Dead In The Hamptons (2 page)

Clea didn’t look so much like the Botticelli Venus any more. Her green eyes were open, opaque as jade. Her jaw hung slack. It didn’t stir when I looked away and back again. I saw what Barbara meant about the mermaid. The detritus in Clea’s tangled hair and the careless position of her tumbled body made her look like garbage.

“Maybe we should drag her higher up the beach,” Barbara suggested. “When the tide turns, it could pull her out to sea.”

“Better not touch her,” Jimmy said. “The cops won’t be pleased with us if we mess with a crime scene.”

“You don’t think she drowned?” It hadn’t been my first thought either, but I couldn’t say why. I couldn’t see any marks of violence on her body beyond what washing up on shore might have done. Scratches. Bits of shell sticking to her skin.

“She was an athlete,” Jimmy said. “I’d guess she was a strong swimmer, or she wouldn’t have gone in alone.”

“She talked about that four-mile run like it was nothing,” Barbara said.

“Cramp?” I suggested.

“I’ve never understood why you’d drown,” Barbara said, “no matter how much it hurt. If the choice was swim to shore or drown, I’d swim to shore.”

“That’s why I’m wondering if someone stopped her,” Jimmy said. “Pushed her in and under. Or wouldn’t let her come ashore.”

“To me she looks drowned,” I said. “No blood, no obvious wound, no dark marks on her neck. I’ve been looking around for any sign of a weapon. A rock, a metal object, a piece of driftwood. I don’t see a thing.”

“I’d like to see the back of her head,” Jimmy said.

“Don’t touch her!” Barbara said. “We need to call the cops. I still can’t believe it. An hour or two ago she was buying bagels, and now she’s gone.”

Jimmy took out his cell phone.

“No signal.”

I scanned the beach. It was still early. Not a soul within earshot, though a few specks far off in either direction had to be people and dogs.

“Look, there’s her stuff.” I ran up to the little pile of belongings. Running shoes with athletic socks stuffed into them, a plain gray sweatshirt, and a towel lay heaped in the soft sand.

Jimmy followed me, frowning at his cell phone and hitting redial every few steps.

“Better not touch that either,” Jimmy said. “Finally! It’s ringing. It’s staticky. I need to get higher up the beach. Get Barbara to come away from there, will you? If I try, she’ll say I’m overprotecting her.”

“Sure, man.” I marched back toward Barbara and the dead girl. “Hey, c’mon, Barb, let’s get a little distance.”

Barbara clutched at my arm with an icy hand.

“I don’t want to look at her any more,” she said.

“Me neither,” I confessed. I cupped her elbow very lightly and took a few steps up the beach. As I’d hoped, she moved with me. “It’s hard to be objective when you keep remembering her laughing.”

“And grabbing the last brownie,” Barbara said. “That’s what I meant.”

At dinner last night, Clea’s eyes had twinkled as she’d given her fingers a long, sensuous lick, curling her tongue around the last bits of gooey brownie. Now death had drained that sparkle out of her.

“Did you notice how she flirted with all the guys?” Barbara asked.

“Yeah, I guess I’d call it flirting. Challenging. An edge to everything she said.”

“And now she’s meat and, oh, I don’t know— compost. It’s horrible.”

“I know,” I said. “Hey, you’re still shivering. Want my shirt?”

Jimmy came toward us, tucking the cell phone into his pants pocket.

“I told them there’s been an accident. They told me to meet them back in the parking lot,” Jimmy said. “And they said at least one of us should stay with her.”

“You two go,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“Thanks.” He put his arm around Barbara.

“I don’t need protecting!” Barbara snapped. “Oh, hell. Sorry. I could use my sweatshirt, anyway.”

I plowed through the soft sand back toward Clea as they trudged off. As the tide advanced, it ate away at the hard walking surface along the edge of the water. Would it reach Clea or the scalloped rim of seaweed and broken shells that marked last night’s high tide before Jimmy and Barbara came back with the cops? I hoped they’d get here fast.

I looked out toward where Spain would be if you swam three thousand miles. Or would it? Didn’t the Long Island ocean beach face south? A flock of black birds passed from left to right, skimming low over the water. A few gulls bobbed closer to shore. I heard a dog bark in the distance. I hoped it wouldn’t come any closer and get curious about the body. I watched the breakers break. They never got tired of it. First a crash as the green water curled up and over into surf. Then shallow fingers grasped at the shore. The foam hissed on its way in and giggled as the water ran out, tumbling little shells and pebbles on the way.

Accident? Maybe. But if Clea had got in trouble out beyond the breakers all by herself, wouldn’t she have drifted more? We’d found her stuff pretty close to where she’d washed up. I pictured a hand pressing hard on the top of her head, pushing her under and not letting up. I didn’t think those Botticelli curls would have held fingerprints.

What about the tide? The body had ended up close to the high tide line. The tide was coming in. If it had been going out, she might not have been found at all. Or not in such good condition. I squinted at the sparkling water and lazy rollers. They looked inviting, but the ocean was still icy, even with the sun high in the sky. Had Clea gone in for a swim? She might have been macha enough. In or out of the water, by chance or design, she could have met someone who wanted her dead.

I wished I had a cigarette. Better, the whole pack. I’d left them in Barbara’s backpack down the beach. Maybe they’d think to bring them. And coffee. I needed an antidote to sudden death. Booze had always topped my list. Did I want it now? Probably.
Too bad, buddy
, I told myself. As they said in AA, I didn’t need that one more problem. I had a feeling life was about to get complicated. Welcome to Deadhampton.

I heard a shout and looked up to see Jimmy and Barbara plodding toward me. With them were a couple of guys in uniforms. I waved, then shivered as a gust of wind swept across the beach, stirring the tangle of curls and seaweed in Clea’s hair. I closed my eyes against the sting of sand. She didn’t.

“Full name, sir,” the younger of the two cops said, “and spell it, please.”

He looked no more than thirty, with bright blue eyes and rosy cheeks. His thumbs flew over the touch screen of his mobile device. When I thought how hard I’d struggled to learn touch typing so I could temp, I felt old.

“Bruce Kohler,” I said. “K-O-H-L-E-R.”

“Local address.”

“We told you—” Barbara burst out. She seemed to have recovered her moxie.

“It’s okay, Barbara,” Jimmy and I said simultaneously.

“We have our procedures, ma’am. Mike, why don’t you escort Ms. Rose and Mr. Cullen over there.” He jerked his head at the stump of a log half-buried in sand, about fifty feet away.

Jimmy shushed Barbara’s protest at being called “ma’am.” He and the other cop, whose steel blue five-o’clock shadow made him look older, herded her toward the log.

My cop’s cell phone rang.

“Yes, sir. Arrived on scene. Yes, sir. No, sir. We’re about to secure the scene. Uh, extended.”

He gestured toward the other cop. If I read the signals right, he was telling him to go get the car and start circling the wagons. I wondered how they planned to secure a beach.

“Ten-sixty-one,” the officer said. I could hear an exasperated quacking on the other end of the line. “Sorry, sir. Witnesses present— I’m just getting their information. Ten-four— uh, affirmative. Yes. No. Understood, sir.” He thumbed the phone to end the call and slid it back onto his belt. “Bring it up behind the dunes, Mike,” he called.

He cast a stern glance at Jimmy and Barbara, who sat obediently on their log.

“Now, Mr. Kohler.”

I arranged my face to look sincere and cooperative. I had to remind myself that I was just a witness. To tell the truth, cops made me nervous. I’d spent too much of my life out of control or unable to remember. Feeling threatened was one of those things I’d always done drunk and now had to learn to do sober. God grant me the serenity.

He didn’t ask me anything I didn’t know. I kept my answers as straight as I could. To my relief, he stayed at the shallow end. He had just walked me over to the log to sit with the rest of the class when Mike came back, sliding over the dunes with his arms full. I guess they didn’t want to add police car tire tracks to a scene that even I could see would be hard to read. Mike started sticking stakes in the ground and stringing yellow crime scene tape between them.

“Tide’s coming in, Frank,” he said as he rounded the seaward end of Clea’s body.

“Do the best you can. Detectives are on their way, and we’ve got at least an hour.”

“Got it.” Mike shoved a stake in the spongy surface that would be completely covered when the tide came all the way in. Bubbles formed around the area and spread outward, as if tiny sea animals were running for their lives.

“How far do I take it?”

“Back to where these folks came on the scene,” Frank said. “You can secure their car separately.”

“Our car?” I blurted. “Sorry, but— how do we get back to the house? It’s at least four miles.”

“The whole area has to be secured,” Frank said. “It will be a while before you can leave.”

“How long is a while?” Barbara demanded. “Who are we waiting for?”

“Detectives.”

“Will there be an autopsy?” Jimmy asked.

