“Oh, yeah! You work East Hampton, right? What’s up, man?”
“I got something for you. I think it’s big.”
“Everybody thinks it’s big. What is it?”
Not wanting to give away too much before getting a price quote, Quinton hedged. “It’s big all right. If you think a dead body in a star’s pool house tied to a chair is big.”
“Holy shit. Where are you?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. The owners aren’t home. Don’t know when they’ll come back, but I know they weren’t here Tuesday, either. That’s when I was last here. No telling how long she’s been here. May have been here then, I just didn’t smell it until now and man, she reeks!”
“Million-dollar question’s overdoing it a little, maybe a thousand’s more like it.” Hadden cut straight to the chase.
“Bullshit.”
“Okay. If it’s an A-lister, I can do five. Who is it?”
“I’m not telling till I get a number, dude.”
“Have they ever won an award? You know… an Oscar, Emmy, Daytime soap? Porn awards don’t count. But maybe they do since it’s a dead body. You gotta give me more… or unless they’re currently on TV, have a recurring role, have ever been in a movie, or if you’ve ever seen a story about them on ET, Access, or the Insider.”
“Award, Enquirer, ET. Is that enough?”
“You got the five. I’m on my way. What’s the address?”
“It ain’t that easy, buddy. How do I know you won’t get your shot and then leave me high and dry? I’ll meet you a few blocks away and bring you here. Cash money up front. But, hurry, I gotta go or the others will get suspicious. I’ll just tell them I gotta take a dump when you get close… But you gotta hurry, man.”
“I’m an hour away. I’ll do my best.”
“Okay. Call me, and after you get here, I’ll give you ten minutes before I call 911.”
“Why do you have to call 911 at all?”
Quinton dug deep. What would Aquinas do? Or Spinoza?
Screw them. Seven years of devoting himself to them and he still had a roommate.
“Maybe I don’t.”
“On the other hand, if you do, then I could snap some long shots of cops arriving and bringing the body out. Coroner’s office, the whole shebang. Hey, tell you what I’ll do… You call 911 and I’ll throw in an extra five hundred.”
“A thousand.”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Done. See you in an hour.” Quinton agreed to the price, having no idea a shot like this would be worth a lot more to one of the tabs. Seven hundred fifty dollars bonus money sounded great to him. All he wanted was a flat-screen.
“Forty-five minutes. I’m already in the car and on the highway. Traffic’s light.”
Quinton took one last peek at her. Poor broad. Nice legs, but, still, poor broad.
He crunched around the side of the mansion to the front drive and headed back to the truck.
“What the hell took so long?” They yelled it at him as they lounged against the back of the truck, waiting.
“Nothing, you lard-asses. Just checking the recycles. Empty again.”
“Rat bastards don’t give a crap about the environment.” His trash partner muttered it under his breath, grinding a cigarette butt beneath his work boot there on the drive.
Quinton hopped on the back of the truck, held on, and off they went to the end of the cul-de-sac. The houses were few and far between. He eyed the digital watch on his wrist.
Forty minutes and counting.
Chapter 5
THIS HAD DAMN WELL BETTER BE GOOD. FRANK LAGRANGE HADDEN III DIDN’T like getting out of bed before 10 a.m. He had been out developing “contacts” at a bar last night and didn’t get home until after three in the morning. It was all a little bit of a blur.
Clutching a large, black coffee from a McDonald’s drive-thru, he floored it, heading up the Long Island Expressway. He didn’t really expect much, but a dead body in an out-of-town celeb’s mansion couldn’t be all bad… Could it?
Oh, hell. It was starting to rain. At least it wasn’t a summer weekend or he’d be stuck in the thousands of city dwellers heading for the Hamptons for forty-eight hours, either to get a breath of sea air or make the scene. And man, what a scene. New Yorkers were convinced, if you didn’t have a place in the Hamptons, you were nothing. They were willing to pay an arm and a leg for a hole in the wall just to say they had a place in the Hamptons. The ones that couldn’t afford to buy or rent just went every weekend to freeload off the ones that sprang for a place.
Whatever. Pretentious boors.
He was just fine with his one-bedroom apartment walk-up two flights above China Fun on First Avenue. It was loud as hell so close to the street and it always smelled like duck, but it was fine. He missed his house back down south in the suburbs, but he lost it in the divorce. He got offered a free place to live with a friend here in the city for a few months, then he just stayed. It was easier.
This coffee was good. He didn’t care what Dunkin’ said. McDonald’s was the best. And the cheapest.
He’d been on the road for over an hour now and, without much traffic, was just about to pull into East Hampton. Feeling around in his pants pockets, he fished out his cell phone and hit “redial.”
“Hello?” Quinton Howard asked it tentatively.
“It’s me, Hadden. I think I’m just a few blocks from you. Wanna give me the location now?”
“Hey, man. You’re late! Do you have the cash?”
“Of course I do. Do you have the dead body?”
“Shut up, man. It’s not my dead body. I saw it. I wanna get this thing over with.”
“All right, all right. Calm down. Where are you?”
“Hurry. I’ll be at 43 East Shore Lane in five minutes. It’s right on the water.”
“Of course it is. You’re a piece of crap if you’re not on the water. Then they gotta have a pool.”
“Yeah. Whatever, man. I’ll be out back by the pool house.”
“Whose place did you say it was?”
“I didn’t. You’ll see when you get here.”
“Oh. Okay. Mr. Secret Agent Man. I’ll find out when I get there. See you in five.”
Hadden was pretty sure he knew how to find Shore Lane. The ritzy side was East Shore, which led down to the water. The “cheap” side was West Shore, which was not on the water but within walking distance. It was the supreme humiliation for the West Shore people to be caught walking through the crosswalk that divided the two, dressed in swimsuits and carrying beach gear. It identified them as the have-nots. Poor schmucks. They had to walk the quarter-mile to the dunes while the haves just looked right out the kitchen window and over their pools to the waves.
Winding through lane after lane of multimillion-dollar mansions, Hadden turned right onto East Shore. The tiny lane could barely handle two cars passing, but luckily, fewer people were around this time of year.
“Let’s see, 37, 39…” Hadden muttered to himself as he edged along, hunching forward over the steering wheel making out numbers on the mailboxes.
“41… Bingo! 43.”
He checked his rearview. Nobody there. Nobody ahead, either. Driving forward about eighty feet or so, he parked on the side of the street on grass that seemed unattached to any of the mansions.
Last thing he needed was to get towed out of somebody’s driveway or reported by Neighborhood Watch. This bunch probably didn’t have a Neighborhood Watch. Probably sprung for private security patrol. He better move it.
Walking casually, as if he belonged there, Hadden crossed the eighty feet and walked up the side of 43. Spotting a walkway on the side of the house, he slipped under an arched trellis and headed down the shelled walk out back. Walking the length of the house, front to back, he looked in several of the windows. It was empty, all right.