Mark Mills - Amagansett

He examined both sides of her neck, instinctively, a vestige of his time in homicide. There was no bruising, but he did find something else, in the sand beside her head.

‘Anyone recognize her?’

The fishermen shrugged, not bothering to reply. Hollis folded back the tarp and got to his feet. ‘Who took her earrings?’

They stared at him, their faces set in stone. He held up the gold back-stud he had found in the sand.

‘I said, who took her earrings?’

He intended his words to have an edge of easy menace, but he knew they sounded petulant.

‘What you take us for?’ From the one with the beard again.

Hollis let it go.

The two men who had netted the body exchanged a few words as he approached them. ‘Deputy Chief Hollis,’ he announced. The tall fisherman nodded an acknowledgment. His dark hair was cropped short, his mouth was wide, intelligent. Steel gray eyes looked down on Hollis from beneath a broad, heavy brow.

‘You were the ones found her?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There was something unnerving about the steady, unyielding gaze. The stillness of the fellow was in stark contrast to his companion, who shuffled his feet nervously as he glanced around him.

Hollis removed a small memo pad from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Your name?’ he asked the taller one.

‘Conrad Labarde.’

Hollis looked up. ‘What is that, French?’

‘Basque.’

Basque. It rang a bell, some distant memory of a geography lesson.

‘And you?’ asked Hollis. The nervous fellow froze, then looked to his tall friend as if for assistance.

‘Rollo Kemp,’ replied the Basque. Even Hollis had heard of the Kemps, an old dynasty of farmer-fishermen, one of those families that went back all the way.

‘Cat got his tongue?’

‘You make him a little jumpy is all.’

There was no hint of aggression in his tone, no allocation of blame despite the phrasing. Hollis looked the Kemp boy over—something not quite right about him, he could see it now. Not ‘overburdened’, as his mother would have said. The product of inbreeding, perhaps.

‘You want to tell me what happened?’

Hollis took notes while the Basque, in an even monotone, described the events leading up to the discovery of the body. When he was finished, Hollis closed the pad and placed it in his hip pocket.

‘Any idea who she is?’

‘No.’

‘And what did you do with her earrings?’ It was an old cop trick—a question charged with assumptions, asked ever so casually.

The Basque held Hollis’ gaze, no trace of a flicker. Hollis showed him the earring back-stud.

‘Wait here,’ said the Basque, making for the group of fishermen. Hollis followed, damned if he was going to be ordered around.

The Basque stopped and turned.

‘It’s best,’ he said.

Hollis was too far away to hear the specifics of the exchange. At a certain moment, the Basque must have mentioned Hollis, because everyone glanced over at him. Not long after, the young fisherman with the beard became agitated, raising his voice. With a dismissive sweep of his arm, he turned on his heel.

He had taken all of two steps when the Basque placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. The younger man spun back, swinging a roundhouse as he did so. More shocking, though, was the speed of the big man’s reaction. He stepped inside the arc of the punch so that it fell harmlessly against his shoulder and in the same movement he pushed his assailant in the face with the open palm of his hand, so that he fell back on to the sand.

The Basque clamped a foot on the other’s chest and held out a hand. The younger man rummaged in his pocket and handed something over. Only then did the Basque remove his foot and step away.

He wandered back over and placed a pair of pearl stud earrings in Hollis’ hand. ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

‘The Medical Examiner’s on his way from Hauppauge. They’ll take her away.’

‘They’ll bog down on the beach. We should move her to the landing.’

Hollis nodded.

An hour later the Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner and his two assistants arrived at the beach landing in an unmarked van. Dr Cornelius Hobbs was a stout, brisk man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a hairpiece that made little attempt to disguise itself as such. Jet black, its curling fringes flapped wildly in the breeze like a young bird struggling to take wing.

‘Deputy Hollis?’ he asked, not waiting for a reply. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?’

His voice was pinched, nasal. Sinuses, thought Hollis, a welcome affliction for someone in his line of work.

The woman’s body had been placed on the bed of the Basque’s Model A. Without any consideration for the handful of onlookers, Hobbs seized the end of the tarpaulin and yanked it off.

‘Mmmmmmm,’ he mused, lowering his voice as he turned to Hollis. ‘A fine figure of a woman. I believe a little mouth-to-mouth is called for. You never know, Hollis, you just never know.’ Like many of the medical examiners Hollis had known in the past, Dr Cornelius Hobbs clearly enjoyed proclaiming his own ease when confronted with a corpse. He was still chuckling to himself as he used the trailer hitch to clamber up on to the back of the truck.

The Basque appeared at the side of the vehicle. ‘A little more respect, I think.’

There was nothing censorious in his tone. Had there been, maybe Hobbs would have reacted differently; as it was, he simply frowned. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘Not sure I’ve ever had the pleasure.’

The reply brought a thin smile to Hollis’ lips.

The woman’s body was loaded into the van on a gurney by the two assistants. Hobbs closed the doors and turned to Hollis.

‘They never learn.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Hollis.

‘The sea’s no friend of ours. Third drowning this week.’

