The sound of breaking glass reached him from the kitchen. Had Angel hurt herself? “Ladies, I gotta go.”
“What did I say?” Leslie said. “Just like my kids.”
Sandro rushed into the kitchen. Angel was at the round table near the window. Her cup was shattered on the floor, a puddle spread across the tile. Angel hadn’t budged. She sat very still, staring at the television screen. Nothing special was on, just an auto insurance commercial. Sandro had to wonder if she was losing her mind.
“Angel!” He sidestepped the mess. “Babe, are you okay?”
She turned to him, blinking, snapping out of whatever trance she’d been in. She stood and opened wide eyes to the mess at her feet. “Oh, God! Look at this! Sorry!”
Sandro pressed a hand to her forehead. “Look at me. What’s going on?”
“I have to go.”
“What?”
“I have to go. I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”
She wiggled free from him and headed out of the kitchen. He chased after her, genuinely panicked. “Angel, talk to me. Where are you going?”
She burst into the bedroom and whirled around, searching for articles of clothing. “I have to get back to Miami. You have to help me get off this island.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“It’s crazy!” She got down on her hands and knees to reach for a pair of sandals under the bed. He recalled that she’d kicked them off on the morning of her arrival and that’s where they’d landed. “The FBI raided the gallery!”
Sandro snapped out of his own trance. “What are you talking about?”
She stood and faced him. “Paloma was arrested this morning!”
“Shit!”
“I have to go back.”
“To do what? Bail her out?”
“No! Be serious.”
She darted into the bathroom and started shoving mini bottles into her zipped pouch. She paused only to gather and secure her hair into a ponytail. The blond, face-framing wisps had long faded. She looked exactly as she had the day they’d first met. Glowing brown skin. Messy hair. Guarded expression. Like that first day, she wore white. Except this time she had on one of his many cotton T-shirts.
He crowded the door. “I am serious. What do you expect to do for them?”
She grabbed her toothbrush. She was intent on leaving and Sandro felt the first stirs of panic.
“It’s the gallery,” she said. “It’s my job. I have to find out what’s going on. Do I even have a job anymore? Don’t you think I should find out?”
“No. I think you should stay away from those criminals.”
She zipped the pouch shut, pushed past him and shoved it into her travel bag open at the foot of the bed. “Sandro, this is bad. This is really bad. Last year one of the biggest galleries in New York shut when it was caught selling fakes.”
“All the more reason for you to stay away.”
“Here’s the thing,” she said, folding a bathing suit into the bag. “I’ve worked with these people. Paloma is a lot of things, but she’s not a criminal. This has to be a mistake.”
Sandro couldn’t take it anymore. “There’s no mistake.”
She went still for the first time since he’d found her at the kitchen table. Brows drawn, she turned to him. “How are you so sure?”
Oh, Angel.
Sandro felt sick. He’d been waiting for the perfect time to come clean. The time was now and it was far from perfect. One thing was certain: Angel would not forgive him.
Moments later, Angel hollered at the top of her lungs. “You let me sell you a fake painting!”
The look in those clear brown eyes told him just how betrayed she felt.
“I didn’t know it was fake. I had my suspicions, but I didn’t know for sure.”
“The only reason you bought it is because you suspected it was fake!”
“Suspected, yes,” he said. “I had no proof.”
“But then you had proof and you still didn’t tell me.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “I can’t believe it. All this was going on and you didn’t tell me.”
“I wanted to catch the people involved without involving you. You worked for them. I couldn’t be sure—”
“Of my involvement?”
“No!” he protested. “Let’s just say, the less you knew the better.”
“We were sleeping together!”
“We are sleeping together. Don’t go putting us in the past tense.”
“Here I thought we were growing close.”
“We are close.”
Sandro hated himself for how meek and desperate he sounded. He could have told her, but their relationship had been only days old. It would have shattered this fragile thing between them.
He went over to where she stood at the foot of the bed. “I only ever wanted to shield you from all this.”
“Shield me? Don’t you think it would have been smarter to warn me about the possible risks of working in a den of thieves? You knew I was trying to get my career on track. I could have gotten out before the scandal broke.”
She had a point there. “I didn’t think—”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Angel, I’m sorry. This whole thing is one big cluster...”
Angel wasn’t listening to him. She bit into her lower lip in that way she did whenever deep in thought. “That first night? Were you trying to keep me around to pump information out of me?”
Emotion rumbled through him and left him trembling. “Don’t do that,” he said through clenched teeth. “Don’t make that first time into something ugly. If I’d wanted information, I would’ve asked straight up.”
That night, he hadn’t wanted to talk about the painting at all.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Part of you suspected that I played a role in this.”
“No. Never.”
“Not even when I showed up at your house with a forged painting?”
Sandro dug his hands in his pockets, unbothered. “Not even.”
She took a step closer, wielding a forefinger like a sword. “Lie to me now and I’ll never trust you again.”
