Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  I flattened myself against the living room wall at right angles to the top of the ramp. And realized I had now more than half-committed myself to mixing it up with whoever was on his way up. Conscious of the dull ache in my shoulder, I was probably about to go one-on-one with someone for the third time in four days—more often than I had in my last ten years on the job. My out-of-shape and aging body was protesting, and so was my cautious mind.

  At least I had surprise on my side. I had better use it decisively.

  That light beam was pointed dead ahead while the feet that moved it up the ramp dragged. This clod was taking forever to make it to my level. When he did, I was ready. I came out low and charging.

  I connected with a hip. The attached body toppled over backward and I landed on it. The two of us rolled a few yards down the ramp, first me up, and then him, before we came to a stop. With me, as luck would have it, on top. Meanwhile my opponent, who was softer than a jelly doughnut and had about that much fight in him, had been yelling “Hey! What the hell! Damn it, stop!”

  The yell was urgent and frightened, but its undertone was almost languid, as though urgent and frightened were alien to this voice. I had heard the voice before.

  Still straddling my adversary, I yanked the flailing flashlight out of his hand and shone it in the face of Kitty Sharanov’s lounge lizard brother. What was his name? Roy Chalmers. He still couldn’t make out who was sitting on him, and now he was shouting, “It’s no use, all I have is six dollars. Take it, it’s yours.”

  I said, “You’ll need it for gas and tolls, Roy. Unless the village police hold you for breaking and entering.”

  I turned the light to my face. Chalmers took a moment to place me and then I felt his body untense. He said, “What do you mean, breaking and entering? I have a key to the front door. What are you doing in this house?”

  It was a reasonable question.

  * * *

  WE WERE SEATED in matching chairs on the west side of the living room. By agreement the only light came from a small lamp we had placed on the floor between us. There would be no one in residence in the summer homes to the west, practically no likelihood of the light being seen to the east, where the nearest house was mine. But why take chances?

  Chalmers was relaxed now, comfortable in the designer chair; he knew how to lounge, all right. He was dressed in his snooping clothes—a pair of good lightweight wool slacks, a maroon cashmere sweater over an open shirt, and Italian shoes with adjustable buckles, in case, I supposed, he lost weight in his feet during the caper. I had already explained that as a conscientious neighbor I had come over to investigate what I thought was a prowler. And what was his excuse for being here in the dark?

  He said he didn’t need an excuse; he reminded me that his sister was mistress of this house, and she had given him the key to pick up a few things for her.

  “With a flashlight?”

  “With a flashlight or a flaming torch,” he said languidly. “What the hell business is it of yours?”

  “None,” I said. Then, “But don’t you think your brother-in-law might be interested in your reason for this visit? If he is, you’d have to give him a full explanation because I happen to know he gets impatient with people who are less than totally candid with him. Have you ever seen Misha impatient? He’s really bad news.”

  Chalmers’s posture shifted noticeably. No longer lounging, he now veered toward cringing. “The man’s impossible to live with,” he whined. “Temper, temper, temper. Plus, he’s a flagrant adulterer.”

  He wrestled with himself briefly before delivering the rest of the news. “You’ll hear about it anyway. Kitty filed for divorce today.”

  “No kidding,” I said; she had plenty of cause but I hadn’t thought she had the guts.

  “Misha’s furious,” Roy went on. “She’s afraid he won’t allow her access to some things here that are indisputably hers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sheer spite. Clothes, accessories, personal items. There’s no reason for you to fan the fire by bringing my presence here to his attention. You met Kitty. She’s a decent woman but dreadfully pliant. Misha will roll right over her. She may end up with nothing. After nearly fifteen years with the creature from the black lagoon.”

  If she ended up with nothing, so would brother Roy. I said, “You’ve been poking around here in the house for—what?—a good twenty minutes. If you’re collecting Kitty’s personal effects, where are they?”

  He wasn’t prepared for the question. After a painful silence he murmured, “I was basically doing an inventory this time out. I plan to return with a minivan in a day or two.”

