Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

The door opened and the woman put her hand between his little shoulder blades and shoved him forward. “Goddamn it! Go on!”

In about two nanoseconds, I spun away from the railing and pinned her to the diner’s stucco wall with my forearm across her throat. “You have a beautiful child, lady, and he deserves a lot better than you. You either start being nicer to him or I swear to God I’ll see that he’s taken away from you and given to somebody who’ll love him.”

All the rage had left her face. She was afraid, and she had every right to be. Something hit my ankle, hard, and I looked down. The little boy was glaring up at me, ready to kick me again.

“Leave my mama alone!”

I stepped away from her and she grabbed her throat with both hands as if she was afraid it had a hole in it. The diner door opened and a family came out—mother, father, three pre-adolescent kids. They flowed around us without paying us much attention, the father teasing one of the kids and the others laughing the way close families do at their private jokes. They moved down the sidewalk to their minivan and got in, still laughing and talking.

The woman was watching me with frightened eyes. The little boy had moved to hug her leg and she had a hand on top of his head.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s all.”

I walked briskly down the sidewalk and around the corner to my car. My hands were shaking so much I barely managed to get the door unlocked. I put my head on the steering wheel and waited for the adrenaline tremors to leave. I felt sick. I felt ashamed. Sergeant Owens had been right about me. I wasn’t ready to deal with people yet.

Maybe I never will be.

Eleven

After I got myself together and saw to the other cats, I drove to one of the ritzy streets coiling around the edge of Roberts Bay to see Shuga Reasnor. Half-hidden behind a cluster of royal palms, her house was a behemoth of glistening white stucco shaped in a wide V, its upjutting wings giving it the look of an albino frigate bird in flight.

In the circular driveway, I got out of the Bronco and pulled my shorts out of my crotch before I climbed three wide stone steps to the entrance. The front door was a thick slab of glass that allowed a view all the way through the house to the lanai. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the pool would be damn near Olympic in size and either equipped with every accessory known to man or built with a cascading waterfall. Or both. I rang the bell, a brass plate the size of a turkey platter, and stood looking up at the glass door while I waited. If that sucker broke as you walked through it, a shard could slice your head right off.

Through the glass wall at the back of the house, a woman moved into view out on the lanai. She came through the slider and walked toward me, giving me a thorough examination as she came.

“Are you Dixie? Sorry it took me so long, I was watering plants on the lanai. Come on in.”

Shuga was tanning-booth brown, with the kind of long blond hair that you get only by being fifteen years old or paying a bundle for extensions. Her skin was smooth and taut like a fifteen-year-old’s, too, and her body was trim and youthful. She was wearing a short black tank top and low-rider white jeans that showed her flat belly and smooth swirl of navel. Only her knowing eyes and corded hands gave away her age, which I estimated as somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Barefoot, she led the way into her living room, her feet leaving faint damp prints on the black tile. Outside the sliding glass doors, a water hose lay coiled like a green anaconda in the midst of a jungle of potted plants.

Swooping over a coffee table the size of my bed, she plucked a cigarette out of a nicotine bouquet stuck in a crystal holder, and waved her hand at me in a gesture that managed to invite me to smoke and to sit at the same time. Her fingernails were like Porsche fenders, sleek and curved and bright red. I shook my head at the cigarette offer and lowered my butt to a curved sofa covered in a rose-colored linen. Like Shuga, the room was beautifully done, but it had a hint of street toughness that no amount of cosmetics or money could overcome.

She got right to the point. “I wasn’t entirely truthful over the phone. I don’t want to talk about the damn cat, it’s Marilee I’m worried about. The detective talked to me, so I know about that man in her house. That what’s-his-name person. But that’s all he would tell me. You know how the police are, they won’t tell you a thing, even if you’re a person’s best friend. You work there, you’re bound to know more than the police do.”

She said the last with a pasted-on smile, as if she had suddenly remembered that she needed something from me and ought to be sucking up.

“I don’t exactly work there,” I said. “I just stop in twice a day to take care of the cat.”

“And you don’t know where she went?”

“No, that’s why I called you. She didn’t leave a number where she could be reached.”

“The detective said she was going to be gone a week.”

She gave me a pointed look with one raised eyebrow, as if it was my turn. I stayed silent. If she wanted me to play coy guessing games, I wasn’t playing.

She sighed and blew out a stream of smoke. “What I want to know is how they can be sure she left town. Has anybody checked to make sure?”

I thought of the hair dryer left on her bathroom countertop. “Do you have any reason to think she didn’t?”

She took another hit from the cigarette and looked out at the plants on the lanai, as if hoping to find inspiration out there. Abruptly, she dropped into a chair and gave me a hard stare. “I might, but Marilee would kill me if I told anybody.”

“Miss Reasnor, if you know something that bears on a crime, you should tell the detective.”

“Call me Shuga,” she said throatily. The seductive way she said it was well practiced.

I gave her a level stare and her mouth twisted impatiently. “People have secrets,” she said. “Everybody has secrets. You probably have secrets.” She slitted her eyes and peered at me as if assessing what kind of secrets I had.

“And you’re afraid Marilee will be mad at you if you tell one of her secrets.”

“Hell yes. Wouldn’t you be mad if your best friend told one of your secrets?”

I shrugged and stood up. I didn’t have time for this. “Don’t tell it, then.”

She crossed her legs and swung her foot like an agitated cat swinging its tail. “I made a phone call last night to the place where she might have been going. She wasn’t there.”

I sat back down. “I thought you said you didn’t know where she was going.”

“I didn’t know there had been a murder when you asked me.”

“And you lied to the detective after you knew.”

“I’m not sure that’s where she was going. It wasn’t like she had told me she was going there.”

Her leg swung faster, and she sucked so hard on the cigarette, it almost disappeared into ash. Then she slapped her free foot on the floor and leaned forward and looked hard at me.

“It’s damn funny. It’s just damn funny. The murder’s all over the news, why hasn’t she called?”

To tell the truth, I’d been wondering that myself.

I said, “If you’re really concerned about her, you should give the investigators all the information you have.”

She leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray that already had several lipstick-tipped butts in it. She lit another cigarette, and this time her hands were shaking. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I really will think about it. You won’t tell them what I said, will you? I mean, I don’t know that’s where she was going.”