My front door was unlocked. That didn’t trouble me; I leave it unlocked about half the time. But as soon as I walked in I saw that person or persons had laid heavy hands on the place. Furniture and painting supplies had been moved, boxes unstacked, drawers opened, canvases spread.
Houses in summer resorts are routinely burglarized out of season, but the houses of year-round residents usually are not: The family might show up to surprise the burglar. And it was widely known around here that I owned nothing worth stealing but my paintings. Local thieves would find those more of a headache to sell than their time was worth. Ask my dealer.
And on closer inspection I concluded that what had gone on here was not the work of thieves. The place had been searched, not ransacked. For what? The answering machine was blinking and I punched it on. There was one message, and it held no answers. Leona Morgenstern had called:
“Sid…? Sid, are you there…? It’s after midnight, and you’re still out on the town? Does that mean the Turkinton woman found you? I trust you two are getting along. Do you know how long it takes for a check to clear on a Texas bank? Many love affairs blossom and wither in less time. Sid, you must have seen the bill from Bennington sitting on my desk. The figure on the bottom line is not my Social Security number. Act responsibly. Talk to you tomorrow.” The woman was urging me to screw my way to solvency.
I went back out to the police car; Walter must have been assigned to keep an eye on the house after it was violated. Some watchdog. I opened the driver’s side door, and my knees buckled as he slid into my waiting arms. His eyes snapped open.
“Right. Yes. Move along here,” he barked into the night before he understood where he was. He glanced at me sheepishly, said, “Uh, good evening, Lieutenant.” And then, with some help from me, he wriggled to an upright sitting position and tried to look professional.
“What’s going on, Walter?” I asked in a reasonable voice.
“I’ve been watching for you,” he said. “Waiting for you,” he corrected, in the interest of accuracy.
“Do you know who broke into my house?”
“They wouldn’t do anything like that. Not nearly. They went in perfectly legal.”
“Who?” But I had already guessed.
“Chuck Scully—the chief. And that detective from County. Mean son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
I was beginning to get a creepy feeling deep in my bowels. “What do you mean, perfectly legal?”
“They had a search warrant. Good day or night. Got hold of a judge in Riverhead and came back with the paper. Perfectly legal, all the way down the line.”
I wished he would stop repeating “perfectly legal.” The creepy feeling was working its way along my extremities. I said, “Walter, what would make a judge sign a search warrant when there was no good cause?” I was asking for it.
“Scully and that other one—Docherty—had their reasons. Don’t ask me what, I wasn’t in on that part, but they were perfectly legal. The judge went down their list and it didn’t take him five minutes to issue the warrant.”
“They had a list?”
“They did. I’m supposed to bring you over to the village, Lieutenant. The chief is waiting to see you at police headquarters.”
I was in some mild form of denial. “No, Walter. Not at this hour, he isn’t.”
“Yes, he is. He said to tell you he’d be there all night, if necessary. He meant it, too.”
* * *
POLICE HEADQUARTERS OCCUPIED the entire ground floor of the village hall. At that hour too many fluorescent lights were burning in too much empty space. No one was on hand but an officer at the switchboard and Chuck Scully, who was nervously shuffling paperwork at his desk. As I approached the open door of his office he jumped up like a startled cat and broke into a relieved grin. It was as though he had been half-expecting word that I had been spotted crossing the Mexican border.
He said, “Come on in, Sid.” He wasn’t calling me Lieutenant tonight.
Walter, a step behind me, said, “Is it okay if I sign out now, Chief?”
Scully barely hesitated. “Tell you what. Why don’t you wait a while?” I supposed that was in case it was going to take the two of them to subdue me. Walter was going to be a lot of help in that situation.
I could see that Scully was bracing for a roundabout approach to a delicate problem. I cut through the underbrush.
“I understand you searched my house, Chief,” I said, looking him steadily in the eye. “You must have had a pretty good reason.”
