Artist's Proof (26 page)

“That little drama was a turning point for me. I had felt like a piece of dirt. Worse. I waited a day to calm down and then I told Misha if he ever tried anything like that again he would damn well have to take his insurance business somewhere else. And the important thing is that I meant it.

“And you know what? It worked. He decided he preferred having me around than not, and for that to continue he would have to behave on my terms. And that was the advice I gave Cassie. I told her that no way should she have to deal with Misha's Neanderthal courtship ritual, that she should tell him if he didn't lay off she'd quit. But she would have to
mean it.

“And then I assured her that he did want her around, absolutely, and he'd accept her conditions. I reminded her that any number of gumdrops he could hit on were drawn to his house, that women are attracted to a man who is already surrounded by good-looking woman; they're like a seal of approval, a sign that he's been pretested. I said he would come to think of Cassie and me as bait. And that's the whole of it. All I can tell you is that Cassie listened to every word I said.”

Cooper was finished, and she didn't even wait for a reaction from me. She said, “What do you say to my putting the casserole in the oven while you finish that drink?”

“Not yet,” I said; I was no longer interested in rushing things. I said, “You must know that what Cassie told you would be of interest to the police. Have you spoken to them about it?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Telling me doesn't get you off the hook. You have to put yourself on the record with this. If Sharanov finally did strong-arm her into going to bed with him, he becomes a likely suspect in her death.”

“That would be true. Except that I know he didn't kill her.”

“How?”

“Because he spent last Thursday night—the night you thought he might have slept in his bed at the beach house—at my apartment in the city.”

I had a flash recall of what Sharanov told me at the Gulliver: He had spent that night with a woman he declined to name. So here was that woman. Or was providing an alibi, along with a wall calendar at Christmas, a thank-you for Misha's insurance business? My take on Cooper's character and motives had gone back and forth these past few minutes like windshield wipers in a snowstorm.

“If he got to spend that night with you,” I said slowly, “there must be a flaw somewhere in your ‘touch me at your peril' strategy.”

She didn't take offense; she was amused. “I didn't say he spent the night with me. He spent the night
in my apartment.
On the couch.”

“Because…,” I prompted.

“Because otherwise he'd have been in my bed. I wouldn't have liked that one bit.”

I said, “I meant, how come he was spending the night in your apartment at all? On whatever piece of furniture?”

“It was an act of charity on my part. Misha and Kitty had been fighting, he was staying in a hotel, and he was so drunk he couldn't remember which one. It was after one in the morning and the doorman's buzz on the intercom had yanked me from a deep sleep. Misha had been asked to leave a bar, and everybody else he could think of to crash with lived in Brooklyn.

“Anyway, that was his story. By the time the doorman got him upstairs he was practically out on his feet. And too drunk to be a threat. I set him up on the couch and went back to sleep.”

“You don't think he was carrying out a clever plan to get in your bed?”

“Of course that occurred to me. He may have thought that since he and Kitty were separated I might change my mind about an involvement with him. I never gave him a chance to test the possibility. I threw him a pillow and blanket and closed my bedroom door.”

“He stayed the night?”

“Yes. And pretty well ruined mine. Around dawn I heard him bumping around the living room. He knocked on my door, and when I didn't answer he tried the knob. I had locked myself in and after a few seconds he called, ‘Thank you, Olivia, for your hospitality. Good-bye.'

“A minute later I heard him on the phone ordering Nikki to pick him up. Can you imagine, at six-thirty in the morning? I know that's what he was doing because the address was in English. Ten minutes later the front door opened and closed and I finally got some sleep.” Abruptly she said, “I'm suddenly very hungry. Okay if I turn on the oven?”

I discovered I was hungry too. I said, “Do it.”

*   *   *

I
T WAS LATE
when I started for home.

Painting rechannels much of my sexual energy toward the work at hand.
Large
was a voraciously demanding canvas, and Olivia Cooper was the first person with whom I cheated on it. She was well worth the wait.

