Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

by Blaize Clement

  Nevertheless, I had talked to him, and he had lied to me. All the way home, I thought about what that lie meant. From everything else he’d said, I figured it was a pretty good bet that he and Maureen had been up to their beautiful necks in an affair all during Maureen’s marriage. That didn’t surprise me. And while my personal philosophy is that married people who don’t love each other enough to be loyal should end the marriage instead of being liars and sneaks, Maureen’s adultery wasn’t any of my business. So why did I feel as if there was something worse than adultery going on between Maureen and Harry?

  Even worse, why, if I was honest with myself, did I have a terrible hunch that a sweet, goofy guy like Harry was somehow involved in Victor’s kidnapping?

  20

  I woke the next morning with Ella cuddled warm against my back. I left her in bed while I splashed my face with water and brushed my teeth. As I streaked down the hall to my closet-office for shorts and T and Keds, I saw that Ella was sitting up and yawning. Four A.M. is way too early for a cat.

  She followed me to the front door, and I stopped a moment to kiss her head and tell her goodbye. I said, “Michael will be home at eight and get you.”

  It was probably my imagination, but her eyes seemed to light up at the sound of Michael’s name. Lots of females have that reaction.

  Outside, the sky was dark and dense as dryer lint. Along the shoreline, coquinas and mole crabs fed on the surf’s salty broth of nutrients as gulls gobbled down the feeding mollusks. Nature is efficient. Going down the stairs, I trailed dew-moistened fingertips along the rail. In the carport, a snowy egret who was balanced on one knobby-kneed leg atop the roof of Paco’s truck twisted his head full circle to watch me pass. A brown pelican on my Bronco unfolded himself, spread his wings to their full six-and-a-half-foot span, and flapped away.

  I made it to Midnight Pass Road without waking the parakeets in the trees, and turned north. Tom Hale’s condo is only a short hop away, so I was at his door in five minutes. Tom was still asleep, but Billy Elliot was waiting for me with a big happy grin. We had the parking lot entirely to ourselves for our run, and when I took him upstairs Billy’s tail was wagging in pure happiness. I read somewhere that you can tell how satisfied a dog is by the direction its tail goes when it wags. If it circles to the right, the dog is happy. To the left, not so much. Billy’s tail was definitely doing clockwise circles.

  There was still no sound in Tom’s apartment, but as I unsnapped Billy’s leash I noticed a filmy pink scarf tossed on the sofa. It had been a long time since Tom had allowed a female guest to sleep over, and I was glad to see that he’d quit sulking over the loss of the last girlfriend. Especially since she hadn’t been nearly good enough for him and Billy Elliot.

  I made a circle of my thumb and forefinger and whispered, “Awright!” to Billy. He waved his tail to the right.

  I had two new clients that morning, a husky male Shorthair named T-Quartz and his house mate, a snow-white Persian named Princess. T-Quartz was stolid and watchful, not ready yet to commit himself, but Princess threw caution to the winds and immediately made me her new best friend. I wondered if their names had affected their personalities. I wasn’t familiar with their house yet, so I spent a bit longer with them and got to Max and Ruthie’s house later than usual.

  Ruthie and I were now so slick at our pill-pushing routine that it had become performance art. We could probably have sold tickets and drawn a crowd. Max beamed while we showed how smooth we were, and then he took Ruthie in his arms and told her she was absolutely the smartest cat in the entire world.

  I left them basking in mutual adoration and zipped to Big Bubba’s house. As I turned into his driveway, a dark sedan passed in the street behind me. The car slowed almost to a stop, and in the rearview mirror I saw the driver’s head turn toward me. It was just a glimpse, but he looked like Jaz’s stepfather. I put the Bronco in reverse to get a better look at him, but the car sped away.

  I didn’t like the idea of Jaz’s stepfather seeing me in Reba’s driveway. If he had something to do with gangs sent out to burglarize houses, I didn’t want him to catch on that Reba was away.

