Artist's Proof (16 page)

The answering machine was blinking. It was Lonnie, uncharacteristically subdued, a note of sympathy in her voice.

“Sid…? Sid, bad news, I'm afraid. Ben Turkinton called. He's heard, of course, about the death of that young girl. Who hasn't? My God, it's been all over the news. He tried me over the weekend, but I was away. He thinks, no surprise, it would be counterproductive at this point for him to gift that man Sharanov with the portrait. Even I would be hard put to deny the element of the ghoulish in such a gift.

“Sid, I'm sorry, he's stopped his check. The picture had already gone out to the framer, so he's agreed to pay for the framing, but that's it. For now, anyway. I got him to agree to reassess the situation in a few weeks, when the picture might again seem appropriate—‘a way for Sharanov to remember a young friend who was cut down as she began to flower.' But I don't think Bennington will take that vague promise in lieu of tuition. So that's it.

“Oh, Alan said to tell you he's sorry he missed you on Friday and he looks forward to seeing you when school ends. He's still painting like mad evenings. Very good stuff. He reminds me of the young Sid Shale.”

End of message.

I formed an image: Mikhael Sharanov in his living room proudly showing a visitor the tastefully framed portrait of a dismembered naked girl who happened to have been butchered in his bedroom.

Yeah.

I climbed up on the scaffold and lost myself in painting.

F
OURTEEN

W
ITHOUT ANY OUTSIDE
stimulus that I was aware of, my eyes sprang wide open at about three in the morning. I had been dead asleep for less than an hour, but I was as fully awake now as if I had been roused with a cattle prod. An idea had sprung full-blown into my consciousness, totally unbidden. It had to have been germinating somewhere in the back of my mind because the sketch I did early in the morning of Cassie's murder—the beach scene with the Sharanov house in the foreground—had been troubling me ever since.

I hopped, literally, out of bed, turned on the desk lamp, tilted it back, and took a close look at the sketch, still taped to the wall. Yes, the answer to “What's wrong with this picture” that I had seen in my head was right there on the paper. If you were looking for it, it hit you in the eye; if you weren't, you slid right past it. Nice work, Sid.

I secured the sketch between cardboards. Before I went back to bed I put it in a shopping bag at the front door.

As if I might forget it.

*   *   *

I
WAS ALMOST
never in the village at ten to nine in the morning. That was another thank-you I owed County Detective Docherty. Except for the Super-ette, Mel's Deep Sea Diner, and the Coffee Cup, none of the downtown shops were open this early. The only activity on one-way Covenant Street was in front of Gayle's Provocativo. Gayle Hennessy was outside the shop fussing with something on the window. She flagged me down when she spotted my pickup. I stuck my head out the window and she stepped aside so I could see the sign she was posting:

PRE-SEASON SPECIAL—ALL MERCHANDISE 20% OFF SALE ENDS SATURDAY

“Is this okay?” she said.

“Good color, nice composition,” I called. “But I don't like the message. With the season coming you should be charging twenty percent
more.
”

“Thank you, I wasn't looking for a critique,” she said. “I just want to know if the damn sign is straight.”

“It's straight.”

A tow truck had pulled up alongside my pickup. Paulie Malatesta was at the wheel, looking ghastly; he obviously wasn't getting much sleep.

He leaned toward me and yelled, “Yo, Lieutenant, have they arrested him yet? Sharanov? Have they nailed the creep?”

That kid had only one tune in his head. Understandably. I was tempted to shake it out of him with, No, but they may be about to nail me for the crime. Instead I cranked down my other window and said, “I don't know any more than you do, Paulie. You could have asked Chuck Scully if you'd been at Cassie's wake last night.” I wanted to see what that would stir up.

He blinked, drew back as though he'd been slapped, and roared off down the street.

Gayle said, “That was cruel, Sid. I don't think Cassie's mother even knows Paulie exists. And what are you doing in town at this ungodly hour?”

If I told her I was on my way to be grilled, the whole village would know in fifteen minutes. I said, “I like to get my shopping done before the stores crowd up.”

*   *   *

D
ETECTIVE DOCHERTY WAS
almost genial this morning. He greeted me in Chuck Scully's office with what I took to be a smile, although his heavy lips had trouble cranking it up. He was not a frequent smiler.

He sent Chuck for a couple of chairs and he arranged them so that we sat at the desk as a circle of equals, three professionals gathered to discuss a murder investigation. A cozy start, and I didn't care whether it was an interrogation ploy or Docherty responding to someone in the DA's office who had instructed him to cool it until he built a reasonable case against me. I had my own agenda for the meeting.

But first I gave the county cop what he asked for. I started with an account of how I came to do a couple of nude sketches of Cassie, despite Mrs. Brennan's prohibition. That wasn't easy. Then I had to lurch through an explanation of why I happened to be hung up on a ceiling beam the morning of the murder and therefore unable to get to the phone when Chuck Scully called me at nine-thirty. I wound up by congratulating Docherty's crime scene people for lifting my prints from Sharanov's headboard. I explained, as I had to Chuck the other night, how they got there, and I admitted that I had possibly been careless in allowing that to happen. I couldn't help adding that in my previous life when we found an officer's prints at a crime scene we considered the source.

“I did,” Docherty said, but mildly. He was exercising restraint.