“You want to see the application for the warrant?” he said eagerly, and thrust a Xerox copy at me. He looked miserable.
I laid it on the desk without looking at it; I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I said, “Why don’t you just tell me the high points?”
He sat down and gestured for me to do the same. We were going to be informal about this awkward business. Walter had ambled out of the office to chat with the man at the switchboard.
“You want a laugh?” Scully said, his way of showing he was on my side. “Docherty thinks you could be unstable, possibly dangerous.”
“Because of that possible lawsuit from the felon I belted a couple of years ago?”
“That ticked him off. I don’t know why, but he’s not a fan of the NYPD.”
“I noticed.” Where were we going with this? “I doubt he used that argument with the judge who signed the warrant.”
“No, he didn’t.” It was too late at night for irony; Chuck hadn’t picked up on mine. He said, “Cassie Brennan’s killer may have wiped the crime scene clean. The only liftable prints were two fingers on the headboard.” He mumbled, “They were yours.”
I couldn’t believe this. “Chuck, I was with you when I touched that headboard. When I stood up after bending over the body.”
He brightened. “You think that’s when it was?”
“I know that’s when it was. Are you telling me Docherty’s crime scene people found the prints and scrambled to check them against my file at the NYPD?”
“I don’t remember if it happened exactly that way.” He shifted gears. “That drawing of yours hanging at Sharanov’s? Sharanov says it was Cassie persuaded him to buy it. He says she pressed him about it until he had to get her off his back.”
“What does that mean? I had something going with her?”
Reasonably, “I, for one, don’t think so, Sid. But you can’t rule it out.”
“And then what? In a fit of jealousy, or a lover’s quarrel, I killed her?” I was doing a slow burn. “Aren’t we getting a little silly here?”
“Not necessarily.” I was hitting him where he lived. That was stupid; I could see his back stiffening. We were becoming adversarial.
He said, “Would you like me to read you your rights?”
“I know my rights,” I snapped. “And Chuck, keep your pants on, you haven’t scored a killer. I was home when Cassie Brennan was murdered. Waiting for my model to show. Gayle Hennessy.”
He shot back, “Sid, you’re the one who showed me how Cassie had to have been killed soon after she came to work. That fit pretty good. And you say you were home then? I called you around nine-thirty. I got your answering machine.”
“I was home.” Did I have to explain that I was draped across a beam, and why? After a very long day I wasn’t going to pick my way through all that at two something in the morning.
I said, “I couldn’t get to the phone.” In a house not much bigger than a hot tub? It sounded lame even to my ears.
The most painful part of this business was that at heart Scully really was on my side. But that county cop, Docherty, had steamrollered him good. And now I could see poor Chuck getting ready to hit me with something worse.
“The thing is,” he began slowly, “it turns out Cassie’s throat was cut with a knife that had a jagged edge. We checked Sharanov’s kitchen and there was an empty slot in the knife holder. Sharanov is sure it’s the bread knife that’s missing.”
; “Sharanov knows what’s in his kitchen?”
“I asked him that. He said Russians eat a lot of bread and the house couldn’t function without that knife.” He was pleased with how his inquiry had gone. “A knife with a serrated edge.”
“That’s on Sharanov’s say-so? That it was a bread knife that was missing?”
“At that point, yes.”
“Good detective work, Chuck.” I wondered how much of it had been Docherty’s. “Anything else?” I knew that there had to be more; his eyes kept sliding off me to his wall calendar.
He said, “When we left the crime scene Docherty thought we ought to stop by your place. To see if you had anything to add that might be helpful. Because you’re the nearest neighbor.”
“And?”
Now he was looking totally miserable. He said, “You know that weirdo statue outside your door?”
“Beach side or road side?”
“I didn’t know there were two. Road side.”
“Flotsam.”
“Doesn’t matter. There’s two sixteen-ounce Schlitz beer cans stuck to, I don’t know, I guess what might be the chest. Those are breasts?”
