Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

It was a view of a large naked man laid out on a messy bed. His arms were spread across the rumpled sheet and his hairy legs were open. Incongruously, he wore black dress socks. A black-headed woman lay prone between his legs with her face shoved into his crotch. A blond woman hovered above him with her breasts dangling above his head, and his lips had a firm hold on one of her nipples. Neither woman’s face was clear, both being shrouded by long hair, but the man’s face was clearly visible. He could not have looked any sillier.

All the other photographs were of the same man, and some of the poses made the first one seem innocent. The man had been caught in every conceivable obscene position with two hookers. He had not only made a complete and total fool of himself, he had exposed himself to eighteen kinds of blackmail, loss of respect, ridicule, and perhaps loss of his loved ones. Each photograph bore the date and time, as if the photographer wanted them to have every possible stamp of validity. A ruled sheet of paper was folded with the photographs. In her rounded handwriting, Marilee had recorded a column of dates, with numbers beside each date. The dates went back over five years, regular as a calendar every month. The amounts were regular, too. Five thousand, five thousand, five thousand. There were no dollar signs, but I assumed the numbers referred to money received.

I put the photos back in the envelope and washed my hands at the sink. Before I went back to the other envelopes, I drank a glass of water. Revulsion really dries up the mouth. The next envelope held almost identical photos, but the man was different. This one was a squat, round man with a receding hairline. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. The two women were the same blonde and brunette, and the man’s look of mindless bliss was also the same. Another ruled sheet of paper with a column of dates and figures, but this one had started only two years ago. The numbers were greater, though. Eight thousand every month. Next to the dates and amounts, Marilee had noted where the money had gone, always distributed in amounts of one or two thousand dollars to several mutual funds. Marilee had apparently believed in diversity. Cora had been right, Marilee had been good with numbers. Big numbers. She had also had a savvy sense of how to invest small amounts of cash without attracting attention.

I had to wash my hands again before I opened the other envelopes. It wasn’t that I found the graphic sexual images so shocking, it was the reason for the photographs being taken that made me feel like I’d been dipped in a vat of congealed chicken fat. The reason was obviously blackmail. And while the two women were always careful to keep their faces hidden from the camera, I was almost positive they were Marilee and Shuga. At least one mystery was solved. Now I knew how two women without any marketable skills could make an indecent amount of money. Literally.

I went through the other envelopes with increasing horror, revulsion, and reluctant admiration.

The photographs of Dr. Gerald Coffey were in the fourth envelope, and they confirmed my first mental image of his hairy back. The pose that exposed it was a special one, involving the insertion of a large dildo into his equally hairy backside while he knelt on all fours and apparently howled like a wolf. It was not the sort of pose that would inspire confidence and trust in heart-surgery patients. Which was no doubt why the column listing his payments culminated in the number one, followed by six zeros. The million he had paid Marilee before she jilted him at the altar had been hush money, not the love money he claimed. Wondering briefly why she had ever considered marrying him in the first place, I moved on to the other envelopes.

Thirty-Three

The photographs seemed almost commonplace now, all of naked men made hopelessly vulnerable by lust and stupidity. Some of the faces looked faintly familiar, and I assumed they were in the public eye in one way or another. Each of them had been paying Marilee between five and ten thousand dollars a month for years. Even splitting the take with Shuga, she would have been raking in a considerable amount of money. With the quarter million she got every year from Harrison Frazier’s family, she surely had never worried about paying the rent.