Further Lane

by James Brady

  “In the name of God! Bob Cratchit and his goddamned family were permitted a lousy goose. We’re talking ‘Geese police’ here. And think of what happened twelve years ago when they did something about Canada geese up-island at the Seawanee Golf and Country Club in Hewlett. Five hundred geese died, mysteriously. The club had to pay five thousand dollars in an out-of-court settlement following charges they’d salted golfing fairways with illicit pesticides. The Lawrence Village Country Club purchased a border collie to chase off the intruders. Did Washington strike medals in honor of this splendid dog? Hell, no. The good people of Lawrence Village ponied up the two thousand four hundred dollars themselves to pay for a sonuvabitching collie to chase geese.

  “Other places they floated helium-filled balloons to scare off the geese or filled up soda cans full of marbles and hired day laborers to rattle them loudly. The Fish and Wildlife one time penned up thousands of geese and shipped them south to the Carolinas by tractor trailer. And the geese were back shitting on Long Island before the trucks…”

  “Pa and his chums,” Alix whispered conspiratorially in my ear so as not to distract Leo, “would have put paid to this goose business in a month.”

  “How?” I asked, also whispering.

  “Shotguns. A dozen or so middle-aged old chaps with Purdey over-and-unders firing away, bang! bang! bang!”

  Leo moved on in his agenda.

  “Bring back the snapping turtle and control the duck population. Ban pesticides that run off following heavy rain into the ponds and bays. Give local stoop labor a break. Eliminate mechanical leaf blowers and let the Guatemalans make a dollar, illegal or not. No new swimming pools anywhere south of the Highway. Bring back ticket clerks to the railroad stations on the East End and do away with ticket-dispensing machines. Reduce the roundtrip cost of a Jitney ride into Manhattan and back.”

  And men, reaching his climax, he made his announcement about The Gut!

  “There’s maybe a hurricane coming. And contrary to how the Baymen traditionally vote on this question, this year we’re having a small change of heart. We think maybe this year and this year only, we ought to flush early. Like this week.”

  Not even the Baymen were expecting this and a shocked murmur ran through the room.

  “What’s that all about?” Alix whispered.

  “I dunno.”

  “But he’s terrific. Super! His command of the language. He’s got them on their feet even if I don’t understand a word of it.”

  Nor did anyone else.

  “He’s been reading Bryan, the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”

  “Who’s Bryan? What Cross of Gold?” Alix demanded.

  “I’d rather explain about grunion.”

  From the row behind, people shushed us urgently.

  Leo’s local popularity among the roughnecks, and with women, as well as his backing by the Baymen might have carried the day. But it wasn’t to be; The Walter jumped to his feet. And with reason; this was Mr. Walter Pincus who may have been East Hampton’s wealthiest man with 120 acres bordering Georgica Pond, a figure so preposterously self-important he was invariably (and to his delight) referred to as “The Walter.” As was his custom, The Walter was accompanied by a bodyguard and an attorney, and he stood now, waving order papers and shouting:

  “Brass, you can’t just…”

  The Walter and Leo were old enemies (both men derived a perverse pleasure from their enmity) and they shouted back and forth, arguing whether and when The Gut was to be flushed.

  “Gosh!” Alix said, “this is wonderful stuff, all the shouting, like a Kings Road pub at closing time. When do they begin throwing chairs?”

  The Walter’s voice boomed out one more time.

  “The Gut, Brass! What about THE GUT?”

  Momentarily, the room fell silent, waiting for an answer. What they got was a low growl:

  “You leave The Gut to me. A John Deere backhoe or a couple pounds of plastic explosive’ll take care of The Gut,” Leo Brass said darkly. That lock of hair fell over one eye and his mustache bristled. All you needed was an armband and rousing rendition of “The Horst Wessel Song.”

  Someone else tried then to get recognized to ask a question about the sacred Indian burial grounds of Montauk and about some paleo-Indian artifacts recently unearthed. But Leo and the acolytes and his phalanx of burly Baymen were already gone, leaving The Walter, flanked by eminent counsel and Pincus flunkies, cursing as he went.

