Bitter Sweet (16 page)

Sam set the cake in place and
arranged some of the table’s decorations attractively around it.

“Will you stay for a drink?”
Renata asked. “The party is just getting started.”

Sam took in the elegantly clad
women and the men in slacks and sport jackets, wondering without daring a
glance at how many frosting stains there must be on her baker’s jacket.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I can’t
stay. I’ll just—”

“At least you must meet the
marvelous woman who is responsible for my marrying Jimmy.” Renata took Sam’s
arm and pulled her across the living room. “It took me many years to find my
Jimmy, you know. After my first husband died—so very young—I traveled the
world. Thirty six years old and my life was so empty.”

A woman with white hair nearly to
her waist turned at the sound of Renata’s voice.

“Zora, this is my newest friend,
Samantha,” she announced.

Zora wore a flowing ankle length
skirt, a handkerchief blouse in a shade of orange that didn’t go with any of
the colors in the patterned skirt, and about twelve bangle bracelets on each
arm. She extended a veined hand thick with silver rings. Her age could have
been anywhere between forty and sixty—her heart-shaped face seemed to have seen
some hard wear. She had a prominent nose and space between her front teeth.

“Samantha,” said Zora. “It’s nice
to meet you.”

Renata piped up again. “I met
Zora last winter, at a holiday party where she was reading palms for the
guests.”

“I also read tarot cards and tea
leaves,” Zora said. “But palms are my specialty.” She grabbed Sam’s hand and
turned the palm upward. At the sight of ingrained yellow food coloring she put
the hand back down.

Renata didn’t seem to notice.
“Last month I went to her place and Zora did the most amazing thing. She told
me that I would soon find the man of my dreams. In fact, she said that the very
next man I met would become my husband.”

“Really.”

“She finished my reading and I
walked out the door, literally into the arms of Jimmy. Can you believe it? He
was trimming the lilac bushes beside the door. I looked at him . . . he looked
at me . . . We were married a week later.”

Zora was nodding
enthusiastically. “It’s true. I saw that match, clear as day.”

Uh-huh. Sam bit back a response.
Out on the patio she caught sight of Jimmy leaning on the bar, coming on to a
girl who should have been in an English Lit 101 class. Sam quickly looked away.

“So, what is it that you do,
Samantha?” Zora was asking.

You tell me—you’re the psychic
.

If the baker’s jacket and sugar
encrusted fingernails weren’t enough clue, this woman’s intuitive powers were
less than that of a schnauzer puppy. Sam glanced at Renata but the new bride
was oblivious.

“I better get going,” Sam said.
“I double parked out there . . . The bakery is really crazy today . . .”

“Thanks again for the cake,”
Renata said, walking her to the door.

“Look, I know you don’t know me
very well,” Sam said, keeping her voice low. “But I’m not real sure about Zora
and her powers.”

Renata gave her a puzzled look.

“Just be careful about what to
believe. There have been cases . . . psychics who take people for a lot of
money.”

“Sam, it’s nothing like that. She
charges very, very little for her readings.” Renata’s eyes drifted toward the
gathering on the patio and a pair of stress lines briefly touched the edges of
her mouth.

“Okay. My mistake. It’s none of
my business.” Sam escaped.

Renata’s condo was not far from
Zoë and Darryl
Chartrain’s
place, and on a whim Sam
made the turn and ended up at their back door two minutes later. The last time
she’d seen Zoë was right after Lila Coffey’s funeral. Maybe checking in on her
friend would be a good idea.

“Hey there.” Zoë greeted her at
the door. “I’m just making some iced tea. Can you stay a minute?”

Although she really hadn’t
planned on it, Sam sat at the breakfast bar and accepted a glass of Zoë’s fresh
raspberry tea.

“Have you ever heard of a psychic
here in town called Zora? I met her just now at a reception,” she said as soon
as Zoë sat down.

“Madame Zora? Long white hair,
thin, dressed in garish colors?”

“Sounds like the one.”

