CHAPTER 27
Brad Houston leaned back in his chair and got comfortable, a signaling we were approaching a favorite subject. “You need to get caught up on your Florida history. Back in the late 1950s, a group of young blacks decided they'd rather sell paintings than work in the citrus industry picking and packing fruit. Working out of the trunks of their cars, they sold paintings all up and down Highway 95. That's how they came to be known as the Highwaymen, even though one of their number is a woman.”
“What did they paint?” I asked, sipping the cola that his secretary had brought me.
“Idealized images of Florida. Old Florida. The St. Lucie River. Poinciana trees in bloom. Think about motel art or old postcards of the era, and you'll have it nearly right.”
“How many did they sell?”
“One estimate is 100,000. Another is 200,000.”
I choked on my cola. “Beg pardon?”
“Usually they would paint three days a week, frame their work on another day, and spend the weekend trying to sell what they'd done. The painters were all from Ft. Pierce originally. My mother remembers seeing one or another of them outside the bank where she worked. Some landscapes sold for as little as $25. To keep the prices down, the Highwaymen painted on Upson board, a roofing product. The frames were constructed of molding and 'antiqued' with gold paint. If you recall, 'antiquing things' was the rage back then.”
“They were successful?” I asked.
“They made enough to live on. Not a lot more. They painted their world, the one they saw around them, and at that time, Florida was going through a housing boom, so their scenes were both familiar and exotic. And, they painted fast, because they realized that the more they painted, the more they could sell. As Al Hair once said, 'Paint slow when you get old.'“
“Who was Al Hair?” I asked.
“An extraordinarily gifted young man who died at age twenty-nine at a juke joint in Ft. Pierce. One of Essie Feldman's favorite painters, or so I'm told.”
“Was he killed because he was famous?” I thought about how Gianni Versace had been gunned down on the steps of his home in South Beach.
“No. Not exactly famous. Al was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But by then he'd earned enough to buy himself a Cadillac, one of his lifelong dreams.”
“Are Al Hair's paintings the ones that are missing? Were they stolen from The Treasure Chest?” I tried to put all the pieces together, but like often happens with puzzles, they didn't quite fit. At least not yet.
“You're getting ahead of yourself. You have to understand that a lot of people laughed at the Highwaymen's efforts. To be honest, when you buy a piece of art out of the back of someone's trunk, you don't expect much. Of course, there was a lot of racial prejudice, too. But a handful of these guys were good. Really good. Even early collectors could see that. For example, Essie Feldman recognized their worth right away. She had an eye for talent. She snapped up as many paintings as she could, concentrating on the better examples of their work.”
“Essie's stash has gone missing?”
“That's right. Twelve years ago, when she had her first stroke, they all disappeared. Vanished. Poof! Into thin air. They've never been recovered.”
“These would be worth a considerable amount of money?”
“A conservative estimate would put them at two million dollars. Maybe even three.”
I nearly fell out of my chair.
“Whoa! You're telling me that the reason The Treasure Chest is in shambles is because someone tore the place apart looking for these paintings?” I asked. “The stolen ones?”
“That's certainly possible.”
“How on earth could that have happened? How could someone swipe so many paintings without Essie knowing? It's not like The Treasure Chest is off the beaten path. It’s in the middle of downtown Stuart!”
“That's a good question. Mrs. Feldman kept all her paintings locked in a storage room right off the main sales floor. She had one employee at the time, a Mary Jayne Austin. Right before the paintings disappeared, Mrs. Feldman suffered her first stroke. After the stroke, she needed several months of physical therapy, so her son, Irving, told Mrs. Austin to close the store and take a vacation. It was during that hiatus that the paintings disappeared.”
“Is it possible that he took them? Her son? I think I only met him once,” I said. “A long, long time ago.”
“Why would he steal them?” asked Houston. “They were going to be his someday anyhow.”
“How do you know he didn't? He could have taken them and turned in a claim for the insurance.”
“And gotten diddly.”
“Excuse me?”
“At the time they were stolen, the paintings weren't worth much. No, if he'd had them, Irving Feldman would have held onto them and sold them one by one as they accrued value over the years. I am certain that he didn't. He doesn’t have any money. It's public knowledge that Mr. Feldman's house was recently foreclosed upon.”
“Isn't it possible that the woman took them? That employee you mentioned? Mary Jayne somebody? Or that she helped someone steal them?”
“Highly doubtful. The police investigated her thoroughly. Mrs. Austin was visiting her sick mother up in Michigan at the time of the theft. She's the one who discovered the works were missing when she came back to work at the store. It hardly seems logical that she would have returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, and reported a theft that she had engineered. If she had stolen the works, there'd be a money trail back to her and there isn't. She's broke, too.”
“How else could they have vanished?” I asked.
“That's a very good question.”
CHAPTER 28
After fattening the wallets of two attorneys, I headed back to Dick's Gas E Bait, keeping my fingers crossed that my grandfather would have Black Beauty up and running. And she was. I thanked Poppy for his hard work.
“You need a place to bunk up for the night?” He wiped his hands on a red rag. Then he turned off the Camry's engine and passed the keys to me. His voice sounded wistful. Lonely even. “I gave her an oil change while I was under the hood.”
