* * *
FOR ALMOST ALL of my twentieth year on the job there wasn’t a taxi crime I thought worth my time to check out. But late that winter word reached me of a suspect in a cabby murder in the South Bronx. Ballistics didn’t match the bullet that did in Pop, but that in itself meant little; some shooters trade off their guns after they fire them, so as not to lay down an MO profile.
What drew me to this case—and it wasn’t much—was the single shot that killed the victim. The gun had been hooked into the upper curve of his right ear, and faced slightly forward—exactly the placement of the weapon that had killed my father. A hunch, more than reason—a gut feeling—sent me up to where the suspect was being held for arraignment in the Bronx County Courthouse on 161st Street. His name was Ray Drummit.
His back was turned when I entered the interview room where they had left him for me to question alone. The first thing I saw was the ring. He had been rear-cuffed, and the tiny ruby glowed dully.
He turned to face me with a sullen smirk, but I spun him around and he let out a gasped “Hey!” when I pulled the ring off him. I knew it was Pop’s without checking, but I checked anyway. The engraving was now so faint I had to turn the ring this way and that to find it. It was there.
I spun him to face me again. “Where’d you get this ring?” I demanded. I usually kept my voice friendly at the beginning of an interrogation; I couldn’t manage it this time.
He was thirty, pipe cleaner skinny, with a ferret’s face and tiny eyes. “What do you mean? What the hell you doing?” he spit out. “You can’t do that, man. Take my property.”
“Where’d you get this ring?” I repeated.
“It was my grandmama’s,” he said, meeting my eyes. “Her ring. She left it to me.”
“You had a grandmother named Sam?”
He had never read the inscription, but he barely took a beat. “Yeah, that’s what they called her. For a nickname.” His tiny eyes were taking my measure, and his tone became conspiratorial. “Listen, man, you want the ring? Hey, it’s yours. It ain’t worth shit to me.”
Without thinking, I drew back my fist and drove it into his face. It was just the one punch, but I felt something give. He staggered back against the wall. A moment later he spit out a tooth, maybe two, and blood bubbled from his mouth. And he let out a howl of anguish.
I had never done anything so dumb in my life—striking a handcuffed prisoner. At my worst, I had never been a physical cop; in the course of a long career I had used force only in the heat of an arrest where there was resistance. I was known on patrol and then in detective squads as “one of those talkers.” I had found that talking usually got me what I needed to know.
That moment of dumb cost me. The suspect beat the charge he had been arrested on (the missing teeth helped; he looked like a lost waif to the grand jury), and there was not nearly enough evidence to tie him to my father’s murder. He claimed he didn’t know where his grandmother got the ring. I ended up with it, and with a twenty-year retirement hastily forced on me by a department eager to distance itself from a possible charge of police brutality.
Apparently, after nearly two years, here it came.
* * *
THE CRIME SCENE Unit arrived three minutes behind Detective Docherty, and I invited myself out of the house. The county cop seemed to have a festering sore he blamed on the NYPD, and this was not the time to pick at it. Even before I left the corridor he was saying to Scully, “What the hell business did he have here anyway?”
On the way up the ramp I could hear Sharanov on the phone in the guest bedroom, his high-performance engine of a voice idling smoothly, but ready to be gunned if that was called for. I stopped to listen.
“Yes, yes, terrible, terrible…” He betrayed no emotion. “Kitty, I am not dismissing it, I am giving you the facts.… What does this have to do with me? Nothing. Not one damn thing … You are not listening to me.… Kitty, if you don’t shut your mouth I will have it shut for you so that it never opens again.” He had dropped his voice for the last sentence but it was spoken with no more revs per minute than the others.
One of the CSU people above began waving for me to keep moving. Reluctantly, I continued on up the ramp.
* * *
OUT ON THE driveway a photographer was taking general shots of the house and grounds. There were now three vehicles I hadn’t seen before, but among them no van from the coroner’s department. I asked Walter, the cop on duty, if a medical examiner had gone in the house.
