Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

by Blaize Clement

  “You think I killed her, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s a definite possibility.”

  He gave a laugh that sounded more like a sob, and pounded his fist against his khaki knee several times to get himself under control.

  “I think it was her skin that I loved most,” he said. “She has the most fantastic skin, so smooth, you just want to—”

  He broke off and blushed, caught in the act of reliving how Marilee’s skin had felt under his hands. “I’m sure I seem pathetic to you,” he said. “Hell, I seem pathetic to myself. She was like a disease I’d caught, you know? I didn’t intend to start anything with her, it just happened.”

  I said, “I’m not making any judgments.”

  “Oh, of course you are. And I don’t blame you. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told another soul. I used to look in her windows at night to see if she was with somebody. I would actually hide in the bushes and spy on her.” He shook his head sadly, as if he were watching himself doing that shameful thing and couldn’t get over how dumb it was.

  “Love makes people do crazy things,” I said.

  “The craziest thing was that even when I saw other men go into her house, I’d still believe her when she told me they didn’t mean anything to her. That I was her only one.”

  “Were you watching her when Harrison Frazier went in? Did you go in and bludgeon them both?”

  He raised trembling hands in front of his face and looked at them. “Just telling about this makes me shake. But all this was two years ago. If I’d been going to kill her, I’d have done it then.”

  “Maybe you waited so nobody would suspect you, and then hired somebody to do it for you.”

  “No.”

  “You still haven’t explained how you knew it was Marilee I was working for.”

  “I recognized the cat’s collar on your wrist. I was with Marilee when she bought it. We got it in New Orleans from a silversmith. It’s one of a kind, I’d know it anywhere.”

  “So why did you go apeshit just because you knew I was taking care of Marilee’s cat? You said, ‘I know nothing about this!’ What was it you knew nothing about?”

  His Adam’s apple did a nervous bobble, and I got a whiff of sour breath. “Marilee and Shuga sometimes got involved in money-making schemes that turned out to be bogus. I guess I thought they were doing something shady again, and that you thought I was involved in it, too. Because I’d been involved with Marilee.”

  I turned the key and started the Bronco. “Dr. Coffey, that’s about the lamest lie I’ve ever heard in my life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  He gave me a long-searching look, then opened his door. “I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I really did love her.”

  I didn’t answer, and he shut the door softly and walked across the parking lot. I watched carefully, but his car wasn’t black. It was a red Porsche that fairly screamed man with little dick. Dr. Coffey might have been telling the truth about being with Marilee when she bought Ghost’s collar. He might even have been telling the truth about recognizing it on my wrist. But he sure as hell wasn’t telling the truth about why he’d jumped up and threatened to call the police when I spoke to him. He’d had some other fear in mind.

  Thirty

  I still had two more cats to see, and then I drove to the hospital to visit Phillip. I took the elevator to his floor and followed the arrows to the ICU. Even before I got there, I could hear the beeps of heart monitors and the occasional squeal of an IV or blood bag that had emptied. Doctors were making rounds, and the head nurse darted from cubicle to cubicle as private duty nurses stood aside like penitents at Mass while the doctors leaned over their patients. Fluorescent lights gave everybody a washed-out look. I turned toward Phillip’s cubicle, hoping he’d look better than he had before.

  He wasn’t there. His entire room had been stripped, even to the wall cabinet unit that had held medical supplies.

  I must have looked stricken, because the head nurse jogged over and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “He went home.”

  “I was afraid he had—”

  “I know. It’s this place. It makes you expect the worst. To tell the truth, I don’t know why they put him here. His injuries weren’t that critical.”

  “It was for the extra security. I’m surprised the doctor dismissed him so soon.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Well, she didn’t. His father came and took him against the doctor’s advice. He said he could recuperate at home just as well as here, and he took him. We couldn’t legally keep him.”

  I could feel myself going pale. I felt as if I’d just heard Phillip had been shipped off to hell.

  The nurse read my face and shrugged. “We did all we could to change his mind, but once the Sheriff’s Department removed him from protective custody, we were helpless.”

  “Did anybody contact Lieutenant Guidry?”

  An alarm sounded in one of the cubicles, and he skittered backward a few steps with an apologetic smile. “I’m not sure. We’re so busy.”

  He ran to help somebody whose condition was truly critical, and I retraced my steps down the hall, dialing Guidry as I walked. He wasn’t in, so I left a message on his voice mail, telling him that Phillip wasn’t safely tucked away in the hospital any longer, but with his parents.

  Morosely, I drove to Bayfront Village, where I found Cora up and dressed. She looked worn, but a lot stronger.

  “I decided to go downstairs and have a bite in the dining room,” she said. “I guess I’ve been in this room by myself long enough.”

  “That’s good, Cora. Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here?”

  “No, dear, I’m all right for now. You’ve been very sweet to look in on me, Dixie. You’re a good girl.”

  We went into the hall, and as I helped her lock her door, I said, “Cora, what do you know about Dr. Coffey?”

  She smiled. “Oh, he’s a strange man, dear. I don’t go to him anymore, not since he and Marilee split up. They were engaged, you know.”

