Artist's Proof (6 page)

“About me?”

“From a lawyer. In New York.” He didn't like the taste on those bulbous lips of the last two words.

Chuck said, “I forgot, so did I,” He turned to me, a slight strain in his voice. “In fact, that's what I called you about at nine-thirty or so, but you were out.”

“A lawyer? Inquired about me?” I had to be sounding stupid.

“Asking if you've done anything nasty,” Docherty said. “Gotten in any kind of trouble since you've come to live out this way.”

I was beginning to get an idea of what he was talking about, but I didn't invite him to expand on his statement.

He did anyway. “I suppose he's looking for ammunition. In the suit he's bringing against the NY fucking PD.” Pause. “On behalf of his client you beat the shit out of. Got a little bit of a temper in there you can't control, Lieutenant?”

I had waited so long for that shoe to drop that I had stopped listening for it.

F
OUR

T
HE PROBLEM ITSELF
was relatively simple, but it trailed a long history.

Shortly after my grandfather, Sam Shalkowitz, came to America, he somehow got it in his head that, poor as he was, ignorant as he was, he could hold his head up in any company, be the equal of any American, if he wore a pinky ring. Who knew what went on in the heads of immigrants at the dawn of the twentieth century? His boss on Seventh Avenue wore a pinky ring. He also wore a heavy gold watch chain, but my grandfather knew that would always be beyond his means.

So out of his meager salary as a garment center presser my grandfather paid fifty cents a week for I don't know how long to buy a gold ring with a tiny ruby embedded in it and
SAM S
. etched on the inside. That ring came to mean a lot to him. When he lay dying at an early age he gave it not to his older son Carl (“the bum would only lose it in a crap game”) but to his seventeen-year-old son Bernie, decades later to be my father, and made him promise to wear it always.

Bernie didn't need to be bound by a deathbed plea; the ring had already come to stand for his father. And except for one time, Pop never took that ring off his finger. So for me it always seemed as much a part of him as his broken nose or his arthritic limp. Maybe more.

The one time he took the ring off was the day of my bar mitzvah. He wanted me to wear it in the synagogue that morning so that when I read the Torah portion that would fold me into the company of the men in the congregation I would be bonding as well with the grandfather I never knew.

In considerable awe, I tried it on. “Pop,” I told him, “it's too loose for my fingers, it's going to fall off.”

“No, it won't,” he said. “You'll keep your hand bent a little. And you'll be careful, because you're wearing your grandfather's ring.”

How careful could I be? It was my bar mitzvah, I was excited, and I had to pay attention to a lot that was going on.

After the service, as we were leaving the temple for the reception my mother had arranged in our backyard, I noticed that the ring was no longer on my finger. I remember staring at my hand in disbelief, as though I could will it back. I had never been so scared in my life. What could I do? Where could I hide?

Thirty minutes earlier I had been recognized as a man. Manfully, I drew my father aside and told him the ring was gone.

If I live long enough so that my early years dissolve in a hazy dream, I will never forget the look, first of incomprehension, and then of rage, that flooded Pop's features. He yanked me back into the now empty sanctuary, my feet barely touching the floor, and the two of us searched inch by inch on our hands and knees for forty minutes while our friends and relatives waited for us at home, the toasts unmade, the food uneaten, the concern growing.

We found the ring on the bimah, where it had embedded itself under the cantor's chair, but it took the rest of the day for the color to come back to my father's face.

Twenty-one years later, when Pop's body was found in the driver's seat of his cab, his brains splashed on the windshield and his blood coating the steering wheel, the ring was gone, along with the cigar box containing the day's receipts that he kept hidden under the passenger front seat. There was no sign that the cab had been searched, so he must have given up the cash willingly, as he always said he would. (“It's only money, am I crazy?”) But my guess is that he had been reluctant to turn over the ring, and the perp had things to do and places to go and not much patience. The .38 slug in the ear had possibly served no purpose but to speed the transfer.

By then I had been a detective first for several years, and it didn't take long for the word of my father's murder to spread from my squad in Washington Heights to all of Manhattan. I was alerted to every arrest stemming from a violent crime involving a taxicab, sometimes even before the perpetrator was booked.

There was a rash of such crimes back then, and I followed wild geese all over the five boroughs. I must have grilled a couple of dozen suspects over the next few years. You never close the books on a homicide, but the faint trail my father's killer left went gradually cold. I began to believe it had become close to impossible to link this crime to a particular perpetrator.

By the fifth year after Pop's murder I interrogated only two or three of the likeliest prospects. I had recently become a lieutenant, with my own detective squad in lower Manhattan and a desk piled with paperwork. After nineteen years as a cop I was looking forward to retirement and full-time painting. I could get out nicely at twenty years, but I had decided to stick it out to twenty-two or -three. With college looming for two kids, the pension would be better, but I had another reason: There was a shortage of lieutenants around that time and I figured I owed the department the benefit of my experience a while longer.

*   *   *

F
OR 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.

*   *   *

T
HE 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.

*   *   *

O
UT 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.”