Artist's Proof

by Gordon Cotler

  “Cassie had a dozen part-time jobs.” His voice was strained but full of pride. “Some days she worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours. But she was at Sharanov’s every Friday. She even managed it last fall, when she was still in school. She did a half-day gig cleaning his house, nine to two.”

  Maybe I didn’t get it, after all. “Those were hours you were at work at the garage.”

  “Not the night before, I wasn’t. On Thursday night Cassie would wait for her mother to go to sleep, then she’d close her own bedroom door and bike over to Sharanov’s. Sharanov didn’t come out until Friday around noon, so she had her own key. I’d meet her at the house, we’d spend the night together, and then I’d leave to change for work. Cassie was already at work. It was pretty neat.”

  “And Cassie’s mother…?”

  “She left for work every morning by seven-thirty. She’d never disturb Cassie at that hour.”

  “You couldn’t be sure.”

  “Pretty much. Cassie was busing tables at Mel’s, six A.M. to ten, Monday to Thursday. Friday morning was her chance to sleep in some, and her mother let her. If she ever did open Cassie’s door and found her missing, Cassie would have made up some excuse for why she went out early. But it never happened.”

  “How many Thursday nights did you have together?”

  My devout wish was that there had been many; I hoped Cassie had more than a glimpse of this particular glory of the world before she left it.

  His voice was sepulchral. “The last was our third.”

  “And all was well when you left her in the morning?”

  “Couldn’t have been better.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Close to seven. I went home to shower and get ready for work. I needed air in my tires, and gas.”

  “Paulie, your truck was seen leaving the Sharanov house at around eight-thirty.”

  “Yes.” He had been waiting for this and his jaw trembled; this was going to be the hard part.

  He said, “While I was home I got a road call. Woman with a flat, around a quarter to eight. When I got to her a neighbor had already changed her tire. But I was out, and I had a few minutes of slack, so I headed back to the Sharanov house. It wasn’t that far, and it would be my last chance to see Cassie all day. I wanted”—he swallowed hard—“I wanted to hold her, tell her again how much I loved her. Needed her.”

  He stopped and I waited.

  “God, it was awful. The blood…” He stopped again.

  “Was she still alive?”

  “No, I could see right away she was dead. I was sick. I wanted to throw up. My Cassie…” He rubbed the heel of his hand against his eyes. “And then I was scared. There was no way I could help her and I wanted to get out of there…”

  “Because someone who showed up might think you were responsible…?” He nodded quickly and I added, “But you didn’t leave right away. You made the bed.”

  “You knew?” He looked frightened.

  “Don’t worry, there’s no physical evidence, it was just a guess. Why did you do that, Paulie?”

  “Because the bed … the unmade bed…” It was an uphill fight. “The police might guess Cassie had slept in it. If she did, she probably wasn’t alone. I didn’t want that idea out there—her name dirtied up with scandal. I wanted the police to believe she’d come in to work as she always did, at nine in the morning.”

  Especially if the person she had slept with in that bed was most logically her boyfriend. But I didn’t say that. I said, “Paulie, it was a made bed that looked all wrong. Nobody would have noticed an unmade one. Sharanov’s was probably that way every time Cassie came to work.”

  “What do you mean? It was always made when I met her there on Thursday night.”

  “Because Cassie made it for you. Clean sheets, a nicely made bed, a proper place to make love. She wanted everything to be right for the two of you.”

  He thought about that. “I didn’t know … She never said…”

  I waited while he blinked back welling tears before I asked a final question. “When the police came, the windows were all shut tight. But there’d been one open earlier. I sketched it that way. Did you open it the night before?”

  “When we went to bed. The room was airless. Stifling.”

  “And then you closed it when you came back after eight?”

  He nodded. “I thought I was making the room look the way it usually did when she came to work.” He took another beat. “I wiped anyplace I might have left fingerprints—that window, doorknobs, wherever.”

