Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  Inside he closed the door, waved me to a chair, went behind his desk to shuffle some papers and rearrange some others; he handled them as though they were not sterile. He looked up and remembered that I was there and asked if I’d like coffee or a soft drink.

  I said no, and was this where I was going to be deposed? Because where was the lawyer from the other side, and didn’t they need a stenographer or at least a recording device? And could we get on with it, because this business was costing me a day I could ill afford.

  He looked mildly surprised. “Aren’t you retired?”

  “Not from life.”

  Pomphrey/Humphrey cleared his throat. This was a moment of truth.

  “Okay. There isn’t going to be a deposition,” he said. “I called your home an hour ago to tell you not to come in, but apparently you had already left.” He sounded injured, as if I had somehow let the side down.

  “As you know,” I said, “I live on the east end of Long Island. If I had been home an hour ago to take your call I wouldn’t have made it here for a noon meeting.”

  He plucked a couple of the possibly germ-laden papers off his desk and said impatiently, “Of course.” Having lost the point, he was moving on. “I have some news that should please you, Mr. Shale.”

  Two pieces of good news today; my cup ranneth over and into my shoes. “Tell me,” I said. “I could use some good news.”

  “There isn’t going to be a deposition,” he said.

  “You already told me that.”

  “I mean ever. The complainant is dead.”

  He was right; this was good news. “Drummit? Why wasn’t I told? When did he die?”

  “At three o’clock this morning.”

  “What was it, a heart attack? I hope he lived long enough to suffer.”

  “He was shot to death in a cab he was attempting to rob at the point of a gun. The cabdriver was an undercover police officer.”

  Relief coursed through me, followed by elation. I said, “So maybe there is a God.”

  Humphrey/Pomphrey wasn’t listening. Sulkily, he said. “This litigation has been a headache and a half to this office. Counsel for the late Mr. Drummit has just informed me that he is withdrawing from the case. For all practical purposes the case is dead.”

  He was looking at my hand. “Is that the ring that got you in all the trouble?”

  “My father’s,” I said. “And my grandfather’s.”

  He was staring at it. “Mmm,” he said, and I detected a faint sneer. If he had said any more I’d have floored him. On general principles. And let the lawsuit fall where it might.

  * * *

  “SID-NEY, FOR LUNCH?” Enzo, polishing glasses behind the bar, could not have been more surprised when I walked into Muccio’s. “And on a Thursday? Your gang won’t be in for another, let’s see, thirty hours.”

  “Yeah, I’m a little early.”

  I owed myself a celebration, and no way was I going to turn right around and make that drive back to the beach. There were things I could do in town, and I had maneuverability. Having failed to extract my car from an extortionist garage during its first hour of bondage, I was stuck with a minimum charge of ten hours.

  I had made some phone calls and filled my dance card. The earliest meeting I could set up was for three-thirty, so I tried to grab a cop friend for lunch; I was hoping for a briefing on the taxi sting that killed Ray Drummit. All three of the old gang I called were out chasing lawbreakers. My taxpayer dollars were at work, which is why I was here alone.

  Why Muccio’s? Habit, the mighty force that keeps Eskimos living in the frostbite zone. And Muccio’s wasn’t that far from the Municipal Building.

  With Enzo’s voice carrying from the bar, “Two weeks in a row, Sid-ney? The kitchen will be pleased,” I went into the backroom and seated myself at a table for two, a first for me. I surveyed the room while a waiter slammed down bread and water and scaled a menu my way. A red sauce thumbprint in a corner told me this was the one I had been given the previous Friday.

  The Muccio customer mix was a little different during the day. Today it featured two large tables of nattily dressed gents who spoke in low voices and plowed through meals that called for several large dishes to be set before each of them at the same time. I recognized two or three of these serious diners. They could well afford more expensive restaurants, but Muccio’s had a floor of bare tiles, and mob guys disdain “rug joints.” One or two of them probably recognized me, but I doubted that my presence made them uncomfortable; cops and crooks often move in the same small world.

