“I was getting to that. She registered at the Taos Inn.”
“I need to talk to her,” Sam said, turning the ignition on the truck and putting it in gear. “Do you know her room number?”
“Sam, slow down,” he said. “We don’t even know if she’s still in town. She gave that as her local address when she got the ticket.”
“Still . . . it wouldn’t hurt to check. And I can ask questions that your deputies wouldn’t, like whether she and Jake were legally divorced yet.”
Obviously, Beau realized there was no use arguing with her. He wished her luck. She arrived at the Taos Inn, pulling into the crowded parking lot with its overhang of green, copper and golden cottonwood leaves. A rippling breeze caught them as Sam locked her truck and headed for the lobby.
She picked up a house phone and asked to be connected and was almost surprised to find Doralee in her room and agreeable to a meeting. Five minutes later the woman entered the spacious lobby from one of the side corridors. She might have been a carbon copy of Sam fifteen years younger, with more brown in her hair than grey at this point and a dozen pounds lighter. She wore a blouse printed with emerald green geometric patterns, a dark brown skirt and a pair of brown pumps. It was something Sam might have chosen for herself at an earlier age. Doralee eyed Sam as if she were seeing her older self.
“I couldn’t believe it about Jake,” Doralee said once they’d settled into a pair of heavily carved Mexican chairs at one end of the huge room. “I’ve just been sitting in my room, thinking I should go claim his things.”
“You weren’t divorced?” Sam didn’t mention that Jake’s brother had already done the claiming. It would be interesting to see where Doralee was going with this.
“Sadly, we were in the process. I . . . well, I think Jake had found someone else. For awhile I thought it might be you. It’s why I came to Taos. To see what you were like. ‘Samantha Sweet, Sam this and Sam that’ . . . he talked about you a lot. I had to think maybe . . .” She rubbed the palms of her hands along the chair’s arms. “After a day or two I realized you weren’t the threat. His big interest was obviously in that teenager who was hanging on his arm.”
“You mean you saw me before today?”
“At your bakery. I knew the name of the place. Jake had jotted it on a note at home. I knew the young lady at the front counter couldn’t be you, but when you walked out front once, wearing a white jacket, I knew that had to be you.”
Doralee was watching her? Okay, that was a little creepy.
“But then I caught sight of Jake with Little Miss Cutie in Pink.”
“So, you came all the way to Taos to get a look at whoever Jake was leaving you for?”
Doralee nodded. “I had to know.” She pinched the fabric of her skirt into pleats, working them with her fingers but the instant she let go the material fell back into its original smooth shape.
“It’s hard being the third wife, you know. You’re never sure why those earlier tries didn’t work—did they leave him, did he leave them, was it always for a younger woman?”
Was it because you’re so insecure that you drove him nuts?
“Did you actually speak to Jake, here in town?”
Doralee gave up on pleating the skirt and began picking at her cuticles. “I tried to. Thursday evening he and Pinky were having drinks at some little bar about a block away from the plaza. I saw them go in there and I wanted a public place to talk to him, you know, so he couldn’t ignore me. I took the divorce papers he’d already signed and asked him to tear them up so we could get back together.”
Sam could only imagine how well Jake would appreciate that.
“He got real mad at me, and it became sort of a scene. When the cops came I just left.”
Cops?
“I never saw him again.” The voice went soft and Doralee’s eyes got moist. “I can’t tell you much more than that.”
Doralee stood up and had disappeared down the corridor before Sam could think what else to ask her.
Sam went out to her truck. A scene where the police were called? There had to be a record of it. A mere argument wouldn’t bring the cops; there had to be more to the story.
Sam left the Taos Inn, realizing that it was nearly two o’clock and she’d never eaten any lunch. She was debating whether to succumb to the call of fast food or go home for something or try to skip eating until this evening. About the time she drove past McDonald’s with that irresistible scent of French fries wafting through the air her phone rang.