  “Congratulations, Paulie. You may have wiped away the killer’s prints.”

  Paulie’s hands were clinging to the dumbbells as though he believed they had the power to restore some stability to his life. He knew that Cassie Brennan had been the best thing that was ever likely to happen to him, and he was just beginning to come to terms with his loss. He looked shattered.

  I left a minute or two later. I would have liked to stay for a while and keep him company, but I had business elsewhere.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  PROPELLED BY WHAT Paulie had told me, I went home and for the second time that week laid out the sketch I drew for Chuck Scully on the back of a wall calendar a few days after the murder. Another hard look confirmed what memory had told me, and I rolled the sketch into a tube and slipped a rubber band over it.

  After that I spent a good ten minutes looking still again for the ammo for my Smith & Wesson five-shot, with no more luck than I’d had before. I ended up putting the piece back where I kept it hidden. I wasn’t about to violate for a second time that day the basic rule about carrying a weapon: don’t, unless you’re prepared to use it.

  I called the police station and the duty officer answered. Helen, who usually handled the switchboard, was off on Sundays. So, it turned out, was the chief; at least, he wasn’t in today. I asked if he could be reached.

  “The wife’s taken him to church,” the sergeant said. “I don’t like to page him there, it pisses the priest. Mass should be over in a few minutes. I’ll try him in half an hour. They’ll be on their way to his sister-in-law’s in Riverhead.”

  I gave him a message for Scully and I carried the rolled-up sketch out to the Chevy and took off.

  * * *

  AT THE GREGG place I parked at the curb behind Harry’s heap. Harry was sitting in the middle of his disorderly front yard on an Adirondack chair with a missing arm. He was wearing a faded checked shirt and frayed jeans and he was untangling a spool of fishing line, a Sunday chore he obviously preferred to cleaning the yard.

  He didn’t glance up until I had walked to within a yard of him. “Hold this,” he said by way of greeting.

  I shifted the rolled-up sketch to my left hand and took the section of line he held out to me in the other. He was so concentrated on the knot he was undoing that I kept my mouth shut until he’d licked it. Then I said, “How many man-hours do you figure you put in per bluefish caught?”

  “I never figured.”

  “Because on my list of the ten tastiest fish I’d rank the bluefish number fourteen.”

  “It’s better when it’s smoked,” he said. He had found another, less challenging knot, and was picking at it. “Anyways, I’m in it for the sport, not the taste. I can tell you’re no fisherman.”

  “Nope.” I let it go at that.

  He finished his knot and glanced at the tube of paper in my left hand. “You got something there for me?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Okay if we go in the house?”

  “You can give it to me here.”

  “I think it would be better if we went in the house.”

  He thought about that. “Maybe you’re right.” He got up and placed the fishing line on the chair’s good arm. “I’m in no hurry for this. It’s a backup.”

  Neither of us said anything as we picked our way across the junk-strewn yard and up onto the porch. As he opened the door he said, “It’s kind of messy inside.”


  I feigned surprise. “Is it? That won’t bother me.”

  The kitchen was to one side of a narrow entrance hall. He steered me the other way, to a corner front room that should have been bright with sunlight but was dimmed down by musty drapes that tinted the room a dull crimson. The two walls that were without windows each sported a large fish that had been mounted too many years ago. Open French doors led to an adjoining back parlor that looked even darker.

  The unifying theme of the furniture here was shabby genteel, heavy on the shabby. The beer cans of the last three days hadn’t been collected, and the ashtrays were spilling the butts of the last six. The place looked like a college fraternity house the morning after a pledge party—anyway, like the one at Columbia where I once sorted out the aftermath of a fight.

  Gregg waved me to a stuffed chair, but I chose to sit on the expiring couch; I needed the coffee table that fronted it. I put the tube of paper on the cigarette-scarred table. Gregg got the idea. He came around and sat down next to me, his hands on his knees.

  “So what is it you got there?” he said. He didn’t seem that eager to find out.

