Dead In The Hamptons (17 page)

“If I were Phil, I’d take it to the city,” I said.

“He might have given it to the cops. Or he might not have, but now they’re interested in Clea again, he might.”

“If she said bad things about him,” Barbara said, “he might have destroyed it already.”

“Why would she?” I said. “She picked him for that second share. She must have liked him.”

“But why?” Barbara asked. “He’s such an asshole.”

“Define your term, my pet.” Jimmy reached out and scooped up the last handful of cherries.

“Phil’s not really in recovery,” she said. “He’s not trying to become a better person. He’s got no empathy or loyalty. He’s not nice.”

That about covered it.

“Why don’t we try again to find that notebook?” Barbara said. “Maybe it’s in his room.”

“We looked in his room,” I protested.

“So maybe he hid it somewhere else and brought it back when he thought we must have given up.”

“I guess it’s possible,” I said. “He had to hide it somewhere. Clea collected information. If she’d written down something damaging about one of them, Phil’s just the kind of scum who would enjoy holding it over them.”

“Watch it!” Jimmy said sharply.

I looked around. Phil himself and Dowling had just come around the corner of the house. They were probably too far away to hear us talking. But everybody knows the sound of your own name can carry over a remarkable distance. No harm being careful.

Phil’s voice carried because he adopted a high, hectoring tone, as if the handyman were deaf and not too bright.

“I’ve scrubbed all these garbage cans with ammonia,” he announced. He demonstrated by rolling out and tilting forward the nearest of a row of olive green plastic bins tucked behind a trellis-like wooden screen under the deck. “That needs to be done regularly, after they go to the dump. We don’t want to attract flies. And it wouldn’t hurt to double bag the garbage.”

I couldn’t see Dowling’s face. He hunched his shoulders and pawed the ground like a bull getting ready to go for the matador.

“Doesn’t like being told how to do his job,” Jimmy murmured.

“Nobody does,” Barbara said. She sat up and shook out her hips, shifting from buttock to buttock. “I’m getting
shpilkes
. Let’s go for a walk.”

“No more cherries,” Jimmy said. “Ergo, you don’t want to sit here any more.”

“Shut up, you.” She flung the cherry pits from the bowl in a backhanded arc, as if she were throwing a Frisbee. “Instant cherry orchard.”

“Yeah, in about twenty-five years. Where do you want to walk?”

“I don’t know. Down the road. How about to the deli? It’s only a mile or so.”

“You know what?” Jimmy said. “You guys go.”

“The mouse is calling, huh? You’ll come with me, won’t you, Bruce?”

“Sure,” I said.

At that moment, Cindy came out onto the deck.

“On second thought, maybe I won’t.”

Barbara laughed. “Okay, I’ll let you both off the hook. I can walk a mile by myself.”

“Just be careful,” Jimmy said. “There is a killer out there.”

“Not between here and the deli,” Barbara said. “I’ll take my cell phone, okay?”

She gave Jimmy a quick kiss, set the empty fruit bowl on the deck, and started down the driveway.

“I’ll bring you back some ice cream,” she said.

“Do you think Barbara is eating more than usual?” Jimmy asked.

“Barbara’s always liked her food,” I said. “And this is a foodie house. No matter what’s going on, from cheatin’ to sudden death, we eat well. You don’t think she’s pregnant, do you, bro?”

“Hell, I didn’t even think of that,” Jimmy said.

Barbara turned left out of the drive. Open fields, stands of scrub oak and pine, and an occasional farmhouse, its cedar shakes so weathered they had darkened to the color of burnt toast, lined the narrow road on both sides. A hawk wheeled overhead. A flock of gulls landed in a field where some dark-leaved vegetable was just beginning to develop. Maybe broccoli. The gulls took off again. A monarch butterfly sailed by ten inches from Barbara’s nose. She walked briskly along the shoulder of the road, where dried grass crunched underfoot, releasing its sweet, dusty smell. Spiky blue cornflowers, deep pink beach roses, Queen Anne’s lace, and purple clover tickled her ankles as she brushed past them.

