Amagansett

Thirty-Five

Gayle Wallace rose late. She pulled on her swimsuit and a pair of sandals, slipped a loose cotton gown around her shoulders and headed downstairs.

She could hear voices in the study, her father discussing the business of the past week with Manfred and Richard, bringing them up to speed. He was excited about a new idea, something to do with water; she hadn’t been paying too much attention during the drive up the previous evening.

Rosa had cleared the breakfast things away, but had left the coffee percolator primed beside the stove.

Gayle made her way across the lawn to the pool. Cup of coffee, cigarettes, lighter and a towel—the same trappings, the same routine every Saturday of the summer.

She was thinking about Justin, and about what dress to wear to dinner at the Maidstone Club that evening, when she reached the poolside.

She didn’t scream. But she did drop the cup. And she did run.

Manfred had to concede it; it was a damned good idea of his father’s. Two years of low rainfall had placed the city’s water supply under enormous strain. An obvious way to combat the shortage was by introducing water meters, which meant only one thing—someone had to manufacture them.

They were discussing the relative merits of taking a stake in the Buffalo Meter Company or the Pittsburgh Equitable Meter Company when Gayle burst in on them, dressed for a swim.

‘There’s a man in the pool,’ she gasped.

‘We can’t have that,’ said his father. ‘Go and deal with it, will you, Richard.’

‘He’s dead!’

Gayle pointed towards the garden, clamping a hand over her mouth, and for a moment Manfred thought she was going to empty her stomach all over the Aubusson rug. But she didn’t.

Richard led her over to a chair and sat her down. ‘Wait here,’ he said.

The man was wearing a dark suit and brown shoes. He lay face down in the deep end of the pool, and he appeared to be hovering just a few inches off the bottom.

Any doubts as to who he might be vanished when Manfred spotted something dangling from a length of string attached to a sun shade. It was the silver-and-jadeite hair clip he had given Lillian on her twenty-first birthday.

They all stared at the body in silence.

‘Richard, go call the police.’

Richard didn’t move. ‘I’m not sure I should do that, George.’

‘What?’

‘It could be a bad idea.’

Richard glanced in Manfred’s direction. His father picked up on the look and his eyes flicked between them.

‘What? What’s going on?’

‘Before we do anything,’ said Richard, ‘we have to move the body.’

‘Move the body!? You tell me just what in the hell is going on here.’

‘Rosa’s out shopping, but she’ll be back soon. She must not see this, George. We have to do this now.’

The following few hours were, by some considerable margin, the very worst of Manfred’s life to date. He was dispatched into the water to bring the body to the surface. There was a neat entry wound in the man’s forehead, a not so neat exit wound in the back of his skull. They used the wheelbarrow to deliver him to the garage, and threw a tarpaulin over the grim bundle.

Rosa was intercepted when she returned with the groceries and was told to take the rest of the day off. Gayle, still in a state of shock, was accompanied upstairs to her bedroom, where Richard spun some yarn about the dead man being a representative of theirs in Cuba, and that going to the police would only mean opening a far greater can of worms. She took his words in good faith, then took to her bed.

Manfred still had no idea how Richard intended to play it; there had been no opportunity to confer in private. But as they all entered the study, he muttered under his breath, ‘Just follow my lead.’

Manfred felt like an observer wandering among actors on a stage, present in the drama, yet not a part of it, a sensation reinforced by the fact that his father didn’t look at him once while Richard spoke.

He did a good job, casting Manfred as an unwitting victim of circumstance, playing up the details of the girl’s bid to kill herself. He added a fine touch, maintaining that Lillian had been at the wheel of the Chrysler when the accident occurred. He sketched the bare bones of the subsequent cover-up before tackling the matter of Labarde’s affair with Lillian, which had recently come to light, along with the existence of the incriminating document. The dead man in the pool was a hireling they had brought in to steal the document from Labarde, nothing more. But their plan had evidently backfired.

George Wallace seemed to visibly shrink before Manfred’s eyes as he listened, the chair swallowing him. When Richard was finished, he eased himself to his feet and walked uncertainly towards the door, leaving the room without uttering a word.

