Further Lane (7 page)

I'd walked down to my old man's house to see him one more time and say good-bye. “He's on the beach, puttering about in the kayak.” This was Inga who kept house for Admiral Stowe and quite possibly was a lot more than that to the old man, a strong, strapping blond woman in her forties, Nordic, placid, crisply attractive. She treated me and just about everyone else with a cool courtesy and no more, reserving more powerful emotions for my father. She might have given the late Dag Hammarskjold the time of day. Or His Majesty, King Olav, but beyond that, very little. There was no one on the beach though out past the surf I could see a lone paddler working hard, coming in. Didn't take long. “Hi, Beecher,” my dad called out as, timing the waves, he brought the sturdy ocean-going kayak smartly and smoothly up out of the shallows and onto the damp sand.

“You look ready for the Olympic trials,” I told him.

“Next time, maybe.”

He rolled nimbly out of the boat and we both lifted it to let the water run out before walking up to the house together, the two of us easily lugging his kayak fore and aft. My father was in his sixties and didn't look it, didn't feel it. He was even taller than I was, lean and suntanned, no varicose veins in the long, sinewy, boater's legs. Inga laid out a marvelous mixed salad and cold salmon with green sauce and a young inexpensive Sancerre and then vanished into the house to finish packing. Or so she said; she kept her place, never eating with us if I was there or he had guests. Inga observed appearances. Over lunch I told my father about Anderson's assignment, to take back tracings on Hannah Cutting and write the story of where she'd come from and how she got to Further Lane. I was a bit uneasy about it, I admitted. “I've never before written about Further Lane. After all, we live here. This is home.”

“You've been a reporter everywhere from Boston to Bosnia and there are people living in every place you've written about, Beecher. Why should Further Lane be sacrosanct? Sometimes I think that's just about the only thing wrong with this place, that people who live here believe themselves to be special, touched by the hand of God. When they're just people who happened to have a little money and the sense and taste to want to own a piece of this part of the good green world.”

“I know, I'm being oversensitive.”

“You're a journalist and a good one, if I'm any judge, based on those pieces you wrote from North Africa and Yugo. Writing about your own town—well, maybe a touch of delicacy and tact might be called for. Beyond that, write the truth, be fair, be yourself.”

He was the moral spine of my ethical core, always had been, and I listened to what he said. Their car was coming at three to take them in to JFK so after lunch I thanked him and said good-bye, wishing him good luck with the salmon, and then mentioning as a postscript I was going by the Reservation to see Jesse, and getting a cautionary bit of paternal advice.

Despite fatherly counsel, I drove the twelve miles to Southampton and then the few miles more to the Shinne-cock Reservation. There were still two Indian tribes on Long Island; the other was the Poospatucks at Mastic, both sets liberally intermarried, mostly with blacks but also some whites. Jesse, typically, was more black than Indian. On the reservation side of the highway an Indian in a shanty bright with garish signs promising savings was selling cigarettes by the carton without the excise tax, so I bought a carton of Luckies. Not to smoke. To get him talking. He looked more Sicilian than Shinnecock and took me for a cop and wasn't very talky until I showed him the press card.

Jesse lived in a pretty nice little house with a healthy garden down by the shore on Shinnecock Bay. He had a green thumb and was handy with tools, and it showed. A nubile young woman came out barefoot and said he didn't want to see nobody. Not cops, not reporters, not nobody. I didn't know if she was his girlfriend or one of his kids. Jesse was capable of coming up with either. So I shouted in at him that I was Beecher Stowe from Further Lane that used to play ball with him and how more recently he'd done work for my old man. Jesse chewed that bit of vital information for a little and then shouted back.

“They find out yet who killed the bitch?”

This wasn't very diplomatic of Jesse, speaking ill of the dead, especially when he was among the leading suspects; but when he came out to shake hands I said no, and did he have any ideas?

Yes, he said, he did. “If I killed her, Beech, and I thought about it a few times, there would have been lots more wear and tear on the body, I can tell you.”

What kind of person would use a spear as a weapon, did he think?

That seemed to puzzle Jesse for a time.

