Further Lane (23 page)

Could be, I admitted. Could also be a red herring offered up to incriminate the innocent and toss a little obscuring dust.

Leo lived out by Louse Point which, despite its name, is a nice neck of land at the east side of Accobonac Harbor. Wonderful boating, nice beach, good fishing when they were running. “Louse Point?” Alix said, turning it over on her tongue to enjoy the dreadful sound of it. “Louse Point.”

“Now you stay in the car. Just in case…”

“But you have your ‘Nixons,' Beecher. We're relying heavily on those, y'know.”

“Sure.”

I wish I felt as confident as she did. All the Winston Churchill bravado, that magnificent wartime defiance toward a more powerful Nazi foe, seemed to have come down to Alix through the genes. Or did they issue stuff like that at Oxford?

Fortunately, Leo wasn't home.

Claire came out, looking sulky but nothing like the whipped girl Hannah bullied. More pugnacious. Each time I'd seen her since Hannah's death, she'd matured, grown stronger. “He's out in the boat,” she said.

I couldn't resist.

“Running down canoes?”

“Go to hell. That was just teasing. If Leo wanted to he could have cut your canoe in half. And you with it!”

“I suppose he could.” No point arguing. And I was pretty relieved not to have to fight Leo Brass, at least not yet.

Claire's mood swings were something. Last time she'd come to apologize. I wondered what she'd say if she heard what Jesse said about her boyfriend. And her mother. I must say, Claire was looking pretty good despite everything. If she ever traded in those glasses, well …

But she was again hostile. “Reporters,” she snarled, “bloodsuckers! Feeding off death, snooping for scandal. Even the cops finally had the decency to take down the yellow ribbons and go away. Page Six and the
Enquirer
went home. But you keep sniffing around.”

I told her I only wanted to know what Leo was up to, why she and Leo tried to scare us off. I didn't mention our midnight prowler; I was keeping that one for Leo himself.

“Just stay away. And that includes Hannah's place—
my
place on Further Lane. I told the Kroepkes. You come messing around there and I'll…”

I thought I could again smell beer on her breath but this wasn't the time or place to discuss the Volstead Act. There was a bit more of her shouting and then I got back in the Blazer and Alix drove us off.

“Well…” I said.

“Yes, well, Beecher. I do admire the way you stood up to Mr. Brass. Even if he wasn't there.”

“Thanks.”

“But I think it's time we delve somewhat more deeply into the case. How can we determine just who was most fearful of what Hannah's book might tell? Who could be most damaged by her revelations? Had the most to lose? Claire and Leo or someone else? I know they're unpleasant, but are we wasting time on them when it's someone else entirely? Isn't it logical to explore things like that?”

She was very brisk. I think Alix felt cheated, disappointed Brass and I hadn't had a fight.

Couldn't blame her. You come all this way, you want to see the show.

“Might Leo have killed Hannah?” she asked, thoughtful.

“He could have. But don't forget, he found the body. Wouldn't that be calling down suspicion on himself?”

“But they always return to the scene of the crime. Or so I've read.”

“That's an old wives' tale.”

“Not in my experience,” she said. “Don't you recall McCray the Hammersmith Strangler?”

We ended up at the Parrot, drinking Mexican beer and munching tortilla chips. Royal Warrender. He was the one that intrigued her. “Is it possible I might meet him? I mean, without being obvious about it?”

I didn't think so, I said. But I'd give it some thought.

When we got back to the gatehouse there was a message from Random House. Not the boss this time. Evans was apparently too annoyed to get on the phone himself. An aide informed Lady Alix that Page Six of the
New York Post
had a report Random House had panicked over the possibility its million-dollar manuscript was missing from Hannah Cutting's house, that perhaps such a manuscript had never even existed, and since Hannah was dead, no one could say. Random House had a dozen editors and private eyes on the case, pestering wealthy people and tracking down clues all over East Hampton. The newspaper gave as one of its sources on the story “local community activist Leo Brass, the man who found Hannah's body on Labor Day Sunday.”

The message to Alix from Random House: “Bring back Hannah's book or don't come back yourself.” Put more tactfully, of course. Book publishers are polite folk.

