Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) Read online

  Grace felt her temperature rising and worked to control her response. “And how did he do that?”

  Candace laughed haughtily. “I can see Mick’s his usual uncommunicative self. He hasn’t told you a damn thing, has he? Listen, you want something to drink? It’s a long story, and you’ve had a long drive.”

  As much as Grace wanted this woman to spill whatever sordid story she had roiling around inside her, the thought of liquor on her empty stomach made her blanche.

  “I’ll do you one better,” Grace said. “I’ll take you to dinner. Earn your story that way.”

  Candace was delighted. She popped to her feet. “Let’s go to the Orange Spot. It just opened up. They have a vintage Wurlitzer. You’ll love it.”

  The Orange Spot indeed featured a vintage Wurlitzer in its dining room, along with a collection of other old-fashioned musical machines, including a group of mechanized monkey musicians. Grace polished off her halibut, which had been cooked in a brown paper bag with shallots and hazelnuts, and let Candace do the talking.

  The woman’s list of grievances against Mick was long. According to Candace, it was she, and not Mick, who first had the idea for Mick’s now legendary Sea Series, inspired by the turquoise waters in the Florida Keys. Grace let Candace prattle on about this even though it was fairly obvious that Mick had in fact been down in Key Largo searching for inspiration. He’d clearly found it, but he’d also picked up this leg biter and brought her home as well.

  “I’m also the one who introduced Mick to the New York art scene,” Candace informed Grace, emphasizing the point by shoving an olive from her martini into her purple-lipstick-ringed mouth.

  “Come again?” Grace countered. “Mick met the gallery owner Peter Swanson at an opening, and the man loved his work. Everyone knows that story.”

  “I introduced him to Peter! You know how shy Mick can be. A real introvert, that one. He wouldn’t have approached Peter on his own!”

  The woman did have a point, but the facts flew in the face of things. “But Mick had already established himself in New York well before you say the two of you met.”

  “I did it!” Candace insisted. “Mick owes his success to me.”

  Grace switched gears, sensing an alcohol-fueled opportunity. “That must make you really angry, Candace,” she said. “If someone I cared about used me like that, I’d want to kill him.”

  Candace downshifted her anger. “But I didn’t torch his studio, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “Oh, a little fire…happens all the time!” Grace said. “Maybe you only wanted to destroy his art. Maybe you didn’t think anyone would be there. How would you know that? You haven’t seen Mick in years!”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him….”

  “You have?”

  “He didn’t even recognize me! At his showing in West Palm Beach. I drove over there to get a look at those big monstrosities he’s making now. And there he was. Bastard didn’t even recognize me.”

  “Well, did you talk to him?”

  “No. He didn’t recognize me….”

  Candace sort of shut down after that. She quit talking and eating, though she continued to drink. Grace paid the exorbitant bill and helped the woman home. As she tucked her into a living-room chair, Grace turned around and said, “Candace, you live in paradise. A lot of people would be jealous of you, but you waste your energy being jealous of my brother. Why don’t you let that go? Enjoy life. Collect a few seashells.”

  Grace thought she heard Candace call her a bitch once she shut the door.

  Grace spent the night in a simple but clean motel, thinking it best to drive fresh in the morning. She’d prefer a nice B&B on the beach, but after the splurge on dinner with Candace, she needed to reel in the spending.

  The next morning she stopped into one of the galleries in Sanibel and found a whole section of paintings signed Candy Port. She perused them with a cold eye, looking for Mick’s influence and not finding it. The woman’s work showed marginal skill, but it had a certain “outsider art” appeal, as she roughed in her subjects’ eyes, making them seem more childlike and lost than they would be had she stuck to the representational. There was certainly something there, that spark of intuition, perhaps, a way of seeing the world. But it was held back; something kept it restrained even here on the canvas. The woman’s own limitations were omnipresent.

