The Cat Sitter's Whiskers

by Blaize Clement

  I looked over at Levi’s trailer and felt a tremor of panic begin to rumble somewhere deep inside me, threatening to turn into a scream. I knew right then and there if I wasn’t careful I’d fall apart, and for a couple of seconds I had an overwhelming urge to kick the car door open and just run … run right into the woods and keep on running until the whole thing was far behind me.

  Luckily, I managed to stay put. I was pretty sure racing through the trees screaming like a maniac might come off as a little weird, if not downright suspicious, so instead I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  I imagined I was sitting on a stretch of white sand, gazing out at the still blue line where the ocean meets the sky, perfectly level and straight. I tried to see the waves rolling in, one after the other, and I timed my breathing to the sound they made as they crashed over the sand. It seemed to help. The tremor in the pit of my stomach quieted down, and the urge to scream slowly disappeared, except that every once in a while the image of Levi’s astonished eyes would bubble up and my breath would catch.

  I’m not sure how long I’d been sitting there when I heard someone say, “Miz Hemingway…”

  Sergeant Owens was standing right next to my window, looking down with a pained expression on his face. His voice deep and slow as oozing honey he said, “Mind if I join you?”

  I scooted over to the driver’s seat as he went around the front and opened up the passenger door. Owens had never been much of a dresser, but as he slid in next to me I noticed he was wearing gray dress slacks with shiny black oxfords and a crisp white dress shirt. There was a hint of aftershave in the air, like mint and orange peel, and I wondered what he’d been doing when he received the call to come here.

  He let the door close softly and then folded his hands in his lap. “Well…”

  I said. “Okay, so this morning when I left my house, Levi was parked outside my driveway. At first I thought maybe he needed help, but then—”

  He put his hand up. “Now, hold on. First of all, you okay?”

  Just the sound of his soothing baritone calmed my nerves a bit. “Oh. I’m fine, sir, thanks.”

  He nodded. “All right. And you didn’t kill that man in that trailer over there, did you?”

  “Sergeant Owens, you know I didn’t.”

  The corners of his mouth rose slightly. “Yes, ma’am. I figured as much, but it’s my job to kick at every barking dog that runs by, if you’ll pardon the expression. Did you know him?”

  “Sort of. His name is Levi Radcliff. We went to school together.”

  Just then I heard a woman’s voice and looked up. Sasquatch was standing in the middle of several deputies, shaking her head and angrily wagging her finger in the air.

  Owens said, “And you said he was parked outside your driveway this morning?”

  “Yeah, he was there when I left for work. At least I think it was him.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “About five a.m.”

  “That seems a tad unusual, doesn’t it?”

  “No, because he delivers the morning paper.”

  He nodded. “And did he seem all right to you at the time?”

  “Well, that’s just it. We didn’t talk. I thought maybe he was having car trouble. I went over to see if he needed help, but then he pulled away, so I figured he was fine. I didn’t think about it until later. I was at my first client this morning, Buster and Linda Keller—”

  “Yes, Deputy Morgan submitted his report to me a little while ago.”

  “Oh. So you know about Dick Cheney?”

  He frowned. “Dick Cheney?”

  “That’s what I call Mrs. Keller’s mask.”

  “Ah. The one your imaginary assailant was wearing.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, except I’m beginning to think it wasn’t so imaginary. When I was unlocking the front door, I heard a car go by in the street, then after I got attacked…”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean allegedly attacked, I remembered there’d been a car on the road behind me on my way there, too. It got me thinking maybe I’d been followed. I mean, you have to admit it makes sense. If a crook was on the lookout for wealthy people who are out of town, all they’d have to do is follow me around for a while. It wouldn’t take long to compile a pretty good list of vulnerable houses to hit.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t see what any of that has to do with the situation here.”

  “Well, I had already decided to ask Levi if he’d seen anything. There aren’t too many people out and about that time of morning, so I knew if there’d been anything suspicious, he might have noticed it. Then when I found out he never finished his paper route, it just seemed too weird to be a coincidence, and I got worried something was wrong—”

  Just then Sasquatch’s voice rose again, and I heard one of the deputies say, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to calm down.”

  I said, “She may need some medical attention. After I knocked on Levi’s door, it swung open, and when she saw him she fainted right on top of me. I tried to calm her down when she woke up but she was too upset. She said someone came home with Levi last night, a woman, and she’s convinced it was me.”

  “Yeah, I’d say she’s not one bit happy with you.”

  “Is she his girlfriend?”

  “Fiancée. She lives in one of the trailers up the road.” He sighed as he reached up and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I still wish I understood what the hell you were doing here.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I just got worried. Judy—she’s the waitress at the diner—she told me their morning paper never came, and then it turned out half the people in the diner didn’t get their paper, either, and it’s really unusual for Levi not to finish his route, and then…” I stopped and sighed. Apparently, explaining what the hell I was doing here wasn’t so easy.

  I said, “I guess you could say it was just a hunch.”

  He nodded. “Well, I’ve got a hunch there’s somebody else who’ll want to hear this, too. So you might as well save your energy.”

