by James Brady
“Well, she’d made it on her own pretty much.”
“She had a Cutting for a husband. That’s hardly…”
“You know Andy as well as I do, Pam. He’s not all that much—”
“At least he’s a gentleman. She’s no lady. Or, wasn’t.”
I was about to respond, “He’s a drunk.” But why? Then Pam said, still furious:
“I suppose we’re all in that book of hers. Getting back at everyone she ever envied and resented. Shocking to think a fine old publisher like Random House would stoop to…”
I wanted to hear more about that, about Hannah’s book, but Pam was focused on another irritant, obsessively so, returning again and again to the matter of competing cocktail parties.
“Hannah began harassing me socially about two years ago. If I asked people to come by for Saturday drinks, casual wear, she’d schedule a cocktail the very same day and hour, but specify cocktail dress. If I threw a more formal affair, she asked people to party al fresco in Bermuda shorts. Since we were inviting some of the same people, it forced guests to change uniform in mid-cocktail so to speak, to make choices, to side with me or with her. Caused difficulties, friction among friends, between husbands and wives. She did it just to be difficult and didn’t seem to care whether anyone enjoyed the parties or not.”
I mentioned I’d been to her last party and she picked up on it.
“No one minds that her parties were noisier or boozier or even if they involved sex, if that’s what went on. Our Maidstone Club crowd does very well on that sort of thing itself. It was the class of people she attracted. And that the wrong people were always taking off their clothes. You don’t mind sin; you do care about manners.”
That was about all I got out of her, that apparently everyone knew about Hannah’s book. Other than that, Pam Phythian hadn’t been much help. Oh, but she was bitter. It surprised me that Hannah had gotten under her skin to that extent. A Phythian ought to be above it all, not getting down into the gutter with an arriviste like Hannah. There must have been more to it than competing benefits and scaling Himalayas. Pam and Hannah were about the same age and both were physical, attractive women.
A man?
Or had something happened on Everest when those people died that Pam blamed Hannah for, even now? Or had it been Hannah who blamed Pam and might have been about to do it publicly in a best-selling book?
* * *
On the strength of her thoroughbred bloodlines I took Her Ladyship to dinner at Jerry Delia Femina’s restaurant on the water, the one with the five-meter Olympic racing sailboat moored right there inside the bar, fully rigged, sheets and mainmast and all. We took her car, the Jag, after she sort of sniffed at my Chevy Blazer. Hell, it couldn’t hurt my reputation around East Hampton to be seen in a Jaguar and especially with someone who looked like this. When I said something about liking the car she was pleased.
“British-built. I buy British if I can. Poor old mother England. If those of us who live there don’t buy British, you can’t expect the Yanks to. One can usually rely on British-built goods. Not clothes, of course, unless it’s underwear from Marks & Sparks or waterproofs from Aquascutum. But cars and whisky and Purdey guns and flyrods and things.”
She was a Sloane Ranger, all right; I knew the type. Except that I was starting to suspect Alix wasn’t a type but an original.
It was the first weekend since Labor Day, and Hannah’s death, and if the story wasn’t leading the evening news anymore and had vanished from the front page of the tabloids, out here in East Hampton there was still plenty of gossip. The latest involved a suspect in the pool house break-in that followed. One of the local Baymen, an unsavory character named Schmid, who’d earlier been scrutinized and questioned (he was the fellow Hannah once accused of fondling her), had been pulled in again for DWI, and discovered to have an unexplained two thousand dollars in his jeans. Cash. None of your damned business where I got it, he told the cops, who kept him overnight and gave him an appearance ticket in the morning when they released him, sober. But they’d assigned Tom Knowles to the case. Where would a layabout like Schmid have gotten two grand unless he’d stolen something from Hannah’s place and handed it off to a fence? Who knew? But I was careful not to tell Alix Dunraven that the detective on the case was a pal.
