by James Brady
Her East Hampton nemesis and neighbor, the very WASP (authentically so; she didn’t marry into it as Hannah did!) Pam Phythian, a doe-eyed, Aztec-profiled, lean, athletic woman about Hannah’s age who was particularly offended by Hannah’s alpine grandstanding: “Everest, Everest, Everest,” wailed Pam, “you’d think she was Tenzing Norkay!,” naming the Sherpa who accompanied Edmund Hillary on that first ascent. Pam and Hannah had been fellow members of an Everest expedition that ended tragically with eight alpinists dead. The traumatized Pam hadn’t climbed since while an apparently insensitive Hannah was planning another Everest assault. Once climbers on the same rope, relations between these two savvy, powerful women had soured into viciousness. Hannah moved onto Further Lane five years ago, Pam’s family had been there for five generations (one set of cousins spelled the name “Fithian”), and the two strong, attractive women were now at the point of scheduling competing dinner parties, backing rival charities, arguing over whether their commonly bordering privet should be trimmed back and by how much. If Pam played for the Artists in the annual Softball game behind the A & P, Hannah volunteered for the Writers’ team. But would a perfectly respectable woman kill over such trivial things?
You jest! Of course she might. Or so I told myself.
Pam was hardly the only one out here who hated Hannah. A famous, flamboyant interior designer, Roger Dafoe, whose stock in trade plummeted when Hannah on her TV show critiqued his finest work as “boasting all the elegance of an OTB parlor”; Hideo (Hideous) Hegel, who lost face with his superiors in Tokyo, the Seven Samurai, because of Hannah’s never-ending, and to them, insulting and arrogant demands;
A brawling bayman Hannah once accused of molesting her in a local restaurant. “Hell, her jeans were painted on and I gave her a little pat on the ass. How’d I know she was Hannah friggin’ Cutting?”;
Boobie Vander, a covergirl recently dropped by Hannah from her TV commercial and endorsement contract, a costly and unpleasant blow made even more painful with Hannah’s widely repeated reference to Boobie as “having a few miles on her odometer”;
Stringer, the big television CEO, who only Saturday evening suggested Bill Paley would have had the woman “bumped off” for dealing traitorously;
Hannah’s grown daughter, Claire, whom she patronized and bullied (and who might have good reason to welcome her mother’s death);
And even the Bayman who discovered her body, Leo Brass. He and Hannah were at opposite ends of the environmental debate clashing only last spring over composting rules (he lived off but cared about nature; she enjoyed and exploited it). And Leo had an arrogance to match her own.
Plus former lovers and people Hannah Cutting used, abused, and climbed over on her way to the top of the ladder. Even the summer’s pet swami, having been snubbed, carried a grudge.
There may have been other suspects at this stage unknown to the police or to anyone else, including me. And a few in Tom’s notebook, like Boobie Vander, turned out to have been on entirely different continents when Hannah climbed that old wooden stair to meet her killer. But had we cast nets sufficiently wide? Where was PR woman Peggy Siegal that night, Peggy, the “flack from Hell”? Where, too, Claudia Cohen? Had she an alibi? What of Senator D’Amato himself, a Long Islander by birth and breeding? Where were Mikey and Mickey the night Hannah bought it? As far as I was concerned, and considering all the people who fought with or disliked or envied Hannah, just about every single one of us was a suspect but Brooke Astor, who already had everything Hannah ever wanted, and who rarely if ever came to the Hamptons.
This was what caught at the sleeve of imagination and piqued the curiosity of so many of us: Who killed Hannah Cutting and why?
SEVEN
People who live here think themselves special, touched by the hand of God …
By Tuesday morning the long holiday weekend had ended and East Hampton was emptying out, frustrating the homicide detectives. Streisand was back in L.A., Martha Stewart in Connecticut, Donna Karan on her way to Lyon and Zurich to buy fabric for the new collection. Demi was on location somewhere. Others scattered this way and that. My own father would be off that very day for Norway and the salmon beat he’d taken on the Merdal, and his annual tour of the parishes, Copenhagen, Paris, London. How do you force rich and famous people to stay around to be questioned simply because they knew her or she attended the victim’s last cocktail party?
The answer, you don’t.
Also, by Tuesday morning, I was no longer merely one of the loitering curious, my summer-long idyll ended. By Tuesday, I was on assignment, covering the Hannah Cutting story.
Anderson phoned early that morning from his office at Parade on Third Avenue in Manhattan. The editor, aimiable but firm, told me to shelve the several assignments we discussed. “Right now, Hannah Cutting’s our story. You’re out there, you knew the woman, you attended her last party, you know the setting and the cast of characters. You probably know most of the suspects. Her death is pure melodrama; it’s her whole life that fascinates people. Who was Hannah? How did a poor girl become a millionaire? Where did she come up with the idea for that first bestseller, The Taste Machine?”
And, the editor wanted most to know, “How did Hannah Cutting get to Further Lane?”
Anderson cut his teeth as a general assignment reporter for the Gannett newspapers and he knew cops solve murders; reporters don’t. He didn’t want me chasing clues and grilling suspects but finding out the truth—not about her death—but about the living Hannah Cutting.…
“You own this story, Beecher,” Walter Anderson growled cheerfully as he hung up, a softspoken man, but you could sense the iron beneath, which left me feeling rather like that anonymous little reporter in Citizen Kane dispatched by his boss to find out about Rosebud.
By now, the television crews had gone back to town and the print reporters were reduced to haunting the Suffolk County DA’s regional office in Southampton, waiting for news and trying to goad someone, anyone, into making an arrest. Why couldn’t the cops just go in there and grab that goddamned drunken Indian Jesse Maine right out of his wigwam? Touch off a riot? Well, yeah, maybe. But, hell! A famous woman’s dead and no one’s been charged! Riot’s a small price to pay. Besides, when did Indians last riot? This is Long Island, not the Little Bighorn. And if it came down to that, an Indian uprising might turn out to be an even better story, Wounded Knee and all that.…
There was a brief flurry of excitement when Hannah’s ex-partner Max Victor was arrested for allegedly groping a young woman sitting next to him on the Hampton Jitney. Ever since Hannah, damn her!, sold the company out from under Max, he hadn’t had much luck. She was his curse, it seemed. And now this … when he’d barely touched the girl’s leg reaching for his book, a biography of Jane Austen, for God’s sake.
Preliminary autopsy results were released. The knock on the head caused concussion; the stab would killed Hannah. And. Torn Knowles told me, they were learning more about that primitive spear. Not only was it privet wood, carved to a dangerous point, but it was carefully hardened by flame, having been turned over a charcoal fire. Privet hedge? Charcoal? Not much of a clue there; in an East Hampton summer you could hardly turn around without encountering both. The place was a-crawl with barbecue fires and lush green hedge.
But why kill with a spear in the East Hampton of the nineties? Silly, and stereotypical, but it nudged me toward starting the Parade magazine assignment with Jesse Maine. Not that my father thought it a very good idea.
“Why not have a talk with Leo Brass? I don’t have to tell you he’s a violent, difficult man, and he did find the body. Used to throw the javelin, didn’t he? Jesse’s okay, Beecher. Watch yourself when he’s been drinking and watch yourself around Leo period. Just because they both know boats and water and hunting and fishing better than you, don’t get carried away with a romantic notion you’re dealing with noble savages. Noble they can be but savage they are. Be sure you know whether it’s Jekyll or Hyde up to bat that morn
ing.” Those were the only warnings my father included in a brief farewell address before being driven to JFK for his flight to Oslo.
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 Evan
s 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.