Further Lane Page 8

  Don’t worry, the girl assured him. Teach me a few things and I’ll make the money for both of us.

  She was a quick study and hers was a crash course in quality, with Andy the sometimes befuddled, often reluctant tutor, urged on by his young wife: Tell me about silver. What was the purpose of the hallmark? Who is Billy Baldwin? Is he as tasteful as Sister Parish? In china, is Spode as good as Wedgwood? Sheffield steel, is that the best? Or that German stuff, Solingen? What about glass, is it the lead that makes Waterford so desirable? Tell me about furniture. Who was Morris and what do his chairs look like? Who was Queen Anne? I never heard of Bauhaus. What is it? How d’you tell fakes from antiques? Does champagne have vintage years the way Bordeaux does? Why do the Brits call it claret and we don’t? Is veneer good or bad? Was Frank Lloyd Wright a great architect or just a publicity genius? She learned by asking questions; she learned by osmosis. Other Cuttings, who still had dough, lived well. When the outsider Hannah was permitted among them, she took notes. Higgins educated Liza Doolittle; Hannah Cutting pretty much taught herself.

  The cops had been there, Andy said, and the TV crews, the tabloids, even the Times. He was beaten down, still a handsome, decent man. But tired. Andy lived not grandly, not well, in a rented apartment over Bucket’s Deli up by the railroad station. He knew it was a comedown; I knew it. So we mutually ignored the House & Garden details and talked about Hannah. When one of the six or eight daily trains pulled in, the apartment shuddered and its windows rattled and chipped coffee mugs moved around on the shelves. Further Lane was two miles and a zillion dollars away.

  The problem wasn’t getting Andy to talk about her; it was getting the poor bastard to shut up.

  I’m still in love with her, he said. “She dumped me and I still love her. She sucked the marrow out of my bones and gave me the drop and here I am sobbing into the coverlet because she’s dead. Wish I knew who killed her. I’d get him.”

  Him?

  “Got to be, Beecher. She turns men into swine or whatever crap it was Hemingway wrote of Brett Ashley. Women hated her; men loved her. You kill the people you love; not the ones you merely hate.”

  Andy wasn’t as drunk as he pretended. But he went on and on, how ambitious, how clever Hannah was, how competently she’d picked his brains, how his family resented her, how she’d ruined him at the same time he’d found in her lush body and nimble head everything he’d ever wanted.…

  I made him some black coffee on his own hot plate and left. I can take only so much cheap sentimentality. Which was how it came off. I had this sense Andy was role-playing. Maybe there’d been too many interviews by Entertainment Tonight and Hard Copy or by people from the Geraldo show. Jesse Maine hated Hannah and yet I didn’t think he’d killed her; Andy Cutting loved her. And might have.

  ELEVEN

  Looking for sea shells, staring up at the big houses on the dunes …

  I got a surprise that evening when Claire Cutting came by the gatehouse on Further Lane, saying, Look, I’m sorry about what happened at Boaters.

  No problem, I said. I shouldn’t have tried to talk to you so soon after …

  I don’t mind, she said.

  There was still light and we sat down outside on the old lawn chairs and she began to talk. She was like Andy now, compulsively talking about Hannah. But then people who knew Hannah well seemed unable not to, people like that old cop up in Riverhead, who remembered her teenaged rear end. Hannah had a way of taking hold. I thought there might be beer on Claire’s breath and when I asked if she’d like a Coors she said sure and I got two from the fridge. Why this contrast to her previous sullen silence? Don’t tell me it was just having a beer or two. She didn’t explain. But somehow it seemed essential that I should understand there was nothing weird about Hannah’s last swim. It was okay if I took notes, she said. And then she proceeded to tell me just how weird such swims were!

  “Hannah read somewhere that big sharks, the dangerous kind, swam in close to the beach at night, hunting baitfish. In Florida, where they knew about such things, most people won’t swim at night. Hannah, being Hannah, determined that night swims were in.

  “You swim with the sharks if you have guts.”

