Amagansett (10 page)

The business continued to prosper, the money kept rolling in, and before long they moved to a much larger three-room apartment on the second floor. This was a matter of grave concern for Irena, who believed that to relocate downwards in the same building brought bad luck.

She was wrong.

At midnight on 16 January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution came into effect.

Prohibition, thought Conrad, without Prohibition I wouldn’t be standing here on the ocean beach, casting into the surf. Not with much success, as it happened. The prospect of landing a fish for his supper was fading fast.

He reeled in, cut a fresh length of squid and fastened it to the hook. Five more casts, he told himself, then he’d throw in the towel.

On the fourth cast he felt a bite and struck. The line thumped taut; the rod craned its slender neck. Big enough for supper, and then some. But what was it? Was he right? Could they be here already, so early in the season?

‘Damn. Hell. Damn. Damn…’

He glanced left. Twenty yards down the beach a woman was hopping around at the water’s edge, straining to examine the sole of her bare foot. She lost her balance and tumbled backwards on to the sand. She looked over at him helplessly, and as she did so, the tension went out of the rod.

The fish was making a play for freedom, running at the shore. She hadn’t slipped the hook, there was still life in the line, he could feel the tremor in it. He reeled in as fast as he could, just fast enough as the fish broke to the westward. Any more slack and the ploy would have worked. But he had her now, she was tiring, resigned to the inevitable. No. She broke again, running eastward
this time, stripping twenty yards of line from the reel. A fighter.

Experienced.

‘Excuse me.’

Not the first time she’s felt the sharp taste of steel in her mouth. He felt bad that it wasn’t going to work this time, that her bag of tricks wouldn’t save her.

‘Excuse me.’

Did the fish have as strong a sense of who he was, connected as they were by the line?

‘Excuse me.’ The indignation of the delivery struck home this time. He couldn’t afford to turn away, but answered nevertheless.

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve cut myself. I’m bleeding.’

He was drawing the fish into the surf now. It leaped briefly and he smiled. ‘Ha!’

‘Is that all you can say? Ha!?’

‘Give me a minute.’

‘A minute?’

‘Less.’

He hauled the fish up on to the sand beyond the wash, pinned it there then struck it behind the head with the handle of his knife. Hard. Only then did he turn.

‘Let’s take a look,’ he said.

Beneath the blood he could see that the cut was long but not deep, running from the ball to the heel of her foot. It would mend itself without assistance, no need for stitches.

The offending spear of metal was poking from the packed sand just nearby.

‘Flotsam,’ said Conrad.

‘Oh really? Not jetsam?’

‘Wreckage from a boat, probably a merchant ship. We still get a lot of stuff cast up. From the war, you know, the U-boats.’

‘That’s very interesting. And what about my foot?’

Conrad prized the object from the sand. It was a small lump of wood pierced by a jagged shard of metal—shrapnel embedded there by some mighty explosion, a fossilized moment of devastation.

‘You’ll live,’ he said.

She used him as support until they reached the steepest part of the frontal dune, where she grew too weak to hop further. Conrad abandoned the rod by a clump of beach grass and took her up in his arms.

She carried the fish.

‘You live here?’

‘Yes.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Don’t you get lonely?’

‘No.’

She looked around the room. ‘I didn’t know there was a place here.’

‘Not many people do. You can’t see it from the beach.’

‘Are those your books?’

‘No.’

‘You stole them?’

‘They’re my stepmother’s. She was a teacher.’

‘Was? She’s dead?’

‘Moved away. California.’

Her eyes scanned the shelves. ‘Have you read them?’

‘No.’ He opened the tin and removed a bottle of iodine. ‘This is going to sting.’

He was right. It did. He held her ankle tightly as he dabbed at the wound, carefully removing the sand, dropping the bloodied swabs into a bowl.

‘You have long toes.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘But then you’re tall.’

‘Do you mind not talking about my feet? I don’t think I’ve ever discussed my feet with anyone, and I can’t see that I should start now.’

