Dead In The Hamptons (5 page)

That’s why they call it a slip. It can sneak right up on you when you’re thinking of something else. But hey, I didn’t do it. I felt downright virtuous as I tiptoed closer to the duet of moans and panting and the thump of a rocking bed. They hadn’t shut the door all the way. I applied my eye to the crack.

It seemed to be the master bedroom, a corner room with plate glass on two sides. The light flooding in was amplified by a mirror over the bed. I caught a glimpse of my startled face in the reflected shadows around the door. I jerked my head back. Luckily the couple now reaching paradise and making a joyful noise were too focused to look up. The guy was Oscar. The woman was Karen.

“So Karen is cheating on Lewis,” Barbara said.

We sat squinched together on a lifeguard chair, watching the sunset over the bay. The glowing red ball had just sunk below the horizon. Now layers of gold and rose and violet bounced back and folded in on themselves in the banks of low-lying clouds around the rim of the darkening sky.

“They’ve organized group houses out here for years,” Barbara said. “Lewis showed us scrapbooks full of photos before Jimmy gave him a check. And Oscar owns that house. He must be rich as a quart of Haagen Dasz.”

“You’ve got food on the brain, my pet,” Jimmy said.

“I love summer food,” Barbara said. “Strawberries and ice cream and corn and tomatoes and ice cream and hey, did you see the fancy gas grill out back? Mmm, steak and grilled jumbo shrimp and ice cream. The whole point of cheating is to keep things steamy— speaking as a professional. I mean a professional counselor.”

“They didn’t have a whole lot of time for foreplay,” I said. “Someone else could have walked in any minute.”

“Do you think what you saw was an episode of an ongoing drama,” Barbara asked, “or a one-night— call it a one-day-at-the-beach— stand?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “They sounded pretty steamy.”

“I bet they have a history,” Barbara said. “No foreplay is one thing. No build-up is another. They didn’t have time to make a connection that wasn’t already there.”

“But does it have anything to do with the murder?” Jimmy asked.

“We don’t know,” I said.

“We could find out.” Barbara didn’t qualify for Al-Anon just because Jimmy drank a hundred years ago. She was hooked on minding other people’s business.

Jimmy and I exchanged a resigned glance over her head.

“You don’t have to quiver like a hunting dog,” Jimmy said. “We don’t even know it was a murder.”

“But if it was,” Barbara insisted. “We’re the only newcomers. The others have been coming out here for years. And Oscar’s house belongs to him. He wouldn’t advertise shares, he’d invite people he knows, don’t you think?”

“Okay, we’re the newcomers. So what?”

“So we’re above suspicion.” Barbara bounced up and down. The lifeguard chair rocked.

“Whoa, there,” I said. “It’s a long way down.”

“I wish we could see those notebooks of Clea’s,” she said. “Any of the others could have had a motive.”

“I don’t think the cops would want to share,” I said. “The boyfriend wasn’t even there.”

“So he says.”

Phil’s shock when Lewis broke the news of Clea’s death had seemed genuine. On the other hand, if he already knew because he’d killed her, he’d have rehearsed precisely that appalled astonishment. The cops wouldn’t take his word for it that he’d just come from the city. If he didn’t have a cast-iron alibi, he’d make a perfect suspect.

“Can’t we just leave it to the cops?” Jimmy asked. A rhetorical question, if I knew Barbara.

“Think of all the stuff they won’t find out,” she said. “The relationships, the undercurrents— all the dysfunctional group house family stuff I bet is going on. And the cops don’t go to meetings to investigate.”

“Barbara!”

“I wouldn’t break anyone’s anonymity,” she said with her best indignant frown. “But for background, you know we’ll hear a lot— and when you go to meetings, you get a sense of who’s reliable, who’s really working the program.”

“You think someone who works the steps can’t commit a crime?”

“Not a
murder
,” she said. “Recovery is about integrity, you can’t say it’s not an indication of character. Besides, doesn’t the thought of spending the summer with a murderer running around freak you out? I’ll feel a lot better if we’re trying to do something about it.”

“What if it was an accident?” I scratched at my scalp with both hands. Sandy hair seemed to be a permanent condition at the beach. “Say whoever killed her didn’t mean to.”

“A program person would own up,” Jimmy said. “Rigorous honesty. Making amends. ‘When we were wrong, promptly admitted it’.”

“Yeah, yeah. Easier said than done.”

