Dead In The Hamptons (20 page)

She braced her arm and scrambled for the keys.

“Oh, fuck it! Get the hell out of here!” Instead of landing on her face, his open palm slammed down on the dresser. She flinched and ducked as his arm thrust past her ear and shoulder. He caught the keys before they fell. “You stay out of my way from now on! And if you try to set those two little dogs of yours on me, you’ll be sorry. You’ll all be sorry!”

He pushed her out of the way and jerked the top drawer open. As she stood stunned and trembling, he snatched up a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. He banged open the closet door, yanked a pair of jeans from a hanger, and threw them on the bed.

“I said get out!” He shoved her toward the door. “And keep your mouth shut, or else! Scram!”

Barbara fled.

She couldn’t go right back and climb into bed next to Jimmy. Tottering as if the confrontation had aged her by twenty years, she pulled herself up the stairs and made her way onto the deck. In the dark of the moon, the sky blazed with stars: the dippers, the couple of other constellations she could recognize, the wide ribbon of the Milky Way, big steady Venus down near the horizon, and the meandering pricks of light that she knew were satellites. She heard a scuffle, squeak of fear, and hoot of triumph off in the brush. An owl pouncing on a chipmunk or young rabbit, she guessed. Predator and prey, like Phil and her. She had cut a sorry figure in there. She hated the loss of her dignity even more than not getting the notebook. She had been terrified. She could talk the talk of a militant feminist, but long exposure to kind Jimmy and easygoing Bruce left her ill prepared for encounters with violent men.

She heard the slam of a screen door, footsteps crunching on the walk, and the heavier slam of a car door. Phil! A motor revved. She saw the headlights of the Lexus come on. The car made a sloppy K-turn, spewing gravel, and raced down the drive. Brakes squealed as the car racketed onto the road. Gone! And the notebook with him, no doubt. He wouldn’t leave it around the house for someone else to find. Barbara drew a deep, unsteady breath.

What if Phil had attacked her? He’d been on the brink of losing control. She’d seen him go off that time he fought with Ted. She couldn’t tell herself he wouldn’t really hit her. That was probably why she’d showed what Jimmy would no doubt call a grain of sense for once and not mouthed off at him the way she usually did when provoked. Phil was scary. He wouldn’t have felt guilty if he had beaten her up, even if it had brought the whole household down on him. Why hadn’t he hit her?

For one thing, he didn’t want to call attention to the notebook. Somebody else might try to take it away. Or somebody might tell the police about it. What had Clea written? Something that incriminated Phil? Information that gave him power over someone else? Why hadn’t he destroyed it? And why had he driven away? It was the middle of the night. Where would he go? Maybe he simply wanted to get the notebook out of the house— and make sure he wasn’t around if she did wake Jimmy and Bruce up and tell them he’d attacked her. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t. His threats hadn’t sounded too specific. She doubted he had a plan for what he’d do if they confronted him, tonight or in the morning. Maybe he’d just drive around and cool down. Or drive to the beach to think. Nice people didn’t have a monopoly on the soothing power of the ocean.

Come to think of it, why hadn’t anybody woken up? The walls of the house were thin. You’d think someone would have come running in. The two of them had banged around and yelled at each other for quite some time. Or had they? What had they actually said? Thinking back, Barbara realized she hadn’t said one word above a gasp. She’d been too completely taken off guard and then too frightened. As for Phil, even while he cursed and bullied her, he must have cared enough about whatever secrets the notebook held to keep his rage in check. They had conducted the whole furious conversation in a whisper.

I woke up to pounding on the door. I squinted past the crusts on my eyes and ran a hand over the bristles on my face. They felt stiff enough to leave scrape marks. An alarmed babble floated down the stairs. Everyone else was up— awake and in the second-floor living room— probably just coming to. That left me closest to the door. The pounding sounded urgent.

“Hold your horses,” I grumbled as I stumbled down the hall. My brain was still on automatic.
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst.
I’d played the king in
Macbeth
in college, my one foray into acting. I’d enjoyed hanging out during rehearsals to see how everybody took my death, so a lot of the lines had stuck with me.

Everybody said you could leave your door unlocked out here. But some of us, notably Jimmy and I, were such city boys that we couldn’t. I slid back the latch and let it dangle from the chain. Wiznewski and Butler pushed their way in. I barely had time to step back as the door swung past my nose. The detectives looked angry and bigger than normal. I knew I hadn’t done anything. But thanks to all those years of drinking, my guilty conscience was on speed dial.

