Sweet Masterpiece

by Connie Shelton

  For the first time she noticed that he had incredible shoulders and Sam guessed him to be a bit younger than herself, probably in his late forties. Dark hair with sprinkles of gray and sideburns nearly white. Blue eyes, the color of deep ocean, distracted her as he pulled out a clipboard with some forms on it.

  Stop it, she admonished herself, you are not interested. She tugged her shirttails down and turned her attention away from Beau.

  Two men, both in uniform, were approaching. The one in charge was about her height, maybe five-five or –six, Hispanic, forty-ish, with a solid paunch. Cardwell quickly introduced him as Sheriff Orlando Padilla.

  “There’s no permit on record for that grave,” Padilla said to Sam. “We also checked county death records for the past six months and cross referenced them with burial records. We don’t have any death certificates without records of where burial took place. That’s why we’re treating this as a potential crime scene. We’ll need to take a look inside the house.”

  “The grave is actually out at the back edge of the lawn,” Sam said.

  Cardwell sent her a wry grin. “Let’s take a look out there first, then you can unlock the house.” He gestured toward the backyard. “Show us what you found.”

  She led the way, noticing how she’d cut the grass yesterday. Nice clean rows near the house, one trail toward the back, an abrupt stop. The mound of dirt was still mainly surrounded by tall grass but she stood aside and pointed toward it. While the three men poked around in the tall grass Sam went back and unlocked the front door, crossed through the living room and kitchen and came out the back.

  Padilla stood with hands on hips, glanced at the ground, looked at Beau. Sam stood by, wishing she could just get on with her job.

  “Do you know when Anderson vacated the place?” It took Sam a second to realize Beau was talking to her.

  “I think our records indicated that the owner left sometime in March or April.”

  Padilla turned to him. “Well, no permit, we have to dig.” He stared at the younger deputy, a stout kid in his twenties, who grimaced and headed for his patrol car. He came back a minute later with a shovel. Sam got the feeling the pudgy young guy would rather that the more physically fit Beau do the digging but he didn’t say anything.

  “Start on this,” Padilla told him. “Cardwell, you take a look in the house. I have to get back to town.”

  Beau touched Sam’s elbow in a gentlemanly way. She looked up at him, but he’d turned back to be sure the other deputy was shoveling. She headed toward the house and let him in the back door.

  It led directly into the kitchen. People who skipped out didn’t seem to feel the need to wash dishes or clean up. A trash can in one corner overflowed, primarily with fast food wrappers, pizza boxes and paper plates. All the real dishes were stacked in the sink and on counters. Sam didn’t even want to guess at the guck that had dried onto them.

  She felt a little embarrassed by the mess, as if she’d invited a guest into her own home and they’d found it in this condition. But Beau didn’t seem to care. He gave the kitchen a glance, ignoring the trash and the table, which she’d just noticed was covered in beer cans with a half eaten pizza dried to a crisp in its box. He’d walked into the living room.

  Almost on auto pilot, Sam went to the sink and tested to see if there was hot water. After a minute the cold stream became warm, then hot, then steamy. She found a nearly empty bottle of dish detergent under the sink and squirted it liberally over the haphazard stack. Stoppering the basin, she let the whole thing fill with hot water.

  “Sam?” The deputy’s voice came from another room. “You’re not moving anything, are you?”

  Oh shit. In her haste to make the place presentable, she’d forgotten that the whole house might be considered part of the crime scene.

  He strode in from the other room. “Don’t tell me you’re washing away our evidence. Please don’t tell me that.”

  She’d turned off the faucet but the sudsy basin gave her away. “Deputy, I . . . should I let the water out?”

  He stared down at her from his six and a half feet, eyes dark beneath the Stetson. “No, it’s okay.”

  She felt like a complete idiot. Hadn’t she watched enough episodes of CSI to know that you didn’t touch a thing at a crime scene?

