by James Brady
“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…”
Leo, doing his “Yankee Doodle Dandy” act, was prancing and singing the entire length of the bar and then out the saloon door and onto the Sag Harbor pike, where cars swerved to avoid accidents and honked in alarm.
“I’m asleep, LaRuffa. Tell me tomorrow.”
But lying abed I could see Leo in my drunken, drowsy mind’s eye. And in ways wished I were there. Leo had talents and commanded loyalties few men have. Or deserve. For all his university education, he was pushy and obnoxious, grabbing a CPA by the lapels and lecturing him about accountancy. Or an engineer just back from building a railroad in Lapland, with Leo informing him why the ties these days were cast concrete rather than wood. Or telling a veteran police detective he knew nothing of law enforcement. One night a visitor from South Africa was at The Grill, an actual white hunter, and before the evening was over Leo Brass was instructing the man in the correct method of stalking wildebeest.
Much powerful grabbing and yanking of shirtfronts and lapels accompanied all of this, even when Leo was congratulating a man for the birth of a child or a killing in the market.
“By God, I’m proud of you, you son of a bitch, showing the damned bastards.”
And with the fortunate, or unfortunate, fellow, smiling his gratitude as his head was jerked back and forth, this way and that, very nearly shaken from his shoulders.
That was Leo Brass, whose specialty at bars was telling people they were full of shit. And occasionally throwing people across the room.
Claire Cutting came back now and I took my drink and went to her, pushing past people.
“Claire, it’s me, Beecher Stowe. I was at your mother’s last party and I wonder if we might…”
I didn’t get very far. Nor did the “fight,” such as it was, last very long. Claire’s friends were young, tough, and muscular. Also very protective. Especially the Bayman who didn’t like Hannah very much and, coincidentally, had found her body. Now here was Leo Brass “protecting” her daughter. Two or three other locals broke it up before Brass and I got very far. “Beecher’s no snooper. He grew up here. Hell, he’s as Bonac as any of us…”
“Bonac” meant you belonged. Short for Accabonac, an old East Hampton Indian word. True “Bonackers” were born here. “Bonac against the world, bub!” That was the popular local slogan and some of these boys took it seriously. And belligerently. But then, Leo didn’t have to be told who I was. He knew very well. We’d played ball as boys, fought as teens, feinted and maneuvered, had drinks together on occasion, yet didn’t even pretend to be friends.
With Leo Brass you got a mixed message: intelligence and good looks melded to behavior you might have expected from a redneck in Deliverance. And it was Leo whom my father suggested I question first about Hannah’s death, my father, who’d spent a lifetime gathering intelligence, assessing and analyzing, and then imparted his knowledge to men who commanded task forces and air fleets, who oversaw our national security.
Tom Knowles said Brass and Hannah had fought, and recently. The clash was over an issue that could only have occurred in East Hampton. She’d accused Leo of clandestinely introducing half-grown and voracious snapping turtles into hers and other ponds in the village to eat the ducklings that were fouling the bottoms with their excrement (more delicate folk preferred the term guano), thus encouraging the growth of stifling algae.
On the other hand, Tom said, Hannah was hardly a local heroine, and who gave a damn what she thought? Brass was to some a charismatic figure, a persuasive, even spellbinding speaker, and there was wild talk of running him for Congress from the East End. After all, there were Long Island people who go to Jones Beach on the Fourth of July and ever after think of themselves as outdoorsmen. Others if they’ve crossed from Orient Point to New London, Connecticut, on the car ferry, consider themselves mariners. A politically incorrect rebel like Brass might appeal to such easily convinced voters.
But these were incidental concerns; my questions d
ealt with the late Hannah Cutting. Questions I couldn’t conveniently ask right now, not with Leo & Co. sufficiently lubricated to interrupt. And brutally. Well, I told Claire Cutting, being as pragmatic as Leo Brass, “I’ll catch up to you some other time.”
Back at the gatehouse there was a voice-mail message.
“Ms. Cutting was using a laptop computer to write her book. An IBM laptop.” It was Mrs. Kroepke’s voice.