Behind me, the gang came pounding down the stairs. It sounded like they all were barefoot but agitated enough to shake the steps anyway. I kept my eyes fixed on the police, so I didn’t know if anyone was missing.

Wiznewski thrust his jaw forward, drew down the corners of his mouth, and pushed his pursed lips out and in again. His gaze bored into mine and moved past me to the gang clogging the stairwell.

“There’s been another fatality.”

The twittering behind me consisted mostly of, “Who? Who?” They sounded like a nest full of owls. But one sharp cry rose above the chorus.

“What, in our house?”

That was downright weird. I wondered which of the women, like me, had
Macbeth
on her internal hard drive. As they herded us up the stairs, I remembered that the line was Lady Macbeth’s. It was the wrong thing to say on first hearing Duncan had been killed. And she said the wrong thing because she was guilty. She already knew.

Once he’d rounded us up, Wiznewski didn’t screw around.

“Your housemate, Philip Kersh,” he said, “was the victim of a hit-and-run collision this morning. He’s dead. We’re treating it as a homicide, and you can consider this house a crime scene.”

“Couldn’t it have been an accident?” Barbara blurted. She shook off Jimmy’s restraining hand on her shoulder. “A coincidence.”

Wiznewski looked grim enough to grind enamel off his teeth.

“At this point, we’re not treating a hangnail in this house as a coincidence.”

Cindy squeezed in beside me as he herded us into the living room. I perched on one corner of the couch, and she sat on the floor with her knees drawn up. I could feel the warmth of her side, upper arm, and shoulder all up the length of my leg.

“Mr. Blaney, you’re first,” Wiznewski said. Lewis jumped to attention. If this killer kept going, I thought, we’d learn everybody’s last name. None of us would be anonymous.

“Butler,” he snapped. “Kersh’s room.” They knew where that was— same as Clea’s.

“We’ll talk—” He looked around at the open-plan space as if he hadn’t seen it before. Everybody looked out the window. It was a dismal day. It was raining so hard that I could see silver raindrops bouncing off the sodden deck furniture like the school of mackerel we’d seen leaping in the bay one day.

Barbara leaned over and whispered in Jimmy’s ear. He gave one of his big, gusty ACOA sighs and raised his hand. Wiznewski’s heavy eyebrows went down for frown, then up for interrogative.

“What, Mr. Cullen?”

“Your best bet is the little porch in back where I keep my computer.” He sighed again. “I suppose I can’t bring it out with me.”

“Not till we examine it.” Wiznewski turned to a uniformed officer who had followed the detectives in and started to unroll the yellow crime scene tape. “Perotsky, you do Kersh’s room. Butler, check out this porch he’s talking about. Set it up for interviews. See what’s on the computer.”

Jimmy looked agonized.

“Can’t I just go in and show her? I make my living on it.”

Wiznewski thought about it.

“Okay, you can go in and give her any verbal help you need to,” he said grudgingly. “You don’t touch, is that clear? Not the computer, not the screen, nothing.”

Jimmy squawked.

“Is it clear, Mr. Cullen?”

“Yes, sir.”

I looked from Jimmy to Barbara. I expected to see steam wafting out of her ears. But she was remarkably subdued this morning.

“You said it was a hit and run,” I said.

“It was,” Officer Perotsky said. “He was tossed on the side of the highway like roadkill.”

Wiznewski bared his teeth and growled. Perotsky scooted out of the room, trailing yellow tape.

Wiznewski pretended the little Keystone Kops moment hadn’t happened.

“We’ll examine all your cars, and we’ll want to see everybody’s driver’s license.”

He looked at our motley dishabille. Not a soul had shoes or pockets, much less a wallet or a handbag. “An officer will escort you one by one to collect them when we’re ready.”

Oh, shit. I had been concerned on Jimmy’s behalf and wondering what had gotten into Barbara. Three bodies in a row had knocked her for a loop. At least she hadn’t found this one. I hadn’t liked Phil enough to be unduly troubled he was gone. I wasn’t scared they’d pick me as prime suspect. If they linked this death with Oscar’s, they’d question everyone over in the other house. Someone would tell them about Phil’s fight with Ted. I didn’t even own a car. But here came Wiznewski’s curve ball. I had been relief-driving Jimmy and Barbara’s Toyota whenever they needed me to for about a year now. I hadn’t gotten into any trouble on the road. I’d simply omitted telling them I’d lost my license years ago. I didn’t have one.

