by James Brady
During the warm weather months it is not a good idea to swim by night among the baitfish.
Vaguely, through sea fog and at a distance, something else now breaks the surface, scattering small fish. But this is no hunter. Just a swimmer. And a good one, stroking slowly and powerfully in an easy crawl, broad shoulders working efficiently to cover yards with every stroke, long legs scissoring in rhythm. Once through the courtesy surf the swimmer, a naked woman, rises from the water to wade the last few paces, splendid body glistening, seawater streaming from her, emerging from the night ocean and striding strongly up the steeply sloping beach toward the high dunes that for centuries have held back the Atlantic.
Everything about the bather conveys strength and purpose. No longer a girl but magnificently mature, tautly muscled yet lithe, a closely cropped cap of ash-blond hair sleekly framing large eyes, high cheekbones, faintly Slavic, a generous mouth and strong jaw. As she nears the dunes the woman pauses, stoops to retrieve from the sand a big white terry robe of the sort deluxe hotels provide and then beg you not to steal. Even in the act of reaching and stooping, her magnificent body does little to suggest this is a woman of forty.
Now, the robe tossed casually over one square shoulder, and as she nears the base of a tall, rickety, steep but familiar stair leading up to a wooden walkway spanning the fragile dunes, the woman tenses, hesitates, sensing rather than seeing someone there at the top of the laddered stair in the starlit shadows.
“Hello?” the swimmer calls, not yet knowing who it is, only that it must be someone who knows her habits, knows her ways …
Then, as the other person moves for the first time, and despite the dark is recognized, the swimmer says, icily:
“Oh, it’s you…”
These are the only words spoken. The last the swimmer will ever speak, as, still naked with the robe slung, she climbs briskly, efficiently up the old stair to the top, strong hands gripping the wooden railings. Then, from above and without warning, she is hammered savagely on the top of the head by some, sort of crude club and slumps loosely, knees caving in, hands desperately gripping the rails as she teeters, trying to keep from falling to the beach below, her brain just marginally functioning, calling up not what is happening to her now but images from the past:
A small girl, blond and plump, running through Polish Town in Riverhead toward the school bus … a handsome young man in a Yale letter sweater … a television studio’s camera, red light on, focused on her … a cover of Time magazine bearing her face … the crisp feel of a newly issued stock certificate with her own name in all that lovely scrolling and engraving … a great house on Further Lane that, after so many years of striving, belongs to her …
So it all ends, just like this?
She lunges upward in an instinctive final spasm of self-survival, striking out at her attacker. But as she does, there is a savage second thrust, this time to her chest, not a clubbing blow this time but a shocking, spearing, stabbing pain. She falls, fatally wounded, backward from the stair, thudding heavily into the sand, her life’s blood ebbing, and yet with a powerful instinct to live, half-crawls, half-squirms as if doing a crude, clumsy backstroke, even as she is dying, back toward the womb of the nurturing ocean.
Then, nothing. And atop the beach stairs where the killer waited in the fog, there is no one, only an empty catwalk across the dunes leading to the faded wooden steps now stained with crimson, already turning dull brown as it dries.
* * *
Early next morning with the sun barely up, a lone vehicle, a rusted red pickup festooned with fishing poles cradled into racks on the front bumper, churns its way slowly along the damp sand of a quiet East Hampton beach, closely skirting the surf, past the big, old, weathered, shingled mansions of the rich, set high on the grassy dunes overlooking the ocean.
The fisherman, a local Bayman named Leo Brass, drives with one practiced eye on the empty beach ahead, the other on the water, seeking out the swooping and plunging and diving seabirds that will tell him precisely where the big blues and striped bass are feeding. Brass earns his money by physical labor, as a commercial fisherman, but he is an educated man, by avocation a naturalist; and often in these complicated times even he is confused by conflicting loyalties. He has been out here since three A.M. and is driving slowly, wondering whether to get out and take a leak. Three hundred yards from the Maidstone Club he sees something and hits the brakes, skidding to a stop and nimbly leaping to the sand before the pickup has stopped rolling.