Or was she faking it? I hadn't even been able to tell whether all, some, or none of what she told me about Cassie, Sharanov, and herself was true or merely self-serving. It sounded right and I didn't stop to analyze it. She caught me on an uptick in my constantly changing feelings toward her and we went from her shrimp casserole to her bed as naturally and inevitably as a barrel rolling over Niagara Falls.

I would have stayed the night—sweet night!—but Cooper explained regretfully and with many apologies that if her neighbors saw a rusting pickup on her property at the crack of dawn she would have to pack up then and there and move. She walked me to the door, naked under an open robe.

I resolved to draw her that way, her gently curved hip gleaming against the dark flannel. The image was vivid enough so that I might be able to do it from memory. I kept it firmly fixed in my mind as I eased the Chevy out of the driveway and began the trip home under a heavily overcast sky.

*   *   *

W
HEN I PASSED
the Sharanov house I made out the red Cadillac still in the driveway. In the starless night I couldn't tell if there were other cars on the property, but the house was dark. Admittedly it was late, but not for Sharanov. Misha seemed to be spending an out-of-character quiet Friday night. Out of respect for the dead, no doubt.

Halfway between his place and mine I dimly spotted a car pulled up in the underbrush, its lights out. High school kids, I figured, making out. It had happened before, as this was a relatively untraveled stretch of Beach Drive. But my tires on the gravel may have panicked them into abstinence. Even before I drew abreast their headlights sprang on and off, possibly in the scramble of untangling bodies. Or not.

My eyes went not to the car but to my house. I had seen a flashlight bob, then wink off—echoes of Kitty's brother Roy skulking around in the Sharanov house. Damn.

I gunned the motor, roared to the front entrance, and stopped on a dime. I raced to the door; it was closed but unlocked. I dove through and flicked on the overhead light.

There was no movement, nobody in sight. But the door to the beach was wide open.

My burglar—Roy Chalmers, whoever—had a good head start on me. I ran out onto the beach and turned west. He would be running that way, toward whoever had signaled from the parked car. In the distance I thought I saw a rustling of dune grass, beach to road. I turned and ran back through the house and out the front.

Up the road the waiting car had emerged from the underbrush and turned to face west. A door was wide and a figure plunged through it to the interior. Even before the door had closed the car was racing into the dark, its lights still out.

By the time I took off in pursuit it would have vanished up any of the many side roads that led away from the beach. Hopeless. I went back in the house.

I couldn't believe this. Déjà vu with a vengeance. The desk drawers were open, their contents scattered. This time papers and drawings covered the floor, paint tubes were scattered, cans of brushes overturned. So far as I could tell from an eyeball survey, nothing was missing.
Seated Girl,
wrapped in a tarp now, sat on its side against the wall where I had placed it.

What the hell could the thief have wanted? I didn't have anything of value but my art, and the jerk didn't seem interested in any of that, so he was probably a local.

I didn't even make a try at straightening up the place. I went straight to sleep.

3

… AND A WEEKEND

T
WENTY-FOUR

I
T WAS AFTER
ten when I opened my eyes on Saturday morning, and I quickly closed them. I had forgotten that the room was a holy mess. The room was always a mess, but I was used to my mess. This one was alien, an affront. That bastard.

Eventually I forced myself out of bed and set to work bringing the place back to a logical disorder. None of the paintings or drawings had been damaged, and my first priority was to get those safely back where they belonged. I picked up the drawings first.

One of them surprised me. I had forgotten that I drew it.

It was the sketch of the tall, skinny, Don Quixote—like fisherman in a floppy hat, T-shirt, and baggy pants I saw on the beach early on the morning of the murder, the sketch I drew at the police station on the back of a calendar for Chuck Scully, who identified it at once as Harry Gregg.

But now this reminder of Gregg popped a thought into my head that should have occurred to Chuck or me when we spoke to Gregg the other day; that it hadn't bordered on stupidity. There was still a way Gregg might be helpful.