In an odd way, the threatening statement gave him hope. He wouldn’t lose her over this. It wouldn’t break them.
“The thought crossed my mind once.”
She lowered her hands to her hips, looking formidable. “When was that?”
“When we went to Papaya, and you told me how you taught yourself to paint.”
She crinkled her nose. “I don’t follow.”
“You copied the paintings in your parents’ collection. You reproduced them.”
“Oh, God.” She folded over and fell onto the bed, looking gutted. “That night we’d shared so much. I opened up to you.”
“It was a passing thought. It never sank in.”
“I told you about my family, my grandfather, my dad’s hometown...” She mumbled the words, speaking mostly to herself.
Fear kicked him in the gut. This could very well break them. “I was confused. That’s all.”
“We made love.”
He joined her on the bed, sitting beside her. It was time to come clean and still he kept one more thing from her. He had fallen in love with her that night.
“Stay,” he said. “We can talk this through.”
“We had rules, Alessandro,” she said. “We promised to tell each other the things that mattered. Didn’t you think this mattered?”
This time her words were sharp and clear. It was his turn to ramble. “I did. I didn’t know. I...”
Her phone blinked on the bedside table, catching her attention. Ignoring him, she got up to retrieve it and stared at the screen before raising it to her ear. “Hello.”
Sandro heard the muffled sounds of a man’s voice
. Angel said, “I’ll be there.” She lowered the phone and turned to him. “I can’t stay. The FBI wants to question me.”
Twenty
Clearing her name with the FBI did not matter as much as clearing her name with Alessandro. Angel sat stone-faced through the interview and tossed out perfunctory answers to their questions. She had consented mainly to avoid hiring an attorney and because she had nothing to hide—two of the worst reasons to risk self-incrimination, that was for sure. When she stepped out of the nondescript building in Downtown Miami, there he was, still waiting, two hours later.
He wore his cap, sunglasses and the plain clothes that allowed him to blend in. When he hugged her she did not pull away. Angel needed to be held. She was emotionally drained.
“If they try to pin this on you, I’ll hire a team of lawyers. You are not taking the fall for those people.”
She pulled away and looked up at his face, his strong features lined with concern. “How do you know that I’m not one of those people?”
“Angel...”
She was serious. How could he ever really trust her? It was upon her to clear her name. She could tell he was anxious to sweep the dirty business under a rug and move past it. But that was impossible.
Angel waited until they were in the car before she spoke. “They don’t care about forgeries.”
Alessandro pressed the ignition button. “I’m not surprised. No one does.”
“They only wanted to know about Paloma’s sales roster, names of clients, etc.”
“What do you think is going on there?”
“I don’t know.” Angel looked at his sharp profile as he eased the car into traffic and wished she wasn’t so head over heels for him. “That doesn’t help you, though.”
“Help with what?”
“Finding the person who forged your grandfather’s paintings.”
“My brother and Myles both want me to let that go, so maybe I should.”
“No,” Angel said, a stubborn determination taking hold in her. “I want to help you figure this out.”
“No,” he said, sounding just as stubborn. “You want to prove something to me. And I don’t want you to prove anything.”
“Head north on 95,” she said, as they approached the junction.
“Why?” he asked. “Don’t you want to go home?”
“There’s someone we need to speak to first.”
His grip on the wheel tightened. “Who?”
“Justine Carr.”
Justine lived in a quiet neighborhood in North Miami. Her house was a plain ranch-style home, the kind that cropped up everywhere back in the seventies. At first glance, it did not look like much, a flat roof and a brick facade painted white. When Justine opened for them, holding the door wide, Angel got a view straight through the house to the backyard and noted that it bordered onto a canal complete with dock.
Justine did not look like her clever self, with her corn-yellow hair in a messy bun and her right foot trapped in an orthopedic boot. Her weary blue gaze slid from Angel to Alessandro. Angel felt like the pet cat that had brought a dead rat into the house.
“I don’t want to get mixed up in any family drama,” she said.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Angel replied, wondering what exactly she meant by that.
“Alessandro Cardenas,” Justine said, quite obviously sizing him up. “We meet at last.”
Alessandro had kept his distance, casting a look around as if he did not trust the neighborhood. Dressed as he was, he looked as if he were playing the role of her bodyguard.
“We spoke on the phone once,” he said.
“Simpler times,” she said dryly, then stepped aside to let them in. “You’re lucky you found me. I just got back from Costco.”
She said this as if it were an ordinary day and her list of mundane errands was all that mattered. “That’s cool,” Angel replied. “I just came back from an FBI interrogation.”
Justine rolled her eyes. “Those fools! I told them you had nothing to do with anything.”
“They didn’t take your word for it,” Angel said. “Thanks anyway.”
Instead of inviting them into her living room, she led them past her kitchen, a gleaming granite and stainless steel box, straight to the yard where a few rattan chairs were set up around a fire pit. She led them past those, too, and straight to the dock where a cooler and a few throw pillows were stacked. The water that drifted through the canal was a particular shade of blue green. Cobalt green, if sold by the tube at the art supply store.
