Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery ssm-2

by Connie Shelton

  As Carlos went on, reiterating his promises for the state, Sam closed her eyes, working to regain a bit of the energy that had flowed out of her during the evening. When she opened them again, she saw Sandy Greene, the reporter, watching her.

  An image popped into Sam’s head—Sandy standing near a door, listening. On the door, some lettering: Suite A. The reporter’s rapt attention to the male voice ranting behind the closed barrier of wood. Suddenly Sam knew exactly how the story had become the startling ‘news flash’ heard round the wires.

  A chill crept over her arms and she wanted nothing more than to be out of there. During one of the louder outbursts from the crowd, Sam opened the tall, heavy door beside her and stepped out into the corridor. At the front desk she asked them to call a taxi.

  By nine o’clock Sam was drifting off, wrapped in her fleece robe with a mug of hot chocolate on the table beside the sofa. She’d switched on the television to catch the results of a few other races—congressional seats were at stake, along with some legislators. The Albuquerque station continued to rehash the little bit they knew about the arrest of Kevin Calendar but it wasn’t much and even the newscasters were tiring of saying the same things and showing a picture of the outside of the Taos jail, quiet and dark this time of night. Across the bottom of the screen, they ran results of the county races and she noticed that Orlando Padilla had, indeed, been re-elected sheriff by a landslide.

  She heard the kitchen door close and Kelly called out.

  “Beau isn’t home yet,” she told Sam, “but Iris is snug in her bed and I wasn’t needed so I decided to come home. What was the story on the radio about Taos County and the new governor? I only caught a bit of it.”

  Sam filled her in on the basics, leaving out everything having to do with witchy predictions, colored auras and the fact that Kevin had tried to attack her before Beau brought him down. There are some things a daughter doesn’t need to know.

  Kelly said goodnight and Sam headed for her own room, after checking the doors and turning out the lights. She had no idea how much time had passed, only that she was in a complete blackout sleep, when the phone rang.

  She felt around for the bedside phone and mumbled a sleepy hello.

  “You meddling bitch!”

  Chapter 26

  Sam came instantly awake.

  “Can’t believe how you, you slimy bitch . . . how you messed me up.” The words were slurred and the voice was definitely Orlando Padilla’s.

  “Sheriff, what’s going on?”

  “You know, you—”

  “No. Stop just a minute. I don’t know. What are you talking about?” Her thoughts tried to wrap themselves around his accusation. He’d been nowhere near the Tafoya victory party tonight.

  “Marg . . . Margaret is going to leave me, and it’s all your fault.”

  Ah, the affair with Elena Tafoya was about to come to light. “How is it my fault, Orlando?”

  “You just . . . just . . . I don’t know what you said to her.”

  His words became more sloppy and rambling as he went. Her denials that she’d said anything at all to his wife went unheeded. Sam couldn’t make any sense of how he thought she was involved and she finally gave him a quick goodbye and hung up the phone.

  It rang again almost instantly but she hung up again when she realized that Padilla wouldn’t give up. She left the receiver off the hook and tried hard to get back to sleep, but she couldn’t get her mind to settle down. Would he come to her house? Would he take out his anger on Beau? Might he even become abusive with Margaret?

  Obviously, his brief affair with Elena was about to come to light and here was a guy who didn’t want to face the consequences. Sam grumbled a little and rolled over once more, falling asleep—finally—sometime near dawn.

  Wednesday morning she gave herself over to the luxury of burrowing into the quilts for an extra hour. With Becky back at the bakery today, both of the younger women had persuaded Sam not to come in early. After the drama of last evening and the interruption to her sleep, it didn’t take a lot of will power to let herself sleep in.

  Somewhere around nine she began to feel hungry. She pulled on a robe and placed the receiver back on the phone, then went to the kitchen for cereal. The morning television shows were full of talk about the election results, with more and more connections between Carlos Tafoya and Kevin Calendar coming out by the hour. Sam planted herself in a corner of the sofa and crunched on her breakfast as she watched.

