The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

by Clement, Blaize, Clement, John

  She was right. Occasionally a truck would go by or a waiter would linger in front of the camera, but for the most part, the front door and the display window of the bookstore were in plain view. Just then a truck pulled into the frame, and McKenzie clicked the pause button.

  “Recognize it?”

  I looked closely. It was a big dump truck with forest green doors. I shook my head, but then, in the very upper-right corner at the back of the truck, were three identical cocoa brown columns rising up out of the frame. They were palm trees.

  I pointed and said, “That’s—”

  McKenzie nodded. “That’s the truck that was involved in the head-on collision, correct?”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  She sped forward a little bit, and I watched it without blinking. I didn’t want to miss a single frame. Next an ambulance rolled by with its lights flashing, and I knew right away it was the ambulance that had come to take Baldy to the hospital.

  “No one comes in or out of the bookstore until…”

  She paused the video again, and there, just entering the left-hand side of the screen, was a white blur.

  McKenzie said, “Tell me if you’ve seen this person before.”

  A gray-haired woman wearing a white dress made her way along the sidewalk outside the bookstore. Her gait was slow and labored. She paused at the window. I could see she was carrying something, like a small cardboard box, about the size of a toaster. She stood there for a few moments, her head down as if she were catching her breath or maybe reading something printed on top of the box, and then the front door opened and Mr. Hoskins appeared.

  I knew it was him right away. The big wraparound sunglasses were a dead giveaway, and even though the picture was blurry and the colors washed out, I recognized the red button-down shirt and the bright red beret. I felt a lump form in my throat, thinking how much he had reminded me of a cute little bridge troll or an elf, and how I thought I’d made a new friend.

  They exchanged a couple of words, and then Mr. Hoskins stepped back, holding the door open, and the woman disappeared inside. Mr. Hoskins looked briefly up and down the street and then closed the door behind him.

  McKenzie stopped the video and turned to me.

  “It’s a bit blurry, but no, she doesn’t look familiar at all.”

  She frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “No idea who she is.”

  She clicked again and the video played on. “I want you to be absolutely certain. The main reason is that, with the exception of here…”

  She stopped the video. All I could see was a black-and-white checkerboard filling half the frame.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s the uniform shirt the waiters wear at Amber Jack’s. Except for here where the view is blocked by the waiter for approximately seven seconds, no one comes in or out of the bookstore until…”

  She forwarded the video a good bit now. All the cars whizzed by and the people in the bar raced around in superfast motion, completely unaware that this mundane moment in their lives would soon be evidence in a potential homicide investigation, every second of it intensely scrutinized. Just as another person appeared on the left-hand side of the screen, she clicked the pause button.

  This time I knew exactly who it was.

  A slim woman in her early thirties with straight blond hair. She was standing in front of the bookstore, looking at the display in the big picture window. I recognized her immediately because everyone else on the street was wearing flip-flops, shorts, and tank tops, but this woman was wearing a black zip-up hoodie that was easily ten times too big for her.

  It was me.

  We watched as I approached the front of the display window, and I remembered thinking how artfully all the books had been arranged, how I’d smiled at the stack of dictionaries in the corner with its fluffy top of orange fur. I lingered in front of the display for a few moments and then pushed open the door to the shop. Seeing myself in the video, the first thought I had was I am not broad in the beam.

  Luckily I kept that to myself.

  McKenzie then sped forward again, this time to the point where I came out of the shop, and I watched myself leave the frame of the video and head back north toward my car, holding my new book under my arm.

  McKenzie said, “That’s it.”

  I turned to her. “What do you mean that’s it?”

  She sighed. “Just watch.”

  The video sped forward as she folded her hands in her lap. Soon it got dark and the crowd at Amber Jack’s thinned out. Then all the waiters raced around clearing away glasses, flipping the chairs over on the tabletops, and mopping the floors. Finally there was only one person left, probably the owner, sitting on one of the tables and drinking a beer as the occasional car passed by in the street. Then he set his empty bottle down and moved out of view, and a few moments later all the lights in the bar went out.

  Now, everything was completely dark—everything, that is, except Beezy’s Bookstore. The big window and the front door glowed yellow. The lights inside had been left on, and they stayed on, all night long.

  As the video sped forward, the sky eventually started to brighten again, and a few early-morning commuters appeared in the street. Then, sure enough, pulling in to the spot next to Mr. Hoskins’s van was a white truck with a short flatbed full of bundled newspapers. A man hopped out and carried one of the bundles over to the sidewalk in front of the bookstore.

  McKenzie stopped the video. “Dixie, with the lights on inside, the front door of the bookshop is clearly visible. After you left, no one went in or out that front door until the next morning when the paper man arrived.”

  I nodded. “So the woman in the white dress, she must have left when the view was blocked by the waiter, right?”

  “Yes. That’s a possibility.”

  “And whoever it was that took Mr. Hoskins, they came in the back door after I left.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. I couldn’t think of any other explanation. “Maybe someone saw something in the alley?”