  Inside, Big Bubba squawked with excitement when I removed the cover from his cage. “Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?”

  I laughed and opened his cage door. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  He laughed too, as if he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. I left him climbing to the top of his cage and went to the kitchen for his banana and apple slices. For an extra treat, I got a couple of crackers as well. When I went back in the sunroom, he had sailed to the floor and was at the slider waiting for me to open it so he could go out on the lanai. Big Bubba was one smart bird.

  As I opened the door, I said, “Your mama will be home in a few days.”

  He said, “Did you miss me?” He was smart, but repetitive.

  While Big Bubba and his wild cousins yelled the latest avian news to one another, I put down clean carpet and fresh food and water. Then I got out the hand vac and sucked up all his seed hulls. When everything was clean and organized, I turned on Big Bubba’s TV to his favorite cop show.

  Except his cop show had been interrupted by a news flash. A hyperventilating newswoman was standing on a dock pointing to a boat belonging to the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department. The boat was empty, but the woman wanted the world to know that it had recently been occupied by a dead body.

  “The dead man is believed to be Victor Salazar,” she said. She smiled while she said it, but she pulled her eyebrows close together to show that she could be as empathetic as the next person about a dead body. “Mr. Salazar was kidnapped several days ago, and his body was found early this morning by some fishermen. His widow, Maureen Salazar, is in seclusion and has not issued a statement since her husband’s body was found.”

  Saddened and vaguely alarmed, I stood motionless as the scene shifted to a newsman back at the studio, who gave the particulars about Victor Salazar and his business. Salazar was sixty years old and a native of Venezuela, he said, and had extensive holdings in Venezuelan oil production. He didn’t mention anything about oil trading, just oil ownership.

  I was surprised at Victor’s age. I’d thought he was a lot older because he’d seemed ancient to me when Maureen married him. But if he was only sixty, that meant he’d been forty-five when he married Maureen, and that didn’t seem so old now. On the other hand, compared to Harry’s thirty-three, sixty was old.

  As I got Big Bubba back into his cage, my mind raced through all the ways I might get in touch with Maureen and tell her how sorry I was. Either by design or negligence, she had never given me a phone number, and I was sure it would be unlisted.

  I changed the station to the Nature channel, told Big Bubba I would be back in the afternoon, and left him. He seemed subdued, as if he sensed my mood.

  Back in my Bronco, I called Information and asked for Victor Salazar’s phone number. As I had expected, it was unlisted. I asked for Maureen Salazar’s number. It was unlisted too. Of course the numbers were unlisted, they were rich people. Harry Henry probably had a phone number for Maureen, but I felt squeamish about talking to Harry again. I might find out more than I wanted to know.

  I needed breakfast, but before I went to the diner I drove half a block to Hetty Soames’s house. At least she might have good news about Jaz.

  She didn’t.

  Looking strained, Hetty said, “Dixie, something has happened to that child. She liked me and Ben. She wouldn’t just disappear without saying goodbye.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, Hetty.”

  She said, “I have a really bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.”

  I did too, but I didn’t say so.

  As I left Hetty’s house to go pounce on breakfast, another dark sedan pulled close behind me. At first I suspected it was the same one I’d thought was driven by Jaz’s stepfather, but some other cars got between us after I turned onto Midnight Pass Road and I decided I was being
paranoid. Half the cars on the street are dark sedans, and one looks pretty much like all the rest.

  As I entered the Village Diner, I glanced at the big-screen TV over the counter. It was turned low enough not to bother people who didn’t want the latest bad news with their breakfast, but high enough so people at the counter could hear every word. I caught the name “Victor Salazar” and the word “kidnapped” but I didn’t slow down.

  Judy was prompt with my coffee. She said, “Did you hear about that kidnapped man? His wife paid them a million dollars and they drowned him anyway.”

  “I heard.”

  “Damn, if she’d known they were going to drown him anyway, she could have saved herself a million bucks.”

