in the wastebasket anymore. I have to take it straight to the can in the garage.”

She sounded proud of the cat’s thievery.

She said, “I had a cat one time that lived to be twenty years old. I cried my eyes out when he died, just like if a child had died.”

I nodded. “That’s how it is when you love a pet.”

With a yearning look at the cat, she said, “Where did you say this cat lives?”

The cat yawned and turned its head away from me.

I said, “You know what? This isn’t the cat I’m looking for! The cat I’m looking for is a lot bigger and has more white in his coat.”

“Oh, that’s too bad!” Her eyes twinkled with delight.

I said, “I wonder if the people in that villa with the white Jaguar convertible in the driveway might have seen my cat. Do you know them?”

“Those French people? I doubt it. They’re not permanent.”

“They’re French?”

She waved her hand. “They speak something foreign.”

“Could they be Swiss?”

She was looking at me funny. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

The question spooked me. I suddenly felt like a criminal about to be thrown in the slammer if I didn’t come up with a cover name.

“Uh … it’s Bridget. Bridget Jones.”

Oh, Lord, I had given her the name of a movie! I was not only a total idiot, I was getting myself in deeper trouble with every lie I told.

I said, “I’m so sorry to take up your time! I’ll just get out of your way and keep looking for the other cat.”

“Well, if you’re sure it’s not the same cat.”

“You know, I’ll bet this cat chose to live with you. Cats do that, you know. If you haven’t seen any lost-cat signs in the neighborhood, I think this cat was meant for you.”

She looked hopeful. “You think?”

“I really do.”

“I’ve missed having a cat. I love Snowball, but cats get to your heart in a different way, you know?”

I was already at the door, trying not to look like an escaping felon. “Thank you so much! Enjoy Cecil! ’Bye!”

With a nervous fake laugh, I skittered out and pulled the door closed behind me. I broke into an undignified lope down to the sidewalk, where a hibiscus hedge would hide me if she came out to ask where I’d come from. Sweaty with shame, guilt, and anxiety, I made it to the Bronco in record time and zoomed away.

In my imagination, I saw a TV reporter interviewing the sweet lavender-haired woman with the yellow cat and the white Pomeranian. The woman was saying, “I knew she was lying about looking for a lost cat. I asked her to come in so I could find out what she was doing in the neighborhood, and then she gave me that phony name. As soon as she left, I called the police and they arrested her.”

At least I’d learned that the man driving Briana’s car had recently moved to Siesta Key, and that he spoke a foreign language to another person who lived in the house with him. The woman with the Pomeranian had said “they” might be French, which could mean that more than two people lived there. Perhaps Briana lived in that house when she wasn’t hanging out in Cupcake’s house and wearing his shirt. Or perhaps the woman who’d been murdered in Cupcake’s house lived there. I groaned. Maybe they all lived there. For all I knew, Briana was part of a Swiss ménage à trois, and I was a provincial fool doomed to live the rest of my life alone, not even smart enough to come up with a plausible fake name.

For the rest of the afternoon, I minded my own business. I walked an elderly boxer with creaky knees and sad eyes. I cleaned litter boxes. I groomed cats. I tossed a Frisbee for a hyperactive terrier, and I played chase-the-peacock-feather with a Russian Blue who could leap as high as my head. I brought in mail and left it neatly stacked on hall tables. I watered house plants and vacuumed cat hair. At every house, I checked timers to make sure lights and TVs would turn on and off at various times to fool would-be burglars. I changed TV programs for the pets, too. Most of them like the nature channels during the day, but they seem to prefer kid shows in the late afternoon and early evening. They’re not too crazy about cop shows or romantic comedies.

While I switched channels at one house, I caught a local news report about the murder at Cupcake’s house. With my thumb suspended over the remote, I stared at old footage of Briana sashaying down a runway in Milan or Rome or Paris, her pelvic bones leading her pale lithesome body, shoulders held in a classic slouch, all that red hair tumbled around her face. That image segued into footage of Cupcake suited up in his football gear, his dark face behind the helmet’s grid looking ferocious and huge.

