Dead at Breakfast Read online

  She tried to remember when she was so hot for Alexander that she hadn’t done that. Moved on. How had that felt, that level of lust? Like being out of your fucking mind, really. After she married him, and Jenny lived with them, it was years before she would call Lisa Mommy. Lisa’s life would have been ten times easier if Alex could have left Jenny behind. She got sick of him doting on gorgeous little Jenny, he was way too attached to her in Lisa’s opinion, and it went on until Jeremy was born.

  The buzzer rang. Someone out at the gate. More flowers? She heard Manuela go to the monitor in the front hall. Manuela had shown a deceitful gift in the last few days for pretending she didn’t speak enough English to understand what the petitioner wanted. But this time, after a minute or so, she came into the kitchen.

  “Mrs. Antippas? It’s a man from the police.”

  Lisa stared, and finally said, “Really?”

  “Could you come? I don’t know . . .”

  Lisa went to the monitor and looked at the screen. She saw a middle-aged man in perma-press slacks and a windbreaker. Didn’t look like police to her. The bloodsucking press again.

  “What is it?” she said into the intercom, and the man came to life and spoke to the camera mounted on the top of the concrete gatepost. Looking up at the fisheye lens, he became all nose.

  “Mrs. Antippas? Detective Prince from LAPD.” He held his badge and credentials up to the camera.

  Lisa had no idea how to tell if they were real or fake, but she thought that the consequence of refusing to let him in might be more trouble than it was worth to her if he was real. If he was fake, Freddy could handle him. Freddy was more imposing than he looked. She buzzed, and watched as the gate swung open. The man got into his car and drove through, and the gate swung shut behind him. Up on the road, the reporters stared hungrily after him. Clearly they believed he was police, or they’d have tried to follow him in.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Kim Prince said, once they were seated in the great room. “Losses.” The view of Los Angeles draped below them just beyond the rim of the dark blue pool was spectacular, like a subject world.

  Detective Prince wasn’t bad-looking. He had thick oiled hair and a compact muscular body with a small paunch. Complexion scarred; she assumed he’d had acne as a kid. He’d opened his jacket and Lisa saw a well-defined chest, and no sign of a gun; probably strapped to his leg, she thought. She watched him scanning the room, noticing the framed pictures of her and Alex, young and radiant. Pictures of the children, of her parents at some birthday or anniversary party. The pictures filled one entire bookcase. So many celebrations as Alexander rose in the world. She remembered one night when they still lived in the flats, when she’d been awakened by some kind of racket in the driveway. When she woke Alexander, sleeping heavily beside her, he listened for a moment, then said sleepily, “That’s probably the Porsche being repossessed,” and rolled over so his back was to her. It hadn’t all been easy, though there were no pictures of those parts.

  When Manuela had brought in a tray with the coffee service and a plate of cookies, Prince said, “Detective Gordon, up there in Maine, asked me to come and talk to you. Would it be all right if I ask a couple of questions?” His voice was gentle. Lisa made a weary gesture of assent.

  Prince took out a notebook and studied a page or two of scribbled handwriting.

  “When you and your husband checked in at the hotel up there, a young lady was on the reservation desk. Do you remember her?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was some sort of problem with your reservation?”

  “No, it was all fine.”

  Prince flipped back a page in his notes and read, then moved on.

  “My husband could be impatient. It never meant anything,” Lisa said, without animation.

  “I see. I understand you were not sharing a room with your husband while you stayed at the hotel.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Could you explain why not?”

  The question seemed to annoy her. “We didn’t always share a bedroom. My husband was a noisy sleeper. And he liked to smoke in bed, which I didn’t allow.”

  “I see. Did you have separate bedrooms here?”

  “Sometimes. He has a bed in his dressing room.”

  “So this wasn’t unusual, your sleeping apart?”

  “No.” After a pause she added, “In the great houses of Europe, husbands and wives always had separate bedrooms.” Her decorator had told her that.