  “Can he do that?” Alix asked, her splendid Oxford education being broadened by the minute. “Can he blow up The Gut?”

  “Not legally. But he can. And may.”

  As we and everyone else maneuvered among the Ferraris and the pickups to find and get into our cars in the dark and avoid being run over in the doing, Alix grabbed my arm.

  “Isn’t that Pam what’s-her-name, Phythian?”

  I looked around.

  “Too late, she must have gotten into her car. I can’t see her anymore.”

  “Maybe it was someone else.”

  “Probably was,” Alix agreed. “Didn’t you say she and Leo Brass were feuding?” We found the Chevy Blazer and got out of there safely. Which was something, considering that Leo had, after all, braced me that time at Boaters and then nearly whipsawed Alix and me both with Claire’s towline. Odd, that Claire wasn’t at the rally. And that Pam Phythian was, or at least was hanging around outside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Part of the entourage, the bodacious O’Leary sisters, nineteen and red-haired …

  None of these little diversions, the pleasant or the painful, must be permitted to get in the way of the piece I was writing for Anderson about Hannah Cutting’s life and times. My first assignment, and I wasn’t even close to getting anything new or exclusive or especially gripping on her quite extraordinary life. The editor had called twice. Patient, he was, admirably so. But you sensed there in his voice a distinct edge, as if he was wondering to himself just what he’d gotten in me. You know, the way a major league baseball owner feels who signs a starting pitcher for fifteen million for three years and is then informed the guy has a sore arm or can’t get his curve ball over the plate. When Walter Anderson hired a contributor, he expected contributions.

  I tried to shrug off Leo Brass and The Gut and Mr. Pincus and his armed guards and even being scared by speedboats as mere distractions. I’d catch up to Brass one of these days and have it out. Let the rest of it lay.

  Please do not think that after Labor Day East Hampton simply empties out like a draining bathtub. Martha Stewart and Streisand and the Swami might be leaving or already have left but there remained a small yet resilient permanent population plus a few new celebrities dropping by, some drawn by the horse show, others by the upcoming Film Festival, some here simply to enjoy September. We even had people like Meisel the fashion photographer, the one who’d created such a fuss for Calvin Klein with those commercials of juicy little boys in their underpants. Once that stir and outrage cooled and Calvin canceled the last few of his ads (the underwear line was already just about sold out, an enormous success!) to mollify the bluenoses, he and Meisel were thicker than ever. And with the autumn horse show season approaching, Calvin’s on-and-off sort of wife, Kelly Klein, would be easing into her jodhpurs, very sleek indeed, going off to garner the old ribbons, leaving Calvin at liberty to enjoy himself.

  And now, back came Felton, for several years considered, after Michael Ovitz, the most powerful man in Hollywood.

  For someone who lived in Malibu, Sid Felton knew East Hampton intimately, having for a couple of summers rented the Regan (now the Johnson) place just off the Maidstone fairways. That was in his third wife’s time; she had sinus problems and whined nasally (and endlessly) about the L.A. smog. That wife was long gone but Sid returned each year for the film festival, much as he did to Cannes and Sundance and Venice. This year, he would come early, drawn by Hannah’s death. It was Labor Day when Sid first heard the news. By Tuesday he suspected there was a mo
vie in it, not one of those crappy TV movies with Kathleen Turner but a class movie, a theatrical release, with Glenn Close or Susan Sarandon, and directed by de Palma, someone like that. With Nicholas Cage to play the cop.

  There had to be a cop, didn’t there? If there’s a murder, you’ve got cops. By Wednesday Felton knew there was a movie in it and that night he and the usual entourage flew out to New York on the red-eye and were met at JFK by a convoy of limos that whisked them out to East Hampton and the 1770 House on Main Street, where four suites and several smaller rooms had been booked in Felton’s name.

  Sid was usually composed. But in moments of stress, he ate Kleenex. I mean that literally. He chewed and swallowed Kleenex. And in recent seasons, due to having had the occasional flop, he’s eaten his share of tissues. Despite the flops and the Kleenex eating, Entertainment Weekly, in its annual compilation of the hundred most powerful people in Hollywood, still put Sid Felton at nine. His own self-assessment would have put him at effing-well five or six. Eight at the outside, but no higher!

