The Beach House Read online

  My walk took me east to a small park overlooking the East River. Technically, I guess, it was the same river that bisected Montrose's view, the one he dangled in front of me like a family heirloom. I liked it better down here. I leaned against a high black railing and wondered what I should do. The Chrysler Building in Montrose's office had reminded me of Pauline. Since I was just about the only one left in the city without a cell phone, I dropped a quarter at a noisy corner pay phone and asked if she'd meet me for lunch.

  "There's a cute little plaza with a waterfall on Fiftieth Street between Second and Third," she said. "Pick up whatever you want to eat and meet me there. What do you want, Jack?"

  "I'll tell you over lunch."

  I headed there immediately. That meant I got to see Pauline nimbly weaving through the packed sidewalk, her head down and her dark brown ponytail brushing her classic blue suit. Despite everything that had happened that morning, I couldn't help smiling. She didn't so much walk as glide through the crowd.

  We found an empty bench against the wall, and Pauline unwrapped a chicken sandwich on twelve-grain. It was a big sandwich for such a slender woman. She knew it, too.

  "Aren't you going to eat? Is that how you keep so trim — starvation?"

  "I'm not all that hungry," I said. I recounted my visit to the top of the world as she listened and ate. Her eyes expressed sympathy, then outrage, and when I told her about Monty's amazing view of her tattoo, a little mirth.

  The city is full of women who with imagination and style can make a little beauty go a long way. Pauline did her best to downplay hers. But with the light on her face, there was no concealing it, and it took me by surprise.

  She already knew about Neubauer's relationship to the firm and had done a little inquiring of her own. "Personally, I don't like Barry Neubauer. He can charm birds out of trees, but he gives me the creeps. Mayflower has an account with the most expensive escort service in the city," said Pauline. "It's not all that unusual for certain corporations. The service is like a co-op, Jack. You need letters of recommendation, there are interviews, and you have to maintain a balance of fifty thousand. That's all common knowledge.

  "The next part isn't," she said. "Two years ago one of their A-list escorts drowned when she supposedly fell off a yacht during a moonlight sail with Neubauer and his friends. The body was never found, and Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel handled the matter with such panache, it never made the papers."

  I stared at the cement and winced. "What's the going rate for a dead escort these days?" I asked.

  "Five hundred thousand dollars. About the same as a one-bedroom. The girl was nineteen." I looked into her eyes as she finished off her sandwich and wiped away the crumbs.

  "Pauline, why are you telling me this?"

  "I want you to know what you're getting into, Jack.

  Do you understand?"

  That's when it hit me, and I couldn't help what I did. "Pauline, help me on Peter's case," I blurted out. "Work on the good side for a change."

  "It doesn't sound like a good career move," said Pauline. "I'll think it over." Then she got up and left. I watched her walk all the way to Third, and then she disappeared into the thick midtown stream of pedestrians.

  Chapter 31

  "WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR," insisted Rob Coon with contagious excitement, "is not another lovely, formal English garden but a full-on maze where you go in one end and get lost for a few days before finding your way out."

  Marci Burt and her potential gold mine of a landscaping client, sitting in one of the sunny front booths of Estia, sipped their lattes and let the deliciousness of the concept sink in.

  Coon, the thirty-year-old scion of the country's first family in parking garages, explained the source of his inspiration. "I rented The Avengers the other night. Except for Uma, it blew. But the maze rocked."

  "It would be a fabulous project," said Marci, and flashing dollar signs notwithstanding, she meant it. "Ideally, you would design it in such a way that you could keep changing the course so no one would get bored."

  Coon beamed. "Very cool," he said.

  The two fell into an enthusiastic discussion about the hardiest strains of evergreen, landscape libraries, possible models. They were talking about the need for a research junket to Scotland when Coon stopped mid-sentence.

  Detective Frank Volpi and two other men in dark suits had entered the popular Amagansett restaurant. Coon's eyes followed them to their back booth.

  "You know them?" asked Marci.