  I wasn’t going to let him off with that lame excuse. I said, “Kitty’s things would likely be in one or two places—the bedroom and her bathroom. You were running all over the house with that light. Looking for what?”

  His mouth pursed. He didn’t want to go into that.

  I pressed. “How about you were looking for something you didn’t need a van for? Like cash.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Whatever wretched little money Kitty has is in the bank.”

  “I mean Misha’s cash. A bundle or two he might not be able to put in a bank. Skim from his restaurant in Brooklyn.”

  Dismissively, “The Tundra? I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  My hunch was that possibly he did. He would if Kitty did. But if that was it I wasn’t going to get it out of Roy Chalmers. Cash money was serious business. Hot irons to the soles of his feet wouldn’t coax that truth out of him.

  Two minutes later we left the house together, and Chalmers locked the front door. I watched him get into his Mercedes—his sister’s, I supposed—and drive off.

  I called after him, “Be sure to give my regards to Kitty.”

  * * *

  I REALIZED WHEN I got home that at least one good thing had come out of the encounter. Jogging hadn’t done the job, but rolling down the ramp in an embrace with Roy Chalmers had readjusted my shoulder; the pain was almost gone. I would have to remember the remedy.

  The answering machine was blinking. It was Lonnie, uncharacteristically subdued, a note of sympathy in her voice.

  “Sid…? Sid, bad news, I’m afraid. Ben Turkinton called. He’s heard, of course, about the death of that young girl. Who hasn’t? My God, it’s been all over the news. He tried me over the weekend, but I was away. He thinks, no surprise, it would be counterproductive at this point for him to gift that man Sharanov with the portrait. Even I would be hard put to deny the element of the ghoulish in such a gift.

  “Sid, I’m sorry, he’s stopped his check. The picture had already gone out to the framer, so he’s agreed to pay for the framing, but that’s it. For now, anyway. I got him to agree to reassess the situation in a few weeks, when the picture might again seem appropriate—‘a way for Sharanov to remember a young friend who was cut down as she began to flower.’ But I don’t think Bennington will take that vague promise in lieu of tuition. So that’s it.

  “Oh, Alan said to tell you he’s sorry he missed you on Friday and he looks forward to seeing you when school ends. He’s still painting like mad evenings. Very good stuff. He reminds me of the young Sid Shale.”

  End of message.

  I formed an image: Mikhael Sharanov in his living room proudly showing a visitor the tastefully framed portrait of a dismembered naked girl who happened to have been butchered in his bedroom.

  Yeah.

  I climbed up on the scaffold and lost myself in painting.

  FOURTEEN

  WITHOUT ANY OUTSIDE stimulus that I was aware of, my eyes sprang wide open at about three in the morning. I had been dead asleep for less than an hour, but I was as fully awake now as if I had been roused with a cattle prod. An idea had sprung full-blown into my consciousness, totally unbidden. It had to have been germinating somewhere in the back of my mind because the sketch I did early in the morning of Cassie’s murder—the beach scene with the Sharanov house in the foregroun
d—had been troubling me ever since.

  I hopped, literally, out of bed, turned on the desk lamp, tilted it back, and took a close look at the sketch, still taped to the wall. Yes, the answer to “What’s wrong with this picture” that I had seen in my head was right there on the paper. If you were looking for it, it hit you in the eye; if you weren’t, you slid right past it. Nice work, Sid.

  I secured the sketch between cardboards. Before I went back to bed I put it in a shopping bag at the front door.

  As if I might forget it.

  * * *

  I WAS ALMOST never in the village at ten to nine in the morning. That was another thank-you I owed County Detective Docherty. Except for the Super-ette, Mel’s Deep Sea Diner, and the Coffee Cup, none of the downtown shops were open this early. The only activity on one-way Covenant Street was in front of Gayle’s Provocativo. Gayle Hennessy was outside the shop fussing with something on the window. She flagged me down when she spotted my pickup. I stuck my head out the window and she stepped aside so I could see the sign she was posting:

  PRE-SEASON SPECIAL—ALL MERCHANDISE 20% OFF SALE ENDS SATURDAY

  “Is this okay?” she said.

