Further Lane by James Brady Read Free Book Online

that took care of herself.
    Some body, she had; some woman, she was. Despite himself he grins in memory.
    Much of this, and more, East Hampton will learn over the next few hours and days from police reports, the eyewitness testimony of Leo Brass, a coroner’s jury, through local rumor-mongers, and from the feverish accounts of ambitious reporters on the daily tabloids and the evening news.
    *   *   *
    Not within memory had there been a capital crime on Further Lane.
    Oh, a wife-beating, perhaps. Driving under the influence. The usual adulteries. Drunkenness. The enjoyment behind private and privileged walls and privet hedges of illicit drugs. A gay-bashing at Two Mile Hollow Beach, where smooth and wealthy older men cruised youngsters in Speedos. Petty theft. Unconfirmed whispers a prominent restaurateur kept a torture chamber, cells, manacles and all, in the cellar of his house. For homicide, you had to go back to 1919 when Captain Chelm came home from France after the Great War to find his lonely young wife in bed with her second cousin Ruggles, whom the Captain promptly shot.
    Since then, nothing of this sort.
    Which was one of many reasons why wealthy people live on Further Lane and why a distasteful real estate ad (it was soon pulled) referred to a per-acre price for land in the area as “south of the highway and north of a million,” and why what happened last September on the sand east of the Maidstone Club shattered so many innocent (more or less) illusions.

SIX
    A stake of sharpened privet driven through her cold heart …
    The dead woman was Hannah Cutting.
    For the first day or so, on Sunday and Labor Day, I took only neighborly, personal interest in what happened. Not professional. There was local shock at having a violent death at our doorsteps; more general shock that the victim was such a celebrated person. TV and newspaper reporters swarmed over the little resort town, complicating the already congested Labor Day weekend traffic and aggravating townspeople. Good thing my old man and his Nordic “housekeeper” were going off to Europe and wouldn’t be back until next month; traffic jams in East Hampton were to him an especial irritant. He’d barely tolerated the annual Hampton Classic horse show, which ended September first. And that was miles away in Bridgehampton! And soon the damned film festival would begin. Although I did no digging into the case and had only a normal curiosity, having been at Hannah’s home mere hours before her death, I was instinctively and by reflex starting to gather information. Reporters are like that.
    Fleshing out fevered accounts in the press, my primary source was a detective named Tom Knowles, a boyhood chum (we split when I went off to Harvard and Tom joined the Marines) who was now a plainclothesman on the small East Hampton P.D. and was professionally irritated that one of the town’s rare homicides had been taken over (force majeure!) by Suffolk County with its sizable and quite competent homicide squad. Knowles realized this made sense but he was nonetheless, as he admitted to old pals like me, slightly pissed. You get someone murdered in a small town, the town cops want a piece of it. Especially a man like Tom who single-handedly had taken on and knocked down Leo Brass in the company of numerous and pugnacious Baymen and brought him in to be booked for mischief against Simon Krantz and his contentious dock. Knowles liked Brass more than he liked the wine baron but the law was the damned law. Tom was the sort of fellow you might cast to play Inspector Harry Callahan if you couldn’t get Eastwood, only half Eastwood’s age but every bit as much “Dirty Harry,” tall, rawboned, hard, handsome, and with a deep voice that came out of his scrotum. Someone once said of Tom’s look, “even his cheekbones have cheekbones.”
    A good cop besides, and, as I say, pissed. Which made him, for me, an