Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

by Blaize Clement

  I should have been alarmed at how easily I lied. I almost convinced myself that I had clients who had moved to Switzerland with their Shih Tzu named Sally.

  Gary said, “Of course. We take pride in the amenities we have for our pet guests.”

  He snapped his fingers and a young man in a crisp white uniform stepped forward and stood at attention. He looked like a cruise ship captain.

  Gary said, “Don, please take Ms. Hemingway on a tour of our pet-friendly area. And if one of the pet rooms is vacant, let her look at it.”

  Don said, “Yes, sir,” and gave me a respectful smile. These people were all so nice, I wished I really had clients who had asked me to check out the hotel. I would have recommended the Key Royale in a minute.

  Don said, “This way, ma’am,” and strode off in a crisp and manly way. I followed him down a hall to double glass doors that slid open when they saw us coming. We stepped through onto what looked like an outside wide bricked pathway, but all the humidity had been sucked out of the air, and it was cool. Overhead, a clear arched ceiling let in filtered light, and we walked between leafy green and flowering plants. There were even little yellow butterflies flitting around, and they looked happy. For butterflies, a lifetime spent in a cool place with no predators and plenty of sweet nectar to drink is probably their idea of heaven. Sounds pretty good to me too.

  Don said, “I’m taking you this way because it’s the fastest path to the park area where your dog could exercise. It would have to be on a leash, but it would have plenty of room to run. We provide doggie bags, and our groundskeepers also police the area several times a day.”

  I said, “It’s not actually my dog. I’m just a pet sitter checking out the place for some clients.”

  Some of the starch went out of his uniform, and he slowed to a less brisk walk.

  We left the air-conditioned butterfly garden for a truly outdoor walk toward a parklike area ringed by a curved two-story building that I assumed held rooms and suites.

  Don said, “This place really is great for pets. It’s not just a hotel come-on.”

  I said, “You know, I live here on the key but I’ve never been to the hotel before.”

  He shrugged. “Most people haven’t. I mean, unless you work here, you wouldn’t come here.”

  “Pretty pricey, isn’t it?”

  He grinned. “Some of the rooms go for five thousand a night. Can you believe that? And a suite for a weekend will set you back twenty thousand.”

  “Wow. Who has that kind of money?”

  “Lots of people. We’re always booked.”

  We reached the grassy park and stopped at its edge. It looked like a very well-tended golf course. The groundskeepers probably immediately excised any grass that turned yellow from dog pee.

  Don said, “Guests who want their dogs in their rooms stay in this building, but some guests prefer their dogs to stay in their own private room. In either case, all the dogs come here to exercise. We get a lot of rabbits from the woods, so even dogs that are well trained have to be leashed. Not many dogs can resist chasing a rabbit, huh? They’re not allowed on the beach, either, so if guests want to take their dogs to a beach, we give them directions to Brohard Beach in Venice.”

  By this time I was so taken with the place that I couldn’t wait to tell my nonexistent clients in Switzerland that a dog beach was only twelve miles away for Sally’s enjoyment. But Don had just explained the source of the injured rabbit that Jaz had carried into Dr. Layton’s office, which brought me back to the real reason I was there.

  I said, “Gee, I’d like to work here. Do they give you guys living quarters?”

  “Just the managers. They have apartments on the ground floor.”

  “What about the security guards?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, they go home when their shift is over. There’s too many of them to give them all an apartment. We’ve got plainclothes detectives all over the place.”

  “What if the managers have kids? Do they live here too?”

  Some of his earlier stiff ness returned. “You’d have to ask them. I don’t know about their private lives.”

  I was impressed. He was willing to give me some insider stuff, but he drew the line at revealing personal information about other employees.

  He said, “Let me show you the private rooms for dogs.”