It is the nude body of a woman, lying face up, dead eyes staring, at the edge of the tide, cropped hair strewn with seaweed, glistening in the low sunlight. And, oddest thing of all, from the woman’s left breast protrudes what seems to be a heavy, primitive wooden stake perhaps two feet long. In the final years of the second millennium in one of the more sophisticated enclaves of America, a woman of whom much of the country has heard and whom Leo knows, and well, has been skewered by a homemade spear. Brass kneels there at her side for an instant, looking down. He not only knows the dead woman, but knows her pierced breast as well, knows her entire body. And intimately so.
Staring down at her dead eyes, Brass licks dry lips and wonders briefly if his mouth is dry but it isn’t. Confronted by violent death, Leo Brass is shaken, but still able to spit. And does so now, into the sand in the lee of her body. He continues briefly to kneel there looking down at the dead woman. Mourning? Remembering? Or marveling how erotic her naked body looks, despite the butchery. Then, his meditations accomplished, he rises to grab his cellular phone from the truck and dial East Hampton 911.
Small fishes drawn by blood wriggle in the shallows but there are no footprints or other tracks in the sand, the ebbing predawn tide having neatly, if inconveniently, scoured the Maidstone beach. Now Leo Brass, distracted despite himself and his noted machismo, remembers that his bladder is full and he’d better urinate before the cops or anyone else comes along. There’ll be questions and people and red tape and cameras, considering the identity of the stiff. Better take a leak now. He steps to the edge of the water and unzips his jeans. As he relieves himself into the ocean, little fishes scattering in alarm, Leo looks again at the corpse. Christ, even dead she looks good. She always was a woman that took care of herself.
Some body, she had; some woman, she was. Despite himself he grins in memory.
Much of this, and more, East Hampton will learn over the next few hours and days from police reports, the eyewitness testimony of Leo Brass, a coroner’s jury, through local rumor-mongers, and from the feverish accounts of ambitious reporters on the daily tabloids and the evening news.
* * *
Not within memory had there been a capital crime on Further Lane.
Oh, a wife-beating, perhaps. Driving under the influence. The usual adulteries. Drunkenness. The enjoyment behind private and privileged walls and privet hedges of illicit drugs. A gay-bashing at Two Mile Hollow Beach, where smooth and wealthy older men cruised youngsters in Speedos. Petty theft. Unconfirmed whispers a prominent restaurateur kept a torture chamber, cells, manacles and all, in the cellar of his house. For homicide, you had to go back to 1919 when Captain Chelm came home from France after the Great War to find his lonely young wife in bed with her second cousin Ruggles, whom the Captain promptly shot.
Since then, nothing of this sort.
Which was one of many reasons why wealthy people live on Further Lane and why a distasteful real estate ad (it was soon pulled) referred to a per-acre price for land in the area as “south of the highway and north of a million,” and why what happened last September on the sand east of the Maidstone Club shattered so many innocent (more or less) illusions.
SIX
A stake of sharpened privet driven through her cold heart …
The dead woman was Hannah Cutting.
For the first day or so, on Sunday and Labor Day, I took only neighborly, personal interest in what happened. Not professional. There was local shock at having a violent death at our door
steps; more general shock that the victim was such a celebrated person. TV and newspaper reporters swarmed over the little resort town, complicating the already congested Labor Day weekend traffic and aggravating townspeople. Good thing my old man and his Nordic “housekeeper” were going off to Europe and wouldn’t be back until next month; traffic jams in East Hampton were to him an especial irritant. He’d barely tolerated the annual Hampton Classic horse show, which ended September first. And that was miles away in Bridgehampton! And soon the damned film festival would begin. Although I did no digging into the case and had only a normal curiosity, having been at Hannah’s home mere hours before her death, I was instinctively and by reflex starting to gather information. Reporters are like that.
