Further Lane (34 page)

“The house still standing? You all right?” he inquired.

“Yes, the house is okay. I'm here as well.”

I thought he might have asked first about his only child.

Relieved to learn there was no damage, not even any family casualties, my old man then launched into a spirited and detailed account of the salmon fishing. When he'd hung up I confessed a slight disenchantment.

“Oh, cheer up,” Alix said sensibly. “No one damaged here and he killed some fine salmon. Well played, both Stowes, father and son, I'd say.”

“I suppose so.”

I guess I was still feeling let down about the disk, now firmly in Her Ladyship's hands, and all for the greater glory and profit of Random House and Harry Evans—Hannah Cutting's story, the story Walter Anderson assigned me to get. Some start to a new job! I'm this highly touted foreign correspondent with
Newsweek
and the
Boston Globe
behind me and a lifelong resident of Further Lane who knew the entire cast of characters. And I get beaten to the story by a slip of an English girl in her twenties who'd never even seen East Hampton before.

Well, I wasn't going to fight her for it. I'd cobble a story somehow about Hannah's humble beginnings. And with Royal and Claire talking so openly, the mystery of what happened on Further Lane long ago was there for the taking. But it would have been sweet, being able to read Hannah's own account of her extraordinary life, even before Random House got hold of it. What the hell! There were winners and there were losers and I had sense enough to recognize the difference.

“Come on,” I said.

She didn't always argue the toss, and didn't this time, but climbed into the four-wheel drive with me without question. It was not only the end of the case, the wrap-up of the story, what Alix and I had together was coming down to an end. I drove up the Three Mile Harbor Road in the dusk and turned onto the little old winding beach road to park. “Let's walk a little.” She wasn't really wearing walking shoes but she was game and the light was fading but it was nice at sunset to see the old beach pavilion where maybe a dozen people were lighting up grills and opening beers, talking, laughing, listening to music from a boom box, local people, aware there wouldn't be many more soft evenings like this with summer gone. On the beach someone had a keg and a lighted grill and a man was grilling hot dogs. You could smell those hot dogs, the greasy smoke rising, from a hundred yards off. A couple of teenagers tossed an old football and three or four men in shorts stood knee-deep in the water, using spinning reels to cast for stripers in the dusk and not getting much. Little kids ran around and girls laughed and a baby wailed. And a mother hushed it soothingly. The sun was down now with millions of stars up, and the water on the incoming tide rushed by dark and swift from the sea.

“Nice,” I said.

Alix reached out and took my hand.

“Yes,” she said.

We walked back to where we'd left the Blazer and got a couple of stools at the bar of Michael's and ordered drinks. Behind the bar a small sign said, “Next time, bring your wife.”

Tom had filled me in on what Pam was saying now with lawyers present, especially about the death of Leo Brass, and I told Alix.

“Leo was so much bigger and stronger, the cops were curious how she'd killed a man like that with a sharpened stick. Pam said he'd been drinking and was more than ever full of himself, how he'd straightened out the experts and told them they knew nothing, how he was going down to The Gut high up there astride the Cat, ready and willing to bulldoze The Gut to let in the sea. And then he was going back to Claire. That it had been fun with Pam but it was over. Claire was half her age and richer. The Cutting name, the Cutting money, would enable Leo to achieve wonders, ecological, political, and otherwise, that would have been out of reach for a Bonacker. Besides, he grinned lasciviously, ‘Claire's pretty good in bed. You know these young ones.…'”

Leo knew how to hurt a woman.

So Pam said they ought to have one final fling, that she'd go with him and his bulldozer down to The Gut, fetch along a poncho and a blanket, so with the wind up and the surf pounding and the hurricane coming ashore, they could make exciting and even extraordinary love one last time, right there at The Gut, on the narrow windswept, rain-drenched strand between pond and ocean.

