Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  “What’s your hurry, Cassie?”

  “Time is too precious to waste on teen stuff.” Her face clouded over. “When you have a sister die when she’s five years old it brings home how every day counts, every hour. I intend to use them.” Her face brightened; she didn’t like to dwell on the dark side. “This pose okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better. How does your mother feel about your cutting out so young?”

  “It so happens she doesn’t really object. She’s a workaholic herself; she thinks it’s work that keeps me on my feet, if you know what I mean. Three girls in my class are pregnant this year—pregnant enough so they’re going to have the babies. I’m not talking about the ones who had abortions. My mother thinks the high school is a hotbed of sin. ‘Cauldron of sin’ was the way she put it. Isn’t that a big pot? Hotbed says it better, if you follow my drift.”

  “I believe I do. Cassie, you sound like you’re all jobs and schoolwork. My advice is, slow down enough to smell the roses.”

  “Everybody’s got a different clock ticking inside. Right now mine says earn some money and get out of here. Next year, or the year after it may say smell the roses.”

  When we broke for the day she would ask to look at the drawings I had done. She never commented on them, but I could tell she liked what she saw. One time she said, “I wish you’d paint me. Why don’t you paint me?”

  “I’m not much into that kind of painting.”

  “You never do portraits?”

  “I have, of people I’m close to. My ex-wife, my children. Like that. Mostly for the record.”

  “You have kids?” She seemed surprised.

  “Even painters have kids.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “I do wish you’d paint me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I had made her think about her request. “Painting’s permanent.” She rattled a drawing. “Not like this.”

  “You looking to be immortalized? Drawings are permanent too. We have Da Vinci’s drawings. Michelangelo’s.”

  “Sure, Michelangelo.” Meaning I was no Michelangelo. “I’d like to hang in a gallery,” she went on. “Even a shop window. People wondering, ‘Who is that girl?’ And someone saying, ‘Probably the artist’s mistress. It’s always the artist’s mistress.’ What a giggle.”

  “Not if your mother walked by.”

  She made a face. “Definitely not.” She lit up. “Or they’d say, ‘Might be the artist’s daughter.’”

  “That she’d like?”

  “Uh-huh. So will you paint me?”

  “Nope.”

  In the middle of our eighth session she had to go to the bathroom. I used the break to reshape my pencils; it takes time to bring them to the beveled point that allows me to do a fine line or a broad one with the same implement. When I looked up, Cassie was back at her chair and taking a pose—stark naked. The gravity-defying breasts floated serenely above the flat tummy and the tiny dark V where the long, tubular legs met. I felt a rush of blood to my face; it was as though I had never seen a nude model before.

  “Cassie!” I barked. “Get back in there and put your clothes on.”

  She was calm; she had decided she was going to do this. “Why?” she said. “You’ve seen nude models before.” She could have read my mind and was now debating it.

  “This was not in our deal.” My voice was tight. “Get dressed.”

  “I will. I promise. As soon as you do a couple of five-minute sketches.” She was determined.

  What the hell, the damage was done. I did her in charcoal, and then, in another pose, in pen, with wash. And once I started drawing, the shock quickly dissipated. I was at work, and the motor responses took over. She seemed to jump off the paper. The drawing went well. So well I did a third.

  As she was taking the third pose I said, “Why are you doing this?”

  “I owe you. Really. This is the way models pose.”

  I sensed there was more. “That’s it?”

  “There’s another reason.”

  “Which is…?”

  “I wanted to see what it would be like to be naked in front of a man.”

  Did she mean a nonthreatening older man? Or a man who could be provoked into making a pass? Her manner had never been boldly flirty, but she was not unlike many teenage girls who sharpen their courting implements on their girlfriends’ fathers. One of Sarah’s friends had practiced harmlessly on me.

  I said, “This is the last sketch. Now you know what it’s like.”

  “Oh, I knew. I didn’t say this would be the first time a man saw me naked. I just didn’t want the second time to be disgusting.” She bit her lip to keep from saying more. And I decided not to pry.

  Fifteen minutes later she was dressed, and I paid her. I told her I would be busy the next few Saturdays but I would call her when I was ready to use her again. I said she was a hell of a model and a hell of a person, and that whatever path she took in life, she had the will and the resources to succeed.

  The session had knocked me off center. Cassie hadn’t been the world’s first sixteen-year-old nude model, probably not even the first that day. But she had gone too far with me, and she knew it and that I might not call her again. And I was possibly sorrier about that than she was.

  * * *

  I WAS SURPRISED when she called in December. “How’re you doing?” she asked, and I said, “Good enough, how about you?”

  She said she was busy with a batch of part-time jobs; not bad, she said, when you consider that “nothing much happens around here in the winter.”

  I said I was glad she was booked because I was on a still-life kick these days and wasn’t doing any figurative work.

  She chirped for a minute or two and got off, graceful but disappointed. She had been testing the waters.

  * * *

  ON A BLUSTERY day a few weeks later I spotted her in the village wearing a too-thin windbreaker, her cheeks pink from the cold. In three or four short months she had moved rapidly—too rapidly—from girl-woman to almost woman. When she saw me she ran up and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You’re looking older and wiser,” I said. “I like it.” I did and I didn’t.