“What are we drinking?”
It wasn’t yet lunchtime. “I...ugh...water?”
That eye roll again. “After the morning you had? They must have gone soft with you. They had me held up for five hours yesterday.”
Angel sank down onto the splintered wood dock, allowing her legs to hang over the edge. She grabbed Alessandro by the hem of his T-shirt and drew him down beside her. He draped a protective arm over her shoulders. Angel’s mood shifted like sand. As angry and resentful as she was with him, she was still more comfortable with him than any man she’d ever dated. It was as if life was playing a cruel joke.
“Look at you two all cozy,” Justine said. “I must have done you a favor of a lifetime when I got hit by that puny car.”
She flipped open the cooler and rummaged through the ice for a chilled can of beer from a local brewery. Angel recognized the blue 305 logo. Alessandro raised a hand and she tossed the can to him. He cracked it open.
Everyone was having a swell time.
Angel got back to business. “I need another favor.”
“Here!” She tossed Angel a can. “Have a beer instead.”
Had Justine always been this wily? Yes, she had.
Using a wood post as support, she slid down next to them and propped her booted foot onto the stack of pillows. Mimicking Alessandro, she cracked open her can.
“Yeah... Paloma screwed us over with those so-called private sales of hers,” she said.
Angel set the can down. “What do you know about it?”
“She helped some really sketchy characters to buy and sell art at outrageous prices as a way for money to exchange hands. She got kickbacks for her trouble. Did you see any of that kickback money?”
“No,” Angel said. “Did you?”
“No.” Justine took a sip of beer. “You know what really bothers me? Those crooks likely tossed those paintings into a ditch when they were done. They didn’t care.”
A seagull swooped low and flew off. Justine cared about art; Angel knew that much. A graduate of Sotheby’s, she was serious about her work and, therefore, excelled.
“Now what am I going to do?” she said. “I was Miss Gallery Six. Everybody knew me from the East Coast to the West as Miss Gallery Six. Now Gallery Six is closed and I’m screwed.”
Alessandro had some advice. “Move to a new city. Start over.”
Angel disagreed. Moving to LA might have worked out for him, but her move to Miami was a disaster from start to finish.
“I’m not moving anywhere,” Justine said. “This house is home. I’ve put everything I have into it. I’m going to sit here, drink my beer, feed the alligators and wave to my neighbors as they sail by.”
Justine...always so dramatic! “No one ever called the shop asking to speak with Miss Gallery Six. Your clients knew you by name and would only work with you. Reach out and tell them you’re flying solo, freelancing. Next thing you’ll know, you’re back on the scene.”
“I guess...” A little smiled teased at the corners of Justine’s mouth. “And what about you, little one?”
“Me? I guess I’ll move back home.”
“Why?”
Justine and Alessandro had shouted the one-word question in unison. They were both glaring at her. All Angel could think to say was “B
ecause!” She might not be Miss Gallery Six, but how could she ever escape it now?
“Don’t let your stint at the gallery shape your life. You were nothing but the salesgirl.”
“Gee, thanks!” Angel reached for her can of beer and cracked it open. It was lunchtime somewhere.
“I’m serious! When anyone asks you say that you were just the salesgirl, hadn’t even worked there a year. You’re young and you’re pretty and no one will care.”
“I’m not that young!” Angel protested.
Justine treated her to yet another epic eye roll. “Just do me a favor,” she said. “Do something you really love. You’re not really suited at pushing art.”
“I’m not really suited at anything!” Angel said, annoyed.
Alessandro was quick to console her. “That’s not true!”
“It is true!”
Angel looked up to the sky, at a cluster of clouds in the shape of a continent. She had a lot to figure out, but now wasn’t the time. Next to her, Alessandro’s body was tight and tense. He must be so confused as to what they were actually doing here, drinking beer on a dock with her former colleague, but he was playing along. She lowered a hand to his thigh and he immediately covered it with one of his own.
They all fell silent for a while, watching the dark blue-green water flow through the canal. It felt good to sit and enjoy the quiet.
Justine stretched her arms over her head. Eyeing them, she said, “I know why you’re here and I’m going to help you out.”
Angel lit up. “You are?”
“Yup.” She took a long sip from her can. “This shitty year is almost over. I should do one kind thing to set things up for next year.”
That wasn’t how it worked, generally, but Angel was game.
Justine tilted to one side to better catch Alessandro’s eyes. “Your niece is selling your granddad’s paintings.”
If Alessandro hadn’t been holding her hand, Angel might have toppled into the canal. His niece, his beloved niece, was peddling fake artwork? No, that’s not what Justine had said. His beloved niece was selling his grandfather’s art. It was possible Justine didn’t know that the paintings were fakes. If that were the case, she hoped Alessandro wouldn’t say anything to give it away. After all, the less anyone knew, the better.
What Happens In Miami... Page 14