  “Good color, nice composition,” I called. “But I don’t like the message. With the season coming you should be charging twenty percent more.”

  “Thank you, I wasn’t looking for a critique,” she said. “I just want to know if the damn sign is straight.”

  “It’s straight.”

  A tow truck had pulled up alongside my pickup. Paulie Malatesta was at the wheel, looking ghastly; he obviously wasn’t getting much sleep.

  He leaned toward me and yelled, “Yo, Lieutenant, have they arrested him yet? Sharanov? Have they nailed the creep?”

  That kid had only one tune in his head. Understandably. I was tempted to shake it out of him with, No, but they may be about to nail me for the crime. Instead I cranked down my other window and said, “I don’t know any more than you do, Paulie. You could have asked Chuck Scully if you’d been at Cassie’s wake last night.” I wanted to see what that would stir up.

  He blinked, drew back as though he’d been slapped, and roared off down the street.

  Gayle said, “That was cruel, Sid. I don’t think Cassie’s mother even knows Paulie exists. And what are you doing in town at this ungodly hour?”

  If I told her I was on my way to be grilled, the whole village would know in fifteen minutes. I said, “I like to get my shopping done before the stores crowd up.”

  * * *

  DETECTIVE DOCHERTY WAS almost genial this morning. He greeted me in Chuck Scully’s office with what I took to be a smile, although his heavy lips had trouble cranking it up. He was not a frequent smiler.

  He sent Chuck for a couple of chairs and he arranged them so that we sat at the desk as a circle of equals, three professionals gathered to discuss a murder investigation. A cozy start, and I didn’t care whether it was an interrogation ploy or Docherty responding to someone in the DA’s office who had instructed him to cool it until he built a reasonable case against me. I had my own agenda for the meeting.

  But first I gave the county cop what he asked for. I started with an account of how I came to do a couple of nude sketches of Cassie, despite Mrs. Brennan’s prohibition. That wasn’t easy. Then I had to lurch through an explanation of why I happened to be hung up on a ceiling beam the morning of the murder and therefore unable to get to the phone when Chuck Scully called me at nine-thirty. I wound up by congratulating Docherty’s crime scene people for lifting my prints from Sharanov’s headboard. I explained, as I had to Chuck the other night, how they got there, and I admitted that I had possibly been careless in allowing that to happen. I couldn’t help adding that in my previous life when we found an officer’s prints at a crime scene we considered the source.

  “I did,” Docherty said, but mildly. He was exercising restraint.

  Chuck looked embarrassed through this part of the meeting. Until Docherty had goaded him into the role of attack dog he had been my totally uncritical fan. Now that Docherty was easing up on me Chuck was out there all by himself, an attack dog without a mission. I sensed his tail curling between his legs. He would start biting it the next time Docherty reversed himself.

  So before the questions grew sharper—I expected a grilling on my relationship with Cassie and a close examination of my movements the morning of the murder—I shifted the focus by going into my own pitch. Out of courtesy, I directed it at Scully: This was his police station.

  “Chuck, I brought something in I thought you’d want to see,” I said and took the sketch from the shopping bag at my feet. I slipped it out of its protective cardboards and laid it on the desk facing the chief.

  The move got Docherty’s attention. He leaned across Scully and turned the sketch to face him. “That looks like the Sharanov house,” he announced. He hadn’t made detective for nothing.

  “It is,” I said. “I drew this sketch the morning of the murder.”

  Docherty jumped all over that. “That morning? You were out there on the beach, near the Sharanov house, the morning of the murder?”

  “Yes, somewhere around seven. I was back home well before eight.”

  Chuck spoke up for the first time. Eagerly he said, “Yeah, you can see the sun hitting the house flat, bouncing off the windows head on.” He was edging back to my side. “It would do that real early.”