I realized then that I didn't know my grandfather. Not really. We'd stayed in communication over the years, but we'd never really spent much time together. Not after that summer when my mother insisted that it was better to kidnap me than to let me continue a romance with “that Indian boy.”
No, my dad had been the primary link between Poppy and our family. You'd think my mother would have kept her father a part of our lives, and she did sort of. They weren't totally estranged. She talked to her father, sent him greeting cards, made his flight arrangements for the holidays, and so on, but they weren't really close. I had long suspected that she'd had a falling out with Poppy. On the other hand, maybe she was simply content to let her husband do the hard work of maintaining ties with the irksome old man.
Marriages are built on a silent contract between two people. Rarely does the couple discuss their expectations. They slide into patterns, and with those come expectations. Instinctively, I understood my parents' agreed upon division of labor: Mom was in charge of raising me, and Dad kept tabs on Poppy. My mother was an organizer, a cleaner, a systems analyst, a drill sergeant whose authority was unquestionable. Our home functioned like a well-oiled machine under her stern watch. So did the restaurant.
My father was the heart of our home. He was the parent who cried over old movies. Who said, “Yes,” when I wanted a dog. Dad was the one who glued people together, who turned strangers into teams of co-workers. While Mom remembered birthdays because they were on her calendar, Dad remembered birthdays because he cared about people.
Whose child was I? My mother's or my father's?
“Yes, I do need a place to sleep tonight. Actually, I could do with a long hot shower. People have been avoiding me all day.”
“Come on back to my house.” Poppy leaned against a dirty wall, his shoulder half-covering a torn calendar of
the Ozarks. “After you get cleaned up, we'll go out to eat.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I wasn't sure I could manage sleeping there. Not in its current state, but a shower would be lovely.
I climbed into Black Beauty and gave her a scolding, as I followed my grandfather to his house. “You were a bad, bad girl, Black Beauty. Don't you ever, ever act up like that again. You're a bad car. Bad!”
Although the shower in Poppy's guest bathroom was a bit dingy, it was clean. There was a rust stain here and there, and a thick rope of dust on the ceiling fan, but otherwise, that particular room was presentable, almost as if my grandfather had kept it pristine just in case someone dropped by.
I nearly moaned with joy as hot water sluiced over my hair and skin, washing away the stink of dead fish. With a bar of Lifebuoy soap in my hand, I scrubbed myself repeatedly. It took forever to convince myself I smelled okay. Why couldn't I have been presentable when I met Cooper?
I told myself it didn't matter.
After I dried off and dressed, I picked my way past piles of magazines to the living room where my grandfather watched CNN on his old TV console. We decided to eat at Shrimpers, a waterfront restaurant on the Manatee Marina. Taking separate cars seemed like a good idea, one that would give me a chance to make sure my Toyota was back to her old self.
“Where are we exactly?” I asked Poppy, after we both parked and as we walked up the gangplank to the covered porch. Even though I had been to Stuart many times, I didn't recognize this area.
“This here's called the Manatee Pocket. Part of the Intercoastal,” he said. “Over the years, I've seen more manatees here than anywhere else in the area. Poor things. They're big and slow and get hit by boaters all the time.”
The waitress seated us by the water. Boats cruised up and parked in front of us as we listened to the water lap at the moorings. Until the food came, we didn't say much to each other.
As I ate my Salerno salad and he dipped fried grouper into cocktail sauce, I asked him if he knew about the theft of the Highwaymen paintings.
“Yep, I heard about that.”
“What do you think happened to them?”
“Beats me. Who cares?”
I tried another topic. “Who do you think murdered Hal Humberger?”
“Philomena.”
“His wife?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“He was a thorn in her side. Spent most of his time gambling down at the Kennel Club in West Palm. Chased after other women. Didn't catch 'em, but he sure made a fool of himself trying. Bought things he couldn't afford.”
I set down my fork. “You seem to know a lot about him.”
“Enough to know he was no good. If she done it, she oughta get a medal.” Poppy didn't sound like he really believed that, more like he was making a case, and he wanted me to drop the subject.
I decided to change the subject. “Speaking of no good, you sure seemed friendly with Cooper.”
“Yep.”
“Why? I mean, he wanted to run you out of business, but you were making nice with him.”
“Who told you that about running me out of business?” Poppy's expression turned sour.
“Don't you remember? I told you what Mr. Humberger said. He told me Cooper was hoping to knock down The Treasure Chest and replace it with a Fill Up and Go station. That would ruin your business.”
Poppy set down his sandwich as he pushed his chair back from the table and glared at me. “Let me get this straight. You bump into a man you ain't never met, that fool Hal Humberger. He tells you an old friend is out to run your granddaddy outta business. You not only believe this stranger, you let him sell you a dump of a building that you ain't even seen in twenty-some years. That the way it went?”
“Pretty much.”
“Cara Mia Delgatto,” Poppy screamed, “you ain't got the brains God gave a goose!” With that, he tossed down his napkin and stormed out of the restaurant.
