Further Lane (29 page)

A guy in a pickup gave us a lift from where we pulled in near the North Road of Southampton and ran us down to the hospital. The Montauk Highway was impassable but a few of these local roads were okay if you picked your way. The hospital folks at the E.R. were fine. Harassed by the storm but with generators working, somehow they coped. It was a cardiac, all right, a bad one. I gave them as many particulars as I could about family and so on and my phone number and address; then it turned out Royal's billfold was in his pocket so we got the paperwork done and got out of there. No one was yet saying if Royal Warrender was going to make it. But we three had done our job.

Back at the marina Richard Ryan was on station and we all had what might be called a “spirited” discussion about the ethics of hot-wiring his boat but in the end Richard said we'd done the right thing and he offered to stand us drinks at The Blue Parrot unless I thought ten in the morning was a bit early for that. Richard had been driving around town and gave us his damage assessment. No casualties among people we knew. But then, all the precincts hadn't yet reported in.

“No one's seen Leo Brass yet this morning. Damn fool, I hope he wasn't out there pulling lobster traps last night.”

Brass missing? And might Claire Cutting be with him?

THIRTY-ONE

A series of terrible tidal waves sweeping over East Hampton …

Driving back into the village we passed those yellow East Hampton municipal trucks with gangs of men wielding chainsaws and tugging at downed trees and limbs. It was some mess. At the Parrot, Roland the manager was tidying up. The big awning out front was in tatters and outdoor tables and chairs thrown about, but beyond that and some rainwater around the windows, the place looked pretty good. Lee the owner was down at Montauk checking his boat and Billy Joel had apparently deserted us. But a few girls came in and so did Morgan Rank, who owns the gallery of primitive art. After that Toni Ross, daughter of the late Steve Ross, arrived, giving the bar a certain tone; she owns Nick & Toni's with her husband, Jeff. Then in came Dave Lucas the lawn-care king and most of Sid Felton's entourage, including the O'Leary twins, driven from their accustomed perch at the sidewalk café by the wind. We all introduced ourselves and Alix looked impressed to have met a moviemaker like Felton and wide-eyed at the sheer physical presence of the O'Learys. “Have you done any acting, Your Ladyship?” Felton was asking, slyly, I thought. By now Roland's white dog was begging for tortilla chips so, considering all things, it was pretty normal. Maybe we should have brought the poodle along, as well. Then we all had a beer, even Alix, who wanted a margarita but the blender wasn't working, so she had a Pacifico too. And Sid Felton was recalling tidal waves at Malibu and what famous movie stars had attended
his
parties.

“Golly,” Alix said, “Tom Cruise. Fancy that!”

Then Claire Cutting arrived.

Sweet as could be and looking pretty good, the wire-rim glasses finally traded in for some outsized shades that must have been prescription lenses because she wasn't hunched forward squinting the way she once did. And those tight, faded jeans did no harm nor did the pink tanktop she wore without any evidence of a bra. I mean, a skinny young woman like Alix could bounce around without a bra and not frighten onlookers. But when you were solid and curvy as Claire who took after her mother in that department, well …

I recalled what Jesse said about her strength, hauling lobster pots with Leo, those strong brown arms ending, dramatically, in white hands. It was the trademark look of the serious East Hampton gardener, forever wearing cotton gardening gloves—we had by the score here in East Hampton—not only Claire but enthusiastic gardeners like Pam Phythian. Whatever, Claire looked good. Felton was looking her over, wondering who she might be, and Richard even moved down one barstool to give her drinking room. “Hi, Beecher,” Claire said, “you folks get hurt at all?”

Last time I'd seen her she was telling me to get the hell off her place. Now she was inquiring after the wife and kids.

“No, we're fine, Claire.”

Alix, who didn't like her, then said disarmingly, “How did that nice Mr. Brass come through the storm? He's not been seen this morning yet, I take it.”

