Artist's Proof by Gordon Cotler Page A

Scully, “What the hell business did he have here anyway?”
    On the way up the ramp I could hear Sharanov on the phone in the guest bedroom, his high-performance engine of a voice idling smoothly, but ready to be gunned if that was called for. I stopped to listen.
    â€œYes, yes, terrible, terrible…” He betrayed no emotion. “Kitty, I am not dismissing it, I am giving you the facts.… What does this have to do with me? Nothing. Not one damn thing … You are not listening to me.… Kitty, if you don’t shut your mouth I will have it shut for you so that it never opens again.” He had dropped his voice for the last sentence but it was spoken with no more revs per minute than the others.
    One of the CSU people above began waving for me to keep moving. Reluctantly, I continued on up the ramp.
    *   *   *
    O UT ON THE driveway a photographer was taking general shots of the house and grounds. There were now three vehicles I hadn’t seen before, but among them no van from the coroner’s department. I asked Walter, the cop on duty, if a medical examiner had gone in the house.
    â€œNope. They told me the doctor on duty is out on a case, and they’re still looking for his backup.”
    Unlike the county people, Walter had no interest in shooing me off the property, and I wandered around to the side of the house and then out to the back—not after anything in particular, just not ready to leave. I was finding that I couldn’t walk away from this crime scene as I had from so many others. I hadn’t realized how strong my connection was to the girl in that bedroom lying in a pool of her blood; beyond help, she still hadn’t given me permission to leave.
    I walked down to the ocean’s edge and looked out at the pulsing waves of the advancing tide. There was reassurance in their unfailing rhythm. The universe rolled on; Cassie Brennan, barely a woman, had been folded into it. Our loss, not hers.
    After a few brooding moments I felt the water lapping at my sneakers. The tide had sneaked up on me. The mood broken, I backed off and turned to face that blindingly white, excessively whimsical house. Only this morning I had included this facade in a beachscape sketch—by my calculation, some two hours before Cassie’s throat was cut. I would never again look at this house without thinking of her. It was all wrong, insultingly so, for the scene of her murder.
    Something was nagging at me. I stared at the house. Something was different. Had I been less than true to it in that drawing? And then I decided after all that I hadn’t; it seemed different now only because I had drawn it from far down the beach, and in the totally different light of early morning. Nothing more than that.
    My peripheral vision picked up someone approaching from the west along the water’s edge. Paulie Malatesta again. Walter had chased him away from the house, but the beach was open to everyone; he must have parked in a driveway somewhere up the road. He came closer but kept a wary distance between us.
    â€œYou’re the guy lives in that shack down the beach,” he decided. “The one painted different colors.” His tone was friendly; he seemed to have forgiven our wrestling match.
    â€œHow did you know?”
    â€œI’ve passed it. Weird-looking. Anyway, you’re a painter, right? She told me.”
    â€œCassie?”
    He swallowed hard and nodded; if he said the name he was going to break down. “She was working for you a couple of hours a week as a model when I met her.”
    That was where I’d heard the name. Malatesta; it sticks with you. He came up during, I remembered now, my next to last session with Cassie. She was her usual chatty self. She’d met this guy in Mel’s, where she bused early breakfast several days a week. He was kind of new in town, good-looking, older. (This was older?) In answer to my question