Further Lane (16 page)

Alix liked that story. She said she liked any story that had people in boats distracting golfers. Also stories with Indians dressed up and Bohemians wearing two shirts.

After dinner, at her request, we drove to Hannah Cutting's place so she could check it out from the Further Lane side. The Kroepkes had refused to see her when she went by earlier. Apparently the lawyers for the estate thought they'd done too much talking already. “Can't we drive in and see it up close?” I didn't think so, I told her. The cops were being a bit brisk about trespassing since the killing and more so after the break-in. But I showed her how to get to Old Beach, between the Maidstone Club and Hannah's property, where we parked the car and left our shoes and went down onto the sand so Alix could see where Hannah'd been speared and her body found. It being a clear, windless night with a half moon and lots of stars it was very pleasant walking there barefoot on the smooth sand with a gentle surf sliding up on the beach to our right. Hurricane Martha, which it now was, hadn't yet reached the Windward Islands, still nearly two thousand miles off.

“Golly, this is lovely,” Alix said, “no wonder all you wealthy chaps go on and on so about the Hamptons.”

“I'm a journalist. My neighbors are the rich ones.”

“Oh, tosh,” she said, “I'll wager you've a bundle.”

When we got to the rickety ladder where Hannah's murder most foul had been committed, Alix insisted on clambering up. She was wearing a dress and the ladder did nice things for her legs. She'd read the various reports and was able to visualize where Hannah had been on the steps and where the killer must have stood on the old boardwalk just above. She was disappointed all the dried blood seemed to have been taken in evidence or washed away naturally by rain and wind and spray. Then, her face set and serious:

“Spearing somebody on the very eve of the twenty-first century. What do you make of that?”

Somebody with an exaggerated sense of nostalgia, perhaps. Or maybe to throw off the cops.

“There was a Red Indian they suspected, wasn't there?” Yes, I said, Jesse Maine. Still a suspect but as yet no hard evidence.

“That may have been why a spear was used. To suggest Mr. Maine, to implicate him?”

Possible. It had occurred to me after a day or two; it had occurred to Alix Dunraven rather more swiftly. When we'd finished with the scene of the crime she said, “Can we put our feet in the ocean? I've been all summer in Manhattan.…”

Of course we could. And did. And strolled along at the edge of the ocean chatting and smoking cigarettes.

“You think the same person killed Hannah and broke into the house? And what were they looking for? Could it have been our precious manuscript?” she asked.

I didn't know. And I said so. Hannah's death was a police matter. I was writing a story about her life. Alix raised a skeptical eyebrow. Smug, she was, weren't death and life the same thing? Oh, yes, smug.

I wasn't getting all that far keeping things from her so I told Alix about Hannah's having worked here on Further Lane as a kid and about her coming back to buy the house in which she once had been a servant. Alix liked that:

“It's all too
Wuthering Heights
to be believed,” she said, shaking her head. I thought it more Dickensian than Bronte-ish but who was I to challenge an Oxonian with a double first? Instead, I decided against telling her yet about Royal Warrender. Let her offer me a little something, first.

About Hannah's manuscript, I meant.

EIGHTEEN

The demon amanuensis of Hampton Bays …

And now Alix did offer something. “Beecher, where are Hampton Bays from here?”

“Where
is.
Hampton Bays is singular, part of Southampton Town.”

“My, you are the grammarian, aren't you?”

Why did Alix want to know about Hampton Bays?

“Someone at Random House told me there's this old stenographer living there who actually typed up Hannah's first couple of books for Simon & Schuster. You know, the self-help things.” She looked at a small notebook (she shared that with detectives and me, carrying a notebook despite the Louis Vuitton laptop. And I admired her for it, being a traditionalist and all). “Rose Thrall is her name. I thought I'd talk to her on the off-chance she's been doing some typing and such for Hannah on our book.”

I liked that “our,” as well, granting me a kind of partnership with Alix on the missing manuscript. Then she promptly disabused me of that idea with, “Random House and I are terribly anxious about all this. Since it's our property that seems to have vanished. Rose Thrall may not know a thing but I think it's worth the toss.”

