Artist's Proof (3 page)

Gayle and I left together.

*   *   *

I
LIKED SKETCHING
the Sharanov house, but I found it otherwise to be a rude intrusion on my low-key east end skyline, way over scale in size and cost. It was only two stories high, but an especially tall cathedral ceiling on the ocean side pointed a “screw you” finger at the sky. Of course that was a subjective judgment, but from what I knew about the owner, he was a “screw you” kind of guy.

Mikhael “Misha” Sharanov was a Russian immigrant, one of the earliest settlers in the vast Russian, mostly Jewish community in Brooklyn centered in Brighton Beach. He had come from the Soviet Union in the first wave of emigration the Soviets permitted Jews after decades of hassling them while at the same time denying them the option of leaving the country.

Most of those who came out were a cross section of ground-down Soviet citizens, but the commissars didn't miss a chance to stick it to America. They dipped into the prisons and shipped us a choice assortment of hardened criminals, establishing an MO Fidel Castro gleefully followed in Cuba with the famous boat exodus from Mariel.

The engineers, doctors, musicians, and other professionals among the Russian immigrants mostly struggled for years before they got a toehold here. The criminals went right to work in their chosen field, and many of them flourished. When I first learned Sharanov was my neighbor in Quincacogue I looked him up in confidential police reports.

As a young punk, not much over twenty, he had formed a small gang that shook down Russian merchants in the busy shops under the el in Brighton Beach, a craft he learned by studying Chinese gangs in lower Manhattan and Italian gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront. America proved to be the land of opportunity, and he moved on to fancier stuff—insurance ripoffs, smuggling, and, most profitably, a complicated scam that robbed the federal government of millions in cigarette taxes, his “thank you” for having been given sanctuary here. Several murders were laid at his door but, unfortunately, none
inside
that door; he had been arrested a few times, but no charge had ever stuck.

As he passed forty, he had gone almost mainstream. His designer beach house (too upscale for the neighborhood) was only one sign of his new gentility. The most important was the huge restaurant/nightclub he owned in farthest Brooklyn, the Tundra, the kind of place that otherwise exists only in movies made in the 1930s.

The Tundra was well beyond what was then my bailiwick, Midtown South in Manhattan, but a year or so before I retired I did go there one evening on a tip that a witness who had been dodging me for weeks had made a reservation for that night. When I walked through the door my jaw dropped to my belt.

In a vast space lit by countless fairy lights (this had once been a warehouse, but you'd never know it), waiters and captains in tuxes hovered attentively over the patrons, many hundreds of them, almost every one a Russian, dressed to the nines. Plates of hors d'oeuvres—herrings, meats, dumplings, God knows what—covered the tables in such abundance they had to be piled two and sometimes three high.

The revelers danced to an orchestra of twenty-six musicians, my count. And serious revelers they were, juiced to the scalp. Drinks were by the bottle, and the bottles, all vodka, were being carried off empty by busboys almost as fast as glasses might be in a lesser nightspot. It looked like New Year's Eve, but this was a nothing-special rainy Saturday night in November.

My witness was expected, I was told, but had not yet arrived. While I waited I hoped to get a glimpse of the famous Misha Sharanov—I had seen a surveillance picture of him—but he was nowhere in evidence. The place was in the hands of minions, four or five of whom formed a loose cordon around my partner and myself when we identified ourselves.

They gave us a range of attitudes. Two or three were big, with faces that had been carved, badly, from yams; they glowered and pressed close, but they knew enough not to make physical contact. The others were smaller, more social, actually polite. All were in starched dickeys. The scene was right off a cable TV rerun of a Warner Brothers movie starring a snarling Edward G. Robinson and a dapper George Raft.

When my witness showed, we took him into the cloakroom and scared what we needed out of him. Then I sent him to join his party, and I took one more look around the big room, still hoping to spot Sharanov. No such luck. I was reminded of the unseen menace in horror movies; once it's shown the terror dissipates.

As I turned to leave, one of the politer minions smiled expansively. In an accent you couldn't cut with a chain saw he said, “Enchoy your eef-ning, Lieutenant.”