“Mom, oh my god, I don’t know what to do!” Kelly’s voice went high and squeaky, near panic.
A million thoughts went through Sam’s head. Her parents, a wreck, some road emergency. “What happened, Kel? Slow down.”
“I can’t believe— It’s a mess. My stuff.”
“Kelly, breathe.”
Sam heard a deep breath on the line. “Someone broke into the house.”
Chapter 18
Sam whipped the truck into a U turn at the first possible chance and arrived at her house minutes later. Kelly stood beside her car in the driveway and rushed into Sam’s arms as soon as the red pickup came to a halt.
“They aren’t still in there, are they?” Sam asked, one eye on the back door.
“No. I’m pretty sure not. It just shocked me to walk in there. I don’t want to go in by myself.”
“I’ve called Beau and he’s—” His cruiser’s siren finished the statement.
With a hand on his holster he told the two women to wait outside. He came back two minutes later saying it was okay to come in.
From the moment they stepped through the back door they faced chaos. In the kitchen drawers had been dumped, strewing cutlery and knives across the counter tops. Food packages were opened, leaving cereal and crackers and coffee and sugar in a crunchy, sticky mess on the floor and across the implements on the work surfaces.
“This is unreal,” Sam said. “More like vandalism than a robbery.”
Beau came in from the living room. “Oh it was a robbery too. Your computer is gone.”
Sam had taken her new laptop to Beau’s, leaving the older desktop model for Kelly. She tried to think what might be on it. Basically, everything.
“Did you have it password protected?” Beau asked.
“Yes. At least that will stop them.”
“Slow them down. Anyone who really wants the information can find somebody with the skills to hack into it. If you ever did any banking or shopping on there, you’ll want to change all your accounts right away.”
Sam followed him to the desk in the corner of the room. Papers lay everywhere but she found the little flowered diary where she’d written her various passwords in her own coded system so that they looked like addresses and phone numbers. She grabbed it up and put it in her pocket.
“Kelly, where are your grandparents? Did they see this?”
“Fortunately, no. I took them by Beau’s after we finished our drive. Grampa looked like he wanted a nap.”
Thank goodness. Sam didn’t need to try explaining to her parents that Kelly would be perfectly safe. She wasn’t all that sure of it herself.
“Here’s where they got in,” Beau said, showing her that the small side window by the front door had been smashed in. “They reached in and twisted open the deadbolt. I’ll get someone out to repair it and change the locks.”
“I can do the locks,” Sam said. “I’ve got spares out in the truck.” Knowing how to break into places had taught her a few valuable skills.
“Oh, god,” Kelly wailed from a distance.
Sam followed her daughter’s voice and found Kelly in her own bedroom. The mattress lay halfway across the room, where someone had upended it to look under. In the process it had crashed into her dresser top and broken two bottles of perfume, which saturated the carpet and bedding. The room smelled like an intense flower garden.
“That was my favorite,” Kelly said as she picked up the crystal heart-shaped top to on
e of the bottles.
“You can get new ones. I’m sure our insurance will cover a lot of this.”
Sam rushed across the hall to her old room. Her heart raced. In here the mattress had been slashed and stuffing lay in tufts like a big indoor snowstorm. All the empty dresser drawers gaped open at odd angles. The few things she’d left in the closet lay in heaps on the floor; someone had obviously gone through pockets and then tossed them aside. Her wedding gown looked as if it had been trampled. Sam fell to her knees and gently scooped it up. Shaking it carefully she saw that it appeared intact, only wrinkled. She reached for the padded hanger to re-hang it.
“The bathroom too,” Kelly called out.
“Don’t start cleaning things up,” Beau cautioned. “You’ll need to file a police report.”
“I don’t want anything to do with them,” Sam said. Pete Sanchez had already ruined her week.
“Your insurance will require it. Kelly could make the call.”
