Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (5 page)

Walking the length of the paintings awaiting their crates, Cat kept expecting to see something more than simple white canvases with a single piece of lint stuck into the middle of each, but that’s all there was to see.

As she returned to her grandmother and Noshihara, Cat watched as Granny Grace reached into the pocket of her linen trousers, grabbed what lint was there, and offered it to the artist.

He accepted the gift with tears in his eyes. “You have a deep understanding of Minimalism, of the detritus of living, in a small way,” he said. “My English fails me. But I think you know.”

“I think I do,” said Granny Grace, nodding.
 

“I will title my next piece ‘The Gift of Grace,’ for you.” The artist bowed.

Cat had to hand it to her grandmother. She really knew how to connect with people. But as for shedding insight on the case, Noshihara had not much more to offer than, well, pocket lint. He knew Mick only by reputation and had a solid alibi for the night of the fire, which had been verified already by Miami PD, which had been by for a chat.

Cat felt the time was wasted, but she also knew from her criminal-justice classes that most of detective legwork wasn’t glamorous or even relevant. In the white elevator of Noshihara’s building, Granny Grace turned to Cat. “You know, you should really take more of an interest in our potential suspects.”

“Do you know how much his lint sells for?” Cat spat back. “Fifty thousand dollars! For the fuzz some hipster scraped out of his pockets, Gran! It’s ridiculous. The whole art world is a joke.”

Her grandmother raised an eyebrow at her. Sizing Cat up and down, she asked, “Let me see your lint.”

“What?”

“Let’s see it. Whatever you’ve got in your pocket. I want to know.”

The elevator chimed, and they stepped out into the white-and-turquoise building vestibule, To Cat, it felt like walking into an iPod. Granny Grace steered her over to a white leather bench perched on aluminum legs.
 

“There,” she said, pointing to the bench surface. “Take it out and set it there.”

“We have two more people to interview on South Beach,” Cat protested.

“Humor me.”

“Fine.” Cat reached into the right pocket of her slacks, not expecting to find much, as they were warm-weather slacks and not appropriate for Seattle most of the year. She’d hardly worn them before this trip.
 

She turned out her pocket, and a scraggly array of fibers fell into her hand. She set them on the bench.
 

Granny Grace knelt to look at them closely, taking her smartphone and flipping to a light-bulb app, which illuminated the pocket lint. “Let’s see…” Amidst gray fibers from Cat’s pants, there was what looked like the corner of a dollar bill. Cat had to admit it was visually sort of interesting, but not earth-shattering or surprising in any way.
 

“A bit of money. Big deal.”

Also caught up in the gray pants fibers was a crumb from the pastry they’d had that morning at the Cuban bakery on Calle Ocho. “Yeah, that’s a cool detail,” Cat conceded. “But art worth tens of thousands? Hardly.”

“The detritus of everyday life,” Granny Grace pronounced. “It tells the story of what we do with our hands, and what we value enough to keep with us.”

“Sure,” Cat said, smiling. “So apparently I value food and money. Can we go now?”

“What’s in your other pocket?”

“Really? We’re doing this?”

“Yes,” her grandmother said, motioning to the bench.

Cat emptied the contents of her other pocket.

Granny Grace bent forward like a forensics examiner. “Oh, look at this,” she said. “It’s paper…” She unrolled a piece of paper fiber that had obviously been through the wash. Faded but still readable were the words
Dave’s Drive-In
and a logo of a frosty soda mug with a happy smiling face superimposed on the white mug froth.
 

Cat took it from Granny Grace’s hands. Seeing it instantly brought her back to the day that Lee had shown up in Missouri, worried about her, foolishly playing the white knight come to rescue her. She had no choice but to take him with her on a trip to Johnson’s Shut-Ins, where she found a clue, etched into the rocks there, that was relevant to her case. They’d stopped at Dave’s Drive-In for lunch on the way, and the two of them had scrunched up the papers around their straws and then siphoned soda onto them, watching them grow like worms. She’d felt like a kid again, laughing with Lee.

Her eyes began to water.

“What is it, Cat? Is it something from your trip back to St. Louis?”