  I slipped the rubber band off the tube and laid it out flat, with an ashtray holding down each side. I said, “Recognize this picture?”

  “Could be me,” he said slowly, and then, “yeah, that’s me. That’s good. You did that?”

  I nodded.

  “How come? You looking to sell it, or what?”

  “Not right at the moment. I drew it because I’d told Chuck Scully that I’d seen a man on the beach a couple of hours before Cassie Brennan was murdered and I thought maybe Chuck could identify him.”

  “That was me you saw.”

  “Right. Chuck and I were wondering if Sharanov had slept in his house that night. Someone passing the house early in the morning would have seen a car out front. And you did.”

  “On my way back from fishing. The tow truck that was pulling away. So what? That was way before the girl was killed.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “I read the papers. They said the girl was killed after nine o’clock.”

  “They were wrong. By the time the police brought in the medical examiner from a fishing trip, he couldn’t pin it down any closer than a two- or three-hour span. The police said “after nine” because nine was when the girl was supposed to come in to work. Why would she come in earlier? She had to stay till two o’clock anyway. But it turns out she was there earlier. She’d been there all night.”

  “That a fact?” His hands hadn’t moved from his knees; he was rock steady. “I see. You think whoever was leaving in that tow truck could have done her. Sorry, I wasn’t close enough to see who that was. I already told you it was a Huggins truck. Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “Thanks, Harry, we found who was in the truck. He has an alibi.” The sketch had begun to curl at the edges and I put my hands on it to flatten it. I said, “Does anything in this drawing strike you as peculiar?”

  He looked at me, not sure what I was getting at, and then at the drawing. “Is it my face?” He was genuinely puzzled. “Is my chin as long as that?”

  “Not really,” I assured him. “I exaggerated it. Why don’t you take a look at how you’re dressed?”

  His eyes narrowed. He was examining the sketch stroke by stroke, but he said nothing.

  “It’s the way I remembered you,” I said. “When we met on the beach that morning.”

  “Okay. So?” If he got it, he wasn’t letting on.

  I said, “The boots with the pants tucked in? The hat? The T-shirt? Your rod in one hand, the creel hanging from your shoulder?”

  “What is this, some kind of fucking game?” He hadn’t raised his voice. “You got something to say, say it.”

  “Harry, it was seven o’clock in the morning, with a stiff breeze off the water. I was wearing a shirt and windbreaker. And you were going surf casting in a cotton T-shirt?”

  “Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. Who the hell remembers?”

  “I do. That’s how you were dressed. But I don’t think you left your house that way.”

  I waited for a reaction, but I didn’t get one. He just sat there, hands on knees, eyes on the sketch.

  I said, “I think when you set out for the beach you were wearing a sweater or a windbreaker, something over that T-shirt. By the time I saw you it was probably stuffed in your creel. I doubt it left much room for fish.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  I said, “You weren’t dressed for the beach any longer but you couldn’t go home. Because some neighbor might wonder why you came back so soon, why you weren’t following your usual routine. So you had to push on down the beach in your T-shirt and spend an hour or more in the surf pretending to fish. How’d that feel, Harry—wave after wave rolling up your legs and whispering God knows what?”

  “That’s the biggest load of bullshit I ever heard in my life. I go fishing wearing any damn thing I please.”

  “Sure you do. And you did that day. So why don’t you ask me, Harry?”

  “Ask you what?”

  “How come I think you had a jacket, a sweater, whatever, in that creel?”

  He wasn’t quite dumb enough to ask, so I volunteered. “When you cut her throat, you cut an artery, maybe both. The blood was jet-propelled. It couldn’t miss you. Not totally.”

