Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  “Except for college.”

  I had already begun sketching in quick, bold strokes. The image was clear in my head, but I left the bony face blank to do the easy stuff first—the long skinny body, the boots and hat, and the gangling arms that stuck out of the T-shirt, one holding the shoulder strap of the creel, the other the fishing rod.

  Then I carefully filled in the features as I remembered them—the squinty eyes in the narrow Don Quixote face, the jutting cheekbones, bent nose, long jaw, and thin mouth. It was an easy face to caricature.

  Chuck stared at the sketch. “What would you say he was—under thirty?”

  “Probably. About your age.”

  “Darkish complexion?”

  “I’d say. Anyway, in the sun a lot.”

  He continued to stare, then took his shot. “I think it’s Harry Gregg.”

  “He lives out near the beach?”

  “Near enough to walk. And I know he likes to fish. We were in high school together. He played pretty fair basketball.”

  “What does he do now?”

  “Last I heard he worked at the Gulliver—the boatel over on the bay side?—as house engineer. I’ve run into him at Mel’s Deep Sea.”

  “You going to talk to him?”

  “Yeah.” Sheepishly, “You want to come along?”

  FIFTEEN

  WE DROVE OVER to the Gulliver in Chuck’s chief’s car. We seemed to be easing back to our old relationship. En route I said, “Will this make a problem for you?”

  “What?”

  “My coming along. Docherty’s favorite suspect?”

  “Docherty’s on his way to Brooklyn,” he said, as though that explained a lot. “And you’re the only one who can make a positive ID of this possible witness.” Then, as an afterthought. “Anyway, until there’s an arrest, everyone east of Patchogue is a suspect. People are edgy. The hardware store is selling door and window locks like there’s a fire sale. It’s a sad time for this village.”

  “How well did you know Cassie?”

  “Mostly to say hello. She was a genuine Ten, wasn’t she? A real winner. If I wasn’t married I’d have asked her out. She seemed to light up around older guys.”

  By Cassie’s standards Chuck was an older guy. I said, “She had an older boyfriend, didn’t she?”

  “That mechanic at the Huggins station. Malatesta. Yeah, he’s twenty-five. If he was her boyfriend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We talked to him. Were they going together? We mostly have his word for it. After she died.”

  “I can’t think why he’d make that up.”

  “And I don’t know anybody who ever saw them together.”

  “They’d have kept a low profile,” I said. “They didn’t have Mrs. Brennan’s blessing. Paulie wasn’t even at the wake.”

  I had a question that was likely to draw a None of your business, so I turned it into a statement that didn’t have to be answered. I said, “I’m sure the ME checked for a possible rape.”

  Chuck took a moment to decide whether to share the information with me. He came down on my side.

  “She’d had intercourse recently. There was no indication of rape.” His voice was tight with embarrassment. “They found traces of a lubricant used on condoms.”

  The news shouldn’t have surprised me, so why did my pulse quicken? Sometime after Cassie proclaimed her virginity to me the previous fall she had obviously had a change of heart. And body. She had left her constricting home, and this world, somewhat more woman than girl. I devoutly hoped her exploration of the senses, no matter how brief a time she had for it, had been fulfilling, and that it had been accompanied by love in all its glory. I was rooting for that.

  * * *

  THEY TOLD US at the Gulliver that Harry Gregg wasn’t due at work until 2 P.M., so we doubled back south toward where he lived. Chuck remembered the house from a single visit he had made to it as a teenager. “I think Harry was born in that house. North of the highway, but not that far north,” he said.

  North of the highway meant a less valuable property; not that far north meant that Gregg lived a brisk walk from the beach. Chuck said the house was old even when he saw it years ago, and declining. And, he warned me, so was the present-day Harry Gregg.

  According to Chuck’s thumbnail sketch, Gregg was from an old local family and possibly the product of too many generations of distant cousins falling in love with each other. His father died when he was a child and his mother had a hard time of it. She died when Harry graduated from high school. He married soon thereafter and moved his bride into the family house. The marriage didn’t last. The bride took him for whatever little he had, and Gregg, always something of a loner, started drinking and became even more awkwardly antisocial.