* * *
Tom Knowles and I met at The Blue Parrot. With the summer people mostly gone, Billy Joel surfaced. He didn’t like their gawking. Billy was a big hero to the East Hampton Baymen who made their living as commercial fishermen. He’d been arrested a couple of times at the Baymen’s protests over striped bass and haulseining restrictions, and local folks admired a man who’d stand up and get arrested for you. Tom and I got a table in back where we could talk and still hear Billy’s piano over by the bar.
The detective said of the people who might be considered hostile to Hannah, Suffolk Homicide had cleared about half as having alibis, solid witnesses to their whereabouts Saturday midnight. The covergirl Boobie Vander, for example, was in Paris on a shoot. Peggy Siegal was in Manhattan at a screening. Senator D’Amato was addressing an Italo-American dinner in Baltimore. Jesse Maine was still under suspicion. “But until we have a lot more, no one’s going to ignite a race riot out here, Beech.” I was tempted to enter Leo Brass’s name in nomination as a leading suspect, the bastard, just to get back at him. But my father wouldn’t have approved. He and Harvard were ethically opposed to bearing false witness so I didn’t. Princeton or Notre Dame might shilly-shally; Harvard didn’t! Instead, I said I was going up to Riverhead, to the East End’s Polish Town, where Hannah came from, where she grew up, searching for roots. Knowles was skeptical but gave me the name of the parish priest and a couple of other people I might see. “If what you’re really after is her story and not solving murders, that’s where you start, Beecher.”
I guess Tom was still suspicious as to my motives. Funeral arrangements hadn’t yet been announced and the body hadn’t been released. There were questions and her next of kin, Claire Cutting, wasn’t being particularly helpful. Was her mother Catholic as she had been as a child? Episcopalian, as she seemed defensively to have suggested in interviews? Jewish? She was too damned smart and successful not to be, or so it was said by the usual local anti-Semites. The coroner was still doing tests. No drugs found, only the alcohol that might have been explained by a drink or two. No more. She was dead before breaking waves washed over her; no water in the lungs. What did all this mean?
We talked a bit about the death weapon, “Jesse Maine says privet’s a dumb wood to use, that it’s too soft.”
“Maybe that’s the reason it was sharpened, hardened up over flame,” the cop said. What sort of person would use a stake or a spear to kill? It was noted that Leo Brass was once a champion javelin thrower. Yes, but …
God, this was crazy, arguing about wooden spears and javelin-throwing in the final years of the millennium. As we spoke, I kept seeing Hannah’s trim, strong, handsome body and imagined how it looked now, cold and dead and carved upon, on the morgue’s cutting tables, slid in and out of the refrigerated lockers for yet another chill session under the scalpels.
“That’s the trouble,” Tom said loudly, and a waitress turned.
“What?” I asked.
It wasn’t just that Jesse was a hothead and Brass a troublemaker and Hannah Cutting a pain in the ass, the detective said.
“East Hampton wasn’t like this when we were kids.” There were all these local frictions and stresses that had become potentially dangerous, according to which side of the argument you were on. What to do about the thousands of Canada geese who spent all autumn and winter shitting on the Maidstone fairways? What about hungry turtles munching and gnawing on downy little ducklings? A petition to ban those noisy leaf blowers, for another example? Which led, inevitably, to the famous snobbery, not by one of our more prominent Bourbons but by Hannah Cutting, now endlessly repeated over cocktails, that leaves and cut grass shouldn’t be blown away by raucous machine but raked by hand:
“That’s why we have Guatemalans,” Hannah declared wickedly, “to rake lawns.”
People took offense, Tom said, and who knew what Hannah, notoriously acid-tongued, had additionally said or who else she had angered? Was it Hannah, or six other people, who remarked there were really any number of Hamptons: East, South, Bridgehampton, Westhampton, Beach Hampton? And then there was that lovely, verdant stretch between Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor where a number of black families lived:
“Lionel Hampton.”
In her defense, that’s what their neighborhood was being called by the blacks themselves who lived there. Okay for local blacks to make jokes; not for the rest of us. WASPs are allowed to twit WASPs; Catholics, Catholics; Jews, Jews. In a time of correctness, if you weren’t black you didn’t do Amos and Andy routines or spoof a black this side of Rev. Farrakhan.
Racism? Snobbery? Elitism? Probably all of the above. East Hampton was still a town where you weren’t considered to belong until there was a village lane bearing your family name.
