Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (22 page)

“Thanks for the chili. Don’t worry about me. I’m cool.”

When I closed the kitchen door, I could see them through the window. Michael was letting Ella lick crumbs from his fingertips. Ella looked blissful. Michael looked worried. On top of his concern about Paco, I had just given him another load to carry.

As for me, I didn’t feel half as cool as I’d pretended. Laying it all out for Michael had made me feel like I was in the middle of a hurricane’s eye. It was calm there for the time being, but hurricanes move on. When they do, you get slammed by winds from an entirely different direction than the one you’ve been facing.

I still had some time before I had to make afternoon rounds so I ran upstairs and got my car keys. I needed to talk to Cora Mathers.

C
ora Mathers is an eighty-something-year-old friend whose granddaughter was once a client of mine. The granddaughter was murdered in a most brutal way, and I had been immensely impressed by Cora’s strength when it happened. Afterward, she and I had sort of adopted each other.

Cora lives on the mainland in a lovely condo in Bayfront Village, a posh retirement tower on Tamiami Trail overlooking the bay. Her granddaughter bought the condo for her with money made in ways Cora has never suspected. As far as Cora knows, her granddaughter was a smart woman who made wise investments, and because she had a good heart she provided well for her cat and for her grandmother. The good heart part is true.

Driving north on the way to Bayfront Village, I swung off the Trail for a few blocks to Whole Foods. Leaving the Bronco in the parking garage, I hotfooted it inside and bought a dozen pink roses and a carton of frozen soup. As I loped back to the garage, a motorcycle arced around
me and pulled into a parking spot. The driver’s head was covered by a black helmet and he wore so much denim that I couldn’t see his body, but I kept a hawk eye on his hands in case he flashed Paco’s signal. He pulled off his helmet and turned his head to look at me. He had a broad freckled face, little piggy eyes, and a scowl that looked as if it had been there forever. He definitely wasn’t Paco.

I pretended I hadn’t been staring at him and got in the Bronco and raced off. When I pulled under Bayfront’s portico, the parking attendant sprinted smartly to open the Bronco’s door before I had time to get out. Rich people get service like that.

When he saw it was me, he lost the servile look but kept the grin.

He said, “You here to see Miz Mathers? Nice roses.”

I slid out of the Bronco and looped the bag with the soup over my arm.

I said, “They’re organic.”

“You gonna eat them?”

“No, but I guess if somebody gets stuck by a thorn, it won’t be a poisonous thorn.”

“Ha! Next thing you know, they’ll be selling organic fertilizer.”

I sort of thought they already were, but I just smiled and left him to disappear my car into the bowels of the Bayfront’s parking garage. I like that about ritzy places. They make you feel like royalty.

The front doors sighed open as I approached, and the concierge waved to me from her French Provincial desk. The lobby was busy with enthusiastic seniors making plans for music lessons and bridge parties and opera trips
and gourmet dinners. For sure their lives were a lot more socially active than mine. Maybe you have to be old to have the time for quality fun. Gives me something else to look forward to.

As I moved toward the bank of elevators, the concierge picked up her phone to warn Cora that I was coming. She used to make me wait until Cora had given permission for me to come up, but now she knows Cora always wants to see me. I like that. It’s good to know somebody always welcomes your presence.

Cora lives on the sixth floor, and when I got off the elevator she was already out in the hall, excited as a child to have company. When she was young, Cora probably stretched herself to an inch or two over five feet, but now that age has condensed her, she’d have to stand on tiptoe to reach five feet. She has wispy white hair like a baby chick and a skinny frame that moves on slow freckled legs. To make up for her slow feet, her brain moves at warp speed. When she looks at me with her pale blue eyes, I feel like I’m being examined by an eagle.

She said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’d of made some fresh chocolate bread. All I’ve got is left over.”

I said, “It’s still good left over.”

She said, “Oh my, what beautiful flowers. What else have you got there?”

“Some of that shrimp and corn chowder you like. The roses are organic, so you can stick your nose in them and not get poisoned. I guess the soup is too.”

