Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

The vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl who had been tricked into giving her baby to Harrison Frazier’s sister had grown up to be a woman who extorted money from a lot of men for the sheer pleasure of it. The money the Fraziers had given her had been more than enough for her and Cora to have a good life. It had been enough to live well in the present and also invest for the future. But it hadn’t been enough to fill the need Marilee had nurtured, the need to have control over men and to make them pay. And she had been aided and abetted by her friend Shuga, the poor girl who wouldn’t have had enough to eat if Marilee’s grandmother hadn’t fed her. I wondered if all the money they’d taken had ever made up for what they thought they’d missed out on.

Now I knew what Shuga had come to get, and why she had been so frightened. If Marilee had the only copy of the photographs, Shuga’s blackmail income was now up shit creek. From what Cora had said, Marilee had always been the cleverer of the two, the one who had led the way. It made sense that she would have controlled not only the money but the photographs. I wondered if Marilee and Shuga had had a dispute that made Marilee change her locks to keep Shuga out. If Marilee had decided to cut Shuga out of her share of the blackmail income, Shuga might have come for the photographs, gotten into a fight with Marilee, and killed her. But where did Harrison Frazier fit into that scenario? Had he simply stumbled into a situation by accident and been killed because he knew who killed Marilee?

I spilled out another photograph and my heart jumped crazily. I should have known he would be included, but I was still shocked. It was Carl Winnick, apparently photographed so recently that there were no payments listed yet.

There were still some unopened envelopes, but I had a question that interested me more than seeing the rest of them. Who had been taking the pictures? Who was the third party to this blackmail ring? I shuffled through another collection, this time searching for clues to the place where they’d been taken. In every photo, the camera had been positioned so nothing was visible inside the frame except the sheets on the mattress, the two women, and the victim. Such consistency suggested a tripod holding the camera, but surely none of these wealthy men would have cavorted in front of a camera he could see.

I left the photos on the bar and went down the hall to Marilee’s bedroom, flipping lights on as I went. It was past midnight now, and I should have been in bed two hours ago, but I was wide-awake and curious. When I flipped the switch in Marilee’s bedroom, the bedside lamp on the far side of the bed lighted up, and Ghost lifted his sleepy head from his spot in the middle of the bed and gave me an annoyed look.

The armoire faced the foot of the bed, and I supposed they could have left the doors ajar and positioned a camera on one of its shelves. I opened both doors and looked for a spot where a camera might have been placed, but the shelves were filled with a large-screen TV, a VCR, a DVD and a CD player, not to mention speakers, along with filed videos and CDs neatly organized according to musical category and artist. Somehow, the idea of Marilee disturbing the neat order of her entertainment center for a smut-capturing camera didn’t fit. And even if she’d been willing to lower her neatness standards to accommodate her lack of moral standards, it would have been too risky. Even with all their blood pooled in their penises, the men would have noticed the open doors to the armoire and gotten suspicious.

I looked toward the top of the armoire. It was a perfect place to hide a camera, using one of the remote controls in Marilee’s night table to turn it on. I dragged a high-backed Spanish Colonial armchair from the corner of the room over to the armoire and climbed on it. From that height, I could see a camera mounted behind a perfectly round lens-size hole drilled in the carved cornice. I felt a tug of reluctant admiration for the way Marilee had gone about the business of blackmail. She had been resourceful, efficient, and organized, all marks of the true professional.

Ghost suddenly sat upright with his ears and whiskers pointed toward the door. At the same moment, I smelled the reek of alcohol behind me and whirled to see Olga Winnick in the doorway, her eyes blood-red with fury and despair, her mouth a rectangular gash of malicious rage. She held a butcher knife in her raised hand, with an unmistakable intention to kill me with it.

Suddenly, it seemed inevitable that she was the one. I said, “I should have known it was you.”

She swallowed with a convulsive movement of her neck, which made me think of pythons swallowing mice. “I will do anything to protect my family. Anything!”

“Let me guess. You thought Marilee Doerring was after your husband, so you killed her.”

“Don’t be stupid! I would not dirty my hands on that woman.”