  He glanced out the back window, noticing that the younger deputy had quit digging. He opened the back door. “Relax. And just call me Beau.” He seemed about to say something more but turned away instead.

  She watched him walk to the back of the property. Suppressing the urge to bag the trash, she jammed her hands into her pockets and stepped out to the back porch. She could see that the deputies had found something. The shovel stuck up from the ground and the young guy was squatting at the edge of the hole, tugging at something. Beau, too, hunkered down examining the object. Curiosity piqued her interest but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details, close up. After a minute or two Beau stood and spoke into his shoulder mike. He brushed dirt off his hands and walked back toward the house.

  From the porch step Sam was exactly eye level with him as he stopped to speak.

  “There’s a body, all right,” he said. “It’s wrapped in blankets, not exactly a funeral director’s style. We’re going to need to exhume and identify it.”

  Exhume, as in dig up and bring out into the open. Sam really didn’t want to know too much about that.

  “It would take me probably another week to get a team of crime lab folks out here from Santa Fe, and this isn’t exactly a fresh scene. It’s just that Padilla and myself will be the only qualified ones in the office the rest of the week—”

  “Could I help in some way? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Well, yeah.” He actually scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “It would just be to go through things in the house and try to get more information about the owner.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what I do.” As long as she didn’t have to get a good up-close look at a decomposing body, she was happy with any other little task. Plus, the sooner this whole thing was resolved, the sooner she’d finish her real job here and be able to submit her invoice. And that meant a check. And that meant groceries.

  Damn Kelly, Sam thought. It’s an awful way to feel about my own daughter, but cleaning out my checking account was a shitty thing.

  She suppressed that line of thought and stepped back into the messy kitchen.

  “What kind of information do you want me to look for?” she asked. “Anderson’s relatives, that kind of thing?”

  He grinned at her. “You’re getting the idea. You’ll make a great assistant deputy.”

  “Isn’t a deputy already an assistant?”

  “Yeah, but we’re kind of winging it here. Unless you want to go out there and help pull the body out of the grave, you’ll have to be content without an official swearing in.” Was he flirting?

  “Trust me, I’m very content not to be sworn in. Just tell me what I have to do to get on with cleaning this place up.”

  “Okay. We need papers, bills, checks—anything that might let us know more about Anderson. How long ago since anyone last heard from him. That sort of thing.”

  “There’s a desk in a corner of the living room. I can start with that.” He handed her a pair of surgical gloves and she cut through the kitchen, refusing to look at the heaping trashcan and piles of food-encrusted dishes. Beau followed, poking at the bathroom door, using a ballpoint pen to pull drawers open, scanning the rooms quickly to get a general feel for the layout.

  “He must have had someone else living here,” Sam observed. “Both bedrooms look lived in. I mean, one guy living here alone—even a husband and wife—there’s going to be one bedroom used and the other as a spare, right?”

  “Good observation, assistant.” He was flirting! Sam noticed how there was the tiniest gap near one of his incisors; he had a habit of smiling slightly wider on that side of his mouth. It had the effect of making him hu
man, dimming slightly the otherwise near perfect looks. Stop thinking about that!

  “Both beds are rumpled, there are clothes in both closets,” he said, stepping back into the hallway. “I’ll canvass a few of the neighbors later. The medical investigator should be getting here soon.”

  Like a prophecy coming true, they heard a vehicle pull up to the house. Beau went out the front door while Sam turned back to her work. Through the open drapes at the back bedroom window she could see him showing a man in a suit out to the gravesite, the same guy who’d been at Bertha Martinez’s yesterday. The men were standing over a bundle of cloth, the blankets Beau had mentioned. The bundle hardly looked large enough to contain a person, she thought with a pang.

  She pulled open the first of the desk drawers. So, Mr. Riley Anderson, who were you? Are you the sad little heap out there in the yard now, or did you put someone else there?

