The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

by Blaize Clement

I wondered if Jancey would think I was crazy, too, if she knew I’d got Briana an attorney.

  I said, “Things will look better after we’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

  Cupcake said, “I’m going to bed as soon as we get home.”

  I said, “The crime-scene cleaners will have to finish their work before you can go home. I’ve booked you into the Ritz.”

  They turned red eyes on me like forest wolves.

  Cupcake said, “What?”

  Jancey said, “Crime-scene cleaners?”

  I braced myself. They still didn’t understand what had happened at their house. They hadn’t allowed their minds to stretch around the facts and imagine the scene in its entirety. They hadn’t seen a woman lying in a pool of her own blood. An adult human body contains about four or five pints of blood, depending on its size. That’s a lot of blood to pour onto a floor.

  As gently as possible, I said, “Blood has bacteria that seeps into cracks and crevices and gets into the air. It takes a specialized cleaning crew to sanitize a house where a brutal homicide has taken place.”

  They both flinched at the word “brutal,” and Jancey’s eyes filled with tears.

  I hated to be the one to explain the ugly reality they’d come home to, but bacteria from a homicide victim’s blood might turn out to be the least ugly thing I had to tell them.

  I said, “You can go home tomorrow morning. I’ll bring Elvis and Lucy home from Kitty Haven.”

  They had such worried faces that I searched for something to lighten the mood. “Elvis carried a slip of paper to Kitty Haven. It’s still in his carry case. He’ll be so glad to get it back!”

  They tried to laugh, managed weak smiles, and trudged downstairs to their borrowed car to drive to the Ritz.

  I closed the shutters and trudged to my own bed, but not to get into it. First I pulled it away from the wall and opened the secret drawer built into its dark side. The drawer was custom made, with carved niches for each of the guns it holds. After Todd died and I left the sheriff’s department, both our department-issued guns had to be returned, but I still have our personal guns. I’m licensed to carry, and I qualify for all of the guns I own. I regularly practice with them, too.

  My personal favorite is a snub-nosed .38 Special revolver with a rubber boot grip. I lifted it from its niche, loaded it with 125 g rounds, filled a couple of speed loaders for backup, and laid it on my bedside table. I did not intend to be caught defenseless again.

  14

  When my alarm went off at 4:00 A.M. next morning, I had slept three hours. My brain begged for more sleep, but my body crawled out of bed and dragged to the bathroom like a half-comatose slug. Still half asleep, I brushed my teeth, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and got dressed for the day.

  Before I stepped onto the porch, I picked up my revolver from the bedside table and held it ready while the metal shutters rose to the top of the French doors and settled into their soffit. I switched on the overhead porch light and looked into every corner to make sure nobody was waiting for me to come out. Nobody was. My assailants from the night before were probably sound asleep, while I, the innocent one, was groggily creeping around with a gun in my hand.

  I hit the light switch to plunge the porch back into shadows and closed the French doors. With one hand holding the gun, I started down the stairs, hitting the remote button with the other hand to close the shutters. Being on guard against attack or intruders takes forethought, common sense, and manual dexterity.

  The salt air was cool and fresh. The trees glittered with fairy lights made by moonbeams bouncing off dewdrops. The vehicles in the carport shone with early-morning sweat, and seabirds sleeping on the cars assured me that nobody was huddled out of sight in the shadows.

  In the Bronco, I slid the .38 under my thigh where I could quickly reach it in one move. Strictly speaking, that was an illegal place, because a Florida license to carry a concealed weapon stipulates that a gun has to be stashed in such a way that it requires two moves to get to it. Like opening a car pocket or a purse and pulling it out.

  With my gun illegally ready under my thigh, I drove at a sedate pace down the lane to Midnight Pass Road, looked both ways, and made a careful legal left turn. At Tom Hale’s condo building, security lamps made puddles of light on the parking lot’s dark pavement. I parked in a well-lit visitor’s spot by the front door, dropped my revolver in my pocket, and hustled into the bright lobby. Before I stepped into the elevator, I looked inside to make sure it was empty.