Claire sensed sarcasm in the question and started to anger, then bit it back. “I've no idea,” she said coolly, and then turned to Richard to ask empty questions about his boat. Mr. Felton, having been told who Claire was, hunkered down, which was unlike him, maintaining a discreet and uncharacteristic silence. Maybe he was trying to figure out if Claire's dead mother was yet in the public domain or if in making his film
Bittersweet
he might be required to pay royalties to the family. You had to say this about Felton: he was a professional who knew about costs, below and above the line. While he mulled over the possibilities, Sid ate a few Kleenex. We all had the one and then a second. Then Jesse and Felton had their heads together briefly.

“He asked me to be a technical adviser on the movie,” Jesse whispered. “Move out to Los Angeles for a time. Become acquainted with female movie stars.”

And? “I told him I'd consider it.”

Then Jesse went off on various errands and Alix and I returned to the gatehouse where, it being noon and the sun high, we went back to bed, unclothed this time. “D'you want me to keep my sneakers on, Beecher? Might be rather kinky.” You had to like the way her mind worked.

She also wanted to know something else.

“Beecher, I'm confused.”

“About what?”

“The O'Leary sisters and Mr. Felton.”

“Seems plain enough to me.”

“No, I mean, do you think Mr. Felton sleeps with them both at the same time or enjoys them seriatim?”

Primly, I said I had no idea. But while we were making love she returned again to the theme, asking if I'd ever slept with two girls at once and was it stimulating or simply complicated? I shut her mouth with mine and retreated into a silent wonderment as to whether her father the Earl knew how his daughter went on and just what Oxford was teaching young people these days.

Afterwards Alix called Random House to inform them she was still alive and, yet again, hot on the trail of the elusive manuscript. And that for the first time, she could guarantee it hadn't been destroyed or anything, and surely it was merely a matter of hours now. I roamed the kitchen where she was using the phone, looking into cupboards and aligning coffee mugs, self-conscious and embarrassed at the growing ingenuity of her lies, which by now were colorfully describing a series of terrible tidal waves that washed clear over East Hampton, sweeping away houses and inundating roads and marooning isolated farmers and lobster fishermen, and which terrified even the redoubtable Indian sachem and war chief Jesse Maine.

We got up about five and showered together, which wasn't such a great idea. Not only with the electricity down was the water ice-cold, we very nearly went back to bed again, and if you weren't at the Parrot by six, you stood a gaudy chance of finding a barstool. Leo Brass was still among the missing. He wasn't the only one but there were plausible explanations for the others; not Leo. East Hampton had its first two fatalities that we knew about. An old lady in Springs had a heart attack trying to pull a big tree limb off her deck. And a body was found down by The Gut where Georgica Pond empties into that channel cut through the beach to the ocean at times of heavy rain and overflows.

Poor devil, someone said, must have drowned in the storm surge. A few of us lifted a Pacifico in solemn tribute.

No, said Roland from behind the bar. That was the odd thing. The body was that of a man with a terrible stab wound of some sort through his chest. Or so went the rumor.

I borrowed The Blue Parrot's cell phone, the one they hang up beneath a copy of Joe Heller's latest book and the scrawled love note to the place from Christie Brinkley, and called Tom Knowles at the police station. He was out checking storm damage with the rest of them but they'd page his car and get him to phone me at the Parrot. So we had another round of Pacificos. When Tom called back, I didn't even have to ask the question.

“Same damn wound, Beecher. Just like Hannah's. Once again, the killer left the weapon behind. Privet hedge. A stake sharpened with a knife and then honed and hardened in flame. Not milled like the one you got slugged with. They're checking for prints as we speak. No I.D. yet. I haven't been over there to see the body because of the roads. I'll get back to you.”

I paid up and got Alix out of there, over her objections.

“I say, Beecher, this is the jolliest spot in town, and I dote on that Richard Ryan chap. And without power and no lights, what's the point of going home so early?”

I repeated what Tom told me about the stake of privet hedge through the dead man's heart.

“Golly!”

We drove around the village looking at damage and checking with a few of my friends not seen since before the storm, all the while wrestling with who might be the man dead in Georgica Pond (Ron Perelman, who lived there and had ruffled feathers? Leo Brass who boasted about “taking care of” The Gut himself? “The Walter”? Jerry Della Femina? Parties unknown?) and what was the significance of a second murder in little more than a week by sharpened privet hedge through the heart.