  I dutifully went along with him, but all the time my eyes were searching for Jaz. The more I saw, the less I expected to find her. The place sprawled all over the bayfront, with tennis courts and swimming pools and little alfresco dining spots under the trees. The bay itself had speedboats, sailboats, fishing boats, canoes, water skis, and paddleboats for more outgoing guests. But set back from the bay were cottages and villas completely separate from the active areas, and winding all over the place were meandering brick paths that led between buildings. An occasional ground-level sign politely pointed the way to landmarks in case guests became confused by all the options.

  Don took me to the special building where dogs and cats could vacation in air-conditioned splendor, with top-of-the-line beds, climbing posts, scratching posts, private TVs, music, and room service. I was positive the imaginary Shih Tzu named Sally would absolutely love one of those rooms, but I still had an eye out for Jaz.

  On the way back toward the main building, a small sign announced HONEYMOON COTTAGES, with a female hand sporting a big sparkly wedding ring pointing down a shady path edged with sweet alyssum. The cottages backed up to the nature preserve and their fronts were screened from view by palms and sea grape. Through the foliage, I saw a flight of stairs going up to a narrow porch.

  I said, “Ooh! Is this where the honeymoon cottages are? Oh, that would be so terrific, to come to a place like this on a honeymoon!”

  I sounded so wistful, I nearly moved myself. For sure I moved Don.

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching. “You want to look at them? From the outside, I mean, I can’t take you inside.”

  “Ooh, yes!”

  I moved forward so fast Don had to double-step to keep up. The honeymoon cottages were brilliantly situated at angles so no cottage faced another, and no window looked out at another. Each was built in old Florida beach style, tall on wooden stilts, with a flight of steps leading up to a narrow porch. Each had a private single-lane drive. Each was a miniature version of Reba’s house.

  I said, “Do those cottages have numbers? Like addresses?”

  For the first time, Don looked uneasy. He said, “They have names, not numbers.”

  Of course they did. I should have known. They would be called the Flamingo or the Hibiscus. If Jaz actually lived in one of those honeymoon cottages, she wouldn’t know her house number because she wouldn’t have one. But what was she doing in a cottage that cost twenty thousand dollars a weekend?

  Don said, “We’d better get back to the front desk. They’ll be wondering why I’m taking so long.”

  I said, “Oh, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have asked you to show me those cottages. It’s just that women dream, you know?”

  He said, “Are you married?”

  “I’m a widow.”

  He colored in embarrassment, and I hated myself. I had never used my widowhood before to get sympathy, and it made me feel cheap. But Don felt so sorry for me now that he’d quit wondering why I’d asked if the managers had children or if the honeymoon cottages had numbers. He probably thought grief had made me weird. He wasn’t far off, but in that particular case I’d been more calculating than nuts.

  I walked with him back to the front lobby, thanked Gary profusely for providing an escort, promised to highly recommend the Key Royale to my mythical clients in Switzerland, and got back in the Bronco. At the gate, I waved a jaunty goodbye to the guard and mouthed, Thank you! He waved back like we were old friends. I should have been contrite to have fooled a nice man, but I actually felt quite proud.

  I was positive that Jaz and her stepfather were somehow connected to t
he Key Royale resort hotel, and that she had described one of the honeymoon cottages to somebody in L.A. as her home.

  I still didn’t understand why she would do that.

  16

  At the diner, I picked up a copy of the Herald-Tribune from a stack by the cashier’s stand and dropped it on my table to mark my spot while I washed up. My energy boost was draining by then, and it pretty much completely evaporated when I saw Bambi Dirk standing at a sink in the ladies’ room. The fact that her name was Bambi was just another example of how some people’s names don’t fit them. Bambi Dirk was more like a moose than a fawn, and for a second I wondered if there was some kind of karmic high school reunion going on, a cosmic force that had first drawn Maureen to me and now Bambi.

