Death Will Extend Your Vacation (11 page)

“Am I a suspect?”

I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. But if an “us” and “them” got established, I didn’t want her on the other team.

“You’re new like us— the three of us, I mean. We don’t know these people the way they know each other.”

“Quite the clan. Is this your first group house?”

“Yeah.” I fished in my back pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Yours?”

“I had a share out in Montauk a few years back.” She handed me a large clam shell. “Ashtray.”

“Thanks. House like this? What kind of people?”

“Not as upscale as Oscar’s house. Montauk is more down home and working class than most of the Hamptons. Bunch of folks who liked to fish and drink beer.”

“I guess you’ve left them behind, huh? Was one of them your boyfriend?”

“Nope. What kind of work do you do?”

“I temp.” It sounded bald and unglamorous. “Pink collar all the way.”

“It’s okay to have a recovery job.”

“I suppose you could call it that. Though it was my drinking job too. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. How about you?”

“City government.”

“Pushing paper?”

She shrugged.

A burst of laughter drew our attention. The main group, clustered in the center of the deck, consisted of Oscar and a harem.

“Sometimes charisma can be so annoying,” I said.

Cindy laughed.

“You don’t know you’ve got it too? Don’t worry, not everyone is drawn to the Pasha of the Hamptons.”

It sounded like she was sending me a signal, but I wasn’t sure. To my own surprise, I got flustered. I guess flirting was one of those skills I’d never practiced sober. That meant I’d have to learn it all over again.

Before I’d figured out what to say next, someone came over and set a bowl-sized candle with a pungent scent on the railing next to me. Citronella. Twilight had turned to night without my noticing, and the bugs were out. I picked it up and toasted Cindy with it. The light flickered on her smiling face. I decided I didn’t have to say anything. I edged a little closer till our shoulders touched. She didn’t seem to mind.

The conversations of the others on the deck were just background noise until shouting broke out. Two angry male voices dominated the hubbub. The rest of them drew closer as if to pull the combatants apart, then fell outward, like a kaleidoscope shifting, to get out of the way as they started swinging at each other. I could see Ted’s head, higher than the rest, bobbing as he tried to land a punch. I didn’t see his opponent, but the string of curses identified Phil.

I slid from the rail and debated whether to jump in. I wanted her to see me be a hero. But with such a crowd, did they need my help to stop the fight?

I heard Shep bleating, “Come on, guys, break it up. Stop it. Work your program.”

Oscar hovered well back of the action, shouting AA slogans.

“Easy does it! Live and let live!”

The twelve steps didn’t work so well with fisticuffs. Shouts from the guys and squeals from some of the women indicated that the fight had brought out the arena hound in most of them.

Cindy jumped down from the rail.

“This is ridiculous!”

She shot forward like a cannonball, boring her way through the knot of spectators into the center of the ring. They froze in stupefaction long enough for me to slip through in her wake. I got there in time to see her chop their straining arms apart, upend Ted by hooking a leg around his, and stop Phil’s furious rush with a head butt that could have cracked a coconut.

“Oscar!” Her command voice would have done credit to a starship captain. “Take this one in the house and clean him up. Someone give him a handkerchief and some ice.”

Phil shook his head like a baffled bull. His nose streamed blood. But he went meekly into the house with Oscar and Corky, who had whipped out what looked like a dish towel and scooped up the half-melted contents of the ice bucket.

Cindy caught my eye.

“Bruce. Good. You take this one.” Ted knelt on his hands and knees. He looked like a disheveled table. His “Save the Whales” sweatshirt, ripped through in front, hung down on either side. He stumbled but eventually got himself upright. Cindy gripped his upper arm as if she were giving him the bum’s rush, except that to hold him she had to reach up, like a toddler crossing the street. I had to smile. I turned my face away, though.

“Yes, ma’am.” I stepped forward and put my arm around as close to Ted’s shoulders as I could reach.

“You!” she snapped at the shaken warrior. “What’s your name?”

“Ted,” he said obediently.

“Do you know the rest? It’s not a meeting!”

“Ted Mailer.”

“Where are you?”

“Uh, right here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Oscar’s deck.”

“And where’s that?”

“Dedhampton. Dedhampton Beach.”

