Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery (4 page)

“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 human, 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 is always at the top of the bestseller lists, but only the
closest of friends know his true identity because even his editor
says that men can’t write romances.