Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  I had told him more than once please not to call me lieutenant. “I guess you’re not there,” he went on. “This is Chuck Scully down at the police station? Could you give me a call when you get in? Something’s come up I want to talk to you about. No hurry, it’s not that important. Well, sooner’s better than later. Oh, it’s—let’s see—nine-thirty-two. In the morning. ’Bye,”

  Looking back many hours later, I knew I should have risked a broken ankle to pick up the damn phone.

  My immediate problem was solved a few minutes later. Gayle walked in, radiant as always. She looked around, called, “Sid? You here, or what?”

  I grunted, and she looked up, startled. Then she grinned. “You devil,” she said. “Are we going to work today, or are we going to play hide and seek?”

  TWO

  I REFERRED TO Gayle Hennessy as my model. She would have called me her planning consultant. We were on a barter system. When Gayle moved out from the city to open a small shop in the village to sell beachwear of her own design, I helped her lay out the place, paint the interior, and make a sign to go above the door that would attract the summer people without violating the village signage code.

  Gayle and I had crossed paths a few times in New York. The first was many years ago when she was seventeen, a skinny high school junior who had just started picking up change after school by running errands for a small-time north Harlem drug middleman. I was the one who nailed her, only I never made it a collar, never took her in for booking. I did make a point of cuffing her, and the hard reality of cold metal against wristbones scared the daylights out of her. She swore through a gallon of tears that if I let her go she would never get in trouble again.

  I had heard that song often enough before, but—I don’t know why—this was the first time I believed it; certainly the first time I acted on it. Maybe in part because she wasn’t a user, mostly because she seemed smart enough to be able to take hold of her life.

  She lived with a grandmother who obviously couldn’t handle her, but she had an aunt in South Carolina. I told her she could go down there and finish school; or, if she preferred, I would run her in. I put her on the bus myself the next day. My partner didn’t approve—he didn’t approve of blacks in general—but I didn’t approve of everything he was up to, and our code was to keep our mouths shut about what the other one did.

  The next time Gayle and I met, years later, she was the live-in girlfriend of a painter I knew and earning a decent living as a dress model on Seventh Avenue. I wouldn’t have recognized her but she remembered me, “the Jewish cop with a heart of chopped liver.” She whooped a greeting and hugged me tightly. In addition to a certain savvy she had gained a shitload of confidence. She knew who she was.

  We kept vaguely in touch, mostly through her boyfriend. When she eventually dumped him she decided to strike out on a path that would give her a measure of freedom from both employers and men. She had evolved into a no-hips, long-waisted stunner with legs to her belly button, velvety brown skin, enormous eyes, and auburn hair out of left field. She dressed mostly in clothes of her own design, and friends had been urging her to turn the talent to money.

  Was it a talent? Gayle would have drawn applause dressed in twin pillowcases. The question was, Could she do for women who ground their teeth in jealousy when she sashayed by what she had done for herself? Probably yes, but it would take another season or two before they trusted her.

  In advance of the tourist season she was paying off her barter debt by giving me two mornings a week—helping me organize the place and sitting for an easel portrait. I hated doing academic painting; fortunately, I could never be truly academic. But I knew as well as Lonnie Morgenstern that I was unlikely to sell Large. Gayle in a green caftan against a bare wood wall might be marketable—especially since, for insurance, one of her long, perfectly shaped legs was exposed, like a smooth-flowing river, all the way to its source. I was calling the thing Green and Brown Morning. A working title.

  Months before, when we first got together on our two projects, I had hopes that the same thought would enter Gayle’s head that had crept into mine: Wouldn’t it be lovely to hop in the sack with this person? I sensed that the needle on her sex-awareness meter did jump once or twice in response to me before it settled down at zero.

  By then, so had mine. The choice was between a brief, passionate fling that might come to a sour end, and a long friendship. I valued the possibilities in the friendship. Maybe she had gone through the same reasoning. It had been more than a year since there had been a woman in my life, but I told myself that was by choice; it allowed me to focus on my work.