  Prince said, “I didn’t know that.” He looked at his notes and remarked, “So the hotel has bedrooms where smoking was allowed? So many don’t, anymore.”

  “It must have. He reeked of cigars the whole time we were there, I know that.”

  Prince looked at her thoughtfully. He had of course seen the website, which specified that the inn was a no-smoking facility.

  “I understood there was something about a dog,” he said. He looked around, as if just noting that no dog seemed to be on view here.

  “Oh. Yes. My dog, Colette. Not all the rooms could have pets. My sister and I stayed in the wing where dogs were allowed.”

  “The wing that did not catch fire.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Is the dog here?”

  “Do you like dogs?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Colette . . . ,” called Lisa. She didn’t think she’d seen her since before the Staples Center. She must be with Manuela or maybe the children.

  “Colette, chérie, viens ici . . .” She raised her voice. Somewhere beyond the kitchen a door opened and closed, and a scrabble of toenails on bare floor could be heard. Then a mop of white fur rocketed into the great room, began yapping when the presence of a stranger was detected, fell trying to keep from braining itself on the massive glass coffee table, and finally broke clear and propelled itself onto the sofa, and into Lisa’s lap.

  The detective introduced himself to the dog, who smelled his hand and then licked it. Detective Prince wiped his hand on his little linen napkin and took a cookie.

  “So . . . the hotel was welcoming to dogs?”

  “They were fine. Very nice. But Colette’s a good girl, she never causes trouble.”

  Prince looked at his notes again. Lisa cuddled Colette and murmured to her in French-sounding baby talk.

  “And the young lady on the front desk. Did you ask her to take treats upstairs to the dog at any point?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. I understood that the chef kept special scraps for the animals in the house.”

  “She may have. I feed Colette myself.”

  “Did you have any contact with her after you checked in?”

  “Who? Oh the desk girl? She brought me the phone when my son called to say Jenny was . . .” Her voice suddenly went up an octave and her throat filled with tears.

  Prince waited for her to compose herself. He ate another cookie.

  “I’m told there was some kind of scene between Cherry Weaver—the desk girl—and the hotel manager on”—he looked at his notes—“Wednesday afternoon.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “No? I had the impression it was pretty public.”

  “My daughter was dead. I had just been in a car crash. I have no idea what was going on downstairs.”

  Prince paged through his notes thoughtfully. “Well thank you very much for your time,” he said at last, and stood up. “May I call you again if I need to?”

  Lisa had stood up as well, spilling the dog to the floor. “I suppose.”

  “Is your sister here, by the way? I was told that she’s staying here.”

  “She is, but she’s out. Why?”

  “I wondered if she had any idea how snake equipment got into her suitcase.”

  Lisa looked at him, trying to conceal her surprise. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said coldly, conveying that she thought it a mean trick to sandbag a person in her circum
stances.

  “They found your sister’s suitcase. Someone buried it in the compost heap. It had a snake bag and tongs in it. Did your sister know how to handle snakes?”

  After a beat, as he responded to the confusion and hostility she was suddenly radiating, Prince thought Well there’s a sore thumb I just hit with a hammer. Lisa said eventually, “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Good idea,” said Prince. “Before I go, could I see your husband’s dressing room?”

  Lisa stared at him. At last, she turned and started for the back of the house. Prince followed her.

  Manuela had made up the king-size bed, put away her pill bottles, and picked up all the clothes and underwear Lisa had left on the floor. Lisa stood, wordless with resentment, letting Prince look at her bedroom. Then she led the way into Alex’s dressing room, which was in fact a small bedroom, through which a huge closet could be accessed on one side, and on the other, a separate bathroom. Detective Prince opened each door, murmured something when he saw the yards of beautiful suits and jackets, the wall of shelves and drawers, and many board feet of custom-built cubbyholes for dozens of pairs of shoes, all polished and fitted with shoe trees. He went into the bathroom, where the walls and floor were lined with manly reddish-gray stone tiles, and noticed the special oversize rain forest shower stall with steam heads the decorator had been so proud of. He opened the medicine cabinets, studied the contents, closed them again, and said, “So your husband always slept in there?” Pointing to the “dressing room.”