“If that’s what you see, Chuck.”
“That bread knife was sitting nice and neat in the left boob. We only noticed because the blade stuck out and glinted in the sun. Naturally we were surprised. And then it turned out you weren’t home. You can see why Docherty thought we should go for the search warrant.”
It took me a moment to find my voice. “Chuck, this is probably your first murder investigation.”
“You know it is.”
“Tip. Not many killers hide the murder weapon outside their front door. Especially if they’ve got thirty miles of beach at their back door.”
“That’s what I’d have thought. But what do I know? Like you said, this is my first murder investigation. So we got the warrant.”
He was still feisty, but now he began to soften. He said, “And then when we did go into your house…” He trailed off.
“Yes…?”
“We found those drawings of Cassie,” he blurted out. “Those naked pictures.”
Oh, boy. “Nude studies, Chuck. It’s what artists do.”
“Her mother was horrified.”
I groaned audibly. “You told her mother?”
“Docherty did. That news came on top of … You know, everything else. She’s a religious woman, Sid. She said Cassie swore there’d be none of that when you asked her to model. Nora Brennan would never have allowed it.”
“There was no reason for you to tell her mother. That was cruel.”
“I know. But Docherty said we had to do what we had to do. He thinks you have an obsession. And that it led to a compulsion. He says you’re bad news.”
* * *
I SPENT THE first twenty minutes back home putting the place in order. It was almost three-thirty in the morning, roughly twenty-one hours since I had climbed up on the scaffold to repair that clumsy hand on Large. I was burned out but too keyed up to sleep; some time in the next couple of days, unless an ADA with some common sense was put on the case, that jerk Docherty was going to find a way to arrest me.
If I had any smarts, I would find myself a lawyer as soon as the sun came up, although every lawyer I had run across since moving out here was a real estate specialist. To a man, they would advise me to shop for the best deal I could get on a thirty-year mortgage on my life.
I could retain a lawyer, or I could pay the damn college fees; until I absolutely had to holler for help I would try to fence with the law on my own. With luck, Cassie’s killer would tip his hand before then. With luck.
The last thing I put away were the drawings spread out on my worktable. The cops had taken almost all the Cassie drawings; they were solid evidence, I supposed, of my sick compulsion. The two they left behind—none of the nudes—competed for attention in my mind with the memory of that limp body beside the bed. I taped one of the drawings to the wall; by keeping that vibrant image before me, maybe I could overcome the one of the dead Cassie lying in her blood. Not a chance. That was the way I would remember her, probably forever.
I had forgotten that I had taped another drawing to the wall—this morning’s sketch on the beach with the Sharanov house in the foreground. I took another hard look at it; what was in that sketch that had bothered me?
Damned if I knew.
By now my eyes were losing their focus. I stripped off my clothes, turned out the light, and crawled into bed.
In a probably vain hope that I would find sleep.
2
… A SHORT WEEK
TWELVE
“ARE YOU GOING to the wake? If you are, okay if I tag along?”
This was Monday morning, and it was Gayle Hennessy on my answering machine. I was up on the scaffold, working near the top left corner of Large. I was on a roll and not inclined to scramble down to pick up.
Except for a few hours of sleep and an occasional bowl of canned chili, I had been painting almost nonstop since Saturday afternoon. Once Chuck Scully turned down my admittedly foolish offer to help in his murder investigation (“Are you kidding? Docherty would kill me.”), I turned to the best therapy I knew—work—to help me lose, or at least temporarily put aside, my laundry list of angsts about recent events.
Since I usually paint for long stretches seven days a week anyway, it was not easy to tell when my regular work habits began to spill over into therapy time. But something was working. Gayle’s call startled me into realizing that I hadn’t thought of Cassie Brennan in hours. I still had the sketch of her posted on the wall, but there was damn little left for me to chew over about her death. Scully had cut me off when I tried to feel him out about the results of the autopsy. I was so out of touch that Gayle’s call was the first news I had that the body had been released to the family.