  Still, Grace found herself especially captivated by the images of children and animals, which lost the sinister feel of the other depictions and seemed to reveal the artist’s lingering sense of wonder. Grace remembered Candace had a cage of parakeets just beyond the front room of her house, and of course there was that cat, who was clearly her closest friend. But the children? She had not seemed to be a woman who would admit children into her life. But in a painting that gave her pause, there were two imps staring over a fence that Grace recognized as the one framing the artist’s yard. The kids must be her neighbors, Grace surmised.

  The painting was priced at three hundred and fifty dollars. The frame alone was worth that, as it was vintage wood and customized to echo the fence in the painting. It set the painting off nicely. Obeying some instinct she couldn’t even name if she tried, Grace bought the painting.

  On her way back to Miami, she decided that Candace was indeed capable of having set that fire, even if her intention had been to destroy the art instead of kill Mick.

  Chapter Five

  Suspect number two was right up the coast in Fort Lauderdale, so Cat didn’t have to travel far to interview him. This was a man Mick referred to as “Chester the Molester,” but Cat planned to address him as “Dr. Canon.”

  His wife answered the door. She was a diminutive woman with an old-fashioned permanent, her natural gray color and lack of cosmetic surgery—unlike many a Miami oldster—revealing her age to be upwards of eighty. On her feet were solid orthopedic shoes.

  “You’re here to see the Professor?” She looked Cat up and down as if she distrusted her on the basis of looks or maybe age alone. “He’s in his studio.” She left the door open for Cat and began walking down a long hallway that opened to an indoor atrium filled with plants and canvas-stacked easels.

  Dr. Canon was sitting on a stool, legs akimbo, staring at a half-finished canvas, a lit cigarette dangling from one hand. He did not respond to the sound of their footsteps on the tiled floor.

  “Chester, darling,” his wife said, raising her voice, suggesting he was hard of hearing. “That lady detective is here to see you. The one who called.”

  At that, Dr. Canon turned and spied Cat over the top of thick reading glasses. What little hair he had left on his head had been combed back neatly with some sort of hair cream. There was a pack of cigarettes in his left shirt pocket. He was wearing a tropical cabana shirt and white loafers with trouser shorts. He looked like a very old-school Florida cracker. Cat thought about the mug in her Uncle Mick’s dream, the one Rose dropped.

  “A lady detective, eh? Well, why don’t you sit down.” He motioned to a hardback chair across from his canvas.

  “I’ll bring you some sweet tea,” said his wife.

  “That’d be lovely, Louise,” said Chester, with a touch of real feeling that surprised Cat. This was the man her great-uncle characterized as “genuine only in his capacity for evil.”

  “I’m here to talk to you about Mick Travers,” Cat prompted.

  That drew a blank look, so she continued. “You had it in for him when he was a student in the MFA program at Columbia.”

  “Who’s that, you say? Travers…” He put a finger to the side of his head as if mentally thumbing through a Rolodex of names. Cat wasn’t sure she bought the act.

  “You must forgive me,” said Dr. Canon with a broad, apologetic smile. “I’m a professor emeritus now. I actively taught in the program at Columbia for more than forty years. So I’ve had thousands of students come through my studio classes in that time. The names alone don’t register.”

  Cat’s face flushe
d with frustration. He certainly wasn’t going to make this easy for her, and she wondered if he were in fact putting on a show.

  “Mick Travers,” Cat said. “He’s quite well-known in the art world now; his work has been featured in Art in Our Time and elsewhere. He was honored at Art Basel. He was your student in the mid-Seventies, back when he was in his twenties. You, ah, didn’t think he had any talent.”

  Dr. Canon chuckled, shaking his head. “You just described a good twenty percent of the crowds of students I’ve seen over the years. Columbia’s a top program, as I’m sure you’ve discovered in your research.” He set his cigarette in a glass ashtray and picked up the brush that was teetering on the edge of his easel. As if bored by Cat’s line of questioning, he began to dab at the painting, bits of maroon paint over what resembled a muddy field.

  Cat cleared her throat. “Well, maybe you’ll remember this: You opposed him for the National Emerging Artist award, but one of your rivals in the department submitted his work anyway. And Mick Travers won. Proving you wrong.”

