Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

Still, I wondered for the millionth time what his background was. What was it that made him walk with such aristocratic confidence? What was it that made him wear the kind of clothes you see in films where Italian playboys are hanging out in sidewalk bistros on the Riviera? All I knew about the man had been dropped in bits and pieces that I’d collected like a starry-eyed groupie. I knew he was from New Orleans and that he’d been a cop there, but New Orleans cops are probably no more elegant than cops in any other city.

I knew he’d been married once, but if being married turned men into model look-alikes the world wouldn’t be so full of fat slobs.

He had spoken French to me once. Actually, I had thought he was speaking Italian, but he had laughed and said, “Italian is one of the few things I’m not.” That’s all I knew about him.

Except that he was a terrific kisser. Oh, yes he was.

For reasons that neither of us ever intended or wanted, Guidry and I had been drawn together by some grisly murders. We had also been drawn together by chemistry. Neither of us had ever intended that either.

Our chemistry had resulted in one kiss that had left me feeling like a volcano that had spewed out a few hot rocks but was still gathering steam to blow sky high. That had happened around three months ago, right before Christmas. Thirteen and a half weeks ago, to be exact. Not that I’d been counting, or that I’d been disappointed that I hadn’t seen him since Christmas Eve, because I wasn’t.

I didn’t any longer feel that being attracted to another man made me disloyal to my dead husband. I’d got over that. But I had a lot of reservations about falling in love with another cop. Too many people had died and left me, and it seemed to me that I might be better off with a man who had a nice safe desk job. Somebody like Ethan Crane, for example, an attorney who had also kissed me and set off some hot tremors.

But both Guidry and Ethan must have had as many doubts as I had, because after a few weeks of eluded opportunity—sometimes mine and sometimes theirs—they had all but disappeared from my horizon.

Guidry stopped in front of me, and for a second we scanned each other’s faces as if we were using visual Braille.

He said, “Enjoying the fresh air?”

My head bobbed up and down like one of those fool dogs that people put in their back car windows. For some reason, I always become incoherent around Guidry.

He said, “Ah, I just wanted to ask you . . . uh, the thing is, somebody donated tickets to the sheriff’s office for a shindig Saturday night. A black-tie thing . . . there’ll be dinner . . . some kind of entertainment too, I think . . . it’s a fund-raiser for the Humane Society—you know, the animal people. I should go, you know, as a member of the department, and I know you like that kind of thing. The animals, I mean, so I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”

Ella must have been as astonished as I was to hear Guidry lose his usual cool smoothness because she sat up in my arms and studied him. Guidry narrowed his eyes as if he wasn’t accustomed to a cat’s scrutiny.

As if I had a lot of pressing engagements, I said, “This coming Saturday?”

“Yeah, sorry. I just got word about it, or I would have asked you sooner.”

I said, “I love the work the Humane Society does.”

Guidry passed the back of his hand across his forehead as if he’d suddenly suffered a pain. He tends to look like that when I talk about animals.

He said, “That’s why I thought you might like to go to the dinner.”

“Okay.”

He looked relieved. “Pick you up about seven?”

“Great.”

“Well, okay, then.”

We smiled at each other for a moment, both of us blinking a little bit because it was probably the first time in our acquaintance that we’d had an entire conversation—if you could call it that—that hadn’t revolved around a murder.

He gave me a half wave and turned back to his car.

I watched him walk away and then felt something with claws clutch my chest.

I said, “Guidry, did you say black-tie?”

He turned back. “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I was proud that my voice didn’t squeak. He got in his car, waved again, and backed out. I looked at Ella, and she looked at me. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that her eyes looked as alarmed as I felt. I had just accepted an invitation to a black-tie event that was to be held in six days. Which meant I had six days to go find something fancy to wear, because I sure as heck didn’t have anything in my closet.

I took Ella back inside Michael’s kitchen and kissed her goodbye.

I said, “I have to go see to my pets. And I have to buy some new clothes. You’re lucky, you can just wear the same fur all the time, but women have to wear special clothes for special occasions. Oh, God, shoes too. Okay, I’ll just do it. It’s really no problem. No, really, it’s not.”

She didn’t look convinced.

I said, “Don’t tell Michael and Paco I stole cookies, okay?”

She tilted her head back, looked solemnly into my eyes, and blinked twice, slowly. In cat language, that means I love you.

Even so, she was probably planning to rat me out.

4

My afternoons are pretty much a repeat of my mornings, except I don’t groom any of the pets. Instead, I spend more time playing with them or exercising them. My pet-sitting day ends around sunset, and it’s very satisfying to know that I’ve made several living beings happy that day. That I left their food bowls sparkling clean and fresh water in their water bowls. That I brushed them so their coats shined, and played with them until all our hearts were beating faster. That I kissed them goodbye and left them with their tails wagging or flipping or at least raised in a happy kind of way. That’s a heck of a lot more than any president, pope, prime minister, or potentate can say, and I wouldn’t switch places with any of them.

Morning or afternoon, my first stop is always at Tom Hale’s condo. He lives in the Sea Breeze on the Gulf side of the key. Tom and I swap services. He handles my taxes and anything having to do with money, and I run twice a day with his greyhound, Billy Elliot.

Tom has curly black hair that hugs his head like a poodle’s trim, and he wears round eyeglasses that give him a cute Harry Potter look. Until you look into his eyes. His eyes betray a time of intense suffering, a look that says he can endure whatever pain life sends, but hopes, oh God, that it won’t happen again.

His transition came during a casual saunter down a lumber-and-door aisle in a home improvement store—one of those huge places that sells everything from flashlights to entire kitchens. To this day he doesn’t know what caused it, but there was an avalanche and his spine was crushed under tons of lumber. And that was just the beginning of the cataclysmic change. Within a couple of years, Tom had lost his CPA firm, his wife and children, and most of the money he’d got in a lawsuit against the store. About all he had left was Billy Elliot, a dog he had saved from the fate that befalls racing dogs who have quit winning. Billy Elliot returned the favor by saving Tom from utter loneliness and despair. Dogs are like that. Dogs don’t stop loving you when your luck turns sour.

Tom had been pretty much of a hermit until last Christmas, when he had fallen in love with a woman named Frannie. Since then, he’d been looking more relaxed and a little heavier. Happiness seems to make men gain weight, while it makes women skinnier. Frannie was nice enough, but I suspected she wasn’t a dog person. I would never have told Tom, but the truth was I didn’t think she was good enough for him and Billy Elliot.