It was close to midnight when I finally returned to David Mintzer’s oceanfront mansion, dead tired from hours on my feet and emotionally drained after my latest, unhappy confrontation with Joy.
I’d had no luck convincing Madame to move out of David’s because of the shooting, but I’d hoped I could at least pull rank on my own daughter. So after we closed the restaurant, I’d waved Joy into the empty break room and tried to convince her to leave East Hampton and go back to the city.
She flatly refused.
“Look, Mom,” she said. “I was ready to go into a share house, but you stopped me. I need this job, and I need the money. I’m really, really sorry Treat got shot, but it’s obvious that bullet was meant for him. He’s dead now, and it’s over. If you force me to leave David’s house, I won’t go back to the city. All the share houses are full up by now, so I’ll just move in with Graydon. And if you get me fired from Cuppa J, I’ll just find another job out here—I hear cocktail waitresses make much more if they wear a little less.”
I was flabbergasted. I stood in front of my daughter speechless. I may have trumped her earlier, but now she was trumping me, and needling me with that last comment. She had cast me as a prude and herself as a slut, just to win her point. It wasn’t fair to either of us. But that’s the trouble with children—they know just how to twist your guts.
Joy sighed. “I’m twenty-one, Mom. Stop treating me like a child.”
“You know very well why I’m worried,” I calmly reminded her. “The shooting aside, moving in with Graydon’s hardly a solution. He’s even less of an open book than Treat. What do you really know about him?”
“I know what counts. He’s sweet. He’s fun. He likes me and he treats me like I’m beautiful.”
A chill went through me. She sounded as naive as yours truly when I’d first met Matt. I’d been around Joy’s age at the time, studying art history during a summer break in Italy. My guard had been down when Matt and I had first encountered each other on a sun-drenched Mediterranean beach. He’d been warm and giving and handsome as hell, his young body tanned and hard from his typical athletic antics, sculpted as perfectly as the Renaissance statues I’d been studying, his ink-black hair, worn down to his shoulders, constantly slipping out of its ponytail.
Being in such a heavenly, exotic location, I’d found it far too easy to dreamily fall into bed with Matt over and over again. But I’d come home to America wide awake, pregnant with Joy, and agreeing to marry the absolutely wrong man.
“You’re being naive,” I told my daughter in a tone more harsh than I intented. “If you want me to see you as an adult, then you should start acting more responsibly.”
Joy’s reply was to storm off again. This time when she marched into the restaurant’s kitchen, she continued moving all the way through it and out its back door. Graydon had been waiting for her in the parking lot and together they drove away in his Mini Cooper.
By then I was totally depleted. Despite my spent spirit, however, I refused to call it a night. With my daughter and ex-mother-in-law refusing to leave David’s house, I was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of Treat’s murder. As soon as I got back to David’s mansion, I intended to ask him about Bom Felloes as well as that suspicious “ten percent deal” with the local vendors Jacques Papas had cooked up. (Pardon the pun.)
Giving my Honda more gas than necessary, I turned off the dark lane and swung onto David’s long driveway. I quickly realized something was different—a tiny gold flame was flickering inside a newly installed gas lamp. It cast a pale light on the stone path that led up to David’s front door. I rolled up to the house, staring with disbelief…and a slowly building anger.
The lamp was a genuine antique, complete with leaded glass and a blackened cast-iron post. The design perfectly suited the shingle-style beach house, but a feebly flickering gas lamp next to a footpath was not what I had in mind when I told David Mintzer that his home needed security lights!
Obviously, the man had not taken me seriously.
Okay, I admitted to myself, so I hadn’t taken him seriously either. He had asked me to drop the idea that he was the murderer’s target, and I obviously hadn’t. And wouldn’t.
David’s driveway looped in a racetrack-size circle in front of his large house. I parked near the front door, right behind the man’s small convertible sports car, noting with annoyance that the meager illumination from his quaint choice of lighting didn’t even reach the front door area.