  * * *

  GAYLE AND I put in a productive couple of hours on Green and Brown Morning. The canvas was turning out even slicker than I had intended. Sometimes you have to bend with the prevailing winds—in this case the monstrous college tuition bill that loomed before me.

  It wasn’t until Gayle left at about noon that I remembered the message from Chuck Scully on my answering machine. I called the police station in the village hall and got the civilian clerk who doubled at the switchboard, a retired schoolteacher I knew only as Helen. She said, “Yes, Mr. Shale, Chief Scully did want to talk to you, but he’s not here.” She sounded distraught. “He went out. I’m really sorry.”

  “Okay, no problem. Just tell him I’m returning his call.”

  “I’ll tell him when I see him, but I have no idea when that will be. Really no idea at all.”

  She was breathless; something was up. There had been a rash of bicycle thefts in the area (at least four); maybe Chuck was following a hot lead.

  “Is he out on a case?” I asked.

  “I’m not authorized to talk about anything,” she said. “Anything at all.”

  Authorized was too big a word for everyday use in a nine-man police force; something was definitely up. I said, “Thank you, Helen.” And then, as an afterthought, “Do you know what he wanted me for?”

  “Oh, that. I … He…” She made a decision. “He’d better tell you himself.” A second mystery. Heavy.

  No sooner had I hung up than Gayle charged back into the house, her big eyes even bigger. “Sid,” she gasped, “there’s been a murder. Right up the beach.”

  So that answered question number one. “Where?”

  “About a quarter of a mile. The big white house? Actually, it’s the next place west. You know those people?”

  “Name of Sharanov. I’ve never met anyone there, but I’m not surprised. Who got killed?”

  “I don’t know. I was driving by and there were two police cars out front. I’ve never seen two police cars together in this town except at Mel’s.” Mel’s Deep Sea was the diner favored by locals. “A cop was posted in the driveway and I asked him what was up. He said someone had been killed inside. That was all he would say, except that Chief Scully was in the house.”

  Chuck Scully was really only acting chief; the chief, a much older man, had been on extended sick leave for over a year. The paperwork on a homicide was going to overwhelm poor Chuck; he was barely up to the challenge of the bicycle thief. I said, “Maybe I’ll take a run over. Just to see what’s going on.”

  Gayle and I left together.

  * * *

  I LIKED SKETCHING the Sharanov house, but I found it otherwise to be a rude intrusion on my low-key east end skyline, way over scale in size and cost. It was only two stories high, but an especially tall cathedral ceiling on the ocean side pointed a “screw you” finger at the sky. Of course that was a subjective judgment, but from what I knew about the owner, he was a “screw you” kind of guy.

  Mikhael “Misha” Sharanov was a Russian immigrant, one of the earliest settlers in the vast Russian, mostly Jewish community in Brooklyn centered in Brighton Beach. He had come from the Soviet Union in the first wave of emigration the Soviets permitted Jews after decades of hassling them while at the same time denying them the option of leaving the country.

  Most of those who came out were
a cross section of ground-down Soviet citizens, but the commissars didn’t miss a chance to stick it to America. They dipped into the prisons and shipped us a choice assortment of hardened criminals, establishing an MO Fidel Castro gleefully followed in Cuba with the famous boat exodus from Mariel.

  The engineers, doctors, musicians, and other professionals among the Russian immigrants mostly struggled for years before they got a toehold here. The criminals went right to work in their chosen field, and many of them flourished. When I first learned Sharanov was my neighbor in Quincacogue I looked him up in confidential police reports.

  As a young punk, not much over twenty, he had formed a small gang that shook down Russian merchants in the busy shops under the el in Brighton Beach, a craft he learned by studying Chinese gangs in lower Manhattan and Italian gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront. America proved to be the land of opportunity, and he moved on to fancier stuff—insurance ripoffs, smuggling, and, most profitably, a complicated scam that robbed the federal government of millions in cigarette taxes, his “thank you” for having been given sanctuary here. Several murders were laid at his door but, unfortunately, none inside that door; he had been arrested a few times, but no charge had ever stuck.