  But where Maureen and I had once shared a special closeness, Bambi and I had shared a special dislike. Actually, she’d hated me like poison and the feeling had been mutual. Bambi had never gotten over the fact that her boyfriend had dumped her for me, and I’d never gotten over the fact that she’d branded Maureen the school slut. All that high school stuff should have been put behind us, but Bambi and I eyed each other like two cats ready to hiss and pounce. She wore a toad-colored blouse and white shorts so tight in the crotch they were giving her a wedgie. She had put on weight since we’d last seen each other, and I hadn’t. That gave me great pleasure.

  She said, “Why Dixie, I didn’t know you still lived on the key. I heard you got fired from the sheriff’s department and left town.”

  I held my hands under a spray of water and resisted flinging some on her.

  I said, “Wrong on both counts, Bambi. I wasn’t fired and I’m still here.”

  Her eyebrows drew together to make a deep vertical groove on her forehead. In a few years, that groove would be permanent and she’d look like an elk. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving woman.

  She said, “But you’re not a deputy anymore.”

  “I’m a pet sitter.”

  In the mirror, her face registered disdain. She ran long manicured fingers through her hair. “I guess you’ve heard what happened to your old skanky friend.”

  “I have a lot of old skanky friends, Bambi. Which one do you mean?”

  “If you don’t know, then you live on another planet. It’s all over the news.”

  I jerked a paper towel from its slot, dried my hands, and wadded the towel into a ball. My hand wanted to throw it at Bambi, but instead I tossed it in the wastebasket and turned on my heel, ready to flounce out. But it’s hard to turn on your heel when you wear Keds, harder still to flounce in cargo shorts. A proper flounce needs ruffles or at least a billowing full skirt. As flounce impaired as I was, though, I managed to get in the last word.

  “Nice to see you’re still spreading gossip, Bambi.”

  The door sighed closed behind me and I stomped down the hall past the men’s room, the manager’s office, and a public phone. At the counter where people sit if they want TV with their meals, everybody was staring up at the huge screen on the wall. I zipped past them toward the main dining area, and then stopped cold when I heard Maureen’s voice. Weak-kneed, I turned to look up at her magnified image on the TV.

  She looked good. She looked like what she was, a not-too-bright woman with great hair and a terrific body who had married money. A lot of money. She wore a hot pink short skirt and close-fitting jacket that had a fluff of something feathery around the edge. The camera was too close to tell what shoes she wore, but only very high heels would have given such a forward thrust to her boobs. Her glossy brown hair was made big as China by curly extensions, her trembling lips were sweetly pink, her eyelashes were thick and dark, and her big brown eyes looking into the camera were moist and pleading. Her voice was so soft it would have made a pit viper weep.

  “Please, please bring my husband home to me. I’ve given you what you asked for. You and I know what that was. Now please keep your promise and bring my husband back.”

  She raised her chin then, like a woman determined to be brave no matter what.

  “Victor, if you can hear me, hang on, darling. I love you very much, and I’m counting the seconds until you’re home with me.”

  Bambi Dirk popped from the ladies’ room hallway and passed behind me on her way to the front door. When she saw me watching Maureen, she gave me an evil grin.

  “Told you,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. I was fresh out of witty comebacks. Besides, what she’d said was apparently true. Maureen was all over the news. Having been all over the news myself one time, that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was knowing that Victor’s kidnappers had said they’d kill him if Maureen told anybody he’d been taken. Instead of keeping quiet, she’d gone on national TV and blabbed it to the world.

  Maureen was dumb, but she wasn’t that dumb.

  The close-up shot changed to a long view of Maureen’s lime green gate and the palatial raspberry mansion behind it. The gate opened to allow some official-looking men to surround Maureen and help her through it. Then the gate swung shut to keep out a crowd of newspeople holding cameras and notebooks, all of them shouting questions.

  As the camera followed the little group escorting Maureen to her house, an announcer’s over-voice said, “That was a rerun of a press conference called this morning by the wife of Victor Salazar.”

  While I was thinking, A press conference? the announcer’s voice continued.