‘Not another word.’

He placed a sterile pad over the cut and began binding it in place with gauze.

‘I hate them,’ she said.

‘Huh?’

‘My feet. They’re too big.’

‘You think?’

‘How many women you know take a size nine?’

‘Not a whole load.’

‘Exactly.’

‘They don’t look big, maybe because they’re narrow. Any wider and they could look big.’

‘You’re doing it again.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He secured the gauze with a safety pin.

‘Where are your shoes?’

‘At home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘East Hampton.’

‘I’ll run you back.’

‘Could I possibly have a drink of water? You do have water, don’t you?’

‘Sure.’

He poured a glass from the pitcher on the table and handed it to her.

‘You seemed very intent on catching that fish.’

The fish lay on the table, slick and metallic, its armored rainbow sides speckled with black dots, its fins and tail yellow, almost as if they belonged to another species altogether.

‘It’s a special fish—a weakfish.’

‘Really? It looked like it was putting up quite a fight.’

He smiled politely at her joke.

‘What makes it so special?’ she asked.

‘It shouldn’t be here yet, not till May. But then everything’s early this year, the shad bushes, dogwoods, birchwood violets, even the oaks. Now the fish.’

For the past few days he had seen gannets circling off the ocean beach, gulls doing the same in the bay: unseasonable indicators that the fish had already started their annual run up the coast and would soon be hitting the beach.

‘What will you do with it?’

‘Fry it in beer batter.’

‘Is it good?’

‘You’ve never had weakfish?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘You should try it some time.’

‘I’ll be sure to,’ she said a little curtly.

He took a filleting knife from the drawer in the table and began sharpening the blade on a stone. ‘You can share it with me if you like.’

‘I wouldn’t want to put you to any more trouble.’

There was a hint of annoyance in her voice that the offer hadn’t been immediately forthcoming.

‘As you like,’ he said, enjoying the game. ‘I have to do this now or the flesh will spoil.’

He sliced open the fish’s belly and pulled out the guts. He cut down to the backbone just behind the head, turned the blade and worked it towards the tail. The first fillet came free. Flipping the fish over, he repeated the process, aware that she was watching him with a look that hovered somewhere between intrigue and revulsion.

‘Beer batter, you say?’

‘Deep-fried cubes. We call them frigates.’

‘And they’re good?’

‘The best.’

‘That’s quite a claim.’

‘I tell you what,’ he said, turning to look her in the eye, ‘if you don’t agree, you’re allowed to say so.’

‘Deal.’

He sliced the skin from the fillets.

‘If I’m going to stay for supper, shouldn’t I know your name?’

‘Conrad.’

‘Lillian,’ she said. ‘Lillian Wallace.’

The Model A bumped along the road to the beach landing, its chassis groaning, the beam from the headlight dancing up ahead.

Conrad pulled the vehicle to a halt. He knew what to expect as he rounded the bend: the sandy lot, fringed with trees and bushes, rising up to the shallow breach in the dune, the ocean out of sight beyond. But he needed to try and see it with fresh eyes. The eyes of a man looking to dispose of a body.

She hadn’t been put in the ocean in front of the Wallaces’ house, of that he was certain. The strength of the longshore set at the time she was supposed to have drowned would have carried her further eastward overnight, beyond the spot where they’d pulled her from the water the next morning. He knew from experience that the ocean could do strange things with a drowned body, taking it on an improbable journey that seemed to defy all natural laws. But that was rare.

It was some distance from the house to the beach, down the bluff and across the dunes, an exposed walk, moonlit on the night in question. Too far to carry a dead weight, and too risky. That was probably the reasoning. Maybe there had been kids on the beach. It was a popular stretch for clambakes at this time of year, the deep sand at the base of the frontal dune pockmarked with the blackened remnants of the nocturnal feasts.

Whatever, he was fairly sure she had been taken elsewhere in
a car and then dumped in the ocean. Fortunately, there were a limited number of spots nearby where this might have happened.