“Oh, dear, they do sound cross.” Usually, she shrugged things off. Now she actually looked concerned and sat down at the Louis Vuitton laptop to rattle off some more E-mail to Harry Evans, telling him God knows what in, I assume, six-figure code signed with the names of horses.

I was sore myself and not for the first time at Leo. “Community activist,” indeed. I'd activate him! But I was also aggravated at Page Six and realized how dumb that was. I was a newsman letting my feelings for Alix get me in a mood to kill stories and suppress rumors.

Then next morning, by what seemed extraordinary coincidence (until I thought about it), a car pulled up and Warrender's manservant came to the door. Our invitation to dinner was on creamy cardboard, handwritten, as these old WASPs do. Very last minute, Royal's note admitted apologetically, but they were juggling dates with the hurricane coming.

“Want to have dinner with Royal Warrender?” I asked Lady Alix, being very cool.

“Oh, you are the clever one.” Had to say this about Alix, she didn't brood, and was already quite cheery.

“Yes, aren't I?”

The truth was that Royal hadn't suddenly dived headlong into the Hamptons' social scene but was simply carrying out an annual ritual of the Maidstone Club, which one of its governors would as likely have flaunted as a member of the College of Cardinals would have snubbed the Pope.

Whatever she'd E-mailed Random House seemed to have resonated with Evans, who now phoned her directly. And instead of reacting to the Page Six business and fobbing the editor off with excuses, she attempted to distract him with tantalizing hints of another book entirely:

“… I realize all that, Harry, and you're entirely right to be miffed. But not since the Sepoy Rebellion has there been someone like this fellow Crispus Attucks. A Gandhi of his time, a Mandela or a Bishop Tutn, and we shot him down there in the snows of Boston. Shocking, I say, Harry, even at the remove of two centuries. Had he lived, he might have been a Jefferson or Washington even if, as a gentleman of color, he might not have gotten due notice. But Chief Maine has all the data, chapter and verse, and I beg to suggest that, given the proper editing, a book on Mr. Attucks could make him bigger than your chum Salman Rushdie.”

There was a substantial pause. After which, Alix said:

“No, no, Harry. Mr. Attucks is dead. Jesse Maine is our chap. Put him together with one of your finest young editors and I'm reasonably sure we'll have a best-seller that may, given the proper promotion, succeed in…”

I don't think Evans was buying her act anymore. When she hung up she was chewing her lower lip as if wondering, where do we go from here? But it wasn't only her failures with Random House that were eating at her.

“Beecher, these are desperate moments.”

“Oh?”

“Yes; at Princeton, did you study ethics? I'm in something of a dilemma and I could use a little ethical counsel.” It occurred to me she was a bit of a nut on ethics but didn't say so.

“Harvard. I went to Harvard, not that other place.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

“It's okay. As to ethics, my old man's the one. He always knows right from wrong. But try me, I'll tell you as best I can.”

What happened was that London had called.
The Times.
Murdoch owned
The Times
of London as well as the
Sun
with its Page Three Girls and the book publishing house of HarperCollins, where Alix was an editor. Murdoch also owned the
Post
in New York with its busybodies of Page Six. The pieces were falling into place and now someone over there was pressing her for a first peek at Hannah's manuscript, if and when. Why should some Yank reporter get there first? Wasn't as if Alix were an employee of Random House. Her firm was HarperCollins. The Random House business was pro tern and honorary. She had sacred responsibilities and loyalties to London, not to New York.

“As if I were a leftenant in the First Fusiliers and had been seconded to the King's Own Scottish Borderers,” she said. “Or at least that was how they put it to me. My primary allegiance was to the old regiment.”

“To Rupert and
The Times.
”

She looked gloomy.

“That's what they were telling me. But what would you do, Beecher?”

I'd never been very good at such questions and admitted as much. “Do what you think is right, Alix. To whom do you owe professional loyalty? To HarperCollins or Random House?”

“Oh, God, I dunno.” She loved HarperCollins but was proud of her Godwin Award and grateful to people in New York, who'd been welcoming and gracious.

When she froze up and didn't answer, I said:

“Tomorrow, when you wake, and before you think or make cold, rational judgments, are you a Brit or a Yank? The First Fusiliers or the King's Own? Who pays your salary, Rupert Murdoch or Harry Evans?”

