Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  1. A Long Friday …

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  2. … A Short Week

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  3. … And a Weekend

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Also by Gordon Cotler

  Copyright

  For

  Amy, Joanna, and Ellen

  with love

  1

  A LONG FRIDAY …

  ONE

  THE MORNING OF the day I was accused of murdering a sixteen-year-old girl I happened to open my eyes at daybreak, an hour or more before my usual time. I had every intention of shutting them instantly. No such luck. I found myself looking up at that offending hand, the grotesque hand that had begun to bug me yesterday. That did it; I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. Not until I’d fixed the damn thing.

  I once read somewhere that Beethoven’s family would get him out of bed in the morning (was it Beethoven or was it Haydn?) by playing an unfinished phrase on the piano (or was it the harpsichord?) The poor composer would have to drag himself to the instrument and hit that last note to get some relief. The principle seems to work for painters. For this one, anyway.

  I knew that hand wasn’t right from the moment I painted it. The way the thumb met the palm wasn’t abstract, or expressionist, or surreal, it was just unhuman—more like a saguaro cactus that had been hit by a truck. I couldn’t stand looking at it that way another minute, especially as it was about twice the size of a normal hand. It would have to be fixed, and now.

  I was working large. Really large. The back wall of my studio/home was higher than it was wide. I had twelve feet of canvas nailed across it, and the canvas fell fourteen feet, to about waist height. To reach that miserable hand I had to scramble to the top of my rolling aluminum scaffold clutching a can of brushes, naked as a blue-assed baboon. I had a week’s supply of acrylics plus a couple of rollers stashed on the platform.

  I put in a concentrated twenty minutes on the hand before I finally felt the sense of relief Beethoven, or whoever, must have gotten from playing that final note. By this time there was no way I would get back to sleep, so I figured I’d put in an hour with a sketch pad somewhere down the beach.

  It had been at least a year since I’d gone out to draw with the morning sun still almost touching the ocean and the beach houses flooded with that low, straight-on light. My drawing doesn’t have much to do with my painting, but I have to draw every day—people, houses, beach junk, anything my eye falls on. Call it a compulsion, but drawing is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. A violinist who doesn’t practice every day is a fiddler whose hat sits upside down on the sidewalk. I pulled on sneakers, jeans, work shirt, and heavy windbreaker. At the beginning of May, the east end of Long Island can still get a chill breeze off the ocean in the early morning. I scooped up my drawing kit and a giant pad.

  My house has two doors, one to a footpath through the dunes to the beach, the other facing the gravel automobile road that is scratched across what was once a potato field. I went out the beach door.

  I’ve mentioned “the east end of Long Island” and “my house,” and I may have conjured up an image of some postmodern bleached-wood architect’s conceit in the Hamptons costing in the neighborhood of a million. I was not in that neighborhood. In actual fact, my place was not much more than a shack that could have been cast ashore on a high tide and might go out again on the next. Nor was it located in one of the cutting-edge, frantic, celebrity-intensive Hamptons. Not nearly.

  When I was on the NYPD—I had been off the cops about a year at this time—word circulated that Sid Shale had this beach house out on the South Fork. On a lieutenant’s salary. Internal Affairs fell over itself launching an investigation.

  Two IA guys actually shlepped out here on the Long Island Expressway on a Friday afternoon in July, a journey I support as a harsh alternative to capital punishment. When the guys reached my place, hot, sweaty, irritable—ready, I suspect, to file charges if they found so much as a deposit bottle I couldn’t account for—they took one look and collapsed in each other’s arms, dissolved in laughter. I happened to be in residence at the time (I was taking a vacation week to paint), and I witnessed the scene through a window, including Cop A’s gasped, “That’s a house?”

  Since then, the beach house had become my principal residence—in fact my only residence—and I had done some work on the place. I insulated and heated it for year-round use. I cut a window on the beach side in the shape of either a swordfish or a blowfish, take your pick. I raised my bed on a platform, so I could store paints and stretched canvases underneath. I painted the outside walls in three not nearly complementary colors and constructed a huge found-object sculpture outside each exterior door and named them Flotsam and Jetsam. Most important, I lifted one wall eight feet because I wanted the added painting surface. That made for a shed roof, and I installed a skylight in it.

  Despite what I had spent on winterizing, the structural changes made the place nearly unheatable in months with an R in them; I consoled myself during those months by eating oysters whenever I could afford them. I took further comfort in the thought that my abode was probably as warm as Buckingham Palace; if the queen could take it, so could I. And with the added height I could work big. Really big.

