Dead In The Hamptons (4 page)

“It didn’t come up,” Jeannette said.

Stephanie nodded. Karen shook her head. Lewis shrugged.

“Who’s Clea’s roommate this summer?” Barbara asked.

“She was supposed to bring a friend,” Lewis said. “This part I did tell the cops. When she sent the check in, she said she wasn’t sure who she’d be inviting to share the room with her. She paid for both shares.”

“She didn’t bring someone with her?” Barbara asked. “Or tell you who her roommate would be?”

“She only got here yesterday,” Lewis said. “We didn’t see her till dinner.”

We had arrived the day before too. Everybody around the dinner table now, plus Clea, had gathered for last night’s dinner. There’d been a lot of talk and laughter. We’d had lobster and strawberry shortcake to kick off what was evidently going to be a season of serious eating.

“I never got a chance to ask her,” Lewis said. “And no one showed up.”

Right on cue, a car pulled up on the gravel. The engine choked and died. A trunk slammed. A door banged. Something crashed, maybe gear being dumped on the floor.

“Yo! Ahoy! Anybody home?” a male voice called.

We heard tromping on the stairs. The guy’s head appeared in the stairwell by installments. First the bald part in front. Then the slicked back brown hair and the broad forehead. Mirrored shades, though it was getting dark outside by now. Beaky nose. Droopy graying mustache. Not much of a chin. When we could see his Izod shirt down to the waist and the big brass buckle on his belt, he spoke again.

“Hi, I’m Phil.”

We all stared.

“Am I in time for dinner?” he asked. “The traffic sucked. Where’s Clea? I’m her boyfriend.”

“You paid for the shares,” Oscar said. “You might as well enjoy the summer.”

A big group of us lay sprawled on the beach, making the most of a hot Memorial Day. You’d think it was August, unless you happened to dip your toes in the frigid ocean. Everyone from our house was there except Phil, who’d gone to talk to the police. Following Lewis and Karen’s lead, we’d all plunked down our blankets, towels, and gear next to the gang of clean and sober folks from Oscar’s house. Oscar himself was a genial mine-host kind of guy. I’d have bet money he’d had a world class beer gut before he got sober. Piercing blue eyes and a rich, warm voice made him attractive. A luxuriant mustache lent him gravitas. All the women from his house clustered around him, putting me in mind of a walrus with his harem. One of them, little Corky, followed him around like a pilot fish cozying up to a shark. She’d trotted behind him out to the beach carrying two folding chaise longues and an umbrella. He’d carried a beach towel and a Panama hat.

The sun beat down on us. All but Jimmy. He huddled under the sole umbrella wearing a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, and a ridiculous big hat. His iPad perched on his knees. His pink face wore as sour an expression as the sweetest tempered guy I knew ever got. Jimmy’s problem was not getting online, but keeping sand out of his iPad.

Oscar’s house rode a dune right off the beach, so close his wireless worked down here near the water. That made him Big Daddy to any clean and sober computer nut in the vicinity.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Barbara said, “but it doesn’t make sense not to, either.”

“I know what you mean,” Corky said. Punk to the ring threaded over her left eyebrow and the stand-up spikes of her inky hair, she wore the briefest of bikinis over a tan that stopped for nothing. “You’ll feel guilty either way.”

“It’s spooky at the house,” Jeannette said. “I keep thinking she’s in the next room.”

“It could be worse,” Karen said. “She could have died there.”

“She wouldn’t have drowned in the house,” Stephanie said.

“Did she drown?” Oscar asked. “Did you hear anything from the police?”

“They’re treating it as a suspicious death so far,” Cindy said. “That means the detectives can act as if it’s a homicide until evidence tells them any different.”

“Maybe I can find out more,” Oscar said.

“Oscar knows everyone in this town,” Corky said with pride.

“They searched through all our stuff,” Stephanie said. “Every room.”

“They didn’t put everything back, either,” Barbara said. “They left things heaped on the bed and hanging out of drawers.”

“They’re allowed to look for evidence,” Cindy said. She wore an NYPD sweatshirt today. She chose that moment to take it off. I couldn’t help looking, but I tried to think post-feminist thoughts.

“I hate it.” Jeannette pulled off her splashy red and purple muumuu, revealing a matching bathing suit and a quantity of opulent flesh. “Why do they have to keep coming back?”

