Artist's Proof (2 page)

I hate having my work dropped in a slot, assigned a style, a school, a fashion. I don't have any theories about painting and I don't want to be put in a school. I never did like school. I paint, take it or leave it. And if Lonnie saw a moral statement here, the baggage was hers. I called the piece
Large,
and that was as much as I had to say about it.

Large II,
actually; I had destroyed a failed
Large I.
The Roman numerals were to mark the work as an event, like those attached to the Super Bowl. I needed the attention because I needed a sale, and Roman numerals are emotion neutral; they don't tell you how to think about the work.

But Lonnie could not be dismissed out of hand. She was a shrewd judge of the market, and she had more than an art dealer's interest in the salability of my work. I did have a daughter at Bennington. Lonnie and I split the tuition, the dentist, the works, as Sarah was daughter to us both. We had been divorced eight years, but Lonnie was a staunch promoter of my work, and the Leona Morgenstern Gallery had been the force behind whatever success I'd had as a painter.

She and I met at the Art Students League in 1977, when I had been on the cops about a year and was taking a couple of evening classes. All I had really wanted to do since I was six was make pictures, but I knew early on it was unlikely I'd make a living at art. My father had said, “Get a job with the city. Teach school. The pension will allow you to paint till your ass falls off.”

A pension looked good to my father, who would never have one. Pop was a cab driver—one of a fading breed of true professionals who knew the city block by block, from Kingsbridge to Coney Island. He and my uncle Carl were paying down the cost of a taxi medallion, and they each drove twelve hours a day, six days a week. Two guys leased the cab from them on Sundays. When Pop was shot to death a few years ago, it was in a cab bearing the medallion he was still four years short of co-owning.

I had piled up sixty credits at Brooklyn College when my father gave me his career advice. Rather than wait the additional years I would need, with the added financial pressure, to get a teaching license, I looked around for another job with the city. I could become a policeman in a fraction of the time it would take to become a teacher; the Police Academy, I was told, was easier to get into than Shea Stadium. And the police pension would also let me paint till my ass fell off, and I could start collecting after twenty years. So I went on the cops.

That nearly killed my mother, but she survived—anyway, until Pop was murdered. That knocked the stuffing out of her and she joined him a few months later. It was the day I made sergeant. Ever since, the word
sergeant
has carried negative vibes for me.

*   *   *

I
HAD BEEN
on a white hot painting streak all week, determined to pull the top third of
Large
into a cohesive whole. My brush hand flew, guided by no more than a vague notion of where I was headed. The salesman who kept me in acrylics—he did a circuit of the professionals in the area once a month—had been around the day before, and he left a happy man. He must have thought I had a commission to paint a barn. A three-inch brush was the smallest I wielded on this big top–size canvas, and I was using that sparingly. Mostly I laid on with rollers and quality house painter's brushes.

That morning, the morning of Cassie Brennan's murder, it was working high on the wall at the top of my scaffold that triggered my troubles. What happened was this: After an hour or so of painting I laid down my brush to get some perspective on what I had done. I could have climbed down from the scaffold and backed off to the east wall of the shack to survey the work, but that would have wasted precious minutes at a time when I was on a streak. Instead, I did something dumb.

My scaffold was a lightweight construct with wheels, and it had a brake I could control from the platform. I released the brake and pushed off from the painting to roll the scaffold tower back to a six-by-six beam that ran from side wall to side wall, parallel to the painting and about eight feet away from it. The roof used to sit on this beam, but since I had lifted it into a shed there was enough air above the beam to allow me to crouch or lie on it and contemplate my work. An awkward arrangement, but did Michelangelo have it any better in the Sistine Chapel?

The trouble was, I was so intent on seeing what I had wrought that I forgot to reset the brake. When I hopped from scaffold to beam, one of my departing feet sent the tower rolling back to the painting wall, well beyond safe reach. The work I had done looked good—it looked
very
good—but there now arose the problem of how to get safely back to it.

