Page 154 of Hello, Summer
She was riffling through a file of old black-and-white headshots. They were all of a younger Buddy, or Robert, or whatever his real name was, and they were a time capsule of the last half of the twentieth century,with a baby-faced Buddy sporting a Beatles bowl cut, to a seventies ponytail and sideburns, to an eighties mullet and porn-star ’stache.
“Hmm?” she said.
“She warned me about messing around with girls with questionable morals,” he added.
“My morals aren’t questionable,” she said. “They’re absolute. I don’t sleep with married men, or steal, or cheat. I only lie if it’s absolutely necessary.” She held up the photos. “These are all from different radio stations. He called himself Robby Breitweis or variations of that everywhere he went. The last headshot is from a radio station in Detroit.”
“Now we know his real name. Can we go?”
“Soon,” she promised.
“Can I ask what you’re looking for?”
“Answers.”
A minute later, she stood up, dusted off her pants, and grabbed the cat carrier. “Got it,” she said.
“What?”
She showed him a yellowing newspaper clipping from theDetroit News,dated 1998, which she carefully folded and placed in her pocket. “Grab the cat, and let’s get out of here,” she said.
“The cat?” Skelly looked officially appalled. “We’re not stealing the poor guy’s cat.”
“He’s dead. The cat’s hungry. It’s the least we can do.”
“Can’t you grab the cat?” he asked.
“I can, but what’s the problem?”
“I’m kind of cat-phobic,” he said. “It’s a Kelly thing. Going back generations, all the way back to County Armagh. We are not cat people.”
“For God’s sake,” she groused. “Get the bag of cat food, okay?”
Having finished its meal, the cat was curled up in the middle of the bed. She picked it up and placed it gently in the cat carrier.
“Now we go,” she told Skelly, walking out the back door with the carrier tucked under her arm.
She turned and taunted him over her shoulder. “Fraidycat.”
“Burglar.”
“Despoiler of young girls,” she countered.
The insults carried them all the way back to Skelly’s car.
“Seducer of middle-aged men,” he said, taking the carrier and placing it in the back seat.
“You can’t be middle-aged,” she told him.
“Why not?”
“Because that makes me middle-aged, and I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Fair enough. Strike that. You’re a cat burglar.”
“I’m good with that.”
“What’s our next stop?” he asked as they drove away from Oleander Trail.