  We started walking toward the elevator, Cora taking teensy steps and me slowing down to such a slow pace that I felt off balance.

  I said, “I talked to him this morning and he said he had been so jealous of Marilee that he would hide in the bushes and watch her house. I’m wondering if he kept doing that even after they broke off their engagement.”

  “You’re wondering if he killed Harrison and Marilee?”

  “I’ve thought about that, yes.”

  “Dixie, I told you before, Harrison Frazier killed Marilee. Now I don’t know who killed Harrison, and I can’t say that I care a whole lot. That’s awful, I know, but it’s the truth.”

  “Was Dr. Coffey always your doctor?”

  “Not my regular doctor. He just does hearts, I think. No, I had some chest pain and nothing would do for Marilee but that I see a heart specialist. She took me to him, and he did some tests. At first, he thought I needed one of those operations where they take a detour around your heart. I don’t know how they do that exactly, but people get it done all the time. But then he decided I didn’t need that after all, and I just went back a few times. Him and Marilee were pretty hot and heavy there for a while, but then she got mad at him about something, I never did know what, and quit him.”

  Ahead of us, the elevator doors opened and two elderly women got off and looked around like migrating geese after a landing. One of them said, “Oh, this is the wrong floor,” and they giggled like girls. They turned back to the elevator and pushed the button.

  Cora and I continued our snail walk toward them. I said, “I heard she and Dr. Coffey were actually in the church about to get married when Marilee called it off.”

  Cora laughed. “It wasn’t that bad, but almost. They were supposed to have a rehearsal for the wedding and she told him before they went. But they weren’t in the church, they were at her house. I thought it was just wedding jitte
rs, you know, but she was serious.”

  The elevator doors opened and the two women hopped inside. They didn’t even ask if they should hold it for us. We were moving so slowly, they could have taken several trips before we got to it.

  “I also heard a rumor that Dr. Coffey gave Marilee a million dollars just before she called off the wedding. Was that an exaggeration, too?”

  “Well, I can’t rightly say about that. He may have, I don’t know. He’s pretty rich, you know, I guess he could have given her some without missing it.”

  Her voice had taken on a serenely hard edge, and I remembered that Shuga had said it was Cora who had demanded money from the Fraziers when Marilee was pregnant. She apparently found it wholly appropriate that Dr. Coffey might have given Marilee a million dollars, just because he had it to spare. I didn’t ask her anything else, and we finally reached the elevator and went downstairs. I declined an invitation to have brunch with her and hugged her goodbye outside the dining room.

  The doorman had left my Bronco parked near the front door with the keys in it, so I didn’t have to wait for him to get it. I waved to let him know I was the one taking it, then headed toward Marge Preston’s Kitty Haven. The time had finally come that I could bring Ghost home, only now the home he was going to was truly his, not just where he lived with his owner.

  I paid Marge for the time Ghost had been with her, and carried him out in one of my cardboard cases. I could see through the air holes that he was hunkered down in a depressed rabbit pose. Neither of us was holding up well.

  At Marilee’s house, no reporters lurked in the bushes, and Bull Banks’s ugly face wasn’t anywhere in sight, but I slowed down when I saw Carl Winnick’s black Mercedes in the driveway next door. I could imagine the kind of conversation going on in that house, and it made me sick. Carl Winnick would be spouting his twisted hate for homosexuals, and Olga would be bleating about Phillip’s future musical career.

  I wanted to call Guidry and yell at him for allowing Phillip to leave the hospital, but I knew he had no reason to hold him there. And if I told him that Phillip shouldn’t be with his god-awful parents, he would tell me they had the legal right to take him home. I told myself Phillip’s parents loved him. I told myself they wouldn’t hurt him any more than he was already hurt, but I didn’t believe myself for one minute.

  I opened the garage door and pulled inside. When the door shuddered down behind me, I took a deep breath—either of relief or apprehension, I wasn’t sure. I got the .38 out of the glove box and put it in my pocket, then carried Ghost into the house through the kitchen door. When I opened the carrying case, he bounded out like a demented gazelle and made several mad careering turns through the house.

  When he was run out, he began aggressively sniffing at the walls and making the peculiar face that cats do when they smell certain chemicals. It’s called “doing flehmen”—stretching the mouth in a tight little smile, front teeth covered by upper lip. The purpose is to expose pores in the upper gum and palate, where a cat’s vomeronasal organ is located—the organ that gives cats a sixth sense, along with the five that humans have. All cats have it, from lions and tigers in the wild to the tamest domestic pussycat. The more they hate a scent, the more pronounced they’ll do flehmen. Sometimes it’s the only warning an animal or person gets before they’re attacked. Tigers, for example, will attack somebody with alcohol on his breath and rip them to shreds.

  I never wear any kind of fragrance when I’m working with pets, but watching Ghost’s reaction to the odor of chemicals on the walls made me remind myself to be extra careful with scents for a while. Ghost was going to be supersensitive until he got used to all the changes in his life. That made two of us.