  Without waiting for a response, she swished away to dispense coffee to other caffeine-deprived people. I felt miserable. If Judy knew I was the person who had delivered the million dollars to Victor’s kidnappers, she wouldn’t see me as a friend anymore. She’d think of me as a person she didn’t know very well, somebody who had weird secrets about weird things done in the middle of the night. If my role in the ransom payment ever came out, everybody I knew would look at me in a different way.

  They might even look at me the same way I was looking at Harry Henry, as somebody involved in Victor’s kidnapping. Just thinking that made me feel as if I were wandering in a maze. The Harry I’d always known wouldn’t have had anything to do with kidnapping.

  Judy brought my breakfast, seemed about to say something, decided not to, and left me alone with my dark thoughts.

  One idea lay like a lion stretched on a rock in the sun, lazily swishing its tail while it waited for me to draw close enough to leap on me. I had to face the possibility that if Harry had anything to do with Victor’s kidnapping, it would have been with Maureen’s knowledge and consent. Harry not only had a history of letting Maureen use him, but I was positive he was currently involved with her. As in being her lover, which can make a man do all kinds of things he might not otherwise do. Harry had always been a fool when it came to Maureen. If she’d asked him for help, he would have helped her.

  But if they were involved in the kidnapping, that meant they also had something to do with Victor’s murder, and I couldn’t believe that of either of them.

  Which made me drop to the less onerous but more likely possibility that neither of them had been involved in the kidnapping, but that Maureen had leaped at the chance to get rid of Victor and keep his money. If she had wanted to leave him anyway, she might have seen his kidnapping as the best thing that ever happened to her. If he were returned, she’d be in the same spot she’d been before, a wife with a rich husband and a poor lover.

  Maybe when she’d got the call from his kidnappers she had decided to do the thing that would make them kill Victor. They had told her not to report that Victor was gone, and the first thing she’d done was run to me. Then after I’d delivered the ransom money for her, she’d put on a distraught wife act and called a press conference to tell the world he’d been kidnapped. Even as she begged for Victor’s release, she’d known her act might get him killed. And all the time, Harry may have known about her plan.

  If all that were true, anything I did now would only help her cause. If I confessed to the investigators that I had been the person who carried the duff el bag full of money to the gazebo, it would simply corroborate that Maureen had paid the kidnappers. It would also make me look like sixteen kinds of an idiot. Which I probably was. The two people I had always believed were dumber than a sack of dirt may have played a clever trick on smart me. They both knew me as well as I knew them, and they had known how to push my loyalty buttons.

  On the other hand, I didn’t have a shred of proof that any of my dark suspicions were true. Once again, I was thrown back to the bottom line: Maureen had done nothing illegal when she chose to pay off Victor’s kidnappers. I had done nothing illegal when I carried the money for her to the gazebo. Even Maureen’s press conference to reveal that Victor had been kidnapped hadn’t been illegal. Stupid, maybe, if she wanted Victor returned alive. Disloyal and unconscionable if she didn’t, but not illegal.

  The only truly unlawful things had been done by Victor’s kidnappers—not Maureen, not Harry Henry, and not me.

  Even so, the whole thing was ugly, and I wished I didn’t even know about it. The fact that I not only knew about it, but was involved in it, made me so disgusted with myself that I didn’t linger for another cup of coffee. I left money for Judy and went out without saying goodbye.

  Like a homing pigeon, I sped south on Midnight Pass Road and made a right turn onto my lane where a discreet sign warns DEAD END, PRIVATE ROAD. I felt better just to be so close to home. I wanted to talk to Michael and try to get my life back on an even keel. Slowing so as not to freak out the parakeets in the oak trees, I began to relax as I looked out at the sun-spangled Gulf. Distant sailboats made white triangles against the blue horizon, and I could make out the white track of a water skier behind a speedboat.

  Motion in the rearview mirror caught my eye, and my heart began to leap like a trapped beast when I saw still another dark sedan in the lane behind me.

