The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

by Blaize Clement

  The Kitty Haven is just around the corner from the diner, so I was there in no time to get Elvis and Lucy. I carried their cardboard carriers inside and helped Marge settle Elvis into the one with his scrap of paper still in it and Lucy into the other. I paid Marge, put the receipt in my pocket to give Cupcake and Jancey, and lugged the carriers out to the Bronco. As if she realized she was going home, Lucy poked a paw through the air holes and made excited noises. Elvis was quiet. Probably sniffing his paper to make sure nobody else had played with it since he left it.

  15

  All the way to the Trillins’ house, the phone call I would have to make to Guidry rode in the car with me like a little gray cloud. It was still with me when I pulled into the Trillins’ driveway and got the cat carriers from the Bronco. Jancey saw me from the living room window and opened the front door before I rang.

  She said, “Good timing! We just this minute got here.”

  She had an odd expression on her face—a normal reaction to returning to a house where a crime-scene cleanup team had removed all the familiar odors. Like other animals, humans rely on their sense of smell as well as their vision and hearing to recognize places and people. Take away the smell of your own home and it will seem alien.

  In the living room, Cupcake was looking around like a tourist visiting a house of some historical figure.

  I couldn’t keep from looking toward the spot on the floor where the dead woman had lain. The cleanup guys had done an excellent job. Nobody would have guessed the floor had been awash with blood a few days before. If Jancey and Cupcake noticed the absence of a rug that had lain on the tile, they didn’t mention it.

  I set the cat carriers on the floor and knelt to open them. Each cat leaped out, Elvis carrying his beloved crumpled paper. Their ears flattened when they smelled the neutral air, and they both went hyper for a few minutes, racing around the room, leaping on furniture, generally acting like wild cats. Also a natural reaction to the absence of familiar odors in a familiar place.

  After they had thrown enough of their own cells around to feel at home, they reverted to their sweet selves. Lucy rubbed her cheek against Jancey’s leg to deposit scent cells on her, and Elvis trotted confidently toward the media room, still carrying his precious paper. Having marked her territory with cheek glands, Lucy made a chirping noise and galloped after her brother.

  Cupcake said, “Dixie, Sergeant Owens said for us to go through the house when we got home and make a note of anything changed or missing. You’d better come with us. You’d know if anything was moved after we left.”

  I suspected they just wanted somebody else with them when they went through the house for the first time, but I would have felt the same way. We moved room to room, Cupcake and Jancey studying every piece of furniture, every picture, every curio. In the bathrooms, they stared at the towels and soaps as if they suspected them of being different than the ones they’d left there. In the kitchen, Jancey even pulled out drawers and looked inside them while Cupcake examined the interior of the refrigerator.

  By the time we headed down the hall to the master bedroom, they seemed anxious in a different way. Personally, I was a wreck. I kept remembering the shirt Briana had worn the first time I saw her. I could imagine her tossing it on the bed and leaving it there for Jancey to find.

  Jancey said, “If that bitch slept in our bed, I’m getting a new one tomorrow.”

  The shirt wasn’t on the bed or on either of the two chairs in the room. The white silk duvet on the bed was smooth, too, and the artfully piled pillows showed no sign of having been dented by another woman’s head.

  But a pair of black sneakers sat in the middle of the duvet. The sneakers looked brand-new. Each shoe had the stark white Nike swoosh. Each was roughly the size of a loaf of bread.

  For a moment, we all stared at the shoes without speaking.

  Jancey said, “Cupcake?”

  He said, “I didn’t leave them there.”

  They looked at me, and I shook my head.

  They strode to the bed and each picked up a shoe. They turned those Nikes over, examined their insides, pulled their tongues out, sniffed them, and then turned them over again and repeated each step.

  Jancey said, “They’re eighteen double-E’s.”

  Cupcake nodded. “My size.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t get them just before we left and put them here?”

  “I didn’t buy these shoes. I didn’t leave them here.”

  They turned to me again, and I shook my head again.