  He slowly set the brush back down on the edge of the easel, picked up a towel, and used it to wipe paint off his hands. “Oh, all right… Now I think I remember that guy. Boy, that takes me back… I must have been in my forties then, not even tenured yet…. Sure. Some painting with pink splashed over it, and they called the kid a genius! What passes for genius in the art world is enough to make you puke most of the time.”

  “But why single him out?”

  “Well, he must have had some talent, obviously,” Dr. Canon said. “He can thank me for making him tougher. After me, he was ready to handle whatever came next. From what you say, he’s done well. So I’ll take my Teacher of the Year award now.”

  Cat let out a breath. She couldn’t believe this guy was actually claiming to have tortured her uncle for his own good.

  “So you’ve held no grudge against Mr. Travers?”

  He chuckled again. “Grudge? Lady, I barely remember the guy.”

  Louise came in with glasses of sweet tea on a tray for them both. She set it down on the table next to Dr. Canon and disappeared again, her orthopedics issuing a soft shuffle across the tiled floor.

  “Why do you ask, anyway?” He handed her one of the glasses of tea. It was terrifically over-sweetened, and she could feel the sugar as if it had been injected directly into her veins.

  “Someone burned down Mick Travers’s studio,” she said. “And his assistant died in the fire.”

  Dr. Canon’s face fell. “Geez, that’s some rough stuff. And it wasn’t an accident?”

  “It looks like arson.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Cat was quiet a moment, sipping her tea.

  “Boy, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

  Cat reached into her coat pocket and fished out her business card. Amazing Grace Private Detective Agency, it read, and included the number for her cell phone. “If you think of anyone who might have wanted to see Mick Travers dead, please don’t hesitate to call. This could be anyone—a fellow grad student, perhaps.”

  “‘Amazing Grace,’ eh?” he replied. “I wouldn’t have figured you for a bible thumper.”

  Cat set her unfinished tea back on the tray and left him to his painting. She marked Dr. Canon as a “possible suspect” in her notes.

  >>>

  Suspects three, four, and five lived in New York, so Cat and Granny Grace planned a trip together to knock on those doors in person.

  By the time she returned from Fort Lauderdale, Cat was exhausted and ready for a dip in the pool behind Ernesto’s place, but there in the driveway was a cop car. Sergeant Alvarez, Cat guessed. She’d wondered how long it would take for her to circle back around in their direction. So far they’d been denied access to the evidence, autopsy, and lab reports, and Cat wasn’t happy about that. Alvarez had been too busy to talk with them but seemed to be casting a tight net around Mick. Every time Cat or Granny Grace talked to someone in Miami who knew him, Alvarez had already been there to question the person. But she hadn’t spoken to any of the suspects on the list that Mick had drawn up.

  Cat opened the front door to find Alvarez, Speck, and Santiago. They were talking with a frowning Mick.

  “Oh, good,” said Alvarez. “The grandniece is here, too.” She looked back at Mick. “If your sister shows up, I can talk to you all at once.”

  “She’s out of town,” Cat informed her.

  “She wasn’t supposed to leave Miami,” complained Alvarez. “Make a note of this,” she instructed Santiago.

  “She’ll be back tomorrow,” Cat explained. “She’s over on Sanibel Island, interviewing someone who might have wanted to kill Mick.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Someone you would have interviewed already if you weren’t so focused on my great-uncle.”

  Alvarez raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure Mick’s the target? Has anyone tried anything in the past few days?”

  Both Mick and Cat were silent. Cat noted that Alvarez was now addressing Mick by his first name. So maybe she was beginning to see him as more than a suspect.

  Alvarez tapped a pen against her clipboard. “We’ve been watching your beach house, Mick. Twenty-four-seven since the fire. Nothing’s going on. It’s quiet as a church out there. So maybe nobody’s after you.”

  Mick looked up at her, surprised. Cat was, too, that they’d committed police resources to watching Mick’s beach house. But maybe they were doing it to keep an eye on Mick as well. They’d already searched his place top to bottom for evidence linking him to the arson.