They stood in the relatively unharmed dining room while Kelly spoke to someone who was obviously asking whether she was in danger at the moment, were the burglars still on the premises and other things that seemed designed to waste time when someone could be on the way. Finally, Beau got on the phone and threw a few cop-code numbers at the dispatcher and was told an officer would be there soon.
Soon turned out to be forty minutes but it was better than nothing. Beau met the police officer—luckily, not one that Sam knew—and walked him through the house telling him what they’d noticed was missing at first glance. Meanwhile, Kelly had the presence of mind to walk around snapping pictures with her phone. Sam leaned one hip against the dining table, her foot tapping and her mind going a thousand directions. This was no random grab-a-TV burglary; they had been after something specific. People don’t slash mattresses and dump cereal boxes unless they’ve got some time and are searching. But for what?
Money? Did Tustin Deor really believe what Jake had told him—that Sam had a lot of ready cash? Could he have possibly done this? Even if she’d agreed to invest in his project, did he honestly think she kept cash in the mattress? All her files and banking paperwork were at Beau’s now, but she thought of the missing computer. She would have to take care of that as soon as possible.
She pictured Deor in his thousand dollar wristwatch and designer jeans with that prissy little short jacket he wore. Ripping and digging through drawers hardly seemed his style. Still, you never knew. He did have his little entourage with him and that one big guy could bully his way through a brick wall, she’d bet. She mentioned it to Beau while the officer got information from Kelly.
“This has to be aimed at me,” Sam said in a low voice. “This address is under my name in the phone book. It’s where anyone who doesn’t know me very well would naturally come looking.”
“You think that Hollywood guy came out here?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He certainly got pushy about the money he thought I should give him. But a lot of people connected me with Jake. Doralee Calendar could have come looking for something, although if she did she was certainly cool about it an hour ago. Maybe those rough guys that Jake owed money to . . .”
Beau bit at the corner of his lip. “This seems extreme but I’ll check it out.”
He stood in the corner of the kitchen and quietly made a few phone calls. When he looked up the uniformed officer was finishing his report.
“I’ll have this typed and you can pick up a copy anytime after tomorrow morning,” he told Kelly and Sam. He walked out to his cruiser and drove away.
“Tustin Deor is still registered at the La Fonda,” Beau said, “but no one answers in the room. I’ve got my men watching out for his car. If we can pull him over we might get the chance to talk to him. That’s about all I can do for now so I guess I’ll head home.”
“See you there,” Sam said. “Can you see that my folks get their usual happy hour treats? I’ll be along after I help Kelly with this mess. When we get a chance to talk I’ve got more.”
“It’s all right, Mom. You don’t have to hang out here. I can clean up. I wasn’t doing much tonight anyway.”
Sam stayed long enough to find a board in the garage and nail it over the broken window and assure that the deadbolt locks were functioning. They closed the door on Sam’s old room with the shredded mattress—it could wait until later—and put Kelly’s bed back together. Sam’s earlier energy came in handy as she organized the kitchen while Kelly worked in the living room.
“I don’t want you here alone tonight,” Sam told her. “If you can’t find a friend to come stay with you, at least come out and take the couch at our place.”
“Thought of that already. Jen’s free and she’ll come by right after work.”
Sam placed a kiss in the center of Kelly’s forehead. “Take care of yourselves. Don’t open the door to anyone, and call Beau the instant you hear any strange noise.”
Kelly gave a brave smile. “We’ll be fine.”
But the break-in kept nagging at Sam all the way home. Aside from the computer, what on earth had the intruders thought they would find that made it worth the time to rip the place to shreds? While the others ate leftover chicken she went online to check her bank accounts and change all her passwords.
She’d no sooner finished that task than her mother suggested a game of dominoes. The parents quickly cleared the dining table but Sam couldn’t keep her mind on the game. Beau kept sending questioning glances across the table to her and Sam felt as if her head would burst with all the information she wanted to share with him.
“You two don’t need to stay up with us old folks,” Howard finally said. “Beau, quit seducing her across the table, just take her on upstairs. We’ll play the TV loud enough that y’all don’t have to worry about staying quiet.”
