Artist's Proof (7 page)

“How do you know?”

“I
know.
I can smell it. Dirty money. He's a crook, crazy mean, and he's been after”—his mouth jammed up—“after her since last year.”

“She was a pretty girl, Paulie. He wasn't the only man who thought so.”

“He was
after
her.”

“Did she say that?”

“She wouldn't, or I'd have made her quit. But she didn't have to say it. His wife got so jealous she hit him with a chair. I'm surprised he didn't blow her head off. That's got to be his style.” He paused. “Is that what he did to … to … He shot her?”

“I don't know how Cassie died.” Telling him was not my call. “You'll have to ask the police.”

“That kid Scully? What the hell does he know? He was probably after her himself.” And then, “I'm sorry, I don't know what the hell I'm saying.”

“That's why you should go back to work.”

“Yeah, I guess…” He considered the option, but not for long. “Do they have what did it? The gun, knife, whatever?”

“Speak to Scully.”

“If they haven't found it yet, they can forget it. Misha's got thirty miles of dunes to bury it in. They should have run him in by now. Is he still in the house?”

As if in answer to the question, Sharanov's voice, smooth and assured, carried to us from the driveway around front. “Officer, this car will have to be moved before I can get mine out.”

Paulie was stricken. “They're letting the son of a bitch go. I can't believe it.”

Before I could stop him he had raced around the side of the house and disappeared in front. I followed, but at a more measured pace. I had done my bit; let Walter handle this one.

By the time I got around to the front of the house, Nikki, the massive yam head, had a thick arm wrapped around the struggling Paulie's throat; his other hand had Paulie's head pulled back by his hair. Poor Paulie, a glutton for punishment, had been licked twice in twenty minutes. If he couldn't handle me, he was a fool to tangle with Nikki, who had a good five inches and fifty pounds on him.

When I didn't see Walter at first, I thought he had departed to a less stressful location, but then I spotted him in one of the police vehicles. He had been trying to move it out of the way of Sharanov's red Cadillac. Now he was wriggling his bulk out of the seat so he could handle the “altercation,” as he would call it in his report.

Meanwhile, Sharanov had walked up to within a foot of the pretty much helpless Paulie. He moved as though he was on a track; if you wanted to change his course you would have to derail him. Quietly he said, “Did you have something to say to me?”

“No,” Paulie managed, “nothing.” Then, “I just wanted to kick you in your fucking, murdering balls.”

After which he tried that. But Nikki yanked him back and Sharanov dodged with a quickness I wouldn't have expected from him. The flailing foot met only air. Now Nikki increased the pressure on Paulie's throat and Sharanov stepped forward and slapped him smartly across the face. Once, with his weight behind it. The sound carried.

Few things humiliate a grown man more efficiently than a slap in the face. A punch is a man-to-man act, a slap a punishment from one's betters. Paulie's eyes glistened with held-back tears. Sharanov, energized by what he saw, hauled off for a second slap.

“Hey!” I called. “Cut that. Right now.”

Sharanov turned to me; his face registered surprise. He was not used to being dissuaded from anything he did.

“Or what?” he asked mildly. It was not a challenge; not yet. He was merely curious. But his eyes were glacier chips.

“I'll tell you when your hired hand releases Mr. Malatesta. By the count of three.” I wasn't going to give him time to think. “One, two—”

Calmly, not in the least intimidated, Sharanov muttered something in Russian. Nikki unwrapped his hand from Paulie's neck and let go of his hair. Paulie adjusted his coveralls and assumed a defiant stance—sheer, face-saving bravado on his part. His dark cheek had an overlay of red.

Nikki turned toward me; he was waiting to be unleashed by his boss. Walter was somewhere in my peripheral vision; he was letting me handle the situation because I had done so well with the last one.

“Or what?” Sharanov repeated, soft but insistent.

Jesus, this guy didn't let go. I walked up close to him, but the cop's trick of looking him steadily in the eye didn't work; he looked back just as steadily.

I said, “That's information I release on a ‘need to know' basis. You no longer need to know.” I turned to Malatesta. “Paulie, shouldn't you be getting back to work?”