  “It’s being out in the world,” she said. “If you can call this the world. It’s school that keeps you a kid. I’m finished with it.”

  We didn’t talk long; it was cold, and she was on her way to some job. She had given up on me, and the words no longer gushed from her in a torrent. I missed that. And when she disappeared around a corner I realized that I missed her.

  Gayle Hennessy stuck her head out the door of her shop. “That the girl you been doing Saturday afternoons?” she asked.

  “Not doing, Gayle. Sketching.”

  “Right. She’s something.” And she ducked back out of the cold into the shop.

  By then I had abandoned Large I and started several smaller canvases, none of which I was crazy about. I was moving back and forth among them, waiting for one to catch fire. The afternoon I ran into Cassie I went home and pulled out the sketches I had done of her. They were good. I taped the best of them—a dozen or so—in two rows to the wall that had held Large, and stepped back for an overall objective look. Yes, they were very good.

  Within an hour I had started a canvas based on the sketches. The work went like a steak knife through Jell-O, and I finished the painting in a week. I had dismembered her like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in a way someone would doubtless stamp as marginally cubist—an arm here, a torso there and also here, a head tilted high and in the same space low, a leg, and another leg, and then, from a new angle, still another leg. And so forth. But there was no mistaking her for anyone else. It was Cassie.

  And I may have made a mistake by including among my reference sketches two of her nude.

  * * *

  “WHAT DO YOU think?” Chuck Scully asked.

  I had rejoined him in the bedroom d
oorway, and we walked back into the corridor. I was still shaky. “She’s been dead at least a couple of hours.” My voice sounded as if it had arrived from somewhere else and was directing the comment at me.

  “Looks that way.” Scully said. “Where the hell’s the ME? He might pinpoint it.”

  “Possibly not, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean? Of course it—”

  I cut him off. “She was due at work at nine?” My body and voice were reconnecting.

  “Every Friday. So the place would be ready for the Sharanovs’ arrival. Sharanov says so, and the girl’s mother verified it. The girl had her own key.”

  “My guess is she was killed within minutes of coming in the house. Before nine-thirty.”

  “Minutes? How do you figure that?”

  This was a crime scene and I was analyzing it; I would be all right. I said, “Have you ever watched a cleaning person at work? The first thing they do is strip the beds and shove the sheets and towels in the washing machine, so they’ll be done by the time they leave. That bed in the master bedroom is still made—sloppily, with the used linens. There are still dirty glasses and ashtrays in the living room. She never got started this morning. You’re sure there’s no evidence of a break-in?”

  “None. And Sharanov says he leaves the place locked tight as a drum when he leaves on Sunday. Anyway, he told me nothing’s missing.”

  “He might say that anyway.”

  “Why?” Scully was looking less and less like Sherlock Holmes and more like a wide-eyed schoolboy.

  “You don’t know he’s almost certainly a crook?”

  Chuck shook his head in wonder. “He is? How would I know that?”

  “He’s not big-time,” I said, “but not that small either. Extortion, smuggling, who knows.”

  Chuck’s eyes widened even more. “What! He gives to every charity in the area.”

  “Don’t they always? But if something was stolen from here that he’d have a hard time explaining—how about a bundle of cash?—he might bite the bullet and not report it missing.”

  “A crook…” Chuck was still absorbing this. “Then again, if the girl discovered something here she shouldn’t have, Sharanov might have been boxed into killing her himself. Or having her killed.”

  “In his own house? I wonder. But you’re right, you can’t rule that out either. Especially since there was no forced entry.”

  “My guess is, she let someone in,” Chuck said firmly.

  “If she did, it was someone she knew—knew well enough so that she went down to the bedroom level with him before he killed her.” Her limp body swam before my eyes.

  “Unless she was forced down here to be raped.”

  “You’ll have to wait for the medical examiner on that,” I said, “but she’s fully clothed, and—I don’t know, this doesn’t look like a rape to me.”

  We turned at the sound of footsteps—the heavy, plodding steps of someone who might be carrying a sack of potatoes on his back. The figure that appeared at the bottom of the ramp—oversize cartoon shoes and floppy socks first—carried no load, but his bent back did suggest he had been burdened all his life, probably by life itself. Dough-faced and dull-eyed, with arms that dangled uselessly from the too-short sleeves of a baggy dark suit, he looked less as if he had lost his last friend than as if he had never had one. I smelled a cop who had been at it too long. And I wanted to sketch him, then and there.

  His dull eyes moved from Scully to me. “John Docherty,” he growled, as though he expected to be challenged on the claim. He flashed a county sergeant’s shield at me. “You Scully? You want to show me the body?”

  “I’m Scully,” Chuck piped up. “This is Lieutenant Sid Shale, NYPD.” Grudgingly, he added, “Retired.”

  Docherty’s heavy lower lip dropped; it may have taken a conscious effort to keep it raised. He turned to face me again, and he took a moment to inventory my features. “Shale, huh?” he said. “Formerly NYP fucking D?”

  “That’s right.”

