Dead In The Hamptons (19 page)

“Thanks.” I mopped my forehead gratefully. “Having fun?”

“Yes!” She’d been dancing too, in between squirreling away information that might be relevant to the murders. But she was still full of beans. Barbara bounces. “You looked like you were doing okay. I don’t suppose you heard anything useful?”

“Nope, I left that to you. Would it be sexist to call those little ladies chicks?”

“Yellow, fluffy, and not a brain among them, huh? I’ll give you a dispensation.”

“Good. They were all only about eighteen, anyway, off to college in the fall. They hadn’t even heard about the murders. They think a paper like the
Dirty Deeds
is fish wrap, and they don’t wrap fish.”

“Not even Oscar?”

“One of them admitted Daddy mentioned he had died. Daddy didn’t shed too many tears. Oscar was the competition.”

“Did she tell you Daddy’s name? Maybe I met him.”

“No, but she pointed him out.” I scanned the room. The band was taking a break. Everybody was talking, eating, or drinking, or all three. Chatter and laughter swelled until it filled my ears. For a moment, it became surreal, like getting stoned and sitting on the beach listening to the breakers crash. “There.”

“The guy with the bright gold hair like Robert Redford? Yes, Jeff introduced me.”

“Short like Redford too. Not as pretty, though.” The man she indicated had a puffy red face and a bulbous nose. As we watched, he lifted a tall glass of amber liquid— no plastic cups at this fiesta— and poured it down his throat in a smooth stream. I could do that. I just didn’t any more.

“Your lips are moving,” Barbara said. “Say the Serenity Prayer and move on.”

“Yes, dear. What’s his name?”

“Morton Day. He said he was celebrating. He just got the contract for a huge new golf course. There must be a dozen golf courses in the Hamptons. Why do they need another one?” She answered her own question. “For the people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the other ones, like the synagogues in the shaggy dog story about the Jewish shipwreck survivors on the desert island— though come to think of it, they couldn’t do it if it really was a desert island, that means no water, doesn’t it?”

Barbara digresses almost as often as she breathes.

“You’re drifting.”

“Yes, dear.” She grinned at me. “But I do have a point. Oh, and for the people who the other people wouldn’t be caught dead letting into the golf courses— country clubs, I guess you’d call them— they’re already in. I always think it’s so silly to say country clubs, don’t you, when what’s all around them is already country?”

“Morton Day,” I reminded her.

“Sorry. He was celebrating. When Jeff introduced us, he couldn’t shake hands because he had a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in one hand and a flute in the other. And now he’s moved on to whiskey. I don’t suppose you or Jimmy could twelve-step him?”

“The program is for those who want it, not for those who need it,” Jimmy said as he came up behind us. “Attraction, not promotion.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I know.” Barbara tucked her arm through his, jostling the glass of club soda with lime that he held. “Hi, I’m codependent, and ooh, how I itch to fix that guy.”

“What was he celebrating?” Jimmy asked.

“The deal to build the new golf course. He said the competition had dropped out. I bet he meant Oscar. He didn’t exactly gloat— that would have looked bad, considering— but he sounded kind of smug. You know, just a few wisps of canary feather hanging from his lip.”

“I talked to a stockbroker who sides with the environmentalists,” Jimmy said. “It sounded like he’s managed to make a bundle on socially responsible stocks. He told me all about what a threat new golf courses are to the Long Island water supply.”

“The single aquifer— I remember,” Barbara said. “Somebody asked Morton Day if he’d keep the whole golf course green.”

“Right,” Jimmy said. “Franchetti— my stockbroker— told me if they can’t keep it out, they try to regulate it, make them leave a certain percentage of it natural. They can do that by planting wild grasses and letting them turn brown in the summer rather than all that emerald stuff that has to be watered constantly.”

“I wonder if Clea ever interviewed Franchetti,” I said. “He would have been a terrific source for her.”

“I’ll look,” Jimmy said. “This was an ongoing crusade for her, from what we’ve heard.”

“I can ask Jeff, too,” Barbara said. “He can find stuff in the files of the
Dirty Deeds
and tell me how to check the other local papers, if not everything’s online. But I bet any really dirty deeds got buried.”