Zoë laughed. “I went to the
farmer’s market this spring. Remember that one day it was pouring rain? Well,
all the vendors and absolutely everyone in the crowd had rain gear or
umbrellas. This was no quick sprinkle. And there’s this woman who is getting
completely drenched, standing there complaining about ‘where did all this rain
come from?’. The guy selling the watermelons called her Zora and teased her
about if she was such a great psychic, why didn’t she know it would be raining.”

Sam laughed. “She asked me what I
did for a living,” she said, spreading her arms to show her jacket with the
bakery name embroidered on it. “What’s with that?”

Zoë wagged her head back and
forth. “She won’t be in business very long. Everyone who has mentioned her has
figured out she’s a big fake.”

“So she does have an actual—what
would you call it?—like a shop?”

“Yeah, there’s a little building
on the south end of town, one of those places that was once a house—right there
on Paseo. Past the big lumber yard.”

“Has she been around very long?”

“Oh, maybe a few months. I
wouldn’t be surprised to see her pack up and leave soon. Or find some other
line of work.”

“Apparently at least one of her
predictions came true.” Sam repeated what Renata had told her about
Zora’s
prediction that led to her marriage to James Butler.
“Renata is crazy about the guy—really believes that fate brought them
together.”

Zoë looked skyward. “Okay . . .”

Sam remembered that she’d never
told Zoë the details about her visit with Beau to Las Vegas and their discovery
that Ted O’Malley had another wife. When she spilled the whole story, Zoë’s
eyes went wide.

“A bigamist! And he’s skipping
the country? That’s just—it’s crazy! Can’t Beau stop him?”

“He would if he could, but he
says there’s not enough evidence to hold him. He says the bigamy charges are
hardly worth pursuing now that Lila has died. Did I tell you that one of my
caretaking properties had a similar situation—the wife died and the husband
cleared out everything of value and was on his way to Switzerland? Beau had him
stopped and questioned but they couldn’t hold him. The wife had made a new will
leaving it all to him.”

Zoë pushed her tea glass around.
“And I suppose Ted O’Malley did the same. Remember? He had his lawyer standing
right there with him as Lila’s things were being hauled out the door.”

Sam felt an electric tingle go
through her. The lawyer.

“I
gotta
go,” she said. She gulped the last of her tea and stood up. “Sorry. Something
just hit me and I need to talk to Beau about it.”

Her heart raced as she put the
van in gear and drove the few blocks to Beau’s office. Why hadn’t she picked up
on it right away? Sleep deprivation? That was a lousy excuse.

She found him at his desk with
stacks of files surrounding him. At her tap on the doorjamb he looked up from
the form he was filling out.

“Hey, this is a nice surprise,”
he said, rising.

“I think . . . I’ve got something
important,” she panted. “It just—”

“Come on in,
darlin
’.
Sit down.”

“I can’t sit.” She paced the
width of the room. “Remember I told you that I ran into Sadie Gray’s husband
the last time I went to their house? He came to get something from the garage.
Well, I finally remembered where I’d seen him before.”

Beau leaned a hip on one corner
of the desk. “Yeah?”

“At Lila Coffey’s. The day of the
estate sale. Ted O’Malley was standing there watching the money roll in.”

Beau’s eyebrows raised in a
so-what expression.

“Ted introduced us to his
attorney, called him Joe Smith. But it was Marshall Gray.”

“Sam, are you
sure
about
that?”

“The way he combs his hair, his
size and build, the face. And the voice. He spoke both times, and I know it was
him.” She had reached the far wall and turned back to him. “I can’t believe I
didn’t pick up on it the minute I saw Marshall that day. Dang, Beau. I knew
something looked familiar about him but I couldn’t pinpoint it.”

“But O’Malley introduced him as
Joe Smith. Couldn’t they just be very similar looking?”

She felt a flicker of hesitation.
The eyes. “No. It was the same man.”

“Well, it might go toward
explaining why we didn’t find either of their names in a phone book or on a
credit record,” he said slowly. “I wonder which name is the real one.”

“I think he recognized me.
Marshall, I mean. The day he came to Sadie’s. He gave me kind of a funny look
and then he ducked around me very quickly and walked to the garage.”

Beau circled his desk and sat
down, pulling the computer keyboard close. He clicked a few keys and Sam moved
to look over his shoulder.