She laughed and began ministepping into her apartment so slowly that I had to march in place to keep from
barreling into her. Cora’s apartment is pale pink and soft turquoise everywhere you look, from the marble floors to the skirt on the round table between the galley kitchen and the living room. Glass doors open to a sun porch overlooking the bay, so she has an ever-changing view of water and clouds and sailboats.

An odor of chocolate always hangs in the air from the decadent chocolate bread Cora makes in an old bread-making machine—another gift from her granddaughter. She won’t divulge the recipe, but at some point in the process she throws in bittersweet chocolate chips that never completely melt but make soft oozy blobs in the bread. She serves it in torn chunks, and when it’s hot and slathered with butter Cora’s chocolate bread would make hardened criminals break down and confess just to get a taste.

Her kitchen wasn’t big enough for both of us, so she sat at her table and watched me work behind the open kitchen bar. She said, “Leave the soup out to thaw. I’ll have it for supper.”

While water heated in her teakettle, I put the roses in a clear glass pitcher and set them on the bar. I got a tray for our tea things and found half a loaf of chocolate bread.

Cora said, “Don’t put it in the microwave, it’ll get tough. Just tear off some hunks.”

“I know.”

She watched me get butter from the refrigerator, teacups from the cupboard, and pour hot water over tea bags in a pot. I brought the tray to the table and sat down across from her. She waited until I’d poured our tea and distributed our hunks of chocolate bread.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

Cora is like Michael. One look at me and they both know what I’m feeling.

I took a sip of tea and tried to think which thing to tell. Like which disaster had precedence.

I said, “I met a teenaged girl a few days ago. Her name is Jasmine, but she’s called Jaz. She’s a cute girl, smart, likes pets. She’s from L.A., and she saw some gang members shoot a boy. A whole street full of people saw it, but she’s the only one willing to testify because everybody else is scared of the gang. The government has put her in witness protection to keep her safe until the trial. They moved her here and stuck her in a little apartment at a resort hotel on Siesta Key. She had an officer assigned to her, and he checked on her a couple of times a day, but she was lonely and called some old friends in L.A. Word got out where she was, and the gang came here looking for her. She’s disappeared now, and the marshal who’s been keeping an eye on her thinks they’ve killed her.”

Sadness clouded Cora’s eyes. “Does her family know?”

“There isn’t a family. Her parents abandoned her when she was little, and her grandmother raised her. The grandmother died a few months ago and Jaz was put in a foster home. Poor kid never had much of a chance.”

“That’s not true. She had a grandmother. She must have done a good job too, to raise a girl so brave and honest.”

I blinked at Cora. Until that moment, I hadn’t seen Jaz as anything except a girl in trouble. But Cora was right. Jaz was incredibly brave to be willing to testify against a
gang. None of the other witnesses had her courage. None of them had her honesty.

I tore off a bite of chocolate bread from my chunk and popped it in my mouth. It was almost as good as when it was piping hot.

I said, “I wish she hadn’t been so honest about telling people where she was.”

Cora said, “I blame the hospitals.”

I tore off another bite and wondered if Cora’s mind was going soft.

She said, “Used to be when babies were born, the hospital put them all in one room with a glass wall so people could look at them. They’d be all lined up in their little plastic bins, pink blankets around the girls and blue around the boys. Sometimes they put little stocking caps on their heads to match. They had strict viewing times, you couldn’t just go see them any old time, so it was a special thing to get to look at them. Sometimes when things were so hard for me and I didn’t know if I was going to make it, I’d go to the hospital and look at those babies. They were so new they still had God’s fingerprints on them, and looking at them would make me remember that we all come perfect.”

I said, “Those guys who killed a boy just for fun may have been perfect when they were born, but they’re bad now.”

Cora said, “That’s because people don’t ever get to see a whole roomful of new babies anymore, so they don’t understand that no baby is born bad. People turn their backs on babies, let them go hungry and sick, and then
when the babies grow up to be killers and thieves, they say, ‘See there? I told you they were bad.’ ”

She raised her teacup and fixed me with her piercing old eyes. “That girl you’re talking about could have turned out bad just like those boys, but she had a grandmother who loved her. That’s why she’s honest and brave. That’s why my granddaughter was honest and brave too, because that’s how I raised her.”

