Further Lane (14 page)

Honest people had ended their vacations and were back in the counting house, the Hollywood studios, or behind their Manhattan desks. East Hampton was left to the natives, the Bonackers who make their lives and their work here, and to the rich, for whom all of life is a vacation.

I loved this place in September. Even if there was talk of a hurricane out there and possibly coming. And when I couldn't work something out in my head, the lead to a story, the answer to a puzzle, I tossed my Old Maine canoe atop the Blazer and drove up to Three Mile Harbor to launch the boat and paddle about for an hour or two, thinking, pondering, wondering …

The storm, if it matured into one, would be called Hurricane Martha. Nice irony there, a big storm named for yet another famous local woman who'd surely had her differences with the late Hannah Cutting.

At this juncture when I couldn't seem to break through to the next stage of Hannah's story, someone with whom I was being awfully canny, not letting on much to her, came to my assistance. Alix Dunraven. She didn't intend to help me out; it was an inadvertent break. And it all came about because I'd given Alix the names of a couple of local places for lunch or a cool drink or the bathroom facilities when she was out shopping. And, despite its bathroom, I'd included The Blue Parrot on my short list of pit stops. Trouble was, Alix went there with her borrowed dog. I'd been halfway down Main Street, talking with Wendy Engel who used to own the pottery shop when I heard the ruckus.

“What the hell was she thinking about, Beecher?” demanded Roland the manager, whose small white dog. Little Bit, had just been rather roughly treated by Alix's Mignonne.

“I'm quite astonished myself by her ferocity,” Alix was assuring Roland. “I am so terribly sorry. She's not really my dog, just on loan, and I don't even like dogs all that much. And certainly never suspected Mignonne to be the Hound of the Baskervilles in poodle's clothing.”

Roland was barely listening, intent instead on murmuring solace and binding up Little Bit's wounds, which, in all candor, seemed more damaged pride than actual hurt. Lee the owner, a tall, handsome Navy brat raised in Hawaii, came out to tend the bar while Roland, and his dog, recovered. Lee rarely mixed a drink himself and this was something of an event. On the basis of which, I bought a round of drinks for the bar, to ease trauma, and included Roland. Not that it mollified him completely, but it was a start.

“What the hell do you feed that dog? Or do you intentionally keep her mean and hungry?” he asked Alix, who instinctively bathed him in the diffident flirtatiousness she might several years before have utilized on an Oxford don about to ask her to defend her thesis on Saint Augustine or old Clive.

“She's actually the property of a chum of mine, a French woman who works at the UN as a translator. We've Manhattan apartments in the same building and she had a stroke of luck when her married boyfriend was dispatched to Bermuda for a week on business and used his frequent flyer miles to take her along instead of his wife. And please, Beecher (this to me rather than to Roland, who hadn't the foggiest what she was talking about), don't ask me to justify the morality of all that. At Oxford, ethics was not my strong suit (then, once again addressing and bestowing enormous charm on Roland), but there I was caught up in this gripping situation, though ethically dubious I quite agree with Roland, and this dog was at hazard. So I was stuck minding a poodle. And then my employer dispatched me to East Hampton and along she came. Barely know the animal, actually, and I'm stunned at this untoward aggression on her part.”

Alix again bestowed her most winning of smiles on Roland. “Mignonne and Mr. Stowe, for example, get along smashingly. Perhaps because they're both unusually articulate in French, as you know.”

This was not precisely the truth since the dog had already bitten me once, and growled occasionally, but I bought another round and when it seemed evident Little Bit wasn't mortally injured and about to expire, Roland was soon back to his usual cordial self. Then Lee bought a round, as owner, which also didn't hurt. And Kelly Klein came in (without Calvin) and she and another very attractive blond woman took stools at the bar and ordered daiquiris and that lent a little chic to the place. Alix helped, as well, putting herself out a bit to make up for Mignonne's savagery, leaning forward on her forearms at the bar, providing Roland with both her dazzling smile and a suggestion of cleavage.

Talk about a double first.