  As he passed forty, he had gone almost mainstream. His designer beach house (too upscale for the neighborhood) was only one sign of his new gentility. The most important was the huge restaurant/nightclub he owned in farthest Brooklyn, the Tundra, the kind of place that otherwise exists only in movies made in the 1930s.

  The Tundra was well beyond what was then my bailiwick, Midtown South in Manhattan, but a year or so before I retired I did go there one evening on a tip that a witness who had been dodging me for weeks had made a reservation for that night. When I walked through the door my jaw dropped to my belt.

  In a vast space lit by countless fairy lights (this had once been a warehouse, but you’d never know it), waiters and captains in tuxes hovered attentively over the patrons, many hundreds of them, almost every one a Russian, dressed to the nines. Plates of hors d’oeuvres—herrings, meats, dumplings, God knows what—covered the tables in such abundance they had to be piled two and sometimes three high.

  The revelers danced to an orchestra of twenty-six musicians, my count. And serious revelers they were, juiced to the scalp. Drinks were by the bottle, and the bottles, all vodka, were being carried off empty by busboys almost as fast as glasses might be in a lesser nightspot. It looked like New Year’s Eve, but this was a nothing-special rainy Saturday night in November.

  My witness was expected, I was told, but had not yet arrived. While I waited I hoped to get a glimpse of the famous Misha Sharanov—I had seen a surveillance picture of him—but he was nowhere in evidence. The place was in the hands of minions, four or five of whom formed a loose cordon around my partner and myself when we identified ourselves.

  They gave us a range of attitudes. Two or three were big, with faces that had been carved, badly, from yams; they glowered and pressed close, but they knew enough not to make physical contact. The others were smaller, more social, actually polite. All were in starched dickeys. The scene was right off a cable TV rerun of a Warner Brothers movie starring a snarling Edward G. Robinson and a dapper George Raft.

  When my witness showed, we took him into the cloakroom and scared what we needed out of him. Then I sent him to join his party, and I took one more look around the big room, still hoping to spot Sharanov. No such luck. I was reminded of the unseen menace in horror movies; once it’s shown the terror dissipates.

  As I turned to leave, one of the politer minions smiled expansively. In an accent you couldn’t cut with a chain saw he said, “Enchoy your eef-ning, Lieutenant.”

  I said, “I’ll do that. And please thank Mr. Sharanov for his hospitality.”

  The minion looked as if I had socked him in the nose, and those behind him twitched. He called after me, “What Mr. Sharanov? Dere is no Mr. Sharanov.” In the Soviet Union of old you admitted nothing to the police, not even that you might have taken a bath that day.

  A yam head was holding open the door for me, a huge man, antsy for me to leave. I looked up at him and said, “Boris, do you check to make sure that every party in the room has a designated driver?”

  He didn’t have the least idea what I was talking about, but for a fleeting instant he looked worried. I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and left.

  So I never did get a glimpse of Sharanov. Not even as his neighbor at the beach.

  * * *

  GAYLE DROVE ON toward the village and her shop, Gayle’s Provocativo; preseason, she didn’t open until one o’clock. I was right behind her in my aging Chevy pickup, but I peeled off at the long Sharanov driveway.

  The front elevation of the aggressively modern Sharanov house was an affront to the eye, with more angles than an origami. It was now partially blocked by the two police cars Gayle had spotted, plus a large maroon Cadillac I had seen parked there before. I recognized the tubby cop on duty out front when I pulled up. He tipped his hat in deference to a former big-city detective.

  “Afternoon, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s Sid, Walter. What’s going on?”

  He looked up the road before he answered, an unnecessary caution; there wasn’t a chance anyone was close enough to eavesdrop, as none of the houses immediately beyond, all strictly summer places, had been opened for the season. When he confirmed that we were alone he ventured, “There’s been a murder. How about that? Someone got killed in there.”