“And they did,” Tom Knowles said, “screwing in a hurricane. And when they finished, Leo was lying there on a blanket, naked, rain-slick, and half drunk, and Pam took out another of her handy privet stakes thoughtfully brought along for the occasion, and just ran him through, cold as January. And when she was sure he was dead, rolled his body into the pond, tidied up, and drove home in her own car, leaving behind the Cat and one dead Bayman. And every clue and track washed away by the grandfather of all wind and rainstorms and a tide washing right across the beach and into the pond. Hell of a woman…”

Alix agreed enthusiastically.

“I'll say! Make love to the chap during a hurricane and then drive a stake through his gizzard. Wow!”

Detective Knowles said her lawyers had already come up with a unique defense in the matter of the dead Sherpa. “Triage,” he said, “that's what they'll argue to get that death thrown out of court. That when one alpinist is inadvertently about to cause the death of two more, the others are perfectly entitled to cut his rope and save themselves. I don't know if it'll wash but it hints just how clever Pam's defense is going to be. They'll have everything in there on her behalf but depositions from Mark Fuhrman.”

Beyond that, Alix was still chewing over the metaphysical aspects of the case:

“Was Pam the real villain or was it Hannah?”

“Oh, hell, one of them killed two and probably three people, maybe four if you count Rose Thrall; the other was just a pain in the ass. There is a difference.”

“Of course. But in a larger sense, I think they're both victims. And perhaps both villains, as well. If you consider the backgrounds of the two women, so different and yet so…”

That was Oxford talking, debating the question from two sides at once, and I let her rattle on without offering much. I was more focused on the inescapable fact our glorious adventure was coming to an end, our week and a little was over. That this bright and beautiful and funny young woman would go home to Random House and not to my house. That her laughter would soon be tinkling once again on the city's East Side and not here on Further Lane. Alix would be vanishing back into the vastness of Manhattan among the ex-pats and the elegant, and this picturesque little episode, this brief encounter by the ocean, would fade and be forgotten, merely a footnote to September.

It was silly of me, I realize, this small melancholy I was indulging, since I would shortly be moving into Manhattan myself, taking an apartment, probably on that same posh East Side, and that all I had to do was to pick up a phone and call her. It was simply I suspected what we had here at a small town in the Hamptons would not travel well nor flourish in great cities. I knew that I would miss Alix in a lot of ways. I confess even to imagining that without her cheerful, frisky carnality, just how vacant my bed was going to be tonight.

We had dinner and drove back to the house. “You'll be driving back to town then,” I said gloomily.

“Yes,” Alix said, more subdued than I'd have expected her to be, considering her triumphs. No gloating, no smug self-applause.

“Okay.”

She paused briefly. “But not until morning if you don't mind. I'm rather bushed. May I sleep here tonight, leave early in the morning?”

“Of course.”

Then, not slyly but with a clear conscience and open face, that lovely face, Lady Alix Dunraven said:

“At the hospital, you may recall, when Mr. Warrender asked if I were going to share what was on the computer disk with you, I was rather precise in my response, almost legalistic. I didn't say yes or no, simply that you were a journalist with your own assignments and responsibilities while I was representing the excellent book publishing firm of Random House. I prefer not to lie, y'know.”

I couldn't recall her exact words but what did it matter, this splitting of hairs. And, in truth, she lied like a newspaper; I'd heard her lying to Evans, who paid her salary and whose employee pro tern she was. But this was our last night. I wasn't going to hector her.

“So?”

She smiled, a small, slow smile, and said:

“So I'm going to leave the disk here next to your own laptop on this kitchen table where I know it'll be safe. And where hardly anyone will notice it or think to scroll through it hurriedly, taking a few crucial notes to be used in an article or two that couldn't possibly be construed as competitive with Random House and its plans to publish a quality hardcover book that could, in fact, end up on various best-seller lists and even attract Hollywood and the producers of major motion pictures that…”

I guess my mouth was somewhat ajar because when she reached up to kiss me, a very light, flirtatious kiss, my mouth was open, though only briefly, to her tongue.

“I'll be off now, Beecher,” she said. “You will be coming to bed shortly, won't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably do a little reading first. But I'll be in, yes.”