I held out for three days. By that time, I felt too depressed to fend off Barbara’s solicitous attempts to find out what was wrong. She wouldn’t leave it alone but followed me around pressing emotional chicken soup on me.

When I told them, Barbara screeched, “How could you do that?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I did a bad thing. Look, both of you, I’m sorry I lied to you.”

“I’m disappointed,” Jimmy said.

I hate disappointing Jimmy.

“If you need a brush-up for your road test, I’ll be glad to help,” he said. “I’ll pay for lessons or take you out myself.”

Even worse. I felt like a worm. I’d fucked up plenty in the many years between when Jimmy put the bottle down and when I ended up in detox on the Bowery. Since I got sober, I had tried to convey to them that I knew I’d been an asshole. I don’t mean they stood over me waiting for me to cop to my shortcomings. But they had thought I’d changed my behavior. It was never too early in recovery to stop breaking laws.

The worst part was that by driving their car without a license, I’d put them at risk. If a cop had stopped me, what would they have said? That they didn’t know me and I’d just hijacked the car? Jimmy would have tried to take responsibility. I didn’t know what the law did to someone who let an unlicensed driver drive his car. But what I’d done sure made it look like I didn’t care. When I was drinking, I did stuff I couldn’t help. I drank too much because I had a disease. A disorder. A compulsion. I acted stupid and crazy because that’s what alcohol does to your brain chemistry. I ran away from relationships and my own feelings. But I was sober now. And I had gone on driving because it was convenient. I wanted what I wanted. I hadn’t told a soul, either, because then I would have had to stop.

It was a little easier to be around Cindy. She showed no inclination to coddle me and didn’t say a word about my mood. Also, she didn’t know. But it was hard to keep up the act of devil-may-care Romeo that I was afraid to drop for fear the real me would turn her off. Part of me was disgusted with myself for finding it so hard to be genuine. What kind of a relationship would we have if I couldn’t stop faking it? All in all, Bruce was not my favorite person right now. Meanwhile, the desire to have a real relationship with Cindy, not just get her into bed, kept getting stronger. Taking it slow was an experience that kept surprising me. And it would serve me right if it turned out she was a lesbian all along.

I did manage to notice that my internal angst was not the most important thing going on in Dedhampton. Over the next week or two, the atmosphere in the house got more and more tense. Oscar’s place was no better, though Corky tried to maintain the anything-goes ambience. Everybody escaped to the city periodically. But nobody who’d paid for a house in the Hamptons wanted their investment to go to waste. My roomie Stewie came out to Dedhampton every weekend but took his couple of weeks’ vacation in Fire Island. Cindy popped in and out on an irregular schedule that had nothing to do with weekdays and weekends. Whenever I asked, she would blow it off and say, “Oh, it’s crazy busy at work.” I got the message: she didn’t want to be asked about her city life. I hoped she wasn’t married.

When Barbara ran out of vacation days, Jimmy suggested she call her boss and ask for some unpaid leave. That was an act of love, since as we all knew, Jimmy would always rather be in the city. But Barbara’s heart didn’t seem to be in her summer in the Hamptons any more. So they started going back and forth as well. I went with them a few times. But the city was hot and sticky. The offices where I temped were air conditioned and freezing. The work was boring. And every day I spent in Dedhampton was a day I might have a chance to spend with Cindy.

Among those who stayed and on the weekends, when almost everyone showed up, invisible barriers went up. Karen moped around the house with puffy eyes or took the car and disappeared. She and Lewis barely spoke. Jeannette spent endless hours in the kitchen. We ate like we’d been given a free pass to a four-star restaurant, and it all tasted like cardboard and ashes. Jimmy dove into cyberspace. Everybody else spent long hours on the beach. Dark glasses, a beach chair inclined all the way back, and an open paperback face down on the belly made a very effective No Trespassing sign.

We all made endless trips to the town police station. When it was my turn, Barbara drove me, making a noticeable effort not to comment on the fact. The detectives remained polite as they asked the same questions over and over. I figured they were trying to fit together the three deaths, Clea’s, Oscar’s, and Phil’s, like a sudoku puzzle or one of those Rubik’s cubes from the Eighties. We all had connections, if not convincing motives. I had to tell the story of my pathetic teen-sex moment with Clea until I wished at least I’d let her give me head. Okay, add crudeness to the list of my nastier defenses. I had no way to prove I hadn’t seen her from that night till we’d both shown up in Dedhampton.