I said, “I'll do that. And please thank Mr. Sharanov for his hospitality.”

The minion looked as if I had socked him in the nose, and those behind him twitched. He called after me, “What Mr. Sharanov? Dere is no Mr. Sharanov.” In the Soviet Union of old you admitted nothing to the police, not even that you might have taken a bath that day.

A yam head was holding open the door for me, a huge man, antsy for me to leave. I looked up at him and said, “Boris, do you check to make sure that every party in the room has a designated driver?”

He didn't have the least idea what I was talking about, but for a fleeting instant he looked worried. I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and left.

So I never did get a glimpse of Sharanov. Not even as his neighbor at the beach.

*   *   *

G
AYLE DROVE ON
toward the village and her shop, Gayle's Provocativo; preseason, she didn't open until one o'clock. I was right behind her in my aging Chevy pickup, but I peeled off at the long Sharanov driveway.

The front elevation of the aggressively modern Sharanov house was an affront to the eye, with more angles than an origami. It was now partially blocked by the two police cars Gayle had spotted, plus a large maroon Cadillac I had seen parked there before. I recognized the tubby cop on duty out front when I pulled up. He tipped his hat in deference to a former big-city detective.

“Afternoon, Lieutenant.”

“It's Sid, Walter. What's going on?”

He looked up the road before he answered, an unnecessary caution; there wasn't a chance anyone was close enough to eavesdrop, as none of the houses immediately beyond, all strictly summer places, had been opened for the season. When he confirmed that we were alone he ventured, “There's been a murder. How about that? Someone got killed in there.”

“Who?” If someone had to be dead I hoped it was Sharanov or one of his thugs.

The cop leaned his moon face in my open window. “I suppose it's all right to tell you. The girl who cleans up. Housekeeper, maid, whatever you want to call her. How about that?”

That came as a surprise. “Okay if I go in?”

“I guess. The chief's inside. Sure, Chuck'll be glad to see you.”

I climbed out of the cab. “He call for a Crime Scene Unit from County?” I asked.

“Supposed to be one on the way.”

That was a start. I turned toward the house, walked a few yards, then stopped and turned back again at the sound of an approaching vehicle. A tow truck was roaring toward us from the west at a speed the road wasn't prepared for; gravel flew. The truck spun into the driveway and headed for the Cadillac's rear end, seemingly prepared to climb in its roomy trunk. It stopped on a dime, inches away, and a dark, good-looking young guy in coveralls leaped out and started toward the house. His bushy brows were knitted in pain or anger, maybe both.

The tubby cop grabbed him around the waist and held him. It wasn't easy. “No you don't, Paulie.”

Paulie's dark face grew darker. “For Chrissakes, Walter, that's my girl in there.”

The cop's arms were short, but he held on. “There's nothing you can do for her. We even sent her mom away. I got orders not to let anyone in. You wouldn't
want
to go in. You understand?”

“The hell I do,” Paulie exploded. He broke Walter's grip with an elbow to his gut and a sharp chop to a restraining arm with the side of his hand. Then he took a couple of long strides toward the house.

The cop was hurting, and he didn't follow. His contribution to securing the crime scene was to gasp through his pain, “You get the hell back here, Malatesta!”

Paulie Malatesta. I had heard the name somewhere. I stepped in front of him. We were chest to chest, roughly the same height. “Easy, Paulie,” I said. “Didn't you hear the officer?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“A neighbor. Why don't you do what Walter says, Paulie? Go back to work. Better yet, go home.” I figured that a few sentences delivered in a reasonable voice would help steady him. “When the time is right, they'll tell you everything you need to know. I'm sure they know how to find you.” I had read the logo on his truck,
HUGGINS SERVICE STA
.

“Screw you,” Paulie said. He jerked his head toward the Caddy. “That's Sharanov's car. You with him? One of his goons? The creep did it, didn't he? I'll kill him, so help me.” His rage was still building, and it was making him a little crazy. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

When I didn't, he raised both hands to my chest and pushed. Fat Walter was letting me handle this—in deference to my previous rank, I supposed. I gave with the push, dissipating its force. Then I grabbed one of Paulie's outstretched arms with my two and bent it behind him and up. I had done something like this often enough, but not in years. My body responded grudgingly; I was forty-one, Paulie twenty-three or -four. But the move still worked well enough, and I managed to get him down on his knees. Almost by reflex I reached for the cuffs I didn't have.