Two Mile Hollow landing seemed unlikely. Although closest to the Wallaces’ house, it became a rendezvous for lovers once night fell, a place of furtive exchanges and steamed-up car windows. Likewise, he had dismissed Egypt landing. Right next to the Maidstone Club, there would have been too many other cars coming and going, and there was the added risk that club members often strolled down on to the beach at night.

The small landing at Wiborg’s Beach, on the other hand, a little further along, would have been ideal—remote, squeezed in beside the wasteland of the club’s west course. The village tryworks for rendering whale oil had once stood there, and since much of the big house just back from the dunes had been torn down, local people had started using the track again to gain access to the beach.

Conrad wrenched the Model A into gear and pulled away. He knew that what he was doing served no concrete purpose, nothing could possibly come of anything he found, it was simply that he needed to know: for himself, and for Lillian.

Rounding the bend, the small landing opened up in front of him. He found himself drawn to the gloom beneath the boughs of an oak, the natural spot to park up if you had something to hide. He turned the engine off, reached for the flashlight on the seat beside him and got out.

What would he have done next? Strolled up on to the beach, probably, to check the coast was clear. Returning to the car, he would then have shouldered the body and hurried as best he could towards the breach in the dune. No. This would leave him vulnerable for—what?—thirty or forty seconds, prey to the headlights of an approaching vehicle. Far better to cut through the undergrowth on the right. It offered perfect cover. If he happened to be surprised he could easily drop out of sight and hide there, undetected, until the danger had passed.

Conrad pushed his way through the hawthorn and dogwood, the thin, poor soil underfoot giving way to sand as he neared the
back of the dune. He swept the rise with the beam of the flashlight, but the dense carpet of beach grass concealed any tracks there might have been leading up the incline.

The crest of the dune, however, was bald of any vegetation, and he found what he was looking for almost immediately; so quickly, in fact, that at first he doubted what he was seeing.

There was a shallow but distinct patch of flattened sand where the killer had laid her on the ground after the climb—carefully, no doubt, so as not to mark the body. Indistinct footprints disturbed the area around.

If this had been the movies he would have discovered a cigarette butt nearby—some rare Turkish brand that would identify the culprit. But all Conrad could see were two tracks in the crusty, wind-packed sand leading down the face of the dune on to the beach.

The scene presented itself to him: the killer hooking his arms beneath hers and hauling her backwards down the dune, her heels furrowing the sand in neat, straight lines.

The tracks led out across the beach a short distance before dissolving in the swathe of disturbed sand where others had strolled in the intervening days.

He carried on past to the water’s edge.

The waves were breaking low and clean to the east, their curling crests catching the light of the moon—strips of silver traveling gently along the shore.

So this was it, the place. He must have drenched himself in the process, dragging her out there beyond the break.

He had thought in terms of just one killer up until now, finding it easier to focus his confusion, his hatred, on an individual rather than a cast of conspirators. It was now clear he’d been right to do so. The lone set of footprints flanking the furrows confirmed it.

He wandered back to the dune, settled himself down and rolled a cigarette. His Zippo wouldn’t light, out of gas, and he slipped the smoke into his shirt pocket.

He laid his hand on the sand, feeling the contours of the indentations left by her heels.

It caught him like a rogue wave, a big sea surging up from the depths, unexpected, overwhelming. He choked, trying to keep it down, but it swept him before it, engulfing him, deep sobs racking his body, tears coursing down his cheeks.

‘Abel, for Chrissakes.’

Hollis moved to block his friend’s path. Abel shimmied left, right, left again, brandishing his camera.

‘No photos.’

‘Tell that to my editor.’ Moonlighting for the
East Hampton Star
was another string to Abel’s bow.

‘I meant to,’ said Hollis. ‘I forgot.’

‘I can’t be held responsible for your failings as a police officer.’

‘Is there a problem?’ They both turned at the voice.

A squat, bull-necked man approached, his dark suit straining at the seams.

‘No problem, thanks,’ said Abel chirpily.