  “So?” Docherty said.

  “You see how I did that?” I said. “The glare whiting out the windows? Turning them blank?” I had done it with a wash.

  “What are you looking for, compliments?” Docherty growled. “Or what?”

  But Chuck got it. He was leaning across Docherty. “Here, the bottom of this window, see? A band of black. No glass. No reflection from the sun.” He let the rest roll triumphantly. “Like this window was partly open.”

  I had to hand it to him. The double-hung bedroom windows were tiny in the picture, and more suggested than drawn in detail. It had taken me three days to spot what I had done with a couple of strokes of my black pen.

  I said, “People may leave their weekend house without making the beds, but they make absolutely sure the house is locked up tight.”

  “Sharanov’s was,” Chuck said excitedly. “Almost the first thing I looked for was forced entry. Every door, every window, was locked.”

  “So what that means…,” Docherty said slowly. He was waiting for someone to tell him what it meant.

  I let Chuck do it. He was coming into bloom. He said, still excited, “That open window is in the master bedroom. It could have been open at seven in the morning because Sharanov had slept there the night before and opened it for ventilation. If he did, he was still there when you drew the picture. And then he closed and locked the window sometime later—maybe because he didn’t want anyone questioning him about having been in the house.”

  Now Docherty came aboard. “And if he closed it after nine, was it because he was there when the girl came to work and they had some kind of dispute?” To make sure we got his point he ran a finger across his throat.

  I let the cops bounce the ball back and forth between them: They were on salary.

  Chuck said, “Sharanov claims he arrived at the house around eleven, hours after the murder.”

  “And according to him, he never went inside,” Docherty said.

  Chuck agreed. “He says he left the chauffeur with the bags and drove into the village to pick up a few things. That’s an easy check.”

  “Toward the village was the way he put it to me,” Docherty corrected. “The chauffeur called him on the car phone and told him about the murder. Sharanov never got to the village. He turned around and went back to the house. That can be checked with the chauffeur. What’s his name?”

  “Nikki,” I said; I couldn’t resist finally joining in. “Nikki wouldn’t be much help. If Sharanov told you he was delayed en route by space aliens Nikki would swear he saw the mother ship. The cellular p
hone record would be more reliable confirmation.”

  “I’d better get hold of this Sharanov,” Docherty said; he was keyed up. “For a sit-down.”

  He had lost interest in me, at least for the moment. He smelled blood somewhere else. It couldn’t have gone better.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER he was gone. He had located Sharanov after a blizzard of phone calls, and he left to meet him in Brooklyn at the Tundra, “to secure your additional assistance in our ongoing investigation.” I gathered that the Russian had not exactly leaped at this chance to help in the fight against crime.

  Chuck offered to accompany Docherty, but Docherty smelled a possible collar somewhere down the road and he declined the offer. Not unless he absolutely had to was he going to split credit for the arrest with a village policeman who was still on his first can of Gillette Foamy.

  Once Docherty left the building I pulled Chuck back into his office and closed his door. He gave me a what’s-going-on-here? look.

  I said, “If Sharanov slept at his house that night there may be a quicker way to find out than driving all the way to Brooklyn. If you can help me with this.”

  I looked around for something to draw on. A large calendar from an insurance company hung on a wall. I pulled the April sheet from off the back and laid it on the desk, blank side up. I selected a ballpoint pen from half a dozen in a coffee mug.

  I said, “While I was settling down on the beach to sketch that morning, a man came toward me over the dunes from Beach Drive. He was heading west to east with fishing gear, looking for a likely spot to surf cast. In walking to the beach, he had almost certainly passed the front of the Sharanov house. If he did, no way could he have missed a red Cadillac out front.”

  Scully nodded his agreement. “Not at seven o’clock on a Friday morning.”

  “Out of season.”

  Scully’s eyes sparkled with anticipation. “You know who that was, Lieutenant?” Suddenly I was no longer Sid.

  “No, but he would almost certainly have to be a local. And you’ve lived here all your life.”