  I said, “I always make a fast pass through the house when I’m here just in case a cat has done something I need to clean up. Those shoes weren’t here the last time I was in this room.”

  Cupcake said, “That would be the day before that crazy woman broke in.”

  “Right.”

  Jancey said, “Cupcake, how does that Briana person know what size shoe you wear?”

  “How the hell would I know, Jancey? I keep telling you, I don’t know her!”

  Jancey said, “You shouldn’t wear those things. They could have radiation or flesh-eating bacteria on them that could kill you. Maybe you should give them to the police.”

  Cupcake looked like he might cry any minute, just from confusion.

  In my head, over and over, I heard Briana telling about breaking into houses with Cupcake: Cupcake mostly did it so he could get a pair of Nikes.

  Jancey pulled back the duvet to uncover pale pink sheets neatly tucked under the mattress. Her face relaxed. “I don’t think she got in our bed.”

  Cupcake said, “Jancey, I swear to God I never knew that woman. I’ve never talked to her. I don’t know anybody else who knows her.”

  I said, “Maybe it wasn’t Briana who left the shoes. Maybe it was the woman who was murdered.” I didn’t believe that, but I wanted to.

  Cupcake closed his eyes. “God, I’d forgotten about her.”

  Shamed, Jancey said, “Me, too.”

  Cupcake said, “Dixie, don’t you think it’s peculiar that nobody knows who that woman was?”

  I said, “She didn’t have any identification on her body. No wallet, no purse, nothing with a name or address on it.”

  “Couldn’t they tell from fingerprints?”

  I told him the same thing I’d told Tom Hale. “Some people live their entire lives without being fingerprinted. There’s also a DNA database, but DNA is only collected in criminal cases.”

  Jancey said, “You’d think her family would report her missing.”

  “Maybe there is no family. Maybe she’s a loner that nobody misses.”

  For a moment, my mind snagged on all the things we didn’t know—gaps in personal histories, holes in life stories, dark secrets that could cost another life. Briana was either from Switzerland or Louisiana. She had or had not known Cupcake as a kid. Somebody had left a new pair of Nikes in the middle of the Trillins’ bed, and nobody knew why. Men who spoke a foreign language had hurt me very badly, but I had no bruises to prove it. A woman had been murdered and nobody knew who she was.

  In the media’s coverage, the murder in Cupcake’s house had been merely an excuse to explore Briana’s glamorous life and Cupcake’s sports history and philanthropic activities. When the dead woman was discussed at all, it was merely to give the particulars of her color, size, and approximate age. There hadn’t even been the usual nattering talk shows about how odd it was that not one but two women had broken into Cupcake’s house that morning.

  The doorbell rang, and we snapped to attention.

  I said, “I’d better go home now. Call me if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  We all moved toward the front door, and Cupcake opened it. The homicide detective, Steven, stood outside.

  He said, “Mr. Trillin? I’m Steven Jorgensen, with the FBI.”

  Catching sight of me, he looked embarrassed.

  When Cupcake introduced me and Jancey, Steven said, “Ms. Hemingway and I have met.”

 
; I said, “Except you told me you were a homicide detective with the sheriff’s department.”

  “You assumed I was a homicide detective.”

  He had me there. When I thought back to our conversation at the diner, I had to admit he’d never actually said he was with the sheriff’s department. I had, as he said, assumed he was because Sergeant Owens had told me “the investigator” would be stopping by the diner to talk to me. I planned to have a little talk with Owens about that, but I should have known the FBI would get involved in the case. They always come in when state lines have been crossed in a crime. In this case, international lines had been crossed.

  Cupcake gave us a puzzled frown.

  I said, “Steven talked to me about the murder. I didn’t realize he was with the FBI.”

  Steven said, “Actually, I’m just on loan to the FBI. I’m with Interpol.”

  Cupcake said, “Interpol?”

  He sounded as if Interpol was just one damn thing too much. His glower was enough to cause the most hardened criminal investigator to quake.

  It caused Steven to look defensive. “Interpol is an intelligence and liaison agency. We get involved in cases where law enforcement agencies of different countries have to cooperate.” Turning to me, he said, “Actually, I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you and Mr. Trillin together.”