The man drew on his cigarette and exhaled, his porcine eyes shrinking to pinpricks as they fixed themselves on Abel.

‘It’s okay,’ said Hollis.

The man turned away grudgingly and sauntered back to the huddle of chauffeurs smoking near the verge. Beyond them, the run of parked cars stretched off into the distance down Main Street.

‘Who’s the gorilla?’

‘The guy who’s been hired to break the back of anyone taking photos in front of the church.’

‘Nice work if you can get it.’

Abel glanced over at the church, then up at the sun, judging the exposure. ‘Must be almost done in there.’

‘For me, Abel, as a friend.’

‘Oh, come on, Tom, don’t pull that one. You don’t call, you don’t write…’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘So I hear.’ The knowing look was accompanied by a faint smile. ‘You and Mary Calder, eh?’

He shouldn’t have been surprised—it was a small town, tongues wagged freely and readily, he knew that.

‘All I did was give her a ride.’

‘There’s a joke there, but I won’t demean your love for her.’

‘Christ, you can be infuriating.’

At that moment the organ inside the church piped up and the mourners broke into song: ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways…’

‘Breathe through the hearts of our desire,’ said Abel distractedly.

‘What?’

‘It’s “breathe through the
heats
of our desire”, but people always sing “hearts”. Have you noticed that?’

‘No.’

‘What about the cemetery?’

‘Out of the question. Anywhere else is okay.’

Abel looked over at the chauffeurs. ‘No photos in front of the church, eh?’

He was gone as the words left his mouth. Hollis could only watch helplessly as Abel approached the group and addressed himself to the Wallaces’ muscle. The man squared off at first, then the tension went out of his bulky frame and he nodded, acquiescing. The group returned to their discussion, albeit a little selfconsciously, while Abel circled around them, snapping with the Graflex, issuing instructions to his models.

Hollis turned back to the church. The two towers flanking the facade were so disproportionate to each other—one low and delicate, the other wide, clumsy, monumentally tall—that he found
himself wondering what had driven the builders to shun symmetry in favor of such glaring discord.

The unseen congregation launched into another verse of the hymn.

‘Breathe through the hearts of our desire,’ they sang, ‘thy coolness and thy balm.’

Abel behaved. He was gone by the time the doors opened and the pallbearers shuffled from the church with the casket. Manfred Wallace was paired at the front, his moist eyes glistening in the sunlight.

His sister, Gayle, head bowed and face veiled, walked behind the casket, her arm hooked through her father’s. George Wallace stood tall and upright, his features devoid of any expression.

Hollis scanned the faces of the mourners as they trailed down the steps of the church.

Where was Mary?

He had arrived as the service was beginning so he didn’t even know if she was inside.

He cursed himself. He’d been too quick to assume she’d turn up. Foolish, when so much was riding on her attendance. Now he was facing the prospect of losing a possible lead.

He didn’t recognize her at first, and it took him a moment to figure out why that was. She was wearing make-up, not much, but enough to distort her features, somehow enlarge her already full lips and overwhelm her pale eyes. It didn’t suit her, he thought, a little guiltily.

A crowd gathered hesitantly near the hearse, as if unsure whether they should be observing this particular stage of the operation. Undertakers swooped to assist as the pallbearers maneuvered the casket from their shoulders and slid it into the vehicle.

‘Hello.’

Mary turned. She was standing on the fringes near the back.

‘Hello.’

So what if her face didn’t light up? It was a somber occasion.

‘You look great.’

‘Thanks,’ she said flatly. She seemed almost annoyed with him.

‘Quite a turnout.’

‘Yes.’

People were dispersing now. He had to be quick or the moment would be lost.

‘She had a lot of friends.’

Not good, but it was the best lead-in he could think of.

Mary looked him clean in the eye.

‘You could just ask me straight, you know, it’s less insulting.’

‘What?’

‘You want me to point him out—the one I saw her down at the beach with. It’s why you’re here.’