“Yes. I went there with Lee.”

Cat felt her grandmother’s arms around her as the tears came. “Oh, my poor dear. You just got socked with the power of art.”

Cat recovered, and, laying a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder, she said, “Gran. I need to ask you something. I hate to ask it, but I have to.” She cleared her throat. “Should we consider Uncle Mick a suspect?”

“Certainly not!”

“He doesn’t have an alibi….”

“Yes, I know.” Her grandmother looked away. “He’s hiding something about that night. But he didn’t set that fire. He lost most of his art, not to mention his best friend, in that fire. So get that out of your head.”

“It’s just…” Cat hesitated, swallowing hard.
 

“What, Cat? Say it.”

“I, um, dreamslipped with him.”

“On purpose?”

“Yes.”

Granny Grace silently regarded Cat.

“I couldn’t help it… I wanted to know… And I found something. He dreamed—”

“—Whatever he dreamed, it doesn’t matter.”

“But what if you’re in denial because he’s your brother? He dreamed that he set his studio on fire and killed Donnie.”

Her grandmother sat there for a long time, not saying anything. Then she picked up the remnant of the straw wrapper, which Cat had set in her own lap. “Like you keep dreaming that you shot Lee. That’s not the same as this, is it? Hard evidence. Always remember that, dreamslipper.”

Cat let the words sink in. Her grandmother was right. But then Cat realized something. “Hey, you’ve slipped into my Lee nightmares! What about the rules?”

“As you illustrated, Cat, rules are meant to be broken.” And with that, Granny Grace hoisted herself to her feet. “C’mon. We’ve got more artists to interview.”

Chapter Three

It was the worst conversation Mick Travers had ever had in his life.

Telling Donnie’s parents that their precious son was gone, their precious boy, no matter that he was a forty-three-year-old man who hadn’t yet made it as an artist—to them he would always be their precious boy sitting on the living room floor drawing like a boy genius—that was the worst conversation he’d ever had. It wasn’t even so much a conversation as a verbal bloodletting. Poor Mary Ellen Hines and Donald Hines, Sr., sitting in their suburban kitchen in suburban Ohio, getting this information over the phone.
 

Mick had let Donald Sr. cry in that silent, wracking way a man not given to shedding a tear finally does when something happens that is so painful, even he can’t hold it back. “No,” was the first thing the man said. Just “no.”
 

Mick waited while Donald told Mary Ellen.

“We should come down,” Donald finally said through choked sobs. “We should…see him.”

Mick thought of Donnie’s unrecognizable body. No parent should have to see that. He also knew they couldn’t afford several trips to Miami or funeral costs. Mick had heard from Donnie that his parents struggled financially after the airline company Donald had worked for all his life defaulted on his pension. The two survived solely on their small savings and Social Security. Donnie hoped to make it big as an artist so he could help them. They’d never been able to visit their son in Miami, not that they were the traveling type anyway. Unlike their free-spirited son, the two had barely ever left Ohio in their own lifetimes. Donnie had driven up to see them whenever he could, usually making the trip in a record two days in his aged Datsun.
 

“You don’t have to do that,” Mick told the man. “Really. It’s better…if you remember him the way he was.”

Seized with a galvanizing sense of guilt, Mick said, “Please, let me handle the wake. We’ll have it here. You can come down then. It won’t be long. Just a week or two.”

The two agreed, and Mick left them to their black hole of grief.

There was nothing for it, nothing at all, not even five bottles of Bushmill’s. When he came out of his stupor, he was still angry enough to carp at his well-meaning grandniece. He left the house just so he didn’t end up saying something he’d regret.
 

Donnie hadn’t deserved to go out like that.

It should have been me
, Mick thought, about fifty times an hour.

He drove to a Cuban bakery in a strip mall where he knew he could get some decent coffee. He would have preferred a walk or a bike ride, and maybe one of those would have cleared his head, but nobody really did that in Miami. Both activities were in fact dangerous; the head of the city’s transportation department had recently been mowed down by an SUV while biking to work. That was Miami for you.
 