The TV voice said, “A bizarre case of fame stalking fame became even more bizarre today when an unidentified woman was found murdered in the home of Tampa Bay Buccaneer Cupcake Trillin. A spokesperson with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department said that the internationally famous model Briana had broken into Trillin’s Sarasota home before the murder occurred. Briana, who uses only the one name, has not been formally charged with homicide, but she is being held without bail pending a hearing. Trillin, who was in Italy when the murder occurred, is on his way home.”

I said, “I guess the department isn’t telling Briana’s real name.”

The three cats who were patiently waiting for me to bring up their favorite TV show turned their wide eyes at me, giving me that phony innocent look that cats do when all the time they’re wiser than anybody.

Embarrassed, I zipped through the rest of the channels until I found the one with flying birds.

I left the cats raptly watching their TV screen. As I headed home, I realized that I had become so caught up in shock that I hadn’t given much thought to the identity of the woman who’d been murdered. I’d given even less thought to the identity of the mystery person Briana claimed had been the killer.

I needed to get my priorities straight. By her own admission, Briana was a liar and a thief. If Cupcake said he didn’t know Briana, then he didn’t know her. Briana was not only a mentally ill woman who broke into people’s houses and hung out with Serbian heroin dealers, she was a murderer. Furthermore, it was silly of me to feel sad about Briana. If I should be sad about anybody, it was the dead woman, not a spoiled, headline-seeking, lying killer.

I told myself that all the way home, and I almost convinced myself. But the question still buzzed in my head:
Why
had Briana stalked Cupcake? It couldn’t have been simply because he was a famous person. She was even more famous than he, so fame couldn’t have been the allure. She didn’t seem like a big sports fan, either.

For the first time, I wondered if it had been Jancey who was being stalked, not Cupcake. Jancey was a beautiful, poised woman who didn’t have to rely on paparazzi to assure her she was admired. Any woman would envy Jancey, especially a woman like Briana who’d had to fight for everything she had. Perhaps Briana had stalked the Trillins not because she coveted Cupcake but because she envied Jancey’s life. Perhaps she had thought the murdered woman was Jancey, and in some hallucinatory madness had killed her so she could take her place.

As I waited for the light at Stickney Point, a motorcycle gang on pimped up Gold Wings roared over the drawbridge. The lead bike was a two-seater with an elderly couple wearing matching black leather jackets, helmets, and goggles. A Scottish terrier rode proudly in a carrier on the back. The terrier wore a helmet, jacket, and goggles like his humans. The group turned onto Midnight Pass Road and made a fast turn into the parking lot of Cap’n Curt’s Crab and Oyster Bar.

Seeing those Gold Wing geezers having fun reminded me that the secret to happiness was to mind my own business. It was not my responsibility to answer any of the questions about Briana or the woman killed in the Trillins’ house. I was a pet sitter coming home after a trying day, not a sociologist or an investigative reporter. Furthermore, I was a hungry pet sitter without a brother to feed her. Michael wouldn’t be home from his firefighting shift until eight the next morning, so there wouldn’t be a meal laid out waiting for me.

Michael is the family cook and the firehouse cook. Since he was four and I was two and our mother left us alone to go off on a weekend binge, he has fed me. When he was four, he fed me peanut butter and jelly. Now that he’s thirty-four, he serves more sophisticated fare, but it’s always with the firm conviction that it’s his duty to make good food for his little sister—and for Paco and his fellow firefighters and anybody else who might want to eat.

When I rounded the last curve in the lane to my apartment and saw Paco’s truck parked in its carport slot, I perked up. When I saw Paco’s Harley also in the carport, I perked up even more. Paco is as helpless as I am when he’s hungry, and unless he had a case to work that night, I could rely on him to join me for a restaurant meal.

Paco is Greek American, but his coloring makes it easy for him to pass as Middle Eastern or Latin American or anything in between. After my brother, he’s my best friend in all the world. He’s so smart that he’s sometimes a little bit scary, plus he’s what women mean when they say “tall, dark, and handsome.” Women tend to get lustful around him, but he and Michael have been a couple for thirteen years and neither of them has any intention of ever not being together.