“What date is it? What time? And who’s the president?”

“If you’re checking for concussion,” I said, “you should probably ask Phil those questions— and yourself.”

“I’ll go,” Barbara said. “I know how to do a mental status. I’ll make sure Phil’s oriented times three and check that his pupils are the same size. Then, if he’s okay, we’ll drive him back to the house.”

Jimmy put his arm around her, and they marched inside.

“Cindy?” I said. I’m in love, I wanted to say. I’m awestruck. “Your head took quite a crack too. Shouldn’t you—”

“I’m fine!” she said. “And I know perfectly well where I am— in the middle of a pack of staring fools. Shoo!”

Sheepishly, the herd retreated.

“Just help him wash his face and make sure nothing’s broken, Bruce,” she said in a softer voice. As I started to lead Ted away, she called after me, “And find a different bathroom. Keep them away from each other. I don’t want to have to make peace all over again.”

Making peace, she called it. My face wore a foolish grin, and I didn’t care.

“There’s a bathroom next to my room,” Ted said. I had forgotten about him and started wandering down the hall. He came up behind me. “You’re headed in the right direction.”

He pushed open the third door down, his arm passing easily over my head. It wasn’t the master bathroom, but it was big enough, with cold mottled blocks of tile that had to be marble and a wall of mirror that stretched to the ceiling. Ted didn’t have to stoop as he surveyed his face. A shiner was making a nice start around his right eye.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“If you want to hear God laugh, make a plan,” I said. I’d heard it in the rooms. “You could use some ice on that.”

“There’s an ice machine,” he said. “In the kitchen.”

“I’ll get it. Back in a minute.”

“And Bruce, is it? Thanks.”

“Hey, no problem.”

I’d already seen the kitchen. It was still a high-tech marvel, but I didn’t linger. I grabbed a bowl, filled it with ice, and got the hell out before anybody came in and started talking. I even found my way back to Ted’s bathroom without getting lost.

“This is so embarrassing,” Ted said as he dabbed ice on his eye and tossed the ruined sweatshirt in the trash. Violence one, whales zero.

“You’re not an alcoholic?”

“Sure I am,” he said. “Why?”

“Never mind.” Barbara had trained me so well that every time I heard “embarrassing,” I thought “Al-Anon.” “I guess you were upset about Clea, huh?”

Ted punched his right fist into his left palm and then winced. I guess his knuckles had taken part of the beating.

“I can’t understand how she could have taken up with that twerp! If I thought he had anything to do with her drowning, I’d kill him!”

“Easy does it,” I said. “The cops said nobody killed her. She did drown, you know. They couldn’t make a mistake about that.”

“Oh, God, the autopsy! I can’t bear to think about them cutting her up. She was so beautiful!”

He clutched his hair in both hands and pulled it till it stood up, like a mourner in a Greek tragedy.

“So you and Clea were tight, huh?”

“I thought so.” He sat down on the lid of the toilet seat and gripped his hair again, but didn’t pull it this time. He rested his elbows on his knees like a big praying mantis. His legs stuck out so far that I had to lean against the door to fit inside the room. “We had such a great time last summer. But you could never tell with Clea. She was that kind of woman.”

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. His naked white skin was blotched with red and dotted with goose pimples. “Have you got another sweatshirt?”

“In my room,” he said, “first door to the right. On the bed. It’s another ‘Save the Whales.’ Thanks. Again.”

“Forget it. You don’t have to keep thanking me.”

I wouldn’t be you, poor boob
, I thought as I tossed the sweatshirt over my arm and ambled back into the bathroom. I figured group house shirts were a lot like motel towels. They migrated into your luggage and home without any conscious thought on your part. But two of them— “Save the Whales” must be his personal manifesto.

“Oscar’s got quite a place.” I pulled words out of my head at random. “You get to sleep within earshot of the ocean. Mother Nature’s white noise machine.”

“It would be great,” Ted said, “if it wasn’t so politically incorrect to build a house on a dune.”

“The damage is already done,” I said.

“That doesn’t comfort me,” he said. “But I like knowing the ocean can take it back any time it wants. Clea used to say that people like Oscar say, ‘I own this dune,’ and Mother Nature says, ‘Sez who?’”

