Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (16 page)

She said, “But you’re not a deputy anymore.”

“I’m a pet sitter.”

In the mirror, her face registered disdain. She ran long manicured fingers through her hair. “I guess you’ve heard what happened to your old skanky friend.”

“I have a lot of old skanky friends, Bambi. Which one do you mean?”

“If you don’t know, then you live on another planet. It’s all over the news.”

I jerked a paper towel from its slot, dried my hands, and wadded the towel into a ball. My hand wanted to throw it at Bambi, but instead I tossed it in the wastebasket and turned on my heel, ready to flounce out. But it’s hard to turn on your heel when you wear Keds, harder
still to flounce in cargo shorts. A proper flounce needs ruffles or at least a billowing full skirt. As flounce impaired as I was, though, I managed to get in the last word.

“Nice to see you’re still spreading gossip, Bambi.”

The door sighed closed behind me and I stomped down the hall past the men’s room, the manager’s office, and a public phone. At the counter where people sit if they want TV with their meals, everybody was staring up at the huge screen on the wall. I zipped past them toward the main dining area, and then stopped cold when I heard Maureen’s voice. Weak-kneed, I turned to look up at her magnified image on the TV.

She looked good. She looked like what she was, a not-too-bright woman with great hair and a terrific body who had married money. A lot of money. She wore a hot pink short skirt and close-fitting jacket that had a fluff of something feathery around the edge. The camera was too close to tell what shoes she wore, but only very high heels would have given such a forward thrust to her boobs. Her glossy brown hair was made big as China by curly extensions, her trembling lips were sweetly pink, her eyelashes were thick and dark, and her big brown eyes looking into the camera were moist and pleading. Her voice was so soft it would have made a pit viper weep.

“Please, please bring my husband home to me. I’ve given you what you asked for. You and I know what that was. Now please keep your promise and bring my husband back.”

She raised her chin then, like a woman determined to be brave no matter what.

“Victor, if you can hear me, hang on, darling. I love you very much, and I’m counting the seconds until you’re home with me.”

Bambi Dirk popped from the ladies’ room hallway and passed behind me on her way to the front door. When she saw me watching Maureen, she gave me an evil grin.

“Told you,” she said.

I didn’t answer. I was fresh out of witty comebacks. Besides, what she’d said was apparently true. Maureen was all over the news. Having been all over the news myself one time, that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was knowing that Victor’s kidnappers had said they’d kill him if Maureen told anybody he’d been taken. Instead of keeping quiet, she’d gone on national TV and blabbed it to the world.

Maureen was dumb, but she wasn’t that dumb.

The close-up shot changed to a long view of Maureen’s lime green gate and the palatial raspberry mansion behind it. The gate opened to allow some official-looking men to surround Maureen and help her through it. Then the gate swung shut to keep out a crowd of newspeople holding cameras and notebooks, all of them shouting questions.

As the camera followed the little group escorting Maureen to her house, an announcer’s over-voice said, “That was a rerun of a press conference called this morning by the wife of Victor Salazar.”

While I was thinking,
A press conference?
the announcer’s voice continued.

“Mr. Salazar was allegedly kidnapped three days ago, and Mrs. Salazar received a ransom demand from his kidnappers asking for a million dollars in cash to be left
at a specific location. Mrs. Salazar says that she complied with the demand, but her husband has not been returned. According to a spokesperson with the sheriff’s office, Mrs. Salazar has not contacted them regarding her husband’s kidnapping. The spokesperson stressed that people who believe a loved one has been kidnapped should immediately contact their local law enforcement agency for help.”

The scene switched to three experts with ponderous faces and even more ponderous opinions about the proper way people should respond to a kidnapping. I doubted that any of them would recommend Maureen’s way.

I went to my booth and plopped down on the seat. Judy had my coffee waiting, and I drank it in a little dark cloud. The woman I’d just watched begging for her husband’s return must have been up all night getting her hair and makeup right before she called a press conference. The pink suit must have been carefully chosen too, not just to harmonize with the raspberry house, but because a woman in pink looks feminine and vulnerable but with plucky inner strength. People just eat that crap up, and Maureen knew it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maureen had put on a big phony show for the camera.