Paulie gasped, cried “Hey!” and then
“Hey!”
He had acted tough, but he was mostly bluff. I eased up a bit.

Now Walter came lumbering up, breathing hard, his service revolver half out of its holster. “Okay, Paulie, back in your truck. Out of here. Now.”

The fight had drained entirely from the kid. He stumbled to the tow truck, biting his lip, holding back tears. “That bastard. I'll kill him. I'll kill him.”

He suddenly bent down, scooped up a handful of bluestone pebbles from the driveway, and hurled them at the Cadillac. But the action, like the threat, came more from despair than anger, and the pebbles bounced harmlessly off a wheel cover. He climbed into his truck, turned the motor on, and poked his head out the window toward Walter and me.

“She was sixteen years old,”
he called through his tears. The motor roared, and he backed out and drove off as recklessly as he had come.

*   *   *

I
T WAS ONE
of those upside down houses—bedrooms below, common areas upstairs. The living room had been placed on the upper floor to give it a dramatic perch above the ocean and to allow for the cathedral ceiling that reached for the moon. An exterior ramp, curled like a wood shaving, led directly to the main entrance on this second level.

The door was open, and I walked in. From just inside I could hear voices rising from the bedroom floor, but I was alone on this level. I took half a minute to soak in the room.

“For the rich they sing,” my father used to say as he wiped the bird droppings from the windshield of his taxi. And for Misha Sharanov, who was rich enough, the ocean looked bluer, grander, more dramatic through the huge windows of his floor-through postmodern living room than it did through the smaller, salt-crusted windows of my shed. Scully hadn't put up crime scene tape, nor had he posted a cop up here, so he must have assumed the bedroom floor was all that counted for purposes of his investigation. A possibly foolish assumption.

It was a minimalist room—unfussy designer furniture in lacquer finishes and pastel fabrics, with plenty of space between the pieces. Nothing dark or lumpily Russian; Sharanov's taste, or his decorator's, was cutting-edge American. Except for some dirty drinking glasses, crumpled cocktail napkins, and half-filled ashtrays, the room looked in order. In an adjoining open kitchen I glimpsed dirty dishes piled next to a sink. I made sure not to touch anything, and I crossed the bare, hardwood floor on tiptoe.

Like most painters, when I walk into a house the first thing I look at is whatever is on the walls. I used to catch myself doing that when I entered a crime scene as a cop on duty. I don't know why I hadn't done it here. When I did get around to these walls, after about fifteen seconds on the view and the furniture, my eye locked instantly on the single piece hanging there. It startled me.

Because it was mine, an ink drawing, with wash, of Covenant Street in the village. This was the wrong room for it, and it was on the wrong wall, but after the initial surprise it gave me a surge of remembered pleasure, like running into an old friend I thought had gone away forever. And then I had a further reaction—a flash of uneasiness, as though the ground had shifted slightly under me.

I had donated this drawing to the volunteer fire department months before, to be auctioned at their annual fund-raiser. The chief had sent me a grateful note a few weeks ago letting me know that it had been bought, at a nice price, “by a collector who wants to remain anonymous.”

A good drawing. My eye traced its lines, and I was carried back to the bench in front of the ice cream shop where I sat and drew it on a raw fall afternoon and knew almost from the first few lines that it would go well. So this was where it had ended up. As the tubby cop out front might have said, How about that?

An interior ramp substituted for stairs. I took it down to the first floor, where I had heard the voices, and followed a hallway past a closed door with a single length of crime scene tape angled across it, like the seal of approval on a motel toilet seat. Chuck Scully was standing just inside an open doorway farther along. He was closing his cellular phone and his greeting to me was a nervous half-smile. I doubt Scully had ever been to a homicide scene before, and the gravity of the occasion had dampened his usual high spirits. But I could tell he was not unhappy to see me.