“I’m really sorry, man. I only met her the one night before it happened. She must have been quite a woman.”

“She was. Listen, can we get out of this bathroom?”

“Sure. I was just keeping you company while you pulled yourself together. You want some coffee? I saw a spiffy machine in the kitchen that must make it in no time flat.”

“I don’t want to see anybody,” he said.

I could understand that. Should I offer to go make the coffee? No. I wanted to hear more about Clea.

“Let’s go and see if the coast is clear,” I suggested. “If it’s not, we can skip the coffee. Tell me more about Clea. What was she like?”

“Good question,” he said. “Passionate. Fickle. Dedicated. Exasperating. Insecure. Cruel.”

“Good words. I thought you’d say, ‘A sexy alcoholic woman with codependency issues.’ Are you a journalist like she was?”

“Ha! No, not me,” Ted said. “I’m a counselor. I work at a clinic in Queens.”

“What kind of stuff did she write?” I asked.

“Environmental stuff when she could get the assignments. She’d had articles in most of the neighborhood papers and once or twice in
Newsday
. Not the
New York Times
or anything like it. And if she had to, she did obits and baby showers or whatever they would pay for.”

“So being out here was a working vacation for her?” Journalists had a thousand ways to get up people’s noses.

“When I was with her last summer, she didn’t go anywhere without a notebook or a digital recorder.”

The cops had the notebooks, as I’d found out the hard way. This was the first I’d heard about a digital recorder. The detectives probably hadn’t interviewed Ted. He hadn’t showed up in Dedhampton till they’d already dropped the investigation. If the autopsy had turned up evidence that she’d been killed, they might have tracked him down in the city. Phil would have been eager to tell them about the rival boyfriend. But now they wouldn’t follow it up.

Could the cops have her recorder tucked away? Maybe it had nothing incriminating on it. No reason to mention it to me. But when Wiznewski told me they’d found Clea’s notebooks, he was trying to scare me into some kind of admission. It seemed to me if they’d also had her digital recorder, he would have said so. Besides, Ted said she’d taken it everywhere. If she wanted to jot down a thought while running on the beach, would she stop to write in a notebook? No. She’d take the recorder so she could keep running while she made her notes. She could tuck it in her cleavage. But if she went for a swim, she’d have to leave it on the beach. So where was it? We’d arrived on the beach before the cops. We’d seen her towel, her sweatshirt, her running shoes. No recorder. It should have been there— if she’d been alone on the beach. Okay, what if she hadn’t been alone? What if whoever was there had taken the recorder? The odds in favor of murder got a lot shorter.

“Tell me more about what Clea wrote,” I said. “For instance.”

The kitchen was still deserted. I figured he was still hurting. He moved stiffly, and the eye was getting darker and more swollen by the minute.

“Sit,” I said. “I’ll make the coffee.” I started opening cabinets. Found filters, mugs, and sugar. Ground coffee in the freezer, milk in the fridge. I could have ground whole beans, but there were limits.

“Clea liked to write about things she could get worked up about,” Ted said. “Out here, that would be the vanishing baymen versus the rich sports fishermen, the surfcasters with their dune buggies versus the nesting piping plovers, that kind of thing.”

“The embattled environment versus the developers?” I poured water, pressed a button, and watched the nectar of the gods start to drip.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “She loved to pick on Oscar. She could be all over him, the way most of the women are, and then turn around and give him a hard time about greed and the land.”

I needed a cigarette. I had a choice of ashtrays: a chunk of millefiore glass from Murano with a depression for the butts or a giant clamshell from the beach outside. I pulled out my pack and shook out a cancer stick.

“Want one?”

“Oh, hell, why not?” Ted said. “Another of the things I do that I don’t approve of. Like loving Clea.”

We smoked in silence for a while. The coffee pot hissed and gurgled.

“Was she a good journalist?” I asked.

Ted blew out a slow stream of smoke.

“Writing came easy to her, I know that,” he said. “I’m no literary critic.”

“I mean, as an investigative reporter. Was she good at putting two and two together? Did she ever dig up a cover-up or blow the whistle on a crime?”

“Maybe not as good as she thought she was,” Ted said. “But those were her aspirations, all right. She was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and that applied to her work as well as her, let’s say, personal relationships.”