“Knew what?” I was beginning to think he was losing it.
“So much time had gone by I thought I was safe. Sure, she’d seen me that day years ago, but she didn’t see, you know? She’d looked at me when I stuck my head out the window to check what I’d hit and she saw me drive away. The papers said she told the police she didn’t see the accident, didn’t see anything, but I knew she did.”
Now I understood; I felt a wave of nausea. “Why didn’t you turn yourself in?” I said.
“I’d been drinking. I looked it up. ‘Vehicular homicide.’ They can hit you real heavy for that. At first I was scared out of my head. I couldn’t even sell the truck, I was never sure I’d got all the blood off it. But after a while I began to figure I was safe. I’d spot her somewhere in the village every few months and I’d look away or cross the street. It didn’t matter, because I knew she didn’t know. But then in that bedroom, just the two of us in that room, she all of a sudden knew. She started screaming how I’d killed her sister, murdered her baby sister, stuff like that. The words came pouring out. So I knew I had to do her. Right then. If she hadn’t remembered I wouldn’t have had to, you know? I’d have just beat it out of there. I’ll never understand how she all of a sudden remembered like that.”
This wasn’t the time to explain repressed memory and its cause, or what had kicked loose that memory in Cassie when she came face-to-face with her sister’s hit-and-run killer. My immediate concern was the rusty shotgun pointed at my chest. It held steady no matter how much Gregg twitched and fidgeted. I began to think he might be too keyed up to make it to the cellar; he looked ready to blow me then and there through the parlor wall.
I said, “Things went wrong. It happens. Not your fault.”
He wasn’t interested in my opinion. “That’s enough,” he said. “We’re going.” His long explanation had satisfied him; he wanted to get this over with.
I said, “Don’t make things worse for yourself. There’s ways out of this. Things the right lawyer can do…”
“Get up,” he said. “Now.”
“Harry, my pickup’s standing at your curb. There’s no way you can get rid of that, no way you can explain it. People will come looking for me.”
“I can’t think about that now. I’ll take care of it. Get up, you hear?” And when I still didn’t move he shouted, “Damn it, stand up.” The gun went back to his cheek. His face darkened with anger.
I stood up slowly. Once I had the coffee table out from between us I would have to make some kind of move. I saw no way it could succeed, but no way would I go to slaughter like a Christmas goose.
I edged around the table. Gregg backed off to a wall and waved the gun for me to move on out to the entrance hall. He was wild-eyed but not stupid; he kept enough air between us so that he could blast me before I reached him. The gun loomed like a cannon. This was unreal but it was happening. Sarah and Alan suddenly crowded my thoughts. I wasn’t going to spend the summer with them, I wasn’t going to see them ever.
I had stopped walking and Gregg began stabbing the air with his gun. His face was flushed, his mouth a slash. “Move it, move it,” he said.
What were the odds on going for the gun as against making a low dive for his legs? Astronomical either way, but it was now or never. I took a small positioning step.
And was spared the decision. A rap on the front door sharp enough to carry through the entrance hall froze us both. Then Gregg poked the gun toward me and mouthed for me to keep shut.
The rap was repeated, louder and firmer. More a pounding. Followed a moment later by a familiar voice. “Open up, Harry.”
And then, “For Chrissakes, I know you’re in there. It’s Chuck Scully. Open up.”
“What’s he doing here?” Gregg whispered fiercely. His eyes were wide and crazy.
“I called him,” I whispered back, flooding with relief. “He knows I’m here.”
“Damn it, open up,” Scully shouted. I was liking that kid more by the second. “Open the damn door.”
Gregg seemed paralyzed. Nothing moved but the eyes. He was gripping the gun so tightly his knuckles went white. And then I could see him considering an option—blast me, shoot Scully through the door.
I shouted, “He’s got a gun!”
Gregg hissed, “Shut up, shut up,”
“Okay, Harry, you want me to shoot out the lock?” Scully called. “Because that’s what I’ll do.”
Gregg unfroze. He had made his choice. Still pointing the gun, he backed swiftly into the entrance hall, past Scully’s insistent banging, and vanished toward the kitchen. I could hear his retreating footsteps.
I ran into the hall and unlocked the front door. Scully rushed in, gung ho, his .45 held high in both hands, and swept his eyes around.
