Beach Road

Chapter 28. Tom

IT’S 4:15 A.M. In the moonlight, East Hampton ’s deserted Main Street looks almost wholesome. The only car in sight is a banged-up white Subaru parked in front of the quaint fifties-era movie theater marquee.

As Clarence plows slowly through town, the Subaru’s lights go on and it tears off down the road. We follow it to the tiny police station, and when we arrive, the Subaru is already parked out front.

Short, solid, and determined, Lenny Levitt stands beside it, one Nikon hanging around his neck, another being screwed into a tripod.

I hop out of Clarence’s car and read Levitt the brief statement I composed during the drive from New York City. “Dante Halleyville and Michael Walker,” I say slowly enough for him to take it down in his notebook, “had absolutely nothing to do with the murders of Eric Feifer, Patrick Roche, and Robert Walco. Dante Halleyville is an exceptional young man with no criminal record or reason to commit these crimes.”

“So where’s Walker?” asks Levitt.

“ Walker will turn himself in tomorrow. There will be no further comment at this point.”

“Why did they run?”

“What did I just say, Len? Now start taking pictures. This is your chance to get out of the Sports section.”

I called Lenny for PR reasons. The tabloids and cops love that shot of the black suspect in shackles paraded through a gauntlet of blue and shoved into a squad car. But that’s not what they’re getting this morning.

The image Lenny captures is much more peaceful, almost poetic: a frightened teenager and his diminutive grandmother walking arm in arm toward the door of a small-town police station. The American flag flutters in the moonlight. Not a cop is in sight.

As soon as he has the shots, Levitt races off with his film as agreed, and Clarence and I catch up to Dante and Marie as they hesitantly enter the East Hampton station. Marty Diallo is the sergeant behind the desk. His eyes are shut and his mouth wide open, and when the door closes behind us, he almost falls out of his chair.

“Marty,” I say, and I’ve been rehearsing this, “Dante Halleyville is here to turn himself in.”

“There’s no one here,” says Diallo, rubbing the cobwebs out of his eyes, and also taking out his gun. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“This is a good thing, Marty. We’re going to sit down here while you make some calls. Dante just turned himself in. Put down the gun.”

“It’s four thirty in the morning, Dunleavy. You couldn’t have waited a couple hours?”

“Of course we couldn’t. Just pick up the phone.”

Marty looks at me with some strange mixture of confusion and contempt, and gives us our first inkling of why Dante was so insistent that I accompany him.

“I don’t even know why you’re here with this piece of shit,” Diallo finally says.

Then he cuffs Dante.

Chapter 29. Dante

SOON AS THE desk sergeant wakes all the way up, something pretty scared and angry clicks in his doughy face, and he pulls his gun and jumps out of his chair like he thinks the four of us are going to rough him up or maybe steal his wallet. The gun points straight at me, but everyone puts their hands up in the air, even my grandmoms.

Just like on the court at Smitty Wilson’s, Tom’s the only one steady enough to say anything.

“This is bullshit, Marty,” he says. “Dante just turned himself in. Put down the gun.”

But the cop doesn’t say a word or take his eyes off me. Folks being scared of me is something I’m used to. With white strangers, it’s so common, I’ve almost stopped taking it personally. But with Diallo-I can read his name tag-I can almost smell the fear, and the hand with the gun, with the finger on the trigger, is dancing in the air, and the other one, fumbling for the handcuffs on his belt, doesn’t work too well either. For everyone’s sake, I put out my hands to be cuffed, and even though the cuffs are way too small and hurt, I don’t say a word.

Even when the cuffs are on me, Diallo still seems nervous and unsure of himself. He tells me I’m under arrest for suspicion of murder and reads me my rights. It’s like he’s cursing me out, only with different words, and every time he pauses, I hear nigger.

“You have the right to remain silent (pause). And everything you say (pause) can and will be used against you. Got that (pause)?” Then he pulls me toward the door to inside, and he’s rough about it.

“Where you taking my grandson?” asks Marie, and I know she’s mad, and so does Diallo.

“Marty, let me wait with Dante until the detectives arrive,” says Tom Dunleavy. “He’s just a kid.”

Without another word, Diallo shoves me through a small back office crammed with desks and then down a short, tight hallway, until we’re standing in front of three empty jail cells, which are painted blue.

He pushes me into the middle one and slams the door shut, and the noise of that door shutting is about the worst sound I ever heard.

“What about these?” I ask, holding up my cuffed wrists. “They hurt pretty bad.”

“Get used to it.”

Chapter 30. Dante

I SIT ON the cold wooden bench and try to hold my head together. I tell myself that with Grandmoms, Clarence, and most of all Tom Dunleavy outside, nothing bad is going to happen to me. I hope to God that’s the truth. But I’m wondering, How long am I going to have to be here?

After twenty minutes, a new cop takes me out to be fingerprinted, which is some bad shit. Half an hour later, two detectives arrive in plainclothes. One is young and short and about as excited as the sergeant was scared. The older guy looks more like a real cop, heavyset, with a big square face and thick gray hair. His name is J. T. Knight.

“Dante,” says the younger one. “All right if we talk to you for a while?”

“The sergeant says I have the right to an attorney,” I say, trying not to sound too much like a wiseguy.

“Yeah, if you’re a candy ass with something to hide,” says the older one. “Of course, the only ones who ask for lawyers are guilty as sin. You guilty, Dante?”

My heart is banging, because once I tell them what happened, I know they’ll understand, but I calm down enough to say, “I want Tom Dunleavy in the room.”

“Is he your lawyer?” asks the younger detective.

“I’m not sure.”

“If you’re not even sure he’s your lawyer, why do you want him in the room?”

“I just do.”

The younger one leads me down some steps, then another tight hallway, to a room the size of a big closet with a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There’s nothing in it but a steel desk and four chairs, and we sit there until the older, bigger one returns with Tom.

From the apologetic way Tom looks at me, I can tell that none of this is happening like he imagined it would. Him and me both.

Chapter 31. Tom

“WHY DON’T YOU start by telling us about the fight,” says Barney Van Buren. He is so amped to have a suspect in the box in his first big case that he’s practically shaking. “The fight that afternoon between you and Eric Feifer.”

Dante waits for my nod, then begins the story he’s waited almost two weeks to tell.

“I barely know why we squared off. I don’t think he did either. People just started shoving, and a couple punches were thrown. But no one got hurt. It was over in maybe thirty seconds.”

“I hear he tagged you pretty good,” says Detective J. T. Knight, his right knee bouncing under the metal table.

“He might have got a couple shots in,” says Dante. “But like I said, it was no big deal.”

“I’m curious,” says Knight. “How does it feel to get your ass kicked by somebody a foot and fifty pounds smaller than you, what with all your buddies standing on the sidelines watching it happen?”

“It wasn’t like that,” says Dante, looking at me as much as Knight.

“If it was such a minor deal,” asks Van Buren, “why’d your friend run to the car and get his gun? Why did he put the gun to Feifer’s head?”

“That was messed up,” says Dante, his forehead already beaded with sweat. “It wasn’t my idea he did that. I didn’t even know he had a gun. I had never seen it before.”

I wonder if Dante is telling the truth about that. And if he can tell small lies, then what?

“And how about when Walker threatens Feifer again, says this still isn’t over?” says Van Buren. “It sounds like a big deal to me.”

“He was fronting.”

“Fronting?” says Knight, snorting. “What’s that?”

“Acting tough,” says Dante, glancing at me again for help. “Trying to save face for letting Tom talk him into putting the gun down.”

“You two think we’re idiots? Is that it?” says Knight, suddenly leaning across the table to stick his face in Dante’s. “Ten hours after a fight that’s ‘no big deal’ and a threat that didn’t mean a thing, Feifer, Roche, and Walco are shot through the head. A triple homicide-over nothing?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you about it being no big deal,” says Dante, his eyes begging the two detectives to please understand and see that what he’s saying makes perfect sense. “The only reason we’re there that night is because Feifer called Michael and asked us to meet him there so we could put this drama behind us. And look, here’s the truth-Michael was looking to maybe buy some weed on Beach Road. The only reason we ran is because we heard the whole terrible thing happen and thought the killer saw us. The fact that Feifer called and asked us to meet him shows what I say is true.”

“How’d he get Walker ’s number?” asks Van Buren.

“I really don’t know. I saw Feifer talking to my cousin Nikki at Wilson ’s; maybe he got it from her.”

“And how did you feel about that?” asks Detective Knight.

“About what?”

“About Eric Feifer putting the moves on your cousin.”

When Knight says that, he’s leaning halfway across the small table again, so when I bring my hand down hard in the middle of the table, he jumps back as if a gun went off.

“You’re the one with the problem,” I say, my face in Knight’s now, even more than his was in Dante’s. I’m bluffing, but Knight doesn’t know that. “Dante had nothing to do with these murders. He was there. That’s all. Now he’s here to share everything he saw and heard that night. But either the tone of this questioning changes, or this interview is over!”

Knight looks at me as though he’s going to throw a punch, and I kind of hope he will. But before he makes up his mind to do it, there’s a hard knock on the door.

Chapter 32. Tom

VAN BUREN STEPS outside, and J. T. Knight and I continue to glower at each other until his partner returns with a large brown paper bag. Van Buren places the bag behind his chair and whispers something to Knight.

I can’t make out Van Buren’s words, but I can’t miss his smirk. Or Knight’s, either. What the hell is this about?

“Let’s all calm down here for a second,” says Van Buren, a trill in his voice belying his words. “Dante, did you stop at the Princess Diner in Southampton on your way out here tonight?”

Dante looks over at me again, then answers. “Yeah, so Tom could use the bathroom.”

“Tom the only one who used the bathroom?”

“No, I think Clarence went too.”

“You think or you’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“So that left you alone in the car? Is that right?”

“I didn’t need to go.”

“Really?”

“What are you getting at?” I ask Van Buren, who maybe isn’t as dumb as he seems.

“An hour ago we got a call from someone who was at the diner at about two thirty this morning. The caller says they saw a very tall black man throw a gun into the Dumpster in the parking lot.”

“That’s a lie,” says Dante, shaking his head and looking at me desperately. “I never got out of the car. Didn’t happen.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes, why don’t you send a cop out there and look for yourself?”

“We did,” says Van Buren, a smug smile creasing his lips. Then he reaches behind his back and drops a sealed plastic bag on the table like a poker player triumphantly laying down a full house.

Staring up at us through the plastic and looking almost obscene is a handgun with a black plastic handle and a dull steel barrel.

“I’ve never seen that gun in my life!” cries Dante. “And it’s not Michael’s gun either.”

I cut him off. “Dante’s not saying another word.”

Chapter 33. Tom

I DON’T KNOW what feels worse-what just happened, or the thought of facing Marie. I stagger up the stairs into the small waiting area, where Marie and Clarence jump from their chairs and surround me.

Behind them, steep sunlight streams through the glass door to the parking lot. It’s 8 a.m. Dante and I were in that box for two hours.

“What’s happening to my grandson, Mr. Dunleavy?”

“I need some air, Marie,” I say, and walk through the door into the cool morning.

Marie follows and stops me in my tracks. “What’s happening to my grandson? Why won’t you look at me, Mr. Dunleavy? I’m standing right in front of you.”

“They don’t believe him,” I say, finally meeting her eye. “They don’t believe his story.”

“How can that be? The young man has never lied in his life. Did you tell them that?”

Clarence puts his arm around her and looks at me sympathetically. “Tom’s doing his best, Marie.”

“His best? What do you mean, his best? Did he tell them Dante had no reason on earth to commit these crimes? And where’s the gun? There’s no weapon.”

I look at Clarence, then back at Marie. “Actually, they have the gun.”

I sit on a bench and look at the early morning traffic rolling by on Route 27. What a mess this is; what a complete disaster. And it’s only just starting.

“So, what are you going to do now, Mr. Dunleavy?” asks Marie. “You’re his lawyer, aren’t you?”

Before I can come up with any kind of response, the door swings open behind us. Dante, in handcuffs again, is being led out by two more cops, this time from the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department.