  She pulled the screen of her laptop down, and it made a little click as it closed. “Well, as a matter of fact, Dixie, someone did.”

  “Who?”

  She slid her computer back down into her briefcase. “The butcher.”

  I was beginning to think ol’ Butch the Butcher was as good as Amber Jack’s webcam when it came to recording what happened in the street around his shop. I started to say as much, but the look on McKenzie’s face stopped me. She was staring off in the distance.

  “He told me that after he locked up the butcher shop, when he saw you getting in your car, he immediately went out back to the alley—”

  I said, “Yeah, he smokes back there. He probably went out to light up.”

  She paused and blinked a couple of times, either because I’d just interrupted her or because she was wondering how I knew so much about what went on in that back alley. Either way I figured I’d better keep quiet and let her talk.

  “He saw a car, an old station wagon. It was pulling away from the back of Beezy’s Bookstore. He said a couple of times he’d caught kids parked back there, making out in their cars, and he’d chased them off. But he said this car sped away before he even had a chance. He said he immediately got the feeling that something was wrong.”

  I sat up, “So, whoever took Mr. Hoskins, they probably watched the front and waited until they knew the shop was empty. Then they came around the back and broke the door in, grabbed Mr. Hoskins and shoved him in their car. Then when the butcher came out, they sped away so he wouldn’t be able to identify them.”

  Of course, that didn’t quite explain the blood on the counter, but I turned to see her reaction to my brilliant analysis anyway.

  She just nodded. “When you left the bookstore, how long do you think it took you to get to your car?”

  I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, especially since I’d just solved a pretty big part of her case, b
ut I figured I’d humor her. “Well, it’s probably less than a minute’s walk, except I probably did it in about twenty seconds or so.”

  Now she took off her big sunglasses. “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Well … I was skipping.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “You were skipping?”

  I nodded. “Or running. Sort of half skipping, half running. I was kind of excited about the book and Mr. Hoskins, and I was in a hurry to get home and take a shower.”

  She looked away. “After the butcher locked his front door, how long do you think it would have taken him to get to the alley?”

  “His shop’s not that big. I’d say ten to fifteen seconds tops.”

  Without pausing she said, “So from the moment you left the store to the moment the butcher saw a station wagon speed away in the alley, a period of roughly thirty-five seconds elapsed?”

  I said, “Um…”

  “So your theory is that someone watched the front of the store until they thought it was empty, and then they went around to the alley, broke in the back door, grabbed Mr. Hoskins, and then ferried him into a waiting car … in thirty-five seconds.”

  I should have known. McKenzie seemed to get some kind of perverse pleasure in letting me know what an utter moron I was whenever she got the chance.

  Well, that was it. I decided I’d had just about all I could take of her games, and besides I still had work to do. I threw my hands up and shrugged. “Well, the only other way it makes sense is if they did it while I was in the store, in which case I would have been in on the whole thing. Did you ever think of that?”

  I turned to find her watching me. There was a look in her eye, a hard gleam, and I knew right away: That’s exactly what she was thinking. Suddenly it felt like I was fixed in the sight of a shotgun, or more precisely a magnifying glass.

  I gulped and said, “Oh.”

  We sat in silence for a while, both of us staring straight ahead, McKenzie with her hands folded neatly in her lap and me with my mouth hanging slightly open.

  On the tennis court in front of us was a tall, gangly young man with copper red hair and long arms giving a tennis lesson to a group of children, seven- or eight-year-olds, all holding their pint-sized tennis rackets in front of them at ninety-degree angles to their little bodies.

  They were all watching the young man intently and copying his every move. When he bent his knees slightly and swung his racket to the right, they all immediately did the same. When he swung his racket to the left, they quickly followed suit. Every once in a while he would pause a bit, flash the kids a mischievous grin, and then let his racket fall to the ground with a clatter. All the kids would look wide-eyed at each other for a couple of seconds and then let their rackets fall, too, bursting into fits of happy giggling.

  I looked at McKenzie out of the corner of my eye. There was absolutely no way she could possibly think I had anything to do with Mr. Hoskins’s disappearance or the blood on his front counter, or that I had seen something and was hiding it from her, but I knew she was considering the same thing I was—anybody else who saw that video would probably think otherwise.

  The fact that I was the last person to be seen going in or out of the bookstore, coupled with the butcher seeing a suspicious car pull away from the back door immediately after seeing me basically run to my car … I’d suspect me, too, if I didn’t know better.

  McKenzie interrupted my train of thought. “Is it possible, Dixie, that the woman in white was in the back room when you arrived?”

  “Huh,” I said.

  Suddenly an entirely different scenario opened up before my eyes. The woman in white wasn’t a customer. She was a friend, perhaps even more than a friend, perhaps even … a lover? It was a little hard imagining befuddled old Mr. Hoskins involved in a little early evening hanky-panky in the back of the store during business hours, but I had to admit it was possible. I remembered his hastily buttoned shirt and untied shoes. Maybe he wasn’t so befuddled after all. Maybe he was just rattled by my interruption.