Nor was Lady Alix being terribly forthcoming with me as to what she knew or even suspected about Hannah’s manuscript We were both being oh-so-clever, keeping the other in the dark lest we lose advantage. So we compromised by smoking my cigarettes and talking about London and our mutually disastrous recent love affairs. Delia Femina’s wine card had some pretty decent vintages on it and we put a couple of bottles to good use as the sun fell toward the distant shore of Three Mile Harbor and the light through the restaurant’s opened windows softened into dusk. Alix actually knew my former girlfriend and even the Old Etonian she’d gone off with. Great chum of Prince Charles, Alix said, and that was about the best she could say for the cad. “Chinless wonder,” I muttered.
“Oh, that’s a bit stiff,” Alix replied, “talking that way about our future king/emperor.”
Not Charles, I protested quickly, “the chap my girl ran off with.”
“Oh,” Alix said, relieved of the duty of having to defend her sovereign. Or even “Fruity Metcalfe,” her recent but former fiancé.
“Fruity Metcalfe? You were going to marry a guy named Fruity Metcalfe?”
“Well, it’s not that astounding. The family name’s Metcalfe. He’s the Viscount Albemarle. But everyone calls him Fruity. Have done since Harrow.”
“Oh, then that’s all right then,” I remarked.
“Don’t be shirty about it. He’s sweet. Quite dotty about me. And we practically grew up together. Awfully good family. Boys like Fruity, they were what I knew when I was young. Not at all hard cases like you.…”
Talk about being shirty! Though secretly I rather liked being thought a “hard case” and when she expressed interest in one, I bought her a good cigar.
On the basis of the cigar and a few glasses of wine I told yarns about East Hampton.
“You’ve got to understand, in an old place like this, there are always strange people.”
“Just like England.”
“Ever since sometime in the last century it’s been a considerable artist’s colony, something about the light. Later, people like Motherwell and Ernst and Jackson Pollack lived here. Pollack died in a car crash on Montauk Highway. Marcel Duchamp the Dadaist had friends here and visited weekends. Traveled light. Wore two shirts and removed one when it became soiled. About the turn of the century rich men’s sons, bitten by the art bug, took off to Europe to learn to paint. One young fellow spent three or four years studying and painting in Venice and was so taken by the place that when he returned to East Hampton, he brought back with him a full-rigged Venetian gondola and regalia. Used to launch it Sunday afternoons on Hook Pond, right in the middle of the Maidstone Club’s golf course, and be poled about by a local Indian he dressed up in gondolier’s straw hat and sailor suit. The Indian stood in the stern poling him about with the artist waving to the golfers, calling out ‘Ciao!’ and drinking chilled Frascati as he floated past. Members of the Maidstone nearly brought it to a vote to have him expelled, disturbing their concentration on the links.”
Alix liked that story. She said she liked any story that had people in boats distracting golfers. Also stories with Indians dressed up and Bohemians wearing two shirts.
After dinner, at her request, we drove to Hannah Cutting’s place so she could check it out from the Further Lane side. The Kroepkes had refused to see her when she went by earlier. Apparently the lawyers for the estate thought they’d done too much talking already. “Can’t we drive in and see it up close?” I didn’t think so, I told her. The cops were being a bit brisk about trespassing since the killing and more so after the break-in. But I showed her how to get to Old Beach, between the Maidstone Club and Hannah’s property, where we parked the c
ar and left our shoes and went down onto the sand so Alix could see where Hannah’d been speared and her body found. It being a clear, windless night with a half moon and lots of stars it was very pleasant walking there barefoot on the smooth sand with a gentle surf sliding up on the beach to our right. Hurricane Martha, which it now was, hadn’t yet reached the Windward Islands, still nearly two thousand miles off.
“Golly, this is lovely,” Alix said, “no wonder all you wealthy chaps go on and on so about the Hamptons.”
“I’m a journalist. My neighbors are the rich ones.”
“Oh, tosh,” she said, “I’ll wager you’ve a bundle.”
