Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

Judy had already poured a mug of coffee for me, and she set my breakfast down as I slid into my booth. Judy is tall and angular, with hazel eyes that hide hurt under defiance. She’s one of my best friends, but we never go to movies or talk on the phone or do any of the things most friends do. Instead, we give each other little bits of gossip and an occasional intimacy at the diner. I know all about the good-for-nothing men who’ve taken advantage of her over the years, and she knows about Todd and Christy dying and about Guidry leaving. Judy thought I was an idiot for letting Guidry leave without me, and she thought it was her duty as a friend to point out my idiocy every chance she got.

She said, “Missed you yesterday.”

I said, “Yeah, I had to be somewhere else.”

She waited for more, but I just gave her a big smile.

I said, “Just so you won’t think I’m having a wild love life if you see me with a man, I’m supposed to meet a detective here this morning.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You getting mixed up in another murder?”

I shook my head. “It’s just a formality. I was in the neighborhood. That kind of thing.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll watch, and if a cop comes in, I’ll send him to you.”

She swayed her hips more than necessary as she walked away, sort of telling me she thought a wild love life would be better than an in-the-neighborhood kind of talk with a new detective.

Almost every day of my life, I have the same breakfast—two eggs over easy, extra-crispy home fries, and a biscuit. Tanisha does the best biscuits in the world. I was buttering my biscuit when Ethan Crane walked in the diner door. With his tall, wide-shouldered body in a dark pinstripe suit, stark black hair brushing the collar of a pale lavender shirt, he could have been on the cover of a romance novel. Maybe it was just because I liked to believe it was so, but the way his dark eyebrows rose in surprise when he saw me looked phony, the way people pretend to be surprised when friends jump out and yell, “Surprise!” when they’ve known all along that a surprise party was planned for them.

The estrogen level in the diner rose like fog as he walked toward me. My knife slipped so I sort of buttered my thumb instead of my biscuit. A woman across the aisle froze with her mouth open and her fork poised in midair with cheese grits dripping off it. Behind his back, Judy fanned herself with a menu.

Ethan has that effect on women.

He said, “Can I join you?”

Trying very hard to be cool, I gestured with my buttery hand toward the booth seat. “Of course.”

He slid into the booth, and Judy was beside him in an instant with a mug and coffeepot. If he’d asked, she would have run to the kitchen and brewed up a fresh batch that instant.

He said, “I’ll have my regular.”

Judy shot me a smug smile that said she knew what his regular was and I didn’t.

I said, “I didn’t know you came here often.”

“Every day. But usually a lot earlier.”

“Oh.”

I wondered if I was the reason he had come later that day. Had he known that my schedule brought me there around ten, and purposefully delayed his own breakfast so it coincided with mine?

He said, “Talked to any wanted criminals today?”

“That was nice of you to get her an attorney. I understand she turned herself in.”

“How do you manage to get involved with people like her? Do you have some kind of magnet?”

Judy skidded to his side and put down his breakfast. Tanisha is fast, but not that fast. Judy must have stolen an order intended for somebody else. Scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, unbuttered rye toast. The white smile he gave her sent her into a near swoon that she covered by topping his coffee.

I watched him cut into a tomato slice. He ate in the European way, both hands working knife and fork, fork tines turned down, spearing a bite of tomato and sort of stacking egg on the back of his fork before lifting it to his mouth. If I ate like that, I’d probably stab myself in the eye.

I said, “I don’t try to attract people like Briana. It just happens. She was in the Trillins’ house when I went in to take care of their cats, and then she followed me.”

“You didn’t have to talk to her.”

I shoveled up some of my own egg in the American way. I speared a bite of fried potato. I chewed, I swallowed. He waited.

“I felt sorry for her.”

His eyes were like dark pools of double chocolate fudge, warm enough to bathe nude in.

He said, “I hear that Guidry left.”

I had an almost irresistible urge to make it clear that Guidry hadn’t left me, he’d just left Sarasota.

“He was offered a job in New Orleans that he couldn’t refuse.”

Ethan nodded. His long fingers broke a triangle of rye toast in half and left both halves on his plate.

“Are you going to follow him?”

I swallowed. I hated that question.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s hard to explain. You know how sometimes you know something is wrong for you even if everything about it seems right? I just knew I couldn’t leave my home.”

He leaned back in the booth. “That’s why I’m here. I practiced law for a while in Colorado, but the white sand and the seabirds of Florida kept calling to me. When my grandfather died and left me his practice, I didn’t think twice about it. This is where I belong.”

“Do you miss anybody in Colorado?”

“Sure. Friends, colleagues. A woman.”

“Ah.”

“She felt the same way about mountains and snow that I felt about surf and sea.”

“But now you’re with somebody else.”

“I was, but that didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry.”

That was such a lie!

I was glad it hadn’t worked out, but I felt guilty because I was glad. Anyway, the fact that he was free didn’t mean anything would happen between us.

He said, “Dixie—”

Before he could finish what he planned to say, I saw the new detective come into the diner. I knew he was a cop the minute I saw him, and probably half the other people in the diner knew it, too. Cops have an alert, watchful look, as if they can swivel their eyeballs and see through the backs of their skulls. The cop standing at the front of the diner scanning the booths also had the spine and shoulders of a career military man, that easy erectness that comes from vertebrae getting the habit of stacking themselves with the least effort.

I said, “Uh-oh, here’s the new homicide detective who took Guidry’s place. I’m supposed to meet him here.”

Ethan turned to look at the man. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

I could have offered to introduce them, but it would have been awkward for all of us. The homicide cop was there as part of an investigation into a murder that Briana might have committed, and Ethan had found a defense attorney for her.

Owens must have given him a description of me, because he started toward me as Ethan left. The two men met in the aisle and gave each other the dismissive once-overs that men do. The homicide guy was lean but not skinny, and I judged him to be midforties. He had that two-day-old beard thing going, along with dark shades and a thin leather bomber jacket. Dark hair cut short and growing gray, skin that was acquainted with sunshine but didn’t live in it. Firm mouth that probably had to remind itself to smile.

He stopped beside my booth and gave me a curt nod. “Ms. Hemingway?”

“That’s me.”

I flipped my palm toward the other side of the booth in an invitation to sit, and he slid into the bench seat opposite me. Judy was instantly at his side to gather up Ethan’s plate and mug.

“Coffee, sir?”

“Please.”

We waited until she wiped off the tabletop and returned with a mug and coffeepot.