I knew for a fact that Cora’s granddaughter had
not
been honest. But it was true she’d been brave, and that was probably because Cora had raised her.

I said, “My grandmother raised me too.”

“See? Grandmothers do it best.”

I opened my mouth to say that Jaz could get killed no matter how honest and brave she was, then remembered what had happened to Cora’s granddaughter and closed it. Cora was right about Jaz. None of the other witnesses had been honest enough to speak up.

The other side of complete honesty, of course, is that it’s a mark of immaturity. If you’re hiding from bad people who want to kill you, and the bad people ask bystanders where you are, you hope the bystanders will be mature enough to lie. If they’re small children or immature adults, they’ll point to your hiding place.

Jaz had the courage to agree to give honest testimony in court about the murder she’d seen. But immaturity had made her tell the truth to somebody about where she was, and now she had been found and possibly killed.

As if she were testing my own level of maturity, Cora said, “What’s going on with you and that nice detective you’re in love with?”

I swallowed a sip of tea wrong and for a moment sounded like a drowning person. “I’m not in love with him!”

She gave me one of those serene smiles unique to wise old women, the kind that makes their eyes almost disappear into fine wrinkles but still allows the flare in their eyes to pin you down like a laser beam.

She said, “I don’t know why you keep saying that. It’s plain as day you’re in love with him.”

My heart had started thumping like I’d been caught at something illicit. I said, “I don’t
want
to be in love with him. I don’t want to be in love with any man.”

“None of us do, hon, but it usually don’t make any difference what we want. We fall in love anyway.”

I always forget that Cora was once a young woman. But of course she was, and of course there had been men in her life.

She smoothed butter on a bit of chocolate bread, then used the bread like a lecturer holding a pointer. “Just make sure you’re not thinking you’re in love when it’s really pity you feel. Women do that all the time. Loving is the easiest thing in the world for a woman. A woman could go out and flag down ten men on the highway and there’d be two or three in the bunch she could love. Soon as a woman gets to know a man, finds out how he had a bad time in school, or had an old man that was mean to him, she falls in love. Especially if he’s good-looking and smiles at her and talks halfway smart. But half the time it’s not love, it’s pity. Women always want to make up to a man for all the bad things the world has done to him, and they think that’s love. Next thing you know they’re
marrying him, and that’s like bringing home a dog that foams at the mouth just because you feel sorry for it. I don’t care how much you think you can fix him, the wrong man will turn on you quick as a mad dog.”

I said, “I don’t feel sorry for Guidry.”

“Well, that’s good. But you’ve got to be sure that other stuff is right too. You know, the part in bed. People don’t like to talk about it, but women need a lot more lovemaking than men do. Men talk about it more, but women want to do it more. And if you’re with a man that don’t like to do it much, or isn’t any good at doing it, you’ll get fat and cranky. Don’t get mixed up with a cold man.”

Oddly, I felt myself blushing. Not that talk about sex embarrassed me, but it made me remember what sex had been like with Todd. He had showed me a survey one time in which people who’d been happily married twenty, thirty, sixty years had sheepishly admitted to fantastic sex. They felt a bit freakish about it because they knew the lust part of love was supposed to die and be replaced with warm companionship, but their mutual lusts had never died. Todd had said, “I guess that means we’ll still be chasing each other around when we’re a hundred.”

I thought about Judy saying that if I ever went to bed with Guidry, I’d probably kill him. But what if I was a firecracker ready to explode and Guidry turned out to have no sizzle?

Cora was watching me with an expectant look, so I must have been lost in thought longer than I realized.

I said, “If I ever fall in love again, I want it to bloom slowly, not explode like Fourth of July fireworks.” I liked the sound of that. I thought it sounded wise and mature.

Cora didn’t look impressed. “If love wants to bloom slowly, that’s what it’ll do. If it wants to bust out like firecrackers, it’ll do that too. Why don’t you just let it take care of itself?”