Further Lane

by James Brady

  “She’s actually the property of a chum of mine, a French woman who works at the UN as a translator. We’ve Manhattan apartments in the same building and she had a stroke of luck when her married boyfriend was dispatched to Bermuda for a week on business and used his frequent flyer miles to take her along instead of his wife. And please, Beecher (this to me rather than to Roland, who hadn’t the foggiest what she was talking about), don’t ask me to justify the morality of all that. At Oxford, ethics was not my strong suit (then, once again addressing and bestowing enormous charm on Roland), but there I was caught up in this gripping situation, though ethically dubious I quite agree with Roland, and this dog was at hazard. So I was stuck minding a poodle. And then my employer dispatched me to East Hampton and along she came. Barely know the animal, actually, and I’m stunned at this untoward aggression on her part.”

  Alix again bestowed her most winning of smiles on Roland. “Mignonne and Mr. Stowe, for example, get along smashingly. Perhaps because they’re both unusually articulate in French, as you know.”

  This was not precisely the truth since the dog had already bitten me once, and growled occasionally, but I bought another round and when it seemed evident Little Bit wasn’t mortally injured and about to expire, Roland was soon back to his usual cordial self. Then Lee bought a round, as owner, which also didn’t hurt. And Kelly Klein came in (without Calvin) and she and another very attractive blond woman took stools at the bar and ordered daiquiris and that lent a little chic to the place. Alix helped, as well, putting herself out a bit to make up for Mignonne’s savagery, leaning forward on her forearms at the bar, providing Roland with both her dazzling smile and a suggestion of cleavage.

  Talk about a double first.

  Then, in an unconsciously inspired moment as Roland went off to tend to other clients, she said, “Since I can’t get anyone in East Hampton to point me even vaguely in the direction of the missing manuscript, I thought I might just go see the richest people in town, one after another, door to door like a salesman, starting at the top and working my way down to mere millionaires. Hannah Cutting’s people, the Krocpkes, are very decent folk but they’re servants. Don’t dare give too much to a snooper like myself. Won’t even tell me if she were typing the story or scribbling it longhand on foolscap. Nor should they, out of sheer loyalty to their patronne. Not at all. Can’t blame them a whit, but rich people, with no sworn allegiance to Hannah, why should they care? They’re the ones who might just possibly put me on to the whereabouts of Hannah’s manuscript. It’s the rich who always know where the body is buried, don’t they?”

  “You’re the rich one; you ought to know.”

  “Oh, rubbish, we’ve all those titles and honours and a little land (Daddy’s place in Berkshire, Kingston Mere, was on forty-five hundred acres, I’d read somewhere), but no real money. It’s why I’m a working girl.”

  Her idea sounded dumb. Or so I told Alix. But why not?

  “Tony Godwin laureates are not ‘dumb.’ We may be drunk or perverse or debauched or other things but rarely dumb.”

  I was enjoying needling so I ordered another round and asked, “Have you ever actually edited a full-blown book?”

  “Scads of them.”

  “Name one recent book I might have heard of.”

  “A brilliant account of the East India Company by an historian named Fellowes. It’s all about…”

  “I know, I know, Clive of India and ‘The Mutiny’ and all that. We’re not totally uneducated here, y’know.”

  “Well, indeed you are. There’s much more to it than that. Did you know, for example, that Elihu Yale, the man who financed Yale University, made his bundle trading in spices as a representative of the East India Company?”

  Well, now that was interesting intelligence for a Harvard man to have, with the new football season coming on.

  “No, I always suspected there was some sort of shady business about it, being Yale and all, but no, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, it’s a thrilling story and I commend it highly to you. Lots of gore, as well, skirmishes and full-rigged battles and the most gruesome of tortures, the Dutch, surprisingly, being especially fiendish! Native cruelties as well. One poor ship’s captain was nailed to a log by the locals and sent floating downriver to be eaten by crocs. That sort of thing.”

  Alix looked inordinately pleased at the prospect, perhaps imagining me stapled to that dreadful log.

