Further Lane (15 page)

“It's no secret Jasper occasionally takes one too many.”

“We chatted over a glass.” I was damned if I were going to let him bully me. Besides that, I was Harvard and he was only Yale. Though you don't rub that in with your elders.

“You're Admiral Stowe's boy.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. Being deferential was okay; letting yourself be bullied was not.

“I'd have expected manners from Beecher Stowe's son. That sort of thing just isn't done, even by journalists, one member of the Maidstone grilling another, especially one in his cups.”

That drew from me a grin. Evidently Mr. Warrender knew nothing of my father's well-earned reputation for dirty tricks on behalf of his country. “Burning and turning” was what they called it in those jolly Cold War days. My father had stories, I can tell you. The grin may have puzzled Warrender. Anyway, it stopped him from hectoring me and even got him answering a few questions.

“So you do remember Hannah Shuba as a kid working around your parents' place?”

“Sure, cute kid, if it's the same one I recall. A lot of the old families brought in local girls every summer to help out. Any number of them over the years. My mother took in one or two every summer. A help to her and a few dollars for the child. Can't say I saw anything in Hannah that would suggest one day she'd be rich and famous. Just another pretty young girl. It says something about America that a kid who once cleaned house comes back to own it. Damned shame what happened to her…”

Warrender, now about fifty, tall, handsome, courtly, was as powerful and admired as anyone on Further Lane, a brilliant merchant banker being considered by the Clinton White House as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve if Greenspan ever left. He was a philanthropist, a sportsman, recently widowed, a pillar of the community, a future governor of New York, perhaps, maybe one day a President. The one flaw: Royal Warrender had just undergone a tricky heart-valve operation. His doctors insisted the heart was sound; the problem was technical. Others whispered of a potentially fatal cardiac condition. I suspected his circulation, which might explain a summer fire to ward off chill. And the blanket across his lap. Or maybe it was just this huge stone pile was damp and chilly. War-render himself declined to discuss the matter during this period of recuperation and was maintaining a low profile far from Wall Street in East Hampton at his vacation home. There'd been some theorizing in the political columns that the White House, and not his doctors, wanted Warrender under wraps.

Whatever the motivation, he didn't give me very much beyond a few memories of a long ago summer and a cute young girl who worked for his mother. When I asked him about Judge Henty's recollection of the closing on the house and Hannah's odd behavior, he sloughed it off. “Wasn't there,” he said, “and Henty never made a point of it. Not to me. We sold, she bought, and they closed. Her check didn't bounce.” I pressed the question of Hannah's book, and he waved a dismissive hand. “Too many celebrity autobiographies now. All that kiss and tell stuff. Cheap thrills for the crowd.”

How did Royal Warrender know it would be “cheap thrills” and “kiss and tell”? Did he have reasons of his own for not wanting to see Hannah Cutting's book published? When I pressed him he went along for a time and then there came a point …

“That's enough, Stowe.”

“I just want to know…”

He shook his large, handsome head. “I won't be harassed in my own house by reporters.”

I looked around. “I'm alone, Mr. Warrender.”

He got to his feet now. My “wit” had not gone over.

“This conversation is ended.”

“I still have questions.”

He looked hard at me.

“Who owns
Parade
magazine? It's a Newhouse property, isn't it?”

“Yes, Advance Publications is the parent company. The Newhouse family owns Advance.”

He nodded.

“I know Si Newhouse. If I must, I'll give him a call.”

“Lots of people call reporters' bosses to complain, Mr. Warrender. Usually, it doesn't work.”

“I'm not ‘lots of people,' Stowe.”

We shook hands and I left, the implicit threat hanging behind me on the genteel air.

Fine, my first assignment for Anderson at
Parade
and I'd ticked off one of the most admired and influential men in the country. His threats were quietly, politely put, of course, but given Warrender's power, no less real. I fell back on the old reporter's consolation that, well, this is the work we do, getting the news, raising hell, discomfitting the comfortable.

But for the next few times the phone rang, I thought, “Uh, oh, here it comes.”

SEVENTEEN

She's not our sort, not our sort at all …

Next stop, Pam Phythian, the quintessential East Hampton clubwoman who didn't even bother to be polite about her locally famous feuding with Hannah.