  "The tall guy with a beard is Irving Bushkin. A lot of people consider him the best criminal attorney in America. If I ever kill my wife, he's the first person I'll call. I believe the guy to his left is the Suffolk County district attorney, Tim Maguire."

  Coon didn't recognize Volpi, but Marci did and realized the meeting might have something to do with Peter's death. "Bob," said Marci, "this is the most exciting assignment I've ever been considered for. But I need thirty seconds to make a phone call."

  That's when she called me at the office and I called Kearns at the Star. Less than five minutes later there was a screech of rubber out front and Kearns stood, mike in hand, in front of Volpi's table.

  "What brought you to town?" Kearns asked Irving Bushkin, and although there was no response, he continued, undeterred. "Who's your client? Does your visit have anything to do with the investigation into Peter Mullen's death?"

  Small and round, with fat, freckled hands, Kearns doesn't look like much, but he has balls. According to Marci, he peppered them with questions until Volpi threatened to arrest him for harassment. Even then he pulled out a camera and snapped a quick picture of the famous visitor and his pals.

  But that wasn't even the best part. After Kearns left, Megan, the waitress who'd taken their order, came out and informed them that there'd been a mix-up. "I'm afraid we're all out of the pasta special," she said.

  "It's ten past noon," protested Volpi, but the waitress just shrugged.

  There was considerably more grumbling before the three changed their order to cheeseburgers and a turkey club. The new orders were barely in when Megan returned with more bad news. "We're all out of that, too," she said. "As a matter of fact, we're plumb out of everything."

  At that point, Volpi, Irving Bushkin, and District Attorney Tim Maguire stormed out of the restaurant. Half an hour later Marci got a handshake deal to build what promised to be the only bona-fide English garden maze in the Hamptons. At least for a week.

  Chapter 32

  FOR MUDMAN'S SAKE, and I suppose because I wasn't quite ready to ditch my whole legal career yet, I returned to Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel and spent all Friday working on the latest appeal. In the morning I re-reviewed his court records and was outraged by the minimal effort of his court-appointed attorney.

  I had lunch with Pauline, who told me she was still thinking about my offer to work for the good guys. I don't know what else we talked about, but suddenly it was three o'clock and we hustled back to the office. Separately.

  For the remainder of the afternoon, I drafted a response to the judge in Texas. If I may say so myself, it was persuasive. It was after eleven that night when I e-mailed a copy to Exley.

  Even though I felt okay about my day, the moment I got back on Peter's bike and pulled down the visor of his blue Arai helmet, I began rewinding my life like a depressing old video. Soul-searching wasn't a real good idea right then. I couldn't come up with too many selfless or generous acts in my life.

  Of course, I had no trouble coming up with bad stuff. The most damning incident that came to mind had occurred seven years before. It was at Middlebury, when I was a twenty-one-year-old senior. Peter was thirteen at the time. It was winter break and he had come up to spend a long weekend with his big brother. One night we borrowed my roommate's car to get some Chinese food. On the way back to the dorm, a local cop pulled us over for a broken taillight. He was being a bastard, and he decided to search the car.

  It occurs to me now that on that p
articular night, the cop was playing the part of the townie and we were the little rich shits. That's why he didn't stop until he was holding up a skinny marijuana cigarette between his fingers. I explained that the car belonged to my roommate and that we had no idea there was pot in it. But he ignored me and drove Peter and me to the station to book us for possession.

  When we got there Peter said that the joint belonged to him. I did nothing to refute it. Peter called it a no-brainer. I was planning to go to law school. He had no intention of even going to college. I was an adult. He was a minor, so they couldn't do anything to him.

  But, of course, that's what made what I didn't do so much worse. What a goddamned role model I was for my kid brother.

  I remembered the exact moment when the cop turned to me and asked if it was true that the pot belonged to Peter, and I just shrugged.

