Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  For a fleeting instant she looked confused. “How”—she hesitated—“compact.”

  I said, “Don’t you mean, how stupid of me? Because you know it’s the other door that leads to the bathroom.”

  “How in the world would I know that?” But she was beginning to suspect that her cover was unraveling.

  “Because you must have found out last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “When you were here snooping around.” I waited the full count. “Ms. Julie Klampf.”

  The color drained from her face, then came back with more intensity.

  “How long have you known?” she said. Her voice had dropped half an octave and the twang had gone flatline.

  “About an hour. Remember the wine I bought you at Muccio’s? I gave the glass to a cop friend to check for latent prints. I thought you and Daddy might have a history in New York. The pair of you gave off an aroma. If you weren’t bit players in a community theater production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas you had to be con artists. Okay, I was only partly right.”

  “Latent prints,” she murmured. She had sunk into my one chair like a deflating balloon. “Damn it, so you are still with the NYPD.”

  “No. Absolutely no connection. I wasn’t put on your tail. I would never even have known of your existence if I didn’t happen to be the guy who painted the picture you thought would help soften Sharanov for the kill. You okay with that?”

  She made a sour face and opened her mouth to speak.

  I said, “Let me finish. Turned out you had no record in New York and I stopped thinking about you. But meanwhile my cop friend was trying the national print file at the FBI in Washington. Lo and behold, you turned out to be a U.S. Treasury agent name of Julie Klampf. By the way, I much prefer that handle to Tess Turkinton. You work out of Washington, but are you originally from Texas?”

  “What the fuck’s the difference?” she hissed.

  “You’re right, none. I was trying to be sociable. You and ‘Daddy’ are not related, are you?”

  “God, no.”

  “You guys sure worked up a lather over this case. Misha must owe Internal Revenue a bundle.”

  “What makes you think he owes anything?”

  “The Tundra is a cash-only operation with God knows how many hundred seats and an average tab per cover of what, sixty, seventy dollars? You tell me how much he’s been skimming with creative bookkeeping these past half dozen years. Not to mention what he picks up from his other, shadier dealings. His wife knows. She sent her brother out here sniffing for hidden sacks of cash. Come on, Julie, what’s his federal bill?”

  Reluctantly, “With penalties? Three million. Close to.”

  “So you and ‘Daddy’ are the bait to make him a secret partner in a Dallas restaurant that will never happen. Flushing out what, half a million or more in undeclared income? Prima facie evidence for an indictment. Correct me if I’ve got it wrong.” I waited for an answer.

  “That’s the plan in its broadest, crudest outline.” She sounded weary.

  So far, so good. I said, “Let me come at you from a new angle and make an informed guess. This isn’t the first time the IRS has tried to nail Sharanov.”

  “So…?”

  “You got burned. Someone in the NYPD is on Misha’s payroll and tipped him off to your operation.”

  “You knew that?”

  “I told you, it’s an informed guess. The detectives trying to make a local case against Sharanov were shut down recently by the top brass, no explanation. To forestall a possible leak, I assume. So when I came on the scene and you heard I was an ex-cop you must have shit a brick. There was a good chance the “ex” part was phony. And whether it was or wasn’t, I could blow your scam. So you’ve tried everything short of hypnotizing me to find out where I stand in this. Jesus, you even went after my son.”

  The spoiled Texas princess had vanished. She was looking more and more like a lost little girl playing grown-up in her momma’s Chinese-y sheath, especially when she tried, pathetically, to tug the hip-high slit closed over her thigh. It was almost sweet.

  She said, “Okay, Sid, so where do you stand?”

  “Absolutely nowhere. I’m not going to talk to anyone about what I know. You and ‘Daddy’ get to finish your amateur theatrical, drop the curtain, and make your collar.”

  She brightened some. “We do?”

  I crouched to put us eye to eye. “Provided you do one small thing for me.”

  “And what’s that?” She braced for the blow.

  “It’ll be practically a steal at the moment. There’s no gallery commission, because it’s back in my hands.”