  He was looking across the yard. I turned and followed his gaze to the line of emergency vehicles. At the end was a black SUV with tinted windows. The driver’s-side door swung open and out stepped a rangy, long-boned woman in her mid-forties, with pale skin and frizzy shoulder-length hair the color of a baked sweet potato.

  I recognized her right away—Detective Samantha McKenzie, the sheriff’s lead homicide detective. She was wearing a plain cotton skirt about the same ruddy color as her hair, and a plain, nondescript blouse with two vertical lines of small brown buttons down the front. Despite the mind-numbing heat, she had a thin gray scarf draped loosely around her neck, which I knew right away was probably to protect her freckled skin from the sun.

  She had a cell phone in one hand, holding it out in front of her mouth like a walkie-talkie, and cradled in her other hand was another cell phone, which she was thumbing as she walked toward us alongside the line of cars.

  One of the deputies trotted over to meet her as she snapped both phones shut and dropped them down in a canvas duffel bag slung over her shoulder, and then they walked across the yard together. The whole way, the deputy was talking under his breath, but when they got even with Levi’s convertible, he waited quietly while McKenzie went up the two short steps and looked inside the trailer.

  There was just a beat, like a millisecond, and then she turned and said something short to him. He immediately nodded and ran back across the yard to one of the squad cars and reached in for his radio.

  I said, “So, his fiancée … does she have any idea who might have done this?”

  He nodded. “Her name’s Mona Duffy, and yeah, she seems to know exactly who did it.”

  I turned to him. “Who?”

  He looked down at his hands and rubbed his fingers together as if they were aching. “Who do you think?”

  Detective McKenzie had pulled a pair of sky-blue rubber gloves o
ut of her bag. She pushed them down into one of the pockets on her skirt and then turned and looked in our direction, shielding her eyes from the sun with the back of her hand.

  “Well,” Sergeant Owens said, “shall we?”

  11

  There were several deputies working their way around the perimeter of the property, driving metal stakes into the ground with rubber mallets and hanging up a border of yellow and black police tape to mark off the crime scene. Two of the deputies had led Levi’s fiancée down the road, and I imagined she was sitting in her trailer now, telling them how she’d found me over Levi’s body, and more than likely how she’d narrowly escaped getting murdered herself.

  McKenzie adjusted the scarf around her neck. “I understand you’ve had quite a day.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. I think I’m still in a state of shock.”

  We were standing next to the pile of old tires in the middle of the yard, and instead of looking me in the eye Detective McKenzie was gazing thoughtfully at a spot between my eyebrows and about an inch up my forehead, which I knew from previous experience is normal, at least for her. It always makes me feel slightly off-kilter, like I’m on a boat at sea and can’t quite find my footing. I don’t know if it’s intentional on her part or not, but I have my suspicions.

  She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a clipboard with a yellow-leafed notepad attached. “I won’t keep you long. I got a full report from one of the deputies, but I’d like to clear up a couple of things. I imagine this is the last place on earth you’d like to be right now…”

  Her voice ended with just the slightest hint of a question as she looked around the yard. The Sarasota ambulance was still parked directly behind Levi’s car, but the two emergency medical technicians had walked down the line of responding vehicles behind us and were leaning against a couple of pine trees smoking cigarettes. Everyone else was keeping their distance, too.

  On TV shows, they always act like the scene of a murder is a big party with lots of people, where the dead body is the center of everyone’s attention and the investigators and crime photographers and law enforcement guys are all flitting around flashing their badges and cameras and guns at one another, busily pulling a wallet out of the victim’s pocket, or lifting up the victim’s shirt to reveal bullet holes or knife wounds.

  In reality it’s not so exciting, and in fact most of what goes on in those shows would be one hundred percent illegal in the real world. First of all, nobody looks like a part-time model—well, there might be a couple of exceptions—but I guarantee you nobody’s running around touching a thing, especially if it’s anywhere near the body, and only a few key people are allowed access to the actual scene of the crime. I don’t care if you’re the sheriff or the chief of police or the mayor of Munchkin City, if you don’t have a really good reason to be there, you have to wait on the other side of the police tape with all the other gawkers, rubberneckers, and TV reporters.

  There’s only one goal on the mind of every crime specialist who first responds to the discovery of a dead body, and that is to treat the victim and every single thing he or she might have come in contact with as potential pieces of a massive and volatile puzzle—because that’s exactly what it is. Everything is evidence. Every surface, every hair, every speck of dust, every fiber, every blade of grass. Even the slightest, seemingly trivial disturbance could result in a piece of the puzzle being lost, and that could mean the difference between finding an answer to what happened, and letting a murderer get away with … well, you know what I mean.

  “Which reminds me,” McKenzie said as she pulled a ballpoint pen out of one of the pockets on her skirt. “What are you doing here?”

  I gulped. “Um, it’s kind of a weird story.”

  She clicked the tip of the pen with the thumb of her left hand and looked me straight in the forehead. “Try me.”