She regarded me in agony. An ethical quandary on top of Page Six and threats from Random House.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

TWENTY-FIVE

It made the turn! The hurricane made the damned turn!

Desperation inspires rash acts. So does too frequent the rereading, at an impressionable age, of books like
The Thirty-nine Steps.

Buchan's thrillers are meant to be read and enjoyed but not acted upon as practical guides to conduct in the waning years of the twentieth century. I don't mean that Alix Dunraven followed literally the example of Sir Richard Hannay and his World War One-era chums as they confounded and battled The Hun, but the accounts of their adventures and defiantly gorgeous gestures in the face of adversity and peril surely planted seeds. So that now at a moment when she should have been keenly focused on the recovery of Hannah's unfinished manuscript, Her Ladyship decided admirably, if not prudently, to do a Madeleine Albright and negotiate peace between the warring factions.

Without letting me in on it, she drove up to meet Claire Cutting to see if between the two of them, something might be sorted out to prevent Leo Brass and me from damaging each other. Though, as she later confessed, Alix wasn't nearly as concerned about Leo's health as about mine. Which didn't say much for her confidence in my “Nixons” but was nonetheless very sweet.

To this moment I don't know precisely what went on between the two women but when Alix and the poodle got back to Further Lane and skidded to her usual racing stop on the gatehouse gravel, she was smiling broadly.

“My watch says nearly four, Beecher. We've not much time. She insists you and Leo foregather on neutral ground and we're to be down there on the beach by five.”

Alix was wearing olive green corduroy jeans, sneakers, and a “Smashing Pumpkins” T-shirt so she didn't have much changing to do.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

It rushed out of her then.

“We're meeting Leo Brass at five down by The Gut. Claire said that's where he wanted it to be and when. Quite precise about it, she was, five
P.M
. at The Gut. I said, I suppose Beecher will know where that is and she laughed. Rather rude of her, I must say. You do know where it is, don't you?”

Yes, I knew where The Gut was. What I didn't know was whatever possessed Alix to …

“Well, I drove up to see Claire and I laid it right out. If Beecher comes up here again and Leo's at home, there's certain to be ill-feeling and all sort of difficulty. Even violence. I told her that in plain language. Much as in
The Three Hostages
Dick Hannay told off that cad Medina after he'd spit in Sir Richard's face while Hannay was pretending to be hypnotized. I told Claire we knew Leo was behind that midnight prowl and the stake of privet through my car seat and the cudgeling of your poor head and we simply weren't going to stand for it anymore. What with my Random House connections and yours with
Parade
magazine and that nice Mr. Anderson of yours, we were anything but helpless. And you have various police officers as chums, besides.

“I suggested you and Leo meet and talk it all out like civilized people and not go bashing each other like angry children. Or rugby players in a pub. Negotiate an armistice of sorts, the way the Germans and Russia met at Brest-Litovsk and hammered out a truce. Your only interest was writing a story about the late Hannah Cutting's remarkable life and times, and mine was in retrieving a manuscript she'd sold to Random House and that now was missing. Neither you nor I was the least bit interested in trashing Hannah or discomfitting Mr. Brass. We had, in fact, and I told her this with considerable emphasis, even attended his recent speech at what was the name of that hall?… and had sat there most attentively and in agreement, to a great extent, with his defense of the wetlands and so on from those dreadful geese flying down from Canada that have him concerned. And rightly so.”

Okay, I said. She hadn't left me much choice, had she, dammit? Refusing to meet Leo now would brand me either a coward or mulishly stubborn.

We drove down Lily Pond Lane to West End and as close as we could get by road and then drove along the beach another half mile and parked the Blazer and shucked our shoes. I showed her the pond and The Gut and the jetties they have down there. We don't have many East Hampton jetties and a good thing, too. Jetties cause all that erosion there along Dune Road in Westhampton. Or so most people believe. There was a fisherman out on a jetty surfcasting and west of The Gut you could see people strolling or a kid throwing pebbles into the surf. We walked along, the water washing against our feet and ankles, still September warm. It felt good. No Leo Brass, no Claire Cutting. I looked at my watch.