I said, “He went that way. Into the kitchen.”
He started to move and I grabbed his arm. “Easy, Chuck. He confessed to the murder. But he’s got a shotgun and I think he’s coming apart.”
“Let go,” he said. “He has to be stopped.”
“Not this minute. He’s got nothing to lose. You get in a gunfight now and there’s a good chance you’ll get hurt. Call for backup.”
“There’s no time for that.” He pulled loose.
A distant shot, muffled but unmistakable, stopped him in his tracks. He breathed, “Shit, what’s he done now, gone and shot somebody?”
The echo-y sound had come from the cellar. “Just himself,” I said.
The poor bastard, it was probably for the best.
EPILOGUE
THREE MINUTES AFTER hanging up on County Detective John Docherty I called Tony Travis and fired him. Travis took Docherty’s news well—better than Docherty had taken it. The ADA on the case had delegated the detective to tell me never mind, I wouldn’t have to present myself to the grand jury in Riverhead after all.
Docherty was less than gracious about the disinvitation. With good reasons. He had failed in his ambition to nail an ex-NYPD cop for Cassie Brennan’s murder; even worse, his name never came up in media stories on the crime’s solution.
The credit for that went entirely to Quincacogue’s Acting Police Chief, Chuck Scully. Chuck had offered to share his triumph with me, but I declined. I already had my pension, I explained; a feather in my cap would carry no financial benefits, whereas a solo spotlight could have positive career consequences for Chuck.
So the accepted wisdom had it that Harry Gregg committed suicide when he learned that Chuck Scully’s investigation was narrowing on him relentlessly. Not that far from the truth, come to think of it.
Rummaging around in Gregg’s cellar after his death Scully found a wool cardigan in an old steamer trunk; it was smeared with what proved to be Cassie Brennan’s blood. The serrated fisherman’s knife that had slashed her throat was hidden at the back of a shelf in a bedroom closet.
“We had our eye on Gregg from day one,” Chuck explained to the assembled media, “even though he tried to throw us off by planting a bread knife stained with the victim’s blood. We always figured the murder weapon to be a fisherman’s knife and Gregg had been fishing in the area the morning of the murder.”
Chuck proved to be a nimble embroiderer of the truth and I predicted he would go far in law enforcement.
Sure enough, a month later he was offered the chief’s job at a north fork town twice the size of ours, at a substantial advance in salary. He left Quincacogue on cordial terms; the locals were grateful for the return of six missing bicycles plus assorted household goods that turned up in Gregg’s basement.
The stolen items may have been the guilty reason Gregg had been reluctant to ask Chuck and me into his house. In a rambling interview for a local weekly, one of the two thousand psychiatrists (my estimate) with summer homes in East Hampton hypothesized that Harry Gregg, who had a good job, stole for no better reason than to compensate for the love that was absent from his life. Did I say hypothesized? Make that pontificated.
I added my own take to t
he hypothesis: Cassie’s guilt over her failure to protect her little sister from harm had caused her to block out all memory of the fatal accident until her traumatic encounter with Gregg in Sharanov’s bedroom.
Before Scully left for his new job I asked him why he hadn’t looked for a thread that might connect the deaths of the two Brennan sisters.
“I did,” he said. “I couldn’t find one. How about you?”
I hated to admit it. “It never occurred to me.”
My main reaction to the crime’s solution and the suicide of its perpetrator was one of relief. Cassie’s troubled spirit—my spirit, weighed down by her unresolved death—could now find honorable rest, and Cassie’s mother decent closure. Nora Brennan would never learn, thank God, that her secret affair with Jack Beltrano had propelled Cassie to the lovemaking sessions in the Sharanov house that led to her death.
Two weeks after Harry Gregg’s suicide, “Ben Turkinton” brought his restaurant sting to a satisfactory conclusion. He coaxed six hundred thousand dollars out of Mikhael Sharanov, the source for which Misha had no reasonable explanation when Treasury agents arrested him. After prolonged negotiations Sharanov managed to escape jail time, but his back taxes and punitive penalties—to say nothing of his legal fees—came to nearly four million dollars.