  Billy Elliot met me at the door all smiles and wags and knee-kisses, and we trundled down the hall to the elevator. He must have sensed that I was operating with half-charged batteries, because he tempered his speed when we ran the parking-lot track. Greyhounds are considerate like that.

  Upstairs, I whispered good-bye to him and left him whirling his tail and grinning.

  The run had wakened my blood, so I drove off with more of my synapses firing.

  Mostly, they were firing questions about the men who had attacked me. Who were they? What had they been looking for?

  Coming so soon after the murder in Cupcake’s house, I was almost certain the incidents were connected but couldn’t imagine how. All morning long, while I felt the weight of the .38 in my pocket, my mind played with the question, but I never came up with an answer.

  After I finished my last pet visit, I called Cupcake’s cell phone.

  Cupcake said, “We’re waiting for room service to bring breakfast.”

  I suppressed a snide comment about people who didn’t have to get up early and walk dogs and clean litter boxes.

  He sounded edgy and achingly hollow, like a man who hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. I hoped the Ritz’s room-service people understood they had to bring large quantities of whatever they were bringing.

  I said, “What about your luggage?”

  “I called a friend, and he’s driving the skycap’s car to the airport. He’ll get our stuff from baggage claim.”

  I heard Jancey’s voice in the background telling him what to say to me.

  He said, “Jancey refuses to wear the same clothes she wore all the way from Parma, so she can’t get dressed until our luggage gets here.”

  “Have you talked to Sergeant Owens?”

  “He said we could go home. The officer heading the investigation will come by later and get a statement from us.”

  Dully, I said, “I’m going to the Village Diner and have breakfast. Then I’ll go get Elvis and Lucy and bring them home.”

  I figured we’d all feel better after a good breakfast.

  When I parked in the diner’s graveled lot, I took the revolver out of my pocket and locked it in the glove box. There are some places where it’s just wrong to take a gun, even if it’s legal. On the way to the diner’s door, I passed a gaggle of men leaning over the opened hood of a sexy red Porsche. One of them, obviously the car’s owner, was punching the air while he talked.

  “It just spent a week at the dealer’s! I just picked it up this morning!”

  The other men looked sympathetic, all of them rushing to tell their own horror stories about their cars. They didn’t even notice me walk by. Not that men always noticed me, but it was a bit deflating to know that a bunch of men were more interested in a car’s innards than in me. Especially since I knew that not one of them knew what he was looking at when he looked inside the car.

  Used to be that men prided themselves on knowing car engines. They’d gather in driveways with beers in hand and pop the hood—once they passed the age of fifteen they always called it “popping the hood”—and they’d all lean over and with their free hands diddle the hoses and wires and dipsticks. They’d pull out a spark plug and examine it like forensic scientists examining blood samples. Then they’d do whatever was needed to get the car engine running like a Swiss watch. Now, men open the hood and peer in and scratch their heads. They say, “Damned if I know what’s wrong. You’ll have to call a mechanic.” Because it�
��s all computers now, and not a man alive understands the car he drives. Women don’t either, but then we never did.

  I opened the diner door and stepped into its homey, steamy smell with a sense of gratitude. The diner’s smells never change. It’s something I can rely on.

  Judy zipped out of the kitchen with both arms balancing plates of food. She stopped and looked solemnly at me.

  She said, “It’s a bacon day, isn’t it?”

  Until she said it, I hadn’t known it, but I nodded in mute gratitude, like somebody who’d been crawling across an arid desert meeting a genie who asked if she’d like a drop of water.

  I can’t live without bacon. I try, God knows I try, and I can go weeks without giving in. Then one day I’ll wake up and hear bacon calling my name. That’s the day I go in the Village Diner with the whites of my eyes showing all around, and Judy signals Tanisha to start frying up a rasher of bacon for me. Tanisha knows how I like it—crisp enough to break if you look hard at it, with no disgusting curled fat ends or little swollen white pimples on it. Judy brings it on its own little special plate as befits something of importance, and I’m like that overeager dog on the commercial who loses his cool because he knows he’s getting bacon-flavored kibble. Given a choice between sex with George Clooney or crisp bacon on toasted sourdough bread smeared with real mayo, a slice of ripe tomato, and a frill of lettuce, I’d take the BLT every time. Well, maybe not every time, but definitely some of the times. Once, maybe. Okay, never, but I’d imagine the bacon sandwich all the time I was making love to Clooney.

