“The detritus of everyday life,” Granny Grace pronounced. “It tells the story of what we do with our hands, and what we value enough to keep with us.”
“Sure,” Cat said, smiling. “So apparently I value food and money. Can we go now?”
“What’s in your other pocket?”
“Really? We’re doing this?”
“Yes,” her grandmother said, motioning to the bench.
Cat emptied the contents of her other pocket.
Granny Grace bent forward like a forensics examiner. “Oh, look at this,” she said. “It’s paper…” She unrolled a piece of paper fiber that had obviously been through the wash. Faded but still readable were the words Dave’s Drive-In and a logo of a frosty soda mug with a happy smiling face superimposed on the white mug froth.
Cat took it from Granny Grace’s hands. Seeing it instantly brought her back to the day that Lee had shown up in Missouri, worried about her, foolishly playing the white knight come to rescue her. She had no choice but to take him with her on a trip to Johnson’s Shut-Ins, where she found a clue, etched into the rocks there, that was relevant to her case. They’d stopped at Dave’s Drive-In for lunch on the way, and the two of them had scrunched up the papers around their straws and then siphoned soda onto them, watching them grow like worms. She’d felt like a kid again, laughing with Lee.
Her eyes began to water.
“What is it, Cat? Is it something from your trip back to St. Louis?”
“Yes. I went there with Lee.”
Cat felt her grandmother’s arms around her as the tears came. “Oh, my poor dear. You just got socked with the power of art.”
Cat recovered, and, laying a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder, she said, “Gran. I need to ask you something. I hate to ask it, but I have to.” She cleared her throat. “Should we consider Uncle Mick a suspect?”
“Certainly not!”
“He doesn’t have an alibi….”
“Yes, I know.” Her grandmother looked away. “He’s hiding something about that night. But he didn’t set that fire. He lost most of his art, not to mention his best friend, in that fire. So get that out of your head.”
“It’s just…” Cat hesitated, swallowing hard.
“What, Cat? Say it.”
“I, um, dreamslipped with him.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
Granny Grace silently regarded Cat.
“I couldn’t help it… I wanted to know… And I found something. He dreamed—”
“—Whatever he dreamed, it doesn’t matter.”
“But what if you’re in denial because he’s your brother? He dreamed that he set his studio on fire and killed Donnie.”
Her grandmother sat there for a long time, not saying anything. Then she picked up the remnant of the straw wrapper, which Cat had set in her own lap. “Like you keep dreaming that you shot Lee. That’s not the same as this, is it? Hard evidence. Always remember that, dreamslipper.”
Cat let the words sink in. Her grandmother was right. But then Cat realized something. “Hey, you’ve slipped into my Lee nightmares! What about the rules?”
“As you illustrated, Cat, rules are meant to be broken.” And with that, Granny Grace hoisted herself to her feet. “C’mon. We’ve got more artists to interview.”
Chapter Three
It was the worst conversation Mick Travers had ever had in his life.
Telling Donnie’s parents that their precious son was gone, their precious boy, no matter that he was a forty-three-year-old man who hadn’t yet made it as an artist—to them he would always be their precious boy sitting on the living room floor drawing like a boy genius—that was the worst conversation he’d ever had. It wasn’t even so much a conversation as a verbal bloodletting. Poor Mary Ellen Hines and Donald Hines, Sr., sitting in their suburban kitchen in suburban Ohio, getting this information over the phone.
Mick had let Donald Sr. cry in that silent, wracking way a man not given to shedding a tear finally does when something happens that is so painful, even he can’t hold it back. “No,” was the first thing the man said. Just “no.”
Mick waited while Donald told Mary Ellen.
“We should come down,” Donald finally said through choked sobs. “We should…see him.”