  “I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about.”

  “Seated Girl. You’re going to buy her.”

  She rose out of the chair. “Are you out of your mind? With what? Government money?”

  “Damn straight. You were prepared to spend government money on her last week. There’s government money available in situations like this. You’d have paid an informant ten percent of what you extract from Sharanov. Two, three hundred thousand dollars. I’m asking less than ten percent of that.”

  “This is not an informant situation. You’re not an informant.”

  “Not for the IRS, no,” I said darkly.

  Her jaw tightened. And then she decided to ignore the implicit threat. She said, “The department would have made the gallery buy back your painting once we had Sharanov under indictment.”

  “Good luck. You’d have had a fat chance of getting Leona to agree to that. But I’ll buy it back. In a year or two.”

  “Then why even—”

  “At the moment I’ve got a serious cash flow problem.”

  “And if we don’t solve it for you?”

  “I’ll be nervous, depressed. Most of my friends are cops, and in my addled state I don’t know what I might accidentally blurt out over dinner with them at Muccio’s—as early as tomorrow night. Or where what I say at that dinner table might go. Or to whom.”

  She said, “You are a goddam bastard.” But her face told me I had won.

  “Hang her opposite your desk. In a good light,” I said. “She’ll give you a great deal of pleasure. She has me.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  JULIE KLAMPF AND I never did get out to that dinner she had promised to spring for. My ultimatum had taken the fun out of the evening, and Klampf had gone back to Sharanov’s house alone (“I’ll walk, thank you”), with her dignity shredded.

  What had been my hurry? I could have waited to blow her scheme until after the lobster, the good bottle of wine, and the associated flirting I could expect from Julie—her all-out effort to pry loose my secret plan, if I had one, to tip her hand to Sharanov. In connection with the flirting I would now never know how far Agent Klampf had been prepared to go to honor her responsibilities to the U.S. Treasury Department.

  With my deficit problem solved, I had my best night’s sleep of the season. I awoke Sunday morning clearheaded, and ideas surged through my brain like bubbles in a newly opened bottle of seltzer. But when the effervescence ebbed I was left roughly where I had begun a week ago, with that badly made bed in Sharanov’s house. And that brought me back to Paulie Malatesta.

  Most murders are about money or sex. Cassie had no money, but she was well-supplied with the other. I lay in bed for a time and contemplated Paulie.

  I would have to do something about that kid. I had avoided leaning on him for his quirky behavior the day of the murder. Much of it could be excused because he had lost his girl, the rest because Paulie was something of a loser anyway, and he had behaved like a loser. I felt sorry for him, I almost liked him, and he didn’t need my hassling.

  On the other hand I didn’t need the grand jury tomorrow and all that went with that. I climbed out of bed, took a long depressing look at Large, and got in the shower.

  * * *

  WHEN I DROVE up, Mr. Hamilton, Paulie’s landlord, was trimming deadwood fro
m the evergreens at the side of his property. He looked at me guiltily as we exchanged greetings and then he explained that he and the missus were skipping church this morning, as she was “helping her sister, who’s not all that well.”

  I don’t know why he felt compelled to seek my approval for playing hooky from church, since I was dressed, at best, for bowling. But I gave it to him anyway.

  “Heaven will appreciate your making the world a little tidier this morning,” I beamed, indicating his work on the evergreens. Then I downshifted to business. “Is Paulie in?”

  “At this hour on a Sunday? He’s likely still asleep. Why don’t you just go on up and knock on his door?” When I hesitated he added, “It’s all right, there’s no one else in the house. Top of the stairs, end of the hall to your left.” We were not in New York; it never occurred to him that I might be here to lift the silver.

  The stairs were at the back of a small unadorned entrance hall. They were covered with a worn runner and they climbed straight and steep. The several doors on the second floor were all shut but I could hear movement behind the one Hamilton had indicated was Paulie’s. I went to it and knocked my commanding cop’s knock.