“A developer who’d screw the planet wouldn’t blink at suing a newspaper for libel,” I said. “But to win, he’d have to make sure they couldn’t prove what they said about him was true.”

“So one, he’d have to get rid of anyone who had proof,” Jimmy said. “Two, he’d have to make sure nobody who might be more cooperative about the environmental agenda outbid him. And three, he’d have to lobby or bribe his way to making sure things went the way he wanted. Not every rich guy out here is like Franchetti. If they golf, they want the greens green.”

“And screw the planet,” I said.

“I can picture Morton Day in that scenario,” Barbara said. “When they asked him about cutting back on the green, he said, ‘That will depend on the politicians, won’t it?’ And I could swear I smelled canary on his breath.”

Barbara stood on one foot in the dark hallway, waiting to see if the creaking floorboard woke anybody up. Wobbling, she reached behind her to steady herself on the door handle of the room where Jimmy lay sleeping. The bolt snicked shut behind her. She had left the door cracked open to avoid making that very sound. Lowering her bare foot gingerly to the floor, she waited another minute. Jimmy’s even snores were muffled by the closed door and the pillow he clutched to his head. In his dreams, she thought, it was probably a sandbag on a Civil War battlefield. No sound came from the other rooms. One cautious step at a time, she edged toward her objective: Phil’s room down the hall.

Her fingers curled around a sliver of plastic: the LED light from her keychain, the only light she dared carry. She hoped she wouldn’t need it to search Phil’s room. With luck, his digital clock would provide enough ambient light for her to find the notebook. Bruce had only seen it for a minute, but he had described it: square, about a half inch thick, with a stained and faded cloth binding. If she felt it, she’d know what it was. That was how he’d found it in the first place.

Was she crazy to search Phil’s room again? She and Bruce had looked high and low. The notebook hadn’t been there— or anywhere else in the house. Obviously he’d taken it away. But she’d had a brainstorm. She couldn’t get out of her mind that Phil might have brought the notebook back once he knew everybody had given up on finding it. Since they’d hunted for the notebook, Oscar had been killed. What if his death made what Clea had written mean something to Phil that it hadn’t before? Suppose he wanted to make trouble for someone? It would fit his character. Maybe before Oscar’s murder, all Phil had meant to do was keep the notebook hidden. She didn’t think he would have destroyed it. Having it gave him power, and Barbara was sure that Phil liked having power. But now, what if he’d brought the notebook back to threaten somebody with? She knew it was just a theory, but it had a convincing ring. What if the notebook was sitting in plain sight in Phil’s room, and the only reason she didn’t get it into her own hands was that she didn’t go and look? She couldn’t take the chance.

She groped for the edge of Phil’s door and found it, as she had hoped, not shut tight but emitting a sliver of greenish blinking light. She eased the door farther open, slipped through, and pulled it almost shut, praying the hinges wouldn’t squeak. They didn’t. A snatch of dinner conversation came back to her: Jimmy, Phil, and Lewis debating the merits of WD-40 versus Vaseline. Men! Only Bruce had abstained. She smiled to herself, wondering at what stage of sobriety, if ever, a guy like Bruce developed handyman skills. In this case, Phil’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies worked to her advantage. He must have oiled the door hinges to prove his point.

She’d forgotten to check the time before she’d left her room. She couldn’t stay too long. A glance at the digital clock showed her it wouldn’t help her. The glowing green digits read 12:00, blinking on and off to indicate that some time during the night there had been a momentary power outage. The clock would need to be reset before it would tell time again. The flickering light fell on a mound of covers, with Phil presumably asleep beneath them. Didn’t people hide things under the mattress? Surely he would wake if she ran her hand along the box spring. She and Bruce had done that before with no success. Maybe beneath the mattress was where he wouldn’t hide the notebook, because everyone knew to look there first. If she had to, she would. But she would start somewhere else.

She looked around the room. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light. She slipped the little flashlight into the pocket of her robe, leaving both hands free. Phil really was a neat freak. His shoes lay lined up in an orderly row at the foot of the dresser: expensive running shoes, sandals, rubber-soled mesh water shoes, Docksiders, and polished dark lace-up dress shoes that he must have worn out from the city. Jimmy, with prodding, stuffed his socks into his shoes. Bruce crumpled his and threw them on the floor. Phil’s were not in sight, but a bulging laundry bag hung from the knob of the closet door. Might he have stuffed the notebook in with the laundry? At least it would make no noise if she dug her arm in and felt around for it.