Then, in an unconsciously inspired moment as Roland went off to tend to other clients, she said, “Since I can't get anyone in East Hampton to point me even vaguely in the direction of the missing manuscript, I thought I might just go see the richest people in town, one after another, door to door like a salesman, starting at the top and working my way down to mere millionaires. Hannah Cutting's people, the Krocpkes, are very decent folk but they're servants. Don't dare give too much to a snooper like myself. Won't even tell me if she were typing the story or scribbling it longhand on foolscap. Nor should they, out of sheer loyalty to their patronne. Not at all. Can't blame them a whit, but rich people, with no sworn allegiance to Hannah, why should they care? They're the ones who might just possibly put me on to the whereabouts of Hannah's manuscript. It's the rich who always know where the body is buried, don't they?”

“You're the rich one; you ought to know.”

“Oh, rubbish, we've all those titles and honours and a little land (Daddy's place in Berkshire, Kingston Mere, was on forty-five hundred acres, I'd read somewhere), but no real money. It's why I'm a working girl.”

Her idea sounded dumb. Or so I told Alix. But why not?

“Tony Godwin laureates are not ‘dumb.' We may be drunk or perverse or debauched or other things but rarely dumb.”

I was enjoying needling so I ordered another round and asked, “Have you ever actually edited a full-blown book?”

“Scads of them.”

“Name one recent book I might have heard of.”

“A brilliant account of the East India Company by an historian named Fellowes. It's all about…”

“I know, I know, Clive of India and ‘The Mutiny' and all that. We're not totally uneducated here, y'know.”

“Well, indeed you are. There's much more to it than that. Did you know, for example, that Elihu Yale, the man who financed Yale University, made his bundle trading in spices as a representative of the East India Company?”

Well, now that was interesting intelligence for a Harvard man to have, with the new football season coming on.

“No, I always suspected there was some sort of shady business about it, being Yale and all, but no, I didn't know that.”

“Well, it's a thrilling story and I commend it highly to you. Lots of gore, as well, skirmishes and full-rigged battles and the most gruesome of tortures, the Dutch, surprisingly, being especially fiendish! Native cruelties as well. One poor ship's captain was nailed to a log by the locals and sent floating downriver to be eaten by crocs. That sort of thing.”

Alix looked inordinately pleased at the prospect, perhaps imagining me stapled to that dreadful log.

But I didn't say so; instead, I paid for the drinks. Fobbing her off with some sort of plausible excuse, I shamelessly co-opted her “dumb” idea of dropping in on the rich and asking questions and headed for Further Lane. After all, I wasn't getting very far, either, and who knew how long Mr. Anderson's patience with me might run? Nor did I bother to reveal what I knew and she and Random House didn't, that Hannah's computer had been scoured, that there was nothing there. Nor would I have to go door to door looking for the rich or start with the
As
and go through to the Zs. There were plenty of rich people out here and I knew most of them.

I was concealing what little I knew from her and she was surely concealing from me whatever Evans had given her. Did either of us know much yet? Were we even being especially clever? Probably not.

My real edge was that I knew, and she didn't, which of those rich people were here twenty-five years ago when young Hannah Shuba first appeared on Further Lane; and that she worked for but one of their families. I could start with them, with the people she actually worked for: start with the Warrenders, start with the head of their clan …

But first, a little legal advice.

SIXTEEN

A possible chairman of the Fed if Greenspan ever left …

Plenty of lawyers live in East Hampton, weekends and summers. But they hang their profitable shingles on buildings in Manhattan. There are only a dozen or so lawyers listed in the yellow pages as practicing in East Hampton. Two of them, deliriously, located on Muchmore Lane. I was after Judge Henty.

“I'm not practicing anymore, Mr. Stowe,” he told me courteously. “Retired three years ago.”

The Judge (he'd been a town magistrate and the title was accepted as honorific but he liked to be addressed that way and was a genial old soul, so why not?) had been the lawyer for the people who sold Hannah Cutting her Further Lane estate in 1990. As we sat in big wicker chairs on the broad shaded verandah of his frame house on Lily Pond Lane, he told me what he recalled of the closing.