  Chapter 6

  Beau and the younger deputy loaded the blanketed bundle into the back of the OMI vehicle to be taken to Albuquerque for autopsy, and saw the man off before coming back into the house. They worked with Sam for a couple of hours side by side, until the men pretty well decided that they weren’t going to find blood stains, bullet holes or signs of violent death. The goal now was to identify the body, so Beau took fingerprints from several surfaces. Two radio calls had come in while they worked and they were beginning to feel the squeeze to attend to other cases. Sam agreed to box up whatever bills or personal papers she came across and turn them over. Otherwise, she was free to clean the place to her heart’s content.

  She filled four garbage bags in the kitchen, threw them into her truck. Scrubbed the appliances, put away dishes, sanitized countertops and floors. In the other rooms, she gathered books and trinkets and boxed them for her favorite thrift shop. There was a book on plants that she thought Zoe would like, and a couple of mysteries that Ivan might be able to sell in his shop. The rules allowed her to distribute the household furnishings in the way she saw fit, so she tried to make the best use of everything. Furniture stayed with the house, those pieces in decent condition. Sometimes they weren’t, and the trashed-out things would be hauled to the dump.

  She spent some time at the desk in the living room, gathering statements from the local bank, unpaid utility bills with progressively harsh warnings and scraps of anything that might provide the sheriff with clues about Anderson’s life. The only thing remotely menacing was a letter from an attorney. Dated nearly a year earlier, it addressed a claim by an adjoining property owner that Anderson’s fence was two feet over the boundary. The neighbor, Leonard Trujillo, was insisting that Anderson move the fence or pay him for the ‘stolen’ land. Sam’s guess was that if Anderson couldn’t pay his own mortgage, he sure couldn’t pay a neighbor the ridiculous amount the letter alleged that he owed for a tiny strip of land. She crammed all the papers into a shoebox, setting the attorney’s letter on top where the sheriff’s people would easily see it. Finally, she closed the drawers and wiped her dusty hands on her jeans.

  Grabbing a duster Sam hit the door jambs and corners, swiping away the cobwebs that seemingly appeared overnight in this part of the country. She noticed quite a number of nails in the walls; there had once been a lot of pictures hung, and by the spacing she guessed that they were larger pieces of art, not just family photos. But they were gone now.

  With the living, dining, kitchen and bathroom in good shape, she tackled the two bedrooms, starting with the smaller. Beau and the deputy had taken several items—clothes and bedding—that might provide DNA for matching with the body in the grave. Sam bagged the rest of the clothing for the trip to the thrift shop. Male, size medium, whose taste ran to rugby shirts and chinos. The bed in this room consisted of a mattress on the floor and it was lumpy looking and stained so it went out to her truck, added to the load for the dump.

  The larger, master bedroom seemed to be where the law enforcement guys had concentrated so there wasn’t much left. They took all the bedding, the contents of the bedside stand, and some clothing from closet and dresser. Sam began going through the pockets of every remaining garment, as she’d promised Beau she would do, before tossing the item into the charity bag.

  In the pocket of a pair of brown slacks, she came across a narrow slip of yellow paper, like a store receipt. Except it was written as a promissory note, with Anderson agreeing to pay someone named Harry Woodruff, the sum of four hundred dollars for “merchandise received.” That was all. No name of the store, no explanation of the purchase. Just someone who gave Anderson credit. It was dated two years ago, so the odds were that the debt had been paid or the man had forgotten about it, but Sam saved the slip for the sheriff’s investigators anyway.

  Garments continued to fill the bag. All of the clothing was old, as its owner must have been. From the styles of the shirts, pants and shoes, he was a slight man who was probably in his seventies or so. Most everything was well worn, and many of the pieces had paint stains on them. When she reached the far corner of the closet shelf she discovered a box with brushes and paints which explained the condition of his things.

  Sam immediately thought of her friend, Rupert Penrick, who probably had friends who might like the supplies. She set the box aside for him.