  All this was a prelude to Chuck’s warning me that we would have to be slow and careful with Harry Gregg.

  “Take it as slow as you want,” I said. “I’m basically along for the ride.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A ten-year-old Ford truck in the driveway, so we figured Gregg was at home. The two-story-plus attic frame house was old, all right, and needed paint and patching and a new porch rail, but age gave it a certain dignity. Toward the back of the weedy property a huge storage shed had gone to its knees with rot. The place looked like the cornerstone of a standard Suffolk County potato farm that had long ago been divided and subdivided to extinction. The surrounding houses were not nearly as old, but they stood helter-skelter, as though they had been dropped at random from above.

  We climbed onto the sagging porch, and Chuck knocked on the front door. And again. And again, louder. Finally we heard shuffling and bumping deep in the bowels of the old place. Eventually the door opened.

  I saw at once that I had caught him in my sketch; this was my Don Quixote, minus hat and fishing gear. His sandy hair was uncombed and he looked sleepy, but his narrow eyes widened some when he recognized Chuck.

  “Chuck Scully,” he said. “What the hell, I do something wrong?”

  “Hello, Harry. Nothing like that. How’ve you been? My wife—you remember Jean—said to be sure to say hello. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “I’m all right. I was napping, is all.” He paid out the words the way a miser does dimes. “I don’t have to be at work until two o’clock.”

  “So they told me at the Gulliver. Okay if we come in for a minute? Oh, this here’s Sid Shale.”

  Gregg glanced my way and nodded, but I didn’t register with him. He said, “Yeah, hi.” Then, to Chuck, “Jean, right.” He nodded again, but I don’t think he had a fix on Jean either. “I was out fishing real early is why I was napping. So the house is kind of a mess. Can we talk out here?”

  I suspected the house was always a mess and maybe nobody ever got inside. As Gregg grew older and more eccentric people would call it “the crazy Gregg house” and kids would scale stones at it.

  There was no place to sit out here but the porch rail, and that looked chancy, but Chuck said, “Sure, here’s fine.” He perched on the rail and it swayed. I continued to stand and so did Gregg. He was signaling that he was not expecting a long visit.

  “You don’t recognize Mr. Shale?” Chuck asked.

  Gregg shook his head slowly. “What’s this about, Chuck?”

  “Did you go down to the beach to fish last Friday morning?”

  “I fish three, four mornings a week.”

  Suddenly he understood. He said, “The morning the girl was killed. Yeah, I fished that morning.” Then, his face darkening, “Now, wait a minute—”

  “Relax, Harry, I just want to know what you may have observed on your way to the ocean. Did you walk along Beach Drive?”

  “Mostly, same as always. Then I cut across the dunes to the beach. I didn’t see anything special along the road. Or anybody, if that’s what you mean. Nobody’s in any of those houses this early in the season on a Friday morning.”

  “How early was it?”

  “Somewh
eres about seven. Wait, there was a guy on the beach drawing pictures. I remember it was that day because when I heard about the murder I thought maybe … But then I figured he must be the artist lives in that crazy-looking shack down the beach and I forgot about it.”

  Chuck nodded toward me. “Is this the man you saw drawing?”

  Gregg took a better look. Under his deep tan he flushed. “Could be him.”

  “It was me,” I said. “Did you have any luck fishing?”

  “That day? I think maybe I did get me one. I’ve got a freezer full, so what I catch don’t matter. My neighbors get the overflow.”

  Chuck said, “Harry, try to remember. You came east on the beach road at seven or so in the morning. You must have passed the house where the girl was killed.”

  He nodded. “The big white house with the winding ramp out front. Yeah, I know it.”

  “Think back. Did you see a car parked out front?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “No.”

  “You’re sure? Maybe a red Cadillac?”

  “I told you, that stretch of road was dead. Any car would have stuck out like a sore thumb. A red Caddy? Forget it.”

