Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Ahead of us, the elevator doors opened and two elderly women got off and looked around like migrating geese after a landing. One of them said, “Oh, this is the wrong floor,” and they giggled like girls. They turned back to the elevator and pushed the button.

Cora and I continued our snail walk toward them. I said, “I heard she and Dr. Coffey were actually in the church about to get married when Marilee called it off.”

Cora laughed. “It wasn’t that bad, but almost. They were supposed to have a rehearsal for the wedding and she told him before they went. But they weren’t in the church, they were at her house. I thought it was just wedding jitters, you know, but she was serious.”

The elevator doors opened and the two women hopped inside. They didn’t even ask if they should hold it for us. We were moving so slowly, they could have taken several trips before we got to it.

“I also heard a rumor that Dr. Coffey gave Marilee a million dollars just before she called off the wedding. Was that an exaggeration, too?”

“Well, I can’t rightly say about that. He may have, I don’t know. He’s pretty rich, you know, I guess he could have given her some without missing it.”

Her voice had taken on a serenely hard edge, and I remembered that Shuga had said it was Cora who had demanded money from the Fraziers when Marilee was pregnant. She apparently found it wholly appropriate that Dr. Coffey might have given Marilee a million dollars, just because he had it to spare. I didn’t ask her anything else, and we finally reached the elevator and went downstairs. I declined an invitation to have brunch with her and hugged her goodbye outside the dining room.

The doorman had left my Bronco parked near the front door with the keys in it, so I didn’t have to wait for him to get it. I waved to let him know I was the one taking it, then headed toward Marge Preston’s Kitty Haven. The time had finally come that I could bring Ghost home, only now the home he was going to was truly his, not just where he lived with his owner.

I paid Marge for the time Ghost had been with her, and carried him out in one of my cardboard cases. I could see through the air holes that he was hunkered down in a depressed rabbit pose. Neither of us was holding up well.

At Marilee’s house, no reporters lurked in the bushes, and Bull Banks’s ugly face wasn’t anywhere in sight, but I slowed down when I saw Carl Winnick’s black Mercedes in the driveway next door. I could imagine the kind of conversation going on in that house, and it made me sick. Carl Winnick would be spouting his twisted hate for homosexuals, and Olga would be bleating about Phillip’s future musical career.

I wanted to call Guidry and yell at him for allowing Phillip to leave the hospital, but I knew he had no reason to hold him there. And if I told him that Phillip shouldn’t be with his god-awful parents, he would tell me they had the legal right to take him home. I told myself Phillip’s parents loved him. I told myself they wouldn’t hurt him any more than he was already hurt, but I didn’t believe myself for one minute.

I opened the garage door and pulled inside. When the door shuddered down behind me, I took a deep breath—either of relief or apprehension, I wasn’t sure. I got the .38 out of the glove box and put it in my pocket, then carried Ghost into the house through the kitchen door. When I opened the carrying case, he bounded out like a demented gazelle and made several mad careering turns through the house.

When he was run out, he began aggressively sniffing at the walls and making the peculiar face that cats do when they smell certain chemicals. It’s called “doing flehmen”—stretching the mouth in a tight little smile, front teeth covered by upper lip. The purpose is to expose pores in the upper gum and palate, where a cat’s vomeronasal organ is located—the organ that gives cats a sixth sense, along with the five that humans have. All cats have it, from lions and tigers in the wild to the tamest domestic pussycat. The more they hate a scent, the more pronounced they’ll do flehmen. Sometimes it’s the only warning an animal or person gets before they’re attacked. Tigers, for example, will attack somebody with alcohol on his breath and rip them to shreds.

I never wear any kind of fragrance when I’m working with pets, but watching Ghost’s reaction to the odor of chemicals on the walls made me remind myself to be extra careful with scents for a while. Ghost was going to be supersensitive until he got used to all the changes in his life. That made two of us.

I got down an ordinary ceramic bowl—Ghost’s silver bowl being not only impounded by the Sheriff’s Department but forever rendered too gross to drink from—and put out fresh water for him. He brushed his cheeks and rubbed his ass against all the cabinet doors to leave his scent and reclaim his territory from the haz-mat crew.

I knew he hadn’t been eating much at the Kitty Haven, so even though he had already had breakfast, I got out his food dish. Ordinarily, I preach a daily diet of dried organic food, because it contains all the nutrients a cat needs to stay sleek and healthy. But a constant healthy diet gets pretty boring, even for cats, so an occasional dish of canned stuff is okay as a special treat. Ghost loved sliced beef in gravy the way I loved bacon, and after all he’d been through, I thought he needed sliced beef. I wouldn’t have minded some myself.

Marilee kept a ten-pound bag of dried cat food in the pantry, along with stacks of canned food. I opened the pantry door and did a double take.

“Huh,” I said. When you’re all by yourself with a cat, you can make an intelligent comment like that without having to explain yourself.

The pantry was L-shaped, with the short end at the left of the door. In the past, the sack of dried food had sat on the floor under the long shelves, and stacks of canned food, jars of catnip, boxes of special treats, and some kitty toys had taken up a long shelf facing the door. Now they took up two shelves on the short end. Marilee had apparently rearranged the pantry since I’d last seen it.

As I moved cans of veal and lamb and chicken around on the short shelves, looking for sliced beef, I realized the shelves were now only half as deep as they used to be. Marilee hadn’t just rearranged her shelves, she had remodeled them.

“Huh,” I said again, my repertoire of intelligent exclamations being somewhat limited by then.

I got out a can of sliced beef and opened it for Ghost. He began to swoon with ecstasy even before I put the bowl on the floor. Then I went back to the pantry and removed everything on the newly foreshortened shelves so I could get a better look at the back wall.

It looked like all the other wallboard unless you looked closely, then you could see it was freshly painted hardwood. I got a knife and slid it in the crack on the left. I moved the knife up and down without hitting any resistance. I did the same thing on the right side, and hit resistance at the top, middle, and bottom.

“Bingo,” I whispered. The back of the shelf was a hinged door.

Right then, I should have got on the phone and called Guidry. I should have confessed that I had an invoice to a wall safe in a folder in my desk drawer. Should have admitted that I had opened Marilee’s mail and found the invoice. I should also have told him I had been keeping this information from him, and that I had no earthly reason for doing so except that Marilee had lost her daughter, too. Even I knew that was an irrational reason to hide evidence, but it seemed logical at the time. If I could protect her secrets, she and I wouldn’t be so vulnerable.

I tried prying the door open with the knife, but it didn’t budge. Thinking it must have a pressure-sensitive latch, I pushed my fingers all along the top edge of the door. When I got to the left side, I heard a click, and the door swung open.