Paulie knew when he was outgunned, and he was grateful to be able to leave in response to a suggestion from me; there would be no loss of face in that. With a final glare at each of his adversaries, he marched out the driveway.

And now Walter lent his weight to the scene. “I'll clear the Caddy for you folks,” he called and waddled back to the police car that was blocking it.

“That young man may have come on too strong,” I said to Sharanov, by way of a half-assed apology for Paulie; I didn't want some Russian goon sandbagging him late one night. “But you have to understand why he's upset. Cassie Brennan was his girlfriend.”

“We are all upset,” Sharanov said evenly. “And I don't think Cassie was anybody's girlfriend.”

That ended our close eye contact. He turned and walked toward his car, Nikki at his heels.

He said, “Nikki, we will stop in the village for something to eat.”

It was lunchtime and he was going to eat lunch. Period.

F
IVE

I
SURFED THE
radio dial on the drive home. The story hadn't broken. It would soon enough, and reporters would climb over each other to get to Beach Drive. “Teenage Beauty Murdered in Beachfront Mansion.” Couldn't miss.

It was now close to two and I had forgotten to confirm with Lonnie that I would come to the city to meet her Texas “collector” at the gallery. It was the last thing I wanted to do that day, but I couldn't afford not to.

The phone was ringing as I opened the front door. It was Gayle, nearly breathless. “I've been calling you for half an hour. I heard. Sid, I feel awful. Sick.”

“You knew Cassie?”

“She's been working for me. Two afternoons a week holding down the shop while I was upstairs doing my line for the new season.”

“Could she do that? Wait on trade?”

“The number of walk-ins I get this time of year, believe me, she could handle. And she had the figure for the beach things I make. I knew that the minute I saw your sketches of her. I pinned patterns on her, draped fabrics, used her body to try out ideas. I never told you?”

Maybe she had; everything about Cassie had taken on new importance in the last half hour. Why hadn't I realized before that Cassie and Gayle had pretty much the same body in different sizes? Clearly, it was the kind of body I wanted to draw.

“Damn, I'm sorry about that girl,” Gayle went on. “Why does this kind of thing have to happen?”

I thought I heard a note of guilt in her voice. I said, “Gayle, did you see something like it coming?”

“Nothing like this,” she said quickly; she may have started down a road she hadn't meant to take. She took a moment, maybe to plan how she would say it. “But looking back I can't say I'm totally bowled over with surprise.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it takes one to know one.” She was surer now. “Sid, she was
me
at that age—spreading her wings, ready to take chances. I don't know how or why, but she may have stuck her nose in where she shouldn't have.”

“A straight-ahead kid like Cassie? Feet on the ground, all-around good?”

“Basically, sure. Hey,
I
was basically a good kid. But if you hadn't come along I'd have ended up modeling a body bag on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.”

“Don't compare your world with Cassie's. She had a real home, a religious mother who fussed over her—”

“Yeah,” Gayle murmured. “That'd keep her in line.”

“From what I could tell she stayed in line.”

“If she did it was because she was afraid her old man would show up to give her a good whipping. That's about the only thing he ever did show up for.”

“She talked to you about that?”

“Not much. But maybe more than with you. Girl to girl. He was bad news.”

“Did he make moves on her?”

That startled her. “What? She never said anything about that. Where'd you get it?”

I started to backpedal. “Was it something she said once? I'm not sure.”

But I remembered it clearly: She said some man had seen her naked and she didn't like it. What had made me make the leap to her father?

Gayle said, “The worst I heard about her old man is that he's a boozer. Like half the people in this town. That other, ugh. Maybe I was lucky.”

“That your father never came after you?”

“That I never knew him.”

Because she and Cassie had been girl to girl, I wondered what she knew about Paulie Malatesta. I never got to ask; a customer had walked into the shop and Gayle had to hang up.

With the phone still in my hand I remembered to call Lonnie. I got the machine:

“You have reached the Leona Morgenstern Gallery. Please leave your name and number and we'll return your call at the very first opportunity.”