Nina Rae’s eyes went wide. “Howard!”
Oh, god, Sam thought. She felt her face redden.
“Samantha, your daddy’s right. You two are supposed to be on your honeymoon. It’s okay if y’all want to, um, turn in a little early.”
If only they knew. Sam and Beau played out the final domino hand and practically raced up the stairs, suppressing laughter.
“As much as I wouldn’t mind my father’s little speculation to be true, I’m guessing that those eye-wiggles from your side of the table have more to do with our investigation,” she said the minute they closed the bedroom door behind them.
“I finally remembered to check on those mobster types you spotted at the press conference, the ones we think might be connected to Jake’s gambling debts.” He kept his voice low. “One of my deputies saw them too, so I’ve had him going through databases to see if he recognized them. He found one, for sure, and a probable ID on the other. They’re both from Las Vegas, so I can start there to get more info. Both have rap sheets for federal charges and there’s a common denominator—they’ve both worked for a guy by the name of Kozark.”
That sounded vaguely familiar. “Do we know anything about him?”
“Still checking. He’s tied to Vegas too, suspected of lots of shady financial deals and loan sharking, but has managed to avoid being cited for anything more than a speeding ticket. I’ve got a bad feeling about the guy but no real information yet.”
Sam nodded, wondering if the name Kozark should mean something to her.
“Your turn now,” Beau said. “You can’t drop a statement like ‘I’ve got more’ on me, like you did at Kelly’s, and expect me to wait forever to learn what it is.”
She sat cross-legged on the bed and told him about her visit with Doralee Calendar that afternoon—everything from the nervous tics that vibrated with the woman’s insecurity over the divorce, to the fact that she’d gone so far as to watch Sam from afar, to the scene in the bar that had required the police.
“I’d like to know more about that,” Beau said. He paced to the far end of the room and back. “My contact guy isn’t on duty right now or I’d make a call and see h
ow violent the fight really became.”
Sam held up a finger and pulled out her phone. “What’s the number?”
“What are you doing?”
“The non-emergency police number?”
He recited it from memory.
“Hi,” Sam said when someone at the police department picked up. “I’m with the Gazette and we’re running a short piece on a disturbance at Murphy’s Pub last Thursday night. I’d like to include some details.”
She was put through to someone else and made the request again. Two minutes passed very slowly.
“Assault on one Jake Calendar? It’s a matter of public record,” said a man who sounded like he was rummaging through a stack of papers. “It’s here. You can stop by and pick up a copy of the report.”
“Oh, gosh, see I’m on deadline and my editor needs it tonight. I have most of what I need except the name of the person who assaulted him. Can you give me that much?”
“You all know the drill,” the man said. “You’re supposed to come by and get a copy.”
“I know . . .” Sam sounded genuinely regretful. “But there’s this deadline . . .”
“Hudson Moscowitz. That’s all you’re getting unless you come in.” He hung up.
“Hudson Moscowitz?” She turned to Beau. “Is that a real person?”
“Hulk. That’s what they call him. We’ve had him in a few times too. Real troublemaker, especially once he gets a few drinks in him.”
“Well, this Hulk Moscowitz was the guy that tangled with Jake Thursday night. I wonder what happened. Doralee only said there was ‘a scene.’ I can’t really imagine Jake in a brawl, but then Kelly did see him get pretty angry with that poor guy who tried his impromptu audition. Maybe Jake had more of a temper than I ever knew.”
“If I were betting on this one, I’d guess Moscowitz threw the first punch. He’s like that.”
“I saw Jake Friday morning. He didn’t look battered.”
“I’ll get the full report,” he said, “and we’ll see what happened.” He lowered himself into the armchair in the corner of the room and began pulling off his boots. “Meanwhile, want to hear about my little talk with Victor Garcia, aka Vic Valentino?”
Sweets Galore: The Sixth Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries) Page 16