Fleshing out fevered accounts in the press, my primary source was a detective named Tom Knowles, a boyhood chum (we split when I went off to Harvard and Tom joined the Marines) who was now a plainclothesman on the small East Hampton P.D. and was professionally irritated that one of the town’s rare homicides had been taken over (force majeure!) by Suffolk County with its sizable and quite competent homicide squad. Knowles realized this made sense but he was nonetheless, as he admitted to old pals like me, slightly pissed. You get someone murdered in a small town, the town cops want a piece of it. Especially a man like Tom who single-handedly had taken on and knocked down Leo Brass in the company of numerous and pugnacious Baymen and brought him in to be booked for mischief against Simon Krantz and his contentious dock. Knowles liked Brass more than he liked the wine baron but the law was the damned law. Tom was the sort of fellow you might cast to play Inspector Harry Callahan if you couldn’t get Eastwood, only half Eastwood’s age but every bit as much “Dirty Harry,” tall, rawboned, hard, handsome, and with a deep voice that came out of his scrotum. Someone once said of Tom’s look, “even his cheekbones have cheekbones.”
A good cop besides, and, as I say, pissed. Which made him, for me, an even better source.
To start with, according to Knowles and others who knew the situation, there was nothing suspicious about Hannah’s taking a midnight swim. When the water was warm, as it is in late summer, she often swam way out, at night and alone. A good swimmer. Whatever happened to her occurred after she was back on land. Second thing? She must have known her attacker and well since she was apparently naked, carrying her robe, when confronted, and yet had made no evident attempt to cover up or flee. There were two blows. Hannah was walloped over the head, said the cop, which stunned and may have knocked her out. That was all. Didn’t finish her. The lethal blow came shortly after, a deep stab wound to her right breast penetrating to the heart. That’s what killed Hannah Cutting.
The odd thing? The weapon was heavy and blunt but it was also sharp, a sturdy length of privet hedge honed and fashioned at one end into a crude but quite deadly spear. The blow to the head, which apparently came first, stunning Hannah, must have been made by the thick handle end of the stake. Which, following swiftly on, had been turned around for that killing spear wound to her breast. Any prints? Anything offering DNA labels? No, said Knowles, the attacker had worn gloves, but the police thought the attacker, from the angle of penetration, might have been left-handed.
Maybe not, I remarked, he might have worn a left-handed glove to avoid leaving prints, and therefore had to use his left hand.
When Tom looked dubious, I said:
“All kinds of folk wear two gloves in summer, people who garden, genteel old Episcopalian ladies, that sort of person. But then there are right-handed ballplayers and right-handed golfers, both of them wearing a single left-hand glove. Unless it’s one of Mort Zuckerman’s softball team, I’d look for a golfer.”
“Harvard,” muttered Knowles in disgust, hating to have civilians offering theories. I enjoyed needling him and suspected I’d scored.
What else? He shook his head in posthumous admiration:
“Beech, that Hannah was something. First the knockout shot to the head, then the puncture wound right through her, and she was still alive.”
Being a Marine, and a cop, Tom Knowles admired toughness.
The victim, not accepting the undeniable clinical fact she was already dead, had refused to die, but had squirmed away on her back, that ghastly spear protruding from her body, only to make it all the way to the water’s edge and then to die, but not easily. An extraordinary feat, Tom admitted, considering that second blow, the stab wound, might have killed anyone almost instantly. But she’d not died, not just yet. Or had she been dragged dying, maybe by the hair, down to the water by the killer? Tom suggested that possibility as well. No footprints, unfortunately. An ebbing flood tide had seen to that.
“Hannah Cutting’s hair is cropped short,” I protested.
“Enough there to get a hold on it,” Knowles persisted, then, “You covering this story, Beech?”
No. And I wasn’t. That was the truth. A day or so later it wouldn’t be true but I never lied to Tom. Not then, not ever.
The newspapers and the tabloid TV shows were, understandably, out of their minds. A glamorous and famous woman of enormous wealth, style, and power, widely admired and recognized, fiercely controversial in some quarters, had been found stark naked and murdered on the sands of America’s most elegant beach resort, a wooden stake (as one overstimulated headline writer put it) “driven through her cold heart!”
The press reported the facts amid wild tales of vengeance, feuds, sexual license, plots and rumors of black magic, and (nothing was too far a reach for headline writers at the New York Post) “orgies among the de-beached and rich.”