A daring leap might have put me back on the scaffold. Or it might have deposited me on the floor. I didn't like the odds, nor those of the alternative, purposely dropping straight from the beam to the floor. My right ankle had been broken years earlier in a foolish jump from a fire escape while I was on a stakeout that unraveled. During weather changes the ankle still reminded me of that day.

What had been my all-fired hurry to get off that tenement fire escape? My showboating hadn't resulted in a collar. And what was my hurry now? I had no immediate place to go, and—I consulted my watch—I was expecting my model, Gayle Hennessy, in about ten minutes. Gayle would rescue me.

So I stretched out on the beam and admired my work. It pulsed with life. It held together. The colors worked. It was good. It was damn good.

And then, because I had all the time in the world to contemplate it, I did start to see things I could fix. Little things, but there they were. Par for the course. I don't fiddle with my drawings, but my paint can pile up on canvas like butter cream on a birthday cake. It would happen here.

The minutes crept by. I had thought maybe Gayle might be early; she wasn't. I wasn't in pain up there on that beam, but neither was I having much fun. And the longer I looked at the damn painting—there wasn't anything else to do—the more things I saw wrong with it. There would be damage control tomorrow. Severe damage control. Working large, really large, carried penalties.

The phone rang. My outgoing message is brief, some say abrupt. Preferable to cute. “Sid Shale here. Please leave your name and number, the purpose of your call, and the time. Thank you.” I figure if I keep it short, they'll keep it short.

I knew the voice before he said his name: Chuck Scully, a likeable youngster who was acting chief of the small village police force. “Hello…? Lieutenant Shale, you there…?”

I had told him more than once please not to call me lieutenant. “I guess you're not there,” he went on. “This is Chuck Scully down at the police station? Could you give me a call when you get in? Something's come up I want to talk to you about. No hurry, it's not that important. Well, sooner's better than later. Oh, it's—let's see—nine-thirty-two. In the morning. 'Bye,”

Looking back many hours later, I knew I should have risked a broken ankle to pick up the damn phone.

My immediate problem was solved a few minutes later. Gayle walked in, radiant as always. She looked around, called, “Sid? You here, or what?”

I grunted, and she looked up, startled. Then she grinned. “You devil,” she said. “Are we going to work today, or are we going to play hide and seek?”

T
WO

I
REFERRED TO
Gayle Hennessy as my model. She would have called me her planning consultant. We were on a barter system. When Gayle moved out from the city to open a small shop in the village to sell beachwear of her own design, I helped her lay out the place, paint the interior, and make a sign to go above the door that would attract the summer people without violating the village signage code.

Gayle and I had crossed paths a few times in New York. The first was many years ago when she was seventeen, a skinny high school junior who had just started picking up change after school by running errands for a small-time north Harlem drug middleman. I was the one who nailed her, only I never made it a collar, never took her in for booking. I did make a point of cuffing her, and the hard reality of cold metal against wristbones scared the daylights out of her. She swore through a gallon of tears that if I let her go she would never get in trouble again.

I had heard that song often enough before, but—I don't know why—this was the first time I believed it; certainly the first time I acted on it. Maybe in part because she wasn't a user, mostly because she seemed smart enough to be able to take hold of her life.

She lived with a grandmother who obviously couldn't handle her, but she had an aunt in South Carolina. I told her she could go down there and finish school; or, if she preferred, I would run her in. I put her on the bus myself the next day. My partner didn't approve—he didn't approve of blacks in general—but I didn't approve of everything he was up to, and our code was to keep our mouths shut about what the other one did.

The next time Gayle and I met, years later, she was the live-in girlfriend of a painter I knew and earning a decent living as a dress model on Seventh Avenue. I wouldn't have recognized her but she remembered me, “the Jewish cop with a heart of chopped liver.” She whooped a greeting and hugged me tightly. In addition to a certain savvy she had gained a shitload of confidence. She knew who she was.

