Free The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas by Blaize Clement Page A

counter while I drank it.
    Tom tapped some keys on his computer to bring up a screen. “Cupcake Trillin’s birth name was Alvin. He’s from Thibodaux, Louisiana, which is the parish seat of Lafourche Parish. Has about fourteen thousand people and is about seventy-five miles southwest of New Orleans. Cupcake played for the Thibodaux High School Tigers and graduated in 2002. Got a sports scholarship to Tulane, played for the Green Wave, then signed with the Bucs right out of college.”
    “The Green Wave?”
    Tom looked up with pity. “That’s the Tulane football team.”
    “Oh.”
    I cleared my throat. “Uh, could you look up another name?”
    Tom’s round eyes became oval, as if he knew the other name was the one I really was interested in.
    “What name?”
    “Weiland.” I spelled it for him.
    “Got a first name?”
    I cleared my throat again. It seemed to have acquired a lump.
    “Briana.”
    “As in the name of the model they say was in Cupcake Trillin’s house when somebody was murdered? The one they’re looking for?”
    “She turned herself in. They’re not looking for her anymore.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “It would be in that town where Cupcake is from.”
    His fingers went into a holding pattern above the keys while he stared at me. “Are you saying they know each other?”
    I erased the idea with the palm of my hand. “I just heard something about Briana being from that same town. I don’t know if it’s true. Even if it is, that doesn’t mean they know each other.”
    Tom bent back to the computer keyboard but after a while shook his head.
    “If I search for ‘Briana,’ I get a ton of articles. She was on the cover of Vogue and Sports Illustrated . Hung out with all the other big-name models. Looks like she’s partied with every rock star in the world, too, not to mention some prime ministers and a few kings. But I don’t find any mention of the name Weiland.”
    He clicked on a link, read some text, and wrinkled his nose.
    “She was tight with a Serbian gangster who was arrested for shipping heroin in a crate of counterfeit Gucci watches. He skipped off before his trial and went to a beach resort. Apparently hid out in plain sight for a long time. Took a false name, threw big parties for people like Briana, generally lived it up. Somebody tipped off the police and got a big reward. The guy got a four-year prison sentence, but another inmate killed him the first week.”
    Tom looked at me over the tops of his glasses. He looked a bit like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. “This babe is a piece of work.”
    Briana hadn’t struck me as a woman who held many ethical values of any kind, so I wasn’t surprised that she had cozied up to a criminal. But my interests were a lot closer to home, like where Briana had grown up, and if she had known Cupcake when she was a kid.
    I said, “I guess Briana’s not from Louisiana, then.”
    “Wait, I’ll check Louisiana birth records.”
    He tapped some more keys, leaned to read the screen, tapped more, wiggled the mouse thing more, and then shook his head.
    I said, “So she lied.”
    “Not necessarily. Maybe her birth was recorded under a different name.”
    “But if she were from Cupcake’s town, wouldn’t the name come up in some way?”
    “Search engines only go to words that are registered somewhere or have been in the news or have a record of previous searches. If she got a reward for something like perfect school attendance in junior high, a search engine wouldn’t catch that.”
    Which meant I didn’t know more than I had before. Briana had said she’d lied about where she’d come from, but maybe she’d lied about lying. The only way I would find out for sure if she’d really known Cupcake when they were kids was to ask him. And since it really wasn’t any of my business, I’d have to decide if there was good reason to tell him what Briana had told me. Good reason other than satisfying my curiosity and giving Cupcake a chance