All Hollis could manage was a feeble look.

She nodded towards a group of young people. ‘The tall one over there on the right.’

He was talking to a girl, a diminutive creature a good foot shorter than him—an almost comical pairing, not unlike the towers of the church facade. He was handsome in an unremarkable way, his features refined by generations of selective breeding to the point of blandness. If it hadn’t been for his height, Hollis might not have recognized him.

It was the same young man he had seen slouched in a rattan chair beside the Wallaces’ pool earlier in the week.

‘Happy now?’ asked Mary, not waiting for a reply.

‘I’m sorry.’

Mary turned back. Nothing in her expression suggested she wanted him to expand on the apology; in fact, she looked utterly unconvinced by it. He was a little surprised, therefore, when she asked, ‘What are you doing next Friday evening?’

‘Nothing.’

He was working the night shift, but he could always get someone else to cover—young Stringer, maybe, always so eager to please.

‘I’m having some friends over for a drink. From seven o’clock.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Hollis. ‘Maybe I’ll get to meet Eugene this time.’

‘Pray you don’t.’

He smiled, but his mind was already elsewhere, figuring both where and how to make his approach.

Bob Hartwell was standing near his patrol car opposite the cemetery entrance on Cooper Lane, turning his cap in his hands. Hollis pulled in beside him.

‘It’s going to be tight, Bob. Best get the first cars to park up right down the end there.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll wave them through to you.’

Hartwell wandered off. Hollis knew he had planned to spend the afternoon on the water, sailing with his kids in Three Mile Harbor, and yet he hadn’t so much as flinched when Hollis announced that he’d be directing traffic instead. He was a good man, smart, unflappable. Even when Chief Milligan chose him as the target for one of his sudden and quite unexplained broadsides, the abuse seemed to wash right over him. Afterwards, he might say something like ‘Guess who didn’t get any last night?’ or ‘The market must be down’, but that was the extent of his ill feeling. He was the closest thing Hollis had to a friend on the town force, albeit a friend with whom he had never broken bread or even shared a beer.

The hearse crept round the corner into Cooper Lane, trailing cars. It turned into the cemetery, followed by the next four vehicles—Richard Wakeley had been very specific—and Hollis directed the others on down towards Hartwell at the end of the road.

He noted that the tall young man whom Mary had pointed out was traveling in a chauffeured limousine. That was good.

There was no disguising the fact that the plot where Lillian Wallace’s bones were to rest for eternity had been hastily put together. The low privet hedge that ringed it was set in freshly
turned earth. Within this perimeter, the lines were still visible in the green and sappy turf.

It was a large plot, a family plot, wide enough to take at least three abreast, though it was doubtful that the soil on either side of her grave would ever be disturbed. She had expressed a wish to be buried in East Hampton, Hollis knew that, but somehow he couldn’t see another Wallace choosing to keep her company.

No, George Wallace had done the very best by his daughter—as in life, so in death—and he wanted people to know it. For her there would be no slender patch of ground off one of the avenues that sliced the cemetery north to south, squeezed into the serried ranks of humble little granite headstones pushing up through the overgrown grass. She would lie in this pleasing little copse, this shady reserve of the wealthy, with its yew trees and cypress trees and ornamental hedges and its names carved into the finest white Italian marble.

Hollis had attended many burials over the years—family, friends, fellow police officers, even a hobo on one occasion—but somehow the experience never lost any of its impact. Weddings, those you became inured to with the passage of experience: the same hymns, the same vows destined to be overlooked or broken. But there was something about the physical act of lowering a body in a box into a hole in the ground that always struck home. There was no other sound quite like that of a handful of earth hitting the lid of a coffin. It reached to the core of your being and shook you.

As he glanced around at the faces of those gathered near the grave, it struck Hollis that he was not alone in feeling as he did. It also occurred to him that the person responsible for Lillian Wallace’s murder was, quite possibly, among those mourning her passing at the graveside—right here, right now—not even twenty yards from where he was standing.