Mick thought of Donnie’s unrecognizable body. No parent should have to see that. He also knew they couldn’t afford several trips to Miami or funeral costs. Mick had heard from Donnie that his parents struggled financially after the airline company Donald had worked for all his life defaulted on his pension. The two survived solely on their small savings and Social Security. Donnie hoped to make it big as an artist so he could help them. They’d never been able to visit their son in Miami, not that they were the traveling type anyway. Unlike their free-spirited son, the two had barely ever left Ohio in their own lifetimes. Donnie had driven up to see them whenever he could, usually making the trip in a record two days in his aged Datsun.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mick told the man. “Really. It’s better…if you remember him the way he was.”
Seized with a galvanizing sense of guilt, Mick said, “Please, let me handle the wake. We’ll have it here. You can come down then. It won’t be long. Just a week or two.”
The two agreed, and Mick left them to their black hole of grief.
There was nothing for it, nothing at all, not even five bottles of Bushmill’s. When he came out of his stupor, he was still angry enough to carp at his well-meaning grandniece. He left the house just so he didn’t end up saying something he’d regret.
Donnie hadn’t deserved to go out like that.
It should have been me, Mick thought, about fifty times an hour.
He drove to a Cuban bakery in a strip mall where he knew he could get some decent coffee. He would have preferred a walk or a bike ride, and maybe one of those would have cleared his head, but nobody really did that in Miami. Both activities were in fact dangerous; the head of the city’s transportation department had recently been mowed down by an SUV while biking to work. That was Miami for you.
He sat in a booth and ordered a cortadito, though he preferred the taste of the colada. But coladas were meant to be shared. He, Donnie, Rose, and some of the other residents of the Brickell Lofts often took communal coffee breaks that way. One of them would go out and get a colada in a big Styrofoam cup and pour the syrupy coffee into tiny plastic thimbles, one shot each. It was the perfect afternoon pick-me-up. They’d stand around in Mick’s studio shooting the shit, Rose complaining about her boyfriend (in Mick’s opinion he seemed to only come around when he needed something from Rose), and the three of them criticizing what they’d read in Art in Our Time that month.
Donnie was Mick’s studio assistant. His first. Donnie could handle the large canvases Mick painted, the twenty-by-twenty-foot behemoths his patrons and collectors loved to put in their big Miami manses. Mick could no longer stretch and manage them on his own. Everyone told Mick to work with the local colleges to get an intern to do it for free, but Mick didn’t believe in slave labor.
Donnie reminded Mick of himself twenty years prior: an artist with amazing work ethic and experience who hadn’t ever hit it big. So Mick hired him and paid him, even gave him health insurance through the Miami Artists’ Guild. And when Donnie’s escalating rent had forced him out of his apartment, and Mick found out Donnie had no savings whatsoever for “retirement,” whatever that was to an artist, or anyone anymore for that matter, Mick let Donnie move into Mick’s own tremendous studio space.
Mick’s cortadito arrived, but then he added a guava pastry. Cat’s sandwich had already burned up in his stomach, which hadn’t been fueled in forty-eight hours. The waitress was Cuban and either knew no English or refused to use it. So Mick was forced to tap into his Cuban-styled Spanish, still accented by his Midwestern roots despite his long stint in Miami. “Pour fahvor, dee gamey una pasteleez con hwava.”
While he waited, he swirled
the sugary coffee in his cup and contemplated the target of his anger, and that was whatever piece of excrement coated in five layers of vomit and snot had come into his studio and set fire to his works-in-progress, killing his friend in the process. His sister was right; clearly the intended target had been Mick himself. Outside of Rose and some of the other live-work tenants, nobody knew Donnie had been sleeping in Mick’s studio. But before he’d let Donnie have it, Mick often slept there, when he worked late at night and didn’t want to drive back to his beach house in South Dade.
Mick had already been killed a million times by other artists’ jealousy. This had begun to happen even before he’d had any success.
As early as junior high, it had set him apart. In the small town where he and Priscilla, aka “Amazing Grace,” grew up, it had already started. In his junior high class, no less, which was made up of Mick and eleven other kids. They didn’t have locks on their lockers, which were stacked against one wall of their homeroom. In art class, Mick painted Johnny Cash performing on The Ed Sullivan Show. His teacher, who was a Cash fan and encouraged Mick’s talent besides, held it up for the whole class to see. Later, when Mick went into his unlocked locker to take the picture home to show his parents, it was no longer there. Someone had stolen it.