“I’m just checking to see if the
state bar association lists a Joe Smith.”

Sam wished her earlier search had
been this specific.

A few more keystrokes and a
listing of licensed attorneys and their addresses came up. There were two
Joseph Smiths, one down south in Las Cruces and the other in Albuquerque.

“Too bad those listings don’t
show photos. I would know in a second,” she said. “I wonder . . . was one of
the Joe Smiths posing as Marshall Gray, or was Gray pretending to be the
lawyer?”

Beau drummed his fingers on the
desk. “Could be either. Could be neither. Joe Smith could be from another
state. But still, I don’t like the looks of this.”

“So, now at least you have
something to arrest Marshall Gray for, right?”

“
Darlin
’,
it’s not quite that easy.” He looked up at her. “Other than practicing law
without a license, we really don’t have much on this Gray or Smith. If he
represented himself as a lawyer and filed documents, we might get him on that.
But in this state a person doesn’t need a lawyer to write a will. You can do your
own or use one of those kits, as long as you have it witnessed and notarized.
Marshall Gray would simply say that his wife chose to write her own will.”

“But then why was he standing
there next to Ted Coffey, introducing himself as a lawyer?”

Beau stood up and took her hands.
“Could you swear in court that’s what happened if he denies it and says you’re
just confused about what you heard?”

Her mouth pursed. “I hate this,
Beau, I know they’ve done something illegal. I hate that we can’t catch them.”

He pulled her close and wrapped
his arms around her. “I know,
darlin
’, I know. It’s
one of the big frustrations in law enforcement. It would be different if
someone—a family member of Sadie’s—had stepped forward to press charges but
they haven’t. And you can see by the look of this desk—I don’t have time to
work the official cases, much less the ones where we only suspect something. I
already used department funds to check out Ted O’Malley and discovered that he
committed bigamy, technically. Neither wife pressed charges on that, and he’s
such small potatoes that it would fall very low in a prosecutor’s priorities,
especially since one of the wives isn’t alive anymore.”

Sam’s mind whirled with the
implications. None of this was making much sense. When Beau released the
embrace, she knew he was thinking again about the stacks of files on his desk.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll
do some more extensive backgrounds on all the names, on my own time, and see if
anything interesting pops up. If it does, you’ll be the first to know.”

She smiled up at him. “Have I
ever mentioned what a great guy you are?”

He kissed her forehead. “You
might have. But you could say it again. If you want to.”

Instead, she gave him a kiss that
more than proved her point.

The rest of the afternoon flew by
in a rush of birthday cakes and a flurry of walk-in customers who managed to
clean out all the cookies, cheesecake and brownies in a little under two hours.
By five p.m. Sam found herself issuing orders like a general, prepping for the
upcoming weekend, and ordering adequate supplies to get them through.

Thoughts of bigamists, lawyers
and shady estate deals completely left her mind until the phone rang at home.
She’d changed into soft capris, shared a salad with Kelly and was just getting
ready for bed when her daughter informed her that Beau was on the line.

“Turns out your feminine
instincts weren’t so far off,” he began.

It took her a minute to figure
out what he was talking about.

“Two marriages, two eerily
similar scenarios. Sadie Gray had married Marshall ten months before her death.
Lila Coffey married Ted O’Malley less than three months ago. Both were older
women marrying younger men. Both revised their wills almost immediately after
marriage. So far, nothing illegal in all that.”

“Oh. But—”

“But, there’s more. Both women
used an attorney named Joe Smith to do their estate plans, consisting of a
Living Trust, a Will and an Advanced Health Care Directive. In each, the
husband had control over his wife’s health care decisions.”

“And both of them ended up in
nursing facilities. Dead. And the husbands inherited everything.”

“I believe so. Since a Trust
doesn’t go through probate, there is no public record of the document. A person
can do their own, as I mentioned earlier, and the document stays private, known
only to the person who signs it and her heirs. We can’t find out who
inherited.”

“When I questioned whether he had
the right to sell everything so quickly after she died, Ted O’Malley told me he
inherited Lila’s estate,” Sam said. “And when you checked the banking records,
both men were listed on their wives’ accounts.”