  I told her the whole sordid thing, starting with Levi’s car parked outside my driveway that morning and ending with Sasquatch fainting and nearly hurling us both headfirst into the trailer. To be on the safe side, I gave her the whole kit and caboodle in between, too, every detail along the way whether I thought it was relevant or not—every Dick Cheney, every imaginary candle and every big-eared, red-toenailed she-Buddha I could remember. I even threw in my brief history of fainting spells just in case.

  After I finished she was quiet for a couple of moments. She looked up at the sky and mumbled in a kind of singsong voice, “Where’s Megan Granda?”

  I think I was expecting her to say something like, That’s quite a story, or even Are you out of your cotton-picking mind? But instead she just scanned the yard with a wry smile on her face and repeated under her breath, “Where’s Megan Granda?”

  I had no idea who or where Megan Granda was, but I figured I should probably just play along, so I shook my head slightly and shrugged. “Uh, I don’t know.”

  At that, McKenzie frowned slightly, and then scribbled in her notepad as she muttered under her breath, “So when you first arrived, was there anyone else on the street that you recall?”

  I shook my head. “No, at least not any cars. There was a little boy playing with a pogo stick in his yard, but other than that I didn’t see anybody.”

  “And about what time did you arrive?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She looked down at her notes. “I’m told your call came in at exactly 10:27 a.m. Does that sound right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, and I think I was only here a few minutes before that. As soon as I saw Levi’s car, I got out to knock on his door, and I probably only talked to his fiancée about twenty seconds before we saw his body…”

  “And how did you know it was his?”

  I frowned. It had been a while since I’d last had a full-fledged conversation with Detective McKenzie. I’d forgotten how her mind careened from one thought to the other. I’ve never ridden blindfolded on a unicycle through a corn maze, but I would imagine it feels pretty much the same.

  Before I could answer she said, with a note of impatience in her voice, “How did you know it was his car, how did you know it was his fiancée, and how did you know it was his body?”

  I put my hands on my hips and thought, Enough.

  The whole day was starting to feel like a parade of abusive lunkheads who refused for one reason or another to take me seriously, from Dick Cheney to Morgan to Sasquatch, and now this honey badger of a woman. I took a deep breath, composing an answer in my head like I was preparing for a school report.

  I said, “I knew it was his car because he’s been delivering the paper in it for twenty years. I knew Sasquatch … I mean, that woman, was Levi’s fiancée because she told me, in her words, that I was trespassing on her man, and also because Sergeant Owens told me, and I knew it was Levi’s body because I’ve known him since grade school and it had his face attached to it.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “It’s good to see you again, Dixie.”

  I blinked. If my frustration was getting through, she wasn’t letting on. “Uh, you, too.”

  “And how’s your brother … it’s Michael, right?”

  “Yeah. Oh, he’s great, thanks.”

  “And how well do you know him?”

  Okay, I thought to myself. You can do this.

  I had a feeling she wasn’t really interested in how well I know my brother. I tried to picture my brain working the way I pictured hers, like a tangled web of telephone wires and high-speed Internet cables wrapped around a nest of smoking cogs and spinning reel-to-reel tapes, with maybe a couple of fuses mixed in, throwing off sparks and little bolts of lightning. My mouth was fixed in a kind of dumb O as I mentally rewound our conversation a couple of beats.

  “You mean Levi?”

  She nodded. “You said you’ve known him since grade school?”

  “Right. We had a few classes together, but we weren’t really that close.”

  I realized I was still holding my indignant Enough pose, which consi
sted of my fists pressed firmly into my ribs and my head cocked to one side. Somehow, without my even realizing it, McKenzie had charmed me right back into submission, but apparently my body hadn’t caught up yet. I tried to relax my arms and slid my hands down into my pockets as nonchalantly as possible.

  I said, “After graduation I didn’t see him again except on his morning paper route. We’re both up early, so our paths cross every once in a while, but that’s about it.”

  “And how did you know where to look for him?”

  “My friend Tanisha. She’s the cook at the diner. She lives in this neighborhood, although I’m not sure which place is hers. She might be able to tell you more about him.”

  “Okay, that’s helpful. So, you were about to knock on Levi’s door…”

  “Right, I was just about to knock and I was trying to figure out what I would say to him, and then all of a sudden his fiancée was there. She said this was private property, and I told her I was just checking on Levi.”

  “And where did she come from?”

  “I don’t know. I turned around and there she was, just to the left of his car.” I pointed at the driver’s-side door of Levi’s LeSabre.

  “And what were her words, exactly?”

  “She was pretty upset right from the start. I think she said, ‘Can I help you?’ or something like that. I tried to tell her I was a friend of Levi’s and I just wanted to make sure he was okay, but she was hell-bent on getting rid of me. Apparently, Levi came home last night with another woman, and she thinks it was me.”

  McKenzie flipped a page over in her pad, and without looking up said, “She says you and Levi came home last night around 11:30. Does that sound right?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No. That does not sound right. Detective McKenzie, I don’t know who that woman was, but it definitely wasn’t me. I was not here last night.”