  The newly elected governor stood before a blue background in some office somewhere, taking questions from the press. In short, it looked like he was taking the tired old “It was inappropriate behavior” line, admitting that he’d once (he made it sound like sometime in a previous life) had an extramarital affair and that there was a child with this other woman. About the time he was getting into the equally tired line about “getting on with the business of the state” Sam’s phone rang.

  “Hey you,” said Beau. “You doing okay this morning?”

  He sounded haggard, and admitted that he’d not slept all night when Sam asked how he was.

  “Kevin actually admitted quite a bit before Carlos showed up with a lawyer for the kid.”

  “I’ve just been watching the spin version on TV,” she said. “No doubt he’ll not lose his public support, once he’s fed them the old boys-will-be-boys routine and expressed just enough remorse.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that. When we questioned him, Carlos actually did seem horrified that Kevin took it as far as he did. Apparently, Jean had kept her son in the dark all these years—made up some story about a father who left when he was an infant. She finally broke down last year and told him the truth. Once he found out who his real father was, Kevin really wanted them to be a family. Showing Carlos what a good son he’d turned out to be was the whole reason he volunteered with the campaign.”

  “Seriously? At twenty, this young man thinks they’ll just go back in time and become a happy little trio?”

  “Well, no one ever said the kid didn’t have issues. A lot of them. And it didn’t help that Carlos played along, letting Kevin believe that he would leave Elena and marry Jean.”

  Sam shook her head. What a mess.

  “So, one down and one to go,” Beau said.

  “That’s right—Bram Fenton’s death. Did Kevin also have something to do with that?”

  “Not as far as I can tell. But when I ran the name past Carlos, he sure clammed up.”

  “What? He didn’t hire Fenton after all?”

  “I’m still pretty sure he did. Jean Calendar said something weird. She claimed that a man—whom she described very well as Fenton—had been following her for days. She thought Carlos had something do to with it because it started just a couple days after she’d contacted him and told him she was in town.”

  “Wait a second. Now I’m really confused,” Sam said. “Did he hire the investigator to follow Elena or to follow Jean?”

  “Well, that’s part of what I’m calling you about. You still have Fenton’s notebook. Can you go through and re-read, now that we know more about all the players in this case? See if you can find information in Fenton’s own notes?”

  With a new mission for the day, Sam got out the notebook and set to work on it as soon as they’d ended the phone call. The dates, described with decimal points, were easy to spot now and she quickly located the timeframe for the past few months. As she perused the sets of letters, it all began to fall into place. An hour later she thought she had the answers.

  A quick shower, fresh clothes, and she was on her way to Beau’s office. She found him with his head on his desk, catching a quick snooze. He raised bloodshot eyes when he heard her approach.

  “Sorry. I should have called first,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I have to stay until the next shift starts and it’s gonna take a lot to keep me awake that long.”

  “Maybe this will help.” She set the notebook down on his desk.
“See this? JC is Jean Calendar. Look: ‘9.15flwdjc’ and ‘9.30pusrvljc@hm.fl2intm’. On September 15, Fenton followed Jean. On the 30th he meant to pick up surveillance at her home and follow to intimidate her. I found instances of these same codes used throughout the book—srvl for surveil, flw meaning to follow someone.

  “This proves that Carlos hired Fenton to follow Jean and if possible to frighten her away from Taos and from him. Carlos couldn’t afford for her to be revealing his old secrets before the election. I guess he thought that if Jean left town, Kevin would too. Naïve thinking, yes. But people do stupid things under pressure.

  “Here . . .” she flipped a page, “are Fenton’s notes when he began the surveillance, about Jean’s appearance. He describes her in terms that could easily describe Elena, too. Think about it, Beau. Both women have blond hair cut in similar styles, and were very close in height and build . . . I think the night Fenton died, he’d accidentally followed the wrong woman.”