The cops try to fend off Marie, but they’re no match for her, and she runs between them and throws her arms around her grandson’s chest. Dante looks ready to cry, and Marie’s face looks even more heartbroken. The cops don’t want to grab her, so they turn to me.

“Where are you taking him?” I ask.

“ Suffolk County Courthouse.”

“We’ll follow them in Clarence’s cab,” I tell Marie. She whispers something to Dante as Clarence gently pries away her arms. Both of them are crying, and I’m pretty close myself.

“Are you in over your head?” Marie suddenly asks me.

I look at her, and I don’t say absolutely, but I’m pretty sure she can read my mind.

Chapter 34. Tom

THIRTY YEARS AGO, when the county slapped it together at the outskirts of Riverhead, the Arthur M. Cromarty Complex, a sprawling campus of county courtrooms, might have looked almost impressive and modern with its big white walls and tall glass doors.

Now it looks as plain and shoddy as any out-of-date corporate park. We pull into the complex just as Dante is being led into the main building. Hustling past a flock of off-course seagulls, we follow him in through the glass doors.

The guard behind the metal detector tells us that arraignments are handled by Judge Barreiro on the third floor, and with a beefy, heavily tattooed arm, he points us to the elevator.

Courtroom 301 has the same stench of catastrophe as an inner-city emergency room, which in a way it is. The distraught members of two dozen families have rushed here on short notice, and they’re scattered in clusters throughout the forty rows of seats.

Clarence, Marie, and I find an empty section and sit and wait as a parade of men, mostly young and dark-skinned, are processed.

One after another, they’re ushered through a side door with a sheriff on each arm and, as devastated moms and girlfriends and court-appointed attorneys look on, are formally charged with burglary, drug sale, domestic battery, and assault. For three years I was one of those public defenders, so I know the drill.

“Such a shame,” Marie whispers, talking to herself. “This is so wrong.”

The system proceeds with brutal efficiency, each arraignment taking less than ten minutes, but it’s still more than two hours before a disembodied voice announces, “The people in the county of Suffolk in the state of New York versus Dante Halleyville.” And now it’s Marie and Clarence’s turn to gasp.

Like the others before him, Dante wears handcuffs and a bright-orange county-issued jumpsuit, in his case several inches too short in the legs and arms.

Dante is marched to a rectangular table in front of the judge. Already sitting there is his court-appointed attorney, a tall, stooped man close to sixty with overly large horn-rimmed glasses. This is mostly Marie’s doing. She knows Dante is innocent, so she’s advised him to use what the court gives him. I don’t necessarily agree, but I’m just here to give free advice when I’m asked, if I’m asked.

Judge Joseph Barreiro leans into the microphone mounted on his podium and says, “Dante Halleyville is charged with three counts of first-degree murder.” Murmurs of disbelief instantly sweep through all the rows of the courtroom.

“The defendant pleads not guilty to all three counts, Your Honor,” says Dante’s lawyer. “And in the setting of bail, we ask that the court bear in mind that this is a young man who turned himself in of his own volition, has never previously been charged with a single significant offense, and has strong ties to the community. For these reasons, Dante Halleyville represents a negligible risk of flight, and we strongly urge that any bail that is set be within the reach of his family’s modest income.”

Dante’s lawyer sits down, and his more-energized adversary jumps up. He is around my age, and with his short haircut and inexpensive suit, he reminds me of half the kids I went to law school with.

“The state’s position is the opposite, Your Honor. Three young men were bound and executed in cold blood. Because of the nature of the crimes and the severe penalties facing the defendant, as well as the fact that before turning himself in he remained at large for several days, we believe he represents a substantial flight risk.”

The black-robed judge weighs the relative merits of both arguments for a full thirty seconds. “This court sets bail for the defendant at six million dollars. Two million dollars for each victim.”

Plea to bail, the whole process takes about as long as it does to place and pick up your order at the drive-through window of a McDonald’s. The echo of Judge Barreiro’s gavel has barely receded when the two sheriffs reappear and lead Dante out the side door.

“He’s innocent,” Marie whispers at my side. “Dante never hurt anyone in his entire life.”

Chapter 35. Tom

IT’S MONDAY MORNING, and the only person feeling semi-okay with the world is AP photographer and friend Lenny Levitt. Since the weekend, Len’s moonlight shot of Dante and his grandmother has appeared on the covers of the Post, the Daily News, and Newsday. My minor role in his affair barely rates a mention-in Newsday-and I think I have a pretty good chance of crawling back into my old and comfortable, if uninspiring, life.

Even though the only thing I’ve got to do is that real estate closing for my buddy Pete Lampke, I’m parked outside my office at 8:15 a.m. Like every weekday morning for three years, I leave Wingo on the front seat and step into the Montauk Bakery for my Danish and coffee.

Why I’ve been so loyal to the bakery is a mystery. It’s certainly not the flakiness of the pastry or the richness of the coffee. Must be the comforts of consistency and the dependable early morning cheer of owner Lucy Kalin.

Today, the only thing Lucy’s got to say is “two twenty-five.” I guess she had a bad night too.

“I think I know the price by now, Lucy girl. And top of the morning to you too.”

Breakfast in hand, I grab my pooch and head for the office.

Grossman Realty has the ground floor of the building next to mine, and the eponymous owner is also arriving bright and early. Normally Jake Grossman is a sinkhole of bonhomie, upbeat, full of chatter even by the outsized standards of his profession.

This morning, though, the way he reacts to my greeting, you’d swear he’s deaf and blind.

Whatever. I’m still relieved to be back in my office where I can quietly read the papers again before checking in with Clarence.

When I call him, the poor guy’s so twisted up about what’s happening to Dante he can barely talk and admits he had to go to the emergency room in Southampton for sedatives to get through the night. I hope I’m imagining it, but he sounds a little chilly too. What’s up with everybody this morning?

I know Marie has to be feeling even worse because she doesn’t even pick up her phone.

When Lampke’s contracts haven’t arrived by noon, I get Phyllis at the broker’s on the line.

“I owe you a call,” she says. “Peter decided to go with a lawyer with a little more real estate experience.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

The bad news makes me hungry, but rather than getting shunned across the street at John’s, Wingo and I drive to a little grocery run by a Honduran man and his three daughters at the edge of Amagansett.

As always, the place is packed with the Hispanic carpenters, gardeners, and day workers who keep the Hamptons buff. Despite the stack of newspapers with Dante’s picture plastered all over them, no one here could care less about the latest Hampton drama. In this disconnected Spanish-speaking pocket of town, I’m invisible, and it feels pretty good.

I eat the pork-and-assorted-veggies sandwich at my desk, where despite my best efforts, I think about Dante scared in his cell and about his tired old public-defender lawyer. The only good thing I come up with is that big as Dante is, no one will mess with him.

As of yesterday, Michael Walker still hadn’t turned himself in, and I call Lenny at the AP offices to find out what, if anything, he’s heard. We’re talking the talk when something is thrown through the window in the office. What the hell? Shattered glass covers my desk. Then I see a burning bag on the floor.

“Call you back, Lenny! Somebody just broke my damn window.”

I douse the flames with the extinguisher hanging in the hall, but the room is already full of acrid yellow smoke and a horrendous stench, which Wingo and I soon discover is the smell of a plastic bag of burning shit.

I think I get the point-somebody is mad at me. And guess what? I’m a wee bit angry at them too.

Chapter 36. Detective Connie P. Raiborne

I GIVE DETECTIVE Yates the address for today’s first reported homicide-838 MacDonough-and he swerves out of the traffic and barrels down the middle of Fulton, his screaming siren and flashing lights barely denting the usual cacophony of a lovely Bed-Stuy afternoon.

Our banged-up Crown Vic barely gets a glance from the sleepy-eyed schoolkids hanging out in front of PriceWise. In this neighborhood police sirens are part of the soundtrack, like the strings and horns in a Nelson Riddle chart.

“Joe, take it easy. I got it on good authority our man will sit tight till we get there.”

Joe Yates has three of the more annoying qualities you’ll ever find in a colleague or friend-tireless good humor, a full head of hair, and a beautiful girlfriend. Maybe the three are related, but that doesn’t make them any less annoying.

Yates doesn’t reply to my request, but apparently he listens. The car slows to double the speed limit, and there’s less screeching around the corners. When we finally pull up in front of a redbrick six-floor walk-up and park behind the two double-parked squad cars, half my iced coffee is still in my cup.

“Smooth enough for you, gramps?”

When we reach the fourth floor, everyone is already here-Heekin from Forensics, Nicolo and Hart from Homicide, and the street cop who broke down the door after a neighbor alerted the super to the funky smell inside.

But except for the guys in white gloves dusting the doorknobs, faucets, light switches, and window, everyone’s been waiting for me to get here and see the scene as it was found.

No one’s touched the teenage brother half lying, half sitting on the bed. Judging by the smell and the pallor and the chunk a rat gnawed off his big toe, I’d say the kid’s been dead about a week.

“TV on when you got here?” I ask.

“Yup,” says Hart, the younger of the two homicide detectives and a bit of a kiss-ass. “Same volume. Same channel. No one touched a thing, Connie.”

Blaring away on the tube is one of those stand-up comedian shows. Right now some skinny black female comic is riffing about large black women, and Heekin seems to think it’s hysterical.

“We catch you at a bad time, Jimmyboy? Because if we did, we can reschedule.”

“That’s okay, Chief.”

“You sure? Girlfriend’s pretty damn funny. I mean, she’s killing our friend over here.”

I get one of the guys from Forensics to dust the TV remote for prints so we can turn the set off and I can ask the question of the hour.

“So who is this poor, unfortunate deceased individual?”

Chapter 37. Raiborne

THERE ARE THREE characteristics I find particularly endearing in a friend or coworker-a deep and dependable level of misery, male-pattern baldness, and a sexually stingy wife. Again, maybe all these traits work together, but that doesn’t make them any less likable, and my favorite medical examiner, Clifford Krauss, bless his heart, has all three.

Because of all his winning qualities, it doesn’t bother me in the least that Krauss, who took over the morgue nine years ago, one year after I made chief of Homicide, is two or three times better at his job than anyone else in the Seventeenth. And he definitely knows it.

By now we all know that the kid stretched out on his back on the metal gurney in the morgue is Michael Walker, seventeen, from Bridgehampton, Long Island, and one of the kids wanted in connection with three East Hampton homicides. Till this morning I didn’t even know there were black people in the Hamptons, let alone triple homicides. But hey, I’m just a street cop from Bed-Stuy.

When I walk in, Krauss is at his desk in front of his laptop. He cups one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and says, “ Suffolk County coroner.”

“They just went through my report,” he says after hanging up, “and are pretty sure that the same gun that killed Walker was also used in the three Hampton homicides on Labor Day weekend.”

Then Krauss grabs his long yellow pad, comes over to where I’m standing next to Walker, and, wielding a stained Hunan Village chopstick for a pointer, takes me on a dead man’s tour.

The crispness and intensity of Krauss’s delivery hasn’t softened in nine years, and if anything, his enthusiasm for gleaning secrets from a corpse has only increased. He starts with the exact size and location of the entrance and exit wounds, and the angle at which the bullet traveled. Reading from his notes, he describes the caliber, make, and casing of the bullet picked out of the plaster from behind the bed, and says all three are consistent with the weapon and silencer recovered by police in Long Island.

“I put the time of death at early in the morning of September eleventh,” he says, “very early in the morning, approximately four a.m.”

“Approximately?”

“Yeah,” says Krauss, with a twinkle in his eyes. “Could have been four thirty. All his blood work and the amount of dilation of his pupils indicate someone who’d been in a deep sleep right up to the moment he was shot.”

“Hell of a way to wake up,” I say.

“I’d prefer a kiss from J-Lo,” says Krauss.

“So Walker wasn’t the one watching the tube?”

“Not unless he left it on.”

“Also, we found a basketball cap on the floor of the closet, where it looked like someone was searching for something. The hat’s barely been worn and is about three sizes too big for this guy here.”