  “Huh? Yeah?” came Paulie’s puzzled voice. He was not used to visitors. Not at this hour, anyway. “Mr. Hamilton? Come on in, okay?”

  I opened the door and walked in. I don’t know what I had expected, but Paulie was on his feet, dressed in denim pants and a flannel shirt, and he held a dumbbell in each hand. Naturally he was surprised to see me. He said, “Yeah, hi. What’s up? You have some news?”

  The room contained a single bed, unmade, a kitchen chair, a footlocker, and a dresser that held a clock radio and a telephone. Nothing on the walls, nothing to personalize the tenant’s abode. I suspected that Paulie didn’t have a clue how to make a room his own.

  I said, “No news. I came to talk. I wanted to catch you before you went out for the day. Mr. Hamilton thought you might still be asleep.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Yeah, your bed looks as if you’ve been wrestling in it. I guess you haven’t slept that well since Cassie’s death.”

  “What do you think?”

  “That you haven’t slept well.” Uninvited, I sat in the chair.

  Paulie’s shoulders sagged; he realized he wasn’t going to get rid of me in a hurry. He tossed the metal dumbbells on the bed and that sagged too.

  “This is my day off,” he said. “Do me and you still have something left to talk about? I don’t know what, but how about if it waits till tomorrow, when I’ll be on Huggins’s time.”

  “I wish. I’m going before the grand jury in Riverhead tomorrow,” I said. “And I want to get straight in my head what I’m going to tell them.”

  “The grand jury? What’s any of that got to do with me?” His chin was thrust forward defiantly, but his voice wasn’t nearly as sure.

  I said, “That’s what I came to find out. But first, I don’t like having to look up at you when we talk. Either you sit down or I stand up.” He stared dumbly and didn’t move a muscle and I said, “Which’ll it be?”

  He flopped back onto the tortured bedclothes and put a hand on each dumbbell, as though to steady himself. His dark face registered sulky.

  I said, “I guess you haven’t had a chance to make your bed this morning.”

  “Make it for who? I didn’t invite nobody for Sunday brunch.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “I know. I sometimes let my bed go all day. Then I’ll crawl into the same wrinkled sheets I left in the morning. It’s a guy thing. Women make beds, men make fires. Do you ever make your bed?”

  “Do I? What the hell kind of question is that? I never thought about it.” He thought now, and said, “I grew up thinking about the kitchen table—what there’d be on it for supper. If there’d be anything on it for supper. Not the frigging bed and whether I made it.”

  I said, “And now, comes Sunday morning and you’ve got the whole day free, you get out of bed, you get dressed, and you reach for the dumbbells.”

  His eyes narrowed. He said, “You’re leading up to something. Why don’t you spit out what the hell it is?”

  I took the plunge. “The morning of Cassie’s murder the bed in Sharanov’s room was made. Badly. Either by a woman in a hurry or by a man who didn’t know much about bed making. I’ve decided you’re the likeliest candidate for the second theory. How about it?”

  His hands were gripping and ungripping the dumbbells. They looked like five pounders. He said, “Why would I make that bastard’s bed?”

  “How about this?” I took a breath and let it roll; it was at least worth the shot. “You and Cassie made love in that bed. Afterward you had a fight. You had been fighting for weeks. One of you got a knife from the kitchen and somehow it was Cassie who ended up dead. And then you made the bed. Out of guilt. A muddled attempt to hide what you had been doing in that bed. I don’t imagine you were thinking too logically. Not after killing your lover.”

  “You shit!” he exploded. He sprang off the bed, a lethal dumbbell cocked at his ear, the other half-raised.

  I had expected a reaction, but not one this big, and I knocked over the chair in my haste to back off to the door. Meanwhile I pulled my .38 from where I had tucked it under my sweater at the rear of my belt before leaving the house. If I had known that ten pounds of dead metal would be part of this equation I’d have spent even more time trying to find the ammo before I came out.

  “Calm down, Paulie,” I said.

