Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (6 page)

7

T
he sky was still pearly white when I walked out on my balcony next morning, and a gentle sea murmured drowsily to the shore. As I went down the stairs to the carport, I caught a faint vanilla scent, a whiff of fragrance from a night-blooming cereus twined around the oak tree beside Michael’s deck. Creamy white and big as dinner plates, cereus blossoms last only one night, but they are magnificent. By June, they are so profuse and fragrant that being outside at night is like bathing in perfume. Since it was only early April, first blooms were there as friendly promises.

In the carport, all our cars and Paco’s Harley were damp with morning dew. Michael’s shift at the firehouse would begin at eight that morning, and then for the next twenty-four hours his car would be gone. I always instinctively look to see whose car is home and whose is gone, and I always breathe a little easier when both Michael’s and Paco’s cars are there. I hate to admit that, but it’s true.

I took a deep final hit of salt air and cereus, shooed a trio of sleepy pelicans off the hood of my Bronco, and crept down the twisting lane toward Midnight Pass Road. I went slowly so as not to disturb the parakeets roosting in the mossy oaks along the lane. Parakeets are such prima donnas, they make a big to-do if you wake them up.

At the Sea Breeze, where Tom Hale lives, the parking lot was quiet, with the only movement from a few early risers and their dogs. The elevator was coming down when I entered the downstairs lobby, and when the door opened Tom’s girlfriend came out, walking fast and frowning like the Wicked Witch of the West. She had a thick square bandage on her chin, and when I spoke to her, she gave me an icy glare. I swear, the more I saw of that woman, the less I liked her. I supposed she must have some invisible stellar qualities or Tom wouldn’t be involved with her, but I had never seen them. More than likely, they only came out in bed.

Upstairs, I used my key to open Tom’s door and found him sitting in the living room with his arm around Billy Elliot’s neck. They weren’t watching early morning news, they were just sitting.

I said, “I just met Frannie leaving the building.”

Tom nodded and tightened his lips.

I got Billy Elliot’s leash and snapped it on his collar. If Tom didn’t want to talk, I wouldn’t press him.

Tom raised his arms like an orchestra conductor who’d been waiting for his cue. “Okay, here’s what happened. She had a small skin cancer removed from her chin. Nothing serious, not a melanoma, she’s going to be fine. But she’s self-conscious like you wouldn’t believe about it. We went out to dinner last night, and when we came home she told me she’d noticed people staring at her. I’d noticed it too. You know how people look at anything unusual, and they were looking at her bandage. I said it wasn’t surprising that people stared at her because she’s a beautiful woman. She said no, they were staring at her because she was with me. Said she could tell they felt sorry for her.”

He spun his chair around to face me. “She brought it up again this morning, and I told her the truth. Nobody was looking at her because she was with a man in a wheelchair, they were looking at her because she had a big honking bandage on her chin. And they weren’t pitying her, they were just rude and curious. She got pissed and stormed out.”

I wanted to tell him Frannie was all wrong for him and Billy Elliot, but I knew better. Tell a friend who’s having a lover’s quarrel that you hate his girlfriend’s guts, and the next thing you know they’ll be back together again and he’ll never forget what you said.

As mild as milk, I said, “You might want to consider what kind of woman would think people pitied her for being with you. Not to mention what kind of self-consumed bitch would
tell
you that.”

He gave me a half grin. “Come on, Dixie, don’t be shy. Tell me what you really think.”

“Sorry, gotta go. Billy Elliot and I have an appointment with some bushes downstairs.”

I took Billy Elliot out to the hall. Before I closed Tom’s door, I saw a full grin on his face.

Billy Elliot and I ran our laps in the parking lot until he was happy and I was wheezing, then we rode the elevator back upstairs to Tom’s condo. I could smell coffee brewing and hear the shower running. I kissed Billy Elliot goodbye, hung his leash back in the closet, and let myself out. On the ride downstairs in the elevator, I counted the women I knew who were both single, attractive, heterosexual, smart, the right age, and good enough for Tom and Billy Elliot. It was a short list, but if Tom ever dumped Frannie’s self-centered ass, I would be matchmaking before sundown.