  I knew what that meant. If he questioned us together, we wouldn’t be able to give each other a heads-up if we told a lie.

  Jancey said, “We can talk in the kitchen. I’ll make coffee.”

  He said, “That would be nice, Mrs. Trillin.”

  Jancey led the way and we all traipsed to the kitchen, where everything was warm wood and cold stainless steel, with a swan’s-neck faucet at the sink tall enough for a child to stand under and take a shower. Cupcake and Steven waited until I sat down at a round oak table; then they took chairs while Jancey bustled around filling a coffeepot and attaching it to a machine that looked as if it had come off a space ship. While the coffee machine sighed and gurgled, she got down black glazed coffee mugs, asked if anybody took sugar or cream, got a united no, and went to the freezer, where she took out a plastic bag of cookies and shook some on a black pottery plate.

  She put the plate on the table, and we all leaned toward the scent of chocolate chips. It may have been my imagination, but Steven’s eyes seemed to go a shade lighter.

  He said, “You freeze them?”

  She nodded. “As soon as they’re cool from the oven. Makes the chocolate set up, and they’re crispier after they’re frozen.”

  She moved gracefully to pour coffee, and Steven watched her. When he looked back at Cupcake, he had a new respect in his eyes. Everybody fawned over Cupcake because he was a great athlete. His close friends knew he was also a great guy, but his adoring fans only knew that he was a powerhouse on the football field. That’s all Steven had known, too, but now he was seeing another side of Cupcake. The side that had a beautiful, gracious wife who baked chocolate chip cookies with extra care and served them with dignity and charm. A man with a wife like that is more than a big athlete, he’s a man who has earned the love of a discriminating woman. Seeing that Steven recognized that and respected it made me look at him with a bit more respect.

  I was becoming so comfortable with the man that I was almost on the verge of asking him where he was from originally. As if we really were just folks having coffee and cookies together.

  Jancey wasn’t as easily seduced as I was. Pointedly looking from me to Cupcake, she said, “Tell him about the shoes.”

  Cupcake said, “That woman left a pair of Nikes on our bed.”

  Steven’s eyes lit. “Could I see them please?”

  Jancey said, “I’ll get them.”

  We waited silently until Jancey hurried back with the shoes.

  Just so I wouldn’t look like I never had an original idea, I said, “It could have been the dead woman who left them.”

  Steven grunted and examined the shoes the same way Cupcake and Jancey had done.

  He said, “Nikes mean anything to you, Mr. Trillin?”

  Cupcake chuckled. “Only that I grew up poor, and wearing a pair of Nikes meant you were somebody. You walked tall if you had Nikes.”

  Steven pulled a penknife from his pocket, sank the tip inside one of the shoes, and popped out the insole. I wondered why I hadn’t thought to do that.

  He said, “Poor kids still covet Nikes. If you ask a ghetto kid why he started dealing drugs, nine times out of ten he’ll tell you it was so he could buy a pair of Nikes.”

  Steven set the shoes side by side with their heels toward us. “See how the top edges aren’t symmetrical?”

  Now that he mentioned it, I could see that one shoe’s top edge slanted slightly to the left.

  Like a magician playing his audience, Steven turned the shoes so their swoosh logos were facing us. “An authentic swoosh is curvy. These are angular. Now look at the stitching. See how some stitches are longer than others? And see how the material is rough at the edges? Look at the laces. Notice the broken fibers that give them a slightly fuzzy look.”

  He held a shoe to his nose and inhaled. “A heavy glue smell is always the first giveaway.”

  I said, “They’re fakes?”

  He nodded. “Not even good fakes.”

  In an aggrieved voice, Cupcake said, “That woman brought me fake Nikes?”

  He sounded so offended that Jancey and I started to laugh, but then we remembered the woman who’d left them had been either a murderer or a victim of murder.