“One of the cops told me it’s against the law to die in the State of New York,” Karen said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means there has to be a reason,” Karen said, “and they won’t stop looking until they find one.” She rose to her knees to fish a tube of sun block out of a big straw carryall, then stood up to smooth it onto her long limbs. Her shadow fell on the patch of sun I’d been basking in.

“The reason was that she drowned,” Stewie said. “Nobody would have killed Clea.”

The remark dropped into a well of silence. Or it might have been my imagination. Lewis climbed to his feet, increasing the shade. He dusted sand off his hands and took the tube of sun block from Karen. She turned her back. He slathered it on, making circles on her back and pushing the straps of her suit out of the way without ceremony. They didn’t seem mad at each other today. A guy named Shep from Oscar’s house started doing pushups on a towel. Jimmy raised the hand that wasn’t scurrying around the touch keyboard to slap at no-see-ums on his neck.

“People had strong feelings about Clea,” Oscar said finally. “Did anybody see her on the beach?”

“We did,” Barbara said, “Jimmy and Bruce and I, and I wish we hadn’t.”

“Sorry,” Corky said. Apologizing for Oscar’s insensitivity? I bet she went to Al-Anon. She’d now used both the passwords. Guilty and sorry, guilty and sorry all day long.

“I meant before you found her dead,” Oscar said.

“The last place she was seen,” Jimmy said, “must have been the deli. She got bagels for the house and dropped them off. None of us at the house saw her then, as far as I know.”

“Nobody was up when I found the bag on the kitchen counter,” Barbara said.

“The police didn’t know she’d gone to the deli until you told them,” Cindy said.

“Someone might have seen her on the beach,” Barbara said.

“They’re knocking on doors near where they found her,” Shep said. “Including ours. I talked to them yesterday afternoon.”

“What?” Oscar sat up so abruptly that his chaise longue almost snapped shut on him.

“You were in the shower. Everybody else was out.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I hadn’t seen her. They showed me a picture, but I didn’t know her.”

“I did,” Corky said, “and so did Oscar and the others who were in the house last year.”

“We didn’t say anything about you guys,” Karen said.

“They dropped a stitch, not thinking of past summers and asking where she’d stayed,” Lewis said.

Oscar closed his eyes. His lips moved. Silent prayer. Or silent cursing.

“They will. I guess I’d better expect them back.”

“What about the day before?” Cindy asked. “I saw Clea when I arrived, mid-afternoon, and she said she’d taken an early train out. Did anybody spend much time with her?”

“We didn’t,” Barbara said. “We got there in the afternoon too.”

“We weren’t there,” Lewis said. “We drove out to Montauk for the day. We didn’t get back till dinnertime.”

“Did the cops ask why everybody’s last name was Alcoholic?” Oscar asked.

“It came up,” I admitted.

“That’s bad.” Oscar shook his head.

“Not telling them would have been worse,” Jimmy said.

I was relieved to hear he thought so.

“Would you rather they thought we were a bunch of drunken assholes,” Jimmy asked, “who kept a stash of dope in every room and might have drowned poor Clea horsing around?”

That was more or less what I’d figured when I blew the gaffe.

“They probably wouldn’t have been surprised to find a stash of dope,” Jimmy said. “I bet nine times out of ten when they get called, it’s a party house.”

“I could tell you stories,” Oscar said. He sounded awfully cheerful for a guy who’d fielded so many questions and expected the police to come back asking more. I wondered what the strong feelings about Clea that he’d mentioned had been.

“Well, we’re all clean and sober now,” Corky said. “Barbara found her, right? You couldn’t tell if she drowned?”

“I tried not to look,” Barbara admitted, “even though I had to.”

“Bruce and I saw her too,” Jimmy said. “We didn’t see a gunshot wound or a rope around her neck.”

He shut down his iPad, stood up, shook out his pants, and picked his way around the blanket to where Barbara sat. He lowered himself to a seated position behind her. She leaned back against his legs.

“So how did you know she was dead? Did you try CPR?”

“We saw her already lying there before I started down the beach,” Barbara explained. “I thought she was a log.”

“She had to come back to tell us,” Jimmy added.

“Didn’t you have a cell phone?”

“All I was wearing was a bathing suit and a bagel,” Barbara said.

“Oh! I’m sick of this!” Karen said. She stamped her foot, spraying sand in all directions. “Let’s not talk about Clea anymore.” Lewis reached out to her. She shook his hand off her arm. “I’m going up to the house.” She stalked away toward the dunes, where a flight of wooden steps led up to Oscar’s deck.