There was one odd sidebar item. In Manhattan, at an East Village gay club, Knowles reported, a man named Roger Dafoe had been arrested for getting into a minor scuffle with another guest. Nothing would have come of it had Dafoe not made something of an ass of himself, claiming he was on a party to celebrate the death on Long Island of a woman named … Hannah Cutting. The first cop on the scene, accustomed to drunken hair-pulling in Greenwich Village joints like this one, ignored the man’s boozy babble. A second cop, more alert, recognized Hannah’s name. A famous woman, recently done to death. And of whose death by stake of privet hedge he called out with evident glee, was “so very East Hampton!” They pulled him in and held Dafoe overnight on vague but plausible charges and in the morning, when he was sober, he was questioned.
“And?”
“Dafoe admitted he hated the woman, that she’d damaged his reputation and hurt his business, and came up with some sleazy stuff about her early career that he claimed included an exotic stint as ‘Madame Hannah, all fetishes explored.’ Beyond that, he claimed not to know what the police were talking about. Must have been drunk, he said. And seemed able to produce on demand responsible witnesses who would swear to an alibi. Most of them attractive young men.”
Billy Joel was still playing the piano when I got out of there.
NINE
Of course you think I’m beautiful. Everyone does …
September in the Hamptons is grand, the best time.
Hot, sunny days, warm ocean, cooling evenings, the big fish running and the traffic gone, the season’s first football on the tube, and it was terrific being back here in September after five years. Even if Anderson had put me right to work. Living in Europe was wonderful, beyond all telling. And then September came along and you remembered a place like East Hampton existed.
I was sprawled the next morning on a battered old chaise out on the lawn of the gatehouse in a faded denim workshirt and knee-length khaki shorts that had once been respectable, reading the Times and having a second cup when the phone rang in the kitchen. The voice, even with the lousy connection, was like bells.
“I’m at Exit Sixty-one on the Long Island Expressway on my cell phone, Mr. Stowe. How do I get there from here? My name’s Alix Dunraven and I work for Harry Evans. Who sent me out here on a vital mission and who, incidentally, practically sends love…”
The connection faded in and out, and above it, the roar of speeding traffic didn’t help nor did a persistent static that sounded like a dog’s yipping but I was too stunned for rational objections and by reflex went ahead and gave this unknown woman the directions. About an hour later a very cool old E-type Jaguar convertible, British racing green with its tan top down, crunched onto my gravel and skidded to an elegantly competent stop. It was piloted by a young woman with her long dark hair up in a
silk scarf to keep from blowing and with what I already knew to be brilliant blue eyes hidden behind the latest in shades:
Crossman the billionaire’s girl from Hannah’s party!
I chose to ignore the silver gray miniature poodle sitting next to her on the front seat, regarding me as if I’d been whistled up for its amusement and curious to know when I’d begin the performance, rolling over and begging for dog biscuits.
She (the young woman, not the dog) got out of the car, wearing a sensibly full-skirted midcalf silk dress of some summery floral design or other and gave me a brisk handshake. I’d not quite gotten her name over the static and she gave it again.
“Dunraven, Alix Dunraven. Mr. Evans provided me your name and number. I’ve been dog-sitting for an absent chum and had to fetch Mignonne along. I don’t even like dogs all that much; un-English, I know. But she’s been awfully decent about it so far, one must admit, hasn’t bitten me or tossed up in the car or anything. She seems quite smitten with me. Are you a dog man yourself?”
I scowled, or tried to. It was hard with someone who looked like Alix Dunraven.
Defensively, she shrugged, as if slightly ashamed to have admitted she didn’t like dogs all that well, being a Brit.
Mr. Evans, she said, had urged her to call upon me as sort of a repository of all useful information East Hampton might have to offer, as if I were not only Harry’s best and closest friend but a one-man Michelin guide to the place and its delights. I barely knew Evans but didn’t argue the toss, just standing there, listening to her rattle on in that husky Belgravia drawl, enjoying how the easy morning breeze blew the silk dress, rustling it gently against her long, slender body. As she suggested, even the dog seemed infatuated by her and made no fuss at all. As to how I felt about Alix Dunraven, I guess it showed in my face. She gave an impatiently tolerant half smile, her attitude toward me, toward the world, being pretty much: