Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

It was close to eleven o’clock when I heard the growl of a car engine downstairs. I went outside and leaned over the porch railing. The sky had darkened to dark purple, and a half-moon bathed the world in silver light. In its glow, I watched Cupcake and Jancey get out of a nondescript sedan. They moved heavily, as if the weight of gravity had pushed them closer to the earth.

I called, “Up here!”

Jancey led the way, both of them looking up at me with concerned faces. Jancey looked drawn and stiff. Cupcake’s eyes were full of red road maps. The first time I met Cupcake, I’d thought he was the scariest-looking man I’d ever seen, but his habitual scowl was a protective shield to hide the sweetest, tenderest heart in the world. That tender heart was housed in a body roughly the size and color of an upended shiny black Volkswagen. A Volkswagen with the whitest teeth and the cutest smile I’d ever seen on anybody over the age of two.

I said, “Rough trip?”

Cupcake said, “A couple across the aisle had a baby that cried practically the entire way.”

Jancey said, “Twenty-two hours is a long time to sit, even with layovers when we could stretch our legs.”

Jancey was almost as tall as Cupcake, smart as a whip, and pretty the way Michelle Obama is pretty, with a natural elegance and warmth that can’t be faked. She handled Cupcake the way a mother cat handles her kittens. Gently but firmly.

We did a kind of group hug there on my porch, with lots of shoulder patting.

I said, “What happened at the airport?”

Cupcake grinned, flashing the dimples that turned his face into a cherub’s. “I just explained to a brother skycap that I needed to get out without cameras following me. He took us down some back hallways to an employee parking lot and gave me his car keys. I told him I’d get the car back to him tomorrow.”

He sounded as if that was a perfectly reasonable thing for a skycap to have done. I guess if you’re a famous athlete, you expect favors like that.

I motioned them inside. “The guys who hit me also broke my only teapot, but I can make individual mugs in the microwave.”

Jancey said, “I’ll help you.”

Cupcake said, “I’d rather have a beer if you have one.”

He sank his wide bulk onto the love seat and looked around my spartan apartment while Jancey and I made two mugs of tea and opened a bottle of Corona.

I said, “Did you eat on the plane?”

Jancey shook her head. “We planned to eat when we got home.”

“Oh, Jancey, I’m sorry!”

I opened my minuscule freezer and peered in at a frost-encrusted box of enchiladas. She visibly shuddered.

I closed the freezer, got out some halfway decent cheeses from the refrigerator, and made a hurried plate of cheese and crackers and sliced apple. Michael would have been able to give them a satisfying meal. I gave them cheese and crackers.

In the living room, Cupcake made room for Jancey on the love seat. He ate a chunk of cheddar before he spoke.

“Okay, tell us what the heck is going on. Who was that woman who was killed in our house?”

I took a sip of weak tea for courage. We didn’t have time to beat around the bush or spare anybody’s feelings.

“I don’t know who she is, but there’s something else I have to tell you about Briana.”

Wedged into the love seat, Cupcake and Jancey leaned forward slightly, intent on my every word.

Ignoring Jancey, I looked into Cupcake’s eyes. “Briana told me that she knew you when you were kids. She said you lived in the same town and that you were close friends in high school.”

Jancey stiffened, and her head whipped to stare at Cupcake.

He glowered at both of us. “The woman’s a liar. A stalker and a liar.”

I said, “She told me details about life in that town. Her family used to boil crawfish in a big pot. People sat in their yard and ate crawfish and drank beer. Did you know anybody whose family did that?”

“Everybody in Louisiana does that!”

“Maybe she used a different name then?”

“Dixie, I did not have a white girlfriend, not by any name.”

“She said you weren’t that kind of friend. More like close platonic friends.”

He shook his head. “Not even that.”

I took a deep breath. “She says you broke into houses together and stole things.”

Jancey’s head turned again. She looked worried.

Cupcake looked less certain. “I never broke into any houses with a girl.”

The sentence hung in the air for several moments.

Jancey said, “But she knows.”

Cupcake’s mouth tightened. “This is nuts.”

His shoulders lowered. “Dixie, when I was a kid I did break into a few houses, but not with that model! It was just me and Robbie Brasseaux, a skinny white boy I knew from school. I didn’t actually go in the houses, but that was mainly because I was too big and muscle-bound to crawl through windows. I mostly boosted Robbie up so he could get in, and then I stood watch outside until he came out. Robbie knew a guy we sold the stuff to. None of it was valuable.”

I said, “What happened to Robbie? Did he maybe grow up to know international models?”

His smile was grim. “He didn’t grow up at all. Nobody knows for sure, but he disappeared in the swamp, and people thought a gator probably got him.”

Jancey and I shuddered.

I said, “Could he have told somebody about you two breaking into houses?”

Cupcake closed his eyes for a moment as if he couldn’t bear to look at my ignorance any longer.

“Robbie’s folks were dead or in prison or run away. Gone, anyway. He lived with an aunt and uncle. Poor white trash, the uncle was drunk half the time. They had three boys about Robbie’s age, all of them mean as wild boars. They bragged they took turns sodomizing Robbie. That was his life. He didn’t talk to anybody. He was just a scared, hungry kid. He just did what he had to do to survive.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. It was too awful to imagine, and I’d heard enough to be convinced that Briana had heard the story of Cupcake’s teen years from somebody. She had borrowed them and repeated them to me as her own past.

I said, “I don’t know if Briana has told that story to anybody else. Maybe it won’t go any farther, but I wanted you to be prepared in case she did.”

“She’s lying.”

With a new note of fear in her voice, Jancey said, “I think Dixie means that if the media gets hold of that story, it won’t make any difference that she’s lying.”

Cupcake looked from Jancey to me. The possibility didn’t seem to have occurred to him that skycaps will guide you down secret hallways and give you the keys to their cars if you’re a beloved athlete. But if you’re a beloved athlete who falls from grace, you’ll become the butt of jokes made by late-night comedians who never threw a ball, and the topic of sermons by pastors who never ran for a touchdown.

Cupcake said, “So what’s going to happen to her?”

I said, “She’ll be in custody until a hearing that will decide if she can be released on bail.”

Trying to sound charitable, Jancey said, “The poor thing must be emotionally disturbed.”

Cupcake and I hid our grins because Jancey’s voice had an edge like a repressed Baptist saying, I’m sure the rattlesnake that bit my foot had Christian intentions.

I said, “Disturbed or not, she had no right to break into your home.”

Jancey’s charitable nature only went so far, so I didn’t add, “Or wear your husband’s shirt on her naked self.”

I wondered if Jancey would think I was crazy, too, if she knew I’d got Briana an attorney.

I said, “Things will look better after we’ve had a good night’s sleep.”