By the time I’d walked all the dogs on my list and fed and groomed all the cats, it was almost nine o’clock and I was on my way to Fish Hawk Lagoon to walk Mazie. Just after the light at Stickney Point, I saw a dark form the size of a toddler’s fist moving across the pavement ahead of me. Only one thing in the world has that shape and moves with that sprawling bent-leg gait. A baby turtle had decided to see the world.

I veered onto the shoulder and had my door open before I came to a jolting stop. Behind me, a green-and-white sheriff’s car stopped in the spot where I’d just been. The driver’s door opened, and a deputy in dark green shorts and shirt jumped out and started flagging down traffic. He must have come up behind me while I was pulling onto the shoulder, spotted the turtle, and realized my intention.

I recognized that deputy. He was Deputy Jesse Morgan, an officer I’d met several times before in less pleasant circumstances. I was fairly sure that Morgan thought I was a nutcase. Considering his reasons, I couldn’t actually blame him.

Flashing him a grateful grin, I sprinted across the pavement and picked up a three-inch Florida box turtle. As I ran back to my car, Deputy Morgan got back in his car and waited for me to pull back on the road. He didn’t smile and his eyes were shielded by dark glasses, but I had the distinct impression that he was pleased. I felt as if he and I had made a new turn in our acquaintanceship.

The turtle’s oval shape marked it as female. When I put her down on the passenger floor, she immediately resumed her plan of moving from Point A to Point B, totally ignoring the interval when a force much larger than herself had swooped down and grabbed her.

I’ve felt that way myself a few times.

Except for the threat of being eaten by birds and killed by humans, nature has been especially kind to female box turtles. If a female meets a male she fancies as a father for her children, she can have a night of mattress-slapping, heel-banging, headboard-butting sex and then store his sperm for six or seven years. She can go to graduate school, start a business, get tenure at a university, make partner at a law firm, all the while secure that she has plenty of desirable sperm ready and waiting. Then, when her maternal urges kick in, she can dig a hole and use the stored sperm to fertilize her eggs. Maybe she has completely forgotten the male who donated his sperm. Or maybe she remembers and a tear rolls down her leathery cheek while she inseminates herself. At any rate, she can repeat the whole sex-and-storage thing as many times as she chooses for the rest of her life. Box turtles may live to be a hundred, so that’s a lot of sex with freedom to choose when to be pregnant. How cool is that?

Fish Hawk Lagoon is actually a man-made lake in the shape of an artist’s palette. The lake has narrow inlets that allow small pleasure boats access to the bay, and it’s a favorite nesting place for ospreys, which are also called fish hawks. The residential area curves around it, and there are picnicking spots interspersed with nature preserves around its perimeter.

I followed the hibiscus hedge beside the jogging trail until it ended at a boggy lakeside area shaded by moss-hung oaks. Thick with ferns, potato vines, lilies, and taro, and bounded on two sides by palmetto and hibiscus, it was as good a sanctuary as a little turtle could hope for. Pulling behind the hedge into a shelled parking area beside the trail, I picked the turtle off the floor and took a minute to study the perfect symmetry of her carapace markings. They conjured a faint echo of drumbeats, a flash of an initiate dipping her finger into pale yellow dye to trace a clue on a dark turtle shell, sounds of female voices raised in triumphant ululation. If creatures that link us to our distant past become extinct, will we lose the unconscious memory of our origins?

With the little turtle’s legs valiantly churning the air, I walked toward the bog, then stopped a moment to look at a nesting pair of sandhill cranes on a minuscule sandbar about ten feet offshore. Four or five feet tall, sandhill cranes are magnificent stalk-legged birds with brilliant patches of red on the tops of their heads. Males and females work together to build nests of twigs and weeds, then the male stands guard while the female sits on their eggs, usually just two. He stays close by until the chicks are able to fly by themselves too, not like some human males who leave their mates to raise their babies alone. This couple must have lost one of their eggs, because only one fluffy caramel-colored chick was poking its head from its mom’s shoulder feathers.

