Further Lane by James Brady

cleaned, things she didn’t have, and cared for them as if they were hers. She seemed to have some primitive notion that marriage to Andy would provide, if not the things themselves, a passport to getting them. I’m afraid I’m a disappointment to you, darling, Andy told her. I don’t have the knack; I keep losing money whatever I do.…
    Don’t worry, the girl assured him. Teach me a few things and I’ll make the money for both of us.
    She was a quick study and hers was a crash course in quality, with Andy the sometimes befuddled, often reluctant tutor, urged on by his young wife: Tell me about silver. What was the purpose of the hallmark? Who is Billy Baldwin? Is he as tasteful as Sister Parish? In china, is Spode as good as Wedgwood? Sheffield steel, is that the best? Or that German stuff, Solingen? What about glass, is it the lead that makes Waterford so desirable? Tell me about furniture. Who was Morris and what do his chairs look like? Who was Queen Anne? I never heard of Bauhaus. What is it? How d’you tell fakes from antiques? Does champagne have vintage years the way Bordeaux does? Why do the Brits call it claret and we don’t? Is veneer good or bad? Was Frank Lloyd Wright a great architect or just a publicity genius? She learned by asking questions; she learned by osmosis. Other Cuttings, who still had dough, lived well. When the outsider Hannah was permitted among them, she took notes. Higgins educated Liza Doolittle; Hannah Cutting pretty much taught herself.
    The cops had been there, Andy said, and the TV crews, the tabloids, even the Times. He was beaten down, still a handsome, decent man. But tired. Andy lived not grandly, not well, in a rented apartment over Bucket’s Deli up by the railroad station. He knew it was a comedown; I knew it. So we mutually ignored the House & Garden details and talked about Hannah. When one of the six or eight daily trains pulled in, the apartment shuddered and its windows rattled and chipped coffee mugs moved around on the shelves. Further Lane was two miles and a zillion dollars away.
    The problem wasn’t getting Andy to talk about her; it was getting the poor bastard to shut up.
    I’m still in love with her, he said. “She dumped me and I still love her. She sucked the marrow out of my bones and gave me the drop and here I am sobbing into the coverlet because she’s dead. Wish I knew who killed her. I’d get him.”
    Him?
    â€œGot to be, Beecher. She turns men into swine or whatever crap it was Hemingway wrote of Brett Ashley. Women hated her; men loved her. You kill the people you love; not the ones you merely hate.”
    Andy wasn’t as drunk as he pretended. But he went on and on, how ambitious, how clever Hannah was, how competently she’d picked his brains, how his family resented her, how she’d ruined him at the same time he’d found in her lush body and nimble head everything he’d ever wanted.…
    I made him some black coffee on his own hot plate and left. I can take only so much cheap sentimentality. Which was how it came off. I had this sense Andy was role-playing. Maybe there’d been too many interviews by Entertainment Tonight and Hard Copy or by people from the Geraldo show. Jesse Maine hated Hannah and yet I didn’t think he’d killed her; Andy Cutting loved her. And might have.

ELEVEN
    Looking for sea shells, staring up at the big houses on the dunes …
    I got a surprise that evening when Claire Cutting came by the gatehouse on Further Lane, saying, Look, I’m sorry about what happened at Boaters.
    No problem, I said. I shouldn’t have tried to talk to you so soon after …
    I don’t mind, she said.
    There was still light and we sat down outside on the old lawn chairs and she began to talk. She was like Andy now, compulsively talking about Hannah. But then people who knew Hannah well seemed unable not to, people like that old cop up in