Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery (9 page)

After awhile she couldn’t postpone getting to
work. She rummaged in the closet for her painting jeans, the ones
that had already met with the touch of a brush, and an old shirt.
Her hair was too short to gather into a ponytail but she decided a
bandana over it might help keep it out of her face during the job.
She stashed her watch and the favorite opal ring that she usually
wore into her new jewelry box. Again, she swore that the stones on
it glowed more brightly after she’d touched the box.

A quick stop at the hardware store for two
gallons of paint and she was headed out to the Martinez place. The
red bedroom felt less ominous this time, with sun shining in the
window and all the weird artifacts gone. In no time at all, she’d
pulled down the heavy drapes and hardware and began rolling paint
onto the dark walls. As expected, it would need at least two coats,
but the stuff dried quickly and by the time she finished the fourth
wall the first was about dry enough. She stopped for a granola bar
and cup of coffee from the Thermos she’d brought. The second coat
went on even more quickly and the trim work was minimal. She
glanced at her wrist but remembered that she’d left her watch at
home. Not that it mattered.

She bagged up the throwaway paint roller set
and the empty cans and set them out for garbage collection, locked
the house and was on her way.

Back at home a message on the machine told
Sam that the Casa de Tranquilidad spa near Santa Fe wanted eight
dozen specialty cookies for a reception. She’d worked with them
before, supplying cakes and pastries for different events. Driving
down there to deliver was a little bit of a hassle but they paid
well and it was a way to get her business name out in front of a
whole new clientele. She returned the call, got the details, and
inventoried her supply of ingredients. Wrote up a little shopping
list. Before she quite made it to the door the phone rang
again.

“Hey, Rupert, what’s up?”

“Girl, I can’t write a word today. I’m just
in such a whirl over the big find.”

“You haven’t heard back from the appraiser in
New York already, have you?”

“Oh, no. They’ve probably just received the
piece. They’ll need a few days at least.”

“I’m just on my way out to the store. Can we
chat a little later?” Sam explained about the big cookie order.

“Can I come with you?” He sounded so eager
that she couldn’t say no. And he might actually be of help. Rupert
was pretty efficient in the kitchen. Maybe she could get him to
operate the cookie press while she decorated or something like
that. His place was right on the way so she told him she’d pick him
up in ten minutes.

They were standing in the checkout line at
Smith’s when her cell rang. Beau.

“Would it be convenient for you to stop by my
office on Civic Plaza at some point today?” he asked. “I’ve
finished with Anderson’s personal papers and thought you might need
to include them with the other contents of the home.”

Normally she didn’t keep papers from the
homeowners, but in this case she could offer to hold onto or
dispose of them, whatever was required.

“How about in five minutes? I’m nearly there
now.”

Rupert decided to go inside with her. “If
you’re dating this guy, I need to pay more attention.”

Sam bristled. “It was
not
a date, big
brother.”

They found parking right next to the
building, which was some kind of miracle, and were directed to
Beau’s cubicle down a narrow corridor. His desk was fairly neat,
considering the amount of paperwork even the most minor case
required these days. A number of file folders stood upright between
the dividers in an organizer caddy. In the center of the desk one
folder lay spread open and he was tamping some pages and stapling
the corner of them as they walked up.

Beau handed her a rubber-banded stack of
envelopes that she recognized as the bank statements she’d
collected from the house. Their fingers touched briefly as she took
them, and she got the feeling that his request for her to get these
items was an excuse to see her.

She glanced toward the open folder on the
desk. Clipped to the front was a DMV photo of a gray-haired
man.

“Is that Mr. Anderson?”

Beau nodded and pulled the picture from the
paperclip, handing it to her.

“Ohmygod—it’s him!” Rupert snatched the photo
from Sam. His breath was coming hard.

“Him?”

“It’s Cantone! He’s older here, but I’d know
that face anywhere.”

Beau stepped forward. “You’re sure?
Absolutely sure?”

Sam looked at it more closely. The photos of
the artist that she’d seen online were mostly taken in the 1960s
and ’70s at the height of his career. He’d been dark haired then,
with a pencil mustache and smooth face. In the DMV photo he was
gray, no facial hair, with severe bags under the eyes. Cruel, what
time did to everyone.