  Remembering the incident again on Peter's bike was a bad idea. It felt as if a white-hot current were running through me. It was all I could do to stay on the Long Island Expressway. A week after the arrest in Vermont, the case got thrown out for an improper search. I never told him how wrong I'd been. Whatever Peter had done to get himself murdered, maybe I'd helped put my brother on the slippery slope.

  Chapter 33

  IT WASN'T QUITE TEN on Saturday morning when I awoke to the pleasant sound of a woman's laughter. Macklin was laying on the blarney charm with a trowel. Judging by the way the lovely laugh kept interrupting his tales, a trowel was barely big enough.

  As I walked down the stairs, I wondered who young and pretty enough to inspire Macklin's A game might actually be visiting us on a Saturday morning.

  When I eased myself into the kitchen, Pauline Grabowski smiled up at me from the table. She looked as comfortable as if she'd been coming over for chats with Macklin her whole life.

  "We have a visitor," said Mack, "who admits to being a friend of yours. And she's so lovely, I'm not even holding that against her."

  "I didn't think you went for women with tattoos."

  "Me, either," said Mack, dumbfounded. "For eighty-six years I've been living a lie."

  The way Pauline chuckled, I could tell she was already taken with Mack.

  "Please don't encourage him," I said. "It's worse than feeding the animals at the zoo."

  "Good morning, Jack," she said, interrupting our routine. "You don't look so great."

  "Thanks. I had a rough night at the shop. But even if I don't look it, I'm at least as happy to see you as Mack is."

  "Well, have some coffee. It's out of this world. We've got work to do."

  I filled a huge mug and took it outside to the back porch, where Pauline sat beside me on the top wooden step. After my long night, her unexpected presence felt almost angelic, and she looked so starkly beautiful in her Crunch T-shirt, cutoffs, and red Converse sneakers, I had to remind myself not to gawk.

  "Here's to working for the good guys. Hope it isn't a huge mistake on my part."

  Pauline pulled out two pieces of paper with a long list on each. "This is everyone who attended the Memorial Day weekend Beach House party," she said about the slightly longer one. "And this is everyone who worked there."

  A third of the way down the second list was "Peter Mullen — valet" and our phone number. "How'd you manage to get these?" I asked her. "I've been trying, and striking out. There's a lot of paranoia right now."

  "I've got a friend who's a very talented and unscrupulous hacker. All he needed was the party planner's e-mail address and the name of her web site."

  There was an awkward pause. Despite my best efforts not to, I was gawking at Pauline.

  "Why are you looking at me like that?"

  "I guess I'm a little surprised you decided to do this," I said.

  "Me, too. So let's not look a gift investigator in the mouth."

  Chapter 34

  "LET'S START WITH THE HELP," Pauline suggested. "The ones you haven't already spoken to, anyway."

  The first phone call to bear fruit was to one of Peter's fellow car parkers, Christian Sorenson, whose fed-up girlfriend picked up after a dozen rings. "According to Christian, he's at the Clam Bar washing dishes," she said, sulking over the phone. "That means he's probably somewhere else."

  The Clam Bar is a pretentiously unpretentious little shack right on 27, halfway between Montauk and Amagansett. The service is minimal and the decor nonexistent, but something about the vibe and the old classic reggae tapes they play has turned it into an institution. In August you can wait an hour to spend forty dollars for lunch.

  Pauline and I were lucky to find seats at the counter, and we ordered a couple of bowls of chowder. It almost felt like a date.

  I spotted Sorenson bent over the sink, and he eventually came out of the kitchen in a sodden apron and latex gloves.

  "I don't think you want to shake my hand," he said.

  I introduced Pauline, and she explained that we were trying to find out a little more about what happened to Peter that night at the party. Christian was glad to help. "I was working the party all night. I was a little surprised the police never called."

  "That's part of the reason we're here," I told him. "They're treating the whole thing like an accident-suicide."

  "No way," said Christian, "but maybe the cops are afraid someone heavy is involved with whatever happened to Rabbit."