  He didn’t shout but his voice grew strong with indignation. “You’re crazy. I didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. Could I be wrong? “I think you did. I think you’re a sneak thief. Your basement is probably loaded with those bicycles that are missing all over town. The Sharanov house was a target of opportunity. This was the first time you’d walked by it out of season and seen a window open. Before seven o’clock on a Friday morning. You figured the owner forgot to lock it when he left for the city on Sunday. An open window at ground level, no climbing required. Practically a gift.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Over and in you went without a moment’s hesitation, except maybe to put on your fishing gloves. And then what? The girl came in from the hall, or maybe the bathroom where she’d just gotten dressed to start work, and she caught you flatfooted, up to no good. She may have thought you’d been watching her get dressed. Maybe she thought you’d been spying for hours. She wouldn’t have liked that. Harry, she’d have hated that. I’ll bet she screamed. And kept screaming. And you stopped her screams with your knife.”

  Almost quietly, he said, “That didn’t happen. It couldn’t. I read in the paper she was killed with a bread knife.”

  “The murder weapon had a jagged edge. So does a fisherman’s knife.”

  “So what?”

  “If the police had considered that a fisherman’s knife might be the murder weapon you could have popped into their heads. But you shortstopped that speculation by lifting a bread knife from the Sharanov kitchen on your way out the front door. I wish you hadn’t dumped that knife at my place, Harry, but all in all I give you a lot of credit for the knife.”

  “Except it wasn’t me. If Chuck Scully thinks he can lay this murder in my lap because I’m a little bit of a loner in this town, uh-uh, it’s no go.”

  “I’ve got it all wrong?”

  “Damn right you do. Everything you said is just talk. That’s all it is. Talk and more talk.”

  “That’s true. It’s just talk until it’s supported by hard evidence. The police will ask you to show them your creel. If they find so much as a trace of Cassie Brennan’s blood on it you’re in deep shit. No matter how well you think you cleaned that creel, her blood will have soaked into the wicker.”

  “If that’s what they’re after, I’m in the clear,” he said and jumped to his feet. “There’s no blood on that creel, not even fish blood. I’ll show you. Take it outside, look it over in the daylight.”

  Before I could stop him he had charged angrily into the adjoining back room.

  I co
uldn’t possibly be that wrong. And still …

  I called after him, “Harry, you’re wasting your time. It’s not up to me. Chuck Scully will send that creel to the county crime lab.”

  By then an alarm had gone off in my head. How could I have been so dumb? But it was too late. Gregg was back in the doorway, and instead of the creel, I was looking into the black eyes of an ancient double-barreled shotgun he was holding at shoulder level. As calm as he had been before, that’s how agitated he was now.

  “Get up,” he said, and then, “I said get up.”

  I didn’t get up; I wasn’t going to compound my stupidity. I said, “Why don’t you sit down, so the two of us can talk about this.”

  He said, “We’re not going to talk. You’re going to get up.” He groped for a reason. “I want to show you something.”

  His feet were doing a fidgety dance, his cheek was pressed against the gun stock. “We have to go to the cellar.” His voice had grown tight.

  My stomach dropped to my knees. The cellar was bad news; what he wanted to show me down there was the business end of his double load.

  I said, “Harry, don’t make it worse for yourself. They’re not going to throw the book at you. You didn’t plan to kill the girl.” Even if he hadn’t, it was a felony murder, but maybe he didn’t know that. I said, “Don’t pile on more charges.”

  I doubt he heard me. He was in a state, his mouth twitching, his shoulders working.

  He said, “All I went looking for was loose cash. That’s all I wanted, you understand?” He was looking to make sure I did understand. “The money weekend people leave around when they go home. I never would have climbed through that window if I thought she was there. If I’d seen her first I’d have turned around and dived back out that window. I was never going to touch her.”

  “The girl wasn’t raped, Harry. We know that. And I know you wouldn’t do anything along those lines.”

  “Damn right,” he said.

  He was in a state, but he felt compelled to unburden himself, maybe to justify himself. He moved his cheek off the gun but he didn’t lower it. “She was coming out of the bathroom pulling on her shirt and she stopped dead when she saw me. She stared and her eyes bugged out. And I knew it then. That she knew.”