“Cold heart,” Alix corrected me. “All the best writers of policiers use a good adjective and do it that way. If this were Miss Marple it would always be ‘through his (or her as the case may be)
cold
heart.'”

“I'm sure,” I said, not being a Miss Marple expert.

We drove along Lily Pond Lane to see if Mort Zuckerman's place or Jerry Delia Femina's dune house had been swept out to sea. Neither had. Martha Stewart's lovely garden had been trashed and there was a big maple down and what looked like a copper beech. We drove past Ken Auletta's and then Ben and Sally Bradlee's house, the old “Gray Gardens” that they bought from Jackie's crazy cousins—and then had to have the exterminators in before the decorators. They, too, seemed to have come through. We swung back and drove down Highway Behind the Pond to the beach, where old Mrs. Lawrence built what
Vanity Fair
called “the house from hell,” but which I thought of as resembling the TWA terminal. The monstrosity, unfortunately, was still standing as well. Then we saw Lee Radziwill, who lived next door and never had forgiven Mrs. Lawrence, or her architect, that rogue!, striding past, walking a couple of skinny dogs on leashes, so we knew Lee was okay.

“Whippets,” I said, not terribly sure. Alix looked narrowly at me.

“Borzois,” she said briskly. “It's amazing the voids Harvard left in your education, darling.”

The “darling” made up for unwarranted attacks on Harvard.

And now Alix turned philosophical.

“You know, Beecher, I've been asking myself just who's the real villain in all this, and when we talk to people who knew her, it seems to come up more often than not to be Hannah Cutting. As if she's to blame for her own death. Being such a bitch and all. Over and over we hear of her appalling ways and lack of manners. And I'll have to admit she cut me there on her own lawn. But now someone else is dead as well, and was that Hannah's fault too? I think we're shortchanging her, y'know; to have accomplished all she did, to come out of nothing and become someone, she couldn't have been all bad.

“There's not that much time, or energy, for people to be completely evil and still do all the things Hannah did.”

We were no sooner back at my gatehouse when Knowles called. The dead man was Leo Brass. Only an environmental whack job like Brass would have gone out to check Georgica Gut atop a bulldozer during a hurricane and it killed him. Not the actual storm but someone who knew him well, knew how he thought, who realized The Gut was one of the places Leo would have checked out as the storm rose in its strangled fury and lashed at the pond and the fragile, protective dune.

Claire Cutting? If anyone knew the dead man, she did.

There was still no power so I cooked a couple of steaks on the Weber grill and Alix tossed a salad and we had a simple dinner on the patio, washing it down with a Châteauneuf du Pape. “I say, Beecher, this roughing it isn't all that harsh, y'know.” Fortunately, there was running water and the toilets flushed.

We'd had so little sleep the night before we turned in early. Without electricity, why not, and as the candles turned down we made love. Undressed, this time. Why not, again, since we needn't be prepared to evacuate tonight. I was marginally asleep when Alix shook me awake. “That nice copper friend of yours, Beecher, Inspector Knowles. We've got to call him. Get him to purloin Claire's gardening gloves. He'll find them simply reeking of privet and soot, I'll wager.”

“Why?”

“I've been literally tossing and turning, meditating on it. Suddenly, it came to me, at least I think it did. Because in both murders, there were no fingerprints. Claire habitually wore gardening gloves, you could see it yourself, strong brown forearms and those pale hands. And she was the daughter of the dead woman, the lover of the dead man. Poirot and so many other adepts always tell you in a murder case, ‘Look to the family! Find the husband! Suspect the wife!
Cherchez les amants
 … seek out the lovers!' By far the majority of homicides are committed by someone who knew the victim well. Strangers very rarely are found guilty of having…”

Once she got on a hobby horse … So I said, “Alix, go to sleep. There are hundreds of pairs of pale hands in East Hampton. The Ladies' Village Improvement Society practically requires them for membership.”

She was stubborn. “I'm not talking about little old ladies with pale hands. I'm talking about someone strong enough to drive a stake through a human chest who also happens to have white hands.”