Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter And The Canary

There’s a downside, though.

Rubbing elbows with the animal kingdom on a daily basis means life can be a bit of a minefield: you never quite know what’s around the corner (or what you might be stepping in). A perfectly well-trained dog might decide to race out the door for an impromptu meet and greet with the neighborhood, or an otherwise rationally minded feline might decide the living room curtains would be much nicer with a little fringe at the bottom. It keeps me on my toes, and it’s never boring, and most of the time I feel like I’m pretty good at avoiding surprises.

But not always …

It felt like I’d only been lying there for a couple of minutes when I thought I heard someone call my name. I opened my eyes to find Gigi stretched out next to me, sound asleep, and Charlie curled up at my feet and snoring quietly. The sun had completely descended. The only light came from the swimming pool, and it took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the darkness. I realized I must have been dreaming, and what I’d heard was probably just my inner voice telling me to wake the hell up.

But then I heard it again.

“Miss Hemingway?”

This time Charlie shot up and fixed his gaze on the row of tall shrubs that separates Caroline’s place from the house next door. I didn’t know what else to do, so I opened my mouth to say, “Yes?” but then Charlie barked a high-pitched yip! and the branches in the middle of the hedge parted.

A man emerged, not much taller than five feet. In the pale blue light from the pool, he looked like a shadowy apparition, which made me wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming, except a flood lamp flickered on—it must have been connected to a motion detector—and the entire patio filled with bright fluorescent light.

The man had a boyish face, with dark curly hair and olive skin. He said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. My employer sent me.”

“Your employer?”

He was wearing black dress pants and a fitted, white dress shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin, which sported a neatly trimmed goatee.

“Are you Miss Hemingway?”

“Yes, but…”

“Ms. Kramer wishes to speak to you.”

I sat up and shook my head. “Sorry. I’m a little confused…”

He looked back behind him and pointed to the house over the hedge. “I work next door. She asked me to speak to you about a pet-sitting position.”

I was wondering how he knew my name or that I was even here, but before I could ask, Charlie hopped off the chair and scampered over to the side of the lanai, his tail wagging like a whirligig. The young man knelt down and put one hand up against the lanai screen. Charlie stood up and gave him some enthusiastic high fives from the other side.

The man chuckled. “Hello there, little man. What kind of dog are you?”

As I’ve said before, I don’t care much for surprises, but I figured I needed to be as polite and professional as possible. I said, “He’s a Lhasa apso. His name’s Charlie.”

He said, “Charlie! What a good boy. Are you a good boy?”

Charlie looked back at me and then danced a little jig on his hind legs as if he hoped to answer before I could.

I said, “When he wants to be. We just met the gentleman that’s visiting across the street, and he didn’t get near as nice a greeting as you are.”

The young man stood up and nodded curtly, almost as if he’d suddenly remembered he was still on duty.

He said, “Ms. Kramer would like to speak to you if you have a moment. She wants to know if you are only a cat sitter, or do you take care of other animals as well?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t ever met the woman who lived next door, but just like most people within a hundred miles of the Key, I knew her name …

Elba Kramer.

The first time I’d heard of her was about seven years earlier, when I was still a sheriff’s deputy. A call had come in reporting a disturbance on the south side of the bay, just a little ways down from the dock at Hoppie’s restaurant. There was a very fancy yacht moored there, and a couple of tourists had snuck up and started taking pictures of it, which normally wouldn’t have been a big deal, except the tourists weren’t so much interested in the yacht as they were the mostly naked couple that was canoodling on its upper deck.

The couple turned out to be local celebrities of sort. The man was Morton Cobb, a well-respected politician who’d made his fortune in computer software. He was in the middle of his second term in the Florida state senate, and the woman was his much younger wife, an attractive brunette who mostly stayed out of the limelight. Once they realized they were being photographed, Mrs. Cobb hid her face behind a sun hat and escaped to the yacht’s lower cabin, but Senator Cobb jumped off the boat and ran up the dock with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, threatening the tourists with all kinds of bodily harm and legal action if they didn’t hand over their cameras immediately, which of course they didn’t. They just kept shooting away.

It was an ugly scene. When I arrived, the senator demanded I confiscate the cameras myself, and when I refused, telling him I had no legal right to do so, he was furious. I can still see his face, scorched red and breaking out in beads of perspiration, calling me all kinds of names I can’t repeat in polite company. He even threatened to have me kicked off the force, and for a while I worried he might actually do it. But in the end, it was just an idle threat from a desperate man backed into a corner. The whole thing would probably have ended right there were it not for the fact that the next morning, strategically pixelated photos of the senator groping his topless wife were splashed all over the local newspaper.

Everybody had a good snicker about it, and the senator held a press conference later that day to denounce the shoddy morals of the tourists and decry the slipping standards of the local law enforcement, but it certainly didn’t look like it was the end of his political career.

That came later.

About three hours later, to be precise, when a local television reporter spotted Senator Cobb’s wife in Pensacola, where she’d been for two days, visiting her mother. Of course, that didn’t make any sense, because Pensacola is a seven-hour drive away, and if the senator’s wife had been there for two days, then who in the world was that topless brunette with the senator? Hiding her face behind a sun hat on the front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune …?

Yep, you guessed it … Elba Kramer.

She’d been a well-known model a decade earlier, so of course that just added fuel to the fire. The affair made headlines not just here but all over the country, effectively putting an end to the senator’s dreams of one day living in the White House. From that point on Elba Kramer’s name popped up in the news regularly: she was spotted at a Hollywood party on the arm of a married rock star, she was thrown out of a nightclub in Berlin for public indecency, she’d been accused of shoplifting in a tony jewelry store in London, and now she was married to a man forty years her senior, who just happened to be filthy rich.

All the locals followed the trajectory of her life with sanctimonious disapproval, which is why it wasn’t long before the name Elba Kramer became synonymous with scandal. She was, as a letter to the editor later dubbed her, the Scarlet Woman of Siesta Key.

“Miss Hemingway?”

I blinked. Elba Kramer’s assistant was still standing just outside the lanai, looking at me with raised eyebrows.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”

“Ms. Kramer wanted to know if you are only a cat sitter. She has a bird she would like your help with.”