When I pulled up in the driveway of her place and parked alongside the tennis court, she was just finishing a game. Pam and another tall fit woman in proper whites were hitting the ball hard, running hard, the September sun glistening off them as they worked up an honest sweat. After a particularly well-played point (the other woman won it with a backhand), I applauded.

“Who's that…? Beecher Stowe?”

“Yeah, sorry. I can come back later.”

“No, we're finished. Martha's beat up on me sufficiently for one morning.”

That was the first time I'd met Martha Stewart, taller than I expected. More relaxed, as well. I'd heard of her as something of a control freak. Instead, I got a crisp handshake and a good smile. After she and Pam had exchanged air kisses, Martha drove off and Pam slung a towel around her neck. We sat on old unpainted Adirondack chairs on the lawn next to the court and talked about Hannah.

“What can I tell you, Beecher? I disliked her intensely. Not our sort at all. Symptomatic of developments here in the village I don't like. Every year there are fewer people like us, more people like … them.”

“You mean, like Hannah.”

“Yes. And don't tell me I'm being a snob; I know I am. It's snobbery and tradition and playing by the rules that distinguish people who belong here from those who don't. Because I was brought up playing the game, I'm a pretty fair tennis player. Hannah couldn't play worth a damn. But she was so intent on getting good she hired the Maidstone's pro to tutor her privately and paid out thousands for one of those ball-throwing machines they have at the Club called—”

“I know, a SAM. Twenty-five thousand bucks. Claire told me.”

“Well, then, you know what I'm talking about. If I got up a committee to raise money for new elm plantings on Main Street she'd counter by announcing an AIDS benefit. Or a hospice of some sort. Or a petition advocating mixed-race adoption. Didn't matter what the cause. Or even if she believed in it. When some of us signed petitions against that new A & P, Hannah decided a superstore was just what the village needed. It was as if having scaled East Hampton, she had to kick everyone else off the summit. She's like that on an actual mountain; I've seen her. I talked the organizers into letting her join that Everest climb and I've regretted it ever since. Hannah drew up her own set of rules, never seemed to have heard of team play.”

“Well, she'd made it on her own pretty much.”

“She had a Cutting for a husband. That's hardly…”

“You know Andy as well as I do, Pam. He's not all that much—”

“At least he's a gentleman. She's no lady. Or, wasn't.”

I was about to respond, “He's a drunk.” But why? Then Pam said, still furious:

“I suppose we're all in that book of hers. Getting back at everyone she ever envied and resented. Shocking to think a fine old publisher like Random House would stoop to…”

I wanted to hear more about that, about Hannah's book, but Pam was focused on another irritant, obsessively so, returning again and again to the matter of competing cocktail parties.

“Hannah began harassing me socially about two years ago. If I asked people to come by for Saturday drinks, casual wear, she'd schedule a cocktail the very same day and hour, but specify cocktail dress. If I threw a more formal affair, she asked people to party al fresco in Bermuda shorts. Since we were inviting some of the same people, it forced guests to change uniform in mid-cocktail so to speak, to make choices, to side with me or with her. Caused difficulties, friction among friends, between husbands and wives. She did it just to be difficult and didn't seem to care whether anyone enjoyed the parties or not.”

I mentioned I'd been to her last party and she picked up on it.

“No one minds that her parties were noisier or boozier or even if they involved sex, if that's what went on. Our Maidstone Club crowd does very well on that sort of thing itself. It was the class of people she attracted. And that the wrong people were always taking off their clothes. You don't mind sin; you do care about manners.”

That was about all I got out of her, that apparently everyone knew about Hannah's book. Other than that, Pam Phythian hadn't been much help. Oh, but she was bitter. It surprised me that Hannah had gotten under her skin to that extent. A Phythian ought to be above it all, not getting down into the gutter with an arriviste like Hannah. There must have been more to it than competing benefits and scaling Himalayas. Pam and Hannah were about the same age and both were physical, attractive women.

A man?

Or had something happened on Everest when those people died that Pam blamed Hannah for, even now? Or had it been Hannah who blamed Pam and might have been about to do it publicly in a best-selling book?