  Steven said, “Counterfeit sneakers make up about forty percent of the goods smuggled into the United States every year. The majority of those goods are fake Nikes. Some of them are obvious fakes. Some are so good even Nike’s people would have a hard time telling them apart from the authentic ones.”

  I wiggled my toes in my Keds. “If they’re that good, does it make any difference?”

  Steven’s eyes grew frostier. “It matters to the company with legal rights to manufacture and distribute them. It matters to the people whose jobs go to Asian sweatshops. It matters to the counterfeiters who make billions but pay their workers only pennies a day.”

  Cupcake said, “It matters to me! If I pay for real Nikes, I don’t want fakes.”

  Steven said, “So does every other consumer. But the prices for fake goods are enticing: A handbag exactly like the original that sells for fifteen hundred dollars may sell for six hundred, and the buyer will think she got a bargain. The only items almost impossible to fake are things like a six-thousand-dollar Cabat handbag. Women who know that bag are savvy enough to recognize when the leather weaving is inferior.”

  I swallowed wrong and had a coughing fit at the idea of somebody spending six thousand dollars for a handbag. Any woman who would do that should just go whole hog and spend ten thousand for a new brain.

  When I’d got myself under control, Steven said, “Other high-end labels are particularly easy to copy. Two-thirds of expensive timepieces are actually fakes.”

  I turned my wrist so the fake Rolex was facedown. I’d never pretended it was a real Rolex, but it was still a rip-off of the genuine article.

  I said, “I don’t understand how they get away with it. Isn’t that what customs inspectors are for?”

  “They catch bad fakes, but it’s impossible to spot good fakes with a cursory inspection. Fakes don’t come all in one shipment, either, or with one point of origin. A single shipment may contain fake Pradas, Fendis, Guccis, Versaces, all the top brands, all with falsified labels of origin.”

  Jancey said, “I’ve always known there were fakes, but I never realized it was such a big problem.”

  “Most people don’t, but high-fashion counterfeiting rings have tentacles all over the world. The goods are distributed to upscale shops in resort areas such as the one you live in.”

  Jancey and I looked at each other, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was: Which shops, and had we ever bou
ght something there? Since my fashion choices are more likely to come from Target or JC Penney’s than a haute couture shop, I didn’t imagine I had bought any good fakes. Jancey shopped at those high-end shops, though, and she might very well have bought a fake and not known it.

  Steven said, “Versace just won a twenty-two-million-dollar settlement in a Los Angeles counterfeiting lawsuit. We found seventy-two retail stores in California and Arizona passing off fake Versace merchandise and charging for the real thing.”

  Jancey said, “Those stores knew the merchandise was fake?”

  Steven smiled grimly. “Nobody sells counterfeit merchandise by mistake. If you sell a genuine Gucci watch, your profit margin is slim. If you sell a good counterfeit Gucci watch, your profit is large. For a lot of retailers, it isn’t a difficult decision to make.”

  Jancey said, “What does all that have to do with a woman breaking into our house and killing somebody?”

  Steven said, “That’s the big question, Mrs. Trillin. I was hoping Mr. Trillin might be able to shed some light on that.”

  Like a scudding cloud, Cupcake’s face went from confusion to recognition to anger in about two seconds. “You think I have something to do with fake Nikes?”

  “If you do, or if you know anybody who does, now would be the time to say so.”

  Like a mother lion whose cub has been threatened, Jancey stood up. For a moment it looked like she might snatch the plate of cookies off the table.

  “Don’t you dare imply that we’re criminals! We were in Italy on the first vacation we’ve had together in years. We got a call from Dixie saying a crazy woman had broken into our house. We cut our trip short and made reservations to come home, but then we got another call saying the woman was murdered before the cops could come and throw her out of our house. Except it wasn’t that woman, it was some other woman, and the first woman, the crazy model with one name, disappeared. Then we got to the Sarasota airport after twenty-two hours of worried travel, but Dixie couldn’t come get us because she was lying on her front porch knocked out by some thugs who ransacked her apartment. Now, to add icing to our cake, you waltz in here and hint that Cupcake is making fake sneakers! Talk about adding insult to injury!”