‘He’s going to call the police.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Richard. ‘He’d have done it right here, in front of us.’

‘It doesn’t mean he won’t though.’

‘No, it doesn’t mean he won’t.’

They watched him from the drawing room. He walked, he sat on a bench beneath a tree, then he walked some more, disappearing from view to the far end of the garden.

Manfred found himself staring into the void, facing oblivion yet again. He felt the hatred and rage build in his gut, spreading through the pathways of his body, tightening the sinews, constricting his chest.

‘I’ll kill him myself.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m trained, aren’t I?’

It sounded pathetic, even to his own ears, which only annoyed him more.

There might have been some truth in the words, but his training wasn’t a patch on Labarde’s. And as for his combat experience, the whole purpose of Fighter Direction was to guide others into warfare from the safety of the Combat Information Center. There had been hairy moments in the Solomon Islands, relentless night bombing raids by the Japanese, the odd barrage from an enemy battleship. He had even seen live rounds fired when the Marines flushed out a handful of enemy troops left behind on the island of Rendova. That ‘invasion’ had lasted no more than half an hour, and they’d quickly set up their big SCR-270 radars, feeding vectors to their own air crews to help them zero in on the Japanese planes.

This was how he’d spent a large part of the war, sitting in front of a cathode-ray tube, helping the Navy leapfrog its way towards the Philippines. As things went, it was about as good as it got. He was a lieutenant attached to the 1st Marine Air Wing; the radar technology over which he lorded was new, exciting, even glamorous; and there was the added cachet of always being on or about the front line. Okay, so it was the pilots of the old P-30s and P-40s who actually laid their lives on the line every day, but you were there with them, at their side, assisting, always in the thick of it, always safe back at base.

Maximum credibility, minimum risk. His father had judged it well, though they’d never discussed the details of the strings he had pulled.

It was a war record beyond reproach, an essential stepping stone toward the prize, playing the long game. The question was just how deep the dream ran in his father. After all his work—all the planning, the foresight—was he really going to throw it away now?

In his heart Manfred knew there was only one answer, though for a moment he doubted the assumption—the moment his father strode back into the drawing room from the garden. He walked straight up to Manfred, his eyes blazing, and slapped him hard across the face.

‘You stupid boy,’ he spat.

Manfred could only think how much worse his reaction would have been if he’d been told the whole truth.

His father walked to the sideboard, helped himself to a cigarette and lit it with a trembling hand.

‘This fisherman, Labarde, does he have a telephone?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes,’ said Richard.

His father made for the door.

Richard intercepted him. ‘What are you going to do, George?’

‘What you should have done in the first place—pay him off.’

‘I don’t know about this one.’

‘Name me one man who couldn’t be bought?’

‘Then let me handle it,’ said Richard. ‘For your own sake, you should stay out of it.’

It was a good point, though not the real reason Richard didn’t want him speaking to Labarde.

‘You should have come to me,’ snapped his father as soon as Richard had left the room.

‘Come to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Since when have I ever been able to come to you?’

His father glared at him.

‘It’s true,’ Manfred went on. ‘You know it is.’

He lit a cigarette. His father wandered to the French windows and looked out over the garden. They both smoked in silence.

His father turned. ‘He’s with you for ever now—Richard, I mean. You know that, don’t you? This is his ticket.’

It hadn’t occurred to Manfred before that Richard might have an agenda all of his own. And he drew comfort from it. If he’d done wrong, it was because his hand had been guided by a man thinking only of himself.

At that moment, Richard returned to the drawing room.

‘He wants two hundred thousand dollars for the document. Tonight.’

‘Two hundred thousand!?’

‘It’s cheap at that price,’ said George Wallace. ‘Though I daresay it’s doubled since you tried to steal it from him.’

‘Where are we going to find that kind of money on a Saturday?’ said Richard.

‘After everything else you’ve arranged,’ snarled Manfred’s father, ‘I can’t imagine it poses too much of a problem.’