  “Not always, of course not,” said Lisa irritably.

  After a beat, the detective said, “Well thank you very much for your time, Mrs. Antippas. I can see myself out.”

  It had been a quiet afternoon at the Oquossoc Mountain Inn. Hope and Maggie had been to visit Brianna, and heard about the bail set by Judge Hennebery. Brianna told them of her doubts about the lawyer she’d chosen. Should she start over? Find someone good in Augusta or Portland? Try the public defenders after all? On the way home, they stopped in at Just Barb’s, where they found Buster on a stool, nursing a cup of coffee. They took the stools on either side of him and Hope ordered a piece of coconut layer cake and three forks.

  “I love cake,” she said. “You never get it except at birthdays and weddings.”

  “When I was a girl we always had coconut cake at Easter,” said Maggie. “I think it was in the shape of a bunny, but I may be making that up.”

  Hope said to Buster, “You know, I could post Cherry’s bail.” She and Maggie had been discussing this in the car.

  “Did you tell Brianna that?” Buster asked at last.

  “No, I wanted to ask you first.”

  He looked relieved.

  “Why? Don’t you want Cherry out?”

  “I’m not sure she’d be safe.”

  “Not safe? Why?”

  “Town’s pretty hot about the inn closing.”

  “But the inn’s not closing!” cried Hope, suddenly wondering if it might be.

  “You say,” said Buster. “But somebody slashed Beryl Weaver’s tires last night anyway.”

  Hope and Maggie stopped eating, giving Buster a chance he took, to eat a big piece of the outside of the cake slice, covered in icing and coconut flakes.

  “So that’s why she rode to work with Zeke this morning,” said Maggie.

  Buster glanced at Mrs. Detweiler and thought it was scary, how much she seemed to know when you couldn’t figure out how she knew it. Even when he was in fourth grade, they all thought she had eyes in the back of her head.

  “I thought that was her car at Lakeview Garage. I noticed as we drove by,” said his mother.

  Jesus. Both of them.

  He knew it would be like this. That if his mother found out he had a girlfriend, before you knew it she’d be in the middle of it. He didn’t want her rescuing Brianna. Or Cherry. He wanted to do that himself.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t getting very far with that. His knees were jiggling and he wished he could go home and play Grand Theft Auto for about ten hours.

  It was twilight at the Oquossoc Mountain Inn. Hope and Maggie were at the table by the bow window playing honeymoon bridge. The new girl on the desk trotted toward them in her too-tight skirt clutching the retro telephone. She put it down on their cards, then lowered herself to her knees to plug it into the phone jack in the baseboard.

  “Phone for you, Mrs. Detweiler,” she said from under the table.

  “Oh! I thought this would be Lauren, for you,” said Maggie as the new girl hauled herself to her feet. “Hello? . . . Oh hello, Bonnie!”

  Hope folded her hand and gave the conversation her full attention. The call lasted ten long minutes.

  “Bonnie McCue,” Maggie said when she had hung up, though Hope had long since figured this out. “She’s out at Montauk teaching yoga. According to the local paper, Albie Clark has killed himself.”

  Hope gave a scream. Then she covered her mouth, as if to take back the unseemly noise in a public place, although they were virtually alone in the room, and she hadn’t disturbed anyone.

  “Killed himself?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Poor man, I’m so sorry. I thought he was doing better. Didn’t you?”

  Actually, Maggie hadn’t.

  “But I mean he got through the whole cooking course. He was taking an interest. I thought he was feeling a little bit of the color coming back into the world.”

  Maggie thought about it. “I was worried about what would happen if it turned out to make no difference.”

  “What did Bonnie say, exactly?”

  “The paper didn’t give much detail and Bonnie’s been doing her best, but so far all she knows is he was found on the beach.”