“Isn’t that how they wear everything now?”

“Jeans, coats, sweatshirts, but not hats. And none of Mr. Walker’s prints are on it. Maybe if we’re really lucky, it was left by the shooter.

“That’s all you got for me, Cliffy?”

“One last thing. The rat who snacked on Walker ’s big toe-a black Norwegian, four to six pounds, female, pregnant.”

“Why’s it always got to be a black rat, Krauss? Why never a white one?”

One thing, just for the record. That description of Cliffy’s wife-pure bullshit. Her name is Emily, and she’s a sweetheart.

Chapter 38. Marie Scott

LAST WEEK THIS very same Riverhead courtroom was filled with a sickening indifference. It is even worse now. It turns my stomach inside out.

Today the room’s bursting with reporters, family and friends of the victims, and, more than anything else, a lust for blood. The parents of the three dead boys stare at me with powerful hatred, and Lucinda Walker, Michael’s mom, who I’ve known since she was a grade-school student at Saint Vincent ’s, looks at me as if she doesn’t know what to think. I feel so bad for Lucinda. I cried for her last night. Deep down she must realize Dante would no more kill Michael than Michael would kill Dante, but there’s so much hurt in her eyes that I look away and squeeze Clarence’s arm and rub the embossed leather cover of my Bible.

The spectators crane their necks and gawk as my grandson Dante, in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, is led to that bare table with nothing but a water pitcher in the middle of it. They stir with anticipation or whatever as a booming voice intones, “The State of New York versus Dante Halleyville” as if it were the ring announcement before a disgusting boxing match. Dante looks so scared and sad up there it breaks my heart. I need to go and hug him but I can’t, and that makes me feel almost as bad.

The electricity builds as the judge leans into his microphone and says, “The state of New York charges Mr. Halleyville with a fourth count of first-degree murder.” Then the judge asks, “How does the defendant plead?”

Dante’s court lawyer says, “Not guilty.” But it’s as if he has said nothing at all. No one seems to believe him, or even listen to the man. Until this very moment, I don’t think I believed that a trial could ever really happen, but now I know it can.

The crowd’s only interest is the district attorney, and now that white man, so young he can’t possibly understand what he’s saying, so forgive him, Lord, addresses the judge.

“Your Honor,” he says, “in light of the heinous nature of the original crimes and the wanton disregard the defendant displayed in executing his accomplice, just as he did in the first three execution-style murders, the state of New York has no choice but to seek the ultimate penalty available to defend its citizens. In this case, the prosecution takes the extraordinary step of seeking the death penalty.”

I nearly collapse, but I won’t let myself fall in front of all these people. The state of New York wants to murder my grandson! Lord, it’s as simple as that. The state wants to murder my miraculous grandson who is as innocent as your own son, Jesus Christ, and the crowd thrills, THRILLS, to these terrible words. If they could, or if it were fifty years ago, they’d surely drag Dante from his chair and pull him out of this so-called courtroom and hang him from the nearest tree.

Lord, help me, and please help Dante in his terrible time of need.

I look at Clarence, and then I look at Mr. Dunleavy. “Please help us,” I say to him. “Please help Dante. He didn’t kill those boys.”

Chapter 39. Tom

IF YOU’VE NEVER seen a live media courtroom circus, consider yourself lucky.

Vans from all the TV networks and the big cable shows have been double-lined outside the courtroom building all day, and everywhere I look a correspondent is summoning the required fake gravitas to describe the ins and outs of such a high-profile death-penalty case.

I can’t get away from the courthouse fast enough. Eyes cast downward, I thread my way through the crowded parking lot, trying to avoid an encounter with people I’ve known my whole life.

I’m so eager to get into my car, I don’t notice Clarence in the front seat until my key is almost in the ignition. He’s shattered, sobbing into the back of his hand.

“They want to kill him, Tom. He’ll never get a fair trial. You see what it’s like in there.”

“Clarence, come back to my place tonight. I could use the company,” I tell him.

“I’m not after your sympathy, Tom. I’m here to ask you to be Dante’s lawyer.”

“Clarence, I haven’t been in a courtroom in over a year. Even then I was nothing special.”

“That’s because you never tried, Tom. Not like you did playing ball. Put your mind to it, I believe you can do anything well. Folks like you. They listen to you.”

“Just because Dante’s lawyer is older doesn’t mean he’s not doing a good job,” I say. “Besides, he’s Marie’s choice.”

Clarence shakes his head. “Marie wants you, Tom. She told me to ask. If you were on trial for murder, would you want that guy representing you? Or if your son was on trial? Be real with me.”

“I’m being real, Clarence. I can’t be Dante’s lawyer. The answer is no. I’m sorry.”

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, Clarence opens the door and pulls himself out of the seat. “You’re a big disappointment, Tom. Not that I should be surprised. It’s been that way for years.”

Chapter 40. Tom

HIGHLY AGITATED NOW, I drive to Jeff’s house. I need to talk to somebody I trust-because I am thinking about being Dante’s lawyer. I need somebody to talk me out of my craziness.

Ten years ago my brother bought just about the last affordable house in Montauk. I loaned him the down payment from my signing bonus, and now the house is worth five times what he paid. That doesn’t make us geniuses. Anything you bought then has gone through the roof. It’s sweet in this case, however, because Jeff’s wife had just left him for, as she put it, “not being sufficiently ambitious.” Now Jeff and his three kids are living in a house worth more than a million dollars.

When she ran out on my brother, Lizbeth assumed she’d be getting Sean, Leslie, and Mickey. But Jeff dug in and hired one of the best lawyers out here. The lawyer, a friend of mine named Mary Warner, pointed out, among other things, that except in football season, Jeff was home by three thirty every day and had summers off, and to everyone’s amazement, the judge awarded Jeff full custody of the three kids.

Sean, the oldest, just turned twenty-five, and when I pull into the driveway, he’s in the garage lifting weights. The two of us talk for a couple of minutes; then he starts breaking my chops.

“So, Uncle,” he asks between reps, “how’s it make you feel to be the least popular person in Montauk?”

“The old man around?” I ask.

“He’s not back yet. The first game of the year against Patchogue is two weeks away.”

“I guess I’ll head over to the high school then. I need to talk to him.”

“You spot me on my bench before you go?”

I’ve got a soft spot for Sean, maybe because he reminds me a little of myself. Because he’s the oldest, the divorce fell hardest on him. And he had that “son of the coach” crap in school, which is why despite being a natural athlete, he never went out for a high school team.

The last couple years Sean’s been lifting weights. Maybe he wants to look good in his lifeguard chair, or make a point to his old man. Well, now he’s making a point with me because he doesn’t stop adding black rings until he’s got 160 pounds on each end. Add the weight of the bar, that’s over 350, and Sean can’t weigh more than 170.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I ask, looking down at his fiercely determined face.

“One way to find out.”

The son of a gun lifts it twelve times, and a huge grin rushes across his beet-red face.

“Thanks for nothing, Uncle Tommy.”

“My pleasure. Okay if I tell the old man how impressive you are?”

“Nah. It’ll only get him talking about all my wasted potential.”

“Don’t feel bad, Sean. For us Dunleavys, squandered talent is a family tradition.”

Chapter 41. Tom

I’VE BEEN BACK in town three years, and this is my first visit to the old high school. Truth is, I’d rather have a root canal than go to a reunion, but as I step onto the freshly waxed gym floor, the memories rush back all the same. Nothing’s changed too much. Same fiberglass backboards. Same wooden-plank bleachers. Same smell of Lysol. I kind of love it, actually.

Jeff’s office is just above the locker room, and a very small step up in terms of accommodations and aroma. He sits in the corner, Celtic-green sneakers up on his metal desk, staring at a game film projected on the white cinder-block wall. The black-and-white images and the purr of the projector and the dust motes caught in the air make me feel as if I’ve fallen into a time warp.

“Got a game plan, Parcells?” Jeff has always worshipped Parcells and even looks like him a little.

“I was about to ask you the same thing, baby brother. What I hear, you need a plan more than me. An escape plan.”

“You could be right.”

There’s a punt on the screen, and the pigskin seems to hang forever in the fall air.

“All I did was help a scared kid turn himself in,” I say to Jeff. I don’t tell him that I’ve been asked to represent that kid. Or that I’m actually considering it.

“What about Walco, Rochie, and Feifer? You don’t think they were scared? I don’t get what you’re up to, Tom.”

“I’m not sure I do either. I think it has something to do with meeting Dante’s grandmother. Seeing where they lived, how they lived. Oh, and one other small detail-the kid didn’t do it.”

Jeff doesn’t seem to hear me, but maybe he does because he flicks off the projector.

“Between you and me,” he says, “season hasn’t started and I’m already sick to death of football. Let’s grab a beer, bro.”

“See, there’s a plan,” I say, and grin, but Jeff doesn’t smile back.

Chapter 42. Tom

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Jeff stops in Amagansett and parks in the lot behind McKendrick’s, the one bar most likely to be full of townies on a Wednesday night. But I guess that’s the point. Or the plan. Make peace with the locals?

We enter through the back door and grab a booth by the pool table, so it takes a minute or so for the place to fall silent.

When Jeff is sure that everyone knows we’re here, he sends me to the bar for our beer. He wants me to see exactly what I could be getting myself into, wants me to feel the hate up close and personal.

Chucky Watkins, a crazy Irish laborer who used to work for Walco now and then, is sitting at a table as I shoulder my way to the bar. “Guess you’re afraid to come here without your football-coach chaperone?”

“Kev,” I say, ignoring Watkins, “a pitcher of Bass when you get a chance.”

“When you get a chance, Kev,” says Pete Zacannino, mocking me from the corner. By the way, a week ago, every face in this room was a pretty good friend of mine.

Kevin, who’s a particularly good guy, hands me the beer and two mugs, and I’m ferrying back to the table when Martell, another former pal, sticks out his foot, causing half my pitcher to spill onto the floor. Snorts of laughter erupt from one end of the bar to the other.

“You all right, Tom?” asks Jeff from the back booth. A week ago, with Jeff or alone, I’d have cracked the pitcher over Martell’s skull if only to see what would happen next.

“No problem, Jeff,” I shout back at the room. “I just seem to have spilled a little of our beer, and I’m going to go back to the bar now and ask Kev if he would be so kind as to refill it.”

When I finally get back to our booth, Jeff takes an enormous gulp of beer and says, “Welcome to your new life, buddy.”

I know what Jeff’s trying to do, and I love him for it. But for some reason, knee-jerk contrariness or just blind stupidity, it must not sink in. Because three beers later, I stand up and unplug the jukebox in the middle of a Stones song. Then, with a full mug in my left hand, I address the multitudes.

“I’m glad all you rednecks are here tonight because I have an announcement. As you all apparently know, I helped Dante Halleyville turn himself in. In the process, I’ve gotten to know him and his grandmother Marie. And guess what? I like and admire them both a hell of a lot. Because of that and other reasons, I’ve decided to represent him. You heard correct. I’m going to be Dante Halleyville’s lawyer, and as his lawyer, I’ll do everything I can to get him off. Thanks very much for coming. Good night. And get home safely.”

A couple of seconds later, Chucky Watkins and Martell come at me. Something goes off inside me, and this is a side of Tom Dunleavy most of these guys know. I hit Watkins full in the face with the beer mug, and he goes down like a shot and stays down. I think his nose is broken. It could be worse.

“C’mon!” I yell at Martell, but he just backs away from me. I may not be Dante Halleyville’s size, but I’m six three and over two hundred, and I know how to scrap.

“C’mon! Anybody!” I yell at the other cowards in the room. “Take your best shot! Somebody?”

But only Jeff comes forward. He tucks me under his beefy arm and pushes me toward the back door.

“Same old Tommy,” he says, once we’re in his truck. “Same hothead.”

I stare out the windshield, still steaming as Jeff steps on the gas and we roar out of the parking lot.

“Not at all,” I say. “I’ve mellowed.”