When I squatted on the loamy ground, the male crane stretched his snaky gray neck, made a high-pitched gurgling cry, and flapped his huge wings a couple of times. With his five-foot wingspan, he looked like Rodan, the old horror-film monster, ready to shock and awe Tokyo. I hoped he had shocked and awed the baby turtle so she would hide from him, because he could easily gulp her down for breakfast.

When I set her down, she zipped out of sight under a clump of taro leaves. She probably thought she had cleverly escaped a giant predator, but it wasn’t the sandhill crane she feared, it was me. Like all of us, she would have to learn that some things that seem horrifying are really benign.

From the other side of the hibiscus hedge separating the street from the trail, a man’s outraged voice rose above the hum of insects and birdsong.

“How could you do that to me? How? Even for you, it’s especially despicable. You’ve outdone yourself this time. Of all the stupid, selfish, unforgivable things you’ve ever done, this is the worst!”

Peering through the hibiscus, I saw two people approaching, a woman in jogging shorts, and a barrel-chested bull of a man in a dark suit. Fury surrounded the man in a kind of subliminal red mist. Not that I’m able to see auras. But if I were, I’m positive that’s what his would have been—hot, pulsating energy the color of blood. He walked with the heavy-shouldered tread of a man with a thorn in his soul.

He said, “This time you went too far. You won’t get away with this one.”

They moved forward until I could see their faces. The man had the glossy patina of raw power, the kind that always sits at the head of the table no matter what the meeting is. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with dark slicked-back hair, deep pouches under heavy-lidded eyes, and a mouth that was accustomed to giving orders. His body was thick and broad-shouldered, but every inch seemed to be muscle. The woman was Laura Halston. She looked bored.

She said, “You can’t do a thing to me, Martin. Not now, not ever.”

I looked harder at the man, imagining him carving Laura’s stomach with one of his scalpels. Now that I knew who he was, I could imagine him as a young linebacker. I could also imagine him stalking like a king through hospital halls while nurses fluttered in his wake.

It was one of those moments when no matter what you do, it’ll be wrong. I could have stood up and made my presence known, but then Laura would have been embarrassed to know I had heard an intensely personal conversation. I could have put my hands over my ears or scuttled out of earshot, but it was too late. I’d already heard enough.

I watched Laura step into the street and start walking away from her husband.

In a voice choked with rage, he said, “Don’t you dare walk away from me! You owe me, goddammit! You owe me!”

Without turning, she stretched her arm overhead and shot him a finger.

He stared at her back a moment longer and then charged to a car parked down the street. Spraying shell, he roared away.

I waited until Laura had disappeared around a curve in the other direction before I stood up and walked to the Bronco. Then I drove sedately and carefully toward Mazie’s house. I might be a voyeur, but I don’t speed.

I didn’t need a playbill to know that Laura’s husband had found her, and he hadn’t sounded to me as if he intended to let her go without a nasty fight. Laura had said she was afraid of him. Now that I’d seen him and had a sample of what he was like, I wasn’t sure she was frightened enough. With his raw rage, he seemed inherently capable of violence—violence that went far beyond the sick practice of throwing scalpels at the ceiling to frighten his wife.

8

A
n ancient story tells about a prince who died and went to heaven. As he always had, his dog followed him. At heaven’s gate, the gatekeeper said, “You can’t bring a dog in here, he’ll have to stay outside.”

The man said, “This dog has been the most loyal friend I’ve ever had. He’s stayed with me through my every loss and humiliation, and he’s celebrated with me my every success. I cannot enter heaven and leave my best friend outside. If he can’t go in, I won’t go in either.”

At that, the dog was revealed as a god in disguise, and they went in together. According to the story, that’s why dogs are called
dogs
, because they’re really gods in disguise.

I thought about that story when I got to Mazie’s house. Pete was in the kitchen crouched beside Mazie, who lay by Jeffrey’s chair with its empty booster seat. Pete’s shaggy eyebrows were so low I could barely see his eyes.