  I waved to Tanisha on the way to the ladies’ room to wash off the affection lavished on me by cats and dogs. Tanisha’s broad face dimpled and she waved back. Next to my brother, Tanisha is the best cook in the world.

  Passing the counter where people can watch TV while they eat, I saw Squatty Knox, a high school algebra teacher who has blighted the lives of Siesta Key students since my parents’ time. Squatty earned his unflattering sobriquet because he was, well, squatty. Low to the ground, as Floridians say, which isn’t the same as short. It’s just squatty. When I was in his class listening to him drone on and on, I always tried not to blink because I knew if I blinked I’d never get my eyelids to come up again. I was also afraid I might fall into a coma and tumble out of my chair, which would have caught his attention and made him call on me to solve some algebra problem. I couldn’t have solved an algebra problem if he’d set my feet on fire. I did the best I could to stare straight ahead without blinking, which made my eyeballs so dry that it’s a wonder flies didn’t settle on them.

  Like everybody else at the diner counter, Squatty was staring at the TV the same way I once stared at him. He seemed mesmerized by footage of Briana in different designer clothes, at different fashion shows. An offscreen male voice identified each place, each designer, each season—“Paris, for Yves St. Laurent, the 2008 spring collection; Rome, the 2010 fall show, for Chanel; Vienna, for Versace…”

  I walked on by, wondering at which show Briana had met a Serbian gangster who’d gone to prison for smuggling heroin in a shipment of fake Gucci watches. Aside from the fact that drug dealing and counterfeiting were crimes, they were crass acts, not the kind of thing a discriminating woman would admire.

  I spruced up in the ladies’ room, and when I left, Squatty was still engrossed in the TV screen, this time showing footage of Cupcake in action on the football field. All the other people perched on stools at the counter seemed equally fascinated. They seemed to be attached to the screen by invisible IV lines, getting infusions of painkillers by watching images of people whose lives seemed more interesting or more rewarding or more bizarre than their own.

  At my regular booth, Judy had already put my coffee on the table. As I slid onto the bench seat, she appeared beside me with my regular breakfast along with the not-regular special plate of bacon. For a second there, inhaling the siren scent of fried hog fat, I drifted off to my own personal nirvana. Some people escape pain through watching TV, some through smelling bacon.

  Judy said, “Everybody’s talking about the killing at that football player’s house.”

  She waited a moment to see if I’d take the bait, then raised an eyebrow a fraction when I got busy buttering my biscuit.

  She said, “You’re not talking, huh?”

  “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

  “Except you were there when it happened.”

  “I was outside the house. I didn’t see a thing.”

  She studied my face and got a worried look. “Well, that’s good. Maybe now that the hunk is gone you won’t be getting mixed up in murders anymore. I sure hope so.”

  I sipped coffee. She topped off the mug and waited. I salted and peppered my eggs. She sighed and went away. For some odd reason, I felt like crying. When an old friend pumps you for information and at the same time is concerned about you, it’s a little bit like having a caring mother quiz you about the questionable kids you’re hanging out with. Not that I ever had a mother who did that.

  The bacon helped calm me. I nibbled its salty, crispy, tranquilizing, artery-clogging goodness and considered all the weird things that had happened, especially the weird thing that had turned me into a helpless victim of violence. It isn’t in my nature to be a victim. I fight back, I stand up for myself, I don’t let myself be used—but violent men had got away with disabling me while they ransacked my apartment. Instead of fighting back, I had lain there helpless as a dead snake, and I was still helpless because I didn’t know who they were. Standing up for myself against those unknown men would be like fighting fog. If I hadn’t had the bacon, I would have got really depressed.

