Amagansett

Thirty-Three

Women swarmed like worker ants across the village green. Those who weren’t chivvying along the men erecting the stalls were chatting like magpies. Very few appeared to be actually achieving anything, just the small handful unpacking boxes of cotton drapes and colorful bunting near the pond.
‘Hello.’
She swept past Hollis like a galleon in full sail, snapped an order then came about, bearing off on another tack. Only then did Hollis recognize her, from Mary’s party.
He moved to intercept her.
‘Barbara.’
‘What now!? Oh, it’s you.’
‘How’s the apron booth coming along?’ he asked, and promptly wished he hadn’t.
‘Don’t talk to me about the apron booth,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Wednesday, he said. But was it ready? Is it here now? Do you see it?’
He glanced around. ‘I’m not sure I’d know it if I did.’
‘What’s that?’
‘See it…the apron booth.’
‘That’s because it’s not here.’
‘I’m sure it’ll show up before tomorrow.’
‘Lunch,’ she snapped. ‘Lunch today. At the latest. It takes time to dress a booth properly, you know.’
‘Is Mary around?’ he asked.
‘Never when you need her.’
Definitely a pretender to the throne, as Mary had told him.
‘She’s picking up Edward from the station,’ she continued.
‘Edward?’
‘Her son. He gets back at…well, any minute,’ she said, glancing at the watch strangling her fleshy wrist. ‘Is it anything I can help with?’
‘It’s about the parking. I’m on traffic duty.’
‘Well, that is Mary’s department,’ she conceded. ‘What did you do last year?’
‘I think we banned parking along the verge there, and on James Lane—’
‘Sounds good to me. I’d go for that if I were you. I’ll tell her you stopped by.’ She raised her hand abruptly. ‘Gordon!’ she bellowed, brushing past him and picking up headway. ‘Gordon, the latch on the door of the tombola’s broken. See what you can do, will you?’
There was no question of intruding on Mary’s reunion with her son, much as he needed to see her. He had hardly slept, the sense of loss deepening with each passing hour, until the cocktail of exhaustion and alcohol had finally prevailed. The dawn had brought a new clarity with it, but the hole was still there. He’d swung by the village green on his way to work in the hope of filling it a little.
It would just have to wait. He’d have another chance to drop by later.
He was wrong.
He arrived at police headquarters to find that Milligan had scheduled a string of fool’s errands for him. First up was a trip to Montauk. Two surfcasters had come to blows out at the Point that morning. A nose had been bloodied, a rod broken. Hollis was forced to sit with the wounded party in a room at Gurney’s Inn, suffering a lengthy discourse on surfcasting etiquette. There had been a flagrant breach of protocol, it seemed, with the result that a large striped bass had got away. It was bad enough—two grown men fighting over a fish—but when it emerged they were good friends, he lost all remaining interest.
His next assignment of the day was chauffeuring the Chief’s wife out to Southampton for some urgent shopping. Dawn Milligan was a short, shy woman, long since bullied into submission, if not servility, by her husband. Hollis liked her. There had always been an unspoken bond between them—the silent complicity of the abused—and he didn’t begrudge her his time, even as she strolled around the shops, chatting idly to friends.
Returning to East Hampton, Hollis slowed the patrol car almost to a crawl as they passed the village green. He failed to spot Mary in amongst the throng of women, and hopes of returning later that afternoon were shattered when the Chief demanded to see his report on the fishermen’s brawl.
By the time he was finished writing it up, Milligan had already left for the weekend, and the village green was deserted. Hollis strolled around it, reading off the names of the empty booths awaiting tomorrow’s cargoes of hot dogs and ice cream, flowers and cakes, candy, cigarettes and scarves.
He wasn’t altogether surprised to see that the apron booth held center stage.
He smoked a cigarette, judging his options. Then he returned to the patrol car and set off for Springs.
Joe was seated at a table in the creeping shade, fiddling with a bunch of engine parts laid out before him. He looked up briefly as the patrol car entered the boatyard, but there was no recognition in his eyes. Even when Hollis wandered over and removed his cap he wasn’t sure if Joe knew who in the hell he was.
‘A word of advice, bub—never get yourself a Marine Spark outboard.’
‘Having problems?’
‘Near on thirty years now. Shoulda named this thing The Bastard.’
He grunted in defeat, his arthritic fingers discarding the two bits of metal refusing to mesh. ‘I’ll have you yet,’ he said.
He wiped his hands on a rag and looked up at Hollis. ‘You come by to thank me for last weekend?’
Hollis didn’t reply.
‘Didn’t think so.’ Joe levered himself to his feet. ‘You want a beer?’
‘I’m on duty.’
‘What do you know,’ said Joe. ‘Me too.’
Hollis stood on the veranda looking out over Accabonac Harbor while Joe busied himself inside. The wind came in light gusts, rippling the surface of the water, the reeds and rushes bending in obeisance.
‘Garden of Eden, bub,’ said Joe, joining him at the rail and handing him a beer. ‘Everything a man needs lies right out there. Ain’t nowhere like it. And that’s from folk what’s traveled some, men of good word.’
‘It’s very peaceful.’
