Sweet Masterpiece - The First Sweet’s Sweets Bakery Mystery

by Connie Shelton

Chapter 11

  Sam awoke Saturday morning feeling lazy. At the suggestion of Delbert Crow, she’d planned to dash over to Bertha Martinez’s place one last time and apply a couple coats of neutral paint to the walls in the red room. He was right, the house would stand a better chance of selling quickly without strange symbols painted on red walls. She’d have probably done it in the first place but needed an okay to lay out money for refurbishment on a property.

  Now, she lounged in bed for an extra thirty minutes reliving the picnic dinner and last night’s beautiful setting. Maybe the extra wine was making her lazy today. Maybe the niggling thought that a fling with Beau Cardwell might not be such a bad thing . . . just maybe, that was the source of her unaccustomed languor.

  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 loved 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