  “Oh, god, that fits.” Beau rummaged through his interview notes. “Last night, Jean told me that Elena once came to her house, sometime in September, to confront her and say that there would be no split with Carlos during the campaign. That he couldn’t afford the scandal of a second family at that time, that Jean should just leave town. Elena suggested that Jean stay low-key for a year or so and then there could be a quiet, civilized divorce.”

  “So . . . Fenton was watching the house. Maybe he didn’t see Elena arrive but he did see her leave. Thought it was Jean, followed, intentionally putting her into a panic. But then Elena had a knife in her purse . . . He wasn’t ready for that.”

  “But Elena told you that she’d been to see her lover that night.”

  “Maybe she had. She might have come from seeing him, decided to take care of Carlos’s little indiscretion herself by reasoning with Jean . . .”

  “Like a scandal about her own affair wouldn’t cause just as much havoc as Carlos’s old affair?”

  Sam sighed. “Who knows what she was thinking. She admitted to me that she’d tried to break it off but just couldn’t help herself. She needed this man.”

  “What’s up?” The male voice intruded sharply. Sam looked up to see that Orlando Padilla had entered the squad room from a side door.

  Beau gestured toward his stacks of notes. “Just putting a few loose ends together on the Tafoya case. Trying to piece together what happened with that private investigator case, Bram Fenton.”

  The sheriff gave him a sharp look. “The suicide off the bridge?”

  Beau’s eyes narrowed warily. “It wasn’t a suicide, remember? The MI found a slashed artery. Guy bled out all over his trench coat.”

  Sam watched closely. Padilla’s outwardly smooth manner couched a vibrating bundle of nerves. The man fairly jangled with tension. The pieces fell neatly into place.

  “You were Elena’s lover.” She stated it simply.

  Words of denial automatically surfaced. He shuffled a little.

  “No,” Sam said. “It’s true. Everything fits with what Elena told me herself.”

  His face went white. “She didn’t tell you anything.”

  “She did. She was practically addicted to you, willing to risk everything just to be with you.” Even as she uttered the words, Sam had a hard time accepting the fact. This pudgy, lazy man . . . the comparison with the sleek demeanor of Carlos Tafoya didn’t even bear mentioning. But things were usually deeper than they seemed, and in matters of the heart who knew what went on.

  “And now I know what happened to Bram Fenton, too. Elena must have panicked. She slashed out at a man who’d been following her, just thinking she could make him back off. But when she actually hit him, got the carotid artery and he began to bleed and then to die right there on the street, she needed help, fast. She called the one person she thought she could count on. You. I’ll bet the records show that you were on duty that night, so you came to her location, bundled up the body, and carried him to the bridge.”

  Padilla began looking around for an exit, but Beau quietly disarmed him and stood ready to get physical if need be.

  “You couldn’t take the risk of dumping the body with the trench coat on it because it would be very evident that blood all around the neck area wasn’t consistent with a fall from the bridge. You even added a few more cuts, thinking the medical investigator would probably mistake them for injuries from the rocks below.” Sam paused to let the images catch up with her.

  “Sam, what about the coat?” Beau asked. “How did it get out to Cheryl Adams’s house?”

  “I saw him, Beau. Remember the vision I had that day? I told you I’d seen a man in dark clothing putting something into the closet? Check the dates. I’ll bet the sheriff was supposed to deliver the eviction notice to Cheryl Adams, and it probably happened within a day or so after Fenton’s death. Cheryl’s house was left unlocked—I found it that way myself. I’m betting that when Sheriff Padilla got there Cheryl had already moved out, but the house was unlocked. He saw the perfect chance to get rid of the coat in all that clutter. Just hang it in a closet and someone would eventually come along to clean out the place and the coat could never be tied to him.”

  She turned to the sheriff. “You would have been better off to burn it.”

  Padilla looked chagrined.

  Beau piped up. “You would have been better off to turn it in. If you’d reported the death as an accident, you wouldn’t be facing charges of tampering with evidence, concealing a murder, aiding and abetting . . . we can probably think of a few more.”