“Bruce has got a point, Jimmy,” Barbara said.

Jimmy put his arm around her. She gave a little wriggle and snuggled up to him. I readjusted my butt into the extra inch or two of space that left on her other side. We sat in silence for a while as the sky faded to muted colors, antique rose and ochre and mauve.

Barbara shivered.

“Let’s go back.”

She swung herself up off the seat and shinnied down the stilt-like struts of the lifeguard chair. Jimmy followed more cautiously, inching toward the edge, hooking his heels in as far down as he could, and then dropping to a crouch on the mounded sand.

“You guys go ahead,” I said. “Take a little alone time.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I need a smoke.” I twisted around, swung my foot over the side of the seat like a cowboy dismounting, and clambered down backwards to the ground, my bare toes clutching at footholds along the way.

Jimmy took Barbara’s hand. I watched as they plodded toward the hump of the wooden steps, almost covered by sand, between the bay beach and the pitted road that dead ended there. Barbara looked back over her shoulder.

“Dinner’s at eight-thirty,” she called.

I raised an arm in a half-wave, half-salute. As they disappeared over the dune, I wheeled and started down toward the shore. The bay beach was a lot narrower than the ocean beach. Someone at the house had said they dredged most of the sand out of the channel that led from the open bay to the inlet that gave some of our neighbors waterfront property. In its natural state, the beach was mostly pebbles and small shells. I found out the hard way that many of the pebbles had sharp edges and many of the shells were broken. I limped back to the base of the lifeguard chair, where I had dropped my sneakers when we climbed up for the balcony view. I stood on one foot, then the other, to put them on. I let the laces dangle. Barbara had been at me to get a pair of those rubber-soled mesh shoes you could wear right into the water. Maybe I would.

My toes and soles safe from impact, I scuffed my way down toward the water, lighting up and drawing deep as I went. A couple of kids with a dog pranced around on the big rock jetty at the far end of the beach. A boat or two, lights bobbing, putt-putted their way toward the inlet, trying to make dock before dark. But I was basically alone.

I’d been a champion liar in my drinking days. Of course I never called it that. Stretching the truth. Little sins of omission. Taking the path of least resistance. I’d never held myself accountable. But about eighteen months ago, I’d butted up against a choice between living and dying. In a weird way, it had still been about the path of least resistance. The door to living stood open, and I’d wandered through. Clueless. Not drinking is just the tip of the iceberg, they’d told me. Yeah, yeah, I’d said.

I still trusted hardly anybody except Jimmy, who’d been my best friend forever, and Barbara, who had worked her way into the glue between us and stuck through everything. I worked hard to keep it honest with my sponsor, a lawyer named Glenn with a radar for bullshit. But now I had a secret and a dilemma. Did I tell Jimmy and Barbara? Did I try to blow it off? If I did, would it go away? If I told them, would their endless tolerance for my screw-ups and stupidities finally crack?

I had met Clea before.

The truth sounded so implausible. Who would believe I’d had dinner with the woman, discussed her looks with Barbara and Jimmy, and kept a vigil over her body without recognizing her as a girl I’d almost, but not quite, had sex with at the age of fifteen? Although Jimmy and I were inseparable at that age, he hadn’t met her. She’d cut me out of the herd at a party. We’d necked on the stairs for a couple of hours while Jimmy talked medieval history with a rare parochial-school intellectual girl with glasses, and everybody else danced their brains out and guzzled canned fruit punch spiked with cheap vodka. Even at fifteen, Jimmy and I despised any drink with fruit in it and tanked up in advance on whatever we could swipe from our dads or get an older kid to score for us.

I’d been hanging out in the doorway of Clea’s room while Karen and the other women sifted through her possessions. The police had taken away the clothes she’d worn yesterday as well as her ID and everything with writing on it. They’d left the rest in chaos. Karen tut-tutted over the balled up clothing. Jeannette sorted shoes and beach gear. Stephanie, the only skinny one, got down on her tummy and wriggled halfway under the bed to retrieve whatever had rolled there. She’d fished out a crumpled photograph.

“Hey, look at this. It’s us, a couple of summers ago.” Stephanie blew dust bunnies off the picture and handed it to me.

It was a group shot, taken on Oscar’s deck with the ocean as a backdrop. Oscar dominated the group, his arms around four of the women. Lewis and Karen towered at the back. I spotted Jeannette trying to hide her bulk behind Oscar. I recognized Stephanie and Corky.

