Artist's Proof Read Free

the floor. My right ankle had been broken years earlier in a foolish jump from a fire escape while I was on a stakeout that unraveled. During weather changes the ankle still reminded me of that day.
    What had been my all-fired hurry to get off that tenement fire escape? My showboating hadn’t resulted in a collar. And what was my hurry now? I had no immediate place to go, and—I consulted my watch—I was expecting my model, Gayle Hennessy, in about ten minutes. Gayle would rescue me.
    So I stretched out on the beam and admired my work. It pulsed with life. It held together. The colors worked. It was good. It was damn good.
    And then, because I had all the time in the world to contemplate it, I did start to see things I could fix. Little things, but there they were. Par for the course. I don’t fiddle with my drawings, but my paint can pile up on canvas like butter cream on a birthday cake. It would happen here.
    The minutes crept by. I had thought maybe Gayle might be early; she wasn’t. I wasn’t in pain up there on that beam, but neither was I having much fun. And the longer I looked at the damn painting—there wasn’t anything else to do—the more things I saw wrong with it. There would be damage control tomorrow. Severe damage control. Working large, really large, carried penalties.
    The phone rang. My outgoing message is brief, some say abrupt. Preferable to cute. “Sid Shale here. Please leave your name and number, the purpose of your call, and the time. Thank you.” I figure if I keep it short, they’ll keep it short.
    I knew the voice before he said his name: Chuck Scully, a likeable youngster who was acting chief of the small village police force. “Hello…? Lieutenant Shale, you there…?”
    I had told him more than once please not to call me lieutenant. “I guess you’re not there,” he went on. “This is Chuck Scully down at the police station? Could you give me a call when you get in? Something’s come up I want to talk to you about. No hurry, it’s not that important. Well, sooner’s better than later. Oh, it’s—let’s see—nine-thirty-two. In the morning. ’Bye,”
    Looking back many hours later, I knew I should have risked a broken ankle to pick up the damn phone.
    My immediate problem was solved a few minutes later. Gayle walked in, radiant as always. She looked around, called, “Sid? You here, or what?”
    I grunted, and she looked up, startled. Then she grinned. “You devil,” she said. “Are we going to work today, or are we going to play hide and seek?”

T WO
    I REFERRED TO Gayle Hennessy as my model. She would have called me her planning consultant. We were on a barter system. When Gayle moved out from the city to open a small shop in the village to sell beachwear of her own design, I helped her lay out the place, paint the interior, and make a sign to go above the door that would attract the summer people without violating the village signage code.
    Gayle and I had crossed paths a few times in New York. The first was many years ago when she was seventeen, a skinny high school junior who had just started picking up change after school by running errands for a small-time north Harlem drug middleman. I was the one who nailed her, only I never made it a collar, never took her in for booking. I did make a point of cuffing her, and the hard reality of cold metal against wristbones scared the daylights out of her. She swore through a gallon of tears that if I let her go she would never get in trouble again.
    I had heard that song often enough before, but—I don’t know why—this was the first time I believed it; certainly the first time I acted on it. Maybe in part because she wasn’t a user, mostly because she seemed smart enough to be able to take hold of her life.
    She lived with a grandmother who obviously couldn’t handle her, but she had an aunt in