Luckily for me, there was a nearly full moon and the stars were providing significantly more glow than the pathetic flame in the gas lamp. Still, I had trouble locating the front door key in my large handbag—something I wasn’t used to doing. Usually David’s butler, Kenneth, let me in, but he was gone for the entire weekend.
I decided simply to use the key to the kitchen door instead. I’d kept that key handy on my car keyring for convenience because that was the door I used to take beach strolls at all hours. With a shrug, I started to walk around the dark grounds to the back of the mansion.
By the time I reached the pool and deck area, my eyes became accustomed to the celestial light, and I could easily discern the outlines of the Adirondack chairs on the lawn and the frothing surf of the rising tide along the empty shoreline.
As I moved across the cedar deck, I heard someone coming towards me with heavy footsteps. If it had been David, I realized, he would have called out by now. I lunged for the back door, then nearly screamed when a gruff voice demanded—“Who are you?”
Reflexively, I lifted my hand and squinted at the blinding white beam directed at my face. Just as reflexively, I began to shout in my best aggressive, pissed off New Yorker tone—“Who the hell are you? You have no right to be here! This is private property! Get that flashlight out of my eyes!”
The blinding beam was redirected toward the heavens. I saw a shape in the shadows. I made out a dark uniform and silver badge.
“S-sorry, ma’am,” said the man with the badge. “Your name please?”
“Cosi. Clare Cosi.”
“Okay, your name’s on the list.”
“List? What list?”
“Mr. Mintzer’s personal list of who’s allowed to enter.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m a security guard from Shield Security Services. I’m making my rounds.”
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, bulky, with a large round head under a blond crew cut. His half smile told me he was as nervous about this unexpected encounter as I was.
“That’s all right,” I replied with extreme relief. “I’m glad David hired security. Better safe than sorry.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Someone from Shield will be here around the clock, twenty-four seven.”
“That’s good to know.” I unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Well, goodnight.”
The youth touched the brim of his hat. “Goodnight, Ms. Cosi.”
He watched until I was safely inside with the door relocked, then he left, I assumed, to continue his rounds. Mouth dry as the Gobi, I dropped my purse on the counter and went to the refrigerator. I unscrewed a small bottle of ice-cold Perrier and gulped it down, hands a little shaky. I poured a second and pressed the bottle’s cold, frosted glass to my forehead.
I searched the house next, starting with the rooms in the guest wing. I discovered I was alone. Madame was still out with her gentleman friend and Joy was, too. Obviously, Graydon hadn’t given her a ride directly home. I was surprised to find David out—especially since I saw his car parked in the drive.
Then I realized David might have decided to move out of the guest wing and back into his own room. So I went back down the steps to the first floor and crossed over to David’s wing on the south side of the mansion. As I approached his second-floor bedroom to knock, I stopped at the door to his private bathroom.
The crime scene tape was gone now, and the door was ajar. I couldn’t resist pushing it further, flipping on the light. The last time I’d opened this door, I’d found a bloody corpse. This time there was not one sign that a crime had been committed. The formerly bloodstained marble was pristine again, the holed window pane replaced with a sparkling new sheet of glass.
Suddenly the door on the bedroom side opened, and I prepared an apology to David for invading his privacy without knocking. But it wasn’t David. Pale blue eyes stared at me. Alberta Gurt’s alarmed gaze. She held an armful of dirty laundry.
“Oh!” we both cried. Then we nervously laughed.
“Couldn’t resist taking a look at the marble, eh?” Alberta said, dumping David’s clothes into a wicker hamper. The woman wore her maid’s uniform and her brown, gray flecked hair was pinned up. There was no sign of the makeup and jewelry she displayed last night when I’d questioned her.
“Oh…yes,” I stammered. “The marble is spotless.”
“The stonemason did a fine job of restoring the finish,” Alberta said, regarding the work. “David had a car service drive the craftsman here from Hoboken. The fellow was working in here for hours. Now it’s as good as new.”
Wish I could say the same for Treat.
“I thought maybe you were David,” Alberta said with a sigh. “He’s had a stressful two days, what with the Fourth of July party and all that’s happened afterwards. Arranging for security, getting the stonemason and the lamp installed…”
“I saw.”