“Nope. They told me the doctor on duty is out on a case, and they’re still looking for his backup.”
Unlike the county people, Walter had no interest in shooing me off the property, and I wandered around to the side of the house and then out to the back—not after anything in particular, just not ready to leave. I was finding that I couldn’t walk away from this crime scene as I had from so many others. I hadn’t realized how strong my connection was to the girl in that bedroom lying in a pool of her blood; beyond help, she still hadn’t given me permission to leave.
I walked down to the ocean’s edge and looked out at the pulsing waves of the advancing tide. There was reassurance in their unfailing rhythm. The universe rolled on; Cassie Brennan, barely a woman, had been folded into it. Our loss, not hers.
After a few brooding moments I felt the water lapping at my sneakers. The tide had sneaked up on me. The mood broken, I backed off and turned to face that blindingly white, excessively whimsical house. Only this morning I had included this facade in a beachscape sketch—by my calculation, some two hours before Cassie’s throat was cut. I would never again look at this house without thinking of her. It was all wrong, insultingly so, for the scene of her murder.
Something was nagging at me. I stared at the house. Something was different. Had I been less than true to it in that drawing? And then I decided after all that I hadn’t; it seemed different now only because I had drawn it from far down the beach, and in the totally different light of early morning. Nothing more than that.
My peripheral vision picked up someone approaching from the west along the water’s edge. Paulie Malatesta again. Walter had chased him away from the house, but the beach was open to everyone; he must have parked in a driveway somewhere up the road. He came closer but kept a wary distance between us.
“You’re the guy lives in that shack down the beach,” he decided. “The one painted different colors.” His tone was friendly; he seemed to have forgiven our wrestling match.
“How did you know?”
“I’ve passed it. Weird-looking. Anyway, you’re a painter, right? She told me.”
“Cassie?”
He swallowed hard and nodded; if he said the name he was going to break down. “She was working for you a couple of hours a week as a model when I met her.”
That was where I’d heard the name. Malatesta; it sticks with you. He came up during, I remembered now, my next to last session with Cassie. She was her usual chatty self. She’d met this guy in Mel’s, where she bused early breakfast several days a week. He was kind of new in town, good-looking, older. (This was older?) In answer to my question she had said sadly, no, she wouldn’t go out with him, was I kidding? She liked that he was from somewhere else, but her mother would kill her, didn’t she say he was older? Anyway, she didn’t have time for that stuff.
Paulie was kicking sand and probing. “She said you were a cop from New York. Right?”
“Used to be.”
“But you’re a pro. Not like these clowns. How long you think before they arrest that creep? That pervert Sharanov?”
“Easy, Paulie. The investigation’s just getting under way. They have to build a case that’ll satisfy a grand jury. They’ll likely want to talk to you, to a lot of people. Meanwhile, why don’t you go back to the garage? Work’ll calm you down.”
He had only heard one phrase. “What do you mean, build a case? While Misha hires himself some high-price lawyer? The man’s a gangster.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. I can smell it. Dirty money. He’s a crook, crazy mean, and he’s been after”—his mouth jammed up—“after her since last year.”
“She was a pretty girl, Paulie. He wasn’t the only man who thought so.”
“He was after her.”
“Did she say that?”
“She wouldn’t, or I’d have made her quit. But she didn’t have to say it. His wife got so jealous she hit him with a chair. I’m surprised he didn’t blow her head off. That’s got to be his style.” He paused. “Is that what he did to … to … He shot her?”
“I don’t know how Cassie died.” Telling him was not my call. “You’ll have to ask the police.”
“That kid Scully? What the hell does he know? He was probably after her himself.” And then, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what the hell I’m saying.”
“That’s why you should go back to work.”
“Yeah, I guess…” He considered the option, but not for long. “Do they have what did it? The gun, knife, whatever?”
“Speak to Scully.”
