Mark Mills - Amagansett

He didn’t recognize her at first, and it took him a moment to figure out why that was. She was wearing make-up, not much, but enough to distort her features, somehow enlarge her already full lips and overwhelm her pale eyes. It didn’t suit her, he thought, a little guiltily.

A crowd gathered hesitantly near the hearse, as if unsure whether they should be observing this particular stage of the operation. Undertakers swooped to assist as the pallbearers maneuvered the casket from their shoulders and slid it into the vehicle.

‘Hello.’

Mary turned. She was standing on the fringes near the back.

‘Hello.’

So what if her face didn’t light up? It was a somber occasion.

‘You look great.’

‘Thanks,’ she said flatly. She seemed almost annoyed with him.

‘Quite a turnout.’

‘Yes.’

People were dispersing now. He had to be quick or the moment would be lost.

‘She had a lot of friends.’

Not good, but it was the best lead-in he could think of.

Mary looked him clean in the eye.

‘You could just ask me straight, you know, it’s less insulting.’

‘What?’

‘You want me to point him out—the one I saw her down at the beach with. It’s why you’re here.’

All Hollis could manage was a feeble look.

She nodded towards a group of young people. ‘The tall one over there on the right.’

He was talking to a girl, a diminutive creature a good foot shorter than him—an almost comical pairing, not unlike the towers of the church facade. He was handsome in an unremarkable way, his features refined by generations of selective breeding to the point of blandness. If it hadn’t been for his height, Hollis might not have recognized him.

It was the same young man he had seen slouched in a rattan chair beside the Wallaces’ pool earlier in the week.

‘Happy now?’ asked Mary, not waiting for a reply.

‘I’m sorry.’

Mary turned back. Nothing in her expression suggested she wanted him to expand on the apology; in fact, she looked utterly unconvinced by it. He was a little surprised, therefore, when she asked, ‘What are you doing next Friday evening?’

‘Nothing.’

He was working the night shift, but he could always get someone else to cover—young Stringer, maybe, always so eager to please.

‘I’m having some friends over for a drink. From seven o’clock.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Hollis. ‘Maybe I’ll get to meet Eugene this time.’

‘Pray you don’t.’

He smiled, but his mind was already elsewhere, figuring both where and how to make his approach.

Bob Hartwell was standing near his patrol car opposite the cemetery entrance on Cooper Lane, turning his cap in his hands. Hollis pulled in beside him.

‘It’s going to be tight, Bob. Best get the first cars to park up right down the end there.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll wave them through to you.’

Hartwell wandered off. Hollis knew he had planned to spend the afternoon on the water, sailing with his kids in Three Mile Harbor, and yet he hadn’t so much as flinched when Hollis announced that he’d be directing traffic instead. He was a good man, smart, unflappable. Even when Chief Milligan chose him as the target for one of his sudden and quite unexplained broadsides, the abuse seemed to wash right over him. Afterwards, he might say something like ‘Guess who didn’t get any last night?’ or ‘The market must be down’, but that was the extent of his ill feeling. He was the closest thing Hollis had to a friend on the town force, albeit a friend with whom he had never broken bread or even shared a beer.

The hearse crept round the corner into Cooper Lane, trailing cars. It turned into the cemetery, followed by the next four vehicles—Richard Wakeley had been very specific—and Hollis directed the others on down towards Hartwell at the end of the road.

He noted that the tall young man whom Mary had pointed out was traveling in a chauffeured limousine. That was good.

There was no disguising the fact that the plot where Lillian Wallace’s bones were to rest for eternity had been hastily put together. The low privet hedge that ringed it was set in freshly turned earth. Within this perimeter, the lines were still visible in the green and sappy turf.

It was a large plot, a family plot, wide enough to take at least three abreast, though it was doubtful that the soil on either side of her grave would ever be disturbed. She had expressed a wish to be buried in East Hampton, Hollis knew that, but somehow he couldn’t see another Wallace choosing to keep her company.

No, George Wallace had done the very best by his daughter—as in life, so in death—and he wanted people to know it. For her there would be no slender patch of ground off one of the avenues that sliced the cemetery north to south, squeezed into the serried ranks of humble little granite headstones pushing up through the overgrown grass. She would lie in this pleasing little copse, this shady reserve of the wealthy, with its yew trees and cypress trees and ornamental hedges and its names carved into the finest white Italian marble.

Hollis had attended many burials over the years—family, friends, fellow police officers, even a hobo on one occasion—but somehow the experience never lost any of its impact. Weddings, those you became inured to with the passage of experience: the same hymns, the same vows destined to be overlooked or broken. But there was something about the physical act of lowering a body in a box into a hole in the ground that always struck home. There was no other sound quite like that of a handful of earth hitting the lid of a coffin. It reached to the core of your being and shook you.

As he glanced around at the faces of those gathered near the grave, it struck Hollis that he was not alone in feeling as he did. It also occurred to him that the person responsible for Lillian Wallace’s murder was, quite possibly, among those mourning her passing at the graveside—right here, right now—not even twenty yards from where he was standing.

How could he be so sure she’d been murdered? He deflected the question. At this stage of an investigation the material facts were often stacked deep and high against you—an autopsy that revealed no evidence of foul play, for example. All you had to go on were your instincts, the little whispers at the back of your mind.

This was not one of those murders committed rashly, in the heat of the moment, then hastily covered up. The planning and execution were to be respected, if not admired. Mistakes had been made—they always were—and it was in the nature of an intelligent crime such as this, carefully conceived, that the lapses, however small, were all the more glaring for it. Like a lone dent in the faultless bodywork of a new car, they drew the eye.

Hollis felt a chill of excitement run through him, for it was becoming clear that this was exactly the kind of investigation at which he had once excelled, on which he had built his name.

One case had set him on that path, bestowing upon him a mantel of notoriety that would never be shrugged off. He could recall every detail of it, his first hesitant steps over the threshold, the two technicians from the Broome Street crime lab on their hands and knees in the living room, the ashen-faced patrolman accepting a cigarette from a colleague in the kitchen. And he could still taste the rust in his mouth, the metallic vapors of the blood that speckled almost every surface in the apartment.

The woman lay on her back beside the sofa, her throat opened to the bone. The man was in the bedroom, slumped in a corner, a bewildered expression on his face, as if still coming to terms with the fact that he was dead. There were several stab wounds in his chest, along with a deep gash in his shoulder. A picture of what had occurred was already emerging, for another man, the gentleman of the house, had survived. Horrifically wounded, Gerald Chadwick had been rushed to hospital, giving officers a sketchy account of the carnage before being sedated for surgery. By noon of the following day his story had been confirmed by a thorough examination of the crime scene. Door-to-door questioning of the other residents of the smart block only lent further weight to it.