CHAPTER 29
Scoreboard: Poppy, two; Cara, zip.
No way was I following Poppy back to his house after that little repeat performance.
I'd had it with him.
Once again, I was dog-tired and without a place to lay my weary head. While waiting for the waitress to return with my credit card, I put “hotels + Stuart” into my smart phone and pulled up a Courtyard by Marriott fourteen miles away. Wasting no time, I drove straight there. In short order, I checked in, stripped to my undies and slid under clean covers.
“This is not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life,” I said, to no one in particular.
My muscles ached from all the scrubbing and cleaning I'd done to Poppy's floor, but my mind was restless and I couldn't sleep. The clock on the bedside table showed the time was still early. St. Louis was an hour behind Stuart.
I called Kiki Lowenstein. She answered the phone as she always did—breathlessly.
“Am I interrupting something?” I asked.
“Yes. No! Sort of. I was chasing one of the cats around the house. Martin is supposed to take this pill and keeps spitting it out. That little dickens. Argh! Call you right back.”
I clicked off the phone and couldn't help but laugh. First Kiki had rescued Gracie, the Great Dane, despite having never owned a big dog. Then Martin, a yellow tom, came home with Kiki after he landed on her head while she was cleaning the house of an animal hoarder. Later, Kiki’s daughter Anya begged to be able to have her own cat, Seymour, a gray tabby. Added to the confusion in their household was the arrival of a five-year-old boy, Erik, who was the son of Detweiler's first wife. With Erik came his thoroughly Scottish nanny, Bronwyn. The place was a regular three-ring circus, minus the popcorn and elephants.
Kiki's heart was as big and wide as the Mississippi. Watching her over the years, I'd seen her grow from an insecure, self-doubter, into a confident, assertive woman. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I wondered. Was I capable of change? If so, what might I do with my life? How could it be different, now that it was up to me?
Kiki had done it. She'd lived through tough times and come through it stronger.
All of us who knew her seemed to huddle under the umbrella of her loving concern. I've never seen her turn her back on anyone in need. Even though she's always strapped for money, if you needed something, she'd find a way to help you.
“Got him,” she said, by way of salutation when she returned my call.
“You okay?”
“I stuffed the pill inside a Hebrew National hot dog.” Kiki chuckled. “Martin decided the pill was a small price to pay for the hot dog.”
I laughed out loud.
As she talked, I got up and explored the armoire. Inside was a one-cup coffeemaker with a couple of bags of decaf Lipton tea teabags. Not my favorite, but it would do. In a few minutes, I held a cup of warm brew in my hands.
“How are you?” Kiki asked.
I filled her in on all that had happened since coming to Stuart. She listened carefully, only interrupting when she needed for me to clarify a point or elaborate. I even told her about Cooper, but not about our history. When I'd wound down, she said, “Interesting, but that doesn't answer my question. How are you? You've stumbled on a corpse. You've had disagreements with your grandfather. You own an abandoned building. Those are a lot of changes in a short time.”
“I'm fine. I guess.”
“Not too upset about the dead guy?”
She was right. I'd done a wizard job of denying how upsetting that had been. Probably because so much other stuff had been going on.
“Luckily for me, it wasn't a messy scene, and I barely knew him. I feel bad, sure, and a little shook up, but mainly I'm worried.”
“About money? That building couldn't have been cheap.”
“Nah. I think the place was seriously undervalued. If I need to, I can flip it.”
She laughed. “Cara, you and your father have always had a golden touch when it comes to property.”
“That's true. Fixing up the place will cost a little money. But after I do, it'll be worth a lot more than I plan to spend. Maybe I'll call the Chamber of Commerce and see if they have any matching funds. Sometimes cities put aside money for refurbishing old buildings. Remember when they did that to downtown St. Louis?”
“I sure do. They turned old factories and a school into residential areas.”
“It would be great if the city can help me with The Treasure Chest. Although funding like that takes forever to come through. Maybe I won't sell the building. I could rent it. Maybe I'll even open my own business.”
“Really? What sort of place do you have in mind?”
“Essie did pretty well selling antiques and collectables. The place is currently full of odds and ends. Stuff that came with the building. Maybe I can fix some of it up. You know how much I love watching HGTV.”
“We both do.” She giggled.
“That's what I'd really like to do,” I said, warming to the idea. “I only got a quick look at the junk with the lights on. From what I saw, there were all sorts of cool things there. Old drawers from chests. Kids' bikes. A set of wheels. The teak grids they use in boats. Baluster shafts. Stuff like that. It's a treasure chest, all right, if you think you can find treasures in a dump.”
“Hmmm. Sounds like you have a plan for making those items salable,” she said. “That's so hot right now. Repurposing and recycling.”
I thought about my conversation on the same topic with Skye and found myself nodding eagerly even though Kiki couldn't see me.
The idea had merit, but the thought of tackling such a big project suddenly overwhelmed me and my confidence ebbed away.
“Something tells me there's more on your mind than this, Cara. What's worrying you? Is it seeing your old boyfriend again?”
I admitted that it was, but I also emphasized that our relationship was over. After all, he was engaged to be married.
Second Chance at Love Page 10