  But I didn’t say so; instead, I paid for the drinks. Fobbing her off with some sort of plausible excuse, I shamelessly co-opted her “dumb” idea of dropping in on the rich and asking questions and headed for Further Lane. After all, I wasn’t getting very far, either, and who knew how long Mr. Anderson’s patience with me might run? Nor did I bother to reveal what I knew and she and Random House didn’t, that Hannah’s computer had been scoured, that there was nothing there. Nor would I have to go door to door looking for the rich or start with the As and go through to the Zs. There were plenty of rich people out here and I knew most of them.

  I was concealing what little I knew from her and she was surely concealing from me whatever Evans had given her. Did either of us know much yet? Were we even being especially clever? Probably not.

  My real edge was that I knew, and she didn’t, which of those rich people were here twenty-five years ago when young Hannah Shuba first appeared on Further Lane; and that she worked for but one of their families. I could start with them, with the people she actually worked for: start with the Warrenders, start with the head of their clan …

  But first, a little legal advice.

  SIXTEEN

  A possible chairman of the Fed if Greenspan ever left …

  Plenty of lawyers live in East Hampton, weekends and summers. But they hang their profitable shingles on buildings in Manhattan. There are only a dozen or so lawyers listed in the yellow pages as practicing in East Hampton. Two of them, deliriously, located on Muchmore Lane. I was after Judge Henty.

  “I’m not practicing anymore, Mr. Stowe,” he told me courteously. “Retired three years ago.”

  The Judge (he’d been a town magistrate and the title was accepted as honorific but he liked to be addressed that way and was a genial old soul, so why not?) had been the lawyer for the people who sold Hannah Cutting her Further Lane estate in 1990. As we sat in big wicker chairs on the broad shaded verandah of his frame house on Lily Pond Lane, he told me what he recalled of the closing.

  “The Warrenders didn’t want the house anymore, not since the old lady, Royal’s mother, passed away. Royal had his own place nearby. Jasper had a place. Horace lived in California and the girls were off married. And the market was good so the agents found a buyer easily and the estate asked me to handle the closing. Hannah Cutting had a team of lawyers come out from Sullivan and Cromwell. We met in my offices upstairs over O’Mally’s Saloon. The price had been agreed (nine million and change as he recalled) and the whole affair should have been routine. No liens on the property. Hardly, since these were Warrenders who were selling, and Ms. Cutting clearly had money. So the thing ought to have been settled in an hour or two.”

  “Except that…?”

  “Except that Hannah showed up. None of the Warrenders did; they left it to me to represent their interests. Hannah had plenty of white-shoe firepower but she was hands-on, I can tell you, and just about drove everyone batty. If you’ve seen my old offices, they’re pretty small, spartan, too, and there was Hannah Cutting flying around that little room like a Valkyrie, picking up on and challenging every phrase, every stipulation as if she were Mr. Justice Holmes handing down precedent-setting opinions from the high bench. She found fault with the survey of the property and intimated the surveyors had been bribed to falsify property lines. Hannah dotted i’s and crossed t’s that weren’t even in there. Demanded to know why no member of the Warrender family showed up. Were they trying to pull a fast one here, staying away so later on they could assert they never agreed to this or that? If she could
take the time out to be present, busy as she was, why couldn’t they? Oh, she was a caution, she was, and I tried my best to respond but she kept cutting me off. Rudely, too. Even the Sullivan and Cromwell boys were embarrassed and she was their client. Did everything but delve into my rolltop desk in search of secret compartments and listening devices. Hannah was doing a regular Leona Helmsley bat-outa-hell imitation and a pretty good one at that. At one point threatening that unless they did a better job, she’d move disbarment proceedings against her own attorneys.”

  Why did the Judge think she was so uptight? Wasn’t this a kind of culmination for her, a splendidly triumphant moment she should have thoroughly been enjoying, sufficiently wealthy and successful to be able to pay millions to purchase a house where she once worked as a kind of servant?