  So there went my theory of why Sharanov’s window was open early that morning. The only comfort I could take from its having proved a lemon was that my nemesis, Docherty, was making the long, dreary, and hopefully traffic-y drive to Brooklyn for nothing. Beyond that, I surmised that when he got back out here he’d start leaning on me all over again. Unlikely a suspect as I was, I was the likeliest he had.

  * * *

  CHUCK SCULLY DROPPED me where I had left my pickup, not far from the village hall. I spotted Jack Beltrano across the street checking a length of hose stretched out in front of the firehouse. He sauntered over to me as I was opening my door. After a perfunctory greeting he said what he had come to say.

  “About that business at the wake last night. Jim Brennan acted like a damn fool. But you have to understand, Sid. The man was loaded.”

  I climbed in. “Is there a time when he isn’t?” I was bored with listening to excuses out here for what people did because of drink.

  “Okay, he’s like a lot of people in this town who drink too much. I don’t have to tell you, the winters are a dead time. Especially in construction. But you have to understand the added factor with Jim. He’s never got over what he did to Cassie.”

  That got my attention. “What he did to her?”

  “The guilt he laid on her. When his little one was run over—Angela, she was five—Jim was supposed to be watching her. But he’d slipped away for a while, leaving Cassie in charge. And that’s when it happened, Cassie reading in the schoolyard and Angie running into the road after a ball. Cassie was ten or eleven, and it took her years to get over it. If she ever did. You can guess how Jim felt. One daughter dead, the other blaming herself. He really did love Cassie something fierce.”

  “If he was so crazy about her, how come I hear he was never around for her?”

  “That was Nora’s doing. She and Jim haven’t gotten along in years. No surprise there. So he keeps his distance. You and I would have gotten a divorce by now—in fact, didn’t you tell me you did?—but that’s not the way it works with couples like the Brennans.”

  “Jack, if you’re apologizing for Brennan, apology accepted.” It was a wrenching story, and it rang true. “Tell him I’m sorry for his troubles.”

  And I took off for home. I had gone the whole morning without painting, and a morning without painting is a morning without meaning.

  * * *

  THE ANSWERING MACHINE announced two messages. I punched it on and climbed the scaffold with a fresh supply of brushes.

  From Leona Morgenstern: “Sid, Seated Girl is back from the framer, and it is much enhanced. The piece is nuanced, fluent, powerful. A man who paints like that I would marry in a minute if I hadn’t already been disastrously married to him. Tess Turkinton dropped by this morning with a check for the framing, but mostly to ask a lot of questions about you, including what’s your phone number. You have no doubt made a conquest. Maybe that’s why I am looking at you with new eyes. Anyway, I’m determined to sell those moneyed Texans something of yours. For both our sakes.” Lonnie did have her good moments.

  But the other call was not from Tess Turkinton: “Sid, I never did thank you properly for a lovely time the other evening. Oh, this is Olivia Cooper—in case, as is likely, you have trouble sorting out the ladies who are grateful to you for recent lovely evenings. Anyway, will you give me a chance to reciprocate? I’ll be out at my beach place this weekend; without being boastful, I believe I can cook you a dinner to equal Muccio’s. And if you don’t like what I do in the kitchen”—a ripple of laughter here—“maybe there’s a room somewhere in the house where I can please you.”

  She left her number and hung up. She had come on like the Macy’s parade; this was a side of Cooper I hadn’t seen.

  I was suddenly a hit with the women currently in my life. If the soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Sharanov checked in, I would be batting a thousand.

  SIXTEEN

  BY TUESDAY EVENING a semblance of normality had returned to greater Quincacogue. Chuck Scully had gone back to tracking down the phantom bicycle thief (five missing, in all); the media had moved on to more active stories; the weather continued seasonal; and a house painting crew and a decorator were hard at work in the Sharanov master bedroom. (Out, damned spots, and everything associated with them. I could understand Sharanov’s impatience to get that job done.)

  Detective Docherty had now taken complete control of the murder investigation. I figured I was still high on his suspect list. I had heard nothing further from him directly, but Chuck Scully dropped by to warn me that Docherty had learned of my “weird temper tantrum” at Cassie’s wake; he wondered whether I might be “going off the deep end—cracking under the intense police scrutiny.”