  And if you were one of the ten most important people in the industry, limos met you at airports and whisked you places and a 1770 House would set aside suites. Set aside a goddamned floor, if need be.

  “Ginny, try keeping your sister from getting too stoned tonight, will you?”

  “I’m Margie, Mr. Felton.”

  “Oh, sure. Well, both of you, try, okay? They’re pretty stuffy here. A classy place like this, I get edgy.”

  “Yes, Mr. Felton.”

  These were the bodacious O’Leary sisters, nineteen-year-old identical, redheaded twins, an integral part of the Felton entourage, providing personal rather than professional services, and cited recently, both of them, as corespondents in the bill of divorcement of Mr. Felton’s fourth wife.

  Most of the press drawn by Hannah’s death had gone back to Manhattan but Sid Felton’s arrival gave the story a fresh spin. The New York Post sent Cindy Adams out to interview the mogul; a camera crew was dispatched by Regis and Kathie Lee, another by CNN. The flurry of renewed media coverage was such that one local wag remarked East Hampton really didn’t need a film festival to hype post-Labor Day business.

  “Just bump off a celebrity every September!”

  But Felton and his executive flunky were already out walking the ground with a cinematographer and a second unit director Sid trusted, looking up from the beach at the “death stairs,” as the tabloids called them, and considering camera angles and lap dissolves, while the O’Leary twins tripped along in Felton’s wake, looking for all the world like the Baywatch extras they had, in several episodes, actually been.

  Felton was in many ways an appalling man but when it came to movies, he was nobody’s fool, having cut his professional teeth here in New York as one of Don Hewitt’s producers at 60 Minutes, winning a handful of Emmys before the money (and the starlets) drew him west. There followed the Oscars. And the wives. And a growing cynicism that matched his talent, his success at making what Hollywood called “high concept” films, those you could describe in one or two sentences.

  Bittersweet, which he was already using as a working title for “the life and death of Hannah Cutting,” was definitely a “high concept” movie.

  “Think of it, the most glamorous and successful self-made woman in America, and a looker as well, is found stark naked, and also dead, on the beach of a spectacular resort with a sharpened stake through her heart, and a dozen of the most famous people in the country, plus a drunken goddamned Indian and her own daughter, among the suspects!”

  It was so gripping a high concept, and so simple, that Ginny and Margie, the O’Leary twins, thrilled even to think of it. And wondered if there might be small roles for them. Variety reported Felton was already talking by cell phone to Joe Eszterhas about a script and quoted him as saying, “Sure, Joe’s written some flops. But memorable flops! No one forgets a Joe Eszterhas flop, never! I assure you.”

  There was talk, which made both Alix and me nervous, that Felton had information about Hannah’s missing manuscript and was quietly talking to cops and others about its whereabouts, letting people know he had deep pockets and wouldn’t be reluctant to pay a handsome gratuity to anyone who could locate Hannah’s story. I asked Tom Knowles if it were so. The detective shook his head in resignation.

  “He came around to the station asking questions yesterday. Beech, wearing an aloha shirt with a very obvious leather checkbook sticking out of his breast pocket and patting it affectionately from time to time. Got to say this for Sid Felton: subtle he ain’t.”

  Each evening at cocktail hour Sid and his entourage, featuring the O’Leary girls in their microminis du jour, planted themselves decorously around several tables on the sidewalk in front of Frank Duffy’s place. The Grill, on Newtown Lane. There they perched, enjoying a refreshment, signing the odd autograph, graciously waving at passersby, the curious drawn by Felton’s fame, or the lascivious, eager to ogle the bodacious twins. For a day or two Felton’s table tolerated Sudsy, gossip columnist for the local weekly paper (the job was unpaid but it got Sudsy invited to parties), permitting him to sit there among his betters and take notes. Until, writing too slowly for Sid’s taste and missing too many Felton mots, and having to ask the great man to repeat them, Sudsy was banished.

  Only Steven Spielberg, who had long owned an East Hampton house, seemed to find Felton truly offensive and crossed to the opposite side of the street when passing, so as to avoid having to say hello to a man he despised.

