Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

I gave him the tips of my fingers to shake, and he enfolded them in a hot meaty hand. “I’m Dr. Win. I understand there’s some kind of problem next door.”

I flinched. I knew that voice, and I knew that name. Carl Winnick was a radio psychologist beloved by people who felt they’d been cheated out of their deserved special place by single mothers, minorities, homosexuals, and feminists. He daily filled the airwaves with ranting diatribes about how public schools were teaching sex perversion to eight-year-olds, how white men were losing their jobs to illegal immigrants, and how working women were causing children to become drug addicts. He was best known for fighting to keep alive an idiotic Florida law that required unmarried mothers giving up their babies for adoption to run newspaper ads giving their names and the dates and places where they’d had sexual intercourse. Three years before, he had added me to the list of people he considered a threat to his definition of a family.

He had left the door open, and Olga Winnick stepped forward to grip its edge, as if she had to hold on to something to keep from falling. Her face was wet with tears, and her mouth was open in a rictus of despair.

I said, “I just came to pick up the cat.”

He gave a false hearty laugh. “Oh, yes! The cat! Mustn’t forget the cat!”

He rushed past me and got in the Mercedes and started the engine. For some reason, I imagined his fingers shaking when he turned the key. As he backed out of the driveway, he gave me a side-to-side wave like a beauty queen in a parade.

Mrs. Winnick was still hanging on to the edge of the door, mournfully watching her husband’s departure the way a loyal dog watches her master drive away.

There was no use pretending I hadn’t caught her crying her eyes out. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is obviously a bad time to come.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “We had an argument. Just a heated debate, really.”

From the raw wound I’d seen on his hand, I thought it might have been more than a heated debate. I had been on enough domestic-disturbance calls as a deputy to know that husbands and wives who seem the epitome of decorum may go at each other like barroom brawlers.

As I got closer to her, I got a whiff of an odor on her breath that I remembered from living with my mother, the scent of alcohol overlaid with mouthwash. Even this early in the morning, Olga Winnick had been fortifying her courage with booze.

Inanely, I said, “These things happen.”

I made a beeline to the back sliders where the heavy drapes were still drawn. As soon as I opened the slider, Ghost came running toward me making little chirping noises of relief. I squatted on my heels to stroke him, then lifted him into the cardboard case and closed it. He whined and poked a paw through one of the air holes, but it couldn’t be helped. I retrieved the food bowl and checked the lanai floor for errant Tender Vittles crumbs. There were none. There was also no water bowl.

With the carrying case in both hands, I went through the living room while Mrs. Winnick tracked along behind me.

“It’s this place,” she said. “Nothing but cheap, predatory women living here, and half of them are Jews.”

For a moment there, I had been feeling sorry for her, but the woman was as pompous and bigoted as her husband. It was a good thing they had found each other, instead of contaminating two marriages.

With my back teeth touching, I said, “Thank you so much for keeping Ghost,” and bolted.

She stood in the doorway and glared at me all the way back to my Bronco. I guess she thought I was one of the predatory women after her husband.

I put the cat-carrying case in the front seat and talked to Ghost as we drove north on Midnight Pass Road. He had got an arm through an air hole all the way up to his armpit and was waving it frantically while he made piteous mewing noises to alert people that he was being catnapped.

From the traffic light where Midnight Pass intersects with Stickney Point from the mainland, beachside condos and private clubs stand shoulder-to-shoulder behind hibiscus hedges and palm trees. They all have salty names like Midnight Cove, Crystal Sands, Siesta Dunes, Island House, Sea Club. My personal favorite is Our House at the Beach. If you spend your vacation there, you can truthfully tell your friends, “We’re going down to Our House at the Beach.”

At Beach Road, I turned left and slowed down so I wouldn’t hit any of the half-naked vacationers crossing the street to get to Crescent Beach. It’s amazing how many normally sensible women come to the key, deck themselves out in skimpy bikinis, tie a beach towel around their hips, and step out into oncoming traffic with bemused smiles on their lips. I think it’s the seaside’s negative ions that get to them.