  That, said Claire, was how her mother was, that was her posture. East Hampton wasn’t Palm Beach, of course, and no one had been eaten by sharks along here in human memory. But Hannah Cutting was intent on meeting the challenge. You climb Everest or try to, you go swimming with sharks.…

  I cut across Claire’s theorizing. “You and your mother get along?”

  Hannah (she called her Hannah, never Mother or Mom) wasn’t easy, she admitted. “I admire her.” Then, and flatly, “She was involved in too many things to have time for nurturing. I’m a disappointment to her. We are not close.”

  She had, she said, no idea who might have wanted Hannah dead. Her mother rubbed people the wrong way. People like … Pam Phythian. Hannah talked of mountaineering as a way to show up other people, show up snobs like Pam. Survival of the fittest. There was bad blood between Pam and Hannah. When did that start? And why? I probed with questions a devil’s advocate might pose:

  “Yeah, but you don’t murder someone who showed you up, who rubs you the wrong way,” I protested. I thought maybe you did; but I was trying to get a rise out of her. Claire seemed uninterested. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen: that seemed her attitude now. She was all over the place. Could she be on something stronger than beer? Why not? Her mother wasn’t dead a week and here she was being grilled by some nosy reporter.

  I was rude, I guess, but I kept at it, asking more questions. Who knew if I’d get another opportunity, not with Leo hanging close and ready to throw his weight around. And me, if he could. Surprisingly, she answered some of my questions. Truly? Well, I couldn’t know that. One answer rang true. I asked just why she thought Hannah was so tough on her only child.

  “She made it out of Riverhead and Polish Town and onto Further Lane, trading in poor for rich, swapping old friends for new. I was a sort of throwback. I like the locals. I hang out with a blue-collar crowd. I drive a pickup instead of a Beamer. She’d die to belong to the Maidstone; I couldn’t care less. She’s into self-improvement and I’m not, she’s a powerhouse and I’m, well … I’m not her and she seems to consider that an offense.”

  She spoke like that, in the present tense, as if Hannah weren’t dead.

  Then, thoughtfully, “I think she really always wanted to be a WASP. She had to work summers and after school as a kid, so except for swimming and being naturally coordinated and pretty strong, she couldn’t do sports. But tennis was a big thing out here. So Hannah decided to learn tennis. Got a coach from the Maidstone, bought a SAM.”

  “What’s a SAM?”

  “A sports action machine, a kind of robotic tennis pro. Fires shots at you at various speeds from lobs to smashes. A warning light goes on and stand back! Here comes the ball! The SAM Hannah has costs twenty-five grand.”

  “Oh.”

  “Same reasoning behind why she married a weakling like Andy Cutting. She was too intelligent to think a wedding could make her a WASP, or even that success and money might do it, but she kept trying, kept butting her head against the wall, and was frustrated by the Establishment. So she takes it out on everybody, WASP or not, and especially on me because I don’t share her WASP ambitions.”

  “Is all that in her book?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Haven’t you read any of it?”

  Claire laughed, the sound brief and caustic, as if to say, “Are you kidding?”

  “Do you know if she was nearly finished writing it?”

  “No. Only that it’ll settle a few scores.”

  “Which scores? Pam? Hideo? Leo Brass? Andy? Jesse Maine…?”

  “I dunno. Just that she said that once when she looked up from the laptop and I asked how it was going.”

  I chewed that one over. Then, “Are you the heiress?” I asked, realizing it was none of my d
amned business but asking regardless.

  She stared into my face. Quite coolly she said, “I haven’t the foggiest, Beecher. I’ve never seen Hannah’s will; if she left one, and if there is, I’m quite certain I’m not the executrix. Attorneys are handling everything. Hannah doesn’t have much faith in my judgment.” The last time I’d seen her, I thought of Claire as a whipped hound, cringing at her mother’s name.