  Half the people in the world drive dark sedans, but they don’t drive down private lanes unless they have reason to go to the house at the end of the lane. Cops drive unmarked sedans. If the car behind me was an unmarked cop’s car, that could only mean that somebody from SIB was coming to notify Michael that something had happened to Paco.

  21

  It’s funny how the world goes gray when you’re faced with something you’ve always feared, as if a layer of cheesecloth settles over all the color and dulls it. I pulled into the carport next to Paco’s truck and forced myself to open my door and slide out. If what I feared was true, I did not think I could bear it. Michael’s car was gone, which was either good or bad. Good that he wouldn’t be there to hear the news that would break his heart, bad that I would have to be the one who ultimately told him.

  The sedan crawled to a stop on the shelled parking area, and the driver turned his head and looked squarely at me.

  The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I half turned to run away. It wasn’t a deputy from SIB, it was Jaz’s stepfather.

  Throwing his door open, he lunged from the car. The gray screen that had lowered over my vision dissolved, so I saw him silhouetted against a sky blazed by a feral sun.

  With bald accusation, he said, “Where’s the girl?”

  I took a half step backward toward the stairs to my apartment and played ignorant.

  “What girl?”

  He moved forward, but not just a half step. He was coming at me, and fast. “My stepdaughter! Is she here?”

  There are times when I feel strong as a jungle tiger. This wasn’t one of them. Pure and simple, I was afraid of the man. Afraid of his size. Afraid of the gun I knew he wore under his left arm.

  Grabbing the remote from my shorts pocket to open my hurricane shutters, I turned and ran up my stairs.

  As the shutters began their upward glide, he thundered to a huffing stop at the bottom step. Red faced, he yelled, “You don’t know what you’re involved in, lady.”

  I hate it when a sleazeball calls me lady. Makes me want to kick him where it would do the most good.

  I looked over the railing and said, “I’m giving you two seconds to get in your car and leave.”

  I tried to make that sound like “otherwise I’ll call down a rain of fire on your head,” but I didn’t really have an otherwise.

  He must have known it, because he started up the stairs, moving with surprising speed for a man his size. My shutters made it to the top and clicked home, but I was trapped. He was halfway up the steps, and even if I pushed through my french doors and ran inside my apartment, he could come after me before I could lower the shutters again.

  As he climbed higher, I did the only thing I could do. I ran to the top of the stairs, planted my foot in the middle of his chest, and pushed. Surprised and knocked off b
alance, he flailed the air while I ran to my door. He grabbed for the banister, missed it, and stumbled awkwardly to the bottom step just as Michael’s car jerked to a stop downstairs.

  Michael slammed out of his car, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he had seen me kick the man. That’s all he needed to go into white-hot fury.

  I yelled, “He’s got a gun, Michael!”

  Michael didn’t even slow down.

  The man looked up at me and then at Michael, and began making erasing motions with both hands. “Lady, you’ve got it all wrong.”

  I was afraid he’d go for his gun, but Michael reached him before he had time.

  The only other time I’d ever seen Michael that mad was when I was twelve and he was fourteen, and a nasty boy at school had jerked up my T-shirt and pinched one of my newly budding nipples. Michael had come at him so hard and fast that the kid’s nose was flattened and a front tooth was hanging by a bloody thread before I’d even got my shirt pulled back down.

  The guy at the bottom of the stairs didn’t fare any better. Michael smashed his fist into the man’s gut, then hooked him with a thudding uppercut to the chin.

  As much as I would have liked watching Michael beat the living snot out of him, I yelled, “Michael, stop!”

  He grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it behind his back so viciously that I cringed at the pain I imagined in the man’s shoulder.

  Michael gave me a grim smile. “Why?”

  “Because Guidry is here.”

  It was true. Guidry’s Blazer was rolling across the shell by the carport.

  Without releasing the man, Michael waited for Guidry to park and get out of his car. Guidry wore the look of a man who cannot be surprised but is willing to be tested.