“Clea wasn’t there?” I asked.

“Let’s see.” Karen plucked the picture out of my hand and squinted. “Sure she is. See? She had short hair.”

Then it hit me. The toasted-biscuit skin. The green eyes that didn’t come from contact lenses. And the honey-colored hair. She’d worn it short at fifteen too. No wonder I hadn’t remembered. The name hadn’t rung a bell either. It had been the era of Last Tango in Paris, the Marlon Brando movie that everyone went to see for the X rating. Even fifteen-year-olds who couldn’t get in to see it knew the girl won’t tell Brando her name until the very end, when she shoots him. Clea was precocious. She said she’d tell me her name if I let her give me a blow job. At fifteen, I was still shockable. Also, my tolerance for alcohol had already started climbing. It took more than I’d had to drink that evening to abolish my half-Irish-Catholic inhibitions. I’d turned her down.

Was there any way the cops could trace the connection between Clea and me? The detectives had indicated that they’d time-travel through her life in the city as far as they needed to. I doubted Sherlock Holmes himself could find that party. But you never know. She’d known my name. She’d asked me on the breath right after the first tonguey kiss. Of course I’d told her. I didn’t know it was the first move in a power play. I wondered if the grownup Clea who’d signed up for a summer in Deadhampton still played sexual games. I wondered if she’d kept a diary at fifteen. I wondered if she kept one now. If she’d brought one to the Hamptons, the detectives had it now.

She could have recognized me. Barbara always said I didn’t deserve to look as good as I did after all those extra years of drinking. She claimed I kept the dissipated portrait version locked in a closet. The whole thing was a helluva coincidence, but I could be in trouble. I had an alibi for whatever time Clea could conceivably have drowned. Of course I did. I’d been with Jimmy and Barbara. And before that, I’d been blamelessly asleep with Stewie gently snoring in the next bed. That part wasn’t such a good alibi. Maybe I’d better tell Jimmy and Barbara the truth. I needed all the backup I could get.

I don’t know how I got roped into scrubbing the salt and dirt off a boat. Okay, I do know. Cindy asked me. She found a fourteen-foot plywood and Fiberglas rowboat half buried in the weeds behind the house and drafted me to help her drag it out to where we could contemplate it. Contemplation turned to cleaning a lot quicker than I wanted.

“How do you know this thing is seaworthy?” I rubbed at a persistent mass of crud on the hull with a Brillo pad soaked in ammonia. I might end up asphyxiated, but I wouldn’t faint.

“I don’t.” Cindy grinned at me. She sat crosslegged in the only patch of shade in the vicinity, sanding an oar. Today her sweatshirt said, “Dolphins do it with a smile.” “I don’t see any obvious cracks, do you?”

“I wouldn’t know what to look for. All I see is encrusted schmutz. Dirt. A Barbara word,” I explained.

“The three of you seem pretty tight,” she remarked. “Don’t you have a girlfriend of your own?”

“Not since I got sober. How about you?”

“Too busy. Hey, watch out for the barnacles. You might need some kind of knife or scraper to get them off.”

“‘It’s me, it’s me, I’m home from the sea, said Barnacle Bill the Sailor’,” I sang. “Hey, don’t wince when I’m serenading you. These clingy little shell bumps around the pointy end here are barnacles? Who knew?” I rocked back on my heels, knees creaking, and drew the tail of my T-shirt up to wipe my sweaty face.

“Let’s see.” She swung the oar to vertical, stuck the blade in the ground, and used its six-foot length to pull herself up. “Yeah, yeah. I get it, you’re a landlubber. I suppose that makes me the press gang.” She came around the bow to stand next to me. She put a light hand on my shoulder and leaned over to look. I could feel the warmth of her flushed cheek next to mine. “Yes, those are barnacles or something very like them. We need to scrape them.”

“We? You really meant it about the press gang. So we get this thing in pristine condition and then what?”

“We take it out on the bay. It’ll be fun.”

I really liked her grin. Her eyeteeth were a bit long. It gave her a predatory look that belied the sweetness of her mouth and the twinkle in her eye. Like a very charming vampire.

“How do we make it go?”

“That’s the easy part. I give the orders, you man the oars.”

I opened my mouth to voice my dismay. The heavy chomp of tires biting gravel and the purr of an engine interrupted us. A red Lexus swept past us. The car drew up in the cleared area to the side of the house. Phil emerged, slamming the door.