The Beach House

"Was Peter a drug dealer?" I was studying Sammy in the mirror.

He didn't even look up from my coif-in-progress.

"Hell, no. He bought them."

"Well, how the hell could he end up with a new Beemer and one hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars? Can you explain that?"

Sammy stopped cutting. "Jack, just let it go. Nothing good will come from this."

"My brother was murdered. I can't let it go. I thought you wanted to help."

Sammy gently massaged the back of my neck. "All right, Jack. Here's the truth. Peter was the hardest-working boy in show business." He cleared his throat, then spoke softly. He sounded like a father belatedly telling his kid where babies come from. "One way or another, every last one of us out here earns their keep servicing the rich. That's how it is, Jack. Well, Peter serviced them a little more literally than the rest of us."

I was starting to feel a little sick. And scared. I almost got up and left in the middle of the haircut. I loved my brother. But I wondered if I'd ever really known him.

"He got paid for sex? Is this what you're telling me?"

Sammy shrugged. "It wasn't like he had an hourly rate, Jack. But he was doing some of the richest women in the very expensive free world and doing them rather well. I thought you knew. I thought that Peter told you everything. I guess he didn't mention that one of his ladies was your potential mother-in-law, Campion Neubauer. I think another might have been Dana. But, Jack, that was before you two started going out."

Chapter 23

AFTER I LEFT SAMMY'S, I stopped at a bar called Wolfies. It's located in the same beautiful wooded part of East Hampton where Jackson Pollock used to paint and drink and drive into trees.

I ordered a black coffee and a beer and sat at the bar, thinking about my day and what to do next. I finally plucked a wrinkled scrap of paper out of my wallet and called the number on the back.

The crisp voice at the other end belonged to Dr. Jane Davis. I hadn't seen or spoken to her in ten years. But in high school we had become pretty good friends, when to everyone's amazement, this shy National Merit Scholar hooked up with my fisherman pal, Fenton Gidley.

Jane, the class valedictorian, won a full scholarship to SUNY Binghamton, then went on to Harvard Medical School. Through Fenton, I'd learned that she spent the next couple of years doing a residency in Los Angeles and ru

Jane had another hour in the lab, but said she could meet after and gave me directions to her house in Riverhead. "If you get there first, could you take Iris for a little walk?" she asked. "The keys are under the second-to-last flowerpot. And don't worry, she's a sweetheart."

I made a point of getting there early, and Iris, a sleek, pale-eyed weimaraner, was beside herself with gratitude. She may have been the size of a Doberman, but Iris was a lover, not a fighter. When I opened the door, she jumped and yelped and skated round the wooden floor on slippery nails.

For the next fifteen minutes she yanked me around the tiny subdivision, peeing on its invisible canine boundaries. That pretty much bonded us for life, and we were sitting contentedly shoulder to shoulder on the front porch when Jane's blue Volvo pulled in.

Inside her kitchen, Jane poured dry cereal for Iris, coffee for me, and a glass of tawny port for herself. In the past decade, her beanpole gawkiness had turned into athletic grace, but she had the same force field of intelligence.

"There's been a little dip in Long Island 's output of suspicious deaths lately," said Jane. "So I've had a lot of time to spend with Peter." She pulled at Iris's translucent ears and looked at me intently.

"So what did you find?" I asked her.

"For one thing," said Jane, "Peter didn't drown."

Chapter 24

JANE REACHED into a battered leather knapsack and dropped a folder labeled "Mullen, Peter 5/29" on the table. Then she pulled out a clear plastic sleeve of color slides and held one of them up to the kitchen light.

"Take a look at these," she said, squinting. "They're photographs of cells I scraped off the inside of Peter's lungs. See the shape and the color at the edge?" The pictures showed a cluster of small circular cells about the size of a dime and tinted pink.

Jane removed a second set of slides. "These are from the lung tissue of a man who got pulled out of Long Island Sound five days before Peter. The cells were nearly twice as large and much darker. That's because the drowning victim struggles to breathe and inhales water into the lungs. Cells like Peter's are what we find in bodies dumped into the ocean after they've stopped breathing."

"How did he die, then?"

"Just what it looks like," she said, carefully tucking the slides back in their sleeves. "He was beaten to death."

She reopened the fat manila folder and grabbed a stack of black-and-white prints. "I know you saw Peter that night on the beach, but the cold water holds down the swelling and limits the discoloration. In these, I have to warn you, he looks a lot worse."

Jane handed me the pictures. Peter's shattered, misshapen face was unrecognizable. It was all I could do not to look away. On the beach his beauty was largely intact. In the photos, his skin was an awful gray. The bruises made him look like a human punching bag.

Jane dug deeper into her pile and fished out the X rays. They documented the assault in terms of fractured bones. There were dozens. With the tip of her pen, she singled out a clean break at the top of Peter's spine.

"This is what killed him," she said.

I shook my head in disbelief. The anger that had been building for the past two weeks was getting impossible to control.

"So what do you have to do to prove someone was murdered, pull a bullet out of their head?" I asked in disgust.

"It's a good question, Jack. I sent my initial report to the East Hampton Police Department and the district attorney's office two weeks ago and I haven't heard a thing."

I cursed out Frank Volpi all the way back from Jane's. He had the reports on Peter and he hadn't done a goddamned thing. He was still talking about a drowning, a suicide. How the hell could they cover up something like that? Who was I up against?

When I got home late that night, Mack was snoring on the living-room couch. I slipped off my grandfather's glasses and shoes, spread a light blanket over him, and tucked him in for the night. I couldn't bear to wake him and tell him what I'd found.

Then it hit me. I went into the kitchen and called Burt Kearns, the reporter from the East Hampton Star who'd slipped me his number at my father's funeral. Ten minutes later Kearns stood at the door with a tape recorder and two reporter's notepads.

"Christ," I said, "you're faster than Chinese food."