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anything,” she said. “Anything at all.”
    Authorized was too big a word for everyday use in a nine-man police force; something was definitely up. I said, “Thank you, Helen.” And then, as an afterthought, “Do you know what he wanted me for?”
    â€œOh, that. I … He…” She made a decision. “He’d better tell you himself.” A second mystery. Heavy.
    No sooner had I hung up than Gayle charged back into the house, her big eyes even bigger. “Sid,” she gasped, “there’s been a murder. Right up the beach.”
    So that answered question number one. “Where?”
    â€œAbout a quarter of a mile. The big white house? Actually, it’s the next place west. You know those people?”
    â€œName of Sharanov. I’ve never met anyone there, but I’m not surprised. Who got killed?”
    â€œI don’t know. I was driving by and there were two police cars out front. I’ve never seen two police cars together in this town except at Mel’s.” Mel’s Deep Sea was the diner favored by locals. “A cop was posted in the driveway and I asked him what was up. He said someone had been killed inside. That was all he would say, except that Chief Scully was in the house.”
    Chuck Scully was really only acting chief; the chief, a much older man, had been on extended sick leave for over a year. The paperwork on a homicide was going to overwhelm poor Chuck; he was barely up to the challenge of the bicycle thief. I said, “Maybe I’ll take a run over. Just to see what’s going on.”
    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