‘It’s changing fast. There’s artists and all sorts moving in now.’ He pointed straight across the water. ‘City fellow bought just in back there, hard drinker, calls hisself a painter, but can’t hit the canvas for shit. I put a stove in for him. You should see the floor in that studio. And the walls. Just tosses that paint all over. What lands in the square, he sells. Now that’s a way to earn a life,’ he chortled, ‘not fiddlin’ with the guts of a bastard old outboard.’
He scanned the harbor, a rueful look in his eyes.
‘I guess it don’t matter who’s got it. The Montauketts took it off the Accabonacs with spears—butchered the whole lot of ‘em one evening—we took it off the Montauketts with a pen, the city folk takes it off us with their checkbooks. Men does as men is. It don’t matter, just so long as who’s got it looks after it. How’s Mary?’
‘Er…she’s fine,’ said Hollis, caught off guard by the swift change of subject.
Joe’s eyes searched his face. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘last week we buried old Underwood from over Molly’s Hill there. He were well along in years, that crazy old he-goat. Worked the big clippers most of his life, seen and done more’n enough for ten men.’ He took a swig of beer and smiled. ‘The priest, he’s a young ‘un from up island, he asks around, and he’s got all these stories to tell of Underwood this and Underwood that, how Underwood done pretty near everything save beat Columbus to the Indies. And we’re sitting at the back of the church, me and some others what knew him going back aways, and Ted Durrant says in that voice of his, “Underwood, Underwood…well he is now.”’
Joe erupted in laughter. ‘It got out, you know, around the church, got handed along till the whole place is just heavin’. You shoulda seen the face of that priestling, bub. If he sees out the month…’
Hollis was beginning to fear for the old man’s sanity, when Joe finally composed himself.
‘I guess I mean we’ve all got us a box waiting for us. I know Underwood went to his with no regrets, and that’s a life well lived in my book.’ He paused. ‘They don’t come better than Mary. I were fifty years younger I’d want her for my bride, fight you or any man for her, I would. Don’t screw it up.’
‘It’s good advice,’ said Hollis, ‘it just comes a little late.’
‘Don’t bet dollars to doughnuts on it. Nothing you done to her comes close to what that other one done.’
Joe eased himself into the old spring-rocker.
‘I’ll stop my preaching now, and you tell me why you come all the way out here.’
Hollis hesitated. ‘Lizzie Jencks.’
‘Young Lizzie…’ said Joe wistfully.
‘You knew her?’
‘Her folks is from Springs. They was married right here, bought a little patch down Amagansett, been skinnin’ fleas for their fat ever since. Sure, I knew her. Damn shame what happened.’
‘I think I know who killed her.’
Joe stopped rocking. ‘You think?’
‘I can’t prove it,’ said Hollis. ‘There’s more. Another killing. I can’t prove that either.’
‘Sounds like one heap of killin’ and not much proof.’
‘It is. That’s why I need your help.’
‘My help?’
‘I need to know what Lizzie was doing out at that time of night. It doesn’t make sense, it never has.’
‘You talk like you think I know.’
‘Her mother knows; she’s not saying.’
Joe scrutinized him. ‘Even if I did, you think I’d go against a mother’s wishes?’
Hollis cursed himself silently; he’d come at it all wrong.
‘I need this, Joe.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s all I’ve got.’
Aside from extracting a confession under duress, this was his last play—Lizzie’s midnight stroll.
‘She was going to meet someone, wasn’t she?’ said Hollis.
‘Was she?’ Joe’s face was set like iron.
‘I think it could have been the man who ran her down.’
He had gone back over his chain of assumptions, challenging each of them, forcing them to earn their place in his thinking. One had failed the test: the idea that mere chance lay behind the accident, that the impact of two alien worlds on a dirt-grade road in the dead of night—young flesh and hurtling metal, poverty and wealth—owed itself to nothing more than an unhappy coincidence.
But what did he really know about Manfred Wallace’s movements that night? Only that he’d gone with Lillian from the Devon Yacht Club to Penrose’s place. The rest was alibi, it had to be, concocted after the event. Maybe Lillian had stayed with her boyfriend that night—it was quite natural that she should—maybe Manfred Wallace had left Penrose’s house not in order to return home, but to keep a meeting, a rendezvous with a local girl.
It was thin, he knew that, but his talk with Sarah Jencks had reinforced his suspicions. She knew a lot more than she was letting on, and he wondered if her silence had been bought, or even secured with threats.
‘What if you’re wrong?’ asked Joe. ‘What if Lizzie was just out walkin’?’
‘She wasn’t.’
‘What if you’re wrong?’ insisted Joe.
Hollis couldn’t bring himself to say the words at first.
‘Then it’s over. I’ve got nothing else.’
Joe heaved himself up out of the rocker and wandered to the rail. He ran his hand over his crest of stiff white hair and glanced up at the sky. ‘Weather’s set fair for Mary’s bash.’
It was a good minute before he spoke again.
‘What I’m fixin’ to tell you goes no further.’ He turned to face Hollis. ‘I need your word on it.’
‘I can’t promise that, Joe, not if it leads to something.’
‘It don’t. It is over.’
‘If you’re right, you have my word.’
‘Why don’t you give me the name you got and we’ll go from there.’
Hollis hesitated before speaking. ‘Manfred Wallace.’
‘It’s the wrong name, bub.’