  "Well, if the police had called," asked Pauline, "what would you have told them?"

  Sorenson folded his muscular arms and told his story. This was where it got interesting.

  "First of all, Peter got there late as usual, so the rest of us were kind of ticked at him. But, as usual, he worked his ass off, so we weren't. Then, just before he disappeared, I saw Billy Collins, who was a waiter that night, slip him a note."

  "How do you know it was a note?" asked Pauline.

  "Because I saw him open it and read it."

  "Ever ask Billy Collins about it?" she asked.

  "I've been meaning to, but I haven't run into him."

  "You know where we could find him?"

  "The last I heard he was an assistant pro at Maidstone.

  He's supposed to be a stud golfer, trying to play the mini-tour or something, and basically I think they just let him practice."

  "Sounds like a pretty good deal," I said.

  "Not half as sweet as this," he said, holding up ten rubber fingers.

  "Thanks a lot, Christian," said Pauline, "and by the way, your girl sends her love."

  "Really?"

  Chapter 35

  "I'M IMPRESSED," I said as Pauline and I made our way outside to her car.

  "It's what I do, Jack. And sometimes even pros get lucky. There were eight guys parking cars that night. We just happened to find the one who saw something. So where's Maidstone? Am I dressed for the joint?"

  I'd lived out there my whole life, but until that afternoon I'd never set foot on the hallowed grounds of the Maidstone Country Club. Then again, I wasn't alone. The Maidstone, built on the Atlantic and laid out like an old British links course, isn't exactly a community outreach program.

  As snooty as Maidstone can be, it's an easy party to crash. No rent-a-cop out front. Not even a gate. A couple of visitors in a twenty-year-old Volkswagen can putter right up to the huge stone clubhouse, park their own car, and start walking toward the driving range. And if you carry yourself as though you've got a God-given right to be there, no one will say boo.

  I don't know if you've ever been to a country club like Maidstone, but there's this feeling of medicated calm, as if the whole place, from the well-seeded sod to the cloudless sky, has taken a Vicodin, then washed it down with a martini. I could get used to it.

  Billy Collins was easy to spot. He was the one hitting one perfect five-iron shot after another. He was also the only golfer on the range.

  "Hey, Jack. Can you believe this place?" he said, still gripping the club and pointing at the idyllic landscape with his elbows before sending another ball sailing out over it.

 
; "This is one of the best tracks on Long Island, but so many of the members are ancient, or have other vacation houses, that the course is empty half the time."

  "So how's your game?" I asked.

  "Shite," said Collins, striping another perfect iron.

  Pauline purposely stepped a little closer to Collins so he had to stop hitting balls. "We want to talk to you because Christian Sorenson said he saw you hand Peter a note. It was just before he disappeared that night at the Neubauers'." I liked the way Pauline talked to people. She didn't try to act tough, or falsely flirtatious. She didn't act at all.

  "There was definitely something weird about it," said Collins, putting down his club.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The note was pink and perfumed, but it was given to me by a guy who was hanging with another guy."

  "You know them?"

  "Nope. Based on their physiques, I thought they might have been Neubauer's personal trainers. But they didn't have the perfect posture, the bouncy energy. And they weren't working the room, trying to hustle up a couple of zillionaire clients. Plus, they were old. Maybe forty."

  "Why didn't you call the police?" Pauline asked.

  "The day Peter's body was found, I called Frank Volpi three times. But he never returned my calls."

  Chapter 36

  DUSK SOFTENED THE SKY as we pulled out of Maidstone and drove down Further Lane, one of the town's toniest addresses. It's the kind of street where a $5 million house stands out for its modesty. Only West End Road, with Georgica Pond and estates like Quelle Barn and Grey Gardens, rivals it.

  "Outside Detroit," said Pauline, "in Birmingham and Auburn Hills, there are some posh enclaves where the auto execs and Pistons and Red Wings live, but it's nothing compared with this. When I was a kid, we used to go out to Birmingham to look at the Christmas lights."