  I was so blissed out on bacon that I didn’t see Ethan until he was standing by my booth.

  “Are you expecting another homicide investigator?”

  I laughed. “No, not today.”

  He slid into the booth and waved to Judy, who trotted like a pony to bring him coffee.

  She said, “Tanisha’s scrambling your eggs. I’ll bring them right out.”

  This time I knew he had planned his breakfast time to coincide with mine. It made me feel proud and scared at the same time. Ethan wasn’t the kind of man to indulge in casual flings. If he went after a woman, he was serious about it. He also wasn’t the kind of man to let a woman jerk him around. If I made a commitment to him, I’d damn well have to keep it or there’d be some high drama. Not that I didn’t keep commitments, but I wasn’t sure anymore how long I could promise anything to anybody.

  He gestured toward the TV over the counter, where voices still gushed the same old words, and diners still hung off their stools absorbing every stale word as if it were new and fresh.

  “The murder in the Trillin house seems to have taken over every minute of the news.”

  I shrugged. “A famous model broke into a famous athlete’s house, and then some mystery woman was killed in the house. If you were a reporter and you had a choice of talking about that or talking about a new downtown parking lot, which would you choose?”

  He grinned. “I can’t imagine myself a reporter.”

  “That’s because you make things happen. Reporters tell about things somebody else has made happen.”

  “That’s probably an oversimplification, but true.”

  “I know a psychologist who says we’re all addicted to drugs our bodies manufacture in response to experiences we have. Even our thoughts create drugs we get addicted to.”

  “Psychoneuroimmunology.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what it’s called. Means that chemicals infuse every cell in our bodies in response to our emotions, and those chemicals affect our health. Happy thoughts create healing chemicals, hateful thoughts create toxic chemicals.”

  Judy whirled to the booth and settled his plate in front of him. She poured more coffee in both our mugs, waggled her eyebrows at me, and whirled away.

  It doesn’t take a man long to eat scrambled eggs and dry t
oast. While he ate, I watched him and felt stupider by the moment.

  I said, “Am I the only person who doesn’t know about psycho-whatever?”

  He laughed. “No, and you’ll be glad to know that it was a woman who discovered there’s no time lapse between emotions and the chemicals they produce. Dr. Candace Pert, very brilliant woman. She says our bodies are our subconscious minds.”

  I sighed. “You’re too smart for me, Ethan. I’m a pet sitter. I only have two years of community college.”

  He ate the last bite of tomato and tossed his paper napkin into his plate. “Nobody in the world knows everything. You’re ignorant about some things I know about. I’m ignorant about some things you know about. Being ignorant about particular things doesn’t mean we’re stupid. Stupid people can’t learn anything new. You and I can learn if we’re exposed to the things we’re ignorant about.”

  “Do you want to go out with me?”

  I hadn’t expected to say that, it just came out.

  Ethan reached across the table and touched my hand. “You know I do.”

  “I have to tell Guidry. I’d feel dishonest to see you and not tell him.”

  “I understand that.”

  I said, “I think all my cells are being flooded with nice chemicals right now.”

  He laughed and got to his feet. “Let me know when you’re ready to move forward.”

  He left money on the table for Judy and left the diner. Judy came and stood beside me with curiosity radiating from her like heat from a stove, but she didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t volunteer any information.

  I was too dazed by what had just happened to be able to talk. Without planning to, I had in one quick instant made a decision about my future with Guidry and acted on it. It was a decision I didn’t like, a decision that I didn’t want to make, but one that had to be made. In a way, I was grateful to Guidry for letting me be the one to make it.

  I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and slid out of the booth.

  In the parking lot, ignorance of car repair had finally won out, and a cluster of men watched other men load the red Porsche onto a flatbed tow truck. The owner of the Porsche had the anguished face of a man watching his child go off to war. Nobody noticed me get in the Bronco, nobody saw me drive away. I was invisible in plain sight, the way Tom Hale had said Briana’s criminal friend had been until he was arrested.