Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Whiskers

“Excuse me, can I help you?”

I spun around to find a squat, pasty-faced woman in her early twenties, with crispy, dyed-red hair and puffy eyes, looking up at me with her head cocked snottily to one side.

“Oh, hi,” I blustered. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

“No kidding. This is private property, you know.”

“Yeah, sorry. I was just looking for Levi.”

She gave me a once-over. “Oh, yeah? What do you want with him?”

“Well, it’s a little weird. He was parked outside my house when I was leaving for work.”

“Oh, he was, was he?”

She was wearing flip-flops and a grubby white button-down with a black silhouette of Mickey Mouse across the front, buttoned all the way up to her neck. It was either a nightgown or an extremely large man’s dress shirt, because it fell halfway down her bare legs.

I said, “Yeah, so I just wanted to know if maybe he’d seen anything unusual.”

“What’s the matter. Can’t you read?”

“Excuse me?”

Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “The sign clearly says NO TRESPASSING.”

I thought about saying that, actually, the sign clearly said PRIVATE PROPERTY, but I doubted it would win me any points. Instead I nodded. “Oh, I know. I just need to talk to Levi. This is his place, right?”

“So, you’re a friend of Levi’s?”

As she said “friend,” she held her hands up and made little fat quotation marks in the air with her pudgy fingers.

“Well, not exactly. But—”

“Uh-huh. You’re the girl that was here last night. What’s the matter, forget your panties?”

I sighed. This wasn’t going well at all. I stepped forward with my hand out and said, “Hey, I think maybe we’re getting off to a bad start. I’m Dixie Hemingway.”

Her upper lip curled into what at first I thought was a smile but turned out to be a sarcastic snarl. She stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “Bitch, I don’t know you. You’re trespassing on my neighborhood and my man, so you better get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

For a split second I thought about leaping off the steps and pummeling this fire-hydrant-shaped Sasquatch of a woman into the ground, but luckily I managed to control myself. I took a deep breath and gave her as pleasant a smile as I could muster.

I said, “Okay, there’s no need to call the cops.”

“I’ll call the cops if I want to. This is America. I got free speech.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I understand that, but the cops probably have more important things to deal with. I just need to talk to Levi for one second and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

Given the state of the chemically altered mess on top of her head, it was all I could do to keep myself from holding my fingers up and putting air quotes around the word hair, but the woman’s cheeks were turning beet-red as it was, plus every once in a while I do actually manage to conduct myself with a modicum of composure.

She squinted and tipped her chin at the trailer. “I’m sure he’s still too drunk to talk anyway, but that don’t matter because I’m gonna count to five and if you ain’t out of here by then, you’re gonna be sorry you ever met me.”

Before I could stop myself I said, “Believe me, I already am. But more than that, I’m sorry you’re so tortured.”

Her eyes widened as I turned on my toes and rapped on the front door of the trailer with four confident knocks. Actually I had planned on four, but I only made it to three because as I knocked it swung open. At the same time, I caught a glimpse of the woman’s shadow approaching from behind. For a split second, I considered the idea that I was about to receive my second beating of the day.

But something stopped her.

It was a man, flat on his stomach on the trailer’s pale blue linoleum floor. I couldn’t see all of him, just his naked legs. The rest was hidden behind the door and blocking it from opening completely. Something clenched shut at the top of my throat, and as I reached for the doorframe, I noticed the man’s toes were splayed out spastically and the pale white soles of his bare feet were facing up, perfectly still. He was lying in the center of a pool of blood that stretched almost the entire length and depth of the trailer.

Just before the woman screamed, I muttered under my breath, “Okay, you win. Call the cops.”

9

I never found out if my little fiery-headed friend had planned on giving me another beating or not, because after she screamed, the full weight of her body slammed into my back and pushed me forward into the trailer. Luckily my instincts kicked in and I grabbed on to both sides of the doorway and held on with all my might. That turned out to be just enough to keep us both from falling facedown in all that blood.

Sasquatch had taken one look at what was inside the trailer and conked out like a light, and now she was draped piggyback over my shoulders. I managed to get over to the left against the doorjamb, then, holding myself upright with one shoulder and squeezing my other arm between us, I maneuvered around until I had her in a tight bear hug. As gently as possible, I slid down to the shallow steps in front of the door and leaned her heavy body up against the front bumper of Levi’s LeSabre.

The first thought that flashed across my mind was something like, Well, this is the story of my life , but I didn’t have much time to indulge in that.

The woman’s hot breath had left a moist spot on the side of my neck, and as I wiped it away with the back of my hand, her head plopped over and came to rest on the hood of Levi’s car. I reached out and pulled her shirt across her shoulder, scrunching it up under her cheek so her face wouldn’t get char-grilled on the hot metal. A few of the top buttons of her shirt popped open, and I saw a crudely drawn bluish black tattoo across the top of her chest, although I couldn’t tell what it was. Her eyes were closed and her jaw was slack, but there was a look of pained terror stuck on her face. For a moment, even though I had no idea what her story was, I felt sorry for her.

It’s funny how the mind works in a situation like this. Here I was, just inches from a lifeless body lying in a pool of blood, and yet my main concern was the safety of this unpleasant beast of a woman. While I fished my cell phone out of my pocket, I braced one arm against her shoulder and locked my elbow so she wouldn’t tip over and break her neck.

I flipped the phone open and gingerly dialed the numbers with my thumb.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

I leaned back and peered around the edge of the open door. The blood had seeped up against the toe kick of the doorframe and had already dried to a dark burgundy around the edges. The man’s face was turned toward me, as white as marble, his mouth slightly askew, his eyes wide open in frozen astonishment.

I said, “My name is Dixie Hemingway. I’m at Grand Pelican Commons. There’s been a murder.”

It was Levi Radcliff.

* * *

The quiet that develops in the presence of a dead body is like no other in the world. I could see straight down the dirt road to the main drag of Grand Pelican, where a group of kids had appeared with a couple of hula hoops and a basketball. They were mostly boys, probably around ten years old or so, but there were a few girls as well, all in bathing suits, shiny wet with their hair slicked flat, screaming and giggling the way kids do. I imagined they’d probably been playing with a garden hose to cool off.

At the edge of Levi’s dusty yard, there were three squirrels racing around in the brush at the foot of the pines and chattering at one another, and there was a loud whispering like the white noise of a broken radio coming from above as the pine needles shimmied in the steady breeze off the coast. None of that, however, could drown out the silence of the body lying not three feet away from me.