Here we go, thought Hollis.

‘Had a lad down Mecox way, city people, father a banker. The boy gets accepted by West Point, has his friends up for the weekend to celebrate, big party on the beach. Swam for his college. Wasn’t drunk, his blood tested clean. Sharks had themselves a nibble before he washed up.’ He nodded towards the van. ‘No, don’t get much cleaner than that.’

‘How long do you reckon?’

‘From the rigor…less than twenty-four hours. You’ll have the autopsy report tomorrow, afternoon at the latest.’

‘I need a photo. For identification.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Today would be good.’

‘Today, today, all I ever hear.’ Nevertheless, he clicked his fingers at one of his assistants. ‘Snap her.’

Clutching two four-by-five film holders, Hollis watched as the van pulled away. Almost immediately the spectators started to dissipate. The Basque was rolling a cigarette by the Model A; the Kemp boy appeared to have left already. Hollis strolled over.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘For the earrings.’

‘I figured it was important.’

‘Yeah?’

‘How many women you know go swimming in their jewelry?’

Damn right, thought Hollis.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

The Basque eyed him flatly, then slipped the rolled cigarette between his lips and lit it with a steel Zippo.

‘Army issue?’ asked Hollis, nodding at the lighter.

‘See you around, Deputy.’

The Basque climbed behind the wheel of the Model A, fired the engine and pulled away. Hollis stood watching the vehicle, the trailer dancing over the ruts, until it turned east on to Bluff Road and was lost to view.

Three

Unable to justify a full-time photographer, the East Hampton Town Police Department subcontracted the work to a local man, Abel Cole. The sign in the window of his narrow shop next to Edwards Theater on Main Street read: Portraits, Christenings, Weddings. ‘ And Bar Mitzvahs ’ had been added beneath in a different shade of ink.

Many wealthy Jews from New York had built houses in the more exclusive beachside areas of town in the years preceding the war. They experienced little or no prejudice from the locals, who looked on all ‘people from away’ as aliens, but if they expected their peers to leave their bigotry behind them in the city they were sorely mistaken.

The Maidstone Club, the sine qua non of social acceptability for the wealthy summer colonists, showed no signs of removing its ban on Jewish members. As a Jew, you could own a lavish mansion overlooking the manicured fairways of the Maidstone’s links course, but if you wished to actually play golf you had to travel west to Wainscott.

Hollis had witnessed at first hand anti-Jewish sentiments, or at any rate their aftermath—a Star of David daubed in white paint on the front door of a Colonial-style residence belonging to a family called the Rosens.

It had been a sorry introduction to East Hampton for Hollis, occurring just two weeks after he’d taken up his position as Deputy Chief. A stark and malicious act, it was also quite unnecessary, since a large brass Star of David was already attached to the lintel above the door, nailed there by the Rosens when they had moved into their new home.

A search of the front garden had uncovered a size-10 patent leather dress-shoe speckled with white paint in a clump of hydrangeas—a discovery that Hollis had kept to himself, along with the name of the shoe’s owner, clearly embossed on the inside.

The gentleman was a member of the Maidstone Club, the son of the club Treasurer no less. Hollis didn’t need to summon the full force of his detective’s training to piece together the events of the evening in question: a drunken dinner following the Maidstone’s annual tennis tournament; the member’s dress-shoe; further sets of footprints in the flowerbeds; a property defaced with white paint that washed off easily—as easily, in fact, as the thin whitewash used to mark the lines on a lawn tennis court. Hardly the stuff of departmental legend.

Hollis had stalked the shoe’s owner for a few days until the opportunity presented itself for a word in private. When confronted with the evidence, the culprit pleaded high jinks. When Hollis informed him that a court of law would only accept a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, he broke down in tears, right there in the changing rooms of a gentlemen’s outfitters on Newtown Lane.

Two hours later, Jacob Rosen answered his door to a blond, redeyed young man in a brand-new blazer who handed him an envelope. Inside was a banker’s draft to the order of five hundred dollars made payable to the Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor. The young man then asked for, and received, Jacob Rosen’s forgiveness. He politely declined the invitation to take tea and cake with the family.

To Hollis’ mind the debt was only part-paid. Almost a year on, he still kept the shoe in a box beneath his bed along with a photo of the incriminating article, taken in situ by Abel Cole in his official capacity as the Police Department’s photographer.

It was the first time the two men had met, but the signs of a fast friendship were there from the start. Hollis’ plan for an unofficial settlement of the matter had required Abel’s discretion and collusion. Indeed, it was Abel who suggested the outrageous sum of five hundred dollars by way of a penalty. He knew the family by reputation, knew the boy was good for the money but that it would pinch him hard enough to hurt. That very same week Abel Cole had added ‘And Bar Mitzvahs’ to the sign in his window.

Hollis entered the shop to find Abel photographing a sternfaced, middle-aged woman seated in a chair set against a mottled backdrop. A Persian cat lay curled on her lap, looking quite as unhappy and mistrustful as its owner. As ever, the sickly smell of darkroom chemicals hung heavy in the air.