He sat in a booth and ordered a cortadito, though he preferred the taste of the colada. But coladas were meant to be shared. He, Donnie, Rose, and some of the other residents of the Brickell Lofts often took communal coffee breaks that way. One of them would go out and get a colada in a big Styrofoam cup and pour the syrupy coffee into tiny plastic thimbles, one shot each. It was the perfect afternoon pick-me-up. They’d stand around in Mick’s studio shooting the shit, Rose complaining about her boyfriend (in Mick’s opinion he seemed to only come around when he needed something from Rose), and the three of them criticizing what they’d read in
Art in Our Time
that month.
 

Donnie was Mick’s studio assistant. His first. Donnie could handle the large canvases Mick painted, the twenty-by-twenty-foot behemoths his patrons and collectors loved to put in their big Miami manses. Mick could no longer stretch and manage them on his own. Everyone told Mick to work with the local colleges to get an intern to do it for free, but Mick didn’t believe in slave labor.
 

Donnie reminded Mick of himself twenty years prior: an artist with amazing work ethic and experience who hadn’t ever hit it big. So Mick hired him and paid him, even gave him health insurance through the Miami Artists’ Guild. And when Donnie’s escalating rent had forced him out of his apartment, and Mick found out Donnie had no savings whatsoever for “retirement,” whatever that was to an artist, or anyone anymore for that matter, Mick let Donnie move into Mick’s own tremendous studio space.

Mick’s cortadito arrived, but then he added a guava pastry. Cat’s sandwich had already burned up in his stomach, which hadn’t been fueled in forty-eight hours. The waitress was Cuban and either knew no English or refused to use it. So Mick was forced to tap into his Cuban-styled Spanish, still accented by his Midwestern roots despite his long stint in Miami. “Pour fahvor, dee gamey una pasteleez con hwava.”

While he waited, he swirled the sugary coffee in his cup and contemplated the target of his anger, and that was whatever piece of excrement coated in five layers of vomit and snot had come into his studio and set fire to his works-in-progress, killing his friend in the process. His sister was right; clearly the intended target had been Mick himself. Outside of Rose and some of the other live-work tenants, nobody knew Donnie had been sleeping in Mick’s studio. But before he’d let Donnie have it, Mick often slept there, when he worked late at night and didn’t want to drive back to his beach house in South Dade.

Mick had already been killed a million times by other artists’ jealousy. This had begun to happen even before he’d had any success.
 

As early as junior high, it had set him apart. In the small town where he and Priscilla, aka “Amazing Grace,” grew up, it had already started. In his junior high class, no less, which was made up of Mick and eleven other kids. They didn’t have locks on their lockers, which were stacked against one wall of their homeroom. In art class, Mick painted Johnny Cash performing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. His teacher, who was a Cash fan and encouraged Mick’s talent besides, held it up for the whole class to see. Later, when Mick went into his unlocked locker to take the picture home to show his parents, it was no longer there. Someone had stolen it.

In graduate school, his talent quickly became known, and one of his professors declared, “We have a real artist in our midst.” But that professor’s rival was a man who’d recently been granted tenure without the level of artistic success the others in the department enjoyed. He had made it his personal mission to destroy Mick not only as an artist but as a human being. Chester Canon, or “Chester the Molester,” as Mick liked to call him, screamed and threw things at Mick during crits, described him as a “no-talent hack” to anyone within hearing, and ridiculed his work with insatiable glee. Canon enlisted into his campaign several of Mick’s fellows, students who couldn’t find the perspective in a painting if it were diagramed into the canvas like a paint-by-numbers kit.

Canon got his comeuppance, though, when he refused to enter Mick’s painting in a national contest of MFA art students’ work. Several of the professors wanted to enter Mick’s
Pink Splash.
To create
Pink Splash
, Mick had taken an old advertisement for facial bleaching cream, decoupaged it onto a canvas, set the canvas on the floor, climbed to the top of a very tall ladder, and then dripped pink paint over it. Canon’s vote was trumped by the other faculty, and
Pink Splash
was submitted against his wishes. In competition with the work of hundreds of students throughout the country, it won.