Chuck looked embarrassed through this part of the meeting. Until Docherty had goaded him into the role of attack dog he had been my totally uncritical fan. Now that Docherty was easing up on me Chuck was out there all by himself, an attack dog without a mission. I sensed his tail curling between his legs. He would start biting it the next time Docherty reversed himself.

So before the questions grew sharper—I expected a grilling on my relationship with Cassie and a close examination of my movements the morning of the murder—I shifted the focus by going into my own pitch. Out of courtesy, I directed it at Scully: This was his police station.

“Chuck, I brought something in I thought you'd want to see,” I said and took the sketch from the shopping bag at my feet. I slipped it out of its protective cardboards and laid it on the desk facing the chief.

The move got Docherty's attention. He leaned across Scully and turned the sketch to face him. “That looks like the Sharanov house,” he announced. He hadn't made detective for nothing.

“It is,” I said. “I drew this sketch the morning of the murder.”

Docherty jumped all over that. “That morning? You were out there on the beach, near the Sharanov house, the morning of the murder?”

“Yes, somewhere around seven. I was back home well before eight.”

Chuck spoke up for the first time. Eagerly he said, “Yeah, you can see the sun hitting the house flat, bouncing off the windows head on.” He was edging back to my side. “It would do that real early.”

“So?” Docherty said.

“You see how I did that?” I said. “The glare whiting out the windows? Turning them blank?” I had done it with a wash.

“What are you looking for, compliments?” Docherty growled. “Or what?”

But Chuck got it. He was leaning across Docherty. “Here, the bottom of this window, see? A band of black. No glass. No reflection from the sun.” He let the rest roll triumphantly. “Like this window was partly open.”

I had to hand it to him. The double-hung bedroom windows were tiny in the picture, and more suggested than drawn in detail. It had taken me three days to spot what I had done with a couple of strokes of my black pen.

I said, “People may leave their weekend house without making the beds, but they make absolutely sure the house is locked up tight.”

“Sharanov's was,” Chuck said excitedly. “Almost the first thing I looked for was forced entry. Every door, every window, was locked.”

“So what that means…,” Docherty said slowly. He was waiting for someone to tell him what it meant.

I let Chuck do it. He was coming into bloom. He said, still excited, “That open window is in the master bedroom. It could have been open at seven in the morning because Sharanov had slept there the night before and opened it for ventilation. If he did, he was still there when you drew the picture. And then he closed and locked the window sometime later—maybe because he didn't want anyone questioning him about having been in the house.”

Now Docherty came aboard. “And if he closed it after nine, was it because he was there when the girl came to work and they had some kind of dispute?” To make sure we got his point he ran a finger across his throat.

I let the cops bounce the ball back and forth between them: They were on salary.

Chuck said, “Sharanov claims he arrived at the house around eleven, hours after the murder.”

“And according to him, he never went inside,” Docherty said.

Chuck agreed. “He says he left the chauffeur with the bags and drove into the village to pick up a few things. That's an easy check.”

“
Toward
the village was the way he put it to me,” Docherty corrected. “The chauffeur called him on the car phone and told him about the murder. Sharanov never got to the village. He turned around and went back to the house. That can be checked with the chauffeur. What's his name?”

“Nikki,” I said; I couldn't resist finally joining in. “Nikki wouldn't be much help. If Sharanov told you he was delayed en route by space aliens Nikki would swear he saw the mother ship. The cellular phone record would be more reliable confirmation.”

“I'd better get hold of this Sharanov,” Docherty said; he was keyed up. “For a sit-down.”

He had lost interest in me, at least for the moment. He smelled blood somewhere else. It couldn't have gone better.

*   *   *

T
EN MINUTES LATER
he was gone. He had located Sharanov after a blizzard of phone calls, and he left to meet him in Brooklyn at the Tundra, “to secure your additional assistance in our ongoing investigation.” I gathered that the Russian had not exactly leaped at this chance to help in the fight against crime.

Chuck offered to accompany Docherty, but Docherty smelled a possible collar somewhere down the road and he declined the offer. Not unless he absolutely had to was he going to split credit for the arrest with a village policeman who was still on his first can of Gillette Foamy.

Once Docherty left the building I pulled Chuck back into his office and closed his door. He gave me a what's-going-on-here? look.

I said, “If Sharanov slept at his house that night there may be a quicker way to find out than driving all the way to Brooklyn. If you can help me with this.”

I looked around for something to draw on. A large calendar from an insurance company hung on a wall. I pulled the April sheet from off the back and laid it on the desk, blank side up. I selected a ballpoint pen from half a dozen in a coffee mug.

I said, “While I was settling down on the beach to sketch that morning, a man came toward me over the dunes from Beach Drive. He was heading west to east with fishing gear, looking for a likely spot to surf cast. In walking to the beach, he had almost certainly passed the front of the Sharanov house. If he did, no way could he have missed a red Cadillac out front.”

Scully nodded his agreement. “Not at seven o'clock on a Friday morning.”

“Out of season.”

Scully's eyes sparkled with anticipation. “You know who that was, Lieutenant?” Suddenly I was no longer Sid.

“No, but he would almost certainly have to be a local. And you've lived here all your life.”

“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?”

F
IFTEEN

W
E 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.”