  Docherty pursed the big lips and allowed them to widen into a half-smile before he spoke. “Mr. Shale, we had an inquiry about you just this morning at County,” he said.

  “About me?”

  “From a lawyer. In New York.” He didn’t like the taste on those bulbous lips of the last two words.

  Chuck said, “I forgot, so did I,” He turned to me, a slight strain in his voice. “In fact, that’s what I called you about at nine-thirty or so, but you were out.”

  “A lawyer? Inquired about me?” I had to be sounding stupid.

  “Asking if you’ve done anything nasty,” Docherty said. “Gotten in any kind of trouble since you’ve come to live out this way.”

  I was beginning to get an idea of what he was talking about, but I didn’t invite him to expand on his statement.

  He did anyway. “I suppose he’s looking for ammunition. In the suit he’s bringing against the NY fucking PD.” Pause. “On behalf of his client you beat the shit out of. Got a little bit of a temper in there you can’t control, Lieutenant?”

  I had waited so long for that shoe to drop that I had stopped listening for it.

  FOUR

  THE PROBLEM ITSELF was relatively simple, but it trailed a long history.

  Shortly after my grandfather, Sam Shalkowitz, came to America, he somehow got it in his head that, poor as he was, ignorant as he was, he could hold his head up in any company, be the equal of any American, if he wore a pinky ring. Who knew what went on in the heads of immigrants at the dawn of the twentieth century? His boss on Seventh Avenue wore a pinky ring. He also wore a heavy gold watch chain, but my grandfather knew that would always be beyond his means.

  So out of his meager salary as a garment center presser my grandfather paid fifty cents a week for I don’t know how long to buy a gold ring with a tiny ruby embedded in it and SAM S. etched on the inside. That ring came to mean a lot to him. When he lay dying at an early age he gave it not to his older son Carl (“the bum would only lose it in a crap game”) but to his seventeen-year-old son Bernie, decades later to be my father, and made him promise to wear it always.

  Bernie didn’t need to be bound by a deathbed plea; the ring had already come to stand for his father. And except for one time, Pop never took that ring off his finger. So for me it always seemed as much a part of him as his broken nose or his arthritic limp. Maybe more.

  The one time he took the ring off was the day of my bar mitzvah. He wanted me to wear it in the synagogue that morning so that when I read the Torah portion that would fold me into the company of the men in the congregation I would be bonding as well with the grandfather I never knew.

  In considerable awe, I tried it on. “Pop,” I told him, “it’s too loose for my fingers, it’s going to fall off.”

  “No, it won’t,” he said. “You’ll keep your hand bent a little. And you’ll be careful, because you’re wearing your grandfather’s ring.”

  How careful could I be? It was my bar mitzvah, I was excited, and I had to pay attention to a lot that was going on.

  After the service, as we were leaving the temple for the reception my mother had arranged in our backyard, I noticed that the ring was no longer on my finger. I remember staring at my hand in disbelief, as though I could will it back. I had never been so scared in my life. What could I do? Where could I hide?

  Thirty minutes earlier I had been recognized as a man. Manfully, I drew my father aside and told him the ring was gone.

  If I live long enough so that my early years dissolve in a hazy dream, I will never forget the look, first of incomprehension, and then of rage, that flooded Pop’s features. He yanked me back into the now empty sanctuary, my feet barely touching the floor, and the two of us searched inch by inch on our hands and knees for forty minutes while our friends and relatives waited for us at home, the toasts unmade, the food uneaten, the concern growing.

  We found the ring on the bimah, where it had embedded itself under the
cantor’s chair, but it took the rest of the day for the color to come back to my father’s face.

  Twenty-one years later, when Pop’s body was found in the driver’s seat of his cab, his brains splashed on the windshield and his blood coating the steering wheel, the ring was gone, along with the cigar box containing the day’s receipts that he kept hidden under the passenger front seat. There was no sign that the cab had been searched, so he must have given up the cash willingly, as he always said he would. (“It’s only money, am I crazy?”) But my guess is that he had been reluctant to turn over the ring, and the perp had things to do and places to go and not much patience. The .38 slug in the ear had possibly served no purpose but to speed the transfer.

  By then I had been a detective first for several years, and it didn’t take long for the word of my father’s murder to spread from my squad in Washington Heights to all of Manhattan. I was alerted to every arrest stemming from a violent crime involving a taxicab, sometimes even before the perpetrator was booked.

  There was a rash of such crimes back then, and I followed wild geese all over the five boroughs. I must have grilled a couple of dozen suspects over the next few years. You never close the books on a homicide, but the faint trail my father’s killer left went gradually cold. I began to believe it had become close to impossible to link this crime to a particular perpetrator.

  By the fifth year after Pop’s murder I interrogated only two or three of the likeliest prospects. I had recently become a lieutenant, with my own detective squad in lower Manhattan and a desk piled with paperwork. After nineteen years as a cop I was looking forward to retirement and full-time painting. I could get out nicely at twenty years, but I had decided to stick it out to twenty-two or -three. With college looming for two kids, the pension would be better, but I had another reason: There was a shortage of lieutenants around that time and I figured I owed the department the benefit of my experience a while longer.