“Some of them Guatemalans and Aztecs and such they got mowing lawns along Further Lane, them fellas got strange ideas. Voodoo even. You might inquire of them if you speak the lingo.”

No, he never heard of local Indians using a spear as a weapon, not since the old days. Not since they got guns. And when the long-ago Shinnecocks did use spears it was mostly for fish or as harpoons for whaling, and back then they used hardwood for the shaft and topped the spear with flint, and later with metal when they could get it. Who ever heard of a soft wood like privet hedge, hardened in flame, for a weapon? Didn't make sense; it was just stupid.

It occurred to me
Town & Country
wouldn't have believed this conversation. They had their own image of the Hamptons; a man like Jesse Maine had no part in it. Nor maybe did a leg man like me.

Then Jesse had an idea: “That Swami fellow down there near you on Further Lane. You might look into him for sheer nonsense. He's got them rich bitches out on the lawn in their skivvies, barefoot and dancing all but naked to the tom tom, eating bees' honey and pondering the Ouija board. They've all given up martinis and espresso, traded them in for scalding water. Swami went to Hannah for contributions and sponsorship but she was too smart, or too mean, to fall for that shit and chased him off. Maybe Swami had a grudge.…”

That would be a swell story. I could see the
New York Post
headlines now, could imagine what
Hard Copy
would do with it. We talked some more, not getting very far, and when I left Jesse waved me off and shouted out hallo to my old man.

Hannah Cutting had her faults but Mr. and Mrs. Kroepke stayed loyal. They were the husband and wife team who lived on her property, the missus cooking and keeping after the cleaning woman and the other day servants and people recruited to wait and bartend parties, and the husband driving and butlering and supervising the gardener and lawnmower man and such. Been with her a long time; still there now. They had a yellow plastic crime-scene tape stretched across the head of the gravel drive, but after I showed my press card and indulged in a little palaver, the cop let me in as far as the gatehouse, where I phoned through. Kroepke said okay, I could come up to the house. The couple sat there in the kitchen on straight-backed wooden chairs; that was their turf, the kitchen and below stairs. Mrs. K. made coffee and we talked. I didn't get a lot from them but what I got was first-rate, blue chip, 24 carat. About how Ms. Cutting was working so hard these days. Not on business, the way she always did, but on the book. Her book. She was at it hour after hour. It had sort of taken on a life of its own, Kroepke said, and Mrs. K. said so too. And it was a blessed shame she'd never finish it now. Her story, her life, and never to be finished when it had become such a passion and a holy cause for their mistress …

Hannah Cutting's book.

EIGHT

Harry Evans said something about sending someone out to look for the manuscript …

I didn't know the whole story about her book but I'd heard some of it.

It all derived from Hannah's being such a control freak. There were already a couple of books out about her, one of them dull and worthy and officially authorized. The one people were buying was the trashy version, decidedly unauthorized and a best-seller. She was furious about it and began talking about setting the record straight and settling scores. So Harry Evans at Random House put on a full-court press and lured Hannah away from the house that had published her earlier self-help books. He got Hannah signed up to write her own story, which Liz Smith informed us would have Ms. Cutting “naming names, taking numbers, and kicking butt.” That was months ago. How close was she to completing the job when she died? Maybe Liz Smith got it wrong and this was just another in a series of the decorate-the-place-yourself volumes she pumped out that sold so well? Or simply ego massage and self-indulgence, preening and posturing? Or would this be a really big one, with Hannah telling the raw and maybe bitter truth and avenging herself on enemies by getting it all down on paper? Did this book-in-progress have anything to do with her death?

I phoned Mr. Evans in Manhattan. He tap-danced for a while even though both Random House and
Parade
were owned by the same gentlemen, the brothers Newhouse. I thought it impolitic for a brand-new hire like me to bring that up; let it occur to Harry Evans on his own. I'm not sure whether it did but in the end Harry told me he was himself in the dark. And he sounded frustrated, even sore about it.

“She told me she was working hard and piling up the pages, but beyond a treatment she was required to give us before we went to contract, I haven't seen a word.”

