Twenty-Seven
The man was unremarkable in almost every regard. He was of medium height and build, he was neither handsome nor plain, and his hair was a neutral brown. His clothes, the cheaper end of smart, looked as though they’d been ordered from a Sears catalog. He wore dark gabardine pants and a lightweight hound’s-tooth sports jacket. The geometric design of his hand-painted silk necktie was discreet and not too colorful.
In fact, there was nothing whatsoever memorable about the man. Which was just the way he liked it.
As he climbed down from the train at East Hampton Station, a casual observer might have taken him for a furniture-polish salesman, and assumed that the brown leather case he was carrying held a selection of his wares.
It did indeed contain the tools of his trade, but these consisted of a leather cosh, a three-foot wire garrotte, a Colt 1911, a nonregistered .357 Magnum with a variation 83/8-inch barrel for extra punch and accuracy, and a hunting knife. He carried his other blade—an ebony-handled stiletto—in an ankle scabbard.
He examined the small station building, flashing white in the afternoon sun. He hadn’t noticed on his last visit, but it was perfectly symmetrical, its pitched roof extending at both sides to provide identical covered seating areas open to the elements. It was, it occurred to him, exactly the sort of station building any kid would be proud to have sitting beside the rails of his toy train track.
People were already queuing for taxis in front of the station. The man strolled past, heading west on Railroad Avenue, then south on Race Lane. The car was parked in front of a laundry. It was a black pre-war sedan, a different one from the last time. He slid his case across on to the passenger seat, climbed in, started the engine and pulled away.
A room had been reserved for him at a guesthouse on Buells Lane. He drove to it, but only out of curiosity. He disliked anyone knowing where he was, and that included his employers. He knew for a fact that this caution had saved his life on at least one occasion.
He stopped at a grocery store on Main Street, bought a few provisions, and, after quizzing the clerk, found himself at the Sea Spray Inn, right on the ocean. It was a large, sprawling establishment with wide sun porches, set just back from the beach. Better still, one of the inn’s small cottages strung out along the dune beyond the main building had come free due to a cancellation. He took it. It offered the privacy to come and go freely at all hours.
He unpacked his clothes and slid the empty suitcase beneath the bed. It would take an expert eye to detect the false bottom with its small cache of weaponry. He poured himself a glass of milk, checked that all the doors and windows were locked, then he tore open the brown envelope he’d pulled from beneath the sedan’s passenger seat.
He smoked two cigarettes while he read the contents, committing the information to memory. There was no fireplace in the cottage, or he would have burned the papers there and then. As it was, he shredded them and flushed the mulch down the toilet.
He changed into some shorts and a sleeveless shirt and strolled on to the beach, pleased to note that there were others as white and pasty as himself spread out along the shore. He headed east, the sun at his back, sticking to the packed sand at the water’s edge where children frolicked, leaping the waves and body-surfing.
By his calculation it wasn’t even a mile to the spot where he had put the girl’s body in the sea, and he was curious to see what the place looked like in daylight.