Next time I climbed down, to clean brushes and replenish my paints, I called Gayle and said, yes, of course I would go to the wake. She said she had the Brennans’ address, and I said I would pick her up at eight.
I knew I had to go, but I don’t do well at wakes. Almost all of those I had been to were of cops killed on the job. (Or by the job; suicides.) Days after the death the painfully young widow and orphaned children would still be in a state of shock, and the photographs of the deceased that took up so much of the crowded living room always seemed to be saying to me, “Why didn’t it happen to you instead of to me?” I’m more comfortable with the Jewish death ritual: Plant them fast, grieve afterward.
Only once had I gone to a nonpolice wake. The deceased was a murder victim. I had a hunch that his killer might be on hand and in some way signal his guilt, the way an arsonist sometimes gives himself away at the scene of his fire. All I picked up on this occasion was a buzz from the alcohol I had to consume to blend in with the mourners.
I stayed aloft on the scaffold until six, then showered and dressed in clothes suitable for showing respect for the departed. They were roughly the same clothes I had worn the previous Friday to show respect for that pair of Texans who were interested in buying my painting of her.
That, I decided, was letting Cassie down. But I had nothing better to offer.
* * *
GAYLE LIVED IN a small apartment behind the workroom over Gayle’s Provocativo on Covenant Street. She was waiting for me in front of the shop when I drove up, casually but calculatedly draped in a dark purple whatever the hell, somber but striking, that she may have whipped up just for this occasion. Gayle worked that way.
The news burst from her as she climbed into my pickup. “The prodigal has returned.”
“Who’s that?”
“Cassie’s old man. Mel, at the diner, saw him drive into town this afternoon. For the wake, I suppose. Cassie told me she hadn’t seen the bastard in months. I guess he couldn’t resist the chance to belly up to the free booze.”
I said, “Come on, Gayle, you’re not being fair. If he hadn’t shown, you’d have said he had
a heart of stone. You’d damn well want your father at your wake.”
“Just long enough for me to stand up in the box to see who the son of a bitch was and kick him in the teeth.”
She fished the driving directions out of a fold of her garment and said, “Sid, be careful what you say to the mother. The way I heard it, she was not all that crazy about Cassie posing for you.” She perched her reading glasses on her perfect Lena Horne nose. “I mean, even before you got the girl to do the nude stuff. I guess you must regret that.”
No kidding. Thank you, Gayle.
“Another thing. Let me warn you: Cassie’s body’s at the house. It’s the way they did it at Nora Brennan’s grandmother’s wake, and she insisted.”
This was not going to be my favorite wake.
* * *
THE BRENNAN HOUSE, a cracker box, stood in a cluster of near relatives in a wooded area about equal distance from the ocean and the bay, with easy access to neither. Resale values here would never climb much above rock bottom. But the Brennan house was tidily landscaped, painted, and curtained, and had a well-maintained path to the front door.
I parked behind half a dozen vehicles. Four or five people were on the path, some leaving the house, one couple arriving with a tray of food. At Gayle’s suggestion we had stopped at the Cake Box, and she carried our contribution to the evening, two pounds of assorted cookies. We edged the front door open against a sea of bodies and squeezed inside.
The front room was so crowded I couldn’t even make my usual eyeball check for pictures on the walls. A plain pine casket took up a good chunk of floor space, and a long table set up with the bar and free lunch consumed much of what was left.
The shoulder-to-shoulder mourners spilled into the kitchen and a bedroom. These people were all locals; they appeared to be neighbors and co-workers of the mother. Cassie had told me that Nora Brennan worked for the tax assessor in the village office. Oddly, I saw no young people—no one Cassie’s age. A priest was the youngest person in the room. Where was the boyfriend, Paulie Malatesta?
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