  Padilla’s eyes were searching the room, looking for a way out of his troubles. His gaze landed on the pistol which Beau had taken from him minutes earlier.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Beau warned.

  Padilla spun and dashed for the back door, flinging papers off of desks and tipping chairs over as he ran. But Beau was quicker. With one leap he tackled the sheriff and brought him to the floor. From the dispatch area a secretary and another deputy came running.

  By the time they reached the tangle of arms and legs, Beau had latched his cuffs onto Padilla’s wrists.

  Chapter 27

  Chocolate buttercream frosting plopped onto the top of the quarter-sheet that Sam had promised for the chocoholics book group this afternoon. She smoothed it with a spatula, creating a flat backdrop for the molded chocolate decorations she and Becky had created yesterday. They’d made a miniature vignette of the bookshop itself, with rows of books—all done in dark, milk and white chocolate—the sales counter with a small chocolate Ivan at the desk, the deep chairs where customers curled up to read sample chapters—Sam’s raspberry chocolate almost looked like the plush burgundy upholstery on the real ones.

  It had been two weeks since the election, a very interesting two weeks. Details of the bizarre story continued to come out, as national media descended upon their small town to poke and prod and ask questions. Beau withheld a lot of the particulars that would have to come out later, in court but Sam, privy to the dead private investigator’s notes, had accumulated more proof against both the new governor and the sheriff. Although Padilla had won re-election to his office, for the moment he was on suspension and being investigated by the internal affairs division of the department.

  Sandy Greene, the reporter who’d been first to break the story at the state level, was immediately fired from her job. A fine thanks, Sam thought, but no doubt sparked by the fact that the newspaper’s owner was a close friend and large contributor to Carlos Tafoya. He gained nothing by trying to quash the spunky young reporter. The firing made the news headlines even larger, and Sandy was quickly snapped up by a television network affiliate in Denver. She’d called Sam to tell her about the advancement in her career and the increase in pay. Some things do end up being all right.

  Meanwhile, as Sam set tiny chocolate figurines of Ivan’s bookstore customers—including herself and Riki and Zoë—in place, she reflected on the way in which Carlos Tafoya was coming out of t
he whole thing amazingly unscathed. But then, wasn’t that the way with politicians?

  She heard voices out in the sales area and looked up from her work to see Victor Tafoya pushing his way through to the kitchen. Her wizened, old landlord had already expressed his displeasure over her role in disgracing his son, as if Sam had actually committed some crime, herself. He shuffled over to her work table, not bothering to remove the battered straw hat that glistened with melting snowflakes.

  “Here,” he grumbled, shoving a folded sheet of paper at her.

  “What’s this, Victor?” She set down her pastry bag and wiped her hands on a damp towel before reaching out to take the page.

  “You’re evicted.”

  “What!” Her heart crashed. “You can’t do that! I have a lease.”

  “Not anymore.” He jammed his hands against his skinny hips. “I don’t need troublemakers like you around.”

  “Mr. Taf—”

  “Be out by Friday!”

  Sam stood frozen to the spot as he stomped out.

  “Whoa.” Becky looked just as immovable as Sam.

  Sam shook herself and dashed after him. “Wait, you’ve got no real cause to throw me out.”

  “So, sue me!” He yanked the front door open, sending the bells into a clamor.

  Jen stood behind the counter, wide-eyed. “Can he do that?”

  Sam’s veins felt like ice. She’d worked so hard to get the shop open and build her clientele. She could find another location but she loved being here, next to the bookstore and so close to the plaza. Tears threatened to spill.

  Outside, fine sleet pelted the elder Tafoya as he jerked open the door to his ratty old pickup truck. Why the father of the new governor didn’t at least drive a decent vehicle was always the subject of speculation, but at this point Sam couldn’t even give it a thought. The engine cranked and cranked in the blustery November day, but it wouldn’t start. She could see him cursing it. He pounded a fist against the steering wheel. Then his face went very pale and he clutched at his chest.