For the first time, I wondered if Maureen really wanted her husband back. I had no idea what kind of marriage she and Victor had, but I knew that she loved being rich. If her marriage ended, she wouldn’t be so rich, not even after getting the considerable amount the law would allow. But if Victor were dead, she would get it all. You don’t have to be a money-grubbing bimbo to know that when money is the goal, all is definitely better than some.

Judy stopped by my side to top off my coffee. “Who’re you planning to kill?”

“What?”

“You look like you’re plotting to knock somebody off.”

I didn’t want to tell her I was pretty sure my old high school friend was scheming to get her husband knocked off. For one thing, it was too awful to talk about, and for another, if I was right about what I suspected Maureen was doing, I had played a part in her scheme.

Some truths are so solid there’s no point in questioning them. Gravity, for example, or two plus two being four. Luck is another one. Everybody knows that luck surrounds some people. Luck allows a fortunate few to do stupid things and never pay the consequences.

I am not one of those people.

It didn’t matter that I’d tried to get Maureen to call the cops and report Victor’s kidnapping. It didn’t matter that I’d helped her because I felt a debt to an old friend. It didn’t matter that my intentions had all been good. The fact was that I’d done something really dumb, and I could feel the icy breath of consequences creeping up on me.

E
verything was quiet when I got home, with that peculiar middle-of-the-day lassitude that mutes both surf and birdcall. Ella was in the living room on the love seat, and we spent a few minutes assuring each other that there had never been anybody else in our entire lives that we loved as much as we loved each other. She purred extra loud to try to convince me that she wouldn’t drop me like a hot mouse the minute Michael came home.

I’ve loved Michael all my life so I understood how she felt. I carried her to the kitchen and gave her fresh water, then headed for the shower. On the way, I flipped on the CD player to let Pete Fountain’s sweet clarinet perfume the air.

I usually do my best thinking while water is spraying on me, but this time my thoughts were too scattered to come up with any conclusions. I told myself I should phone Maureen because I was her oldest friend and she was in distress. I reminded myself that fifteen years had
passed since we were in high school, that her phone number was unlisted, and that I didn’t have it.

I told myself that I was involved in Victor’s kidnapping because I’d let Maureen manipulate me into taking that damn duff el bag of money to the gazebo. I reminded myself that she hadn’t mentioned me in her staged press conference, so maybe my name would never come up. I rebutted that the possibility of my name never coming up was about the same as the possibility of a summer in Florida without a hurricane.

By the time I stepped out of the shower I was close to being water dissolved but no closer to seeing anything positive about the situation. Pete Fountain was still playing on the CD, but as I reached for a towel I heard a ring on my cellphone that made me shoot out of the bathroom trailing water droplets. Only a handful of people have my cellphone number, and only three people—Michael, Paco, and Guidry—rate a special alert ring. Michael and Paco know they’re on the elite list. Guidry doesn’t have a clue.

I hoped Michael was calling to tell me he’d heard from Paco, but it was Guidry.

He said, “Are you at home?”

I admitted that I was.

“I’m just turning into your lane. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Damp and gasping, I wriggled into a thigh-length spaghetti-strapped tank and pulled my wet hair into a knot. With Pete Fountain playing in the background, I met Guidry at the door with bare feet and a bare face. His gray eyes tried for objective and neuter, but his irises gave
him away. Stand in front of a man with your nipples hard under knit, and his irises will expand like spreading inkblots. The other side of that, of course, was that my nipples had given me away first.

He said, “I wanted to talk to you about the girl.”

My mind had been so stuck on Maureen that it took a moment to realize he meant Jaz. I gestured toward the love seat and dropped into the matching chair. I folded my legs under me, realized I was exposing a lot of thigh, and tugged the tank toward my knees. Ella hopped into the chair with me and settled into the corner. I was glad to have her there. She made a little warm mound behind my hip.

Guidry’s eyes flicked toward the sound of Pete Fountain’s clarinet.