Chapter 43. Tom

THE NEXT DAY, at the Riverhead Correctional Facility, I place my wallet, watch, and keys in a small locker, then step through a series of heavy barred doors, one clanging shut behind me as another slides open in front.

The difference between the life of a visitor and those locked inside is so vast it chills me to the bone. It’s like crossing from the land of the living into the land of the dead. Or having a day pass to hell.

To the right, a long, hopeless corridor leads to the various wings of the overflowing fifteen-hundred-bed jail.

I’m led to the left into a warren of airless little rooms set aside for inmates and their lawyers.

I wait patiently in one of them until Dante is led into the room. He’s been inside a little less than a week but already seems harder and more distant. There’s no trace of a smile.

But then he clasps my hand and bumps my chest and says, “Good to see you, Tom. It means a lot.”

“It means a lot to me too, Dante,” I say, surprisingly touched by his greeting. “I need the work.”

“That’s what Clarence says.” And his two-hundred-watt smile finally cracks through the shell. This kid is no murderer. Anyone should be able to see that, even the local police.

I really do need the work too. It feels like the first day of high school as I take out a new pack of legal pads and a box of pens.

“Other than the fact that I will believe everything you tell me,” I say, “today’s going to be like being in that box with the detectives, because we’re going through that day and that night again and again. And we’re doing it until every detail you can remember is on these pads.”

I have him start by telling me everything he knows about Kevin Sledge, Gary McCauley, and Dave Bond, his three other teammates that day. He tells me where they live, work, and hang out. He gives me their cell phone numbers and tells me how to track them down if they try to avoid me.

“All have been in some scrapes,” says Dante, “but that doesn’t mean much where I’m from. McCauley’s on probation for drugs, and Bond served ten months right in here for armed robbery. But the real gangster is Kevin, who has never spent a day in jail.”

“How did they react to Michael pulling the gun?”

“They thought it was wack. Even Kevin.”

We talk about what happened the night of the murder. Unfortunately, his grandmother was visiting relatives in Brooklyn, so she hadn’t seen him before or after the shootings. Dante swears to me that he didn’t know where Michael Walker was hiding.

I’d forgotten how tedious this kind of work can be. Hartstein, my professor at St. John’s, used to call it “ass in the chair” work because that’s what it comes down to, the willingness to keep asking questions and the persistence to go through events again and again even if it only yields a few crumbs of new, probably useless, information.

And it’s twice as hard in here because Dante and I have to do it without caffeine or sugar.

Nevertheless, we keep on slogging, turning our attention to what he and Michael Walker saw and heard when they arrived to meet Feifer that night. These few minutes are the key to everything, and I keep pressing Dante for more details. But it’s not until our third time through that Dante recalls smelling a cigar. Okay, that could be something.

And in the midst of his fourth pass, he sits up straight in his chair and says, “There was a guy on the bench.”

My posture suddenly improves too. “Someone was there?”

“You know that bench at the far side of the court? A guy was sleeping on it when we arrived. And five minutes later, when we ran past it, he was gone.”

“You sure about that, Dante? This is important.”

“Positive. Hispanic-looking dude, Mexican, or maybe Colombian. About thirty, long black hair in a ponytail.”

Chapter 44. Tom

A CIGAR. MAYBE belonging to one of the killers.

The news that somebody else may have been at the murder scene who could confirm or add to Dante’s story, who maybe saw the three kids killed.

Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.

The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York. I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly pressed.

At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable white-shoe law firms-Walmark, Reid and Blundell.

Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I push through the gleaming brass doors and catch an elevator to the thirty-seventh floor.

But that just gets me to the wrong side of another barrier, as daunting in its way as the walls that ring the Riverhead jail. Instead of barbed wire and concrete, it’s a giant piece of polished mahogany so immense it must have arrived from the rain forest in the hold of a tanker and been hoisted to its new, unlikely home by a cloud-scraping crane.

Instead of an armed sentry, there’s a stunning blond receptionist wearing a headset and looking like a cyborg.

“Good morning. I’m here to see Kate Costello,” I say.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Is she expecting you?”

“I’m a friend.”

To the receptionist, that’s the same as a no. Maybe worse. She directs me toward a leather purgatory, where for the next twenty minutes I sweat into a thirty-thousand-dollar couch. Last night, coming here unannounced seemed a stroke of genius, and during the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Montauk, my confidence never flagged. Well, not too much anyway.

But witty conversations with yourself and mock rehearsals can never duplicate the tension of the actual moment-and now Kate strides toward me, low heels clicking like little hammers on the marble floor.

I wonder if she knows how little her austere navy suit does to conceal her beauty. And does she care?

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and before I say a word, I’m back at the bottom of the hole I dug with Kate ten years ago.

“I need your help to defend Dante Halleyville.”

This is the point where I figured Kate would invite me back to her office, but all she does is stare through me. So I make my pitch right there in the lobby, laying it out as succinctly as I can. What I say makes perfect sense to me, but I have no idea how it’s being received. I stare into Kate’s bright blue eyes but can’t read them, and when I stop to catch my breath, she cuts me off.

“Tom,” she says, “don’t ever come here again.”

Then she spins and walks down the hall, the clicking of her heels sounding even chillier than when she arrived. She never looks back.

Chapter 45. Kate

I RETREAT FROM Tom Dunleavy’s totally unexpected ambush to the sanctuary of my office. I know that sounds superficial. It’s just a room. But I’ve only had it a month, and the elegant furniture and dazzling East River view haven’t lost the power to make me feel better the instant I step inside.

Thirty-one e-mails have come in since nine last night. Eight are related to the cease-and-desist letter I messengered to the lead attorney for Pixmen Entertainment last night. Our client, Watermark, Inc., considers Pixmen’s new logo too close to one used by one of their divisions, and my letter accused them of trademark infringement and raised the prospect of aggressive legal action, including a possible freeze on all Pixmen income for the last fourteen months.

In an e-mail sent at 3:43 a.m., Pixmen’s attorney reports that the logo has been deleted from all outgoing product, and e-mails from Watermark’s attorneys express their satisfaction and gratitude. Persuasively threatening cataclysmic doom is one of the cheap thrills of my job.

A dozen other e-mails are the fallout of an embarrassing feature in American Lawyer about rising female legal stars. Many are from headhunters, but the most interesting is from the president of Columbia University, who asks if I have time to serve on the committee to find the new dean of the law school. Yes, I will find the time.

At exactly 9:00 a.m., Mitchell Susser arrives to brief me on the upcoming insider-trading trial of former Credit Mercantile managing partner Franklin Wolfe. An earlier trial, handled by one of our senior partners, ended in a hung jury, and I’ve been assigned the retrial.

“Relax, Mitch,” I say, not that it does much good. Susser, a brand-new hire who was Law Review at Harvard, has been reviewing the trial transcripts. “Wolfe,” he says, “spends way too much time implausibly denying activity that isn’t clearly illegal. It costs him his credibility and gains him almost nothing. I think a second trial is a great opportunity.”

We’re considering which of our defendant-preppers would make the best pretrial coach when Tony Reid, the “Reid” of Walmark, Reid and Blundell, sticks his eminent gray head into the room. Beside him is Randall Kane, arguably the firm’s most valuable client.

“Got a minute, Kate?” he asks rhetorically.

Susser sweeps up his papers and bolts, and Tony Reid and Kane take his place in the seating area at the far end of my office. “Of course, you know Randy, Kate.”

I don’t need to have met Kane to know him. In the process of making Bancroft Subsidiaries one of the fastest-growing corporations in the world, Kane has become an iconic business leader, the embodiment of the hard-charging CEO. With a proposal jotted down on a napkin, a colleague in another division just got him a six-million-dollar advance for a business book.

But as Reid explains with exactly the right degree of urgency, all that could be jeopardized by a just-filed class-action lawsuit. It charges Bancroft with tolerating a work environment hostile to women and allowing a pattern of widespread sexual harassment. The suit names Kane directly.

“I know I don’t need to tell you,” says Reid, “that this opportunistic litigation is nothing but thinly veiled extortion.” Based on my own experience with class-action lawyers, that’s probably true. Sophisticated ambulance-chasers, these lawyers come up with a target, prepare a suit, and then trawl for victims.

“I’m not rolling over on this one, Kate,” says Kane. “It’s total crap! Three of Bancroft’s eight senior vice presidents are women, and the company was cofounded by my wife. They’ve got the wrong guy. If I have to, I’ll take it all the way to trial.”

“I can’t believe that will be necessary,” I say, “but I assure you our response will be aggressive.”

“You bet it will!” says Randall Kane.

The rest of the day is wall-to-wall briefings, meetings, and conference calls. The company dining room delivers a chef’s salad for lunch and sushi for dinner, and when I turn off the light at 11:00 p.m., I’m not the last person to leave.

The lovely fall night reminds me of the lovely fall day I’ve missed, and I decide to walk awhile before catching a cab.

I’m taking my first steps toward mostly deserted Park Avenue -when a tall figure rises from the shadows of the small stone plaza beside our office building.

Chapter 46. Kate

WALKING STIFFLY, THE man hurries toward me, then stops before he reaches the brightly lit sidewalk.

“Half day?” he asks.

It’s Tom!

“How long you been here?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I’ve always sucked at math.”

I’m shocked to see him again but, much as I hate to admit it, kind of impressed. Tom’s always been too charming by half but has never seemed the kind of guy capable of sitting on a stone bench for fifteen hours. Hell, one of our problems was that I never knew what Tom was capable of.

“Kate, you have got to hear me out. Can I please buy you a drink?” In the streetlight now, he looks exhausted, and his eyes plead. “This is a matter of life and death. That may sound lame to you, but not to Dante Halleyville.”

“A cup of coffee,” I say.

“Really? That’s the best news I’ve had in ten years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, hoping I caught my smile in time.

The least intimate place I can think of is a Starbucks around the corner, where Tom wolfs a muffin in three or four bites and gulps down a bottle of water.

“Here’s my spiel, Kate, the one I didn’t get a chance to give you this morning. Dante Halleyville has never had one good thing happen in his entire life. When he was twelve, his father was stabbed in front of him, and he watched him bleed to death because in his neighborhood ambulances get there a lot slower than on Beach Road. His mother-a crack addict, prostitute, and thief-wasn’t much better than no mother at all. She’d been in and out of jail even before his father died. So how does Dante deal with all this? He sees he has a talent that can take him out of this world and help everyone in his family. He can play ball.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“I mean really play, Kate. A whole different level than me. The Michael Jordan-Magic Johnson level. He makes himself the best schoolboy player in the country. He’s easily good enough to go hardship and enter the League out of high school, but out of respect for his grandmother Marie, he agrees to go to college. Three weeks ago, he’s framed for four murders he had nothing to do with, Kate. Now the state of New York is seeking the death penalty. The least he deserves is a great lawyer.”

“What are you?”

“I don’t know what I am, Kate, but we both know it’s not a great lawyer. On a good day, I’m an okay lawyer trying his ass off. He needs a brilliant lawyer trying her ass off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Kate, it’s a figure of speech.”

It’s a good pitch. Tom didn’t waste those fifteen hours-but I don’t even think about it. The bastard could charm the birds out of the trees, but I’m not falling for it. Not TWICE. It’s a big world. He can find another sucker.

“Sorry, Tom. I can’t do it. But keep trying your ass off-you might surprise yourself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tom, it’s a figure of speech. And thanks for the coffee.”

Chapter 47. Tom

COME WHAT MAY, I am definitely on the case now, and in the spotlight again.

Since Lucy and the Montauk Bakery don’t want my business anymore, me and Wingnut, who by the way was named after the great Knicks reserve player Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo but answers to anything with a wing in it, have been forced to refine our morning routine. Now we start our workday at that Honduran-owned grocery where no one knows our names. There I can sit alone at the outdoor table ten feet from Route 27 and try to figure out how to keep New York from executing an innocent eighteen-year-old kid.

Since I’ve taken on Dante Halleyville’s case, my days pass in a blur and end wherever I fall asleep over my notebooks. I am nothing if not dedicated, and a little crazy.

