Further Lane (6 page)

“Hannah Cutting's hair is cropped short,” I protested.

“Enough there to get a hold on it,” Knowles persisted, then, “You covering this story, Beech?”

No. And I wasn't. That was the truth. A day or so later it wouldn't be true but I never lied to Tom. Not then, not ever.

The newspapers and the tabloid TV shows were, understandably, out of their minds. A glamorous and famous woman of enormous wealth, style, and power, widely admired and recognized, fiercely controversial in some quarters, had been found stark naked and murdered on the sands of America's most elegant beach resort, a wooden stake (as one overstimulated headline writer put it) “driven through her cold heart!”

The press reported the facts amid wild tales of vengeance, feuds, sexual license, plots and rumors of black magic, and (nothing was too far a reach for headline writers at the
New York Post
) “orgies among the de-beached and rich.”

The briefly most fevered theory featured allegations of devil worship, voodoo rituals, and, yes, that favorite of sexually heated gothics, the Black Mass. Here was a female victim, stripped naked and spread-eagled (not so, said the cops!), pierced by a clearly phallic device, the sharpened wooden stake; and wasn't Hannah, after all, a lapsed Roman Catholic? And weren't the Hamptons officially (and famously so) part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Center? What could be more obvious? There was talk the bishop was in confidential contact with the Jesuits and might summon an exorcist.

An illegal Haitian immigrant, meanwhile, employed in nearby Wainscott by a sod-laying firm, was arrested and closely questioned as to his whereabouts the night of the crime, and his belongings thoroughly ransacked for beheaded chickens and other possible clues to voodoo practices and unspeakable acts. Once the poor man proved to have an alibi, he was swiftly re-arrested by immigration authorities and hustled off. The immigration people hate to let a live one get away.

Almost as exotically, according to detective Tom Knowles, the local Indian Jesse Maine headed the list of suspects, having recently and quite loudly been fired as a handyman by the dead woman on her complaint that he'd used her own personal bathroom while working around the house. Hannah, a housekeeping fanatic, had flown into a powerful rage. Jesse, with quite a rap sheet for drunkenness and violent behavior, was overheard by several reliable witnesses threatening to “get back at” Ms. Cutting. But Jesse hadn't yet been charged. He was a popular figure on the nearby Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton and the authorities didn't want an “incident” especially this weekend, the annual Labor Day Reservation Pow Wow that drew thousands of spectators and hundreds of Indians from other Eastern tribes.

“Bringing in Jesse during Pow Wow would be like busting the Pope Easter Sunday at Solemn High Mass in Vatican City,” Knowles had said.

Another thing about Jesse, he and detective Knowles and I all played ball together (against the angry and trouble-making Leo Brass) in one of the Hampton summer leagues when we were kids. Tom was the fastest of us, Jesse maybe the strongest, Brass the loudest, and I also played.

Jesse the Shinnecock, like most of his tribe, was of decidedly mixed blood. “I'm seventy-five percent black, one hundred percent mean, and I'm all Shinnecock,” he was fond of boasting when in drink.

But he was hardly the only possible killer.

Hannah had her enemies. Half the people in town had reasons to dislike her; with the other half, she “got along.” Since for five years I'd been away, returning only briefly on home leave or summer holidays for family reasons, Knowles's narrative became for me a sort of personal “Greek chorus,” not only in regard to Hannah's death, but on recent changes here in the little town where both of us spent some or all of our youth. The Knowleses were old East Hampton and of modest means; the Stowes old East Hampton and well-off.

“No one resents the old families, Beech, for having a few bucks. It's the new bunch, the carpetbaggers, the actors and rock stars and Wall Street arbs, the fashion designers and hairdressers, this latest swami with his patter about Rosicrucians, about Merlin and mystic numbers. They arrive here and start to throw their weight around and treat blue-collar types like me as picturesque local color, as if we were part of the scenery, sent here by central casting for their amusement. Billy Joel, now, he's swell. But that Sting, he'll look right through you. I encountered him one day on Main Street and said hello.”

“And?”

“He nodded, smiled, and called me ‘My man.'”