However, the more she looked, the more
resemblance she could see. He wore his hair in essentially the same
style, combed straight back, longish, touching his collar. Although
the official photo was straight-on, whereas the publicity photos
were generally posed at a more flattering angle, the bone structure
was the same.

“I’m telling you . . .” Rupert said.

“Yes, I can see it too,” she told Beau.
“Check online. There’s a lot of information about the artist. I
think it’s him.”

She handed the photo back and Beau clipped it
to the file.

“Well, this adds a new wrinkle. Surely there
must be someone related . . . I mean, it wouldn’t be right to put
him in a pauper’s grave now, would it?”

Rupert inhaled sharply. “For Cantone? You
have
to be joking.”

“Well, we didn’t know—”

“I will personally pay for a grand funeral
for this man before I’ll let you just stick him—” He actually began
to tear up.

Sam laid her hand on his arm. “Rupert, it’s
okay. Now that we know who he is . . . It’s going to be okay.”

Beau spoke up. “Rupert, that’s very kind of
you. But now that we know his identity, we have to make an attempt
at locating next of kin. Once we know if he has living relatives,
decisions can be made.”

“I’m sure you can be part of the plans,
Rupert, once his relatives are found.”

He visibly relaxed. Rupert loves to plan a
party and Sam could already see the cogs turning.

Beau said, “You know a lot about this man’s
life, Rupert. Do you know if he had children?”

Rupert told Beau the same story Sam had
discovered online, that the artist’s wife and children were killed
in a train crash years earlier. He’d never remarried and had become
quite reclusive. Adopting a fake identity was about as anonymous as
a person could get, Sam imagined.

She spoke up: “I’m wondering about the
younger man who was living with him. According to Betty McDonald he
showed up in March and was gone—well, both men were gone—in June. I
wonder if he was related. Anderson, uh, Cantone, didn’t seem like
the type of guy to have a stranger move in with him.”

“I seem to remember a brother . . . or maybe
it was a sister,” Rupert said. “Let me check.” He pulled out his
cell phone and dialed a number from memory.

“Esteban. Hey, Rupert here. What do you know
of any family history on Pierre Cantone?” He listened and hmm’d a
couple of times. For a couple of minutes he simply waited, as the
other man talked. “Okay. Thanks ever so.”

“Okay, here’s the deal.” Rupert loved to tell
a story and he was just warming up.

Beau picked up on that and pulled a couple of
chairs closer to his desk so they could sit down during the
telling.

“Cantone had a sister. Sophie. She was ten
years younger. She married an American, an older man—really a
romantic whirlwind thing during a trip to New York.” He sighed.
“Kind of like the scenario I created in
Love’s Glory
where—”

Sam tapped his foot with her toe.

“—oh, right. Sophie Cantone became Mrs.
Robert Killington. He was wealthy, an industrialist or something.
They had the most to-die-for apartment in New York, right on
Central Park, and a villa in the south of France.”

She could see Beau’s eyes beginning to glaze
over.

“Children?” she reminded.

“Ah yes. Esteban wasn’t sure. He thought he
remembered there being a son, but if so the child was kept
completely out of the limelight. Sophie and Robert traveled the
world and attended all the right parties and there were never any
children in sight.”

Beau stood, a clear signal. “That gives us a
lot to go on. Thanks, Rupert.”

Sam nudged Rupert in the shoulder to remind
him that they needed to get moving.

“I’ll do some checking to see if Sophie and
Robert Killington are still living. As his sister, she—”

“Oh, they aren’t,” Rupert interrupted.
“Living. That’s what else I meant to say. He died after only about
ten years of marriage. He was quite a lot older, remember. She
stayed around the art scene, attending many openings as Cantone’s
hostess, for a few years more. But then she became ill—the rumor
was cancer. She died only five or six years after her husband. It
was so tragic. So young.”

“Then I guess I’ll start with the possibility
that the son might still be living. Maybe even in Europe,” Beau
said.

Rupert and Sam left him to the search. His
phone was already ringing as they walked down the corridor.

“Sam, let’s dash back out there. To Cantone’s
house? Please?”

