The TV voice said, “A bizarre case of fame stalking fame became even more bizarre today when an unidentified woman was found murdered in the home of Tampa Bay Buccaneer Cupcake Trillin. A spokesperson with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department said that the internationally famous model Briana had broken into Trillin’s Sarasota home before the murder occurred. Briana, who uses only the one name, has not been formally charged with homicide, but she is being held without bail pending a hearing. Trillin, who was in Italy when the murder occurred, is on his way home.”
I said, “I guess the department isn’t telling Briana’s real name.”
The three cats who were patiently waiting for me to bring up their favorite TV show turned their wide eyes at me, giving me that phony innocent look that cats do when all the time they’re wiser than anybody.
Embarrassed, I zipped through the rest of the channels until I found the one with flying birds.
I left the cats raptly watching their TV screen. As I headed home, I realized that I had become so caught up in shock that I hadn’t given much thought to the identity of the woman who’d been murdered. I’d given even less thought to the identity of the mystery person Briana claimed had been the killer.
I needed to get my priorities straight. By her own admission, Briana was a liar and a thief. If Cupcake said he didn’t know Briana, then he didn’t know her. Briana was not only a mentally ill woman who broke into people’s houses and hung out with Serbian heroin dealers, she was a murderer. Furthermore, it was silly of me to feel sad about Briana. If I should be sad about anybody, it was the dead woman, not a spoiled, headline-seeking, lying killer.
I told myself that all the way home, and I almost convinced myself. But the question still buzzed in my head: Why had Briana stalked Cupcake? It couldn’t have been simply because he was a famous person. She was even more famous than he, so fame couldn’t have been the allure. She didn’t seem like a big sports fan, either.
For the first time, I wondered if it had been Jancey who was being stalked, not Cupcake. Jancey was a beautiful, poised woman who didn’t have to rely on paparazzi to assure her she was admired. Any woman would envy Jancey, especially a woman like Briana who’d had to fight for everything she had. Perhaps Briana had stalked the Trillins not because she coveted Cupcake but because she envied Jancey’s life. Perhaps she had thought the murdered woman was Jancey, and in some hallucinatory madness had killed her so she could take her place.
As I waited for the light at Stickney Point, a motorcycle gang on pimped up Gold Wings roared over the drawbridge. The lead bike was a two-seater with an elderly couple wearing matching black leather jackets, helmets, and goggles. A Scottish terrier rode proudly in a carrier on the back. The terrier wore a helmet, jacket, and goggles like his humans. The group turned onto Midnight Pass Road and made a fast turn into the parking lot of Cap’n Curt’s Crab and Oyster Bar.
Seeing those Gold Wing geezers having fun reminded me that the secret to happiness was to mind my own business. It was not my responsibility to answer any of the questions about Briana or the woman killed in the Trillins’ house. I was a pet sitter coming home after a trying day, not a sociologist or an investigative reporter. Furthermore, I was a hungry pet sitter without a brother to feed her. Michael wouldn’t be home from his firefighting shift until eight the next morning, so there wouldn’t be a meal laid out waiting for me.
Michael is the family cook and the firehouse cook. Since he was four and I was two and our mother left us alone to go off on a weekend binge, he has fed me. When he was four, he fed me peanut butter and jelly. Now that he’s thirty-four, he serves more sophisticated fare, but it’s always with the firm conviction that it’s his duty to make good food for his little sister—and for Paco and his fellow firefighters and anybody else who might want to eat.
When I rounded the last curve in the lane to my apartment and saw Paco’s truck parked in its carport slot, I perked up. When I saw Paco’s Harley also in the carport, I perked up even more. Paco is as helpless as I am when he’s hungry, and unless he had a case to work that night, I could rely on him to join me for a restaurant meal.
Paco is Greek American, but his coloring makes it easy for him to pass as Middle Eastern or Latin American or anything in between. After my brother, he’s my best friend in all the world. He’s so smart that he’s sometimes a little bit scary, plus he’s what women mean when they say “tall, dark, and handsome.” Women tend to get lustful around him, but he and Michael have been a couple for thirteen years and neither of them has any intention of ever not being together.
He and Ella were on the deck waiting for the sunset, Paco stretched in an Adirondack chair my grandfather built decades ago, Ella sitting on his chest. Paco’s eyes had dark shadows under them, and his skin had the dried look of weariness. He wore rumpled shorts and a loose T-shirt, his bare feet cool on the redwood floor. Ella wore her usual red, white, and black blocks of color. Paco gave me a lazy grin of welcome, and Ella flicked the tip of her tail. I took another wooden chair and sighed with relief at being home.
With the easy intimacy of people who don’t need to talk, Paco and I looked toward the ball of fire sliding down the curve of blue sky. A few wisps of white cloud drifted across its face, and an occasional brave bird made a V as it flew by, but otherwise the sun held center stage.
There’s something almost supernatural about a sunset over the Gulf, something that makes the sun seem to swell and pulsate with growing intensity, sending out a higher energy to meet the energy of beings who turn to it as a source of life. A hush falls over the edge of the sea as the sun draws closer to it. Birds cease their crying, humans stop their chatter, even the surf hitting the sand seems to whisper.
Entranced, we sat in goldenrod light as the sun flirted with the sea, now languorous, sultry, heavy with desire, then bold and brassy with coming-at-you demand. A breathless moment like the instant between a shutter clicking and the image being recorded forever, and the rim of the sun touched the sea. Bold now, sun and sea reached for each other and the sun sank into the sea’s depths, leaving a wake of gilded aurora.
A shimmering golden highway stretching to the shore faded into the sea, and the sky’s last wisps of turquoise and violet dimmed and disappeared. The day was over. Evening had begun.
9
I heaved a heavy sigh and looked morosely at Paco. He looked as if his day had been as trying as mine.
I said, “What are you doing for dinner?”
He grinned. “Guess what I found in the refrigerator.”
“If it wasn’t Michael to cook for us, I don’t care.”
“Almost as good. He left dinner.”
I sat up with new hope. “You’re kidding.”
“I swear to God. He left a note.”
We both got up and surged through the kitchen door as if we were ancient sailors hearing the call of exotic sirens. The kitchen is the only room in the house that Michael and Paco modernized when they moved in. They replaced my grandmother’s four-burner range with a shiny six-burner job with a grill down its middle. A counter separates the range from a column formed by three ovens set into the wall, and there are Sub-Zero things all over the place to keep all the stuff Michael stocks. If you’re not paying attention in Michael’s kitchen, you’re liable to stick your hand in a drawer intending to grab a napkin and instead come up with a handful of lettuce leaves.
A butcher-block island with a salad sink at the far end runs down the center of the kitchen and serves as both dining table and workstation. Paco picked up a note from the island and waved it at me, then folded his arms and grinned while I read it: