Orient (38 page)

“Okay,” he said, returning it to the bag.

“I’m not joking,” she said. “You never touched it.” Mills caught the same protective tone in her voice that he heard in Paul’s when he offered to help hose off the house. He lowered the volume on the radio.

“Why are you going to the Seaview?” he asked. “Why are you determined to get involved in this whole thing?”

Beth checked her speed as they whipped across the causeway toward the trees of East Marion, where snow still clung to the branches.

“I feel like I didn’t help Magdalena like I promised. I should have taken her more seriously,” she said. Then she tapped his knee, as if to induct him too into her list of obligations. “I’m sorry about Tommy,” she said. “I know you two were close.”

“We weren’t that close,” he replied. “But still I feel bad for him. I think there was something in him that could have been good if he’d been given the chance. . . . I don’t know. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

Sincerity put Mills in an irritated mood, so he turned away and concentrated on the scenery. He hadn’t come this far west in more than a month. The world flew by faster with each mile they burned. Houses gave up their clapboard exteriors for more ornate suburban mash-ups. Window shutters became merely decorative. Convenience stores and gas stations lined the road, aged to the color of traffic exhaust. Five cars waited for a clear turn onto a street marked with an arrow toward Greenport. Beth drove by it, in the direction of Manhattan, and Mills resisted the urge to tell her to keep driving until the wasted tract houses of Queens appeared and beyond it the needle tips of the faraway island. They were running up the woman’s leg on the map. The air already seemed warmer. He shifted in the upholstery, his body gluier than he imagined muscles to be, as if some homing device in his brain had caught a signal that faded beyond the causeway.

“The way I see it, there are three parts,” Beth said, spreading her fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s Magdalena and Jeff, there’s the historical board, and there’s the death of the Muldoons. I just can’t figure out how they’re related.
If
they’re related.”

“Will the historical board be able to continue without Bryan?” Mills asked.

“Nothing will stop them,” Beth replied. She slowed at the presence of merging cars. “My mother lives out this way.”

“If Jeff died because of something he found out, then maybe the Muldoons were killed because Tommy had uncovered the answer in Jeff’s book. Maybe it was blackmail. I think Tommy may have been capable of that. If it’s all about hiding an affair, then we’re back to Holly Drake. It could be that simple. Although I don’t know how OHB fits in, except for the fact that Cole helped Magdalena change her will. But that’s what lawyers do.”

Beth glided the car onto a gravel cutout. “Let’s just check this place out.”

On a metal sign overhead, a curving swordfish jumped in midair. Under it, the words S
EAVIEW
R
ESORTS
M
OTEL
were stamped in slender, aristocratic letters. Set off of Route 48, the motel was a long, single-story accordion of pink stucco, its 1950s flair overlaid with a 1970s grittiness. A 1990s renovation had resulted in a stainless-steel bubble in the center that served as the check-in entrance. There were fifty rooms running from end to end, each with brass number plates and peepholes corroded green on the doors. It was the kind of motel that might look charming in a Web site thumbnail, but in person it evoked hypochondriac fantasies about scabies, lice, bedbugs, and microbes multiplying on torn condom wrappers. Mills suddenly missed the invisible fear of mutant diseases in Orient. Were bedbugs designed on Plum Island? Chlamydia? Beth stopped the car in front of the door marked 18.

“Bryan used room thirty-one,” he said.

She pulled the emergency brake. “I thought we’d try to be subtle.”

What the Seaview did have was its spectacular namesake. Beyond the motel, Mills could hear the slapping surf of Long Island Sound. The air was damp with sea vapor. Gulls crapped fish remains onto the motel’s tin roof.

“This place is notorious,” Beth said. “If you want to have an affair on the North Fork, this is where you come. Like all things out here, if you want to be secretive, you end up going to the most obvious place.” She opened the door and climbed out. “We have to look for the owner. I think Holly said her name was Eleanor.”

Mills’s hand froze on the door handle. Eleanor, the name on Paul’s matchbook. So she wasn’t some secret afternoon lover after all, waiting there for Paul’s blue Mercedes. Yet Paul had hidden the proprietor’s name behind his framed picture of Orient. Mills didn’t know what to make of it, except to wonder all over again about Paul’s sexuality. He’d have to see Eleanor before he could rule her out as a love interest.

The Seaview had seemed like some sort of key to the deaths, but as Beth and Mills stood there in its pebbled parking lot, it looked more like a giant pink dead bolt. Perhaps they’d both just needed an excuse to stretch their legs somewhere inland where no one would recognize them. He followed Beth through the swinging door. A sign hung on the window: C
HECK IN ANYTIME.
C
HECK OUT THE SAME
.

Animal prints were supposed to be sexy, but the accumulation of patterns at the Seaview’s welcome desk/piano bar/restaurant lounge spoke a language of camouflaged despair. Instead of pheromones, Lysol and gin oozed from the darkened interior. The carpet was zebra striped, the velvet wallpaper leopard spotted, the eight stool cushions at the bar a mangy jaguar, which no drinker occupied, and the counter’s gray leather trim had the cracked epidermis of a rhinoceros. Peacock feathers in golden vases fluttered what air they could. A short, bald man in a tuxedo jacket played at the baby grand, winking first to them and then to his fishbowl tip jar.
Sail away, sail away, sail away
, he Enya-ed. Beth glanced at Mills, eyes warning
Do not laugh
. He was one kitschy cue away from misbehaving. How could anyone who snuck off here take their affairs seriously? But the piano player switched to Elton John midsong—
Oh ohhh, change is gonna do me good
—and Mills felt himself betraying his first impressions. He liked the Seaview and its peccable tastes.

Beth walked to the bar, tended by a woman—at least she must have been a woman once, twenty years ago, in the prime of her seventies—with skin the texture of redwood bark. She shook a silver shaker with a sound that reproduced small bones breaking. Her eyes were as black as hair-clogged drains, and a firework of
wrinkles shot out at her temples from years of squinting in the dark. She wore a peach dress with its sleeves sawed off. The dress’s right breast was covered in political pins: Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush, Reagan, Nixon, Goldwater. At some point, by accident or aversion, Gerald Ford had fallen out of sainthood.

“Hi,” Beth said, palming the rhino skin.

“Ya here for lanch?” the old woman asked. “Outta season so outside deck is cloused. But take any table in the dinin rum and we’ll serve ya.” She spoke the language of the east, the tongue of the lost tribe of Eastern Long Island, a tuneless birdcall not unlike a dropped metal lid revolving on a floor. When exactly had that accent faded from the local speech? Could younger Long Islanders even understand her? Mills raced to comprehend each sentence as it faded.

“No, we just stopped in—”

“Ya wanna rum then? Not too many bookins since it’s winta. We’ll fit ya.”

“No, no.” Beth sat on a deflating stool. Mills took the one next to her. “Just a drink. Scotch if you have it. Straight.”

The old woman smiled. She had managed to keep three teeth in her gums—sharp and black, like Wall Street buildings after hours. “That’s what I drink. But not til fivah. It’s only one thuty. People who drink this early arh bored with themselves. They hate theyr own company.” She had earned the nonagenarian’s right to insult her customers. Perhaps that was her most endearing quality.

“What can I say?” Beth replied. “I’m bored with myself.”

She appreciated Beth’s response. “And who’s this?” She eyed Mills. “Sorry, sweets, I can barely see ya. I got no eyesyt left. Lou, wherah my glasses.”

The piano player sang, “In your basket, Eleanor.” Then he sang “Ain’t We Got Fun.”
“Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun? Not much money, oh, but honey, ain’t we got fun?”

So this was Eleanor. Paul had no love life.

“I’ll have water,” Mills said. Eleanor hated to hear someone
order water more than she hated scotch at one-thirty. She sneered. Smaller fireworks flared from her lip. “A Guinness then,” he said.

“Fancy. You from New Yok City? Folks from New Yok City tip good. Unless theyr black.” She shook her head and disappeared behind the counter to reappear with a wicker basket. Storm-window-thick lenses in a clear plastic frame were held up in front of her eyes, their arms still crossed over the glass. She peered through them, as if looking through a mail slot. “No, ya ain’t black. But ya do look young. No need to ID ya.” She reserved a look of disapproval for Beth, presumably for robbing the cradle. “I tell ya, every year we get more of them black folk coming out heyr. Not tipping is like stealin, which is what they do best.” Beth and Mills laughed hollowly. Because Eleanor was uneducated, because she was old, because she was born early in the last century, and because they needed her for information, they forgave her racism. And yet because they forgave her, they both felt guilty, as if her racism were now their burden, a contagion they had inhaled. They both briefly dipped their heads in shame. On the bar, Eleanor placed two drinks between their empty white hands.

“In the winter, in the summer, don’t we have fun? Times are bum and getting bummer, still we have fun.”

“I’m from Orient,” Beth told the old woman, leading her away from the subject of race. It worked. Eleanor’s face softened from redwood to oak.

“I love Orient. Love the ospreys. We get our oystahs for the restaurant out theyr. From August Floyd. But the prices! And all the gays! The gays arh goin out theyr like crazy. No wondah it costs so much.” Mills pursed his lips. Eleanor dropped her glasses in the basket. “Gays have money because they don’t have kids. Soon ya wont need Sycamore High anymorh and the place will be turned into a gym. What’s theyr to be proud of? Stop rubbin my nose in yah pride and go back to New Yok.”

Beth dipped her head alone.

“There’s nothing sure, the rich get rich and the poor get poor. In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”

“It must be crowded in summer here,” Mills offered.

“We can’t run this place forevah. Gonna be too expensive to keep up. Then they’ll miss me. Where else arh people gonna go for theyr good tyme?”

“That would be a shame,” Beth said. “I know lots of people in Orient who love to come here. I tell everyone, no better hotel than the Seaview.” No closer hotel, at least.

“Damn right. Hear that, Lou?” Lou winked. Mills scrounged his pockets for a dollar and left his stool to drop it in the fishbowl. Lou tried to thank him, but Eleanor overheard. “Lou, no talkin. Just singin. Ya ain’t given free rent to chit-chat.”

When Mills returned to his stool, Eleanor smiled with the certainty of being the bar’s main attraction. “Gets hardah and hardah,” she said. “Heyr’s a joke. How do ya tell if a Polish man has been cheatin on ya with ya sistah? If you wake up at night and yahr dad’s not in ya bed.” Faint laughter massaged the air. Eleanor leaned over the bar, directly in front of Beth’s face. The Bush pins clamored on the wood. “Speakin of people from Orient, got the daughter of that family kelled in the fire stayin heyr.
Been
heyr. And her grandparents come and see her. So sad. She’s been eatin by herself in the dinin rum. I give her some extra food to be kind. I wish she’d have more visitahs, her boyfriend or someone.” Beth nodded at the sadness.

“Yes, her father was a friend of mine,” Beth said. Eleanor found that surprising. She remained leaning over the bar to study Beth’s face.

“Really? Nevah seen ya before, if ya know what I mean.” She laughed.

“I didn’t come here with him, but a friend of mine did.” Beth cleared her throat. “She’s shaken up about the fire. Probably because she came here so often with Bryan. This was their special place. Room thirty-one.”

Eleanor seemed to be eating something invisible. Her teeth rolled around. “I knew her fathah pretty well, but obviously I couldn’t tell the poor girl that. Wouldn’t be fair to her or to her dad. I respect the privacy of my patrons. But he used Seaview quite a bit. Didn’t
he, Lou?” Lou galloped on the keys into a fast-tempo version of “Nobody Does It Better.” “It’s not all sleeze heyr. People come to have fun. And so they should. Not my bizeness. The whole place ain’t gonna be my bizeness for long.”

“Do you remember the women he came with?” Beth asked. “I know there was a redhead named Holly. But were there others that you could describe? I think it would help my friend to talk to them.” Beth’s cheeks flushed at the question, though her modesty seemed misplaced; Mills felt sure she could tell Eleanor that she’d just had a gangbang with ten men in one of the guest rooms and she wouldn’t blink, as long as there weren’t any blacks, Polish men, or gays among them.

“Talk? Now that would be quite a convahsashion.”

Beth pulled her wallet from her purse and placed it on the bar. Eleanor noticed it. “Well, theyr were a few, including the redhead. But I can’t name them of couse.” Eleanor brought two meaty fingers to her eyes and pushed on her eyelids to indicate near-blindness. “I can only see so much. The doc says operation, but I ain’t all blind. It was Bryan who usually got the keys and paid in cash. I take cash. Wives and husbands, they look at credit cahd bills. I understand for my patrons. I don’t judge. It’s not the fuckin Waldorf. I gotta pay my bills, same as you.” But then Eleanor seemed to pause a moment, as if to recall an itching detail. She gummed her teeth, sucking them clean, and raised a finger, swatting it in a circle, like a woman tuning her ears to a song.

Eleanor dug through her wicker basket. A pincushion, a child’s pacifier, spiderwebs of cell phone chargers, cuff links the shape of whales, an asthma inhaler, a scrunchie with black hairs still stuck to its elastic, an inside-out golf glove—an inventory of forgotten items, overlooked by harried, dressing lovers in midregret. Near the bottom, she finally discovered her prize: a silver pendant, its chain knotted up in a bundle of charger cords. She worked as patiently as a seamstress to undo the tangles.