He said, “She didn’t eat last night, and she didn’t eat this morning. She’s too sad.”

I wasn’t surprised. Dogs don’t have superficial love or shallow devotion. They don’t ever wonder if it would better serve their own interests to switch their loyalties to somebody else. Once they give their hearts to one person, that’s where their commitment lies, and they grieve the loss of a loved one the same way humans do. For a service dog like Mazie, her sense of loss was even more acute.

I knelt to stroke Mazie’s head. “Did Hal call?”

“Not yet. It’s too soon.”

I went to the cupboard and shook some kibble into my hand, then went back to sit on the floor beside Mazie.

I said, “Jeffrey will be back, Mazie. And you have to keep your strength up so you can take care of him when he comes home.”

As I said it, I sent a mental photo of Jeffrey giggling and hugging Mazie, while Mazie’s tail beat with wild happiness. Some people think I’m nuts to send pictures to animals, but the animals seem to get them, so I keep doing it.

She lifted her head, sniffed the kibble, and ate one or two nuggets.

Pete said, “She needs to eat more than that.”

“If she’s drinking water, she can fast for a day or two with no problem. Remember, don’t try to tempt her with people food. When she’s ready, she’ll start eating again.”

Pete reddened, as if he might have already offered her a bite of his own breakfast.

Trying to act as if I were as confident as I sounded, I got Mazie’s leash and took her for a walk. She came along docilely, but her heart wasn’t in it and she kept looking back toward her house. I didn’t keep her out long. As soon as she had done her doggie business, we ran home at a fast clip.

I looked toward Laura’s house, but all I could see were trees and the driveway. It was just as well. I was still embarrassed to have eavesdropped, and I needed some time before I saw Laura again.

Back at Mazie’s house, I handed her off to Pete, told him I’d be back around three P.M., and scooted to the Bronco with visions of breakfast dancing in my head.

On the way to the diner, I stopped at a traffic light and noticed a hand-lettered cardboard sign taped to a light pole: LOST CHIHUAHUA PUP! REWARD! CALL LYON’S MANE. There was no phone number or address, which I took to mean that whoever printed the sign assumed that everybody knew where and what the Lyon’s Mane was. Which they probably did. The Lyon’s Mane was the salon Laura had mentioned, a pricey place for people accustomed to big-city stylists and big-city fees. Needless to say, I’d never been there.

A car honked behind me and made me aware the light had changed, so I moved on with the herd. Somebody had been busy putting up that LOST CHIHUAHUA PUP sign, because it was at every intersection. A block away from the Village Diner, I spotted the little guy cowering under an oleander bush. I pulled off the street and got out of the Bronco, moving as slowly as I could so as not to frighten him. Even adult Chihuahuas make me feel like a big ogre, they’re so small and dainty. A Chihuahua pup is like a fairy dog, all big eyes and dancy legs.

I knelt down and spoke softly while my hand crept forward, palm up. “Don’t be scared, it’s okay. I’m going to take you home.”

I slipped my hand under the pup’s chest and lifted his front paws off the ground, then did a one-hand lift to cuddle him against my own chest.

I said, “How in the world did a little bitty thing like you get so far away from home? Did a hawk pick you up and carry you? Catch a ride on a turtle?”

He didn’t answer, just burrowed into my bosom as if he liked the warmth.

I thought he’d been through too much trauma to add a ride in a stranger’s car, so I walked through some parking lots and side streets to the Lyon’s Mane. At the salon, I pulled open the glass door and stepped into the odor of shampoo, styling products, and singed hair. A young woman with lizard-green eye shadow and hair in white Statue of Liberty spires stood behind a tall reception desk talking on a phone. Before I got to her, a ponytailed marionette of a man came clattering around the desk on backless clogs. His arms were raised from the elbows and his hands were flapping excitedly.

“Oh, my God, you’ve found Baby!”

He grabbed toward me, and I hastily put the puppy into his grasping hands. The puppy licked the man’s lips while he cooed and kissed its nose.

I said, “He was under an oleander bush. They’re poisonous, so I hope he didn’t try to eat any of the leaves.”