In graduate school, his talent quickly became known, and one of his professors declared, “We have a real artist in our midst.” But that professor’s rival was a man who’d recently been granted tenure without the level of artistic success the others in the department enjoyed. He had made it his personal mission to destroy Mick not only as an artist but as a human being. Chester Canon, or “Chester the Molester,” as Mick liked to call him, screamed and threw things at Mick during crits, described him as a “no-talent hack” to anyone within hearing, and ridiculed his work with insatiable glee. Canon enlisted into his campaign several of Mick’s fellows, students who couldn’t find the perspective in a painting if it were diagramed into the canvas like a paint-by-numbers kit.
Canon got his comeuppance, though, when he refused to enter Mick’s painting in a national contest of MFA art students’ work. Several of the professors wanted to enter Mick’s Pink Splash. To create Pink Splash, Mick had taken an old advertisement for facial bleaching cream, decoupaged it onto a canvas, set the canvas on the floor, climbed to the top of a very tall ladder, and then dripped pink paint over it. Canon’s vote was trumped by the other faculty, and Pink Splash was submitted against his wishes. In competition with the work of hundreds of students throughout the country, it won.
“A riveting commentary on the nature of racial complexion,” said the judges. That had taken the wind out of Canon’s sails, for sure, since Mick’s talent had been vindicated by an independent panel of judges whose opinion he had to accept, even if he vehemently disagreed.
Mick ran down the list of hating grad students in his head, wondering if any of them still bore a grudge. It was possible. A year after grad school, Art in Our Time published a Letter to the Editor that bad-mouthed the work of one of Mick’s professors, making it sound as if the letter had been written by Mick. It was signed Mick in Miami, which is where he’d fled after graduate school. He was the only “Mick” in the Miami art world. Coupled with the letter’s references to the professor’s work and the classes Mick took, it was easy to assume that Mick had written the letter. That professor had been one of Mick’s staunchest allies, and it pained Mick to think the professor believed he’d written it. Mick tried to get the magazine to print a retraction, but it refused. And the professor refused to take Mick’s calls.
The worst part was, Mick had criticized some aspects of that professor’s work, over beers with the other students, in confidence, but never to the professor’s face. Whoever wrote the letter cribbed some of Mick’s details from those conversations. So the letter had an air of authenticity to it, and Mick knew whoever betrayed him had been close enough to be involved in the regular round of criticism most art students doled out against their professors, especially when drinking.
The pastry was a delicious concoction of orange guava jelly between layers of buttery, flaky crust. Mick wolfed it down and gulped his coffee. Then he took his flip sketchbook out of his back pocket and began to jot down some names. It was something Priscilla and Cat had been asking for since the night of the fire. It was a humiliating task, compiling a list of people who might want him dead for no other reason than jealousy over his knack for putting lines and colors together on canvas. And he was alarmed to find that it was a rather long list, one that had grown through the years.
When he was finished, he sat there staring at the ring of milky brown coffee left in the bottom of his cup. He could give this list to the police, but they would still think of him as a suspect unless he coughed up his alibi.
But he feared his alibi would make him look guiltier.
He flipped the cover closed on his sketchbook and decided to talk to the one person who could verify he hadn’t set the fire that night: A goth chick named Jenny Baines.
Chapter Four
Grace was sitting in the cottage in Ernesto’s living room listening to her granddaughter complain about Mick when the man himself burst into the house. He tossed a crumpled sheet of notebook paper at Grace, said, “Here’s your damn list,” and announced that he was leaving again.
Grace smoothed out the paper. He’d done a good job, at least, with names, dates, and details. In the silence after he slammed the door, Grace read the list aloud to Cat.