She unlocked the truck. “Oh, Rupert, I’ve got
all those cookies to bake . . .” And she wanted his help. She would
get that a whole lot easier if she didn’t send him into a pout.
“All right, but just a few minutes, okay?”

He seemed as delighted as a kid going to the
carnival. The Anderson/Cantone place was only about fifteen minutes
away. Sam was surprised to see that it was just a little past noon,
anyway. She’d accomplished a lot already today so it shouldn’t
matter that they take a quick side trip.

Rupert was beaming as she unlocked the door
to the simple wood frame house. While he clearly regarded this as a
near-shrine, knowing that his beloved artist had lived here, Sam
merely saw it as sad, that such a respected man had ended up unable
to pay for even this worn-down abode.

He headed straight for the front bedroom,
where they’d found the art supplies and where the mural was
painted. Even with it gone and the wall patched, Rupert seemed to
sense the essence of the artist at work in the cramped space. Sam,
meanwhile, went to the kitchen, updating her sign-in sheet, making
sure that she’d left everything in order for the pending sale of
the place.

At once she sensed something different. What
was this greenish, powdery stuff on the wall near the table? And
there—more of it near the sink. She’d wiped down the counter and
table with disinfectant cleaner. She could see her circular wipe
marks in dried swirls of green. No way she left it like this. She
checked the back door. Still locked tight.

“What’s going on?” Rupert asked, peering
around the doorjamb.

“Huh?”

“You cursed. I heard you say ‘what the f—’
all the way down the hall.”

“Look at this!” She pointed to the table. “I
didn’t leave all that green stuff.”

“Uh-huh. Sam, there’s no green stuff.”

“Right there!” She flicked her fingers toward
the wall. “And there. Powdery stuff on the wall. Swipe marks on the
table.”

He was staring at her blankly.

“Stop it! No teasing.” She laughed but it
came out sort of shaky. “Rupert, you’re scaring me. You do see
this.” She wiped her finger across it and some of the green came
off. She held it up to him.

“Honey, I see a table and a kitchen that
looks perfectly clean. You’d never leave a mess behind in one of
your places. You clean like the devil when you do these jobs.”

Sam felt like she’d been whacked. What the
hell was going on? She rubbed at her eyes and blinked hard. The
green stuff was still there. And her good friend was looking at her
like she’d just sprouted horns.

“I want a third opinion.” She pulled out her
phone and dialed Beau. No answer on his cell. Sam stopped herself.
How crazy would it sound, trying to explain this to him?

Rupert was watching her from the doorway.

“You. Keep out of this,” she grumbled. He
flinched and slinked away.

She stomped across the kitchen and flung the
door open. It closed behind her, a lot more firmly than she’d
intended. She strode over to the gaping hole in the back corner and
stared into the empty grave for a good ten minutes. Maybe she
was
going crazy. Maybe not. But snapping at her friends
wouldn’t solve anything.

She took a deep breath and headed back to the
house.

Refusing to look closely at the kitchen
walls, Sam went back to the bedroom where Rupert was sitting on the
bed, looking like a whipped puppy. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t
have yelled at you.” She sat down beside him.

“And I shouldn’t have doubted you. That’s not
what friends do.” He took her hand.

“So, we’re good?”

“We’re good.” He patted her hand and gave it
a light squeeze. “Want some help with those cookies?”

“Absolutely. I’ll just recheck all the locks
first.”

He went out to the truck while Sam made the
rounds, ignoring the green powder in several places. She rinsed her
fingers at the kitchen sink and the substance came right off. So
strange.

She drove back home, still shaky over the
fact that she was seeing things other people couldn’t see, hoping
that it wasn’t some alien concoction from the Planet Whatever.

Chapter 12

By two o’clock Rupert and Sam were up to
their elbows in cookies. He’d completely moved past the earlier
little tiff and pitched in with his practiced ease in the kitchen.
As Sam mixed each new flavor of dough he operated the press and
filled cookie sheets with neat rows of butter cookies, chocolate
spritz, butter-mint whirls and more. She shuffled them in and out
of the oven and onto cooling racks. As he worked up the final batch
she prepared decorator icing and began piping a variety of tiny
summer flowers onto the cooled ones. She loved to see how many
different styles she could come up with, customizing every order so
the customer always received a surprise.