“If they haven’t found it yet, they can forget it. Misha’s got thirty miles of dunes to bury it in. They should have run him in by now. Is he still in the house?”
As if in answer to the question, Sharanov’s voice, smooth and assured, carried to us from the driveway around front. “Officer, this car will have to be moved before I can get mine out.”
Paulie was stricken. “They’re letting the son of a bitch go. I can’t believe it.”
Before I could stop him he had raced around the side of the house and disappeared in front. I followed, but at a more measured pace. I had done my bit; let Walter handle this one.
By the time I got around to the front of the house, Nikki, the massive yam head, had a thick arm wrapped around the struggling Paulie’s throat; his other hand had Paulie’s head pulled back by his hair. Poor Paulie, a glutton for punishment, had been licked twice in twenty minutes. If he couldn’t handle me, he was a fool to tangle with Nikki, who had a good five inches and fifty pounds on him.
When I didn’t see Walter at first, I thought he had departed to a less stressful location, but then I spotted him in one of the police vehicles. He had been trying to move it out of the way of Sharanov’s red Cadillac. Now he was wriggling his bulk out of the seat so he could handle the “altercation,” as he would call it in his report.
Meanwhile, Sharanov had walked up to within a foot of the pretty much helpless Paulie. He moved as though he was on a track; if you wanted to change his course you would have to derail him. Quietly he said, “Did you have something to say to me?”
“No,” Paulie managed, “nothing.” Then, “I just wanted to kick you in your fucking, murdering balls.”
After which he tried that. But Nikki yanked him back and Sharanov dodged with a quickness I wouldn’t have expected from him. The flailing foot met only air. Now Nikki increased the pressure on Paulie’s throat and Sharanov stepped forward and slapped him smartly across the face. Once, with his weight behind it. The sound carried.
Few things humiliate a grown man more efficiently than a slap in the face. A punch is a man-to-man act, a slap a punishment from one’s betters. Paulie’s eyes glistened with held-back tears. Sharanov, energized by what he saw, hauled off for a second slap.
“Hey!” I called. “Cut that. Right now.”
Sharanov turned to me; his face registered surprise. He was not used to being dissuaded from anything he did.
“Or what?” he asked mildly. It was not a challenge; not yet. He was merely curious. But his eyes were glacier chips.
“I’ll tell you when your hired hand releases Mr. Malatesta. By the count of three.” I wasn’t going to give him time to think. “One, two—”
Calmly, not in the least intimidated, Sharanov muttered something in Russian. Nikki unwrapped his hand from Paulie’s neck and let go of his hair. Paulie adjusted his coveralls and assumed a defiant stance—sheer, face-saving bravado on his part. His dark cheek had an overlay of red.
Nikki turned toward me; he was waiting to be unleashed by his boss. Walter was somewhere in my peripheral vision; he was letting me handle the situation because I had done so well with the last one.
“Or what?” Sharanov repeated, soft but insistent.
Jesus, this guy didn’t let go. I walked up close to him, but the cop’s trick of looking him steadily in the eye didn’t work; he looked back just as steadily.
I said, “That’s information I release on a ‘need to know’ basis. You no longer need to know.” I turned to Malatesta. “Paulie, shouldn’t you be getting back to work?”
Paulie knew when he was outgunned, and he was grateful to be able to leave in response to a suggestion from me; there would be no loss of face in that. With a final glare at each of his adversaries, he marched out the driveway.
And now Walter lent his weight to the scene. “I’ll clear the Caddy for you folks,” he called and waddled back to the police car that was blocking it.
“That young man may have come on too strong,” I said to Sharanov, by way of a half-assed apology for Paulie; I didn’t want some Russian goon sandbagging him late one night. “But you have to understand why he’s upset. Cassie Brennan was his girlfriend.”
“We are all upset,” Sharanov said evenly. “And I don’t think Cassie was anybody’s girlfriend.”
That ended our close eye contact. He turned and walked toward his car, Nikki at his heels.