Hannah Cutting was New Money but was also old East End, from Riverhead, and that confused people; they didn't know quite how to react to Hannah. As for motive, there were plenty who hated her guts. Tom Knowles tugged out of a seersucker jacket pocket a narrow spiral notebook such as good cops, and good reporters, carry, and checking his notes, he read them for me, ticking off the usual suspects:

Max Victor, Hannah's former partner, sloughed off when she sold herself and the company to the Japanese. Victor was paid millions but not the fortune he believed he was owed; he drank and had an unhealthy letch for unsuitably young women; was still resentful and rarely referred to his ex-partner except as “that bitch;”

Hannah's former husband, Andy Cutting, the product of aristocratic if tired loins, wearer of the old school tie but these days a nonentity celebrated largely for having once shared Hannah's bed. He'd long ago been dumped by Hannah and had been sliding downhill ever since;

Her East Hampton nemesis and neighbor, the very WASP (authentically so; she didn't marry into it as Hannah did!) Pam Phythian, a doe-eyed, Aztec-profiled, lean, athletic woman about Hannah's age who was particularly offended by Hannah's alpine grandstanding: “Everest, Everest, Everest,” wailed Pam, “you'd think she was Tenzing Norkay!,” naming the Sherpa who accompanied Edmund Hillary on that first ascent. Pam and Hannah had been fellow members of an Everest expedition that ended tragically with eight alpinists dead. The traumatized Pam hadn't climbed since while an apparently insensitive Hannah was planning another Everest assault. Once climbers on the same rope, relations between these two savvy, powerful women had soured into viciousness. Hannah moved onto Further Lane five years ago, Pam's family had been there for five generations (one set of cousins spelled the name “Fithian”), and the two strong, attractive women were now at the point of scheduling competing dinner parties, backing rival charities, arguing over whether their commonly bordering privet should be trimmed back and by how much. If Pam played for the Artists in the annual Softball game behind the A & P, Hannah volunteered for the Writers' team. But would a perfectly respectable woman kill over such trivial things?

You jest! Of course she might. Or so I told myself.

Pam was hardly the only one out here who hated Hannah. A famous, flamboyant interior designer, Roger Dafoe, whose stock in trade plummeted when Hannah on her TV show critiqued his finest work as “boasting all the elegance of an OTB parlor”; Hideo (Hideous) Hegel, who lost face with his superiors in Tokyo, the Seven Samurai, because of Hannah's never-ending, and to them, insulting and arrogant demands;

A brawling bayman Hannah once accused of molesting her in a local restaurant. “Hell, her jeans were painted on and I gave her a little pat on the ass. How'd I know she was Hannah friggin' Cutting?”;

Boobie Vander, a covergirl recently dropped by Hannah from her TV commercial and endorsement contract, a costly and unpleasant blow made even more painful with Hannah's widely repeated reference to Boobie as “having a few miles on her odometer”;

Stringer, the big television CEO, who only Saturday evening suggested Bill Paley would have had the woman “bumped off” for dealing traitorously;

Hannah's grown daughter, Claire, whom she patronized and bullied (and who might have good reason to welcome her mother's death);

And even the Bayman who discovered her body, Leo Brass. He and Hannah were at opposite ends of the environmental debate clashing only last spring over composting rules (he lived off but cared about nature; she enjoyed and exploited it). And Leo had an arrogance to match her own.

Plus former lovers and people Hannah Cutting used, abused, and climbed over on her way to the top of the ladder. Even the summer's pet swami, having been snubbed, carried a grudge.

There may have been other suspects at this stage unknown to the police or to anyone else, including me. And a few in Tom's notebook, like Boobie Vander, turned out to have been on entirely different continents when Hannah climbed that old wooden stair to meet her killer. But had we cast nets sufficiently wide? Where was PR woman Peggy Siegal that night, Peggy, the “flack from Hell”? Where, too, Claudia Cohen? Had she an alibi? What of Senator D'Amato himself, a Long Islander by birth and breeding? Where were Mikey and Mickey the night Hannah bought it? As far as I was concerned, and considering all the people who fought with or disliked or envied Hannah, just about every single one of us was a suspect but Brooke Astor, who already had everything Hannah ever wanted, and who rarely if ever came to the Hamptons.

