Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2)

by Lisa Brunette

  “Are you retired, Mr. Smith?” she asked. “And by that I mean from the web-services company you worked for, not from art.”

  “Yes, I am,” he replied, without going further.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said, putting an overabundance of cheer into her voice.

  Clive cleared his throat. “Are you here to investigate my family?”

  “Well, no. I was making small talk.”

  “I think Clive here isn’t the small-talk type,” Cat interjected.

  “Got that right.” His voice sounded irritated. “I’m driving around here with two white women in my car, both of whom say they’re here to investigate me. That’s not exactly the kind of scenario that lends itself to small talk.”

  “My apologies, Mr. Smith,” Grace said.

  There was a long silence in which Clive Smith neither acknowledged nor accepted her apology. Cat and Grace let him drive without interruption, and soon they were in an older subdivision, the houses nearly identical to one another and built sometime in the late Sixties. The Smith residence was a rambler with a tightly manicured front yard. Smith led them through his front door, where an enthusiastic collie greeted them, followed by a woman in her thirties carrying a baby on her hip. Both mother and child shared Smith’s likeness.

  For the first time, Smith’s stony countenance softened as he greeted his family at the door and introduced everyone. The woman was his daughter, Tabitha, and her baby was named Ru. They migrated to a playroom off the dining room, and Smith shepherded Grace and Cat into the living room. He did not offer them anything to drink.

  He sat in an imposing leather armchair that Grace surmised was his favorite, and she and Cat took the couch. Steepling his fingers under his chin, he said, “Now then. What would you like to know?”

  Pent up from the long journey to see him, Cat and Grace fired questions at him rapidly. He answered in as short a manner as possible. They were getting nowhere till Cat asked him this one: “What did you think of Mick’s grad-school masterpiece? Pink Splash? The one that won him that national award.”

  Smith’s face broke into a look of utter disgust. He rolled his eyes. “Some masterpiece,” he said. “Mick did what every white man does who wants to make it big. He’s the Elvis of the art world.”

  “Because the piece dealt with racial identity,” Cat prodded.

  “Racial identity! That’s a laugh.”

  “You didn’t think the work had merit?” asked Grace.

  “No, I did not,” said Smith. “Only inasmuch as he lifted his ideas from black artists of the time whose work deserved recognition but who would not get it because they were black.

  “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to kill the man. I could care less what happens to him, honestly. I’ve had nothing to do with Travers since Columbia. I see his work every once in awhile by accident, browsing through a magazine or something, but other than the ever-persistent, low-grade resentment I foster toward a racist culture, I have no beef with that man in particular.”

  “Do you remember anyone who might hate him enough to hurt him in print, so to speak?” asked Grace. “There was a letter in an art magazine. You might have seen it when it came out. It was made to look like Mick wrote it, criticizing a professor who supported him, but he didn’t write it.”

  “I don’t recall any letter like that. A lot of people were jealous of the attention he received. We’d bitch about it over beers, that kind of thing. But I don’t think any of them have carried that around this long. You do realize it’s been forty years, don’t you?”

  Grace felt deflated again by the man’s words, but her granddaughter seemed to rise to his challenge.

  “That’s long enough to build into something pretty ugly,” she said. “Especially if someone’s looking at heading into old age without the artistic success they feel was their due. How are you on that front, Clive? I’ve never seen your face on the cover of Art in Our Time. Mick’s been on several times.”

  He gave a bitter chuckle at that one. “You’re like a dog with a bone.” He shook his head. “Look, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for out here. Sure, I regret not having become the artist I dreamed of becoming, but that’s life. I married a wonderful woman, God rest her soul, and I regret losing her to cancer more than I regret not becoming a big-shot artist.”

  He gestured toward a photo on the mantel, an old wedding photo taken in the Seventies. Clive had exaggerated sideburns and an afro. The bride was voluptuous and must have known it, for she’d chosen a form-fitting dress that hugged her curves.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cat. “When did she pass?”

  “Two years ago,” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “After our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

  Grace felt her phone buzz in her pocketbook. “She was quite the looker,” she said. “How many children do you have?”

  “Oh, just the one.” His gaze redirected to the room beyond, where they could hear his granddaughter exclaiming with delight over something her mother was showing her. “Have you got everything you need, ladies? I’d like to spend some time with my family, if you don’t mind, and I need to take you back to where you can catch a bus.”

  They rose to leave although Grace hadn’t felt the trip gleaned enough information to clear Clive of suspicion. She peeked at her phone in the car and noticed a call from Mick, who only called her when it was urgent. She listened to the message.

  “Pris,” he said, his breathing hard, “someone torched my beach house.”

  Chapter Eight

  Cat wondered now if Granny Grace was right, that someone wanted Mick dead.

  She reflected as she surveyed the remains of his beach house that the killer had twice missed the mark, which could mean murder didn’t come naturally to him. Or her.

  Mick’s beach house was located in far South Dade, further south than where O.J. Simpson famously lived. And it was tiny, with only one bedroom plus a sort of indoor/outdoor porch with louvered glass windows that everyone in Florida called a “lanai.” The house was too small for Mick to work on anything other than small roughs or prototype sketches for his oversized paintings, which is why he was hardly ever there except to sleep or when he wanted to sit and stare at the water. But it was beachfront property, set on a narrow strip of land on Biscayne Bay.

