Further Lane (10 page)

Tom Knowles had provided the name of a tame River-head cop, an older man who remembered the family. And young Hannah Shuba. Wild, he said, shrewd, too, but wild. Was known to have spent the occasional evening in the backseat of a car. Local boys were all hot for her but when she had options, Hannah went for summer people and rich kids. Long before she ever lived there she had East Hampton tastes. The old cop had no idea who might have wanted her dead. But he sure remembered she had the cutest little bottom in the Hamptons and that she swung it around.

He sent me on to the old man who used to own the shop where she clerked later on, after Mr. Pilsudski died. The man was retired and might no longer be all that cogent, the policeman alerted me. Good thing, too. The old gent, Mr. Ober, lived these days with his sister in a big old frame house on a scruffy, weedy plot near the stone bridge where the Peconic River cut through the old town. The sister hadn't known Hannah when she worked in the store; her brother had, but she gave gave me fair warning. “He's not the man he once was. Keen, he was. You didn't skin Elmer Ober. Not in a deal, not in business. Oh, but he was keen. No more. Just sits there in his hat talking to the dog about television.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what all that meant. I shortly was to find out. Mr. Ober was inside the house in the cool gloom some old houses provide even at midday in summer. And wearing a hat. Otherwise, just his underwear, old-fashioned underwear, what they used to call a union suit. He sat there on a sofa, an old man in his underwear with a Panama hat squarely set on his head while a big dog sat next to him on the couch. Both man and dog were focused on a large television console on which an old black-and-white movie was showing. I thought I recognized George Raft but couldn't be sure. Mr. Ober was talking. To the dog.

“Don't trust that feller on the right. He's not a reliable sort. Keep an eye on him. The feller that just left, with the raincoat, now, he's okay. You'll see. They hold back clues in the first few reels. Catch you up in the story without revealing all. Too early to reveal all. It comes in later reels. Build the tension, there's the secret. You have to watch for it. Uh oh, look at this one. What's she up to? Nice pins, though…”

Mr. Ober might no longer be keen, as the sister warned, but he knew his movies. And appreciated a well-turned leg. The dog listened to the old man, tongue lolling damply, pointed ears reacting to his voice, and seemed to be watching the screen with equivalent concern.

Mr. Ober's sister made the introductions, including the dog.

“That's the neighbor's dog, not ours. He comes over every day to visit my brother and watch television with him. They like to watch together.”

“Oh.”

Mr. Ober and his dog stared at the TV with enormous interest, and obvious pleasure, as James Cagney got out of a big car with running boards, chauffeured by Frank McHugh, and nipped nimbly across the sidewalk to a nightclub, moving as he always did with that dancer's grace. Mr. Ober was telling the dog, “That's Jimmy Cagney now. You watch, he'll straighten this bunch out.…”

After I'd asked a few questions and wasn't getting through, to either the old gentleman or the neighbor's dog, I thanked them all and left. As the living room door closed behind me, the dog's tongue was out, lolling.

The newspaper editor was fuzzy-cheeked, too young to have known the Shuba family, but when I gave him dates he pulled out the dusty bound volumes. Pilsudski died grotesquely, suffocated when a cesspool he was digging caved in. You live in shit, you die in shit. Who was it said that? A year or so later Hannah married again, to Andy Cutting this time.

Driving home from Riverhead didn't take long and I thought I'd better stop to see Andy. He was drunk. Only late afternoon but he was already soused. I can come back some other time, Andy, I said.

“No, Beech, draw up a pew. If I can't talk to old friends…” And then, boozily but cogent, he talked to me:

The Cuttings were a fine old East Hampton family. Old Money, as well, except that Andy was apparently the one member of the family who never learned to count. His business acumen was zero and his share of the family fortune was eroding rapidly. Hannah must have seen something in him. To raise her daughter and pay the bills, she'd clerked in Elmer Ober's shop and moonlighted cleaning houses. Her mother baby-sat and Hannah worked hard with energy and lavished attention on good wood and china and silver and glass. She never stole. Or broke things. Or skipped a cleaning day. A Hannah-cleaned house shone, sparkled, shimmered. She appreciated the fine things she came across in the great houses she cleaned, things she didn't have, and cared for them as if they were hers. She seemed to have some primitive notion that marriage to Andy would provide, if not the things themselves, a passport to getting them. I'm afraid I'm a disappointment to you, darling, Andy told her. I don't have the knack; I keep losing money whatever I do.…

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 damned 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.…