Not a car passed. A small plane hummed overhead on its way toward the airfield in Westhampton. A rustling in the brush startled her. Two squirrels burst out of the leaves and chased each other up the trunk of a fat oak. She laughed aloud when one paused to scold and the other dropped an acorn on its companion’s head. Walking with her eyes on the treetops, she stumbled. She looked back at the road, still empty except for a solitary box turtle making its dignified way across.

“Hey, little guy,” she said. “Aren’t you a handsome one?” She approached it cautiously. “Don’t shell up on me now, let me help.”

She squatted down and picked the turtle up. Its lizardlike orange head arched up in outrage, its legs churned comically as she held it suspended by its black and yellow shell.

“Don’t worry, little guy, I won’t send you back where you came from.” She had heard that if a turtle was returned to its starting point, it would invariably turn and start making its laborious way across again. “I know you want to get to the other side. I’m just speeding up the process so you won’t get hurt.” Hurt was a euphemism. The wheel of a speeding car could crush the shell, kill the turtle instantly, and continue on its oblivious way.

“There you go, little guy. Bye-bye. Have a nice day.”

She set the turtle down on the far side of the road, watching with satisfaction as it began to plod forward, still in the same direction. She dusted her hands together, although the turtle’s shell had felt clean and dry.

“It is a nice day. Good afternoon. Doing your good deed, I see.”

The voice, a man’s and unfamiliar, startled her. But one of the things she loved about the country was the way people greeted each other when their paths crossed. So she turned with a smile, ready to be friendly.

“Hi. I always cross a turtle when I get the chance. Look at him go.”

The stranger grinned back amiably. He was a tall man, perhaps in his early sixties, loose-limbed as the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
, with a lived-in face seamed with laugh wrinkles and pale blue disillusioned eyes. A shock of silver hair flopped over his forehead. He wore a pair of faded but not disreputable jeans. Both the pants and the lightweight tan blazer that hung open over his clean white T-shirt sagged as if thoroughly familiar with his body. His scuffed brown work boots looked like old friends of his feet.

“Nice to see a fella who knows what he wants,” the man said.

They both watched the turtle until it disappeared into the brush. Then Barbara flashed a quick glance left and right along the road. Where had he come from? She couldn’t see a vehicle parked along the roadside, at least as far as the nearest curve in both directions. Her hand reached down to pat the cell phone at her belt.

The man stood at ease, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans. His eyes crinkled with amusement as he watched her. He unhooked his right hand and held it out.

“Jeff Bushwick,” he said. “I’m harmless.”

For whatever reason, she believed him. She shook.

“Hi, I’m Barbara.”

“I know,” he said. “You’re the young lady who finds bodies.”

A cricket chirped in the silence. Barbara spat out a small flying insect that paused on her lower lip to investigate.

“I’m not usually speechless,” she said.

“I just missed you back at the house. You can check if you like.”

Barbara started thumbing in Jimmy’s number.

“So what are you, anyway, Mr. Bushwick? What do you want?”

“Call me Jeff,” he said, responding to her suspicious glare by somehow melting into an even more relaxed stance. “I’m a reporter for the
Dedhampton Deeds
. I just want a few words.”

Jimmy’s voice squawked in her ear as the man waved a press pass at her.

“Hey, pumpkin. Did that reporter catch up with you?”

“Jimmy! You told him how to find me?”

“Well, he seemed like a nice guy. And he wasn’t going to go away. His car is blocking the driveway. Do you want me to come? I’ll have to walk.”

“No, forget it. I’ll handle it.” She scowled at the reporter, who grinned. “Okay, Mr. Bushwick, five minutes. What do you want to know?”

The pale blue eyes twinkled.

“Jeff. Come on, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

Barbara found herself strolling beside him as he made a shaggy dog story of his search for the best ice cream in the Hamptons.

“The Dedhampton Deli came in third,” he told her. “My cholesterol went up twenty points, but we scooped the competition.”

Barbara snorted.

“I hope your questions are better than your puns. How did you find us, anyhow?”

“Us?” He left it there, a technique Barbara recognized from counseling.

“How come you’re interested?” She could play the ask another question game too.

“How much did you know about Oscar Ainsworth?”

Not even his last name
, she thought. People don’t have to be introduced properly to kill each other, though. She wondered if Jeff Bushwick considered her a suspect. She wondered if he was a local— well, obviously he lived here now, since he wrote for the paper— but whether he’d gone to school with all those cops.