We kept vaguely in touch, mostly through her boyfriend. When she eventually dumped him she decided to strike out on a path that would give her a measure of freedom from both employers and men. She had evolved into a no-hips, long-waisted stunner with legs to her belly button, velvety brown skin, enormous eyes, and auburn hair out of left field. She dressed mostly in clothes of her own design, and friends had been urging her to turn the talent to money.

Was it a talent? Gayle would have drawn applause dressed in twin pillowcases. The question was, Could she do for women who ground their teeth in jealousy when she sashayed by what she had done for herself? Probably yes, but it would take another season or two before they trusted her.

In advance of the tourist season she was paying off her barter debt by giving me two mornings a week—helping me organize the place and sitting for an easel portrait. I hated doing academic painting; fortunately, I could never be truly academic. But I knew as well as Lonnie Morgenstern that I was unlikely to sell
Large.
Gayle in a green caftan against a bare wood wall might be marketable—especially since, for insurance, one of her long, perfectly shaped legs was exposed, like a smooth-flowing river, all the way to its source. I was calling the thing
Green and Brown Morning.
A working title.

Months before, when we first got together on our two projects, I had hopes that the same thought would enter Gayle's head that had crept into mine: Wouldn't it be lovely to hop in the sack with this person? I sensed that the needle on her sex-awareness meter did jump once or twice in response to me before it settled down at zero.

By then, so had mine. The choice was between a brief, passionate fling that might come to a sour end, and a long friendship. I valued the possibilities in the friendship. Maybe she had gone through the same reasoning. It had been more than a year since there had been a woman in my life, but I told myself that was by choice; it allowed me to focus on my work.

*   *   *

G
AYLE AND I
put in a productive couple of hours on
Green and Brown Morning.
The canvas was turning out even slicker than I had intended. Sometimes you have to bend with the prevailing winds—in this case the monstrous college tuition bill that loomed before me.

It wasn't until Gayle left at about noon that I remembered the message from Chuck Scully on my answering machine. I called the police station in the village hall and got the civilian clerk who doubled at the switchboard, a retired schoolteacher I knew only as Helen. She said, “Yes, Mr. Shale, Chief Scully did want to talk to you, but he's not here.” She sounded distraught. “He went out. I'm really sorry.”

“Okay, no problem. Just tell him I'm returning his call.”

“I'll tell him when I see him, but I have no idea when that will be. Really no idea at all.”

She was breathless; something was up. There had been a rash of bicycle thefts in the area (at least four); maybe Chuck was following a hot lead.

“Is he out on a case?” I asked.

“I'm not authorized to talk about anything,” she said. “Anything at all.”

Authorized
was too big a word for everyday use in a nine-man police force; something was definitely up. I said, “Thank you, Helen.” And then, as an afterthought, “Do you know what he wanted me for?”

“Oh, that. I … He…” She made a decision. “He'd better tell you himself.” A second mystery. Heavy.

No sooner had I hung up than Gayle charged back into the house, her big eyes even bigger. “Sid,” she gasped, “there's been a murder. Right up the beach.”

So that answered question number one. “Where?”

“About a quarter of a mile. The big white house? Actually, it's the next place west. You know those people?”

“Name of Sharanov. I've never met anyone there, but I'm not surprised. Who got killed?”

“I don't know. I was driving by and there were two police cars out front. I've never seen two police cars together in this town except at Mel's.” Mel's Deep Sea was the diner favored by locals. “A cop was posted in the driveway and I asked him what was up. He said someone had been killed inside. That was all he would say, except that Chief Scully was in the house.”

Chuck Scully was really only acting chief; the chief, a much older man, had been on extended sick leave for over a year. The paperwork on a homicide was going to overwhelm poor Chuck; he was barely up to the challenge of the bicycle thief. I said, “Maybe I'll take a run over. Just to see what's going on.”