  “Mr. Salazar was allegedly kidnapped three days ago, and Mrs. Salazar received a ransom demand from his kidnappers asking for a million dollars in cash to be left at a specific location. Mrs. Salazar says that she complied with the demand, but her husband has not been returned. According to a spokesperson with the sheriff’s office, Mrs. Salazar has not contacted them regarding her husband’s kidnapping. The spokesperson stressed that people who believe a loved one has been kidnapped should immediately contact their local law enforcement agency for help.”

  The scene switched to three experts with ponderous faces and even more ponderous opinions about the proper way people should respond to a kidnapping. I doubted that any of them would recommend Maureen’s way.

  I went to my booth and plopped down on the seat. Judy had my coffee waiting, and I drank it in a little dark cloud. The woman I’d just watched begging for her husband’s return must have been up all night getting her hair and makeup right before she called a press conference. The pink suit must have been carefully chosen too, not just to harmonize with the raspberry house, but because a woman in pink looks feminine and vulnerable but with plucky inner strength. People just eat that crap up, and Maureen knew it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maureen had put on a big phony show for the camera.

  For the first time, I wondered if Maureen really wanted her husband back. I had no idea what kind of marriage she and Victor had, but I knew that she loved being rich. If her marriage ended, she wouldn’t be so rich, not even after getting the considerable amount the law would allow. But if Victor were dead, she would get it all. You don’t have to be a money-grubbing bimbo to know that when money is the goal, all is definitely better than some.

  Judy stopped by my side to top off my coffee. “Who’re you planning to kill?”

  “What?”

  “You look like you’re plotting to knock somebody off.”

  I didn’t want to tell her I was pretty sure my old high school friend was scheming to get her husband knocked off. For one thing, it was too awful to talk about, and for another, if I was right about what I suspected Maureen was doing, I had played a part in her scheme.

  Some truths are so solid there’s no point in questioning them. Gravity, for example, or two plus two being four. Luck is another one. Everybody knows that luck surrounds some people. Luck allows a fortunate few to do stupid things and never pay the consequences.

  I am not one of those people.

  It didn’t matter that I’d tried to get Maureen to call the cops and report Victor’s kidnapping. It didn’t matter that I’d he
lped her because I felt a debt to an old friend. It didn’t matter that my intentions had all been good. The fact was that I’d done something really dumb, and I could feel the icy breath of consequences creeping up on me.

  17

  Everything was quiet when I got home, with that peculiar middle-of-the-day lassitude that mutes both surf and birdcall. Ella was in the living room on the love seat, and we spent a few minutes assuring each other that there had never been anybody else in our entire lives that we loved as much as we loved each other. She purred extra loud to try to convince me that she wouldn’t drop me like a hot mouse the minute Michael came home.

  I’ve loved Michael all my life so I understood how she felt. I carried her to the kitchen and gave her fresh water, then headed for the shower. On the way, I flipped on the CD player to let Pete Fountain’s sweet clarinet perfume the air.

  I usually do my best thinking while water is spraying on me, but this time my thoughts were too scattered to come up with any conclusions. I told myself I should phone Maureen because I was her oldest friend and she was in distress. I reminded myself that fifteen years had passed since we were in high school, that her phone number was unlisted, and that I didn’t have it.

  I told myself that I was involved in Victor’s kidnapping because I’d let Maureen manipulate me into taking that damn duff el bag of money to the gazebo. I reminded myself that she hadn’t mentioned me in her staged press conference, so maybe my name would never come up. I rebutted that the possibility of my name never coming up was about the same as the possibility of a summer in Florida without a hurricane.

  By the time I stepped out of the shower I was close to being water dissolved but no closer to seeing anything positive about the situation. Pete Fountain was still playing on the CD, but as I reached for a towel I heard a ring on my cellphone that made me shoot out of the bathroom trailing water droplets. Only a handful of people have my cellphone number, and only three people—Michael, Paco, and Guidry—rate a special alert ring. Michael and Paco know they’re on the elite list. Guidry doesn’t have a clue.