As I sit in the steep October-morning light, pickups roll in and out and traffic streams west on 27, ten feet from my nose, but I’m too preoccupied to be distracted. When Dante dredged up that “witness” on the bench from his memory, he gave me a tantalizing lead. But I’m having a hard time following up on it.

If there’s a person out there who can corroborate Dante’s version of events or saw the real killers, the state has no case. But I barely have a description, let alone a name.

Maybe Artis LaFontaine, dealer, pimp, whatever he is, stayed at the basketball court long enough to see the guy arrive, but I have no idea how to get in touch with him. If I went to the police, they might have him on their radar, but I hate to do that unless I absolutely have to.

As I take a pull of coffee, a yellow VW Bug rolls by. Yellow is the color du jour, I guess, and that makes me think of Artis’s canary-yellow convertible.

There can’t be that many places where a person can buy a $400,000 Ferrari, right?

I flip open my cell and start using up my minutes. The dealership in Hempstead refers me to an exotic-car dealership on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. They refer me to a dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Two hours later, still at my outdoor office on the side of the road, I’m talking to Bree Elizabeth Pedi. Bree Elizabeth is the top salesperson at the Miami Auto Emporium in South Beach. “Of course I know Artis. He’s putting my kids through college.”

I persuade Pedi to give Artis a call, and a couple minutes later, Artis is on the line, but he’s chillier than I expect. “If you’re calling about that night at the basketball court, I wasn’t there.”

“Artis, if I have to, I’ll subpoena you.”

“First you got to find me.”

“Dante’s facing the death penalty. You know something, and you’re going to keep it to yourself?”

“You don’t know Loco. I’ll do time rather than testify against him. But as long as you understand that I was NOT THERE, I might be able to help.”

I describe the man lying on the bench, and Artis knows who I’m talking about right away.

“You’re looking for Manny Rodriguez,” he says. “Like everyone else, he’s an aspiring rapper. He told me he works for a tiny label called Cold Ground, Inc. I bet they’re in the phone book.”

Chapter 48. Tom

OKAY, SO NOW I’m an amateur detective. And I’m back in Manhattan because Cold Ground, Inc., turns out to be in a funky postwar building right below Union Square.

A mirrored elevator drops me on seven, where a thumping bass line pulls me down a maroon-and-yellow hallway and the scent of reefer takes me the rest of the way.

Inside the last door on the left, a little hip-hop factory is chugging industriously. What had been the living room of a one-bedroom apartment is now a recording studio.

Behind a glass wall a baby-faced rapper, his immaculate Yankee cap precisely askew, rhythmically spits rhymes into a brass microphone.

I ice him and vanish

No trace of what I done

Finding me is harder

Than finding a smoking gun

The artist looks no more than seventeen and neither does his girl, who sits on the leather couch on the other side of the glass with an infant on her lap dressed just like his dad, right down to the cockeyed cap and retro Nikes. A dozen others are scattered around, and whether dazzlingly elongated or powerfully compact, they all seem like the fullest expression of who they are.

Who is in charge? No one that I can tell, and there’s no desk or receptionist in front.

“Manny’s making dupes,” says a tall woman named Erica, and she nods helpfully when a cable-thin guy with a jet-black ponytail steps out of a back room.

In Manny’s arms is a stack of what look like pizza boxes. “Got to deliver these to another studio,” he says, heading out the door. “Come and we’ll talk on the way.”

In a crosstown cab, Manny lays down the plotlines of his frenetic life. “I was born in Havana,” he says. “My father was a doctor. A good one, which meant he made a hundred dollars a month. One morning, after a great big breakfast, I got on an eight-foot sailboat, pushed off from the beach, and just kept going. Twenty hours later, I almost drowned swimming to shore fifty miles south of Miami. I was wearing this watch. If I died, I died, but I had to come to America.”

Three years later, Manny says he’s a break away from becoming the Cuban-American Eminem. “I’m dope, and I’m not the only one who knows it.”

I suspect he’s confused about why I’m here, but I’ll set him straight in a minute. We get off on West Twenty-first Street in front of a Chelsea townhouse, and he drops his tapes at another apartment-turned-recording-studio.

“I’m not going to be doing this much longer,” he tells me.

I offer to buy him lunch around the corner at the Empire Diner, and we take a seat at a black-lacquered table overlooking Tenth Avenue.

“So what label you with?” Manny asks once our orders are in.

“I’m not with a label, Manny. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing Dante Halleyville. He’s falsely charged with killing three people at Smitty Wilson’s court in East Hampton. I know you were there that night. I’m hoping you saw something that can save his life.”

If Manny is disappointed that I’m not a talent scout looking to sign him to a huge deal, he keeps it to himself. He looks at me hard, as if he’s running through his loop of images from that night.

“You’re the ballplayer,” he says. “I seen you there. You were a pro.”

“That’s right. For about ten minutes.”

“You got a tape recorder?” he asks.

“No, but I’ve got a pad. I’ll take careful notes for now.”

“Good. Let me hit the bathroom. Then maybe I got a story that could save that tall black boy.”

I wrestle my legal pad out of my case and hurriedly scribble a list of key questions in my barely legible shorthand. Stay calm, I tell myself, and listen.

I’ve been lost in my notes, and Manny still isn’t back when the waiter drops the food on the table. I twist around, and I see that the bathroom door is wide open.

I jump out of my chair and run like a maniac to the street.

I’m just in time to see Manny Rodriguez hop into a cab and roar away up Tenth Avenue. He finger-waves out the back window at me.

Chapter 49. Loco

THERE’S A GRAY, pebbly beach on the bay side of East Hampton where on Sunday afternoons the Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Costa Ricans play volleyball. During the week, they put in seventy hours mowing lawns, clipping hedges, and skimming pools. At night they cram into ranch houses that look normal from the street but have been partitioned into thirty cubes. By Sunday afternoon, they’re ready to explode.

These games are wild. You got drinking, gambling, salsa, and all kinds of over-the-top Latin drama. Every three minutes or so two brown bantamweights are being pulled apart. Five minutes later they’re patting each other on the back. Another five minutes, they’re swinging again.

I’m taking in this Latin soap opera from a peeling green bench fifty yards above the fray.

It’s six fifteen, and as always, I’m early.

It’s no accident. This is part of the gig, the required display of fealty and respect. Which is fine with me. It gives me time to light my cigar and watch the sailboats tack for home at the Devon Yacht Club.

I should cut back. The Davidoff torpedo is my third this week. But what’s life without a vice? What’s life with a vice? Did you know Freud smoked half a dozen cigars a day? He also died of mouth cancer, which I like to think was poetic payback for telling the world that all every guy wants to do is kill his father and boff his mom. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t need to know that.

Speaking of authority figures, a drumroll please, because here comes mine-BW-and he’s right on time, eleven minutes late.

With his three-hundred-dollar Helmut Lang jeans, torn and faded just right, and his God-knows-how-expensive light-blue cashmere hoodie and week-old growth, he’s looking more like a goddamn weekender every day. But who’s got the stones to tell him? Not me, bro, and they call me Loco for a reason.

“What’s up?” asks BW, but not in the convivial way most people use it. Out of BW’s mouth, it sounds more like “what’s your problem?” or “so what’s your problem now?” But this time it’s not just my problem, it’s our problem, which pisses him off ten times more.

“Apparently, we had company,” I say. “Out behind Wilson ’s house.”

“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”

“Lindgren.”

“That sucks.” For all his peccadilloes, BW has an impressive ability to cut to the chase.

Down in the sand, a drunk volleyballer is pointing at a ball mark and screaming bloody murder in either Spanish or Portuguese.

“What should I do now, boss?”

“Whatever you think is best.”

“Whatever I think is best, BW?”

“And let me know when you’ve done it.”

Then, like a puff of smoke from an overpriced cigar, BW’s gone, and it’s just me, the night, and the salsa.

Chapter 50. Loco

WHATEVER I THINK is best, huh? I think I get BW’s point, which means another trip to Brooklyn and another shitty, shitty, bang, bang.

Like his compadres out in the Hamptons, Manny Rodriguez works way too hard. It’s three in the morning, and I’ve been parked across the street from Manny’s apartment since eleven, and everyone in Bed-Stuy is asleep but him. Is it that immigrant work ethic or is something boiling in their blood? Quien sabe, ay?

Wait just a second-here comes Manny. Just in time, because my stomach couldn’t take any more bad coffee tonight.

Even now, our boy is still hopped up, bouncing to the music pumping through his headphones.

If you ask me, nothing’s ruined the city more than headphones and iPods and computers. It used to be New York offered the kind of random interaction you couldn’t get anywhere else. You never knew when you might have a moment with the beautiful girl waiting next to you for the light to change.

Or maybe you’d say something to a guy, not a gay thing, just two people traveling through this world acknowledging each other’s existence. Now everyone walks around obliviously listening to their own little music downloaded from their own little computers. It’s lonely, brother.

Plus, it’s dangerous. You step off the curb and don’t hear the crosstown bus till you’re under it, and you certainly don’t hear the Chinese guy pedaling around the corner on his greasy bike.

Well, now you can add the sad cautionary tale of Manny Rodriguez. He’s so caught up in his own tunes he doesn’t hear me walk up behind him and pull out my gun. He doesn’t sense anything’s the slightest bit amiss until a bullet is crashing through the back of his skull and boring into his brain. The poor guy doesn’t know he’s been murdered until he’s dead.

Chapter 51. Kate

THE BLUEBACK LAYING out the formal complaint against Randall Kane hits my desk at Walmark, Reid and Blundell around 2:30 p.m. I shut my door and clear my calendar for the rest of the day.

I’m well aware that this choice assignment is not based entirely on my skill as a litigator. For the high-powered CEO charged with crossing the line, walking into court with a female lawyer is pretty much textbook. And I don’t have a problem with that. There are still so many more disadvantages than advantages to being a woman, career-wise, that in those rare instances where it plays in your favor, I believe in going with the flow.

Once I read the language at the top of the complaint, I’m confident this is something we can win not only in court but in the media. It’s sprinkled with phrases like “hostile work environment,” which usually refers to off-color jokes and pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues pinned to cubicle walls.

Then I read the affidavit from the first of Randall Kane’s alleged victims. She’s a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three who spent nine years as Kane’s executive secretary. In her written statement, sworn under oath and the penalty of perjury, she describes how on more than thirty occasions, she repelled Kane’s physical and verbal sexual advances, and how when she finally quit and filed a complaint, he used all the corporate resources at his disposal to destroy her life.

By the time I finish reading the complaint, I realize that Randy Kane’s problems aren’t going away with a scary letter or pretrial motion. And there are eleven other women whose sworn testimonies are essentially identical, right down to the phone call they receive from Kane’s corporate lackey telling them they’ll never work again if they keep this up. Three of the women recorded the calls.

I close the file on my desk and ponder the East River. Kane apparently isn’t just an unfaithful husband. He’s a scumbag and possibly a serial rapist who just happens to be worth a billion dollars. He deserves to pay a high price for his actions, and if I help him avoid it, I’m no different from that in-house lackey of his making obscenely threatening phone calls.

For a decade I’ve punched all the right tickets, from Law Review at Columbia to two years prosecuting white-collar crime for the DA’s southern circuit, and after three and a half years at Walmark, Reid and Blundell, I’ve got senior partner in my sights.

You know how many female senior partners there are or have been at Walmark, Reid and Blundell? None.

So why am I walking down the corridor to Tony Reid’s corner office?

Is it possible that Tom’s midnight pitch hit the mark? God help me if it did. Tom has made me feel like crap in a hundred ways, but I never dreamed he’d make me feel professionally jealous, or worse, that he’d pass me on the ethical ladder.

But now I’m a very well-paid consigliere, and he’s defending someone he believes is innocent-for free.

Reid waves me into his office, and I drop the stack of affidavits on his antique desk.

“You better read this,” I say. “We go to trial, Randall Kane will be exposed as a ruthless sexual predator.”

“Then it can’t go to trial,” says Reid.

“I can’t represent this man, Tony.”