This wasn't the shrew who phoned me just after the crack of dawn, but the woman who had taken a lease on my heart when we first met two decades ago. Lonnie now mostly reserved that liquid, come-hither voice for the paying customers.

After the beep I said, “Lonnie?… Lonnie, where the hell are you? It's nearly two o'clock. Rule one for selling art—open the door.” No wonder my work wasn't selling.

I waited a few seconds for someone to pick up. Nothing but tape static. I said, “Okay, I'm coming in. I'll be there at six to meet your Texas fat cat. If he shows before me, warn him to stand back from my paintings with his pointy alligator boots.”

I thought that this might stir her to pick up her phone. When it didn't, I added, “And, Lonnie, would you tell Alan I'm coming in? When I'm through at your place, I'll take him out for spaghetti or another budget dinner of his choice. Just the two of us, we haven't talked in a while. And no, in answer to your reminder, I haven't forgotten I have a daughter at college.”

I glanced at Sarah's laughing photo at the back of the desk and I was reminded again how close in age she was to Cassie Brennan. I said, “And yes, I will come up with my half of the tuition—if I have to earn it painting the white line down the middle of the Montauk Highway.”

And suddenly the phone was being answered. Perkily. “Hello?… Hello?” It wasn't Lonnie. “Leona Morgenstern Gallery. May I ask who's calling?”

“Jackie, is that you?” It was; I had recognized her voice. Lonnie's assistant.

The voice dropped an octave. “Oh, Officer Shale.” Meaning, I wasn't a customer, just her boss's dreary ex-husband, and a hard sell, to boot. Jackie could get all of that into three words. Even Lonnie had told her not to call me “Officer Shale.”

I bit my tongue and made nice; this woman was sometimes the bridge between me and a possible buyer. I said, “Hi, Jackie, how you doing? Leona around?”

“Ms. Morgenstern?” God, this woman was exasperating. Did she think I meant Leona Helmsley? “I'm expecting her in about an hour. I'm just opening up.”

“At two o'clock? You open the gallery at two o'clock in the afternoon?”

“This isn't a doughnut shop, Officer Shale. Our clients don't buy paintings in the morning.” Subtext: They're unlikely to buy yours at any time of day and maybe your work would do better hanging in a doughnut shop.

She went on in that fake cultivated voice that probably fooled nobody, “Did you wish to leave a message?”

“Thanks, Jackie, it's on your tape.” And I got off before I said something that would be reflected in my future sales.

*   *   *

O
N A FRIDAY
afternoon at three I would be driving against the main traffic flow between here and the city, and well before local people left their jobs in the area for home. If there was no major repair work on the LIE, I could make it to the gallery in well under three hours. Lonnie claimed that my usual beachcomber attire failed to inspire confidence in the “collectors,” as she always called them, so I would have to trick myself out in city clothes before I left. That gave me about an hour to work on
Large.

Before I climbed up the scaffold I took a moment to pull out the sketches of Cassie that I hadn't looked at in months. They hurt. My drawing hand had been more cunning than I remembered. The girl came alive on the paper, her body lithe and playful, her pixie face alternately sly and open. I was no doubt reading more into these drawings than was there, but Cassie Brennan invited that.

These maudlin thoughts were doing me no good. I put the drawings down on my worktable. Next to them were the two I had done this morning—the beachscapes.

Was it only this morning? The second drawing, pen and wash, with the Sharanov house filling the foreground, held my eye—as that same elevation of the actual house had held it half an hour ago, when my troubled contemplation of it was interrupted by the arrival of Paulie Malatesta.

I picked up the drawing. It was true to the occasion; it caught the feeling of that harsh early sun flooding the beachside façade of the many-windowed house—the windows, in my wash, throwing the blinding light back out to sea. The ocean was fretful, the dunes unruly, the rubble-strewn beach forlorn. It said, Will summer never come? A good sketch.

And yet, something about it bothered me. Was it too facile, or what? Was it the sketch that bothered me or the house itself? Because I had this same feeling when I looked at the house, life size, half an hour ago.