  She didn’t cringe now, and her shoulders didn’t sag. No longer did she squint nearsightedly into the middle distance, neck bent. In so many ways, she conveyed the impression she was no longer cowed. Confused and maybe sedated or a little stoned, but not scared or bullied. Hannah’s death had liberated her child. Unless by some legal fluke she was disowned, Claire was going to be a very rich young woman. That could help, too, in taking the slump out of your shoulders.…

  One more thing, Claire said, “She isn’t always the automaton some people think. Hannah has her softie side, her vulnerable moments. Sea shells. She has a collection of sea shells from when she was a kid. They didn’t have much money and shells were free for the picking up.”

  “At Riverhead?” There were no sea shells there.

  “No, down here at the ocean. Once a year the family would pile into the pickup truck for a day at the public beach in East Hampton. She looked forward to those outings all spring. Used to tell me about them when I was small, about walking the beach looking for shells and staring up at the big houses on the dunes. A little kid searching for shells and looking up to where the rich people lived. In houses like the one she bought and I live in now.”

  I nodded. Let her talk. Maybe there’d be something else I could use in my story, like this about the sea shells and staring up at the big houses where the rich lived. Good stuff, that, the dead woman as more than just another rich bitch who’d scored big. And still swam in the night ocean.

  “And for all of her famous, even ruthless, efficiency, Hannah can be a bit of a pack rat. With a roomful of junk. Not throwing away things that hold meaning, no matter how silly to anyone else, no matter how worthless otherwise. An old shoebox of sea shells. A beat-up old climbing rope from that Everest expedition when those people died and she didn’t. Her first tennis racquet. Never had a racquet until she married Andy Cutting and he bought her one and she practiced at the cement courts behind the high school. Or against the handball wall behind the A & P. Rich people played tennis; it was important to Hannah that she learn how. At least be able to get the ball over the net. Stuff like that…”

  I walked up to the Further Lane gate with her.

  “That freak-show crowd she had to her last party. If she was so intent on impressing the WASPs, they were hardly…”

  “Oh, that was defiance. She’d sucked up and been rejected so now she was being naughty.”

  “But for a woman who became famous for teaching American women how their homes and their gardens and even they themselves ought to look and behave, to think of that bunch as her set, it doesn’t make sense.”

  Claire didn’t look at me but at the gravel drive in front of her as she said, very softly:

  “Hannah’s got good taste in everything but people.”

  At the head of the drive a pickup was parked, waiting. Not Claire’s. In the dusk I could just see the driver’s profile. Surly, he looked. Maybe he was pissed off that Claire’d come to my house to apologize. Or maybe this was just one of his surly days, when he wasn’t doing Jimmy Cagney impersonations.

  “Cheer up, Leo,” I called out brightly, “maybe you can run over a raccoon on your way out.”

  Leo Brass didn’t say anything; just looked at me, measuring an enemy.

  TWELVE

  I wasn’t out to earn the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval …

  Alix Dunraven was back in the morning.

  I’d hoped she’d call eventually but I hadn’t expected it to be this soon or that she’d show up in person.

  “I got hopelessly lost,” she confessed. “Finally purchased a map at the stationer’s. Couldn’t make head nor tails of that, either. Might as well have been celestial navigation. I called Harry for divine guidance and he told me to throw myself on your mercy. So here I am, groveling, really, ’umble as Uriah Heep.”

  She didn’t seem to be groveling nor did she appear especially humble or in any way did she resemble the Uriah Heep either Dickens or I would recognize. But she was too good to look at to quibble. So I just grinned.

  “Besides,” she said, “I didn’t like the Mauve House awfully.”

  “Too mauve?”

  “Oh, decidedly too-too. A rum place, strictly poofter, of course, but being British, I’m more than accustomed to that. Many of my dearest friends, all great chums, are poofs. But this East Hampton bunch, oddly, are very stern about dogs. Those chaps usually dote on having poodles about.”

  What I couldn’t know and wouldn’t until much later was that Evans ordered her back to me, convinced for some reason that I knew more than I was saying, about where the manuscript might be, Alix was to get close to me and find out. Even if it meant throwing herself at me and moving in. Nor did she or Mr. Evans seem to care about the bad name they were giving the poor Mauve House, which had always enjoyed an excellent reputation.

