Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

“I could end up in prison myself if I tip him off that he’s under investigation.”

“ If you tip him off? Hell, you’ve done everything but hire the Goodyear blimp to fly over his house blinking a sign. It’s too late to get skittish, you’ve already crossed the line.”

I stood up and tossed money on the table.

“If I’m arrested for Ramón Gutierrez’s murder, I will sing like a prize Roller Canary about a certain FBI agent who was working both sides of the street. So keep that in your wee fake-Irish head while you think about what you’re going to do.”

TWENTY-FIVE

I went home after talking to Jessica. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I mean, what can you do to follow up something like that? The Bronco sort of guided itself down Midnight Pass Road and onto the meandering drive to the carport. I got out and went up the stairs to my porch, where a cat’s cardboard travel case sat on my glass-top table, with faint mewing sounds coming from it.

Even before I peered through an air hole, I knew what was inside. The calico kitten was crouched in a bunny pose with her ears flattened and her eyes wide with anxiety. A note had been taped to the case, written in round girlish script on paper torn from a child’s school tablet.

Dixie,

I know you wanted the kitten so it is yours.

Your friend, Paloma.

I groaned. I didn’t want a kitten! I had merely been concerned about the kitten, not covetous about it. I opened the carrying case and lifted the kitten out. She really was cute.

“It’s okay, kitty, don’t be scared.”

Some stroking and soft talk make the kitten retract her little trimmed claws, and a bowl of cool water in the kitchen and more smoochy talk made her hunched shoulders relax. Then, knowing I would really need to pee if I’d been confined in a box and carried to a strange place, I carried her down to the big sandbox by the sea. She seemed to believe me when I told her the waves and seagulls wouldn’t hurt her. After she made a silver-dollar-sized puddle, I took her back upstairs, explaining as I went that while I thought she was the smartest and cutest kitten I’d ever seen in my life, I couldn’t keep her.

I said, “It’s just not in my life plan right now to have a pet.”

She licked my thumb with her little sandpapery tongue and purred.

I lay down in the hammock with the kitten on my stomach. She sat up with her front legs straight and looked around. A seagull flew by with a loud squawking sound and she raised one hairy eyebrow and made a little firping sound that made me laugh.

I said, “You know, I don’t even know your name.”

She made some more firping sounds.

I said, “You sound like Ella Fitzgerald when she does that skatting thing. If you were my kitty, I’d name you Ella Fitzgerald.”

She yawned and curled into a contented ball and fell asleep. I lay there with both hands cupped around the calico kitten and told myself I should get up and call Guidry and tell him what I’d learned. But the kitten was sleeping so peacefully I didn’t want to disturb her.

Besides, Jessica Ballantyne’s predicament was so stupid and so human that I wanted to give her more time. While my fingers lay warm in the kitten’s fur, I thought about all the significant world events that have been instigated or foiled or screwed up by love. Napoleon and Josephine. Abelard and Héloïse. King Edward and Wallis Simpson. Princess Diana and Prince Charles and Camilla. Funny how those supposedly stiff Europeans are the ones willing to give up all they have for love, while supposedly less repressed Americans—think Bill Clinton with Monica, Gary Hart with Donna Rice, Wilbur Mills with Fanne Foxe—give up all they have for sex. Not even grown-up sex either, but immature, trivial, banal sex.

Ken Kurtz wasn’t a national leader, but he had developed something of international significance, something worth the FBI’s interest, something that had caused a man’s murder. Jessica Ballantyne had been a respected scientist, a woman who had been tapped by the United States government first as a researcher and then as an undercover investigator. These two people had awesome intellects, and yet both of them were acting like high school kids blowing their SATs because love was turning their brains to mush. Maybe it was all that time they’d spent in Europe and Southeast Asia. If they’d stayed in the United States, they might be focused on sex instead of love.

And what about me? What was I focused on?

I was thirty-two years old, a healthy, normal woman with a healthy body and healthy desires, and cuddling this kitten was the closest thing I’d come to real intimacy with another living being in over three years. Ethan Crane was the answer to any woman’s best sex dream, but was that the way I wanted to go? When I decided to live again and love again, was it so I could go to a man’s house and have sex?

While my mind agonized over the question, my body rolled out of the hammock, causing Ella to wake up and wiggle in my hands.

I said, “It’s okay. We’re going inside now. There are some things I have to do. See, I have this date tonight.” She raised an eyebrow again, and I said, “A date is something humans do when they’re in heat. You cats just go ahead and do it— wham, bam, thank you, ma’am —but we humans can’t do that until we have dinner and talk first. That’s what a date is. Dumb, isn’t it?”

Inside, I left Ella exploring the apartment while I took a shower. I shaved my legs. I put a deep conditioner on my hair. I used an exfoliant to make my skin smooth. I decided to call Ethan and cancel the date. I thought I would use the kitten as an excuse— Somebody left this cat with me, and I have to take it to the SPCA . I was an astronaut on the liftoff pad having a genuine crisis of conscience or a bad case of first-time jitters.

I crawled into bed. Ella came crying for me, and I took her into bed with me. She was soft and warm against my side, and we slept for a couple of hours. When I woke up, the headache was gone. Was that a go-ahead sign from God? Or just a sign that my concussion was healed? Maybe both?

The evening with Ethan was now only seven hours away.

Naked, I carried Ella to my office-closet and put on a terry-cloth robe. I put on a Patsy Cline CD and sat down at my desk to enter information in my pet records. Ella came to my side and tried to jump up. I picked her up and let her sit in my lap for a few minutes while I worked, but then I put her down and stomped to the CD player and turned Patsy off. Sometimes innocent love is too sweet to stomach.

Somebody rapped on my French doors, and I pulled the robe closed and padded into the living room. Guidry was leaning with one hand on the door, looking calmly through the glass into my life. As if he had a right to drop by in the middle of the afternoon without calling. As if it didn’t matter that some people might like a little advance notice so they could dress before they had company.

I jerked open the door and scowled at him. He ignored me and sauntered inside, leaving me with the doorknob in my hand. He went to my refrigerator and opened it and took out a bottle of water. While he uncapped the bottle and drank half of it, I closed the door and went to stand at my bar. The soft back sides of my knees tingled. I wished he would kiss me again.

I said, “How nice to see you, Lieutenant. Could I offer you something to drink? Water, maybe?”

“Thanks, I already have some.”

He carried the bottle into the living room and set it on the coffee table, then dropped onto my green-printed couch. After a moment, I sat in the chair. Too late, I realized I was squeezing my knees together like a schoolgirl on her first make-out date. Only we weren’t making out and we weren’t going to, and I had to make that crystal clear before Guidry got the wrong idea. If he hadn’t already.