When we got to the rickety ladder where Hannah’s murder most foul had been committed, Alix insisted on clambering up. She was wearing a dress and the ladder did nice things for her legs. She’d read the various reports and was able to visualize where Hannah had been on the steps and where the killer must have stood on the old boardwalk just above. She was disappointed all the dried blood seemed to have been taken in evidence or washed away naturally by rain and wind and spray. Then, her face set and serious:
“Spearing somebody on the very eve of the twenty-first century. What do you make of that?”
Somebody with an exaggerated sense of nostalgia, perhaps. Or maybe to throw off the cops.
“There was a Red Indian they suspected, wasn’t there?” Yes, I said, Jesse Maine. Still a suspect but as yet no hard evidence.
“That may have been why a spear was used. To suggest Mr. Maine, to implicate him?”
Possible. It had occurred to me after a day or two; it had occurred to Alix Dunraven rather more swiftly. When we’d finished with the scene of the crime she said, “Can we put our feet in the ocean? I’ve been all summer in Manhattan.…”
Of course we could. And did. And strolled along at the edge of the ocean chatting and smoking cigarettes.
“You think the same person killed Hannah and broke into the house? And what were they looking for? Could it have been our precious manuscript?” she asked.
I didn’t know. And I said so. Hannah’s death was a police matter. I was writing a story about her life. Alix raised a skeptical eyebrow. Smug, she was, weren’t death and life the same thing? Oh, yes, smug.
I wasn’t getting all that far keeping things from her so I told Alix about Hannah’s having worked here on Further Lane as a kid and about her coming back to buy the house in which she once had been a servant. Alix liked that:
“It’s all too Wuthering Heights to be believed,” she said, shaking her head. I thought it more Dickensian than Bronte-ish but who was I to challenge an Oxonian with a double first? Instead, I decided against telling her yet about Royal Warrender. Let her offer me a little something, first.
About Hannah’s manuscript, I meant.
EIGHTEEN
The demon amanuensis of Hampton Bays …
And now Alix did offer something. “Beecher, where are Hampton Bays from here?”
“Where is. Hampton Bays is singular, part of Southampton Town.”
“My, you are the grammarian, aren’t you?”
Why did Alix want to know about Hampton Bays?
“Someone at Random House told me there’s this old stenographer living there who actually typed up Hannah’s first couple of books for Simon & Schuster. You know, the self-help things.” She looked at a small notebook (she shared that with detectives and me, carrying a notebook despite the Louis Vuitton laptop. And I admired her for it, being a traditionalist and all). “Rose Thrall is her name. I thought I’d talk to her on the off-chance she’s been doing some typing and such for Hannah on our book.”
I liked that “our,” as well, granting me a kind of partnership with Alix on the missing manuscript. Then she promptly disabused me of that idea with, “Random House and I are terribly anxious about all this. Since it’s our property that seems to have vanished. Rose Thrall may not know a thing but I think it’s worth the toss.”
I knew how to get to Hampton Bays but didn’t know the local streets and roads that intimately so I said I’d go along and help her find the stenographer’s place. Alix thought for a moment, weighing convenience against confidentiality, I suppose, and then said, “Right. Then let’s get to it.”
We took the Jag. And the poodle.
“I’d be mortified if she did the nasty on your nice carpets, Beecher.”
My “nice” carpets were decidedly tired old Rya rugs but it was considerate of Alix to fret, tired as they were.
She’d fetched along a copy of the book review from last Sunday’s New York Times. “Hannah’s got still another book on the best-seller list, in the Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous category. Good Taste, Better Taste.”
“She won’t be able to do the talk shows.”
“There is that,” Alix conceded.
We stopped once for gas.
“What sort of place is it, Hampton Bays?” Alix asked.
“Ham Bays is what the locals call it and it’s pretty much blue collar, with a lot of New York city firemen and cops owning places here, summer cottages and houses to retire to, about a half-hour drive from Further Lane, just across the Shinnecock Canal. At a dinner party one night in East Hampton a guy named Bill Flanagan, a senior editor for Forbes, who’s written a handful of books, said he lived in Hampton Bays and some woman asked, ‘And how far is that from East Hampton, Mr. Flanagan?’