I knew how to get to Hampton Bays but didn't know the local streets and roads that intimately so I said I'd go along and help her find the stenographer's place. Alix thought for a moment, weighing convenience against confidentiality, I suppose, and then said, “Right. Then let's get to it.”

We took the Jag. And the poodle.

“I'd be mortified if she did the nasty on your nice carpets, Beecher.”

My “nice” carpets were decidedly tired old Rya rugs but it was considerate of Alix to fret, tired as they were.

She'd fetched along a copy of the book review from last Sunday's
New York Times.
“Hannah's got still another book on the best-seller list, in the Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous category.
Good Taste, Better Taste.
”

“She won't be able to do the talk shows.”

“There is that,” Alix conceded.

We stopped once for gas.

“What sort of place is it, Hampton Bays?” Alix asked.

“Ham Bays is what the locals call it and it's pretty much blue collar, with a lot of New York city firemen and cops owning places here, summer cottages and houses to retire to, about a half-hour drive from Further Lane, just across the Shinnecock Canal. At a dinner party one night in East Hampton a guy named Bill Flanagan, a senior editor for Forbes, who's written a handful of books, said he lived in Hampton Bays and some woman asked, ‘And how far is that from East Hampton, Mr. Flanagan?'

“And Bill said: ‘About two and a half books.'”

I liked that story and told it whenever I could. Alix humored me. “My, that was clever of him, wasn't it.”

I had to ask directions only once. Hampton Bays had some fine houses with water views or actually on the bays. There were plenty of cardboardy-looking bungalows of plywood or siding with small, above-ground pools in the backyard and a rowboat or a dory on cinder blocks in front. Rose Thrall lived at the Peconic Bay end of a rutted dirt road in a sagging, weathered old frame house that had seen better days. As had she, on first glimpse. Except for her hands. As she came out on the porch and then down steps toward where we'd gotten out of the Jag, she was carefully pulling on a fresh pair of white cotton gloves. I guess she saw me looking at what she was doing. Or maybe Alix was staring, too.

“I have rather pretty hands,” Ms. Thrall said, “so whenever I'm outdoors, even briefly, I cover them. Don't like old ladies' hands if I can keep them at bay.”

“I quite agree,” Alix said, “and I say, you do have lovely hands.” She did, you know.

Alix extended her own to shake both of Ms. Thrall's and to tell her she was from Random House, leaving me sort of vaguely there, offering my name but little else. Rose was a talker:

“If my life had developed differently and I'd been assiduous about it, I might have had a considerable career as a hand model. You know, doing commercials and print ads for dishwashing liquids and lotions and the like. Instead, I won another sort of fame as Stenographer of the Year in 1960. Kennedy was elected that year and I took three hundred sixty words per minute in a national competition. Gregg. I was always partial to Gregg when it came to the various shorthand styles.”

“That's jolly good, three hundred sixty words per minute,” Alix said, “isn't it, Beecher?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. Alix was doing all the running and desperately wanted me to pitch in. Rose Thrall came to the rescue.

“Come in out of the sun,” she said. “Have a refreshment.”

We both thanked her. This was going to be cake. The poodle was leashed to the steering wheel and for once was docile, curling up and preparing to nap. She liked the Jag's leather seats. But Ms. Thrall beckoned.

“Bring in the dog. I like a dog around. Had one but it died. Buried it out back there.”

Mignonne hesitated and then trotted in after us.

“I suppose it's about Hannah,” the old woman said.

She was tall and gaunt and had a breath on her I thought was probably rye. And cheap rye at that. Once we were inside the old house you could smell the booze permeating the wood, the furniture, the rugs. There was a sitting room with a fireplace and some dark, heavy wood furniture, all of it dated. Except against one wall, where the only good lighting was, where Ms. Thrall did her work. A desktop IBM computer, a fax machine, a Xerox copier, a printer, and two impressive-looking electronic typewriters.