  “So I gotta figure, we’ve got a few choices here,” Alvarez went on. “One, the killer’s biding his time, of course. Laying low till the dust settles. Then he goes after you again, Mick.”

  “That’s a likely scenario,” Cat interjected.

  “Great,” said Mick. “So I’m looking over my shoulder the rest of my life.”

  “Two,” Alvarez continued, “you’re the killer, Mick, and your move out of the beach house was a ploy to throw us off.”

  “Why would I want to kill Donnie?”

  Alvarez leaned in toward Mick. “Because he was better than you?”

  Mick didn’t even flinch. “He might have been. Or just different. Art is not a contest. I don’t know why everyone thinks it is. But there’s room for everyone. Donnie had a different expression than I did. I liked having him around. We inspired each other.”

  Alvarez leaned in closer to Mick. “It didn’t burn you up inside to see his paintings in your studio? To see what he was doing? To see that he was beginning to attract attention?”

  Mick stared at her. “I liked having him there.”

  “But you knew he’d been contacted by Gallery 120. The one gallery in town that never showed your work.”

  “He was? Well, good for him.”

  “Why didn’t that gallery ever show your work?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mick, running his hand through his red-and-gray hair. “They didn’t like it, I suppose.”

  “You didn’t know Donnie’d been approached by them?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “That he was thinking of leaving your employ? Going out on his own as an artist?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why do you think he didn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t know…” Mick was quiet. Then he clapped his hands together. “Good deal, Donnie. You did it. I just wish you’d lived to see it—” Mick choked up. “Are we done here?”

  “Far from it,” Alvarez said.

  Cat butted in. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting him?”

  “I can,” said Alvarez. “But you’re a detective, aren’t you? People put on acts all the time.”

  Cat gestured at Mick, who’d got up and was pouring himself a drink. His eyes were watery even though up till now he’d been sober. “Sure, he’s acting.”

  Alvarez sat down. “He doesn’t have an alibi,” she said softly, so only Cat
could hear. “How well do you know him, anyway? You and your grandmother, his sister. You live in Seattle. That’s about as far as you can get from here without leaving the continental United States. That doesn’t exactly say ‘family ties.’”

  Cat didn’t know how to respond. She flashed on the dream of Mick’s she’d slipped into, how he poured gasoline over Donnie and lit the match. But then she remembered her grandmother’s words, which echoed something Cat’s father had always said, too. A dream isn’t evidence.

  “He’s innocent,” she said to Alvarez.

  “If you’re right, and Mick didn’t kill Donnie, then that brings us to another possibility.”

  Speck, who looked like a fresh recruit with his baby face and new buzz cut, spoke up. “The victim was the intended target.”

  “That’s right. We’re investigating Don Hines’s past, trying to find out if anyone bore a grudge against him.”

  Cat groaned inwardly. She’d actually brought up this point to Granny Grace, who clung to her hunch that it was about her brother. Cat wondered if her grandmother couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

  “As far as I know, he didn’t have a single enemy,” said Mick, slumping back down in his chair. The ice in his drink tinkled.

  “If someone wanted Hines dead, we’ll find him,” said Alvarez.

  “Unless we find him first,” said Cat.

  “You people,” said Mick. “Why is life always a contest?”

  Santiago, whom Cat thought was kind of cute in an abstract way, cleared his throat. “You’re forgetting the other possibility.”

  Cat looked him in the eyes, wondering if he was thinking what she was thinking.

  “What’s that?” Alvarez quizzed him, as if she already knew the answer.

  “Neither victim was the intended target,” Cat put in.

  “That’s right,” said Santiago. “The paintings were.”

  “This would make what my grandmother and I are doing even more valuable.”

  “And what’s that?” Alvarez asked, her tone dubious.

  “We’re interviewing people who had a grudge against Mick. Maybe one of them wanted to destroy his work. That’s a fairly stepped-up brand of jealousy there, but maybe they didn’t bank on Donnie being in the studio. It does have the mark of an amateur.”