  While I waited for my lunch (“Please be patient,” Muccio’s menu should have noted, “all dishes are reheated to order”) I reviewed my schedule. Kitty Sharanov was my three-thirty, and I was meeting Alan for dinner. The period between Kitty and Alan would not be dead air. I had called Lonnie at the gallery for help in tracking down Alan, and she told me that he was at home studying for an exam. It was good that I was in the city, she added; she had just received something she knew I would want to see. I agreed to drop by the gallery at about five. My cup was now overflowing my shoes.

  Because of the above productive schedule I attacked my eggplant parmigiana with a clear conscience. While I ate I amused myself by trying to guess what forms of felony were under discussion nearby. Soon after my double espresso and rum cake arrived (this was a day for reckless splurging) a very large shadow fell across the table.

  Behind me a bass voice said, “Hey, Lieutenant, how’re they hanging?” and Bobby “Wee Willy” Sonnino came around the table and put a foot on the chair opposite me, like a dog registering his claim on a tree. Wee Willy had been arrested twice on union racketeering charges and once for murder (that’s how we first met), but he had never been indicted. His street name, inevitably, had been inspired by his size, six three in every direction.

  “Hello, Bobby,” I said, “I didn’t see you.”

  “If I’d been here you’d have seen me,” he said confidently; of course, he was right. “I just come in. Okay if I sit?”

  I said what I’d have said to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. “Help yourself.”

  He dropped into the chair. It held. He looked at my dessert and said, “How’s their rum cake here?”

  I pushed the leaden dish across the table and said, “Why don’t you finish it? I have to go swimming in half an hour.”

  “Yeah?” He had already picked up the sodden cake between two meaty fingers and was shoveling it into his mouth. “Too sweet,” he said. But down it went. “I hear you put in your papers, got yourself a place out there at the beach.”

  “That’s right. I wore out young, Bobby, keeping my eye on guys like you.”

  “Sorry about that. You anywhere near Misha Sharanov? That Russian who a girl was killed in his house?”

  “He’s my neighbor. Was that a shot in the dark?”

  “Not exactly. His people are saying there’s heat on you for that dead girl.”

  “They’re saying that because Sharanov is taking some heat himself. Bobby, where is it you run across his people?” Wee Willy was a sometime extortionist, Sharanov had once been in the shakedown racket, and they could very well have locked horns in the past. But now?

  “Here and there sometimes.” Wee Willy smiled and wiped rum cake from the corners of his mouth. “It happens I took a Jewish broad out to the Tumbra—Tundra?—couple of nights ago. She’d heard about it and she made a stink that’s where she had to go. It was a first date, so could I whack her in the chops and drag her by the hair to one of my joints? I went. You ever eat that Russian shit? Garbage. I got to tell you, what these foreigners put in their mouth…”

  He shifted gears. “Anyway, that’s where I heard you trashed. From one of his people. You worried?”

  “No. But thanks for asking.”

  Wee Willy’s gaze was fixed covetously on an invisible prize in the middle distance. “That’s a real money machine, that Tumbra. You know they don’t take plastic.”


  “Neither does this place.”

  He hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, but this place…” He looked for a way out. “This place is nickel and dime. The Tumba’s bigger than the Garden. And can those Russkys knock back the sauce.” His eyes shone with envy. “Sharanov has to be stuffing mattresses with the skim.”

  “Is that a guess, Bobby, or do you know something?”

  He shrugged. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  “How well do you know the man?”

  “We would run across each other. Years ago.”

  “You ever run across him with a woman?”

  “Not his wife, if that’s what you’re asking. But he did like the broads.”

  “How young?”

  “How young? Young. I don’t think he knows from ‘too young.’ You expect any different from these animals?”

  He heaved himself out of the chair. “I’m meeting some people.” He pointed at the plate that had held the rum cake. “Not that bad. I might order me a couple of those.”