Reid calmly gets up and closes the door. It barely makes a sound.

“I wouldn’t think I’d have to remind you, of all people, how important Randy Kane is to this firm. In every department, from corporate to real estate to labor management, we bill him hundreds of hours a year. A dozen unfortunate women have been manipulated by a shameless lawyer, an ambulance-chaser out for his own gain. You know the game. And if by some chance they’re telling the truth? Guess what, ladies? It’s a tough world.”

“Get someone else then, Tony. Please. I’m serious about this.”

Tony Reid thinks about what I’ve said before he responds. Then he speaks in the same persuasive tone that has made him one of the most successful trial lawyers in New York.

“For an ambitious attorney, Kate-and everything I know about you indicates you are as ambitious and talented as any young lawyer I know-cases like this one are a rite of passage. So unless you come back to this office at eight tomorrow morning and tell me otherwise, I’m going to do you and this firm the favor of pretending this conversation never happened.”

Chapter 52. Kate

THAT NIGHT, I get back to my apartment at the unheard-of hour of 7:00 p.m. Three years ago, I bought this insanely expensive one-bedroom apartment in the eighties on the Upper West Side because it had a garden. Now, having poured myself a glass of pricey Pinot Noir, I’m actually sitting in my garden and listening to the sounds of the city as the lights blink on in the surrounding apartments.

I watch the sky go black on this late October night, then go back inside for a refill and a blanket. The scene is almost but not quite right. So I drag out my ottoman and put my feet up. Now that’s more like it-comfortable, warm, and miserable, my life in a nutshell.

That arrogant prick Reid is right about one thing: I should hardly have been shocked to discover Randy Kane is a scumbag. Wealthy scumbags pretty much fill the coffers at Walmark, Reid and Blundell. If the firm is ever in need of a catchy motto to chisel into the marble lobby, I’d suggest Scumbags Are Us.

But I don’t want to be the person defending those clients anymore. How did this happen? When I went to law school, aiding and abetting white-collar crime couldn’t have been further from my career goal. But then I did well at Columbia, got on the fast track, and wanted to prove I could stay on it, earn just as much money, make partner just as fast, etc., etc., etc.

Sitting in the cold dark of my lovely garden with my third glass of Pinot, I realize there have been other consequences of my fab career. You may have noticed that I’m sharing my depressing thoughts with myself tonight rather than bouncing them off a succession of dear old friends. That’s because I really don’t have any. Forget a boyfriend. I don’t even have a really close girlfriend I’d be comfortable pouring my heart out to right now.

I think it’s that competitiveness and pride thing again. In law school I had two wonderful, very close friends-Jane Anne and Rachel. The three of us were thick as thieves and swore we’d be soul mates to the end and bring the bastards to their knees.

But then Jane Anne gets happy and pregnant, and Rachel stays on a fast track for a couple of years before dropping out to work for Amnesty International. Both resent my “success” a little, and I’m miffed by their resentment. Then one time a week goes by without one of us returning a call, and then it’s a couple of weeks, and eventually no one wants to give in and pick up the phone. So I finally break down and make the call but feel the chilliness on the other end, or think I do, and wonder who needs that.

It turns out I do, because the next thing you know I’m alone in the dark with only a blanket and a glass of wine for company.

Now it’s 2:00 a.m., and the empty bottle of Etude lies next to the half-empty box of Marlboros, which was full when it was delivered from the bodega three hours ago. Let the record show that I never once represented a cigarette manufacturer. Of course, no one asked me to, but it should still count for something.

An hour and a couple more cigarettes later, I’m dialing the number of the one person on this planet I’m reasonably confident will be delighted to hear from me at three in the morning.

“Of course I’m not sleeping,” says Macklin as if he’s just been told he hit the Lotto. “At my age you never sleep, unless, that is, you’re trying to stay awake. Kate, it’s so lovely to hear your voice.”

Mack, why did you have to say that? Because now I’m crying and can’t stop. It’s five minutes before I can blurt, “Macklin, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? What are you talking about, darling girl? That’s what unlimited minutes are for.”

That sets off more sobbing. “Macklin, you still there?”

“Yup. Always.”

“So, Mack, I’m thinking of coming out to Montauk for a while and was wondering if that offer about your extra bedroom is still on the table.”

“What do you think, Kate?”

And then I lose it again.

And in the morning I call Jane Anne and Rachel too.

Chapter 53. Tom

BACK IN THE day when an East Hampton billionaire turned fifty, he’d buy his way out of his second marriage, get a Harley and a tattoo, and find a nice twenty-something girl (or boy) who admired him for what he truly was-a very, very rich person.

Now instead of a scooter he can barely ride, maybe he buys a surfboard he can’t ride at all. And instead of a leather jacket, he squeezes into a full-body polyurethane girdle, otherwise known as a wet suit.

I have nothing but respect for real surfers. Feif, for example, was a wicked athlete and a bona fide badass on the water. It’s the middle-aged nouveau surfers I have trouble with, the guys who wander into what used to be perfectly decent dive bars and try to get the ball rolling with that pretentiously simple two-word question: “You surf?”

Still, the surfing craze has been good to my pals. Sometimes Feif made five hundred dollars a day giving lessons, and it’s been manna from heaven for Griffin Stenger, who owns the Amagansett Surf and Bike Shop. Grif tells me that on Saturday mornings the Beach Road crew tries to catch the baby waves that come off the breaker at the end of Georgica Beach. Since the spot is no more than two hundred yards from where Feif, Walco, and Rochie were murdered, and because there’s no point going back to Cold Ground, Inc., till Monday, I’m here to see if one of these ocean gods saw anything the night of the murder.

Saturday morning, I’m out of the house at dawn and waiting at the breaker when the surfer lads start to waddle in.

In the first group, flanked by a burly duo, is Mort Semel, who sold his company to eBay last year for $3 billion.

When I approach him to introduce myself, the two younger, muscular guys drop their boards and get in my face. “Can we help you, sir?”

“I was hoping to talk to Mort for a minute.”

“About what, sir?”

“I’m a lawyer representing a young man accused of committing a murder near here a couple months ago. I know Mr. Semel is a close neighbor of Mr. Wilson’s and often surfs here. I need to find out if he saw or heard anything that night, or knows anyone who did.”

One bodyguard stays with me, the other walks over to Semel, then trots back as if he can’t wait to tell me the good news. “Nope. Mort didn’t see or hear a thing.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, since I came all the way out here, I’d kind of like to ask him myself.”

“Not a good idea.”

“This is not his home,” I say, and my temperature is starting to rise a little. “This is a public beach, asshole. I’m talking to Mort.” I start to walk his way.

Apparently not a good idea either, because now I’m flat on my back in the sand, and the bigger of the two has his foot on my throat.

“Stay down,” he says. “Stay still.”

Chapter 54. Tom

“I GET THE picture,” I say. “I get it, all right?”

But I’m thinking, A surfer with two bodyguards. How rad is that? It’s almost funny, except, as I tried to point out, this is a public beach. Also, I’m lying in the public sand.

So I grab the foot in my face and twist it around like little Linda Blair’s head in The Exorcist. The ankle makes a satisfyingly unnatural sound; then the cartilage around the bully bodyguard’s knee cracks, and a scream comes out of his mouth. I don’t see him fall because I’ve already turned my attention to his colleague, and the two of us pretty much break even until some of the other surfers pull us apart.

Break even might have been a slight exaggeration on my part. When I get back to my car one eye is closed already. And back at my house, a half hour later, there’s some blood in it. But I’d be feeling worse if I let those jerks scare me off my own beach.

Besides, one eye still works fine, so I go back to the notes from my last interview with Dante.

In addition to the aching ribs and the eye, I must have taken a blow to the head, because I swear a woman who looks exactly like Kate Costello just walked into my backyard. The woman in question wears blue jeans, a white Penguin shirt, and black Converse sneakers, and she comes over to where I’m sitting at a wooden table and takes the chair next to mine.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

“A couple of bodyguards.”

“Belonging to whom?”

“Oh, some guy on Beach Road I tried to talk to about the murders this morning.”

Kate wrinkles her nose and sighs. “You haven’t changed, have you?”

“Actually, I have, Kate.”

Then this woman, who I’m pretty sure actually is Kate Costello, says, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to help you defend Dante Halleyville.”

And as I sit there too stunned to reply, she continues, “The thing is, you’ve got to say yes because I quit my job yesterday and moved out here.”

“You know there’s no pay, right? No perks. No medical insurance. Nothing.”

“I’m feeling healthy.”

“So did I when I woke up.”

“Sorry about that.”

“And you’re okay working as an equal with someone who couldn’t even get hired by Walmark, Reid and Blundell?”

And then Kate nearly smiles. “I consider your unworthiness of Walmark, Reid and Blundell an important point in your favor.”

Chapter 55. Kate

HE’S JUST A kid.

A very tall kid who looks frightened.

Those are my first unformed thoughts when Dante Halleyville, bending at the waist so as not to bang his head, steps into the tiny attorney’s room where Tom and I are waiting. Now I’m thinking that it’s one thing for an eighteen-year-old to hold his own with men on a basketball court but another to do it at a fifteen-hundred-man maximum-security jail. And Dante’s eyes definitely reveal he’s as terrified as my kid, or your kid, or any kid would be who suddenly found himself locked up in this terrible place.

“I’ve got good news,” says Tom. “This is Kate Costello. Kate is a top New York lawyer. She’s just taken temporary leave from her job at a major firm to help with your case.”

Dante, who has already gotten way too much bad news, only grimaces. “You’re not backing out on me, are you, Tom?”

“No way,” says Tom, straining to make himself understood better. “Defending you is all I’m doing and all I will be doing until you’re out of here. But now you’ve got yourself a legal team-a shaky ex-jock and an A-list attorney. And Kate is from Montauk, so she’s local too,” he says, reaching out for Dante’s hand. “It’s all good, Dante.”

Dante grabs for Tom’s hand and they embrace, and then Dante very shyly makes eye contact with me for the first time.

“Thanks, Kate. I appreciate it.”

“It’s good to meet you, Dante,” I say, and already feel more invested in this case than any I’ve handled in the last few years. Very strange, but true.

The first thing Tom and I do is talk with Dante about the murder of Michael Walker. He’s close to tears when he tells us about his friend, and it’s difficult to believe he had anything to do with the killing. Still, I’ve met some very convincing liars and con artists in my day, and Dante Halleyville has everything to lose.

“I got another piece of good news,” says Tom. “I tracked down the guy who was at the basketball court that night-a Cuban named Manny Rodriguez. We couldn’t talk for long, but he told me he saw something that night, something heavy. And now that I know where he works, it won’t be hard to find him again.”

As Dante’s young face brightens slightly, I can see all the courage that’s been required to keep it together in this place, and my heart goes out to him. I think, I like this kid. So will the right jury.

“How are you holding up?” I ask.

“It’s kind of rough,” says Dante slowly, “and some people can’t take it. Last night, about three in the morning, these bells go off and a shout comes over the intercom: ‘Hang-up in cell eight!’ That’s what they say when an inmate tries to hang himself, and it happens so often the guards carry a special tool on their belts to cut them down.

“I’m in block nine, across the way, so I see the guard race into a cell and cut some guy down from where he’s hanging. I don’t know if they got him in time. I don’t think so.”

I haven’t read through the materials yet, but Tom and I stay with Dante all afternoon to keep him company and give him a chance to get to know me a little. I tell him about cases I’ve worked on and why I got sick of it, and Tom recounts some NBA lowlights-like the night Michael Jordan dunked the ball off his head. “I wanted to ask the ref to stop the game and give me the ball,” says Tom, “but I didn’t think it would go over too well with my coach.”

Dante cracks up, and for a second I catch a glimpse of his smile, which is so pure it’s heartbreaking. But at six, when our time is up, his face clouds over again. It feels awful to leave him here.

It’s after eight when we get back to Montauk, but Tom wants to show me the office. Our office. He grabs the newspapers lying on the first step and leads me up a steep, creaking staircase. His attic space-with dormer walls slanting down on both sides so he can only stand up straight in half of it-is a far cry from Walmark, Reid and Blundell, but I kind of like it. It feels like rooms I had in college. Hopeful and genuine, like starting over.