I remembered that his shift at the Gulliver didn't begin until two in the afternoon (did he work at all on Saturday?) and even if he went fishing this morning he would be home by now. There was a good chance I could catch him there.

*   *   *

I
TOOK THE
long way around, through the village. Covenant Street was enjoying its liveliest Saturday since fall. Cooper was right; the infiltration of summer people was beginning to build toward the late May invasion. The new arrivals hadn't yet settled into the rhythm of village traffic flow. Cars backed and filled in frustration, especially around the hardware store, where homeowners with winter damage would be loading up on repair supplies. I also noted shoppers peering in the window of Gayle's Provocativo—a harbinger, I hoped, of a good season for Gayle.

I don't know what made me glance at the village hall as I passed it, up toward the window that Tony Travis had pointed out as Nora Brennan's; I certainly didn't expect to see her at work on a Saturday. But there she was, in sharp profile, still as a cameo, eyes on her computer screen. At this distance the lines of care and aging washed out and she looked almost as young and pretty as her daughter.

I supposed she was making up for the week of work she had missed. She would have no distractions on a Saturday, and for a workaholic like Nora the office was preferable to sitting at home and brooding.

I wondered whether it was gazing at Nora from the firehouse across the street that had given Jack Beltrano the itch for her. The firehouse doors were closed this morning. Beltrano would be busy receiving inquiries at his contracting office outside of town; the sap would be rising this weekend in more than a few owners of undeveloped land who half believed the time might finally be right to put up a couple or three spec houses.

*   *   *

O
N HARRY GREGG'S
haphazard street on the outer rim of the village his nearest neighbor was in the front yard finishing his spring cleanup. He stared at me with naked curiosity as I climbed onto Gregg's porch; I had the feeling a visitor was a rare event in Harry's life.

So was a spring cleanup; his yard looked as if he had missed the last few. Distributing his overflow fishing catch among the neighbors might have been his way of keeping their good will in the face of the affront his house and grounds were to the neighborhood.

It took a long while for my insistent knocks to be answered, and then the door was opened only a couple of inches. Gregg was visible in the crack, dressed in wrinkled pants and a denim work shirt. His long face was set in what I suspected was its most natural expression, deep suspicion.

He said, “Yeah?”

I said, “Hello, Harry, remember me? I dropped by with Chuck Scully the other day.”

He looked over my shoulder to see if Scully was with me now. He said, “Yeah, I remember. Was that you the other night at the Gulliver called my name?”

“Right. You were carrying an air conditioner.”

“Could have been. Those window units they got there are more trouble than the damn things are worth, especially after the salt air's had a few years to get at them. Are you a cop?”

“No, but I used to be. Chuck's swamped, and I'm sort of helping him out on that case he was here about.” What the hell, it was a small lie. “There's something maybe you can help with. Okay if I come in?”

I knew he'd say no. “If you want, you can sit out here for a minute.” He slipped out and closed the door behind him. “You wouldn't like it in there, it's a mess.” He tested for a strong part of the porch railing and sat on it.

“I know what you mean,” I said, “I don't like visitors in my house either. Without a woman in charge it looks like the village dump.”

He looked at me appraisingly and the suspicion eased slightly: Maybe he had found a kindred soul. He said, “My mother knew how to take care of the place. Even my wife, some. They're both gone, one way or another.”

“Thinking about another wife?” We were cozying up.

“Nope,” he said, and allowed himself the shadow of a smile. “I do better with fish than women.”

“It's about the same with me. Substitute painting for fishing. That's what I do. Paint.”

He couldn't have cared less, but I figured we had established a bond. I didn't know how long an attention span he had, so I went for the meat.

“When we were here the other day,” I said, “Chuck asked you whether you saw any cars at that big white house on your way to the beach the morning Cassie Brennan was murdered. The one with the spiral ramp. Do you remember that?”