  * * *

  KITTY SHARANOV HAD put me off till three-thirty because when I called she was on her way out to the hairdresser. It was a new Kitty Sharanov who opened the door to me now, with a new, younger hairstyle and a tailored suit that made much of her long legs and flat hips. And she was sober. Either the visit to the hairdresser had imposed a few hours of abstinence, or this really was a new Kitty Sharanov. Whichever, I saw for the first time what Sharanov might have seen when he married her—a young Katharine Hepburn, the pluckily independent, unattainable WASP. Just about the opposite, I would have guessed, of Misha’s Russian wives.

  She didn’t offer me a drink. The only theme that carried over from my previous visit was a renewed hint of come-hither in her eyes. She may have had me marked as a possible target for her first postmarital adventure. Brother Roy, she told me almost before I stepped over her threshold, was out for the afternoon.

  “Is that what you wanted to see me about?” she said. “Roy’s behavior?” She had settled on a short couch, and she indicated I was to sit next to her. “He told me you two had some sort of misunderstanding at the beach house.”

  “What we had was a knockdown fight. I thought he was a burglar. He was skulking around like one.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “If you think you’ve seen messy divorces, this one will top your list. I’m trying to find out what Misha’s assets are.”

  “And where they are?”

  She looked away. “He keeps his books in his armpit. My lawyer throws up his hands in despair.”

  “You must be entitled to a healthy settlement. How long were you married?”

  “Thirteen years. And we were seeing each other for two before that. While he untangled from that awful Russian. His second wife. Misha is a slow learner.”

  “You must have been in high school when you met.”

  “Not quite nineteen, thank you, and a year out of Miss Porter’s. If you’re counting on your toes, I’m thirty-four.”

  “No kidding? I’d never have guessed.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  I opened my mouth to lay on some additional flattery, but she held up a hand. “Please, don’t spoil it.”

  I managed to get in a plug anyway. “So where does an eighteen-year-old debutante of the year meet—what?—a close-to-forty-year-old Brooklyn hood?”

  She neither confirmed nor denied the debutante accolade, but her tone softened. “I didn’t know he was a hood. He had a box at Belmont next to my grandparents’. It was the last year they had it. It was the last year,” she added bitterly, “they had anything. Misha knew how to bet. He was good-looking, well dressed, almost courtly. With just enough of a foreign accent to be interesting.”

  And probably flashing a roll of bills that would choke the winner of the feature race. I said, “Thirteen years seems a long time to be married to a Mikhael Sharanov.”

  “Especially when there are no children. Misha already had a couple he didn’t much like by his dreary first wife. He didn’t want any more.”

  “Where are those kids?”

  “One is a lawyer who works on environmental issues, the other is in graduate school, studying, I think, astrophysics, whatever that is. They are Misha’s despair.”

  She’d had enough of that subject. She leaned toward me and touched my knee lightly with two fingers. She said, “Is this a social call or are you playing detective again?”

  I said, “Your lawyer will tell you it’s too soon for you to receive gentleman callers.” I hoped I sounded regretful, but she withdrew the fingers. I added, “Yes, I’m still on Cassie’s death. You told me you cared about her, too.”

  Impatiently, “I did. I do.”

  “Last time I saw you I said I thought Misha may have slept at the beach house the night before Cassie died. Do you remember my asking if you could guess who was with him? Because his bed was made and you agreed he’d never have made it himself?”

  She took some time weighing how to answer this. Finally she said, “Are you trying to pin Cassie’s death on Misha?”

  “Would that worry you?”

  “Plenty. Because whatever the bastard’s assets, they do me no good if they go to a clutch of lawyers defending him on a murder charge.”

  I said, “No, I don’t think Misha did it. I’m just trying to sort out what was going on in the beach house around the time of the murder.” She didn’t respond to that and I had to prompt. “As I remember, your first choice, and your brother’s, for a sleeping companion for Misha, was Olivia Cooper.”

