Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (7 page)

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 flushed 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.”

“Any information you gather, I’d like to know about it,” said Alvarez.

“Sure,” Cat agreed. “But we need copies of the evidence reports. And the autopsy and lab reports. Your department hasn’t been cooperative.”

“You’ll get them,” said Alvarez, rising to leave. “But as soon as your grandmother returns, I want to know what you’ve got.”

Cat stuck out her hand. “Deal.”
 

They shook on it.

“Now,” Mick broke in. “Can a man get a little quiet in his grief? I’ve got some serious drinking to do.”

They left him alone.