He and Ella were on the deck waiting for the sunset, Paco stretched in an Adirondack chair my grandfather built decades ago, Ella sitting on his chest. Paco’s eyes had dark shadows under them, and his skin had the dried look of weariness. He wore rumpled shorts and a loose T-shirt, his bare feet cool on the redwood floor. Ella wore her usual red, white, and black blocks of color. Paco gave me a lazy grin of welcome, and Ella flicked the tip of her tail. I took another wooden chair and sighed with relief at being home.

With the easy intimacy of people who don’t need to talk, Paco and I looked toward the ball of fire sliding down the curve of blue sky. A few wisps of white cloud drifted across its face, and an occasional brave bird made a V as it flew by, but otherwise the sun held center stage.

There’s something almost supernatural about a sunset over the Gulf, something that makes the sun seem to swell and pulsate with growing intensity, sending out a higher energy to meet the energy of beings who turn to it as a source of life. A hush falls over the edge of the sea as the sun draws closer to it. Birds cease their crying, humans stop their chatter, even the surf hitting the sand seems to whisper.

Entranced, we sat in goldenrod light as the sun flirted with the sea, now languorous, sultry, heavy with desire, then bold and brassy with coming-at-you demand. A breathless moment like the instant between a shutter clicking and the image being recorded forever, and the rim of the sun touched the sea. Bold now, sun and sea reached for each other and the sun sank into the sea’s depths, leaving a wake of gilded aurora.

A shimmering golden highway stretching to the shore faded into the sea, and the sky’s last wisps of turquoise and violet dimmed and disappeared. The day was over. Evening had begun.

9

I heaved a heavy sigh and looked morosely at Paco. He looked as if his day had been as trying as mine.

I said, “What are you doing for dinner?”

He grinned. “Guess what I found in the refrigerator.”

“If it wasn’t Michael to cook for us, I don’t care.”

“Almost as good. He left dinner.”

I sat up with new hope. “You’re kidding.”

“I swear to God. He left a note.”

We both got up and surged through the kitchen door as if we were ancient sailors hearing the call of exotic sirens. The kitchen is the only room in the house that Michael and Paco modernized when they moved in. They replaced my grandmother’s four-burner range with a shiny six-burner job with a grill down its middle. A counter separates the range from a column formed by three ovens set into the wall, and there are Sub-Zero things all over the place to keep all the stuff Michael stocks. If you’re not paying attention in Michael’s kitchen, you’re liable to stick your hand in a drawer intending to grab a napkin and instead come up with a handful of lettuce leaves.

A butcher-block island with a salad sink at the far end runs down the center of the kitchen and serves as both dining table and workstation. Paco picked up a note from the island and waved it at me, then folded his arms and grinned while I read it:

Dear Big Doofus and Little Doofus,

Knowing that you may starve without me to feed you, I have left you a casserole and salad. Heat the oven to 425. Take the foil off the casserole. Put it in the heated oven for 15 to 20 minutes until it’s bubbling and the top is slightly browned. Remove. Turn off oven. Love, Michael

PS: I’m assuming you know what to do with the salad.

I said, “Hot damn!”

“Amen.”

I said, “I have to shower first.”

“While you do that, I’ll open the wine and turn on the oven.”

“What did he make?”

“Who cares? It’s food, and we don’t have to go anywhere to get it.”

I galloped off, charged up the stairs to my apartment, and within ten minutes was out of the shower and pulling on white gauzy pants and a bright yellow floating gauzy top with spaghetti straps. I love that gauzy stuff for lazy Florida nights. It’s like being invisibly naked. I slid my feet into flip-flops, shoved a wide white abalone bracelet on one wrist, and thundered down the stairs.

Paco had set the butcher-block with big white plates, napkins, and tall wineglasses. A bottle of white wine chilled in an ice bucket. A big salad bowl sat in the middle of the butcher block. Paco looked extremely proud of himself. From her perch on her favorite bar stool, Ella looked proud of him, too.