  * * *

  We got hold of Jesse the next morning. The weather was holding, whatever was happening down there in the Caribbean, with sun and low humidity and a few billowy, pillowy clouds only helping define the blue sky. I told Tom Knowles what I was going to do.

  “Oh, shit, Beech. You and Her Highness and Jesse? Why, compared to the trouble you’ll get into, Wounded Knee was a promising start.” Tom never was a great one for having faith.

  Jesse, however, liked the idea. Though, typical of him, he was carping from the first. “Don’t expect me to betray my own people, Beech. I won’t turn in Shinnecocks. Nor other Native Americans regardless of tribal affiliation. I won’t play stooge for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, those conniving, graft-ridden bastards. I tell you upfront that I’ll…”

  “Jesse, shuddup, This is a murder you didn’t do…”

  “… though I might have, Beecher. Never forget that. I am capable of enormous violence when provoked. There have been occasions when…”

  His pickup followed us back to Further Lane and turned in on the gravel. Alix made tea for herself and Jesse and I drank instant coffee. We sat on the patio and talked.

  Since I was leveling with Jesse, at least to an extent, there was no longer any valid reason for keeping Her Ladyship in the dark. So I told her about my talk with Royal Warrender, about what I’d learned up in Polish Town in Riverhead, what Miz Phoebe remembered, all of it.

  She listened. But then, “That still doesn’t tell us anything about where the manuscript is. And that’s why I’m here, y’know.”

  She was right. But now with Jesse, there’d be three of us looking for it. That was progress, wasn’t it? I didn’t yet let her in on the fact the laptop had been thoroughly scoured by parties unknown and there might not even be a manuscript anymore. If she were convinced of that, and more importantly if she sent coded E-mails to Harry Evans and if he accepted this unhappy reality, Alix would very shortly be back in her Jag, heading for the LIE and Manhattan. And I was getting more than accustomed to having her around.

  She sort of looked at me as if to say none of the above was getting us anywhere. I forgave her. Oxford University was a grand place, I was sure. It didn’t necessarily prepare you for actual life.

  Then I told Jesse I wanted to know whom he’d seen around while he was working at Hannah’s place. Not the Kroepkes or the regulars, but others.

  “You mean like Leo Brass?”

  “No, no. He’s Claire’s boyfriend.
Of course he’d be around.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Him and Hannah, they had something going on with them that Claire didn’t know about. Should I go on…?”

  Yes, I said, he should go on.

  Hannah and a local Bayman? Even one as celebrated as Brass. And one whom she’d publicly cursed out in a nasty squabble over wetlands. That was something I hadn’t figured, not with all her social-climbing, New Money ways, and her impatience with Claire who was wasting her time with local rednecks and …

  … who was also sleeping with young and very active Mr. Brass?

  I thought I’d better tell Jesse Maine about Leo’s speedboat intimidation. “He just being nasty, Jesse, or is there something more to it?” The Shinnecock didn’t waste breath on speculation but nodded and took in the information to be looked into at the appropriate moment.

  “Who else, Jesse?”

  “Andy Cutting,” he said. “Andy’s around a lot. Looking like a sick cow and feeling sorry for himself.” Then, after a slight hesitation, considerate of Alix, “He’s a peeper as well. D’you know that, Beech? Likes to look through windows. I don’t know if he checks out what all the local beauties wear to bed, but he sure does keep tabs on what his ex-wife’s up to after hours and in private and intimate moments.”

  That puzzled me. I knew Andy was still carrying a torch for Hannah and looking pitiful. I didn’t peg him for a peeping tom stalking his own ex-wife. Then Jesse tossed in a surprise candidate.

  “Well, Royal’s been there, too. Now why would you think after all those years that Royal might come around? His drunken cousin Jasper, sure. But Royal, maybe our next President? Or at least CEO of a major conglomerate.”

  We talked about the permutations of that and then I leveled with Jesse about the missing manuscript, without mentioning it might or might not have been on personal computer. Hell, if Jesse’d stolen it from the laptop, he knew already. If not, maybe he could help find it. “You want to ask around, Jesse? No questions asked if it gets turned over. Might even be a modest reward.”