  “That was the odd part of it. I don’t believe any of us knew that. She was just another New Money millionaire buying into Old Money East Hampton. Happened all the time. And customarily, the New Money folks are just delighted when they get their mitts on one of these old cottages here along Lily Pond or over there on Further. Not Hannah. Not as bitter as she was. I never did quite figure it. And I didn’t know until you just told me that she’d worked in the house years back. Must have been that. Why else would she carry on like a spoiled brat when the birthday cake was there just waiting for her to blow out the candles?”

  The Judge didn’t know; neither did L Maybe Royal Warrender could shed some light.

  His vast house perched on the dunes, a twenty-bedroom place on eight acres, the house designed by Rodolphe Daus, a Mexican architect who’d studied in Berlin and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and had put the place up in 1910, a cheerfully eclectic mix of Tudor and other mostly English architecture, 175 feet long and three stories high, with lots of stone arches and a huge stone conservatory. The thatched roof alone, when it had to be replaced several years back, cost two million dollars. The house was built by one of the robber barons of the era, Warrender’s great-grandfather, and was of a similar size and epoch as Hannah Cutting’s, built by yet another Warrender (and an architect who’d gone a decidedly different and less ornate direction than Rodolphe Daus when it came to style).

  I’d met Royal Warrender before and was able to talk my way in. His man led me through the ground floor past doors and turnings and down corridors to a bookish study. Evening, with the sun dipping from view, the final rays slanting in through mullioned windows. Curiously, for late summer, a fire burned in a hearth that must have been twelve feet across and seven or eight tall.

  “You’ve been asking questions around town,” Warrender said after gesturing me to an easy chair in the sort of soft old leather cracking slightly that you saw in good men’s clubs where members dozed with the Wall Street Journal opened but unread on their ample laps. “My cousin Jasper said you were pumping him at the Club.”

  “That’s what reporters do, Mr. Warrender.”

  “It’s no secret Jasper occasionally takes one too many.”

  “We chatted over a glass.” I was damned if I were going to let him bully me. Besides that, I was Harvard and he was only Yale. Though you don’t rub that in with your elders.

  “You’re Admiral Stowe’s boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Being deferential was okay; letting yourself be bullied was not.

  “I’d have expected manners from Beecher Stowe’s son. That sort of thing just isn’t done, even by journalists, one member of the Maidstone grilling another, especially one in his cups.”

  That drew from me a grin. Evidently Mr. Warrender knew nothing of my father’s well-earned reputation for dirty tricks on behalf of his country. “Burning and turning” was what they called it in those jolly Cold War days. My father had stories, I can tell you. The grin may have puzzled Warrender. Anyway, it stopped him from hectoring me and even got him answering a few questions.

  “So you do remember Hannah Shuba as a kid working around your parents’ place?”

  “Sure, cute kid, if it’s the same one I recall. A lot of the old families brought in local girls every summer to help out. Any number of them over the years. My mother took in one or two every summer. A help to her and a few dollars for the child. Can’t say I saw anything in Hannah that would suggest one day she’d be rich and famous. Just another pretty young girl. It says something about America that a kid who once cleaned house comes back to own it. Damned shame what happened to her…”

  Warrender, now about fifty, tall, handsome, courtly, was as powerful and admired as anyone on Further Lane, a brilliant merchant banker being considered by the Clinton White House as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve if Greenspan ever left. He was a philanthropist, a sportsman, recently widowed, a pillar of the community, a future governor of New York, perhaps, maybe one day a President. The one flaw: Royal Warrender had just undergone a tricky heart-valve operation. His doctors insisted the heart was sound; the problem was technical. Others whispered of a potentially fatal cardiac condition. I suspected his circulation, which might explain a summer fire to ward off chill. And the blanket across his lap. Or maybe it was just this huge stone pile was damp and chilly. War-render himself declined to discuss the matter during this period of recuperation and was maintaining a low profile far from Wall Street in East Hampton at his vacation home. There’d been some theorizing in the political columns that the White House, and not his doctors, wanted Warrender under wraps.