The Tundra went into bankruptcy and was bought on the cheap by a national restaurant company that specializes in fake ethnic restaurants. The Tundra was soon as fake as any of them, and its Russian clientele abandoned it to thrill seekers from Great Neck and Short Hills who thought they were rubbing shoulders with the Russian mafia when they were merely mingling with each other. As a by-blow of the turnover, Olivia Cooper lost her underwriting deal to the new owners’ insurance broker.
Sharanov’s economic bind forced him to sell his East End house at a steep loss. The sleeping jungle beast was so panicked by his monetary situation—he no longer had a permanent roof over his head—that he scrambled to patch things up with his estranged wife. Oddly enough, Kitty readily accepted his solemn promise to end his philandering. She kicked out brother Roy, and the declawed tiger moved back in with her. Kitty was confident that her husband would somehow find a way to maintain her standard of living. He would think of something.
The Treasury Department had kept its word: It bought my painting Seated Girl. But later there was an unexpected development. Once I was in a position to buy back the painting, the Treasury Department refused to sell. A high-level IRS career civil servant had taken a fancy to the work and hung it in his Washington office. He wouldn’t give it up.
Julie Klampf was in town around that time and she bought me lunch, in part to break this news. Julie said the aide, whom she refused to name, thought the dismembered figure in the painting eloquently conveyed the spirit of the average taxpayer on April sixteenth.
Whatever. I have always said the viewer has to bring his own baggage to my work. And it was probably best that Seated Girl hang where people were unaware of its subject’s tragic end. My principal regret was that Cassie had fancied her portrait displayed at the very least in a shop window, and it had ended up in a location a good cut below even that.
Julie Klampf, by the way, is a totally different woman when she is not playing Tess Turkinton. At my suggestion, because I couldn’t think of anyplace else, our lunch was at Muccio’s. It ran so long, thanks to Enzo’s industrial-strength drinks, that by the time we left Mona had come on duty. For some reason she sent us out the door with a head-pounding “Havanagila.” That almost spoiled a hell of a good afternoon, but not quite. I like Julie. We have been keeping in touch.
It turned out to be a fine summer. Both Alan and Sarah were out at the beach for all of it. I didn’t have room to put them both up, so Sarah bunked in with Gayle Hennessy in her apartment over Gayle’s Provocativo, where Sarah worked as a sales clerk all through the busy season. Gayle charged her up to the point where Sarah is considering going into fashion design. Gayle says she has a definite flair.
Alan I put to work beside me on Large. Was I founding a painting dynasty, like the Wyeths? The jury is still out on Alan’s talent, but his pick and shovel contribution to the work (no greater than that of Rembrandt’s disciples on many of his paintings) helped move the project along. I didn’t tell him, but I had already decided to give Alan his great-grandfather’s ring when he graduated high school; I had been waiting to make sure it wouldn’t slip off his finger.
We finished the painting by Labor Day. By then I hated it, really hated the overheated monster. But in October, miracle of miracles, Lonnie managed to sell it to a department store conglomerate with headquarters in, I think, Waukegan, Illinois. Anyway, somewhere beyond the zone of influence of New York art critics. The chain’s CEO was caught by Lonnie’s title for the work, Man’s Eternal Striving. Life began at the water’s edge, she reminded him, and humankind crawled up from the beach to challenge nature and conquer it.
Again, whatever. The CEO planned to hang the behemoth in the conference room as an inspiration to his management team. I could have kissed Lonnie for her inspiration when she phoned with the news.
I did kiss her a couple of weeks later, at the end of a celebration of the sale that went late into the evening. Kissed her and a great deal more. Our relationship is undergoing changes. In exactly which direction and how far it is still too early to say, because I see Olivia Cooper fairly often, and Julie Klampf when she gets to New York. After a long drought, my cup really doth runneth over.
That’s good and it’s bad. Bad because the sexual energy I had redirected into my work I was now directing back into sex. I was drawing less, painting hardly at all. I needed a major project to help me sharpen my focus, and I am beginning to form an idea for a really big painting, a Large III that calls for more wall space than I’ve got. There may be a way to extend my shack a few feet to the west.
I am working on that.
ALSO BY GORDON COTLER
Prime Candidate
Shooting Script
The Bottletop Affair
The Cipher (as Alex Gordon)
Mission in Black
ARTIST’S PROOF. Copyright © 1997 by Gordon Cotler. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First Edition: October 1997
eISBN 9781466884359
First eBook edition: September 2014
Artist's Proof Page 24