  The knotty pine walls and floors must have gone up like fireplace kindling, as there was nothing left of them. Cat could see the sand beneath the floor joists. What she and Granny Grace had been able to piece together so far was that the Miami PD had stopped its twenty-four-seven watch on the place even before Cat and her grandmother had left for New York. But Mick hadn’t been back except to pick up a few things here and there. He’d visited the beach house earlier that day but had been sleeping in Ernesto’s cottage when the fire occurred. This time, the only victim was the building itself.

  Alvarez, who’d been speaking with the forensics team combing the site, trudged across the sand to Cat and her grandmother.

  “We haven’t charged Jenny Baines,” she informed them. “And she’s looking less guilty for the first arson since she was in a jail cell at the time of this fire. We’re likely going to let her go.”

  Cat nodded, thinking about her grandmother’s theory about that night, how the revenge photo Jenny took likely contributed to Donnie’s death in a roundabout way even if she hadn’t actually set the fire. “That’s assuming the two arsons were committed by the same person.”

  “True,” said Alvarez. “But we’re not sure we could make the charges stick. I suppose Mick could try to press charges against her for defamation, since she confessed to faking the photo, but that’s a long shot, and he’d have to be pretty crude to want to do that. Jenny’s clearly suffering. We, of course, don’t have a recording of their conversation, but it’s likely that her last words to Donnie were pretty bad. Still, there’s no hard evidence linking her to the arson.”

  Granny Grace said, “And you don’t have anything on
Mick.”

  Alvarez gazed at Cat and then at her grandmother. “No, we don’t. But we’ll look at him for this one.”

  Cat knew they had to, especially since Mick was likely an insurance beneficiary, but it irked her anyway. Her great-uncle had already gone back to the cottage, badly shaken.

  Alvarez excused herself and returned to the forensics team. Cat turned to her grandmother, speaking out of earshot of the others. “Could any of the people we met with in New York have made it down in time to set this fire?”

  “I was just trying to work out the math myself.”

  “We met with all three of them in the daytime.”

  “You can get a three-hour non-stop flight from New York to Miami.” Her grandmother stepped delicately over the burned ruins in her canvas espadrilles. “It’s practically a commuter zone, what with all the northern snowbirds. That’s why they call it the sixth borough of New York.”

  “So this fire doesn’t eliminate any of them as suspects,” Cat observed. “They’re estimating it was set around midnight. That would have given both Annie Lin, whom we met on Thursday afternoon, and Clive, whom we saw on Friday morning, just enough time to reach South Dade and set the fire at the beach house.”

  “And dear Norris had even more time,” said Grace.

  They were quiet in their mutual frustration at having eliminated no suspects.

  “Let’s find out if any of them traveled,” said Cat.

  She and Granny Grace went back to the cottage and got to work. Granny checked the passenger lists at the airlines for the three New York suspects but came up blank.

  Disguising herself as one of his clients, Cat called Norris’s office to see if he was available for an urgent meeting. Chatting up his admin, she discovered that Norris was in fact in Miami.

  “Miami, eh?” she said, making her voice sound aggressive. “I’m not far from there myself right now. Tell me where he’s staying, and I’ll drop by.”

  The admin gave a nervous cough in response. “Oh, well, Mr. Grayson took his wife for their anniversary. He didn’t want to be disturbed with any business matters.”

  “The account’s in jeopardy, so I’d say that’s important enough to disturb Grayson,” Cat spit back.

  “Would you like to speak to one of the other partners?”

  “Would Grayson like me to speak to one of the other partners? Or wouldn’t he rather handle this on his own?”

  “You’re right. Let me find that hotel name for you… He’s staying at the Biltmore. Special occasion, you see.”

  Cat informed her grandmother, who suggested it was time to loop in Sergeant Alvarez. Cat agreed and did the honors herself.

  Within an hour, Cat, Grace, and Alvarez descended upon the Biltmore, where a stunned and angry Norris Grayson effected what Cat took to be a self-righteous act. Rising from a lounge chair in his swim trunks beside the Biltmore’s famed Grecian pool, Norris sputtered his outrage at being disturbed on his anniversary.

  “I told you everything I know about Mick Travers in New York!”

  Alvarez stepped between Norris and Granny Grace, who bore the brunt of his ire. “Calm down, Mr. Grayson,” she said. “You’re under suspicion of arson, and we need you to cooperate and answer some questions.”

  At that, Norris’s wife, who’d been ensconced on the lounge chair next to his, softly but firmly said, “Could we take this somewhere less public?” Cat followed her gaze toward the coiffed, slick hotel guests staring with interest at the spectacle. Norris’s wife tightened her beach cover-up for emphasis and gestured to a door beyond a faux Greek statue. “There are private meeting rooms inside.”

  Cat was only too happy to oblige, as she was still wearing pants and a blazer, and the close Miami noontime sun was making her sweat. She welcomed the blast of air conditioning as they stepped into the hotel proper and filed into a swanky meeting room.

  “Now then,” said Alvarez, “tell us how you got to Miami without having your name added to any passenger lists.”

  Norris’s wife broke in. “That’s my father’s doing, I’m afraid. This trip was a surprise for us, so it’s in my father’s name—the plane tickets, the hotel reservations.”

  “But with the Homeland Security precautions these days, you’d have to give your real names,” Cat challenged.

  “It’s under the VIP Club,” his wife said. “We didn’t have any problems. They simply took Norris as my father’s guest. His name is Stephen Dunnavan, if you want to look it up.”

  Cat felt this was too convenient, even if true. And what was this preferential treatment from Homeland Security? It figured that those with enough money and influence could avoid the scouring of security checks.

  Her grandmother turned to Norris. “So you’ve been here at the hotel the whole time? Who can vouch for you? Do you have an alibi for last night?”

  “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.