  Whatever the motivation, he didn’t give me very much beyond a few memories of a long ago summer and a cute young girl who worked for his mother. When I asked him about Judge Henty’s recollection of the closing on the house and Hannah’s odd behavior, he sloughed it off. “Wasn’t there,” he said, “and Henty never made a point of it. Not to me. We sold, she bought, and they closed. Her check didn’t bounce.” I pressed the question of Hannah’s book, and he waved a dismissive hand. “Too many celebrity autobiographies now. All that kiss and tell stuff. Cheap thrills for the crowd.”

  How did Royal Warrender know it would be “cheap thrills” and “kiss and tell”? Did he have reasons of his own for not wanting to see Hannah Cutting’s book published? When I pressed him he went along for a time and then there came a point …

  “That’s enough, Stowe.”

  “I just want to know…”

  He shook his large, handsome head. “I won’t be harassed in my own house by reporters.”

  I looked around. “I’m alone, Mr. Warrender.”

  He got to his feet now. My “wit” had not gone over.

  “This conversation is ended.”

  “I still have questions.”

  He looked hard at me.

  “Who owns Parade magazine? It’s a Newhouse property, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Advance Publications is the parent company. The Newhouse family owns Advance.”

  He nodded.

  “I know Si Newhouse. If I must, I’ll give him a call.”

  “Lots of people call reporters’ bosses to complain, Mr. Warrender. Usually, it doesn’t work.”

  “I’m not ‘lots of people,’ Stowe.”

  We shook hands and I left, the implicit threat hanging behind me on the genteel air.

  Fine, my first assignment for Anderson at Parade and I’d ticked off one of the most admired and influential men in the country. His threats were quietly, politely put, of course, but given Warrender’s power, no less real. I fell back on the old reporter’s consolation that, well, this is the work we do, getting the news, raising hell, discomfitting the comfortable.

  But for the next few times the phone rang, I thought, “Uh, oh, here it comes.”

  SEVENTEEN

  She’s not our sort, not our sort at all …

  Next stop, Pam Phythian, the quintessential East Hampton clubwoman who didn’t even bother to be polite about her locally famous feuding with Hannah.

  When I pulled up in the driveway of her place and parked alongside the tennis court, she was just finishing a game. Pam and another tall fit wom
an in proper whites were hitting the ball hard, running hard, the September sun glistening off them as they worked up an honest sweat. After a particularly well-played point (the other woman won it with a backhand), I applauded.

  “Who’s that…? Beecher Stowe?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I can come back later.”

  “No, we’re finished. Martha’s beat up on me sufficiently for one morning.”

  That was the first time I’d met Martha Stewart, taller than I expected. More relaxed, as well. I’d heard of her as something of a control freak. Instead, I got a crisp handshake and a good smile. After she and Pam had exchanged air kisses, Martha drove off and Pam slung a towel around her neck. We sat on old unpainted Adirondack chairs on the lawn next to the court and talked about Hannah.

  “What can I tell you, Beecher? I disliked her intensely. Not our sort at all. Symptomatic of developments here in the village I don’t like. Every year there are fewer people like us, more people like … them.”

  “You mean, like Hannah.”

  “Yes. And don’t tell me I’m being a snob; I know I am. It’s snobbery and tradition and playing by the rules that distinguish people who belong here from those who don’t. Because I was brought up playing the game, I’m a pretty fair tennis player. Hannah couldn’t play worth a damn. But she was so intent on getting good she hired the Maidstone’s pro to tutor her privately and paid out thousands for one of those ball-throwing machines they have at the Club called—”

  “I know, a SAM. Twenty-five thousand bucks. Claire told me.”

  “Well, then, you know what I’m talking about. If I got up a committee to raise money for new elm plantings on Main Street she’d counter by announcing an AIDS benefit. Or a hospice of some sort. Or a petition advocating mixed-race adoption. Didn’t matter what the cause. Or even if she believed in it. When some of us signed petitions against that new A & P, Hannah decided a superstore was just what the village needed. It was as if having scaled East Hampton, she had to kick everyone else off the summit. She’s like that on an actual mountain; I’ve seen her. I talked the organizers into letting her join that Everest climb and I’ve regretted it ever since. Hannah drew up her own set of rules, never seemed to have heard of team play.”