Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (13 page)

“I’ve been with Debbie,” Norris said. “We had dinner here at the Biltmore. Room service. You can check with the hotel staff.”

Debbie linked her arm with Norris’s. “I haven’t let this man out of my sight since we landed. It’s rare that I get to drag him away from work like this.”

Cat flipped to the notes she’d taken when they conferred with hotel staff before ambushing the Graysons. “According to staff here, you had room service delivered around eight. But your hotel card was swiped to let you back into the room at one thirty. That’s the exact window of time that would allow you to set the fire.”

Debbie laughed, tossing her hair. “Oh, come now. Norris and I were at the Cuban guitar concert in the hotel lounge. It ended around that time. You can check with the other guests, the staff…”

Regarding them warily, Alvarez asked, “When do you plan to return to New York?”

Norris answered. “I’ve got an important meeting next Monday. But we’ll be here till then. Not that we welcome another visit from any of you.”

At that, Cat, Alvarez, and Granny Grace left the two and made for the hotel desk.
 

Several staff members confirmed that the Graysons were in attendance at the concert. Cat maintained that Norris could have slipped away from the concert, set the fire, and returned. But her suspicion wasn’t enough, especially when they checked and found out that Stephen Dunnavan’s name had indeed been on the VIP clearance for the Graysons’ flight from New York to Miami, and the Biltmore reservations were under his name. Cat confirmed Dunnavan’s identity and that he had a daughter named Debbie.
 

If it came down to it, Debbie would either claim spousal privilege and refuse to say anything or else voluntarily back up her husband’s alibi in court. But would she really, Cat wondered, if she knew her husband were guilty? It was worth pursuing.

>>>

Angry at having to leave Norris to his Biltmore excesses, Cat was a little irritated to find Ernesto waiting for them back at the cottage. He politely sat on the front porch though he had a key and could have waited for them inside. She was beginning to feel that his presence kept interrupting their work.

“How are my señoritas enjoying the sunshine?” His lilting tenor preceded him through the doorway. Cat saw her grandmother’s eyes light up at the sight of him. They greeted with an intimate embrace and the customary Cuban-style kiss on both cheeks.

“The sunshine, we find divine,” her grandmother said in answer to his question. “The heat, not so much.”

“I heard about the fire. How’s Mick? He must be in shock.”

“He’s pretty shaken,” admitted Cat. She’d been surprised not to find him home but figured he’d gone to a bar.

“I’m worried about the three of you here,” Ernesto said.

“I’m worried about your cottage’s future as a bonfire,” said Cat. She’d been thinking about it ever since they left the ruins of Mick’s beach house.

“Oh, that’s no matter,” said Ernesto. “It’s your safety I would like to ensure. I have other rentals. Let me move you to another.”

“That only works as long as our arsonist doesn’t know your properties,” said Granny Grace. “And doesn’t follow Mick.”

“He hasn’t so far,” Ernesto pointed out. “Come to think of it, your arsonist has not been successful. One might even call him bumbling.”

“Assuming Mick is indeed the target,” said Cat.

On their way to the Biltmore, Alvarez had let them know they hadn’t turned up anyone with a grudge against Don Hines or anyone with the motive to kill him. Cat thought of that now. “The chances that Don Hines was the target keep dwindling. But I think we should look again at whether or not the target was Mick’s art.”

“His art!” Ernesto said. “Why would someone wish to destroy his art?”

“Jealousy, revenge…” Granny Grace suggested. “The arsonist might not have realized there’d be someone sleeping in the studio. It’s kind of a peculiar quirk of artists, sleeping in their work spaces.”

Ernesto kept pressing. “Still, I think we should move you. I have a place in Brickell, an apartment, that I don’t rent publicly. It’s for family who come from out of town.”

He made a handsome living in the financial-services industry as a registered investment advisor, and his properties were one of his many investments. He also invested in art, Cat remembered.

“Oh!” Granny Grace exclaimed, putting her hand on Ernesto’s shoulder. “I nearly forgot. We’ve got a gift for you.”

“Please, there is no need.” Ernesto let himself be shepherded into Mick’s makeshift studio in the lanai, where Candace Shreveport’s masterpiece still sat on a sawhorse easel.

“Voila!” said Granny Grace, bracketing the canvas with her hands as if she were Vanna White.
 

“What’s this?” Ernesto took a pair of sleek reading glasses out of the pocket of his suit and put them on so he could examine the work in detail.

“It’s not the hand of a master. But there’s a levity here, a lightness of being. It’s these children. They inspired her.” He dropped his gaze to the artist’s signature. “Candy Port, eh? I do not know this artist.”

“Well,” said Granny Grace, “let’s just say she’s germane to the case.”

“As an art investor, I would not have advised you to purchase this,” he admonished with a smile. “But I understand the impulse to see value where there isn’t any, speaking strictly in terms of the market.”

Cat flinched a bit at Ernesto’s response. She cast a glance at Granny Grace, who didn’t seem at all put out by his criticism.

“I will always think of you when I see it,” he continued. “Let’s hang it. It suits the living room, don’t you think? The beach poster I have there is dated now. I haven’t changed the décor in here since the Nineties.”

Cat drifted off to her room to do more research, letting them hang the painting together. Her grandmother’s flirtatious laughter carried down the hallway to her room. Cat felt a pang of loneliness. She remembered Lee making her breakfast the first morning they were together after she’d moved to Seattle. When she dressed and joined him at the dinner table, breakfast was already made, and there was a daisy in a vase in the middle of the table.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked. “You don’t have a single plant in here, let alone a garden.”

Lee grinned at her. “No, but my neighbors do.”