The steady growl of a motor overhead distracted us all. We watched as a small plane, the kind with the wings on top, flew by, low and parallel to the beach. It trailed a banner exhorting us to drink a well-known beer.

“I knew it well,” I said.

“Nevermore,” Jimmy said.

“Oy, have you got the wrong beach,” Barbara said.

As the plane puttered out of sight, I realized that half the group had left. The rest shook the sand out of towels, applied more sun block, and drank from their water bottles.

Someone took out a set of beach paddles and the bounceless ball that went with them. The
thock thock thock
of the game provided rhythm beneath the swish of the surf and the cries of gulls. A shadow swept down the beach as a black sheep amid the fleecy clouds blew briefly across the sun. I shivered.

“Catch.” Barbara flung a T-shirt in my general direction. I made an awkward left-handed catch. “Jimmy and I are going for a walk. Want to come?”

“No, that’s okay.”

I wanted a cigarette. Recovering alcoholics used to smoke like chimneys. But like chimneys, most of them no longer smoked. Our house had “Smoke Free Zone” signs posted everywhere, even on the deck. Having a cigarette, like shooting up or jerking off, had become something you snuck away to take care of privately.

When I stood up, I could feel the kiss of the ocean in the breeze. My lips tasted of salt. I palmed the pack of cigarettes I’d rolled in a towel and added a matchbook. I pulled the T-shirt over my head. Barbara and Jimmy, hand in hand like kids, receded in the distance. I turned the other way. The hard-packed sand close to the water still made the easiest walking. But in this direction and on this tide, it slanted, so I had to gimp along. The soft sand farther back toward the dunes was level, except where the fat tires of off-road four-by-fours and pickup trucks had carved their tracks in the sand. It gave my arches a workout. I sat down near the dunes with my back against a log. Then it took me a dozen tries to strike a match. Next time, I’d bring my lighter.

As I dragged deep, I decided lolling on the beach was idyllic only in the eye of the beholder. First I sat on a clam shell. Then two big green glistening flies decided my legs made a tasty snack. When I stood up, the hot sand burned the soles of my feet. Then I had to pee. I thought better of relieving myself on the beach or into the water. No pissing on the Hamptons. As my sponsor kept telling me, it was better not to do anything I’d have to make amends for later. Besides, the beach was anything but deserted. People kept walking by. Families with kids and dogs. I didn’t want to get arrested. Using the dunes as an outhouse was not an option either. Eastern Long Island was a hotbed of environmental activism. I didn’t feel inclined to clamber up past the sign that said that walking on the dunes was
verboten
.

I smoked my cigarette down to the filter, tossed it into the sand, and kicked some more sand over it. Then I trudged back toward Oscar’s house. He’d invited us to use the facilities and help ourselves to soda from the refrigerator. The big weathered cedar ark had decks fore and aft and plate glass windows on the ocean side. Peering in, I saw no sign of life apart from brightly colored tropical fish swimming in a wall-mounted aquarium.

The door gave when I pushed it. People left their doors unlocked out here. Amazing. I found myself in a kind of mud room, or rather, sand room, with terra cotta tiles cool beneath my feet. A wall of hooks and cubbies. Washing machine and dryer. Towels, flip-flops, a broom, a couple of clamming rakes. The living room lay beyond it. Nobody there. The faint scent of tobacco hung in the air. Oscar’s house was not a no-smoking zone. I thought of calling out. Instead, I crossed to the kitchen. It was vast, with marble counters, gleaming steel appliances, and a forest of gleaming copper-bottomed pots hanging from the ceiling. The whole kitchen could have been photographed for a gourmet or design magazine.

The light from the big picture window provided a transition from the dazzle outside. I heard what sounded like a moan from the other end of the house. A dark corridor led toward other rooms, probably bedrooms. Again, I thought of calling out, decided not to. My bare feet made no sound on the hardwood floor. I followed the moaning, which got louder and more unmistakable as I got closer. It was none of my business who was having a quickie in the middle of the afternoon. But I was curious. I suppose spying was one of those things I would be expected to make amends for. But I rationalized it. I couldn’t embarrass them by saying I’d seen them screwing, could I? If I knew who it was, I’d know who not to embarrass, right? It didn’t convince me either. But snooping was better than sneaking a drink. I wondered if Oscar had a cold frosty in his refrigerator.