How could he be so sure she’d been murdered? He deflected the question. At this stage of an investigation the material facts were often stacked deep and high against you—an autopsy that revealed no evidence of foul play, for example. All you had to go on were your instincts, the little whispers at the back of your mind.

This was not one of those murders committed rashly, in the heat of the moment, then hastily covered up. The planning and execution were to be respected, if not admired. Mistakes had been made—they always were—and it was in the nature of an intelligent crime such as this, carefully conceived, that the lapses, however small, were all the more glaring for it. Like a lone dent in the faultless bodywork of a new car, they drew the eye.

Hollis felt a chill of excitement run through him, for it was becoming clear that this was exactly the kind of investigation at which he had once excelled, on which he had built his name.

One case had set him on that path, bestowing upon him a mantel of notoriety that would never be shrugged off. He could recall every detail of it, his first hesitant steps over the threshold, the two technicians from the Broome Street crime lab on their hands and knees in the living room, the ashen-faced patrolman accepting a cigarette from a colleague in the kitchen. And he could still taste the rust in his mouth, the metallic vapors of the blood that speckled almost every surface in the apartment.

The woman lay on her back beside the sofa, her throat opened to the bone. The man was in the bedroom, slumped in a corner, a bewildered expression on his face, as if still coming to terms with the fact that he was dead. There were several stab wounds in his chest, along with a deep gash in his shoulder. A picture of what had occurred was already emerging, for another man, the gentleman of the house, had survived. Horrifically wounded, Gerald Chadwick had been rushed to hospital, giving officers a sketchy account of the carnage before being sedated for surgery. By noon of the following day his story had been confirmed by a thorough examination of the crime scene. Door-to-door questioning of the other residents of the smart block only lent further weight to it.

The dead man in the bedroom was a neighbor of the Chadwicks, Samuel Kuhn, a wealthy widower, withdrawn and private, but prone to raging outbursts against the other occupants of the building. A feud had sprung up recently over the issue of the Chadwicks’ cat, which Kuhn claimed was fouling the common parts. When the poor animal was found hanging from the
Chadwicks’ door handle, the police were called. It was clear from the patrolman’s report that he sided with the Chadwicks—a respectable insurance man and his petite, attractive wife—but he was bound to let the matter drop through lack of evidence. This incident had occurred some two weeks prior to the killings, and in the intervening period Samuel Kuhn had, by all accounts, grown more cantankerous and vocal than ever, accusing anyone unfortunate enough to cross him in the hallway of conspiring against him.

Then one evening he cracked. Taking up a long paring knife from the drawer in his kitchen, he wandered upstairs and vented his spleen on the Chadwicks. He gained access to their apartment on the pretext that he wished to apologize to them, but on entering the drawing room he went berserk, slitting Julia Chadwick’s throat before turning his attention on her husband. Badly wounded, Gerald Chadwick fled down the corridor to the bedroom, where he managed to wrest the knife from Kuhn’s grasp, turning it on him and stabbing him several times in the chest, killing him. Bleeding profusely, Chadwick then called the police from the bedside phone.

It was an entirely plausible account of the horror that had unfolded in the apartment. Analysis of fingerprints, blood distribution and blood-types all supported it. The multiple lacerations to Gerald Chadwick’s palms, forearms and face were concomitant with defense wounds sustained in a knife attack, and would lead to unsightly, lifelong scarring. Moreover, the knife was undeniably Samuel Kuhn’s, one of a matching set discovered in his kitchen.

The Homicide Bureau was satisfied. And this was their case. Had Hollis not been responding to a break-in at a pawnbroker’s when the call came in, he might have got there ahead of them and been able to stake a claim—his precinct, his watch. Unlikely, though. The Bureau detectives would never have allowed a highprofile, open-and-shut case like this one to slip through their fingers without a fight. No, they would have muscled him out, a precinct detective, and a third-grade one at that. Either way, his was always going to be a lone voice of dissent struggling to make itself heard, if only because he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was that was troubling him.