  There was apparently great excitement back there in Manhattan at Random House. Hannah Cutting’s book was going to be big when she was alive. But dead? With a sharpened stake of privet hedge through her breast? Huge! So went a wildfire of gossip through the hallways of the publishing company. The marketing people salivated. Even the salesmen were excited. And you know salesmen.

  Trouble was, neither Evans nor anyone else knew where Hannah’s manuscript was.

  And in the book biz, if you can’t find the book, you may have a little problem. Especially if the author is dead. Because trouble calls for a trouble-shooter, Harry Evans had whistled up Alix Dunraven, who filled me in in colorful detail about all these goings-on at Random where, amid considerable drama, a sales meeting had been informed:

  “A bloody spear, hardened in flame, thrust through her black heart? My God! It’s a cover of the Times Book Review. It’s a network miniseries. It’s bigger than a miniseries! A movie. No, ‘a major motion picture.’ One that ‘reeks of Oscar!’ With Streisand playing Hannah! Glenn Close! Sarandon! And Hanks in there somewhere…”

  Except that, there was no book. No miniseries. No movie. No Oscar. No Streisand and Hanks. Forrest Gump sounded like a more promising idea when it was still moldering on Winston Groom’s back burner.

  Another major difficulty: Evans and his people were dealing with an author new to them. Hannah’s first book, the national best-seller, The Taste Machine, and each subsequent effort, starting with Hannah’s House and going on through Hannah’s Garden, Hannah’s Kitchen, and the like, had been published by bitter rival Simon & Schuster. And over there at S & S, where Michael Korda and the others who’d shepherded Hannah from best-seller to bestseller, knew Hannah Cutting and her writing methods intimately and in ways Harry’s people couldn’t, they were hardly likely to put themselves out to assist Random House in recovering a manuscript S & S probably believed ethically and morally should have been theirs.

  The phone rang.

  “Harry Evans here, Beecher. Has Lady Alix driven over yet this morning? I told her…”

  That’s how I learned about that title of hers. That it wasn’t a corporate label but something regal and inherited, bigger than Lady Di’s. Besides being gainfully employed by a prestigious London house, HarperCollins, and now temporarily by one of the biggest Manhattan book publishers, Alix had a curriculum vitae that resembled Burke’s Peerage. Maybe the Almanach de Gotha as well. And looking as she did as a bonus.

  Alix Dunraven’s daddy was the fourth senior Earl in Britain. The family title dated back to Henry IV, whom the first Dunraven had served both gallantly and fiercely, slaying and eventually being slain, in the jolly tradition of the time and in the service of his liege master, the King. Lady Alix’s squa
re name was Alixandre (named for the unfortunate last Czarina of Russia, a third cousin several generations removed); she was twenty-six; she’d taken a double first at Oxford (in Greats and History, having written dissertations on “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” and “Clive of India”); worked briefly for British Vogue; had recently only just gotten out of a quasi-arranged marriage; and had been taken up by Harry when assigned to Random by the Tony Godwin Award folks. Evans, married to Tina Brown, was one of the few important men in Manhattan who really knew women. And in Alix he early saw not just a luncheon companion or a charmer, but someone he could dispatch to a little mess of one sort or another and be reasonably confident she would straighten things out and within an acceptable time frame. Would have made a good sleuth, a great crook. Scotland Yard and the Mafia both loved people like Alix: competent, swift, efficient. Ruthless?

  No, a woman who looked like this couldn’t be … ruthless. Well, perhaps.

  Harry kept her around because she was beautiful, she was London, she was … good. Recently on a new tell-all yarn about the royals, a book she didn’t write or edit, she’d been able to nail a few potentially embarrassing errors and to flesh out one or two anecdotes with firsthand information. You sent Alix out to do something; she usually did it. She wasn’t all that professionally trained; with her, it was instinct. Sort of in the way I got Rose Kennedy to talk about the family, Alix had a knack for finding things. How big a job was it finding a lousy book manuscript that had gone missing? Which probably still resided quietly inside an IBM computer somewhere in the house. And, as he had once said of his own wife, Evans paid Alix a sincere compliment: “She has the cunning of a rat.”