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” says Tom, “every piece in the room is original IKEA.”

Tom leafs through the Times while I look around. “Remember,” he says, “when I used to just read the Sports? Now all I read is the Metro section. It’s the only part that seems connected to anything I under-”

He stops midsentence-and looks as though he’s been kicked in the stomach.

“What? What’s the matter?” I say, and walk around to look for myself.

Near the top of the page is a picture of a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Candles have been set out and lit in front of a makeshift shrine, an attempt to mark and protest one more pointless street killing in the neighborhood.

Beneath the picture is a story with the headline HIP-HOP FEUD CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM.

The name of the vic is right there in the first paragraph, staring up at both of us-Manny Rodriguez.

Chapter 56. Tom

I AM QUICKLY learning that misery does love company. And let’s hope two lawyers without a chance in hell are better than one.

When Kate and I pull into the lot behind East Hampton High School, all that’s left of the sudden November dusk is a violet smudge in a desolate sky. We park behind the gym and wait, doing our best to ignore the awkward reunion feeling of sitting next to each other in pretty much the exact spot where we met almost twenty years before.

“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” I finally say, and regret it immediately.

“Still quoting Yogi,” says Kate.

“Only when it’s absolutely appropriate.”

A parade of students, all looking ridiculously young, pushes through the rear doors of the gym, and each drives off in one of the cars or SUVs parked or idling in the lot.

“Where’s our girl?” Kate asks.

“Don’t know. Our luck, she has the flu.”

“Our luck, she was run over by a semi this morning.”

At six thirty, when only a couple of cars are left, Lisa Feifer-Eric’s kid sister-steps through the door into the chilly air. Like her brother, Lisa is thin and graceful, the star on the girls’ state-championship lacrosse team. She moves across the empty lot with the relaxed shuffle of a spent athlete.

As she drops her gym bag on the roof of her old Jeep and unlocks the door, Kate and I get out of our car.

“We can’t waste time feeling sorry for ourselves about Rodriguez.” Kate had told me that first thing in the morning when she walked into the office. By then she had already read through my interviews with Dante and thought there were several areas worth pursuing. “It’s not our job to find out who actually killed Feifer, Walco, Rochie, and Walker. But it would sure help if we could steer the jury somewhere else. We’ve definitely got to find out more about the deceased.”

“You mean, dig up dirt on the dead?”

“If that’s how you want to put it,” Kate said, “that’s fine with me. Feifer, Walco, and Rochie were my friends too. But now our only loyalty is to Dante. So we have to dig, unmercifully, and see where it leads. And if it pisses certain people off, so be it.”

“Certain people are already pissed off.”

“So be it.”

I know Kate’s right, and I like the concept of unmerciful action on our part, but when Lisa Feifer turns around and sees us coming toward her, she looks at us as if we’re muggers, or worse.

“Hi there, Lisa,” says Kate, in a voice that manages to sound natural. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

“About what?”

“Eric,” says Kate. “You know that we’re representing Dante Halleyville.”

“How messed up is that? You were his babysitter. Now you’re defending the guy who put a bullet between his eyes.”

“If we thought there was any chance Dante killed your brother, or Rochie, or Walco, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

“Bullshit.”

“And if you know anything dangerous that Eric might have been involved in you’ve got to tell us. If you don’t, Lisa, you’re just helping his real murderer get away with it.”

“No, that’s what you’re doing,” says Lisa, pushing past us and getting into her car. If we hadn’t jumped back, she probably would have run us over as she tore out of the lot.

“So be it,” I say.

“Very good.” Kate nods. “You’re a fast learner.”

Chapter 57. Tom

DIGGING FOR DIRT on your old pals in a town like Montauk is a lot easier said than done though.

Walco’s father slams the door in our face. Rochie’s brother grabs a shotgun and gives us thirty seconds to get off his property. And Feifer’s mom, a sweet woman who volunteers three days a week at the Montauk Public Library, unleashes a stream of curses foul and vicious enough to earn the approval of Dante’s most hardened fellow inmates over at Riverhead.

We get the same obscene kiss-off from Feifer, Walco, and Rochie’s old friends and coworkers. Even ex-girlfriends, whose hearts had been stomped on by the victims, become ferociously protective of their memory at the sight of us.

Dante thinks being represented by locals is helping him, but right now it’s a hindrance, because to townies our decision has made the whole thing personal. Just acknowledging Kate or me on the street is viewed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Being treated like a pariah is harder on me than it is on Kate. She hasn’t lived here for years, and working at Walmark, Reid and Blundell has thickened her skin.

But the lack of progress frays her nerves, and after a week and little to show for our efforts, my cramped dormer office has lost its charm. Same goes for the absurdly loud creaking stairs leading to the chiropractor next door. I, on the other hand, kind of like having Kate around. It gives me confidence. Makes the whole thing feel real.

Another visitor to the chiropractor and Kate yells out, “This is like working in a theme-park haunted house.”

“I’ll get you coffee,” I say.

It’s a half-hour round trip to the nearest deli whose owners are unlikely to poison us, so I’ve brought my antique Mr. Coffee from home. But even the time-honored combination of caffeine and desperation doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

“We need to find an outsider,” Kate finally says. “Somebody who grew up here but never fit in.”

“You mean, other than the two of us?”

“Somebody has to be willing to talk to us, Tom. C’mon, think. Who’s our Deep Throat?”

I think about her question for a bit. “How about Sean?” I finally say.

“He was a friend of all three of those guys. Plus he’s a lifeguard, for God’s sake. I was thinking of a little more of an outcast.”

“He’s not a social pariah, Kate. But he’s got the guts to go against the flow. People talk to Sean. He could have heard something.”

“You think you’d have better luck talking to him alone?”

I shake my head. “Actually, I think you’d have a better chance, me being his uncle and everything. Plus, he probably has a crush on you.”

Kate screws up her face. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t he?”

Chapter 58. Kate

L.I. SOUNDS, WHERE Tom’s nephew Sean has been working since the lifeguard chairs came down, is one of the few stores still open in East Hampton, and it’s not clear why to me.

At nine that night, there are exactly two people in the brightly lit, narrow space. Sean is up front by the register, as his one potential customer browses the aisles. Sean’s a good-looking kid with long blond hair. Actually, he looks more like Tom than Jeff.

I glance around the store. Sounds will always have a special place in my heart. Until they built the mall in Bridgehampton, it was the only record store for thirty miles. With posters of Hendrix, Dylan, and Lennon up on the walls and a staff of zealots preaching about the eternal difference between Good and Awful music, it felt as serious as stepping into a church.

Sean smiles in welcome as I step into the light. He puts on a spacey CD I don’t recognize.

The other customer, a tall, skinny guy with wire-rimmed glasses, glances at me then looks away. Nothing changes. He’s pushing fifty but has the self-conscious slouch of an eighteen-year-old. The guy is working the back of the alphabet, so I start on the other end and move happily from AC/DC to the Clash to Fleetwood Mac.

When he leaves, I take a reissue of Rumors up to the register.

“Classic,” says Sean.

“You approve? I was sure you’d think it was too girly and lame.”

“What are you talking about, Kate? I was playing it an hour ago. Me and the cross-eyed cat couldn’t get enough of it.”

“Also, the title seemed kind of appropriate,” I say.

“You lost me.”

“You know, have you heard any?”

Sean seems a little disappointed, but I’m not sure if it’s the subject matter or my attempt at humor.

“Is that really why you’re here?”

“It is, Sean.”

“You mean information about Feifer, Walco, and Rochie?” asks Sean.

“Or anything that might help explain why someone would want to kill them.”

“Even if I did-I’m not sure I’d tell you.”

“Because people told you not to.”

Sean looks at me as if I just insulted him in the worst possible way. “I could care less about that bullshit. But these dudes were my pals, and they’re not here to defend themselves.”

“We’re just trying to figure out who killed them, Sean. If you’re a friend, I’d think you want to know too.”

“Spare me the lecture, Kate,” says Sean. But then he flashes one of those gracious Dunleavy smiles. “So you going to buy this CD, or you loitering?”

“I’m buying.”

I take my CD out to a dark bench a couple doors down and claw at the cellophane as I take in the elegant street and cool, fragrant air. East Hampton is one of the prettiest towns you’ll ever see. It’s the people who can be ugly sometimes.

Beside the bench is a mailbox. Looking closely, I see I’m not the only Sounds customer to make this their first stop. The blue surface is covered with hundreds of tiny little peeled-off CD titles, and now Rumors is part of the graffiti montage.

Rumors is even better than I remembered, and when I get to Mack’s place, I sit in the car in the driveway until I’ve heard the whole thing.

When I finally go inside, Mack is snoring on the living room couch, and my beeping cell doesn’t faze him at all.

It’s Sean, and he’s whispering. “I have heard something, Kate, and from people I trust-which is that in the last few weeks, Feif, Walco, and Rochie were all hitting the pipe. This summer, crack was all the rage out here, particularly on Beach Road. Supposedly, all three of them got into it. Once you hit the pipe, you can go from zero to a hundred in a weekend. That’s what I know. So how’d you like the CD?”

“Great. Thanks. For everything, Sean.”

I hang up and look over at my sleeping host. Grateful that Mack still hasn’t stirred, I pull the blanket up to his chin and head upstairs.

So they say the dead boys were hitting the pipe. I wonder if it’s true.

Chapter 59. Tom

THE CALL FROM my nephew Sean seems to break the frustrating logjam on the case, because the very next afternoon, eighteen-year-old Jarvis Maloney climbs the creaking stairs to our office. He is the first visitor we’ve had in a week, and Wingo is beside himself, not to mention all over Jarvis.

“I’ve got something that might not mean anything,” he says. “But Coach told me I should tell you about it right away.”

Every summer, the village of East Hampton shows its appreciation for the influx of free-spending visitors by siccing a teenage army of meter maids on them. Dressed in brown pants and white shirts, they hump up and down Main Street chalking tires, reading dates on registration and inspection stickers, writing tickets, and basically printing money for the town. Jarvis, a jug-headed high school senior, who also happens to play noseguard for the East Hampton High School football team, was a member of last summer’s infantry, and once we get Wingo off him, he shares what’s on his mind.

“About nine o’clock on the Saturday night that Feifer, Walco, and Rochie were murdered, I ticketed a car at Georgica Beach. Actually, I wrote two tickets-one for not having a valid 2003 beach sticker and another for the missing emissions sticker. Only reason it stuck in my mind was the car-a maroon nine-eleven with seven hundred miles on the odometer.

“The next day, I’m shooting the breeze with my buddy who works the early shift. We had a little competition about who ticketed the sweetest car, and I throw out the Porsche. He says he ticketed it too, at the same spot, early the next morning. That means it was sitting there all night, right next to where the bodies were found. Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean a thing, but Coach says I should tell you.”

Soon as Jarvis leaves, I drive over to Village police headquarters. What little crime there is out here is divvied up two ways. The Hampton police patrol the roads from Southampton to Montauk, but the Village police are in charge of everything falling inside the village itself, and as you might expect, the two departments pretty much hate each other’s guts.

Mickey Porter, the chief of the Village police, is a friend. Unlike the Hampton police, who tend to take themselves very seriously, Porter, a tall guy with a big red mustache, doesn’t pretend he’s a character on some cop show. Plus, he’s got no issue with Kate and me representing Dante.

After 9/11, the Village Police Department, like others all over the country, received a powerful fifty-thousand-dollar computer from the Bureau of Homeland Security. In thirty seconds Mickey has the registration of the ticketed Porsche on his screen-a New York plate, IZD235, registered to my beach buddy Mort Semel at his Manhattan address, 850 Park Avenue.

Bingo.

Well, not quite.

“Even though it’s registered to Semel,” says Porter, “I’m pretty sure the only one who drove it was his daughter Teresa.” He scrolls down on the screen and says, “See, Teresa Semel, eighteen. One week in August she got three tickets, two of them for speeding.”