  And then Tom Ohlmayer phoned from Manhattan South to report that the county detective was nosing around the NYPD, trying to build a “psychological profile” of what he believed was a dangerously angry man with a fatal obsession. I hoped that kept Docherty busy into the foreseeable future.

  Tom had struck out locally on the prints from Tess Turkinton’s wineglass; he was going to try the national file in Washington. The hell with them all; I was painting up a storm.

  Cassie Brennan’s funeral had been held that afternoon. I didn’t go. I had already attended a funeral for Cassie in my heart; an appearance in church might have set Jim Brennan off again. Not to disappoint Detective Docherty, but I had reached my quota of hand-to-hand combat for the week.

  Gayle Hennessy called after the funeral to report that both Sharanovs had shown up at the church. Mrs. Sharanov she recognized because she had bought a beach outfit from Gayle the previous summer and paid by check. Mr. Sharanov she figured out because he looked just about the way she guessed he would, right down to the jacket not worn but draped over his shoulders, “Hollywood gangster style,” and by the way he and Mrs. Sharanov kept ten yards between them at all times.

  By nine at night I was painted out; my brush hand was going numb. What I needed was a forty-minute jog, followed by a drive into the village to finish unwinding over a few beers. My pub of choice was Pulver’s; the locals hung out there to escape the frantic second-homers with their trendy gossip and cutting-edge wardrobes. Nothing at Pulver’s was cutting edge except the knife that sliced the salami for the free lunch. I intended to end the evening with some serious sack time.

  I stripped off my painting shirt and found another that wasn’t yet ready for the Laundromat. I remembered it as the one I wore when I went over to the Sharanov house the day of the murder. White, but remarkably clean. Waste not, want not.

  The salt air was relatively still, the rolling surf calming. I jogged east for a mile or so. There were locals in the houses in this direction, lights were on, and shadows moved behind the windows. Except for the gentle sound of the ocean it was too much like a city suburb. I
preferred the feeling of Colorado ghost town I got when I headed west toward the belt of summer homes there. I turned in that direction and jogged to the Sharanov house and beyond, past half a dozen in deep slumber.

  When I doubled back I slowed to a walk as I passed the Sharanov house. I had thought the master himself might be in residence tonight, since he had come out to the beach for the funeral, but the lights were out. With nothing special in mind I made my way around to the front. A couple of painter’s ladders were stacked beside the entrance ramp, ready to be picked up in the morning. The repainting was finished.

  I realized Sharanov probably wouldn’t use his bedroom again until the paint was dry, the smell was gone, the new furniture was in place, and the memory of the tragedy had faded. For most people that last might take months or years; for Misha, I figured, violent death would be less of a nuisance than having to keep two sets of books for his restaurant. He would be over Cassie’s in a day or two.

  I had worked my way to the Sharanov driveway, so I set out for home along Beach Drive; under a thin moon this was a less treacherous route than the beach, with its ever-shifting gullies. When I made the dogleg turn a couple of hundred yards on I could see my property dimly silhouetted against the sky—house, dune grass, Flotsam, pickup.

  And another shape, a bulky sedan, possibly a Volvo. It was not a police car, thank God, but I had an unknown visitor sitting out there in the dark waiting for my return.

  There was no point in trying to steal up to this vehicle for a sly preview of my caller. If he hadn’t already heard my sneakers crunching on the gravel he certainly had kept an eye peeled for my return. So I slowed to a saunter: Let him wait.

  Closer, I was able to make out two heads in the car, one in the driver’s seat, one in the back. Both were turned my way. The backseat visitor opened his door and got out—unfolded out, would be a better description. He was big. A couple of steps closer I saw that he was Nikki, Sharanov’s chauffeur, maître d’, whatever. Man of a thousand disguises, he was in an ill-fitting houndstooth jacket and a sweater with a baggy turtleneck. A country gentleman from a Third World country. But perched on this backwoods squire’s outfit the yamlike head looked more aristocratic. Clothes do make the man.