  With the closet clear, she brought in the vacuum cleaner and started to work with the crevice tool. The far reaches were coated in dust balls and cobwebs and she quickly did away with them. Closets always sell a house, so she wanted this one to look as big and unencumbered as possible. She switched on the light and opened the bedroom drapes to see the space better. And then she noticed something strange.

  The far wall of the closet was painted very crudely, almost as if someone had taken white shoe polish to it. They were clearly trying to cover up something else, because a design of some kind showed through in a few places. She grabbed a bottle of spray cleaner and decided to check it out.

  As she rubbed at one corner of the area, the cheap white over-coat came away, revealing a scene underneath. The more she worked, the larger the hidden painting became. It was a mural, a rural scene done in an impressionistic style. Odd. What a strange place for a painted mural. She worked at it a little more until the entire scene was revealed. And in the lower corner was a signature. Pierre Cantone.

  Her pulse quickened. The Pierre Cantone? No art expert, what little Sam knew had rubbed off from time spent around Rupert, but she knew the name Pierre Cantone. It was like saying have you heard of Renoir or Picasso. Everyone had heard of Cantone. What on earth was Riley Anderson up to? Copying a famous artist’s work, maybe for practice? Or . . . an even more astounding thought . . . could it be possible that the famous artist had once stayed at this house? Before Anderson bought it? Maybe the old man had unknowingly painted over a real masterpiece.

  She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed Rupert’s number.

  “What are you doing?” she asked the second she heard his voice.

  “I’m writing, Sam. It’s what I do. Every day. I’m two hundred pages into Love’s Velvet Hammer and you wouldn’t have caught me except that I just paused for a quick lunch break.” Rupert was an aging writer, former Little Theatre actor, and art aficionado who secretly wrote romance novels under the name of Victoria DeVane. He made a fantastic amount of money, as Victoria was always at the top of the bestseller lists, but only the closest of friends knew his true identity because even his editor says that men can’t write romances.

  “Good,” Sam said. “I’ve got something here that you have to see.”

  “Where? Your house?”

  “No, sorry. I’m at one of my break-ins. I may have just found an original Pierre Cantone.”

  “Ohmygod! No way!”

  “I’m pretty sure. Well, okay, I’m not at all sure. I don’t know this stuff, but there’s a mural on one wall, about two feet by three feet big, his style, and his signature.”

  “Girl—” He breathed the word more than he said it.

  “If you w
ant to come out here . . .”

  Very little would get Rupert to vary his writing schedule, but art was one thing and a find of this type would definitely do it. Sam gave him directions and he said he’d be there in ten minutes. That worried her a little, since the place was at least twenty minutes from town. But Rupert was known for driving his Mini-Cooper like a Formula-1 racer.

  She began to have pangs the minute she hung up. She really should have told Beau Cardwell about this first. She dialed his direct number from the card he’d left with her and quickly explained the find.

  “It’s painted right on the wall?” he said.

  She confirmed.

  “Well, then I guess it’s not going anywhere very soon. You got a camera with you?”

  “Out in the truck.” She carried one for the occasional property where she might need to document something really unusual for her supervisor. “I’ll get some pictures.”

  “Good. And don’t paint over it or anything. I may need to come back out there at some point and take a look.”

  Paint over it? Like that would happen. She would, however, be lucky if Rupert didn’t bring a saw with him and want to take out the wall.

  “Any word yet on the identity of the body in the grave?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Sam, it’s only been three hours since I was there.”

  Really? She glanced at her watch. Holy cow. She’d blazed her way through the house in record time. The kitchen alone would have normally taken longer than that. And she didn’t even feel tired.

  True to his word, Rupert showed up minutes later. They sat in front of the closet door, staring at the mural. He’d run his hands lovingly over the paint, verifying that it wasn’t just some kind of decal or trick of decoupage or something. No, it truly was an original, painted right there. But was it a Cantone?