He said, “Nikki, we will stop in the village for something to eat.”
It was lunchtime and he was going to eat lunch. Period.
FIVE
I SURFED THE radio dial on the drive home. The story hadn’t broken. It would soon enough, and reporters would climb over each other to get to Beach Drive. “Teenage Beauty Murdered in Beachfront Mansion.” Couldn’t miss.
It was now close to two and I had forgotten to confirm with Lonnie that I would come to the city to meet her Texas “collector” at the gallery. It was the last thing I wanted to do that day, but I couldn’t afford not to.
The phone was ringing as I opened the front door. It was Gayle, nearly breathless. “I’ve been calling you for half an hour. I heard. Sid, I feel awful. Sick.”
“You knew Cassie?”
“She’s been working for me. Two afternoons a week holding down the shop while I was upstairs doing my line for the new season.”
“Could she do that? Wait on trade?”
“The number of walk-ins I get this time of year, believe me, she could handle. And she had the figure for the beach things I make. I knew that the minute I saw your sketches of her. I pinned patterns on her, draped fabrics, used her body to try out ideas. I never told you?”
Maybe she had; everything about Cassie had taken on new importance in the last half hour. Why hadn’t I realized before that Cassie and Gayle had pretty much the same body in different sizes? Clearly, it was the kind of body I wanted to draw.
“Damn, I’m sorry about that girl,” Gayle went on. “Why does this kind of thing have to happen?”
I thought I heard a note of guilt in her voice. I said, “Gayle, did you see something like it coming?”
“Nothing like this,” she said quickly; she may have started down a road she hadn’t meant to take. She took a moment, maybe to plan how she would say it. “But looking back I can’t say I’m totally bowled over with surprise.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it takes one to know one.” She was surer now. “Sid, she was me at that age—spreading her wings, ready to take chances. I don’t know how or why, but she may have stuck her nose in where she shouldn’t have.”
“A straight-ahead kid like Cassie? Feet on the ground, all-around good?”
“Basically, sure. Hey, I was basically a good kid. But if you hadn’t come along I’d have ended up modeling a body bag on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.”
“Don’t compare your world with Cassie�
��s. She had a real home, a religious mother who fussed over her—”
“Yeah,” Gayle murmured. “That’d keep her in line.”
“From what I could tell she stayed in line.”
“If she did it was because she was afraid her old man would show up to give her a good whipping. That’s about the only thing he ever did show up for.”
“She talked to you about that?”
“Not much. But maybe more than with you. Girl to girl. He was bad news.”
“Did he make moves on her?”
That startled her. “What? She never said anything about that. Where’d you get it?”
I started to backpedal. “Was it something she said once? I’m not sure.”
But I remembered it clearly: She said some man had seen her naked and she didn’t like it. What had made me make the leap to her father?
Gayle said, “The worst I heard about her old man is that he’s a boozer. Like half the people in this town. That other, ugh. Maybe I was lucky.”
“That your father never came after you?”
“That I never knew him.”
Because she and Cassie had been girl to girl, I wondered what she knew about Paulie Malatesta. I never got to ask; a customer had walked into the shop and Gayle had to hang up.
With the phone still in my hand I remembered to call Lonnie. I got the machine:
“You have reached the Leona Morgenstern Gallery. Please leave your name and number and we’ll return your call at the very first opportunity.”
This wasn’t the shrew who phoned me just after the crack of dawn, but the woman who had taken a lease on my heart when we first met two decades ago. Lonnie now mostly reserved that liquid, come-hither voice for the paying customers.
After the beep I said, “Lonnie?… Lonnie, where the hell are you? It’s nearly two o’clock. Rule one for selling art—open the door.” No wonder my work wasn’t selling.
I waited a few seconds for someone to pick up. Nothing but tape static. I said, “Okay, I’m coming in. I’ll be there at six to meet your Texas fat cat. If he shows before me, warn him to stand back from my paintings with his pointy alligator boots.”
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