Alberta shook her head. “Now he’s off gallivanting again. He needs his rest, that boy. He’s already had one migraine this week. If he’s not careful, he’ll be courting another.”
“Where did he go, by the way?” I asked. “His car’s still parked outside.”
“He’s gone to another party, just down the beach. He walked there around sunset.”
“Walked? Alone?”
Alberta nodded.
Now I was really annoyed with David. The lack of proper security lighting was bad enough. I’d told him about the flipper footprints in the sand! Didn’t he realize what an easy target he was making himself?!
“When did the security people arrive?” I asked.
“Soon after the detectives left. David arranged everything with a few phone calls.”
Alberta carried the wicker hamper out the bathroom’s hallway door. I followed her downstairs, to the laundry room, where she methodically separated the clothes by color.
“You’ve known David a long time,” I said.
“Too long, according to David. He tells me I treat him more like a son than a boss. It’s true I guess. When you see someone every day for fifteen years, it’s like they’re family.”
I tried to imagine what David Mintzer was like fifteen years ago. He would have been around thirty, I knew, but I couldn’t form a picture in my mind of him looking any way but how he looked today.
“I can’t complain,” Alberta continued. “David’s treated me like family, too.”
“Really?” I fished, thinking of his abrupt firing of Prin. “He can be a pretty demanding boss. Doesn’t like to be questioned.”
Alberta gave me a funny look. “Well, to me, he’s been good. He put me in his will so if something ever happened to him I’d be taken care of. He even included my nephew, too. How many people would do that for an employee?”
This was the first time I’d heard Alberta mention any other member of her family. “Your nephew?” I asked.
Alberta nodded. “My sister’s boy. Thomas got into some gang trouble in Buffalo a decade ago, when he was still a juvenile. After the justice system was done with him, Thomas came here to live with me, to get away from that environment. David helped Tommy get his G.E.D. After that, the boy enlisted in the Army.”
“He’s still a soldier?”
“Not anymore. He finished his enlistment last year, got an honorable discharge and landed a nice security job over in Hampton Bays. That might not have happened without David’s help.”
Of course I wondered if that security job involved carrying a gun. Certainly, the army would have given the guy training in target shooting. I also wondered if he knew that David had included him in his will—and if the amount of his inheritance was worth killing for. The hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle.
I was glad Alberta Gurt was feeling talkative. Perhaps it was the isolation that came with working on a property like this one. Although a whirl of social activity suffused the Hamptons, folks like Alberta weren’t part of that lifestyle. For them the Hamptons was a very different place.
“David seems like a very complicated man,” I said after a pause. “Over the years, you’ve watched him rise to the top of his game. It must have been an interesting sight.”
Alberta nodded. “I remember when David sold his fashion line to the Unity department store chain, and the first time he was on Oprah, too. I was sitting in the audience that day. He introduced me to Ms. Winfrey herself after the taping.”
“That must have been exciting.”
“David knows all sorts of people. He’s made so many friends over the years.”
“I suspect he’s made a few enemies, too?”
“That’s the funny thing about David. Even his business rivals come around. David finds a way to make things work out for the best, especially when he turns on that charm of his.”
I thought about his firing Prin and instructing Jacques to lie about it to the Cuppa J staff. Then there was that neighbor of his across the lane, the heiress in black, smoking among the trees.
“His charm certainly hasn’t worked on Marjorie Bright,” I pointed out to Alberta. “She told me she’s suing David.”
Alberta frowned and shook her head. “That woman is a piece of bad road, I can tell you. All her threats and raging over a few silly trees that only partially block her view from one window. But then people get riled up easily out here. Egos and money make for a bad mix.”
Alberta didn’t talk much more after that, just checked her watch and said she had to finish up her work for the night. I followed her down to the first floor, then bid her goodnight as I stepped into the kitchen to pick up my handbag. That’s when I heard my cell phone chiming.
“Hello, Clare. You needed to speak to me?” The voice was female, familiar, and blunt as a kitchen mallet.
Prin Lopez was returning my call.