Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

It was almost eleven o’clock when I ate the last morsel. I put some bills on the table before the waiter came back, adding a hefty tip to make up for being churlish earlier, and stood up and started inside. The waiter saw me leaving and scurried over with a questioning look.

I said, “I’m going to sit at the bar and listen to the piano player.”

He looked over my shoulder at the money on the table and smiled. “No prob,” he said. “The pianist should be here any minute.”

“You know him?”

“Just to speak to. Seems like a real nice guy.”

“He is.”

“Oh, he’s a friend of yours?”

I smiled, suddenly feeling proud to know Phillip. “Yeah, he’s a friend.”

Inside, only a few people were at the bar. All men, and all with the appraising look of people who realized the evening was growing old and if they hoped to hook up with somebody, they’d better do it soon. None of them gave me a glance. I took the stool at the end near the bandstand and ordered another margarita.

The bartender grinned when he set it in front of me. “This will be your third, right?”

“Counting the one I didn’t drink.”

“That guy, what an asshole! What’d he think, anyway?”

“Maybe that works for him sometimes.”

“Not with a woman like you. He shoulda known that.”

Behind me, Phillip’s voice said, “Miz Hemingway?”

I spun around, to see him standing there looking at me in disbelief, as if I were a genie he had conjured up from a bottle. Up this close, I could see the black flocked jacket he wore had been made for a much larger man. He looked like a little boy dressed up in his father’s suit coat.

“Gosh, you snuck up on me, Phillip!”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t, I just didn’t see you come in.”

“I came in the back.”

“Can you talk a few minutes before you start playing?”

He grinned nervously, and I wanted to hug him. He was all wrists and ears and cheekbones, too ill at ease to know how to handle this unexpected moment.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go sit at a table for a minute. You want something to drink?”

He shook his head, then licked dry lips and nodded. The bartender, who had been silently watching us, filled a glass with club soda and handed it to him.

“Okay,” I said briskly, and walked the length of the bar to a tiny two-top in the back corner. Phillip trailed along behind me carrying his club soda, and we both dropped into chairs like falling rocks.

He still seemed nonplussed that I was there, so I leaned toward him and said, “You left a message on my machine that you wanted to talk to me.”

“Oh. Yeah. That. Well, see, I got to thinking and all…you know, about what happened next door. You know, how the policeman asked if I’d seen anything?”

“Uh-huh. And did you see something?”

“Well, that’s just it. I mean, I should have told him, but my mother was there and I didn’t want her to know I’d been outside at that time, you know. But the cops probably should know…I thought maybe you could tell that detective guy.”

I could tell this would take all night if I didn’t prompt him. “Okay, what did you see that you didn’t want to talk about in front of your mother?”

A deep port-wine blush rose from his throat and suffused his face. “It was when I was coming home Friday morning. I was crossing behind Miz Doerring’s house and I saw a woman come out of her house and get in a car in the driveway. A black Miata. The car swung in the driveway, the woman came out of the house and got in, and it drove off. I thought it was Miz Doerring, but now I’m thinking maybe it was somebody else. You know, like the killer.”

I waited, but he seemed unable to continue. I said, “Could you see the driver?”

Phillip’s flush deepened. “The top was up, so I couldn’t see. I just saw the woman.”

I took a sip of my drink and pretended not to notice his discomfort. “And you could see her well enough to think it was Marilee Doerring?”

He looked down at his plate, and for a moment I thought he might cry. “Not really. I guess I didn’t really look good. It could have been her or it could have been some other woman.”

He averted his eyes and his throat bobbled in a nervous swallow. I tried to put myself in his place, a kid coming home after an evening that had to be kept secret from his parents and seeing a woman he thought was a neighbor get into a car and drive away.

“Did the woman see you?”

He bobbled his head in a staccato motion I took to be an affirmative nod. “I think maybe she did. She looked over her shoulder toward where I was and it seemed like she jerked a little bit—you know, like she was surprised or scared or something.”

“And then what?”

He looked directly at me for the first time. “Then she got in the car and left.”

Carefully, I said, “What time do you think this was?”

“I don’t want to get anybody else mixed up in this.”

“I’m not asking you where you’d been or who you’d been with, just what time you saw a woman leaving Marilee Doerring’s house.”

“It was a little after four.”

I remembered the flash of movement in the woods that morning when I was walking Rufus. That had been around 4:30.

“Did you see me that morning?”

He blinked at me. “You? No, ma’am, I didn’t see you.”

Poor kid, he was obviously terrified, and with good reason. If the woman he saw thought he could identify her, he could be in a lot more trouble than his family finding out how he spent his nights.

“Phillip, if we’re going to be friends, you have to do something for me.”

“What?”

“You have to stop calling me ‘ma’am.’ And my name is Dixie, not Ms. Hemingway. Got that?”

He gave me a weak smile. “Okay.”

“You were right to tell me about the woman, and it’s something Lieutenant Guidry needs to know. I’ll tell him what you saw, and he’ll probably want to talk to you again. If he does, don’t be scared. I’ll tell him to be sure and talk to you in private, and he’s not going to repeat anything you say to your parents or to anybody else. He’s a nice guy, you can trust him.”

“Okay.”

I was so proud of him for having the guts to confess what he’d seen that I didn’t check his story with my builtin lie detector.

We looked at each other for a second, sort of cementing a new friendship, and then he gave me a genuine smile. “I have to go play now. Are you going to stay for a while?”

“I’d love to, but it’s way past my bedtime.”

We got up and walked together down the aisle toward the piano. Before I left him, I turned and gave him a hug. “I’ll come back another night, when I can stay.”

He was blushing and smiling when he waved goodbye.

When I stepped outside, all the lights were out in the parking lot, the only illumination coming from a waning moon. Nobody else was around, and the spaces between the cars were black wells where anything could have been hiding. I stood a minute outside the door, wondering if I should go back inside and tell the manager about the lights, then decided to let it go. My footsteps made quick scrunching noises in the loose shell as I stepped across the dark lot toward my car.

Part of me was proud that Phillip had trusted me enough to confide in me. The other part was dismayed. Now I knew something that could get the kid in a lot of trouble. If he had seen the killer leaving Marilee’s house, he would most likely be called upon in the future to say so in public, bringing upon himself the full glare of media attention that would inevitably reveal that he was gay. He was a good kid, and I didn’t want to be the one who outed him. But I had to let Guidry know about the woman he’d seen.