Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

“He saw a car, an old station wagon. It was pulling away from the back of Beezy’s Bookstore. He said a couple of times he’d caught kids parked back there, making out in their cars, and he’d chased them off. But he said this car sped away before he even had a chance. He said he immediately got the feeling that something was wrong.”

I sat up, “So, whoever took Mr. Hoskins, they probably watched the front and waited until they knew the shop was empty. Then they came around the back and broke the door in, grabbed Mr. Hoskins and shoved him in their car. Then when the butcher came out, they sped away so he wouldn’t be able to identify them.”

Of course, that didn’t quite explain the blood on the counter, but I turned to see her reaction to my brilliant analysis anyway.

She just nodded. “When you left the bookstore, how long do you think it took you to get to your car?”

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, especially since I’d just solved a pretty big part of her case, but I figured I’d humor her. “Well, it’s probably less than a minute’s walk, except I probably did it in about twenty seconds or so.”

Now she took off her big sunglasses. “Oh? Why is that?”

“Well … I was skipping.”

She raised one eyebrow. “You were skipping?”

I nodded. “Or running. Sort of half skipping, half running. I was kind of excited about the book and Mr. Hoskins, and I was in a hurry to get home and take a shower.”

She looked away. “After the butcher locked his front door, how long do you think it would have taken him to get to the alley?”

“His shop’s not that big. I’d say ten to fifteen seconds tops.”

Without pausing she said, “So from the moment you left the store to the moment the butcher saw a station wagon speed away in the alley, a period of roughly thirty-five seconds elapsed?”

I said, “Um…”

“So your theory is that someone watched the front of the store until they thought it was empty, and then they went around to the alley, broke in the back door, grabbed Mr. Hoskins, and then ferried him into a waiting car … in thirty-five seconds.”

I should have known. McKenzie seemed to get some kind of perverse pleasure in letting me know what an utter moron I was whenever she got the chance.

Well, that was it. I decided I’d had just about all I could take of her games, and besides I still had work to do. I threw my hands up and shrugged. “Well, the only other way it makes sense is if they did it while I was in the store, in which case I would have been in on the whole thing. Did you ever think of that?”

I turned to find her watching me. There was a look in her eye, a hard gleam, and I knew right away: That’s exactly what she was thinking. Suddenly it felt like I was fixed in the sight of a shotgun, or more precisely a magnifying glass.

I gulped and said, “Oh.”

We sat in silence for a while, both of us staring straight ahead, McKenzie with her hands folded neatly in her lap and me with my mouth hanging slightly open.

On the tennis court in front of us was a tall, gangly young man with copper red hair and long arms giving a tennis lesson to a group of children, seven- or eight-year-olds, all holding their pint-sized tennis rackets in front of them at ninety-degree angles to their little bodies.

They were all watching the young man intently and copying his every move. When he bent his knees slightly and swung his racket to the right, they all immediately did the same. When he swung his racket to the left, they quickly followed suit. Every once in a while he would pause a bit, flash the kids a mischievous grin, and then let his racket fall to the ground with a clatter. All the kids would look wide-eyed at each other for a couple of seconds and then let their rackets fall, too, bursting into fits of happy giggling.

I looked at McKenzie out of the corner of my eye. There was absolutely no way she could possibly think I had anything to do with Mr. Hoskins’s disappearance or the blood on his front counter, or that I had seen something and was hiding it from her, but I knew she was considering the same thing I was—anybody else who saw that video would probably think otherwise.

The fact that I was the last person to be seen going in or out of the bookstore, coupled with the butcher seeing a suspicious car pull away from the back door immediately after seeing me basically run to my car … I’d suspect me, too, if I didn’t know better.

McKenzie interrupted my train of thought. “Is it possible, Dixie, that the woman in white was in the back room when you arrived?”

“Huh,” I said.

Suddenly an entirely different scenario opened up before my eyes. The woman in white wasn’t a customer. She was a friend, perhaps even more than a friend, perhaps even … a lover? It was a little hard imagining befuddled old Mr. Hoskins involved in a little early evening hanky-panky in the back of the store during business hours, but I had to admit it was possible. I remembered his hastily buttoned shirt and untied shoes. Maybe he wasn’t so befuddled after all. Maybe he was just rattled by my interruption.

“You said you heard a noise from the back room right before Mr. Hoskins appeared?”

I had completely forgotten. “Yeah. Like a thud.”

“And what do you think that could have been?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe they were on that couch, the one with the gold tassels. Maybe when they heard me Mr. Hoskins jumped up and bumped into something?”

McKenzie frowned. “On the couch?”

I shrugged slightly. “Well, I mean, it seems like if they were doing anything, you know … the couch would be the most comfortable place for it.”

The slightest hint of a smile played across her lips, and then I thought of the blood on the countertop next to the register. I was still casting about for a reasonable explanation for everything, like a fish who refuses to accept she’s been hooked, but McKenzie didn’t seem convinced. She was watching the kids on the tennis court with a distant look in her eyes. They had all lined up in a row along one of the lines on the court, and now the tall red-haired man was handing a single tennis ball to each one of them.

I sighed. “You think that woman hid in the back of the store until I left and then murdered Mr. Hoskins, don’t you?”

I didn’t like saying it out loud like that. It meant giving up hope that Mr. Hoskins was alive and well, drinking sangria on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Her expression didn’t change. She leaned over and picked up her briefcase as she stood up. “Dixie, I think until we find a body, we can’t begin to know what happened.” She shook my hand with a wan smile. “Let me know if you remember anything else.”

I nodded as she turned and headed back for the sheriff’s building. When she got to the edge of the tennis court she turned and said, “Oh, and Dixie, if I were you I’d keep looking for that cat. I got the lab results back this morning. The blood on the countertop … it’s human. Which human, however, is still up in the air.”

* * *

On the way to my next appointment, I stopped at Vito’s Subs and got an Italian with extra hot peppers, and as I crossed back over the bridge to the Key, it was still sitting on the seat next to me, untouched.

What Detective McKenzie was suggesting had made every neuron in my head go to mush, and all the way down Higel my feeble brain did its best to wrap itself around it. I tried to imagine everything that had happened as if it were a painting hanging on the wall, and the picture it made was pretty clear. There was blood on the countertop, human blood. There was a missing person. There was a suspicious-looking figure dumping what might have been a body off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into the bay. Considering all that, it wasn’t too far-fetched to come to the conclusion that something had happened in Beezy’s Bookstore that night … something bad.