  “Who?” If someone had to be dead I hoped it was Sharanov or one of his thugs.

  The cop leaned his moon face in my open window. “I suppose it’s all right to tell you. The girl who cleans up. Housekeeper, maid, whatever you want to call her. How about that?”

  That came as a surprise. “Okay if I go in?”

  “I guess. The chief’s inside. Sure, Chuck’ll be glad to see you.”

  I climbed out of the cab. “He call for a Crime Scene Unit from County?” I asked.

  “Supposed to be one on the way.”

  That was a start. I turned toward the house, walked a few yards, then stopped and turned back again at the sound of an approaching vehicle. A tow truck was roaring toward us from the west at a speed the road wasn’t prepared for; gravel flew. The truck spun into the driveway and headed for the Cadillac’s rear end, seemingly prepared to climb in its roomy trunk. It stopped on a dime, inches away, and a dark, good-looking young guy in coveralls leaped out and started toward the house. His bushy brows were knitted in pain or anger, maybe both.

  The tubby cop grabbed him around the waist and held him. It wasn’t easy. “No you don’t, Paulie.”

  Paulie’s dark face grew darker. “For Chrissakes, Walter, that’s my girl in there.”

  The cop’s arms were short, but he held on. “There’s nothing you can do for her. We even sent her mom away. I got orders not to let anyone in. You wouldn’t want to go in. You understand?”

  “The hell I do,” Paulie exploded. He broke Walter’s grip with an elbow to his gut and a sharp chop to a restraining arm with the side of his hand. Then he took a couple of long strides toward the house.

  The cop was hurting, and he didn’t follow. His contribution to securing the crime scene was to gasp through his pain, “You get the hell back here, Malatesta!”

  Paulie Malatesta. I had heard the name somewhere. I stepped in front of him. We were chest to chest, roughly the same height. “Easy, Paulie,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the officer?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “A neighbor. Why don’t you do what Walter says, Paulie? Go back to work. Better yet, go home.” I figured that a few sentences delivered in a reasonable voice would help steady him. “When the time is right, they’ll tell you everything you need to know. I’m sure they know how to find you.” I had read the logo on his truck, HUGGINS SERVICE STA.

  “Screw you,” Paulie said. He jerked his head toward the Caddy. “That’s Sharanov’s car.
You with him? One of his goons? The creep did it, didn’t he? I’ll kill him, so help me.” His rage was still building, and it was making him a little crazy. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  When I didn’t, he raised both hands to my chest and pushed. Fat Walter was letting me handle this—in deference to my previous rank, I supposed. I gave with the push, dissipating its force. Then I grabbed one of Paulie’s outstretched arms with my two and bent it behind him and up. I had done something like this often enough, but not in years. My body responded grudgingly; I was forty-one, Paulie twenty-three or -four. But the move still worked well enough, and I managed to get him down on his knees. Almost by reflex I reached for the cuffs I didn’t have.

  Paulie gasped, cried “Hey!” and then “Hey!” He had acted tough, but he was mostly bluff. I eased up a bit.

  Now Walter came lumbering up, breathing hard, his service revolver half out of its holster. “Okay, Paulie, back in your truck. Out of here. Now.”

  The fight had drained entirely from the kid. He stumbled to the tow truck, biting his lip, holding back tears. “That bastard. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him.”

  He suddenly bent down, scooped up a handful of bluestone pebbles from the driveway, and hurled them at the Cadillac. But the action, like the threat, came more from despair than anger, and the pebbles bounced harmlessly off a wheel cover. He climbed into his truck, turned the motor on, and poked his head out the window toward Walter and me.

  “She was sixteen years old,” he called through his tears. The motor roared, and he backed out and drove off as recklessly as he had come.

  * * *

  IT WAS ONE of those upside down houses—bedrooms below, common areas upstairs. The living room had been placed on the upper floor to give it a dramatic perch above the ocean and to allow for the cathedral ceiling that reached for the moon. An exterior ramp, curled like a wood shaving, led directly to the main entrance on this second level.