“Let’s split up this time,” Grace said. “These first two are here in South Florida, but after that, it looks like we’re going to the Big Apple.” She gave Cat the task of interviewing one of Mick’s former professors up in Fort Lauderdale and took it upon herself to interview the number-one hater on Mick’s list.
This happened to be a woman.
With whom her brother had once slept. There it was in Mick’s chicken-scratch handwriting: Candace Shreveport, ex-lover. Grace remembered meeting Candace, but only briefly. Back then—more than thirty years ago—she’d been a young beachcomber with stars in her eyes about Mick. When Grace called to set up the appointment, the woman sounded surprised, then suspicious.
“It would be great to talk to someone who’s practically an expert on Mick Travers,” Grace said. There was no response, so she added, “And his art.” The woman agreed to meet.
Candace lived on Sanibel Island, on the Gulf side of the Florida peninsula, but Grace was keen for the drive. It took her across the Everglades along Alligator Alley, a straight shot she’d traveled many times during her visits to see Mick. The name was not a misnomer, as Grace spotted several alligators without leaving her air-conditioned car. She gave herself the luxury of a stop at Shark Valley, which was a misnomer, since there were obviously no sharks slogging through the swampy glades. But a long, paved path led to a hummock, an area of solid ground where a few slash pines bravely fought for their existence.
The alligators lining the pavement seemed fat and happy, lazing in the sun without much care for how close she and the other tourists approached. The gators yawned, wide-jawed, and looked away. She was mercifully glad when she reached a shaded kiosk at the end of the paved trail. A clever crow lifted a silver-sheathed energy bar out of her backpack, making off with the treat before she realized it.
Without the energy bar, she was famished by the time she arrived in Sanibel. A restaurant on the edge of the shell-lined beach called to her, but she was to meet Candace Shreveport at her beach bungalow. Perhaps she could entice the woman into an early dinner.
The bungalow was a delight from the outside, reminiscent of the gingerbread Victorians of Key West, and painted in pale pink with aqua trim. “What a lovely home,” Grace remarked when Candace greeted her. The woman was holding a black-and-white cat balanced on her ample middle when she came to answer the door. Her hair had gone gray some time ago but was dyed black; Grace could see it was time for a root touch-up.
“Well, Mick would hate it,” Ca
ndace said, gesturing to the outside of the house. “All that decorative busyness. He’d say it was too folksy.”
“You’re probably right about that,” Grace said.
“Come on in,” Candace said, without warmth, shifting the cat to one hip and propping the screen door open for Grace.
“Thank you so much for meeting with me.” Grace followed the woman inside.
Candace gestured to a set of white wicker furniture that creaked loudly when Grace sat down. On the walls were, presumably, Ms. Shreveport’s own creations: a row of Impressionistic paintings of none other than the cat she was holding at the door.
“Those are mine.” Candace noticed Grace’s gaze. She pointed to the signature in the bottom corner of one. “I sign my works Candy Port.”
Grace cringed but tried not to show it. What on earth had her brother Mick ever seen in this woman?
“Mick and I met at a bar,” the woman announced, as if she sensed Grace’s bewilderment. “The Conch. Down in Key Largo. To this day, I don’t know what he was doing down there, but I’d just run off from my husband.”
“I see,” said Grace, though she didn’t really.
“I was drunk off my ass, and Mick danced with me. It was fun. He’s loads of fun to drink with. Of course, we ended up in bed, at the Largo Lodge. Cute place—I’ve gone back a few times with my girlfriends.”
“My brother says you drunk-dial him every couple of years,” Grace broke in. “And as recently as this past spring.”
“Yeah, he’s not exactly on my speed-dial, if you know what I mean, but when you get to thinking hard about where your life went wrong, you know, he’s one of the first people I think of.”
“But you’ve done well for yourself.” Grace couldn’t help herself.
“Oh, I do fine. I’m in a few crafty galleries here in town, right there with the mosquito huts and the yard art. But I’ll never be a real artist. I’ll never be recognized. That’s Mick. He took it from me.”
Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) Page 4