She was doing the book herself, he confirmed. No ghostwriter. Was Hannah talking into a tape recorder or writing on a computer or longhand on legal pads or what? Harry said he'd recommended a word processor but really didn't know. She told him she'd dictated her earlier books to a crack stenographer. This time, she'd do it herself, concerned about confidentiality. With a book this big they'd take it any way it came in and hire transcribers. He said something about sending someone out, a young editor, to look into the manuscript's whereabouts.

“Appreciate your pointing my editor in the right direction, Stowe. Place like East Hampton can be confusing to a stranger.”

“Sure, Harry,” I said, not really meaning it. Evans and his wife had a place on the East End but not East Hampton. I knew the town and they didn't. I also had a competitive journalism assignment and why should I give anyone else a leg up? In this business, you don't “blacksheet” anyone, you don't hand around copies of what you have or what you've written.

Stupid of me but I hadn't asked the Kroepkes if Hannah was using a computer or writing it out longhand or what. When I phoned the Cutting house again to ask, I got the answering machine so I left a message and spent the afternoon working on my own book, clearing my head of Hannah Cutting, enjoying the warm, cuddly memories of downtown Sarajevo during a mortar attack, and those jolly days and nights in Algiers when the mullahs stripped and stoned decent women for wearing Western clothes instead of the veil and I got shot in the … well, I got shot by sticking my nose in.

At about six I got in the Blazer and drove up to Boaters for a beer. You weren't supposed to dance but when the old jukebox was being fed, people danced. No one tried to stop them. Everyone smoked, everyone drank, everyone danced. That was Boaters. They had everything but gypsy violins and the Don Cossack Chorus. I had a beer and then another and looked around. Among the dancers, Claire Cutting.

Bereft of a loving mother, but clearly not in mourning or rending her garments, the newly orphaned and devoted daughter Claire danced. The girl who freely admitted in comparison to her mother that she was herself inept and artless, danced. And well. Or, at least sexily. Healthy young body. If she traded in those granny glasses for contacts with decent lenses …

And she was dancing with Leo Brass, the Bayman who found her mother's body on the beach. When they got back to the bar during a break, she went to the ladies' room and I moved in, squeezing between a couple of locals. Knowing how bristly Brass was, I kept a distance from him, watching him as I drank, waiting for Claire to come back. Tom Knowles told me while I was away Leo hadn't mellowed much. “Remember Crazy Frank, Beecher? He must go about two-sixty these days but one night during a full moon he and Leo got into it. Leo threw Crazy Frank off a highway overpass and damn near killed him. Crazy was laid up for days … two or three of them.”

Brass was one of your black Irishmen, maybe six-four with huge hands, rawboned and fit, with the crow-black hair hanging lank, through which from time to time he ran a cheap plastic pocket comb. From the size of him, good tight end material. I'd known Leo for years, played ball against him, didn't like him very much. Wherever he went, acolytes followed. Pugnacious little men who drank too much and got into fights they inevitably lost, they stuck by Brass, testifying to his significance. Unlike Leo, the acolytes were unattractive to women or to anyone else, although to him they were faithful as the Twelve Apostles. He had his other adherents, a motley fringe of neo-Fascists and Green Peacers who saw him as a Populist hero, stuck to Leo like napkin lint on a navy suit, and argued passionately he ought to be in politics. And in truth, with all his ranting and that brief mustache, when a lock of black hair dipped over one eye, he resembled a tall Hitler.

Some people felt Leo belonged in Washington; he'd do well down there with Gingrich and that crowd.

Leo himself? Women liked his athletic, cocky, to-hell-with-you look. Some liked it a lot. Men had varying opinions. Was he a blowhard peddling blather though undeniably entertaining? Or a true menace? He was big and tough enough to be dangerous, sufficiently intelligent to be more than that. Lethal? It was possible.

Unlike me, who can't carry a tune, Leo played piano by ear, had a voice, and was a gifted mimic, doing a more than passable James Cagney as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Years before in the Wild Rose bar drinking with Leo and others, I'd gone home early. At some point the phone rang. It was LaRuffa, a mutual friend: “You gotta come back. He's never been this bad. Everyone's going crazy, buying rounds … and women flailing about and rooting him on…”