Amagansett

Twelve

‘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.
All he knew was that he had a sense of unease about the case—an itch, a niggle—something he had seen, heard, imagined? He couldn’t rightly say. His persistence drew hoots of derision from Lieutenant Gaskell, who refused to share Hollis’ misgivings with the Homicide Bureau. Gaskell was an incompetent, a man who had made lieutenant before they required you to sit an exam, but he was no fool. He had his record to think of.
The night before the crime scene was due to be cleaned up, Hollis gained access to the apartment, spinning some yarn to the uniform on duty at the door. He wandered the rooms and corridors deep into the night, working every angle he could think of. No idea was too preposterous; and not one of them bore fruit. He was smoking his last cigarette, pacing through the events of that evening one final time, when it hit him. It was almost as if it had teased him enough and out of pity had decided to reveal itself to him. One moment it wasn’t there, and then it was, as it had always been, since that first day. He dropped to his hands and knees in the corridor, peering at the wooden floor.
Gerald Chadwick maintained that he had fled down the corridor in fear of his life, hotly pursued by a knife-wielding maniac. The spots of blood on the floor were indeed Chadwick’s—that much had been established—but if he’d been traveling at anything more than a walking pace, the impact pattern of the drops would have betrayed this fact, with jagged, toothlike projections extending forwards.
The uniform, almost perfectly circular shape of the drops in the corridor suggested that Gerald Chadwick had in fact been strolling towards the bedroom.
In one blow, it was now possible to construct an altogether different scenario for the evening in question: Gerald Chadwick somehow luring Kuhn to the apartment, Gerald Chadwick slitting his wife’s throat in the drawing room, Gerald Chadwick slashing himself with the knife then calmly trailing his terrified guest down the corridor to the bedroom.
Why? It didn’t matter. That would follow. Gerald Chadwick had lied, and to Hollis’ mind that suggested Gerald Chadwick was guilty of murder.
Two hours after his arrival at the Homicide Bureau headquarters on Centre Street, and following further examination of the bloodstains, Harry Beloc, the Chief of Detectives, announced that Hollis might be on to something. By now, word had filtered through to Lieutenant Gaskell, who showed up in Beloc’s office, backing his boy, and keen to point out that he’d done so from the very first. He changed his tune when Hollis suggested they go straight for a confession.
‘Gaskell, shut the hell up,’ Beloc had snapped. ‘This could be your meal ticket. Might even get your name in the Daily News.’ Beloc had made up his mind by the time the laughter subsided. He handled the matter himself, paying Chadwick a visit in his recovery room at Bellevue Hospital. Chadwick crumbled under questioning. Too weak to be moved, he spent that night in the hospital, but two floors down—in the Department of Correction’s prison ward.
The story made the front pages, and Lieutenant Gaskell did indeed get his mention in the Daily News. Hollis didn’t. That was okay, though; it was the way things worked. Besides, those who mattered knew that the breakthrough clue and the subsequent strategy had been his. Three months later, he was promoted to detective second-grade, which meant an extra two hundred dollars a year. Lydia celebrated by promptly spending a sizable portion of this sum on clothes. They dined out on Broadway, the ‘Great White Way’ unnaturally dim and moody because of the wartime blackout restrictions, and they toasted their future with an overpriced bottle of French Champagne.
There was cause for real cheer: Hollis had turned a corner in his career. Gaskell had already pulled him off the petty larcenies—the sneak thieves, pennyweighters and pickpockets—and if he continued to make the Lieutenant look good on the bigger cases he might even get a call from the Homicide Bureau in a year or two. He hadn’t seen or heard from the Chief of Detectives since that day in his office, but he knew Beloc had registered his existence.
But if Hollis felt good, it wasn’t so much for his growing status—Lydia was covering that base—as the fact that he was beginning to believe he might actually have a gift for detective work, a nose.
So young, so earnest, so thoroughly self-absorbed that he hadn’t even noticed his enemies already ranging themselves against him in the shadows of his victory, his vainglory.
Hollis waited until the mourners dissipated, heading for their cars, before making his move.
‘Mr Penrose?’ he said, approaching from the rear.
Getting the name had been easy, requiring no more than a casual exchange with the chauffeur; figuring where he’d heard it before had taken a little longer. He’d found it eventually, scrawled in the memo pad amongst the notes taken at his first meeting with the maid, Rosa: Lillian W. moves to East Hampton in January following split from fiancé (Penrose).
‘Yes?’
‘Justin Penrose?’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s about Lillian Wallace. I have a few questions.’
‘Questions?’ frowned Penrose.
‘You knew Miss Wallace well.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘We were together for a time if that’s what you mean. Why?’
‘I believe you were engaged, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘I don’t know, a month or two ago.’
‘Up here?’
‘Look, what’s this all about?’
‘In East Hampton?’
‘Yes, in East Hampton.’
‘This was the time you went swimming with her off the ocean beach.’
Penrose visibly stiffened. ‘You know,’ he said firmly, ‘I really don’t think I have time for this right now.’
‘Of course. We can do it later if you want.’
Penrose glanced around him. Cars were beginning to pull away from the verge, making for the reception at the Wallaces’ house. He turned back to Hollis, resigned to having the conversation.
‘How did she appear to you?’
‘Well, a lot better than just now.’ Embarrassed by his flippancy, Penrose added solemnly, ‘Look, she seemed well. Very well indeed.’
‘Were you worried about her? I mean, her leaving the city, coming up here over the winter?’
‘Yes, I was worried about her. We all were. But as I say she seemed very well, much better.’
‘Do you mind me asking why you broke off your engagement?’
Penrose weighed the question. ‘As a matter of fact, I do. I don’t see that it’s any of your business. In fact,’ he added, ‘what is your business?’
‘I’m just trying to get a picture of her state of mind. It’s routine in cases of unattended deaths.’
That phrase again.
‘What are you saying?’ asked Penrose. ‘That you think she took her own life?’
‘Oh no, Mr Penrose, I know she didn’t.’
This was the moment he had been heading for. A guilty man would recognize it for what it was: Hollis laying down his hand. Penrose’s expression was impossible to read. A poker player, no doubt about it. And a good one.
‘Then why are we having this talk?’ said Penrose.
‘Like I say, it’s just routine. Thank you for your time.’
Hollis stood his ground, waiting to see if Penrose glanced back at him before climbing into the limousine.
He didn’t.
But Hollis did see Bob Hartwell observing him from down the far end of Cooper Lane. He turned away when Hollis caught his eye.