  “You said you heard a noise from the back room right before Mr. Hoskins appeared?”

  I had completely forgotten. “Yeah. Like a thud.”

  “And what do you think that could have been?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe they were on that couch, the one with the gold tassels. Maybe when they heard me Mr. Hoskins jumped up and bumped into something?”

  McKenzie frowned. “On the couch?”

  I shrugged slightly. “Well, I mean, it seems like if they were doing anything, you know … the couch would be the most comfortable place for it.”

  The slightest hint of a smile played across her lips, and then I thought of the blood on the countertop next to the register. I was still casting about for a reasonable explanation for everything, like a fish who refuses to accept she’s been hooked, but McKenzie didn’t seem convinced. She was watching the kids on the tennis court with a distant look in her eyes. They had all lined up in a row along one of the lines on the court, and now the tall red-haired man was handing a single tennis ball to each one of them.

  I sighed. “You think that woman hid in the back of the store until I left and then murdered Mr. Hoskins, don’t you?”

  I didn’t like saying it out loud like that. It meant giving up hope that Mr. Hoskins was alive and well, drinking sangria on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

  Her expression didn’t change. She leaned over and picked up her briefcase as she stood up. “Dixie, I think until we find a body, we can’t begin to know what happened.” She shook my hand with a wan smile. “Let me know if you remember anything else.”

  I nodded as she turned and headed back for the sheriff’s building. When she got to the edge of the tennis court she turned and said, “Oh, and Dixie, if I were you I’d keep looking for that cat. I got the lab results back this morning. The blood on the countertop … it’s human. Which human, however, is still up in the air.”

  * * *

  On the way to my next appointment, I stopped at Vito’s Subs and got an Italian with extra hot peppers, and as I crossed back over the bridge to the Key, it was still sitting on the seat next to me, untouched.

  What Detective McKenzie was suggesting had made every neuron in my head go to mush, and all the way down Higel my feeble brain did its best to wrap itself around it. I tried to imagine everything that had happened as if it were a painting hanging on the wall, and the picture it made was pretty clear. There was blood on the countertop, human blood. There was a missing person. There was a suspicious-looking figure dumping what might have been a body off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into the bay. Considering all that, it wasn’t too far-fetched to come to the conclusion that something had happened in Beezy’s Bookstore that night … something bad.

  I guess I must have been distracted, because instead of taking the dogleg at Higel and shooting straight down to Midnight Pass, I took a left on Ocean Boulevard, which of course took me right by the bookstore. I’d like to think I didn’t do that on purpose, that what I really meant to do was get on with my day and forget about the whole bloody mess and let Detective McKenzie take care of it on her own.

  But I’m not sure.

  As I approached the bookstore, I slowed down and studied the front entrance. The police tape was gone, which meant the bookstore was officially no longer an active crime scene. I could see the display of books through the front window, and the stack of dictionaries on the side where Cosmo liked to nap.

  I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. There was a CLOSED sign hanging in the window, and the lights were off. I wondered what the chances were that in the seven seconds the webcam’s view had been blocked by the waiter at Amber Jack’s, the woman in white had come out of the bookstore before I got there.

  I looked at the door and tried to calculate how long it would take. I imagined someone pulling it open, exiting the store, and walking down the sidewalk. One-one thousand, two-one thousand … Then I stopped.

&nb
sp; In the video, the woman had walked into the frame on the left-hand side just as I had, from the north. When she came out of the store, if she’d gone back in the same direction, it would have taken her much longer than seven seconds to leave the webcam’s view, and we would have seen her in the video as soon as the waiter moved out of the way. The angle of the camera didn’t provide as long a view going in the other direction. If the woman in white had turned south when she came out of the store, she would have disappeared out of frame in less than four seconds, giving her more than enough time to leave without being recorded.

  That was one possibility. I pulled back out on the road and tried to imagine the other option, that she’d gone out the back door instead. Maybe she’d parked back there, or maybe she just felt like taking a tour of the alley … No. I’d been in that alley. There was no place to walk and no designated parking spots, and anyway it was filthy. No woman in her right mind would go walking around back there willingly.

  The reason it mattered how the woman in white left the store, and the reason I was so distracted now, was that Detective McKenzie was suggesting something that sent a chill down my spine. Yes, the blood on the countertop was human, that was certain, but McKenzie had said “which human.” All this time I’d been asking myself, who could have murdered Mr. Hoskins? I’d missed another possibility altogether.

  McKenzie was suggesting that if the woman in white had left the shop by the back door, it might very well mean that she was the murderer. On the other hand, it could just as easily mean she was the victim.

  If that was true, sweet old Mr. Hoskins had a very good reason to disappear.

  16

  As I made my way south toward the end of the Key, the sun was dead center in the sky and there were wavy lines of heat radiating off the asphalt up ahead. My mind was swimming. Could there have been something about Mr. Hoskins that I had overlooked? Something he was hiding? He had seemed so harmless and sweet, even grandfatherly.