First things first, as they said in the program. On the purloined letter principle, she scanned the visible surfaces: the window sill, the empty chair— the one in her room was piled high with half-worn clothes, both hers and Jimmy’s— the dresser top. Phil’s wallet, watch, and keys were arranged with finicky neatness. He’d even pooled his loose change in a giant clam shell. No notebook. How about the closet? Plenty of hiding places there: tossed casually to the floor in the dark depths at the back or tucked into the pocket of a shirt or pair of pants on a hanger. He must have a suitcase or at least some kind of travel bag in there. If so, she’d already failed. No way could she lift down a suitcase and unzip it without waking him. Searching the dresser drawers would be almost as difficult, unless he’d oiled them too.
Maybe this had been a bad idea
, she thought, not for the first time.

But she was here, and she had to give it a shot.

The easiest place to start, she decided, was with the shoes. She didn’t have to move them. In fact, she’d better not. She’d simply slip her hand inside each one— except the sandals, which obviously concealed nothing. No flip-flops, she observed. Too plebeian for Phil with his red Lexus. No bedroom slippers either. That surprised her. She wouldn’t have expected him to allow a grain of sand to touch the soles of his feet, much less a germ-laden dust bunny. She crouched, maintaining her balance by anchoring the fingertips of her left hand while her right crept out and worked its way inside the right-hand dress shoe. Nothing. The notebook might not even fit. Bruce had said it was small, but how small? Phil sure was a silent sleeper. He hadn’t stirred or expelled an audible breath.

Now the left. She caught her breath on a near gasp as her fingertips touched an obstruction. It had to be the notebook! It was wedged tight inside the shoe. She couldn’t bunch her hand enough to wiggle her thumb under it and get a good grip to pull it out. She’d have to scissor it between her index and middle fingers and pluck it out like a hair in a pair of tweezers. She’d have to be careful and work it out little by little. If the notebook remained stuck, pulling it too hard might flip the whole shoe over and send it flying across the room. No way Phil could sleep through the kind of clatter that would make.

She held her breath as she tugged at the notebook, gradually working her fingers deeper into the shoe and the notebook farther down past her knuckles until she had a firm two-finger grip on it. One more jerk and it came free. She shifted her grip, finally able to use her thumb, and twisted it out without scraping or moving the shoe. She had it!

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She whirled, still on her knees, and found herself crouching at Phil’s feet, which were clad in leather scuffs. No wonder there’d been no noise from the bed or slippers in the lineup. Some Nancy Drew she was!

“Get up!” He clamped a viselike hand around her wrist and hauled her to her feet. “Bitch! I ought to slap your face! Give me that!” He plucked the notebook from her hand.

Shaking with fear and humiliation, Barbara couldn’t find a word to say. Her arms tingled, and her knees went loose and weak. Phil slipped the notebook into his pocket without letting go her wrist. He too wore a robe. He must have been in the upstairs bathroom off the kitchen when she came down the hall. And then she had been too absorbed to hear the sound of flushing or his footsteps on the stairs. He grabbed her other wrist and shook her hard. Her head swam. Her teeth clattered against one another. It felt as if her very bones rattled.

“Listen to me, you nosy little cunt! You stay out of my business, do you hear? Do you?” He shook her harder. “Answer me!”

“Yes,” she gasped. Should she scream? If she did, Jimmy and Bruce and probably all the rest of them would come running, and there would be the most godawful scene. She hated scenes. She might be codependent, but she didn’t have a death wish. If he hit her, she would scream. “Let me go!”

He released her wrists in an abrupt motion that flung her away from him. She fell back against the dresser. Its rim dug into her back. He glowered at her, and she shrank away from him. He raised a menacing hand. She tucked in her jaw and shielded her face with her forearm. She needed a weapon. His keys! She groped behind her on the dresser.

“If you touch me, I’ll scream the house down,” she panted.

“Like hell you will,” he jeered.

“I will too!” She took a deep breath and opened her mouth as his hand hovered above her head. It looked enormous. His face was set with fury, his neck cords bunched.