“What do you expect, you give a hundred-thousand-dollar car to an eighteen-year-old?”

“On Beach Road, a nine-eleven is a Honda Civic,” says Porter. “An act of parental restraint. Besides, Tess is no ordinary teenager.”

“She’s a fashion model, right? Dated some guy in Guns ’N Roses?”

“Stone Temple Pilots, but close enough. Beautiful girl. Was on the cover of Vogue at fourteen and played the hottie in a couple teen flicks. Since then, she’s been in and out of rehab.”

“It sucks being rich and beautiful.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m just beautiful.”

“Trust me then. So, Mickey, I gotta see this girl. For whatever reason, she was at the murder scene.”

Chapter 60. Tom

I REINFORCE WITH Mickey that I need to talk to Teresa soon. Before she does something bad to herself or someone decides to do something bad to her. Still, I don’t expect him to report in before I’m halfway back to Montauk.

“Tom, you’re in luck. Teresa Semel just got back in town after a stint at Betty Ford. Hurry, maybe you can catch her while she’s still clean. What I hear, she’s replaced her heroin addiction with exercise. Spends all day at the Wellness Center.”

“The proper word’s dependency.”

“I mean it, Tom. The girl’s got a thousand-dollar-a-day Pilates habit.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Wellness Center myself, watching Teresa’s class through a green-tinted oval window.

Spaced evenly on the floor are five female acolytes. All exhibit near-perfect form as far as I can tell-but no one can match Teresa Semel’s desperate concentration.

Seeing her effort, I regret mocking her. Instead of sitting at home and feeling sorry for herself, she’s literally taking her demons to the mat and fighting them off one after another.

Informing the client that time is up is always a delicate moment in the service industry, and the instructor shuts down her hundred-dollar session with a cleansing breath and a round of congratulations.

The women collect themselves and their belongings and serenely slide out of the room.

Everyone except Teresa, who lingers on her mat as if terrified at the prospect of being left on her own with time on her hands. She actually seems relieved when I introduce myself.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about the murders on the beach last summer,” I say. “I represent the young man charged with the killings.”

“Dante Halleyville,” Teresa says. “He didn’t do it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just do,” she says as if the answer floated into her beautiful head like the message in a plastic eight ball.

“I’m here because your car was parked at the beach nearby that night.”

“I almost died that night too,” says Teresa. “Or maybe that was the night I got saved. I’d been so good, but that night I went out and copped. I met my connection in the parking lot. Shot up on a blanket on the beach. Slept there the whole night.”

“See anything? Hear anything?”

“No. That’s the point, isn’t it? The next morning I told Daddy, and twelve hours later, I was back in rehab.”

“Who’d you buy from?”

“As if there’s a choice,” says Teresa.

I don’t want to seem too eager, even though I am. “What do you mean?”

“There’s only one person you can cop from on Beach Road. It’s been that way as long as I can remember.”

“Does he have a name?”

“A nickname, anyway. Loco. As in crazy.”

Chapter 61. Kate

FIVE MINUTES AFTER we lift off from the East Hampton heliport, the guy seated next to me glances down at the traffic crawling west on 27 and flashes a high-watt smile. “I love catching the heli back to town,” he says. “An hour after going for a run on the beach I’m back in my apartment on Fifth Avenue sipping a martini. It makes the whole weekend.”

“And it’s even lovelier when it’s bumper to bumper for the poor slobs down below, right?”

“Caught me peeking,” he says with a chuckle. He’s in his late forties, tan and trim and dressed in the traveling uniform of the überclass-overly creased jeans, dress shirt, a cashmere blazer. On his wrist is a platinum Patek Philippe; on his sockless feet, Italian loafers.

“Fifteen seconds and you’ve seen right through me. It takes most people at least an hour.” He extends a hand and says, “Roberto Nuñez, a pleasure.”

“Katie. Lovely to meet you too, Roberto.”

In fact, I already knew his name and that he owns a South American investment boutique and is Mort Semel’s neighbor in the Hamptons. After Tom’s run-in with Semel’s bodyguards taught us how hard it would be to talk to Beach Road types, I called Ed Yourkewicz, the brother of a law school roommate. A helicopter pilot, Ed has recently gone from transporting emergency supplies between Baghdad and Fallujah to shuttling billionaires between Manhattan and the Hamptons.

Last week I e-mailed him a list of Beach Road residents and asked if on a less-than-full flight he could put me beside one of them for the forty-minute, thirty-five-hundred-dollar trip. He called this afternoon and told me to be at the southern tip of the airport at 6:55 p.m. “And don’t come a minute earlier unless you want to blow your cover.”

For the next ten minutes Roberto struggles in vain to capture and convey the miracle that is Roberto. There are the half-dozen homes, the Lamborghini and Maybach, the ceaseless stress of presiding over a “modest little empire,” and the desire, growing stronger by the day, to chuck it all for a “simpler, more real” life.

It’s a well-oiled monologue, and when he’s done he smiles shyly as if relieved it’s finally over and says, “Your turn, Katie. What do you do?”

“God, I dread that question. It’s so embarrassing. Try to enjoy my life, I guess. Try to help others enjoy it a little more too. I run a couple foundations-one helps inner-city kids land prep-school scholarships. The other involves a summer camp for the same kind of at-risk kids.”

“A do-gooder. How impressive.”

“At least by day.”

“And when the sun goes down? By the way, I love what you’re wearing.”

After getting Ed’s call, I had just enough time to race to the Bridgehampton mall and buy a black Lacoste shirt dress three sizes too small.

“The usual vices, I’m afraid. Can’t they invent some new ones?”

“Altruistic and naughty. You sound perfect.”

“Speaking of perfection, you know where an overbred philanthropist can score some ecstasy?”

Roberto purses his lips a second, and I think I’ve lost him. But, hey, he wants to be my friend, right?

“I imagine from the same person who supplies anything you might need along those lines, the outlandishly expensive Loco. I’m surprised you aren’t a client already. From what I hear he has a tidy monopoly on the high-end drug trade and is quite committed to maintaining it. Thus the nickname. On the plus side, he is utterly discreet and reliable and has paid off the local constabulary so there’s no need to fret about it.”

“Sounds like quite the impressive dude. You ever meet him?”

“No, and I intend to keep it that way. But give me your number and I’ll have something for you next weekend.”

Below us, the Long Island Expressway disappears into the Midtown Tunnel, and a second later all of Lower Manhattan springs up behind it.

“Why don’t you give me yours?” I say. “I’ll call Saturday afternoon.”

The width of Manhattan is traversed in a New York minute, and the helicopter drops onto a tiny strip of cement between the West Side Highway and the Hudson.

“I look forward to it,” says Roberto, handing me his card. It says Roberto Nuñez-human being. Good God almighty.

“In the meantime, is there any chance I can persuade you to join me for a martini? My butler makes a very good one,” he continues.

“Not tonight.”

“Don’t like martinis?”

“I adore them.”

“Then what?”

“I’m a decadent do-gooder, Roberto, but I’m not easy.”

He laughs. I’m such a funny girl-when I want to be.

Chapter 62. Tom

ABOUT THE SAME time that Kate catches her whirlybird to Manhattan, I squeeze into a tiny seat in a fourth-grade Amagansett homeroom smelling of chalk and sour milk.

Like her, I have a role to play, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s much of a stretch.

As I take in the scene, more adults enter the classroom and wedge themselves into small chairs, and despite how rich most of them are, there’s none of the usual posturing. The leader closes the door and signals me, and I walk to the front of the room and clear my throat.

“My name is John,” I say, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

The crowd murmurs with self-recognition and support as I lay out a familiar story.

“My father gave me my first glass of beer when I was eleven,” I say, which happens to be true. “The next night, I went out with my pals and got gloriously drunk.” Also true, but from here on, I’m winging it.

“It felt so perfect I spent the next twenty years trying to re-create that feeling. Never happened, but as you know, it didn’t keep me from trying.”

There are more murmurs and empathetic nods and maybe I actually belong here-I’m hardly a model of sobriety. But I try not to think about that and keep my performance marching along.

“Six years ago, my wife walked out and I ended up in the hospital. That’s when I went to my first meeting, and thank God, I’ve been sober since. But lately my life and work have gotten much more stressful.” I assume some of the people in the room know me or the work I’m referring to, but Amagansett is a different world from Montauk, and I don’t recognize anyone personally.

“In the last couple of weeks, I’ve felt myself inching closer to the precipice, so I came here tonight,” I say, which is also true in a way. “It’s hard for me to admit-but I need a little help.”

When the meeting comes to a close, I have a set of new friends, and a handful of them linger in the parking lot. They don’t want to leave here and be alone just yet. So they lean on their Beamers and Benzes and trade war stories. And guys being guys, it gets competitive.

When one describes being escorted by two cops from the delivery room the morning his son was born, another tops him-or bottoms him-by passing out at his old man’s funeral. I’m starting to feel kind of sane, actually.

“What was your poison?” asks a gray-bearded Hollywood producer who owns one of the homes on Beach Road. He catches me off guard.

“Specifically?” I ask, buying time as I frantically canvass my brain.

“Yeah, specifically,” he says, snorting, provoking a round of laughs.

“White Russians,” I spit out. “I know it sounds funny, but it wasn’t. I’d go through two bottles of vodka a night. How about you?”

“I was shooting three thousand dollars a week, and one of my problems was I could afford it.”

“You cop from Loco?” I ask, and as soon as I do, I know I’ve crossed some kind of line.

Suddenly the lot goes quiet, and the producer fixes me with a stare. Scrambling, I say, “I ask because that’s the crazy fuck I used to cop from.”

“Oh, yeah?” says the producer, leaning toward me from the hood of his black Range Rover. “Then get your stories straight. You an alkie or a junkie?”

“Junkie,” I say, looking down at the cement. “I don’t know you guys, so I made that shit up about the drinking.”

“Come over here,” he says.

If he looks at my arms for tracks, I’m busted, but I have no choice.

I step closer to his car, and for what seems like a full minute, he stares into my eyes. Then he pushes off his car, grabs my shoulders, and digs his gray beard into my neck.

“Kid,” he says, “if I can beat it, you can too. And don’t go anywhere near that fucker Loco. What I hear, he was the one who offed those kids on the beach last summer.”

Chapter 63. Tom

AT THE OFFICE the next morning, Kate and I lay out our notes like fishermen dumping their catch on a Montauk wharf. In a month of digging, some straightforward and a lot of it shamelessly underhanded, we have managed to complicate the case against Dante in half a dozen ways. According to Kate, every new wrinkle should make it easier to cast doubt about what really happened that night.

“For the prosecution, this is going to be about the fear of young black males,” she says. “Well, now we can flip the stereotype. If what we have is accurate, then in the weeks before their death, the white kids were messing up. And they weren’t doing coke or ecstasy or pills, but crack, the blackest and most ghetto drug of all. Then there’s this mysterious dealer, Loco.”

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“Try to confirm what we have. Look for more. Look for Loco. But in the meantime, we’re also going to share what we have.”

“Share?”

Kate pulls a white shoe box out of her gym bag and places it on the table. With the same sense of ceremony as a samurai unsheathing a sword, she takes out an old-fashioned Rolodex. “In here are the numbers of every top reporter and editor in New York,” she says. “It’s the most valuable thing I took with me from Walmark, Reid and Blundell.”

For the rest of the day, Kate works the phone, pitching Dante’s story to one top editor after another, from the murders and his arrest to his background and the upcoming trial.

“This case has everything,” she tells Vanity Fair’s Betsey Hall, then editor Graydon Carter. “Celebrities, gangsters, billionaires. There’s race, class, and an eighteen-year-old future NBA star who’s facing the death penalty. And it’s all happening in the Hamptons.”

In fact, it is a huge story, and before the afternoon is over, we’re negotiating with half a dozen major magazines clamoring for special access to both Dante and us.

“The cat is out of the bag,” says Kate when the last call has been made and her Rolodex is tucked away. “Now, God help us.”