“Baby? Eat a leaf off a bush? Hell, Baby won’t even eat dog food! My wife feeds him off her plate.”

I smiled and nodded, polite as anything, and edged toward the door. I’d done my good deed for the day, and breakfast was close by.

The man said, “Hold on! There’s a reward for bringing Baby home.”

I waved him off like Lady Bountiful telling the peasants they didn’t owe her anything. “That’s okay. Glad to do it.”

He stopped patting Baby and stared at my head. “No offense, hon, but who’s been cutting your hair? The yard man?”

Actually, I’d cut it myself, and I thought I’d done a pretty good job. My hair is straight and just hangs there, so cutting it isn’t like rocket science. Nevertheless, my hand went anxiously to my head. Suggest to a woman that her hair is bad, and her hand is compelled to feel it.

“You think it’s uneven?”

“Doll, if it was any choppier, people would get seasick just from looking at it. Sit down and I’ll even it up for you. A reward for rescuing Baby.”

I gave a fleeting thought to breakfast, and dropped into his chair. No woman in her right mind would turn down an opportunity to get her hair trimmed by a master stylist.

I said, “Maybe just a teeny bit off.”

He flapped a hand from a loose wrist. “Sweetie, you just leave it to me. You’re gonna love it. By the way, my name’s Maurice.”

He pronounced it Maur-
eeese
.

I said, “I’ve heard of you. My friend Laura Halston is one of your clients.”

As soon as I said it, I was afraid I’d mentioned Laura’s name to elevate myself from a strange woman in cheap shoes to a person who was in the same league with his clientele.

He said, “Oh, Laura! Isn’t she gorgeous? And just as down-to-earth as she can be.”

He scooted away to settle the pup in its own monogrammed basket, and I looked at the hair stuff laid out on his workstation. I didn’t know what half of it was. A shallow shelf under the work top held a couple of glossy glamour magazines, and I pulled one out and looked at the photograph on the cover. It was the generic photo that every glamour magazine has—airbrushed close-up of a young woman with carefully applied eyeliner and fake eyelashes that somebody spent an hour or two lacquering and separating so they look like heavy fringe, chemically colored hair with extensions teased and gelled and sprayed to mimic the way healthy hair would look if nothing had ever been done to it, and a pouting, seductive mouth plump with collagen shots. We are all supposed to believe that if we only purchase the products advertised in those magazines, we too can look like the cover model, but not even the cover models look like that.

Maurice came back and grabbed a pair of scissors. “Put the magazine down, because I’m going to turn you around so you’re facing me instead of the mirror. You just relax.”

I immediately tensed up, because my experience is that when somebody says, “You just relax,” you’re in for a harrowing time.

Maurice spun me around and began to cut and snip like a wild man, sending pieces of hair flying all over the place. I was so disappointed I could have cried. Sarasota women have two hairstyles: Barbie-doll long and highlighted white blond, or short and chopped off at the nape of the neck. The Barbie-doll do has bangs that hang over the eyebrows, the chopped-off do is frothed up on the crown like meringue. There is no in between.

I stand up for myself against alligators, religious fanatics, and gun-toting madmen, but I am a hopeless coward with hairdressers. I not only thank them for bad haircuts, I pay them and tip them. Then I go home and recut my hair. It’s disgusting to be a hairdresser wimp, but I am. And every time, while I’m in the chair being ruined, I rationalize my cowardice by telling myself that my hair will grow out, that a bad haircut won’t last forever.

Maurice knelt in front of me to get a better angle with his scissors. He had kind eyes.

He said, “I worry about her.”

“Who?”

“Laura. With that awful husband of hers, I think she should hire a bodyguard. But she’s so brave, she just acts like there’s no danger. And then there’s that other man after her. I feel bad that she met him here, but it’s out of my hands, you know? She’s an adult and she can see anybody she wants to.”

Maurice apparently didn’t share my disinclination to gossip about his clients, and I felt a bit let down. Laura had apparently told Maurice everything she’d told me, plus he knew about a man she hadn’t even mentioned. So I wasn’t so special after all. I wondered how many other people knew her story.