  * * *

  THE DIRTY SAND was strewn with assorted junk and the remains of marine life—most prominently, the nearly black lengths of stringy seaweed I think of as the discarded hair of mermaids who come ashore in the night for a cut, bleach, and set. A few more weeks would pass before the village would begin raking the beach to tempt sunbathers. I would more than likely make a find this morning for either Flotsam or Jetsam. These were, and always would be, “works in progress.”

  I decided to head west. I had drawn the houses in that direction many times—the nearest was nearly a quarter of a mile distant—but the unfamiliar early light made them seem almost a new challenge. The low sun barely warmed the left side of my face as I picked my way over the minigorges and temporary rivulets created by winter storms.

  I walked a few hundred yards without seeing a soul. But then, as soon as I found a likely spot to settle down for a first sketch—an overview of sand, sky, and houses—a gaunt figure rose over the dunes some distance ahead: Don Quixote with lance. He came from the road, made for the high-water mark, and then ambled along it in my direction. When he got close I saw that his pantaloons were actually baggy jeans tucked into high rubber boots, and the lance was a fishing rod. He wore a floppy hat and a torn T-shirt, and a creel was slun
g over a shoulder.

  He was a surf caster out after bluefish. If these guys ever haul one in, I’ve never seen it. I’m willing to believe they’re all following doctor’s orders to do an exercise designed to strengthen a weak wrist.

  I hoped this one would take his stand before he reached me, so I could put some foreground interest in my sketch. But on an otherwise deserted beach the man of La Mancha didn’t stop walking until he was abreast of me. By this time I was sitting on a west-facing perch on the high-water shelf, pad on my knees, pencils, pens, and charcoals stuck points up in the sand, water jar, paints, and brush beside them.

  The fisherman eyed me resentfully. Since I had picked this spot, it must be a good one; never mind that I wasn’t equipped for fishing.

  “You planning to stay here?” he asked stupidly.

  “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  He thought for a moment. “Well … you was here first.” Fair was fair. He turned and continued on down the beach.

  “Hook the queen of the bluefish,” I called after him. I was glad to see him disappear. After ten minutes of futile casting he would have put down his rod, taken up a position at my back, and advised me that I wasn’t getting it quite right. Bad enough I had to take criticism from the seagulls that sometimes waddled up and quickly waddled away, unimpressed.

  I faced up the beach and began drawing. Pencil to virgin paper, I started as I always do, in the lower right-hand corner and working my way up and across. No blocking, no erasures, no hesitation in my long unbroken lines. No conscious thought, actually; my eye signals my hand without the message passing through my brain. Total commitment to the moment. Drawing is the purest, truest, most naked form of art, the keenest challenge to the artist. It brings my senses alive, it makes my blood pound. As almost always, I had a hell of a good time.

  * * *

  BACK HOME AGAIN I was surprised to find the answering machine blinking at this early hour. I punched Play, recognized Leona Morgenstern’s voice, and started making coffee. I knew it would be ground, dripped, and possibly half drunk before Lonnie signed off. She was in her shrill mode:

  “Sid…? Are you there…? For God’s sake, pick up.… Hello-o-o-o…? Where the hell are you at seven-forty-one in the A.M., passed out? Have you taken up serious drinking? Sid, you can’t drink like Jackson Pollock until you sell like Jackson Pollock. Which brings me to my point. I’ve got hold of a live one. Remember the Texan I told you about who came in on Tuesday asking to see your work? Rich Texans are harder to sniff out since they got out of oil, but this one gave off a heady aroma. Computer software? Rocket components? Something.

  “Sid, he wants to meet you. Six P.M. sharp at the gallery. Today. This is a command performance, don’t fail me. Show up on time and make nice for a change. And Sid, need I remind you, your daughter is not in community college, she’s at Bennington College. For ten dollars less she could live at the Waldorf. With room service. Sid, you can paint, but can you sell? The jury is still out.

  “Oh! I forgot to ask the other day. Are you still on that ‘I’m working big, really big’ kick? Because the buyers for corporate board rooms aren’t buying these days, and if they were they wouldn’t buy a larger-than-life expressionist painting that shows the final collapse of the greedy class on the beaches of eastern Long Island—your cry of conscience that I think of as the Guernica of the Hamptons, and who needs it? So, Sid, will you please—”

  I shut the thing off and climbed to the top of my extruded aluminum scaffold with my coffee mug and went back to attacking the canvas. Lonnie was wrong, of course. No way was this work an homage to Picasso. If it had been, I would have admitted it. Many good paintings have been inspired by other paintings. And expressionist? Not by a long shot, but Lonnie felt more secure when she had a handle to hang on to.

  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 see
ing 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…?”