  “And how did he do it?”

  “Cut his own throat with a kitchen knife. Practically cut his own head off.”

  “Holy mother of God.”

  “Yes. That knife class he was so interested in. It’s Bonnie’s theory that he didn’t want to make a mess in his wife’s house.”

  “Cut his own throat, is that even possible?”

  “Oh yes. Especially with a really sharp knife.”

  “How awful for whoever found him. Who did?”

  “A woman out on the beach with her dog. At sunrise.” And off leash at that hour, she didn’t have to say.

  They both pictured the scene, and what the dog would have done with what was splattered all over the sand, and sat for a bit. One week earlier Albie had been with them at this very table.

  “What a terrible way to end,” said Hope.

  “How terrible he must have felt before it ended,” said Maggie.

  They were quiet for a while. Finally Hope said, “Did Albie leave a note?”

  Maggie’s thoughts came back into her body. “Oh! Yes! The Star said that he had a note in his pocket but they wouldn’t disclose the contents.”

  “That’s maddening.”

  “But he left another kind of message.”

  “Really?”

  “Guess whose beach he chose to die on.”

  “Whose beach? No, wait . . . no!”

  “Yes. Right below the great big lawn of Alexander Antippas.”

  “Between those seawalls he was so pissed off about.”

  “Exactly.”

  DAY ELEVEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16

  On Wednesday morning, Jorge Carrera parked his car near Windmill Lane and walked to the Southampton Village Police Station. He had already cruised around the block twice, so he knew that there were two police cars in front of the station and all was quiet. He was wearing “I’m on vacation” clothes, a bomber jacket, khakis, and a shirt with an open collar. He walked up the stairs and into the station and stood for a minute, relishing the smell made up of floor polish, dead cardboard cups, and a dozen other things that you probably thought had no smells, the paper, the clipboards, the elderly office equipment.

  The uniform manning the desk was a young guy with a mullet haircut
, wearing big black shoes with soles that looked half an inch thick.

  “Is Chief Rideout here? Detective Carrera. He knows me from the NYPD.” He knew from a phone call last night that Rideout was in Hartford at a conference, and felt that if the young officer chose to assume he was still with the NYPD, that was not his problem.

  “He’s out today. Can I help you?” The mullet didn’t ask for credentials, and Jorge had counted on that. He’d worked in a backwater station too when he was this guy’s age.

  “Oh, that’s too bad. No, I was out here on some personal business, and I wanted to say hello.”

  “Are you staying in town? He’ll be in by tomorrow lunchtime.”

  “Damn. No, I’m just wrapping up what I came for.” He cracked his knuckles and looked around. “Quiet morning?”

  “Like the grave.”

  “A fine and quiet place,” said Jorge, and the kid looked at him uncertainly. “God, it’s been a long time since I did your job. You grow up out here?”

  “I did. My dad’s a cop. Just retired.”

  “So you’ve got the local knowledge, it’s important. And you’ve got the standard-issue burnt coffee. Do you mind if I . . . ?”

  “I don’t mind, but if I were you, there’s a Starbucks up the street.”

  “Not my people,” said Jorge.

  The kid smiled. “How do you take it?”

  When he came back with a mug, Jorge had taken off his jacket and pulled a chair over beside the desk.

  “My daughter was telling me at breakfast, you had a suicide on the beach yesterday.”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Must have been hard on the guy who took the call.”

  “Yep.” He gestured with his head, and Jorge saw over his shoulder a young officer sitting at a desk, talking on the phone and doodling with some intensity.

  “Could I talk to him? My daughter, Terry, knew the family.”

  He was on his feet and moving around the barrier, carrying his coffee, before his young friend could figure out the answer to the question. “Hey, Dylan,” the kid called, as if to convey that he was on top of this, that he’d given Jorge permission to go back.

  Dylan was getting off the phone and looking up at him, puzzled, as Jorge sat down on the aluminum chair beside his desk.