Further Lane (36 page)

I didn't come back to the Hamptons this year until May. And then, unexpectedly.

I'd been in California to interview an important actress. I won't mention her name here. Not fair, since the interview never came off. But she was one of the biggies with the requisite Academy Award and all that. And good; her Oscar was no fluke. She was as big even as Streep and Close; younger, too. A little younger. A wonderful actress and beautiful woman, and I'd arranged, with her people, to do a piece for the magazine about her new film. And after all the arranging, with her people getting back to me and my getting back to her people (in California, people are always “getting back” to you), when I arrived she wouldn't see me. Didn't even hint she might be “getting back” to me. Just plain sent out word to go away. Something happened. Was she ill? I could understand illness. People got sick and they canceled. No, not that. Well, maybe she'd disliked the new movie's final cut and didn't choose to promote it. No, not that, either. In the end no one ever told me exactly what it was and I never got to see her. But the buzz suggested it was a young man, much younger. They'd been together here and in Europe, France, I believe, and then something happened and he went off. And the joy went out of her and she didn't give a shit anymore and didn't care to hype the film or talk to me or go on Letterman or do those other things actors do. Nor did I find out the young man's name.

So I flew back to New York.

“These things happen,” Anderson said. He wasn't happy about it but he said he understood. Anderson is the editor of
Parade,
the largest-circulation magazine in the world, and we were sitting in his corner office at 711 Third Avenue talking about what happened out there in L.A. and about what I might think about doing instead. I'm under contract to write eight pieces a year for Anderson and this was the first time I'd failed to deliver. “Not your fault, Beecher,” he said, and of course it wasn't. But neither was Anderson much for trotted-out excuses and labored explanations; few serious editors are. While I was also a professional who took pride in getting the job done. It's no great credit to me, just how Episcopalians and Harvard men were supposed to be, how my father is, how we were in my family. Professionals, who knew the work and did it. Anderson, who'd been a Marine, was that way himself, perhaps one of the reasons we get along.

My new book was out, the one I wrote on terrorism in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (the king of Morocco having graciously provided a brief book jacket blurb), and doing well with both the reviewers and the
Times
best-seller list, sitting there at an encouraging number six for nonfiction, and until this failed assignment with the actress, I was feeling myself a pretty bright fellow indeed. Anderson was sensitive to mood and didn't want his writers sulking, so to clear the air between us over my failure, he said why didn't I get out of the city. Maybe go out to the Hamptons, now that the weather had turned, to do that piece on the Baymen I was forever talking about, about the last hardcore commercial fishermen we have in our overcivilized part of the world. After all, the
Parade
story I wrote about Hannah Cutting, and how Hannah got to Further Lane, finding fame and wealth, until in the end it all kind of ganged up and killed her, had turned into a pretty good yarn.…

“This best-seller about the Gloucester fishing boat that goes down,
The Perfect Storm,
is good stuff,” Anderson said. “Same kind of men as your Baymen, I imagine. A slice of America people in the great cities, sitting down to a fish dinner in a first-rate restaurant, never pause to consider. I thought of asking Peter Matthiessen to do the story. He's out there, knows the territory.”

“You could do worse. He's very good,” I said. “Very.”

“So are you,” Anderson said, “and you're under contract and he isn't. I prefer to use the writers we're paying already.”

That made sense. And who ever said editors considered only the words and not the dollars?

And so that was how a pout on the part of a famous actress who'd lost her boyfriend sent me slinking back to New York unfulfilled. And almost as an afterthought, got Anderson to give me an assignment that, without his intending to do so, would entangle me with Cowboy Dils and whatever demons pursued him.

Not something Anderson expected or I sought. But reporting was the work I did and so it was I found myself getting my bags packed for East Hampton. Anderson was probably right; with the good weather, there was nothing to keep me in the city, and the beach and ocean beckoned. The Baymen idea might work, could be a fine story. They were hard, wonderful, colorful men working a difficult, often dangerous trade. I was already getting enthusiastic about it; I'm that way about a good story. I get worked up, get excited; show me a writer who doesn't feel that way and I'll show you a cynic. Or a burnt-out case. Besides, our house out there stood empty and available, my father, the Admiral, having been seconded by the Pentagon (by the defense secretary himself) to a liaison job at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

“But you don't even like Brussels.”

“I know, Beecher,” he acknowledged, “but I can't just say no to Bill Cohen. He's a decent man and he called personally and I'm going.”

The Admiral wasn't enthusiastic about the post, or the place, but for forty years since Annapolis, his had been a career in which you saluted and went, finding along the way small consolations. So he reminded himself, as the French are fond of saying: “One eats well in Brussels.” Thus dismissing the neighbors, as the French are wont to do, with faint praise, and, like Caesar, not all that fond of Belgians, the Admiral shut down his (and my) house on Further Lane, and off he went.

I had additional small consolations as well. East Hampton would be relaxed and casual. It was a place where tradition still meant something; you could go to the bank on that. The Hamptons were traditionally pretty tranquil until the Season began and that would be Memorial Day at the earliest and nothing could possibly happen until then.

Or so I believed …

EVERYONE IS RAVING ABOUT JAMES BRADY'S
FURTHER LANE!

“Everybody in the Hamptons is reading FURTHER LANE … The hunt for the killer is fast-paced and unpredictable. Readers will also delight in the author's take on the ceaseless class wars in the Hamptons—a subject Brady, a resident, has long been watching with evident amusement.”

—
Town and Country

“As witty, erudite, and on the cutting edge as its author, James Brady's FURTHER LANE is a lot of fun and ‘must' reading for everybody in the Hamptons set—and all those who aspire to be.”

—Michael Korda, Senior Vice-President and Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster

“James Brady moves easily between fact and fiction, building composite personas in FURTHER LANE. Finding the celebrities as well as solving the crime is part of the fun of this who's whodunit.”

—Rochelle Udell, Editor-in-Chief of
Self

“Brady combines his novelistic talents with his status as a bio-coastal insider to deliver the goods in this entertaining, fast-moving yarn.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Dry humor, literate tone, acid observation, and lots of name-dropping help characterize the village and its people.”

—
Library Journal

“Readers get taken on a Liz-Smith-meets-Agatha-Christie murderous romp through the celeb-studded hedges of East Hampton.”

—
Hamptons
Magazine

“An always-stylish romp through the playgrounds of the very pampered and vaguely famous.”

—
The Purloined Letter

J
AMES
B
RADY
is a weekly columnist for
Advertising Age
and
Parade
magazines. His previous novels include
Paris One
and
Designs,
and he is author of the critically acclaimed memoir of Korea,
The Coldest War.
He lives in Manhattan and on Further Lane, in East Hampton, New York.

FURTHER LANE

Copyright © 1997 by James Brady.

Excerpt from
Gin Lane
copyright © 1998 by James Brady.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-53927

ISBN: 0-312-96598-2

St. Martin's Press hardcover edition published 1997

St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / June 1998

St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

eISBN 9781466841901

First eBook edition: March 2013