“Super,” said Her Ladyship firmly, “that's quite what I'd hoped you'd say. We don't have all that much time till morning and there are one or two things we haven't yet tried.”

On that provocative note, she turned and left. As Zooey once remarked of his mother, you do give yourself the exit lines. I didn't say it. Instead I growled, but in silence, try to keep me away. You don't say rude and vulgar things to a proper young woman whose daddy was the fourth (or was it the fifth?) senior Earl in the realm and who had a double first at Oxford, and won the Tony Godwin Award, besides.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Impudent people, who tried to become us …

They set bail at half a million and, as Detective Knowles predicted, Pam made it. Local people, most of them (not the Baymen, however, still mourning Leo as one of theirs), were supportive, sympathetic, even cordial. Pam Phythian was Old East Hampton and Hannah wasn't; whatever the crime, that still made a difference out here. The old lineup: WASP vs. anti-WASP; you know who wins that one. The Ladies' Village Improvement Society got up a subcommittee to study whether a Pam Phythian Defense Fund ought to be raised. A board meeting of the Maidstone Club will convene shortly to determine if her membership should be suspended pending the trial. Sentiment is apparently leaning toward continuing her in good standing. On assumption-of-innocence grounds, of course. She was routinely getting the usual cocktail and dinner invitations and I wasn't, in that I may have broken the code (by tattling on a fellow member of the Maidstone). I saw Pam a couple more times around East Hampton, once on Further Lane, the other time buying doughnuts at Dreesen's. She cut me dead. Which was not entirely a shock, considering.

In an interview with
Newsday,
an interview Sullivan & Cromwell urged her not to grant, Pam sketched out what her defense would be at the murder trial. It wasn't anything personal, these things she was supposed to have done, but “a matter of class warfare,” the legitimate struggle to protect and preserve the old values. Pam saw it as a Constitutional issue, the right of a society to defend and maintain itself against external or internal dangers. Hannah's purchase of farmland for development threatened the common weal; Leo's attempt to blow up The Gut put wetlands at risk. Pam was nuts, of course, but the argument resonated powerfully among some of the East Hampton Establishment; the Old Money people secretly thrilled when Pam spoke of defending them and their class against strivers like Hannah and Leo Brass who, she said, “had gotten above themselves.”

As Pam Phythian viewed it, “These were impudent people. Who tried to become us…”

September was nearly over and I was glad of it. Jesse Maine was still around and we did some fishing and took a haul of late blues off Gardiners Island. Sid Felton actually did offer him some vague situation in Los Angeles but Jesse turned it down.

“I was tempted, Beech, the O'Leary sisters and all, but there are people who belong in Hollywood and people who don't. I have my little problems here with the Bonackers and the authorities, but they know me and I know them and in ways, we're like family.”

I'd lost Alix to the city, to her responsibilities amid the stepped-up frenzy of book publishing in autumn's change of seasons. Having brought in Hannah Cutting's book made Alix something of a heroine and Harry Evans even approved an expense account for her time in East Hampton that consisted mainly of gas for the Jag, one night at the Mauve House, and any number of purchases from the clothing boutiques. I missed her a lot, even missed the poodle growling at me in Alix's bed, missed Alix in Alix's bed. Where did you find women like Alix who drove like Richard Petty in Jags and traveled with borrowed poodles and brought you Dreesen's doughnuts in bed and sent E-mail messages in cipher on Louis Vuitton laptops?

Walter Anderson liked the piece I did for
Parade
and especially that it would run months before Harry could get the book out. When both editors worked for the same company, things like that mattered. The weather turned crisp and we had frost on the lawn one morning. You could feel it on the wind, change coming, and no longer did I swim every day. The striped bass were running thin and the party boats came into port empty. A fresh film festival was cranking up and private jets landed hourly at the airport, disgorging men and women wearing black clothes and handsome folk sporting shades at night were seen in the streets.
Le tout
Hollywood had arrived. And I realized with a shudder I actually knew and had interviewed some of these people. It would be a relief to be moving into the City.