“The Warrenders didn't want the house anymore, not since the old lady, Royal's mother, passed away. Royal had his own place nearby. Jasper had a place. Horace lived in California and the girls were off married. And the market was good so the agents found a buyer easily and the estate asked me to handle the closing. Hannah Cutting had a team of lawyers come out from Sullivan and Cromwell. We met in my offices upstairs over O'Mally's Saloon. The price had been agreed (nine million and change as he recalled) and the whole affair should have been routine. No liens on the property. Hardly, since these were Warrenders who were selling, and Ms. Cutting clearly had money. So the thing ought to have been settled in an hour or two.”

“Except that…?”

“Except that Hannah showed up. None of the Warrenders did; they left it to me to represent their interests. Hannah had plenty of white-shoe firepower but she was hands-on, I can tell you, and just about drove everyone batty. If you've seen my old offices, they're pretty small, spartan, too, and there was Hannah Cutting flying around that little room like a Valkyrie, picking up on and challenging every phrase, every stipulation as if she were Mr. Justice Holmes handing down precedent-setting opinions from the high bench. She found fault with the survey of the property and intimated the surveyors had been bribed to falsify property lines. Hannah dotted
i
's and crossed
t
's that weren't even in there. Demanded to know why no member of the Warrender family showed up. Were they trying to pull a fast one here, staying away so later on they could assert they never agreed to this or that? If she could take the time out to be present, busy as she was, why couldn't they? Oh, she was a caution, she was, and I tried my best to respond but she kept cutting me off. Rudely, too. Even the Sullivan and Cromwell boys were embarrassed and she was their client. Did everything but delve into my rolltop desk in search of secret compartments and listening devices. Hannah was doing a regular Leona Helmsley bat-outa-hell imitation and a pretty good one at that. At one point threatening that unless they did a better job, she'd move disbarment proceedings against her own attorneys.”

Why did the Judge think she was so uptight? Wasn't this a kind of culmination for her, a splendidly triumphant moment she should have thoroughly been enjoying, sufficiently wealthy and successful to be able to pay millions to purchase a house where she once worked as a kind of servant?

“That was the odd part of it. I don't believe any of us knew that. She was just another New Money millionaire buying into Old Money East Hampton. Happened all the time. And customarily, the New Money folks are just delighted when they get their mitts on one of these old cottages here along Lily Pond or over there on Further. Not Hannah. Not as bitter as she was. I never did quite figure it. And I didn't know until you just told me that she'd worked in the house years back. Must have been that. Why else would she carry on like a spoiled brat when the birthday cake was there just waiting for her to blow out the candles?”

The Judge didn't know; neither did L Maybe Royal Warrender could shed some light.

His vast house perched on the dunes, a twenty-bedroom place on eight acres, the house designed by Rodolphe Daus, a Mexican architect who'd studied in Berlin and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and had put the place up in 1910, a cheerfully eclectic mix of Tudor and other mostly English architecture, 175 feet long and three stories high, with lots of stone arches and a huge stone conservatory. The thatched roof alone, when it had to be replaced several years back, cost two million dollars. The house was built by one of the robber barons of the era, Warrender's great-grandfather, and was of a similar size and epoch as Hannah Cutting's, built by yet another Warrender (and an architect who'd gone a decidedly different and less ornate direction than Rodolphe Daus when it came to style).

I'd met Royal Warrender before and was able to talk my way in. His man led me through the ground floor past doors and turnings and down corridors to a bookish study. Evening, with the sun dipping from view, the final rays slanting in through mullioned windows. Curiously, for late summer, a fire burned in a hearth that must have been twelve feet across and seven or eight tall.

“You've been asking questions around town,” Warrender said after gesturing me to an easy chair in the sort of soft old leather cracking slightly that you saw in good men's clubs where members dozed with the
Wall Street Journal
opened but unread on their ample laps. “My cousin Jasper said you were pumping him at the Club.”

“That's what reporters do, Mr. Warrender.”