*   *   *

On the strength of her thoroughbred bloodlines I took Her Ladyship to dinner at Jerry Delia Femina's restaurant on the water, the one with the five-meter Olympic racing sailboat moored right there inside the bar, fully rigged, sheets and mainmast and all. We took her car, the Jag, after she sort of sniffed at my Chevy Blazer. Hell, it couldn't hurt my reputation around East Hampton to be seen in a Jaguar and especially with someone who looked like this. When I said something about liking the car she was pleased.

“British-built. I buy British if I can. Poor old mother England. If those of us who live there don't buy British, you can't expect the Yanks to. One can usually rely on British-built goods. Not clothes, of course, unless it's underwear from Marks & Sparks or waterproofs from Aquascutum. But cars and whisky and Purdey guns and flyrods and things.”

She was a Sloane Ranger, all right; I knew the type. Except that I was starting to suspect Alix wasn't a type but an original.

It was the first weekend since Labor Day, and Hannah's death, and if the story wasn't leading the evening news anymore and had vanished from the front page of the tabloids, out here in East Hampton there was still plenty of gossip. The latest involved a suspect in the pool house break-in that followed. One of the local Baymen, an unsavory character named Schmid, who'd earlier been scrutinized and questioned (he was the fellow Hannah once accused of fondling her), had been pulled in again for DWI, and discovered to have an unexplained two thousand dollars in his jeans. Cash. None of your damned business where I got it, he told the cops, who kept him overnight and gave him an appearance ticket in the morning when they released him, sober. But they'd assigned Tom Knowles to the case. Where would a layabout like Schmid have gotten two grand unless he'd stolen something from Hannah's place and handed it off to a fence? Who knew? But I was careful not to tell Alix Dunraven that the detective on the case was a pal.

Nor was Lady Alix being terribly forthcoming with me as to what she knew or even suspected about Hannah's manuscript We were both being oh-so-clever, keeping the other in the dark lest we lose advantage. So we compromised by smoking my cigarettes and talking about London and our mutually disastrous recent love affairs. Delia Femina's wine card had some pretty decent vintages on it and we put a couple of bottles to good use as the sun fell toward the distant shore of Three Mile Harbor and the light through the restaurant's opened windows softened into dusk. Alix actually knew my former girlfriend and even the Old Etonian she'd gone off with. Great chum of Prince Charles, Alix said, and that was about the best she could say for the cad. “Chinless wonder,” I muttered.

“Oh, that's a bit stiff,” Alix replied, “talking that way about our future king/emperor.”

Not Charles, I protested quickly, “the chap my girl ran off with.”

“Oh,” Alix said, relieved of the duty of having to defend her sovereign. Or even “Fruity Metcalfe,” her recent but former fiancé.

“Fruity Metcalfe? You were going to marry a guy named Fruity Metcalfe?”

“Well, it's not that astounding. The family name's Metcalfe. He's the Viscount Albemarle. But everyone calls him Fruity. Have done since Harrow.”

“Oh, then that's all right then,” I remarked.

“Don't be shirty about it. He's sweet. Quite dotty about me. And we practically grew up together. Awfully good family. Boys like Fruity, they were what I knew when I was young. Not at all hard cases like you.…”

Talk about being shirty! Though secretly I rather liked being thought a “hard case” and when she expressed interest in one, I bought her a good cigar.

On the basis of the cigar and a few glasses of wine I told yarns about East Hampton.

“You've got to understand, in an old place like this, there are always strange people.”

“Just like England.”

“Ever since sometime in the last century it's been a considerable artist's colony, something about the light. Later, people like Motherwell and Ernst and Jackson Pollack lived here. Pollack died in a car crash on Montauk Highway. Marcel Duchamp the Dadaist had friends here and visited weekends. Traveled light. Wore two shirts and removed one when it became soiled. About the turn of the century rich men's sons, bitten by the art bug, took off to Europe to learn to paint. One young fellow spent three or four years studying and painting in Venice and was so taken by the place that when he returned to East Hampton, he brought back with him a full-rigged Venetian gondola and regalia. Used to launch it Sunday afternoons on Hook Pond, right in the middle of the Maidstone Club's golf course, and be poled about by a local Indian he dressed up in gondolier's straw hat and sailor suit. The Indian stood in the stern poling him about with the artist waving to the golfers, calling out ‘Ciao!' and drinking chilled Frascati as he floated past. Members of the Maidstone nearly brought it to a vote to have him expelled, disturbing their concentration on the links.”