“You stole it?”

“Borrowed.”

“It’s not like you’re going to give it back…”
Granny Grace appeared in the doorway, breaking Cat’s reverie. “Ernesto wants to take us to dinner. You game?”

Cat stretched. “Oh, I think I’ll let you two have a date without your third wheel.”

“You sure?”
 

Cat could tell her grandmother was still reluctant to leave her alone. But she really didn’t want to be a tagalong. “I want to get a jump on this research.”

“Have it your way, stick-in-the-mud.” Granny Grace looked beautiful in a shift dress and colorful wrap, for covering her shoulders when the trade winds kicked up in the evening. “Ernesto’s moving us to his Brickell place tomorrow,” she added.

In the quiet of the cottage after they left, Cat booted up her laptop and went to work studying the paintings that had been destroyed during the fire. If they held any clues, she did not uncover them. Part of the problem was that it seemed incomplete—some of the paintings weren’t accounted for, and not all the ones that were had digital images. But by the time she fell asleep, still fully clothed, she felt she was becoming an expert on his work.

Chapter Nine

Mick drove hard, praying that his Fiat would make it across Alligator Alley without any issues. All he could think about was that if Candace Shreveport killed Donnie, he’d wring her pudgy neck.

He’d been too angry to say anything to his sister and niece. He could barely think straight, and he thought of that saying, “seeing red.” It had never happened to him before, but now he understood that the saying was literally true. As soon as he noticed that the conch shell was gone and put together what that meant, he saw red.

The shell came from Bahia Honda, where he and Candy once spent a rum-soaked afternoon. Swimming just off shore, she’d stepped on something jagged, dived down to retrieve it, and come back with the shell. It was larger than what you’d stumble across lying on the beach and perfectly intact, a true find.
 

He admired the shell, made studies of it in his sketchbook that very day on the beach. It became the basis for his Conch Series, and Candy gave it to him to keep.
 

“My heart’s in this shell,” she’d said to him, and for a while, he believed her. “As long as you have this shell, you have my heart.”

The shell had been in his beach house, sitting on a steel Army-issue bookcase. The bookcase had survived the fire, but Mick noticed the shell was gone. There was soot atop the bookcase in the spot where the shell had been. So whoever set the fire took the shell first.

He knew it was Candace, and she was such an awful wretch to carry on her bitterness this long, long enough to still hate Mick, long enough to set that fire in his studio that killed Donnie.
 

He’d be putting her out of her misery, really. “You’re not so big, Mick,” she said the last time she drunk-dialed him. “You’re small where it counts, no matter how big-ass your paintings get.”

And this gem: “I never loved you anyway. I told you what you wanted to hear. Like every other woman in your life.”

He drove like a madman, ignoring the speed limit and the growing darkness. In the sherbet-colored dusk, he saw wide-winged birds swooping across the Everglades.
 

Once he’d gotten lost on a hike that turned into a slog through the ’glades. He kept slogging that night though his feet were wet in his boots. He remembered trying not to think about the rather large carcasses of birds and boars he’d seen earlier in the hike and was deeply relieved when he spotted car headlights in the distance. He followed them till he came to a road, which eventually brought him back to his car. That was Christmas Eve, two years ago, he realized. He’d spent it alone.

But he would rather be alone than shackled to someone like Candace.

Finally, the Fiat rumbled into Sanibel. He knew her house; she’d inherited it from her mother. Mick had had dinner there once, made small talk with the old bird of a mother who died not long after of heart disease. He hated the gingerbread Victorian design of the place, the narrow rooms and hallways.

He banged on Candace’s door, not caring that it was late, her porch light off. He banged until he heard a cat meow and knew Candace was up.

“What in the h—” She came to the door, tying her robe closed across her belly.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into the house.

“Mick!” she said, pulling her cell phone out of her robe pocket. “You get out of here! I’m calling the cops.”

“You aren’t calling anyone.” Forcing her to sit down, he grabbed the phone out of her hand and tossed it across the room. It skittered under a wicker chair and broke apart when it hit the baseboard. The noise startled her cat, which ran out of the room.

“That’s my phone, you asshole! Get out of my house!”

He hauled off and smacked her across the face, knowing as his hand hit her that he’d spiraled out of control, that he had crossed a line, and that he was hitting both Jenny Baines and Candace Shreveport in one go here.
 

She got quiet.

“Where’s the shell?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“The conch shell, Candy. I know you have it.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mick laughed. It looked like fifty miles of bad road had been laid atop the woman he once got a hard-on from just looking at. He remembered flashes of a dream of hers he kept inadvertently slipping into back when she’d moved into his beach house. Something about being the prettiest ballerina, the one other girls envied. Not for her dancing, but for her looks. At the time he thought it was kind of sweet and sad, but now it seemed indicative of where Candace had gone wrong as a human being.

“You’re old, Candy.”

“So are you.”

She was right, of course. He could turn the mirror back onto his own flabby middle, his graying hair, the wrinkles creasing his forehead.

“Mick the Dick,” she hissed.

“At least I’m not a murdering sack of shit.”

“Murder? What are you talking about, Mickey Travers? I’m no murderer.”

“You took the shell, Candy. From my house. I know you have it. So that means you set the fires. You killed Donnie.”

Candy kicked him in the shin, and it hurt like hell. He resisted the urge to smack her across the face again and only felt mildly disturbed by how strong that urge was.

“Is that how you treat a woman, Mick? You abuser!” She began to cry, and he deeply resented her tears.

“What happened to you?” He meant it.

“What happened to you?” She reflected the question back to him in a way that really hit the mark.

He sat down, put his face in his hands. “I don’t know.”