  “I believe it was. So?”

  “I spent a couple of hours with Cooper later that evening. And what troubles me is, she didn’t seem anything like the bimbo you and Roy described.”

  “I don’t care what she seemed. I know what I know.”

  “Which is?”

  “What is this about, Mr. Shale?” She had pulled the chain on her flirty look. “I’ll grant Olivia this much—she knows how to manipulate men. Don’t tell me she’s worked her magic on you.”

  The best I could do was, “I’m puzzled, that’s all.”

  “Okay, you asked, so here’s what I know.” She was simmering, and the story came pouring out. “Misha and I were at the house one weekend late last summer. We were having our usual marital ups and downs and this was during a rare up. On Sunday we were supposed to have lunch with a girlhood friend of mine who had taken a rental in Amagansett. At the last minute Misha complained that his arthritis was kicking up and the long drive would just about kill him. Since Midge was my friend, why didn’t I go on alone? So I did.

  “About fifteen minutes east I discovered I had left Midge’s address at home, and I had to turn around and drive back. I went into the house, and down that goddam ramp. I headed for our bedroom, where I’d left the note with Midge’s address and phone number. Still with me, Mr. Shale?”

  “I may be ahead of you.”

  “Passing the main guest room I heard sounds. The door was open a crack, and I pushed it wide. Misha and Cooper were locked so tight you couldn’t tell where he ended and she began, except that I don’t think the hand on her ass was her own. She couldn’t have been there more than a few minutes. He must have called the instant I was out of the house, and she came running like a bitch in heat. They hadn’t even heard my car. Maybe the heavy breathing drowned it out. Bimbo enough for you, Mr. Shale?”

  She seemed to take pleasure in watching my face. The air of hospitality in the room had dissolved and there wasn’t much more I was going to learn from Kitty. In point of fact, I had learned everything I came for. As soon as I could do it gracefully I thanked her for her time, asked to be remembered to her brother, and made my exit.

  At the door I turned with a final thought. “If Misha was such a bastard—and I bet that wasn’t the first time you caught him—how did you stick it out for thirteen years?”

  “After I taught him he couldn’t knock me around the way he had his Russian wives, he was v
ery much the husband I wanted. I was used to having good things and he gave me good things. Many. And, oh yes.” She smiled sweetly. “When he put his mind to it, he was a hell of a lover.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “MS. MORGENSTERN IS engaged,” Jackie informed me triumphantly, and I felt a split second of alarm until I saw through the open office door that what she was engaged in was a hard sell to a brace of clients. Funny how I didn’t want Lonnie for myself, but neither did I want her to want someone else badly enough to become engaged to him. I wasn’t sure why; maybe it had to do with how much less time she would have left for selling my work.

  Jackie suggested that since I had to wait, mightn’t I profit from a serious look at the gallery’s new show that opened this week? I had already taken a quick glance and I said, no thanks, but I might take a stroll up their alley for a serious look at the neighbors’ garbage.

  Jackie favored me with a venomous smile and, “As you wish, Officer Shale. To each his own.”

  We were saved from a continuing duel of wits by the breakup of the meeting in the office. The client couple left, a bit dazed-looking, and Lonnie came to greet me wearing her victory smile: There had been a sale, probably after some heavy arm-twisting. Whether the sale was the reason or not, she was radiant—confident and startlingly attractive. She locked an arm in mine and pulled me back toward the office.

  I said, “You’re a great-looking woman, Lonnie, but you always have a special glow after sex or when you’ve made a good sale. Can I take a guess?”

  I’m not sure my compliment, if that’s what it was, registered. She closed the door and said, “I just sold two paintings. I wish one of them was yours.”

  “So would that bursar in Vermont.” Every time she told me she had sold someone else’s work I felt cuckolded. “Better luck next time,” I said gamely and moved on to business. “You said you had something to show me.”

  “Yes, but you’d better call your son first. He phoned twice looking for you. He seemed anxious.”