Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  In a flash, Beau leapt across the open space and threw an arm around Kevin’s neck. Sam watched, amazed, as he did some kind of kick that took Kevin’s legs out from under him. Pinned to the floor, Kevin flailed until Beau got handcuffs on him. Without a glance at anyone else in the room, Beau keyed his shoulder mike and called for backup.

  Keeping a knee in the middle of Kevin’s back, Beau looked up at Sam. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice came out a little on the shaky side, but Kevin hadn’t actually touched her.

  Beau kept an eye on Carlos, watchful in case the older man should attempt to free his son, but the politician seemed to be more concerned with himself.

  “I didn’t know anything about any of this,” he swore to Beau.

  Jean was openly crying, sobbing into her hands, her body a limp blubbering mass on the sofa.

  Carlos turned to face his son. “I can’t believe—” he stammered. “Kevin? Why would you— Elena?”

  Beau recited Kevin his rights, finally eliciting agreement that the young man understood what he was being told, even as he continued to spew invectives at both Beau and Carlos.

  Sam stood with her back to the wall, stunned at the show going on before her. Kevin’s red aura was fading to a dull burnt orange now; Jean was surrounded by a white fog; Carlos’s was a bright lemon yellow. She didn’t know what any of it meant and was glad when a deputy arrived to take Kevin away. Jean followed quietly, hardly speaking to Carlos, murmuring something about being with her son.

  Carlos continued to plead ignorance of the whole thing, even as he watched his son being hauled away in handcuffs and his former lover nearly becoming a zombie in her own confusion. He poured himself a half-glass of scotch at the bar and stood at the window, gazing down at the parking lot as he downed it in three gulps.

  Beau pulled Sam aside. “I’ll be tied up with the paperwork for awhile . . . He glanced at Carlos on the other side of the room.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Sam said. “This hotel, the victory party downstairs . . . it’s exactly where he wants to be right now. I’ll call down to the ballroom and get some more of his entourage to come up. We’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “I wonder how many other people know anything at all about what happened,” he said as he left.

  Indeed, Sam thought, looking toward the politician who was now sitting on the sofa in front of the television set, cupping a fresh glass of scotch in both hands.

  “Look at those numbers,” he said, smiling widely, looking around the room as if he were only now realizing that everyone else had left.

  Before his little group gets here, Sam thought, maybe I can get some more information out of him.

  “Carlos,” she said gently, waiting for a commercial break on the TV. “Kevin said that you’d promised that you and he and Jean would be a family. I guess that was pretty important to him.”

  He shrugged. “Kids need to hear certain things. It’s what I do, Sam. I tell people what they want to hear. I had no idea Kevin would ever take his desire that far.”

  Voices sounded at the door just then and Sam opened it.

  An hour later, with the election a certainty. Tafoya’s campaign manager suggested that it was time for him to go down to the ballroom and give his speech. Sam stayed behind in the suite as the rest of them left. She needed a few minutes of silence before being overtaken by the tidal wave of excitement downstairs.

  A bright yellow banner across the television screen caught her attention and she un-muted the sound.

  “Shocking news from Taos County this evening . . .” The newscaster’s voice held a somber tone as the pictures began to flash on screen. Beau leading Kevin Calendar out of the hotel in handcuffs. How had the media gotten hold of this so quickly? She watched until the story had run out of facts and the journalist began to repeat himself. So far, all they had for sure was that a young volunteer in the Tafoya campaign had been arrested.

  The picture switched again and the voiceover promised live coverage of the governor-elect’s speech, right after the break.

  Sam turned it off and left the suite.

  In the ballroom the mood was frenetic. A band played rock music with a heavy beat and the mesmerized crowd were waving their arms overhead, swaying and chanting to the tempo. She stood to the side, near one of the massive carved doors.

  From the front of the room, a cheer went up, moving through the huge ballroom like a tsunami. Carlos Tafoya stepped from behind a curtain, waving widely and smiling his familiar grin. He took the podium and let the cheers go on for a full three minutes.

  When he finally raised his hands, signaling for silence, Sam was likely the only one in the room who noticed the faint whiteness around his mouth, the haunted look in his eyes. If anyone else noticed it was undoubtedly, after all, because the man had just lost his loving wife this past week, the woman with whom he’d planned to share this moment.

  “Good evening, New Mexico!” Carlos shouted, and the speech was on.

  Sam watched, amazed that he pulled it off. His wife dead, his son going away in handcuffs less than an hour ago, and himself in danger of being pulled into the whole mess. Somehow, she knew the man before this room tonight would come away unscathed, although his unsuspecting son might very well never be free again. A plea bargain—Kevin’s life for an admission of manslaughter—it wouldn’t be the first time something like had happened in northern New Mexico.

  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—”
<
br />   “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 na
rrowed 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.