It was his first mistake. The first of many.
Milligan shot the proposal down. Clearly, the last thing he wanted was some jumped-up city fellow telling him how things should be done—or, more to the point, exposing the gross procedural errors he’d already committed. When Hollis then gingerly brought up the possibility of sending a sample of the black paint chips recovered at the scene to the Broome Street crime lab for analysis under their spectroscope, Milligan actually laughed. He dismissed the new technology—which he’d evidently never heard of—as a passing fad. Hollis had quietly sent the sample anyway, not that there’d ever been a suspect vehicle to check against the lab’s spectrogram.
The case, dead for over a year, was now very much alive again, and this time Hollis was in charge, no Milligan to keep him at bay. He quickly reacquainted himself with the sequence of events, scanning the reports, the Chief’s clipped and unfeeling prose. The body was first sighted a little after seven in the morning by a potato farmer from Wainscott heading east on Town Lane for a spot of Sunday fishing off Barnes Landing.
She lay in the hedgerow on the north side of the road, fifty yards west of the junction with Indian Wells Highway. Hollis had never actually visited the spot, but he could picture it. Almost three miles in length, Town Lane ran parallel to Montauk Highway, about half a mile to the north of it, cutting through open countryside, farming land studded with pastures. It was a straight road, a fast road; he had often found himself unwittingly pushing the throttle to the floor when driving it.
By the time Chief Milligan had arrived on the scene, Lizzie Jencks’ parents, whose homestead lay a little to the west on Town Lane, were already present amongst the gathered. The scene was photographed, the body then removed by the Medical Examiner.
Examination of the road surface suggested that the vehicle had been traveling west on Town Lane at considerable speed, the autopsy subsequently setting the time of death at somewhere between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. The parents were unable to explain why their daughter had been out walking in the dead of night, and no one else had come forward with an explanation for her nocturnal ramble. It was this that had stuck in Hollis’ craw at the time, and it was still there.
He poured some more gin into the glass, then began to peruse the statements, looking for a name: Manfred Wallace.
He quickly ascertained that Manfred Wallace had never been questioned over the hit-and-run. Justin Penrose, on the other hand, had been, though not as a possible suspect. It was in his statement that Manfred Wallace’s name was buried away, along with that of his sister, Lillian. The document was Bob Hartwell’s follow-up report on the movements of all those who’d attended a dinner dance at the Devon Yacht Club on the night in question. According to the club’s secretary, Manfred and Lillian had left the event early in the evening to join Mr Penrose at his house. The departure of two members well before the time of the incident would have marked the end of that particular investigative trail for most police officers; but Hartwell had made the effort to visit Penrose at his house and ask him when exactly the Wallaces had moved on from his place. Hollis silently praised him for his thoroughness, while struggling with the questions thrown up by the report.
The Devon Yacht Club connection with the hit-and-run was tenuous at best. Town Lane was far from being the most direct route back to the summer colony in East Hampton from the club. More importantly, if Manfred and Lillian Wallace were already back in East Hampton just after nine o’clock, what the hell were they doing heading west on Town Lane some three or four hours later?
The answer was staring him in the face, it just took him a while, and a couple of slugs of gin, to see it for what it was.
Penrose’s given address was Water’s Edge—a house name displaying as little imagination as that of the Wallaces’ place: Oceanview. Or so he’d assumed. Maybe it wasn’t a house after all.
He went to the hallway and picked up the phone.
‘Operator.’
‘Olive, it’s Tom Hollis.’
Olive Hibbel worked the board most evenings over at the telephone exchange on Main Street.
‘I’m looking for a local number,’ said Hollis. ‘Penrose, maybe Justin, maybe not.’
‘We’ve only one Penrose in East Hampton—Everett.’
Probably the father; must be a family home.
‘Any way I could get the address?’
‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Number 2 Water’s Edge.’
Not a house, but a road. And not a road he’d ever heard of in the summer colony, though private tracks were constantly being opened up for new residences.
‘Where is that, do you know?’
‘It’s near Springs, just off Old Stone Highway.’
He felt his heart leap, the pieces falling into place, his eyes already searching the framed map on the wall across the corridor.
‘Thanks, Olive,’ he said absently, then hung up.
The map laid bare the events of the evening in connecting lines, some straight as an arrow, others twisting and coiling, but all leading to and emanating from that dusty stretch of Town Lane west of the junction with Indian Wells Highway.
Manfred and Lillian Wallace hadn’t headed back into East Hampton on leaving the Devon Yacht Club, because the Penroses’ house lay directly to the north, on the western shore of Gardiner’s Bay. And if driving from Water’s Edge to East Hampton, then Town Lane was a likely route to take, especially if you felt like picking up a head of steam.
Hartwell had abandoned the trail after Justin Penrose’s assertion that Manfred and Lillian Wallace had visited him for no more than an hour, leaving well before the time of the accident. And that had been that, just another of the many blind alleys Hartwell would have wandered down at the time.
Or maybe Hartwell hadn’t bought the story. His keen observation of Hollis and Penrose at the funeral suggested