I said, “I saw Jaz this morning at Hetty’s house. She said she and her stepfather live nearby. She doesn’t know the house number but I described Reba Chandler’s house—you know, built on stilts with a tall stairway—and she said it looked like that.”

His eyes said
I’m listening,
but his head leaned a fraction of an inch toward the music, so I wasn’t sure if he was paying attention to me.

I said, “While we were talking, Jaz noticed the time and got scared. She said if her stepfather came home and found her gone, he’d kill her. I don’t think she meant it literally, just, you know, the way kids talk. Anyway, she rushed out and I followed her. Drove behind her and watched where she went. She ran into the nature preserve behind the Key Royale, so I knew the only place she could be going was there, to the hotel.”

Guidry’s eyes had grown sharper on me, so I was pretty sure he was listening.

I said, “I talked myself into the Royale and one of the employees showed me around the place. They have honeymoon cottages that back up to the nature preserve, and he said rabbits come from there all the time. The cottages are built on tall stilts exactly like Reba’s house, so I think Jaz must have described one of them to somebody, and that’s why those boys came in Reba’s house looking for her. She didn’t have a house number to give them because those cottages are all named instead of numbered.”

Guidry looked skeptical. “You think she lives in a honeymoon cottage at the Key Royale?”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I do. The guy who showed me around said those cottages rent for twenty thousand a weekend. Jaz’s stepfather doesn’t look like he could afford that, but I don’t think there’s any other explanation. I’m thinking he must work there as a security guard, but Don—that’s the guy at the Royale who showed me around—said the hotel doesn’t give living quarters to anybody except the managers. The employees I saw were all well dressed and sophisticated. Not like Jaz’s stepfather.”

He said, “Did you or Ms. Soames ever get a last name from the girl?”

“No, but I found out Jaz is short for Jasmine, pronounced Jas-
meen,
and she said that’s what her mother named her. She resents her stepfather calling her Rosemary. When she mentioned her mother, she got teary and stopped talking. Hetty doesn’t believe there’s a mother in the picture, and she may be right. Hetty took her shopping
last night and bought her some new clothes. She’s also feeding her.”

Pete Fountain began playing “Tin Roof Blues” and Guidry’s eyes changed in a way that made me positive he was as aware of the music as he was of me.

I suddenly felt like a complete dolt. Maybe it hadn’t been my nipples that had caused Guidry’s pupils to dilate, maybe it had been Pete Fountain. Guidry was from New Orleans. His name was Jean Pierre. He spoke French. He came from a wealthy family, and he was smart as all get-out. New Orleans French Quarter jazz might turn him on more than I did.

I said, “Guidry, are you French Creole or French Cajun? What is Cajun, anyway?”

I swear to God I hadn’t meant to say that. It wasn’t an appropriate time or an appropriate question. Besides, I truly didn’t
care
what kind of French he was. It was just that my mouth didn’t know I didn’t care.

Ella raised her head above my hip to look hard at me. She said, “Thrippp!” and curled up behind my back again. The music had apparently brought out her scatting tendencies. Either that, or she was embarrassed at my nosiness and didn’t want to be seen with me.

Guidry’s gray eyes examined my face for a moment, pretty much the way Ella had. When he answered he sounded a bit like a teacher whose patience is stretched.

“You’ve heard of the French and Indian War? When Canada fought France and Great Britain?”

I shook my head. I was sorry I’d asked. I didn’t want a history lesson, I just wanted to know if he was Creole or Cajun.

“France and Great Britain both claimed an area in Canada that had been settled by Frenchmen. Part of the area was Acadia. Great Britain won the war and ordered all the French settlers to leave. A lot of them went to Louisiana. That’s what the poem
Evangeline
is about. Since they’d come from Acadia, they called themselves
Acadian,
but the Americans in Louisiana pronounced it
Cajun
. French Creoles were already there when they came, and the Cajuns spoke a different French dialect. Still do. It’s about as hard to find a pure Cajun today as it is to find a pure Creole. Lots of intermarrying, lots of different bloodlines.”

“So you’re Cajun?”

He grinned. “When did you get into genealogy?”