He stood up and whirled me around so I could see myself, and I made an involuntary gasp of surprise.

I felt like Julie Christie in the old movie
Shampoo
. My hair wasn’t any shorter, and I didn’t know exactly what was different, but now it looked as if it needed a man’s fingers running through it.

Maurice smiled. “Now that’s kick-ass hair!”

The front door flew open and a woman built like a manatee came charging in. She had large dark eyes with lots of dramatic makeup, shiny black hair cut close to her head like a skullcap, and she wore lavender Lycra tights under a bright orange smock. She should have looked ridiculous, but she looked oddly exotic.

In a deep baritone, she bawled, “Baby!” and snatched the Chihuahua pup from its basket.

Misty-eyed, Maurice said, “That’s my wife.”

I didn’t know whether he was on the verge of crying because my hair was so gorgeous or because his wife was so . . . so
much
.

To his wife, Maurice said, “Ruby, sweetie, this is . . . who are you, hon?”

Weakly, I said, “I’m Dixie Hemingway.”

As if he’d invented me, Maurice said, “She’s the one found Baby and brought him back to us.”

With Baby held tight against her jutting bosom, Ruby stuck out a hand twice as big as Maurice’s and gave me a firm handshake.

“You’re a pet sitter, aren’t you? I read about you in the paper. Great haircut.”

I allowed as how I was a pet sitter and that I also thought it was a great haircut, but I didn’t respond to the comment about reading about me in the paper. There were only a few times my name had been mentioned in the paper, and none of them were because of events I wanted to remember.

Maurice said, “She’s a friend of Laura Halston’s.”

Ruby opened her mouth to say something enthusiastic, but she closed it when the front door opened and a thick man stalked in, glowering like he owned the place and had caught the employees goofing off. He was donkey-butt ugly, with a deeply pockmarked face and thorny black eyebrows. When he raised his hand to his shades to remove them, several diamond rings glittered on fingers thick as cheap cigars. Maurice and Ruby got quiet, and the smile Ruby gave him was so false it could have been lifted off and pinned to the wall.

She said, “Sheila will be right with you, Mr. Gorgon.”

He said, “Well, get her up here, I don’t have all day.”

The young woman with the Statue of Liberty hair whipped around the front counter with a smile as phony as Ruby’s. “I’m right here, Mr. Gorgon. You can come on back.”

As he strutted away, I watched him with the repulsed fascination I’d give a nest of baby vipers. Maurice and Ruby seemed equally unable to tear their eyes away from him. Even Baby had cocked his ears and was staring at him with big astonished eyes.

Sheila of the white spiked hair bustled around a manicure stand, getting him seated, making sure he was comfortable, offering him something to drink, putting out her bowls and bottles and tools as if she were getting ready to do major surgery. The man all but sneered at her, but he allowed her to touch his broad hands. They seemed to have something of a practiced routine.

As if we all came out of a trance, Maurice and Ruby and I turned away from them at the same moment.

In a barely audible murmur, Maurice said, “Speak of the devil.”

Brilliantly, I said, “Huh?”

He leaned close and pretended to arrange a hair behind my ear while he whispered, “That’s the man Laura’s seeing!”

Since she’d only lived in Sarasota a few weeks, she couldn’t have seen much of him. Besides, anybody with two brain cells to rub together would know he wasn’t Laura’s type. Then I remembered how she’d talked about how rich her husband was, and how much she’d liked being a rich man’s wife. This guy sporting diamonds on his hammy hands obviously had money. Maybe his money was enough to make Laura overlook his nasty disposition. I gave the man another look. I knew he wasn’t the man who’d called while I was there because his voice was gruff and harsh, not the unctuous smarm of the guy who’d come to Laura’s door.

I thanked Maurice profusely, tried to give him a tip which he refused, and left him and Ruby telling Baby how wonderful he was. I didn’t say goodbye to Sheila. I was afraid it would interfere with her concentration and enrage her manicure customer.