This was what caught at the sleeve of imagination and piqued the curiosity of so many of us: Who killed Hannah Cutting and why?

SEVEN

People who live here think themselves special, touched by the hand of God …

By Tuesday morning the long holiday weekend had ended and East Hampton was emptying out, frustrating the homicide detectives. Streisand was back in L.A., Martha Stewart in Connecticut, Donna Karan on her way to Lyon and Zurich to buy fabric for the new collection. Demi was on location somewhere. Others scattered this way and that. My own father would be off that very day for Norway and the salmon beat he'd taken on the Merdal, and his annual tour of the parishes, Copenhagen, Paris, London. How do you force rich and famous people to stay around to be questioned simply because they knew her or she attended the victim's last cocktail party?

The answer, you don't.

Also, by Tuesday morning, I was no longer merely one of the loitering curious, my summer-long idyll ended. By Tuesday, I was on assignment, covering the Hannah Cutting story.

Anderson phoned early that morning from his office at
Parade
on Third Avenue in Manhattan. The editor, aimiable but firm, told me to shelve the several assignments we discussed. “Right now, Hannah Cutting's our story. You're out there, you knew the woman, you attended her last party, you know the setting and the cast of characters. You probably know most of the suspects. Her death is pure melodrama; it's her whole life that fascinates people. Who was Hannah? How did a poor girl become a millionaire? Where did she come up with the idea for that first bestseller,
The Taste Machine?
”

And, the editor wanted most to know, “How did Hannah Cutting get to Further Lane?”

Anderson cut his teeth as a general assignment reporter for the Gannett newspapers and he knew cops solve murders; reporters don't. He didn't want me chasing clues and grilling suspects but finding out the truth—not about her death—but about the living Hannah Cutting.…

“You
own
this story, Beecher,” Walter Anderson growled cheerfully as he hung up, a softspoken man, but you could sense the iron beneath, which left me feeling rather like that anonymous little reporter in
Citizen Kane
dispatched by his boss to find out about Rosebud.

By now, the television crews had gone back to town and the print reporters were reduced to haunting the Suffolk County DA's regional office in Southampton, waiting for news and trying to goad someone, anyone, into making an arrest. Why couldn't the cops just go in there and grab that goddamned drunken Indian Jesse Maine right out of his wigwam? Touch off a riot? Well, yeah, maybe. But, hell! A famous woman's dead and no one's been charged! Riot's a small price to pay. Besides, when did Indians last riot? This is Long Island, not the Little Bighorn. And if it came down to that, an Indian uprising might turn out to be an even better story, Wounded Knee and all that.…

There was a brief flurry of excitement when Hannah's ex-partner Max Victor was arrested for allegedly groping a young woman sitting next to him on the Hampton Jitney. Ever since Hannah, damn her!, sold the company out from under Max, he hadn't had much luck. She was his curse, it seemed. And now this … when he'd barely touched the girl's leg reaching for his book, a biography of Jane Austen, for God's sake.

Preliminary autopsy results were released. The knock on the head caused concussion; the stab would killed Hannah. And. Torn Knowles told me, they were learning more about that primitive spear. Not only was it privet wood, carved to a dangerous point, but it was carefully hardened by flame, having been turned over a charcoal fire. Privet hedge? Charcoal? Not much of a clue there; in an East Hampton summer you could hardly turn around without encountering both. The place was a-crawl with barbecue fires and lush green hedge.

But why kill with a spear in the East Hampton of the nineties? Silly, and stereotypical, but it nudged me toward starting the
Parade
magazine assignment with Jesse Maine. Not that my father thought it a very good idea.

“Why not have a talk with Leo Brass? I don't have to tell you he's a violent, difficult man, and he did find the body. Used to throw the javelin, didn't he? Jesse's okay, Beecher. Watch yourself when he's been drinking and watch yourself around Leo period. Just because they both know boats and water and hunting and fishing better than you, don't get carried away with a romantic notion you're dealing with noble savages. Noble they can be but savage they are. Be sure you know whether it's Jekyll or Hyde up to bat that morning.” Those were the only warnings my father included in a brief farewell address before being driven to JFK for his flight to Oslo.