“Name your poison,” she said in a loud voice, pouring herself a refill of the rye. She was no dilettante when it came to that, straight rye right into a water glass with no intervening ice or mixer.

“Ah, tea?” Alix said, for once confounded. The old woman drank off a third of her fresh glass.

“Lipton's okay? Afraid I don't have milk. Got some lemons somewhere. I like a twist of lemon in a glass.”

“Coffee for me,” I said.

“Instant?” Without waiting for my answer, and with Mignonne trotting amiably in her wake, she went deeper into the gloom of the house to what I guess was the kitchen. She walked steadily, you had to say that for her, carrying her glass—as if concerned we might empty it once her back was turned—and not spilling a drop.

Alix and I looked at each other.

When we were all three again seated, refreshment in hand, and the poodle curled up contentedly on the worn carpet at our hostess's feet. Rose Thrall started right in, sipping from her glass with the bottle handy next to her.

“I'm surprised someone didn't come before. The police should certainly have checked me out. Considering all the sturm und drang.”

“What sturm und drang was that?” Alix asked. Let the old girl tell the damned story, I thought fiercely, willing Alix to hear the unspoken caution. People talk more freely if you don't press them. I shouldn't have worried; there was no scaring off Ms. Rose Thrall.

“When she got that contract from Simon & Schuster for her first book, I sent a letter offering my services. I read
PW
each week, y'know. That's the trade magazine
Publishers Weekly,
” she explained to me, assuming Alix would already know. I nodded my thanks and she went on:

“Hannah called and asked for samples and references and to make a long story short, she hired me to take dictation and then cleantype the manuscript. She could type herself, she said, but wasn't that fast and found the process boring. It was how I made my living. I enjoy typing.

“I learned a lot about her that first book. I'd go over there to her apartment, I still had a place in Manhattan then, too, and we'd work together a couple of hours. Hannah would pace up and down, gripping a sheaf of papers, notes, torn-out newspaper clips, articles from magazines, pages ripped from books, and she'd rustle through them and dictate to me nonstop, and fast. Barked it out at me and I got it down. I never knew if what I was taking down were Hannah's own words and ideas or pure plagiarism. I couldn't tell until later. After she finished dictating she'd stuff the papers into my hand.

“‘Here,' she'd say, ‘if you can't spell something I said or didn't quite get it all down, everything's in here. My source material. You work it out. Bring me the cleantyped pages when you come back.' And that's just what I'd do.

“But when I'd get back to my place and sort out my shorthand and her bits and pieces, it was clear she was stealing right and left. There were articles from
House Beautiful
and
Better Homes
and
Architectural Digest
and the autobiography of Billy Baldwin and a
Time
cover story about Sister Parish or tearsheets from
Vogue
and the
Times
and articles on Jackie Kennedy's influence on White House décor or how Giverny was furnished and the gardens at I Tatti …

“A grab bag of stolen goods. But when I went back that first time and handed over the cleantyped pages, I said, trying to be subtle, ‘I assume you'll be crediting your sources in footnotes. Or will you do it in the body copy as you go along?' Well, she just exploded.

“‘There's very little new under the sun, Ms. Thrall, and contemporary women are already too pressed for time, balancing family and career, to be slowed down with a lot of academic posturing. I'm not writing a Ph.D. dissertation here; I'm helping busy American women improve their quality of life and I refuse to harass them further. It is callous and wicked of you even to suggest adding
footnotes
to their other burdens!'”

Rose Thrall put the water glass on her head and swallowed off whatever was left in it and reached for the bottle on the table at her elbow and gave herself another refill. Again, no ice, no water. It was astonishing to see. I wondered how long she could do this. As if she'd seen the puzzlement in my face she said, quite reasonably, “I have every vice but one, Mr. Stowe. A fifth of rye a day being among them. I don't smoke, can't abide the noxious weed. As to having a glass, my physician lectures me about it, goes on and on, but I say to him, ‘Doctor, how many of your patients my age sleep a full night through night after night as I do? And have a full set of teeth as well?'”

“My,” Alix said, “that is impressive.”