  Paulie hesitated, the dumbbell still raised, his eyes on the piece. Then he said with quiet intensity, “Do you really think I killed Cassie? That I could kill her?”

  I took a moment. “Probably not,” I said. “Not on purpose. If you were mad enough to stab her there’d be one or two random wounds. Whoever cut Cassie’s throat did it deliberately. He—or she—wanted to make sure she was dead.”

  Paulie was slowly lowering the dumbbell. His mouth made a couple of false starts and then he said, “Then what—?”

  “I said I believe you didn’t do it. Who knows which way a grand jury will go? You were weird that day. Off the wall. There are witnesses. Including your boss.” I tucked the piece back in my belt.

  “You talked to Huggins?”

  “Half an hour ago. All the police asked him was whether you came in on time that morning. I wanted to know how you were acting that day. Huggins thought about it and said what I’d have said. ‘Not like himself.’ Even before anyone knew Cassie was dead.”

  “I already told you I—”

  I waved him silent. “Don’t give me that bull about being sick. Huggins said he learned long ago the difference between sick employees and bullshit sick employees. Now he’s concerned that he should have told that to the police, even though you were at work at the time of the murder. If they don’t come back to him he’s going to call Chuck Scully.”

  I had made this up out of whole cloth and a gut feeling, to move us off dead center. Huggins had told me he’d taken Paulie’s story of being sick that morning as the truth. Why not? The kid had always been straight with him.

  Paulie took a long moment before he said, “What the hell do you want out of me?”

  “I want you to tell me what happened that morning. Step by step.”

  “Why? What difference will it make? I didn’t kill Cassie.” His voice was dead flat.

  “Because when I know what you know, maybe I can help you. When that detective from County starts asking you questions it won’t be to help you but to charge you. Same for Chuck Scully.”

  “Scully would love to see me arrested. Scully had eyes for Cassie.”

  Cassie was dead but she could still spark jealousy. “So wouldn’t it be better to talk to me?”

  “Would it? I don’t know.”

  In a deep sulk now, he sank back on the bed and began clunking one dumbbell against the other. He was working up the courage to talk.

  I figured a nudge might help. “I can set
it up for you to talk to Scully if you think he’d be a better listener.”

  That did it. He dropped the dumbbells on his blanket, a sign of final surrender. He said angrily, “Mr. Hamilton told you someone heard us arguing? He’d have been deaf not to. We fought off and on for a good month. Hot and heavy. But it stopped way before Cassie was killed.”

  “What were you fighting about?”

  “Can’t you guess? Look, Cassie and I were in love, really in love. You have to understand that.” His eyes met mine to make sure I did understand before he went on. “It got to be way past time we were, you know, going to bed together. But Cassie wouldn’t.”

  He shook his head; her attitude remained beyond his comprehension. “She’d made that dumb promise to her mother and she wouldn’t break it, wouldn’t lie to her old lady.”

  “But she did break it, didn’t she?”

  He couldn’t say it but he nodded.

  “When?”

  “Not that long before she died.”

  I had to press; this was like pulling teeth. “What made her change her mind?”

  “Her mother got knocked off her pedestal. Flat on her face in the mud.” He bit out the words. “Cassie caught her with a guy. Saw them through a window. It blew her mind. She shook when she told me.”

  “So all bets were off. And you two had sex.”

  “Not right away, no. She was coming around to the idea, but she took her time. She hated the kids in high school who were screwing in cars, under the grandstand, on the golf course, in the woods. Like animals, she said. Worse, because the woods is where animals live, it’s their home.” His eyes were misting. “That’s the way Cassie talked, the way she was.”

  “I know.”

  “We couldn’t go to my place, we couldn’t go to hers, and she said flat-out no when I offered to spring for a motel, like on a Sunday afternoon. She wanted it to be right.”

  “And what was right?”

  “That we’d be together all night. That’s when we came up with the plan.”

  I thought I was beginning to get it. “The plan was to use the Sharanov house to make love?”