“Are you city or country?” she asked.

“Oh, I’ve knocked around some. I tell you what, Ms. Rose. I’ll give you some answers if you’ll give me some. Oscar Ainsworth was news. He was a big man around here. He didn’t have to die to get his name in the paper, but his death could make a difference to a lot of people.”

“I know he was a developer,” Barbara said.

“That’s an understatement. He was a mega-developer with strong opinions about land use.”

“That seems to be a hot issue around here,” she said.

“That’s an understatement too. Do you read the
Deeds
?”

“Lewis— the guy who organized our house— says the farmer next door calls it fish wrap.”

“Don’t kid yourself. They call it the
Dirty Deeds
, and everybody reads it, whether they admit it or not.”

“I’ve skimmed it. So what about Oscar and development?”

“He wanted to buy up as much farmland as possible and turn it into houses for yuppies with families. Some folks thought he wouldn’t be satisfied until the whole East End became a suburb.”

“And the locals are against that?”

“The town is against it. Most of the owners of the farmland would rather sell it off at a million bucks an acre than break their backs trying to turn a profit on corn and potatoes.”

“When I was a kid,” Barbara said, “I used to hear about Long Island ducks, but I haven’t seen a duck since I’ve been out here, not a domestic one, anyway.”

“That was the environmentalists. The ducks used to shit in the streams. The whole eastern end of Long Island is a case of ‘water, water everywhere,’ but there’s only one aquifer to supply fresh water. It doesn’t help that we’re more or less at sea level and that the seafood industry depends on the wetlands.”

“So the environmentalists and the town are on the same side?”

“Nope, it’s more complicated than that,” he said. “Town government consists of locals, and the voters are the all-year-rounders who don’t care what happens in New York City and are out here on a Tuesday in November. The old families are not only farmers. They’re baymen too. They don’t want the land and sea destroyed, but they don’t want it regulated, either. They can barely make a living as it is.”

“And the tourists and summer people come out here for the country. They don’t want it turned into suburbs.”

“Yep, but they want their conveniences too. And they want to lie on the beach half nekkid, but they also want to protect the piping plovers. They don’t want the locals to go surfcasting with their dune buggies slashing up the beach.”

“Okay, so Oscar was news. I get that. Our housemate Clea was a journalist. How come you didn’t care when she died?”

“I cared, all right.” Bushwick’s face set. The grim look sat like a mask on his amiable features. “How about a bargain? If I tell you a few things, how about you tell me all about how you found both Clea and Oscar? I mean details. Deal?”

“Maybe.” Barbara thought hard. “When you say a few things, do you mean things I couldn’t possibly know? What makes you so sure you’ve got ‘em?”

“I have my sources.”

“And do you write the headlines?”

“Sometimes they change them,” he admitted. “But I can try. My editor usually listens when I say it’s important.”

“So nothing that makes me and my friends look bad.”

“All your friends? All the people in that group house you’ve got back there— which is illegal by the way— and Ainsworth’s house? That might be difficult, especially since one of them could be a murderer.”

“No, my real friends— Jimmy Cullen and Bruce Kohler. They were with me when I found Clea’s body. I assume you want to hear more about that.”

“Okay, no sensational headlines. No ‘Death Trio Makes a Habit of Finding Bodies’.”

“That’s exactly what I meant,” she said. “So talk. No, first buy me an ice cream cone and then talk. Three scoops.”

The center of Dedhampton consisted of a crossroads with four-way stop signs, the deli, a two-pump gas station, and a pizzeria. Within minutes, Barbara and the reporter were sitting on a slatted bench outside the deli door.

“Okay, Mr. Bushwick, talk,” Barbara said. “So you did know Clea. Did you sleep with her like everybody else?”

“Jeff. Have you ever thought of being a reporter?”

“I’m a counselor,” Barbara said. “I’m thinking about going to social work school so I can be a real shrink. If I’m going to turn people inside out, I’d rather end up making them feel better. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I knew her,” Jeff said. “She was a journalist. Everybody who writes for the various local rags knows everybody else.”

“So why wouldn’t her dying make a big story? We found her too, but nobody bothered us.”