The briefly most fevered theory featured allegations of devil worship, voodoo rituals, and, yes, that favorite of sexually heated gothics, the Black Mass. Here was a female victim, stripped naked and spread-eagled (not so, said the cops!), pierced by a clearly phallic device, the sharpened wooden stake; and wasn’t Hannah, after all, a lapsed Roman Catholic? And weren’t the Hamptons officially (and famously so) part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Center? What could be more obvious? There was talk the bishop was in confidential contact with the Jesuits and might summon an exorcist.
An illegal Haitian immigrant, meanwhile, employed in nearby Wainscott by a sod-laying firm, was arrested and closely questioned as to his whereabouts the night of the crime, and his belongings thoroughly ransacked for beheaded chickens and other possible clues to voodoo practices and unspeakable acts. Once the poor man proved to have an alibi, he was swiftly re-arrested by immigration authorities and hustled off. The immigration people hate to let a live one get away.
Almost as exotically, according to detective Tom Knowles, the local Indian Jesse Maine headed the list of suspects, having recently and quite loudly been fired as a handyman by the dead woman on her complaint that he’d used her own personal bathroom while working around the house. Hannah, a housekeeping fanatic, had flown into a powerful rage. Jesse, with quite a rap sheet for drunkenness and violent behavior, was overheard by several reliable witnesses threatening to “get back at” Ms. Cutting. But Jesse hadn’t yet been charged. He was a popular figure on the nearby Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton and the authorities didn’t want an “incident” especially this weekend, the annual Labor Day Reservation Pow Wow that drew thousands of spectators and hundreds of Indians from other Eastern tribes.
“Bringing in Jesse during Pow Wow would be like busting the Pope Easter Sunday at Solemn High Mass in Vatican City,” Knowles had said.
Another thing about Jesse, he and detective Knowles and I all played ball together (against the angry and trouble-making Leo Brass) in one of the Hampton summer leagues when we were kids. Tom was the fastest of us, Jesse maybe the strongest, Brass the loudest, and I also played.
Jesse the Shinnecock, like most of his tribe, was of decidedly mixed blood. “I’m seventy-five percent black, one hundred percent mean, and I’m all Shinnecock,” he was fond of boasting when in drink.
But he was hardly the only possible killer.
Hannah had her enemies. Half the people in town had reasons to dislike her; with the other half, she “got along.” Since for five years I’d been away, returning only briefly on home leave or summer holidays for family reasons, Knowles’s narrative became for me a sort of personal “Greek chorus,” not only in regard to Hannah’s death, but on recent changes here in the little town where both of us spent some or all of our youth. The Knowleses were old East Hampton and of modest means; the Stowes old East Hampton and well-off.
“No one resents the old families, Beech, for having a few bucks. It’s the new bunch, the carpetbaggers, the actors and rock stars and Wall Street arbs, the fashion designers and hairdressers, this latest swami with his patter about Rosicrucians, about Merlin and mystic numbers. They arrive here and start to throw their weight around and treat blue-collar types like me as picturesque local color, as if we were part of the scenery, sent here by central casting for their amusement. Billy Joel, now, he’s swell. But that Sting, he’ll look right through you. I encountered him one day on Main Street and said hello.”
“And?”
“He nodded, smiled, and called me ‘My man.’”
Hannah Cutting was New Money but was also old East End, from Riverhead, and that confused people; they didn’t know quite how to react to Hannah. As for motive, there were plenty who hated her guts. Tom Knowles tugged out of a seersucker jacket pocket a narrow spiral notebook such as good cops, and good reporters, carry, and checking his notes, he read them for me, ticking off the usual suspects:
Max Victor, Hannah’s former partner, sloughed off when she sold herself and the company to the Japanese. Victor was paid millions but not the fortune he believed he was owed; he drank and had an unhealthy letch for unsuitably young women; was still resentful and rarely referred to his ex-partner except as “that bitch;”
Hannah’s former husband, Andy Cutting, the product of aristocratic if tired loins, wearer of the old school tie but these days a nonentity celebrated largely for having once shared Hannah’s bed. He’d long ago been dumped by Hannah and had been sliding downhill ever since;