“And Bill said: ‘About two and a half books.’”
I liked that story and told it whenever I could. Alix humored me. “My, that was clever of him, wasn’t it.”
I had to ask directions only once. Hampton Bays had some fine houses with water views or actually on the bays. There were plenty of cardboardy-looking bungalows of plywood or siding with small, above-ground pools in the backyard and a rowboat or a dory on cinder blocks in front. Rose Thrall lived at the Peconic Bay end of a rutted dirt road in a sagging, weathered old frame house that had seen better days. As had she, on first glimpse. Except for her hands. As she came out on the porch and then down steps toward where we’d gotten out of the Jag, she was carefully pulling on a fresh pair of white cotton gloves. I guess she saw me looking at what she was doing. Or maybe Alix was staring, too.
“I have rather pretty hands,” Ms. Thrall said, “so whenever I’m outdoors, even briefly, I cover them. Don’t like old ladies’ hands if I can keep them at bay.”
“I quite agree,” Alix said, “and I say, you do have lovely hands.” She did, you know.
Alix extended her own to shake both of Ms. Thrall’s and to tell her she was from Random House, leaving me sort of vaguely there, offering my name but little else. Rose was a talker:
“If my life had developed differently and I’d been assiduous about it, I might have had a considerable career as a hand model. You know, doing commercials and print ads for dishwashing liquids and lotions and the like. Instead, I won another sort of fame as Stenographer of the Year in 1960. Kennedy was elected that year and I took three hundred sixty words per minute in a national competition. Gregg. I was always partial to Gregg when it came to the various shorthand styles.”
“That’s jolly good, three hundred sixty words per minute,” Alix said, “isn’t it, Beecher?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. Alix was doing all the running and desperately wanted me to pitch in. Rose Thrall came to the rescue.
“Come in out of the sun,” she said. “Have a refreshment.”
We both thanked her. This was going to be cake. The poodle was leashed to the steering wheel and for once was docile, curling up and preparing to nap. She liked the Jag’s leather seats. But Ms. Thrall beckoned.
“Bring in the dog. I like a dog around. Had one but it died. Buried it out back there.”
Mignonne hesitated and then trotted in after us.
“I suppose it’s about Hannah,” the old woman said.
She was tall and gaunt and had a breath on her I thought was probably rye. And cheap rye at that. Once we were inside the old hous
e you could smell the booze permeating the wood, the furniture, the rugs. There was a sitting room with a fireplace and some dark, heavy wood furniture, all of it dated. Except against one wall, where the only good lighting was, where Ms. Thrall did her work. A desktop IBM computer, a fax machine, a Xerox copier, a printer, and two impressive-looking electronic typewriters.
“Name your poison,” she said in a loud voice, pouring herself a refill of the rye. She was no dilettante when it came to that, straight rye right into a water glass with no intervening ice or mixer.
“Ah, tea?” Alix said, for once confounded. The old woman drank off a third of her fresh glass.
“Lipton’s okay? Afraid I don’t have milk. Got some lemons somewhere. I like a twist of lemon in a glass.”
“Coffee for me,” I said.
“Instant?” Without waiting for my answer, and with Mignonne trotting amiably in her wake, she went deeper into the gloom of the house to what I guess was the kitchen. She walked steadily, you had to say that for her, carrying her glass—as if concerned we might empty it once her back was turned—and not spilling a drop.
Alix and I looked at each other.
When we were all three again seated, refreshment in hand, and the poodle curled up contentedly on the worn carpet at our hostess’s feet. Rose Thrall started right in, sipping from her glass with the bottle handy next to her.
“I’m surprised someone didn’t come before. The police should certainly have checked me out. Considering all the sturm und drang.”
“What sturm und drang was that?” Alix asked. Let the old girl tell the damned story, I thought fiercely, willing Alix to hear the unspoken caution. People talk more freely if you don’t press them. I shouldn’t have worried; there was no scaring off Ms. Rose Thrall.