The word added more grim images to my inner gallery of portraits of Clea.

“It’s Sergeant Wiznewki’s call,” the cop said.

“How long does that take?” Barbara asked.

The cop shrugged.

“It’s a holiday weekend.”

“So after the detectives interview us,” Barbara said, “will you let us go home, I mean to the house?”

“Sorry, miss, no can do.”

Barbara scowled. She didn’t like being called “miss” either.

“Since you’ve all informed us that the deceased is a resident of your house, that will be secured as well. You won’t be able to enter until we’re through there too.”

“The whole house? But— but we hardly know her. We just arrived yesterday. We hardly know any of them. It’s a group house.”

“Group houses are illegal throughout the Town. But that’s between the Town and your landlord.”

That was news. I’d never paid any attention to the Hamptons, but Jimmy and Barbara knew dozens of people who’d had shares. I guess renting to a group was one of those crimes that homeowners committed without a second thought, like what Arlo Guthrie called “litterin’.” Could we get kicked out? One problem at a time. First, we needed to find out whether we were knee, thigh, or waist deep in a murder.

We watched as Mike, still staking and taping, made his way back toward where we’d left our things.

“If you’re through with us for now,” Jimmy said, “can’t we wait back at our blanket? We’d be out of the way and much more comfortable.”

Frank thought about it.

“You can accompany the officer,” he conceded. “But your effects are also part of the scene. Mike, you make sure it’s not contaminated before the team gets here.”

“We can’t even put on a pair of socks?” Barbara asked as Mike herded us back toward our blanket, stopping every twenty-five feet, maybe, to stake and tape. “Or drink our coffee if there’s any left?”

“Once the CS guys are done,” Mike said. He added, “You knew the deceased. You found the body. We have to check everything in the largest possible area that could give us information.”

“What if we’d found her floating?” Barbara asked. “You can’t put yellow tape around the ocean.”

“That would be an entirely different set of procedures.” His face cracked in about a quarter of a grin. “This is a lot easier on the Town budget.”

That was the last explanation we got for a while. The detectives who arrived shortly questioned us a lot more thoroughly than Frank had. Wiznewski was the sergeant, a guy in his forties with the long face of a basset hound, sleepy eyes with droopy pouches under them. He wore a hairpiece as brassy as his gold shield, but I bet nobody teased him about it. The regular detective was Butler, a stocky woman, maybe ten years younger than Wiznewski, with raw umber skin, a very firm jaw, and close-cropped hair so nappy it made a political statement. She nipped in the bud my attempt to charm her without wasting a word.

They didn’t let us touch anything, not so much as a Styrofoam cup we’d already used for coffee. The whole beach between our car and blanket and the place where we’d found Clea was part of the secured area. The cops kept not calling it a crime scene, but it was hard to remember there was a difference.

Officer Mike escorted each of us in turn up over the dune to the parking lot. They made us sit in a police car. Another cop car, lights flashing, blocked access to the lot and to the beach beyond it. Since this was the nearest beach access to the spot where we’d found Clea, the road from this point was hardly more than a sandy track running parallel to the dunes. That was taped off. They used a ton of yellow tape. The only part they left alone was the piping plover nesting area, which was already taped off, though not with crime scene tape.

The CS folks literally sifted sand. Detective Butler did the verbal equivalent when she questioned me. She wasn’t hostile, but she was thorough. Clea probably hadn’t even handled the two bagels I’d eaten, but Butler sure was interested in the fact she’d bought them. I didn’t much like admitting that I couldn’t have afforded a share in the Hamptons if Jimmy hadn’t paid for it. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to tell her. The point was that I hadn’t picked the house or known who’d be there before the season started.

I hated to do it, but I broke the house’s anonymity. Butler had trouble understanding how people could share a house without knowing each other’s last names. I could only repeat, “It didn’t come up,” so many times before I broke down and mentioned AA and other twelve-step programs. They interviewed me first, since I’d been alone with Clea’s body the longest— if they believed what all three of us said about how long it had taken Barbara to walk down there, see she was dead, and run back. I didn’t know what Jimmy and Barbara would say. Jimmy holds the program sacred, and he has a lot of self-control. Barbara has the discretion of a mouse, but she loves the program too. I didn’t know how they’d feel when the detective said, “Mr. Kohler told us it’s a clean and sober house.” I’ve tried not to disappoint Jimmy since I got sober. I’ve got a lot of bad years to make up for.