  I got down an ordinary ceramic bowl—Ghost’s silver bowl being not only impounded by the Sheriff’s Department but forever rendered too gross to drink from—and put out fresh water for him. He brushed his cheeks and rubbed his ass against all the cabinet doors to leave his scent and reclaim his territory from the haz-mat crew.

  I knew he hadn’t been eating much at the Kitty Haven, so even though he had already had breakfast, I got out his food dish. Ordinarily, I preach a daily diet of dried organic food, because it contains all the nutrients a cat needs to stay sleek and healthy. But a constant healthy diet gets pretty boring, even for cats, so an occasional dish of canned stuff is okay as a special treat. Ghost loved sliced beef in gravy the way I loved bacon, and after all he’d been through, I thought he needed sliced beef. I wouldn’t have minded some myself.

  Marilee kept a ten-pound bag of dried cat food in the pantry, along with stacks of canned food. I opened the pantry door and did a double take.

  “Huh,” I said. When you’re all by yourself with a cat, you can make an intelligent comment like that without having to explain yourself.

  The pantry was L-shaped, with the short end at the left of the door. In the past, the sack of dried food had sat on the floor under the long shelves, and stacks of canned food, jars of catnip, boxes of special treats, and some kitty toys had taken up a long shelf facing the door. Now they took up two shelves on the short end. Marilee had apparently rearranged the pantry since I’d last seen it.

  As I moved cans of veal and lamb and chicken around on the short shelves, looking for sliced beef, I realized the shelves were now only half as deep as they used to be. Marilee hadn’t just rearranged her shelves, she had remodeled them.

  “Huh,” I said again, my repertoire of intelligent exclamations being somewhat limited by then.

  I got out a can of sliced beef and opened it for Ghost. He began to swoon with ecstasy even before I put the bowl on the floor. Then I went back to the pantry and removed everything on the newly foreshortened shelves so I could get a better look at the back wall.

  It looked like all the other wallboard unless you looked closely, then you could see it was freshly painted hardwood. I got a knife and slid it in the crack on the left. I moved the knife up and down without hitting any resistance. I did the same thing on the right side, and hit resistance at the top, middle, and bottom.

  “Bingo,” I whispered. The back of the shelf was a hinged door.

  Right then, I should have got on the phone and called Guidry. I should have confessed that I had an invoice to a wall safe in a folder in my desk drawer. Should have admitted that I had opened Marilee’s mail and found the invoice. I should also have told him I had been keeping this information from him, and that I had no earthly reason for doing so except that Marilee had lost her daughter, too. Even I knew that was an irrational reason to hide evidence, but it seemed logical at the time. If I could protect her secrets, she and I wouldn’t be so vulnerable.

  I tried prying the door open with the knife, but it didn’t budge. Thinking it must have a pressure-sensitive latch, I pushed my fingers all along the top edge of the door. When I got to the left side, I heard a click, and the door swung open.

  “Oh gosh,” I whispered, because a cream-colored safe was set flush inside the wall.

  “Oh hell,” I muttered, because the safe had both a combination and a keyed lock.

  To open this sucker, you not only had to get inside Marilee’s mind and figure out her code, you also had to have a key.

  My cell phone rang and I froze. Only two or three people in the world had my cell number, and I wasn’t looking forward to talking to any of them. It was Michael, calling from the fire station.

  He said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I really am.”

  “You’re at Tom Hale’s, right?”

  I twisted the toe of one of my Keds into the floor, exactly the way I used to do when we were kids and Michael quizzed me about something we both knew I’d done and I was denying. I took a deep breath and straightened my back. I was thirty-two years old and I could do anything I wanted.

  “Actually, I’m at Marilee’s house. I’m going to spend a few days here. I’ll explain about it later. It’s a long story.”

  He said, “Are you crazy?
”

  “I think that’s still to be decided.”

  “Aw shit, Dixie, I don’t like this one bit. That asshole Dr. Win is right next door. He’ll have every reporter in town over there.”

  “I don’t think so. I think this is the last place anybody would think to look for me. I’ll be back in a day or two. After this blows over.”

  He warned me about a hundred times to call if I needed anything, and I promised I would.

  He said, “I don’t like it, but I guess it’s okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Dix.”

  That’s my big brother, the gentle giant.

  Ghost was still hunkered over his sliced beef, blissfully chewing with his eyes half-closed. I went back to the pantry and fingered the safe’s keyhole. I hadn’t expected to need a key. People usually select a birth date or address or Social Security number for a numerical code, so I had thought I had everything I would need to open the safe when I found it. Needing a key was a major problem.

  I looked around the kitchen. If Marilee had chosen the pantry to hide the safe, maybe she had hidden the key in the kitchen, too. But before I started searching, I needed to take care of my primary business of pet-sitting. I sat at the kitchen bar and used my cell phone to check phone messages at my apartment. A few more reporters had called, and one client had called all the way from North Carolina to say she had heard the news about me and didn’t want me going back in her house. She had called another sitter, she said, and she would never hire me again.

  That really hurt my feelings. I felt like a little kid whose best friend had just told her she didn’t like her anymore.

  The last call was from Phillip Winnick. His words were slurred, but more intelligible than they’d been the day before. It wasn’t how he talked that alarmed me, it was what he said.