The Beach House

Chapter 1

EVEN BY THE HEADY NORM of millennial boomtown Manhattan, where master craftsmen paint frescoes on subway walls, the new law offices of Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel were over the top. If the great downtown courthouses around Broadway were palaces of justice, the gleaming forty-eight-story tower at 454 Lexington Avenue was a monument to winning.

My name is Jack Mullen, and as a summer associate at Nelson, Goodwin, I guess I was winning, too. Still, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I entered Columbia Law School at the advanced age of twenty-six. But when a second-year student with $50,000 in college loans is offered a summer position at the most prestigious firm in the city, he doesn't turn it down.

The phone started ringing the instant I stepped into my small office.

I picked up.

Female operator on tape: "You have a collect call from Huntsville, Texas, from…"

Male voice, also recorded: "The Mudman."

Female operator again on tape: "If you wish to accept, please say yes or push the number -"

"Yes, absolutely," I interrupted. "Mudman, how are you?"

"Not bad, Jack, except maybe for the fact that the state of Texas is pissing its pants at the thought of putting me down like a dog."

"Dumb question."

The surprisingly high-pitched voice at the other end of the line belonged to outlaw biker Billy "Mudman" Simon, and it was coming from the pay phone in Huntsville Prison's death row. Mudman was there waiting for the lethal injection that would put him to death for murdering his teenage girlfriend nineteen years earlier.

Mudman is no saint. He admits to all manner of misdemeanors and an occasional felony during his run in the Houston chapter of the Diablos. But killing Carmina Velasquez, he says, wasn't one of them.

"Carmina was a great woman," the Mudman told me the first time I interviewed him. "One of my best friends in this miserable world. But I was never in love with her. So why would I kill her?"

His letters, trial transcripts, and records of repeated failed attempts to win a new trial were dropped on my desk three days after I started working for the firm. After two weeks decoding every wildly misspelled word, contorted phrase, and hundreds of footnotes painstakingly transcribed in tiny block letters that looked as if they had come from the unsteady hand of a grade-schooler, I was convinced he was telling the truth.

And I liked him. He was smart and funny, and he didn't feel sorry for himself, despite a truckload of reasons why he should. Ninety percent of the convicts on death row were as good as screwed the day they were born, and Mudman, with his deranged junkie parents, was no different.

Nevertheless, he had no enthusiasm for blaming them for what had happened.

"They did their best, like everyone else," he said the one time I mentioned them. "Their best sucked, but let 'em rest in peace."

Rick Exley, my supervisor on the project, couldn't have cared less about Mudman's character or my rookie intuition. What mattered to him was that there were no witnesses to Velasquez's murder and that the Mudman had been convicted completely on the basis of blood and hair samples from the crime scene. That all happened before the forensic breakthrough of DNA testing. It meant we had a reasonable chance to be granted our request that blood and hair samples be taken to confirm that they matched the DNA of the physical evidence held in a vault somewhere in Lubbock.

"I'd hate to get your hopes up for nothing, but if the state lets us test, we could get a stay of execution."

"Don't ever worry about getting my hopes up for nothing, Jack. Where I'm at, insane hope is welcome anytime. Bring 'em on."

I was trying not to get too excited myself. I knew this pro bono project, with the pompous name of "the Innocence Quest," was primarily a PR stunt and that Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel didn't build forty-eight stories in midtown by looking out for the innocent poor on death row.

Still, when the Mudman was cut off after his allotted fifteen minutes, my hands were shaking.

Chapter 2

I WAS STILL MARVELING at how well the Mudman was bearing up when Pauline Grabowski, one of Nelson, Goodwin's top investigators, stuck her head in my office. To introduce the new recruits to the unique resources of the firm, Grabowski had been assigned to Mudman's case and had spent the past two weeks sussing out things in East Texas.

Grabowski, who was renowned for her resourcefulness and was said to have made as much as a junior partner, carried her reputation lightly. Somehow she'd carved out a niche for herself in this male bastion without being overtly aggressive. She was low-key but straightforward. Although attractive in a captain-of-the-soccer-team way, she did nothing to draw attention to it. She wore no makeup or jewelry, except for earrings, pulled her dark brown hair back in a hasty ponytail, and seemed to wear the same tailored blue suit every day. Actually, I liked her looks just fine.

What gave her such style was the way the simplicity of everything else in her appearance contrasted with her tattoo. Rather than a discreet, dainty turtle or butterfly, Pauline had the indelible mark of the Chrysler Building on her right arm.

It started just below her right shoulder and extended for several inches, to her elbow. It was rendered in a lustrous gold that caught the light bouncing off the spire, and in such detail that it included a winged gargoyle scowling down at the metropolis. According to rumor, it had taken six eight-hour sessions.

When I asked her why she felt so strongly about a skyscraper, her brown eyes flashed as if to say I didn't get it. "It's about people choosing to make something beautiful," she said. "Plus, my grandfather worked on a Chrysler assembly line for thirty-eight years. I figured he helped build it."

Pauline sat on the edge of my desk and told me that Stanley Higgins, the prosecutor in Mudman's case, had sent six men to death row from one little Texas county. He'd retired recently, mainly to a redbrick bar in a working-class section of Amarillo. "According to some nice people who befriended me there, Higgins has a serious drinking problem. Approximately every night, he spouts off about his career as a prosecutor and what he calls 'Higgins's justice.' I should probably make another trip before he parties himself to death."

"Is this what you do all day? Collect voir dire on the enemies of Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel?"

She smiled, and it was hard not to join in with her.

"You can use the Latin if you like, but I call it dirt. There's no lack of it out there, young Jack."

"Not as young as you might think. Mind if I ask what you do in your spare time?"

"Garden," Pauline said, straight-faced.

"Seriously?"

"Cactus, mainly. So be careful, Jack. Besides, I hear you're spoken for. Private investigator, remember?"

Chapter 3

AT 9:20 THAT FRIDAY EVENING, I grabbed my backpack and descended by elevator, escalator, and stairs, each a little grittier than the one before, until I reached a subway platform beneath Grand Central Terminal. The MTA shuttled me west and south to Penn Station, and I high-stepped it over to the track that would take me to Long Island. I caught the last train out.

Every car would soon be cheek by jowl with frisky young urbanites headed for the summer's first big Hamptons weekend, but I was early enough to claim a window seat. I slipped a CD into my Discman and hunkered down for the creaking three-hour ride to where the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road dead-end.

Montauk.

Home.

Minutes before the train lurched out, a kid who looked like a college freshman going home for the summer, all his dirty laundry and worry squeezed into one huge bag, sank into the seat across from mine.

Five minutes later he was asleep, a dog-eared paperback of The Red Badge of Courage hanging perilously from the pocket of his Old Navy tech vest. The book had also been a favorite of mine, and I reached over and tucked it safely back in.

Looking at the kid, who was tall and gawky with one of those mustache-goatees a nineteen-year-old sprouts with anxious pride, I was reminded of all the trips I made back home on that same train. Often I traveled in total defeat. Other times I was just looking to rest and refill my wallet, laboring for my old man's little construction company if he had enough work or, more often when he didn't, repainting the hulls at Jepson's Boatyard. But for five years I never made the trip without a nameless dread of what the future held.

It made me realize how much better things had gotten. I had just finished my second year at Columbia and made Law Review the semester before. I'd parlayed that into the associate gig, where I made more in a week than in a summer humping two-by-fours or repainting hulls.

And then there was Dana, who'd be waiting for me at the train. I'd been going out with her for almost a year, but it still amazed me. Part of it was her last name, Neubauer. Maybe you've heard of it. Her parents owned one of the biggest privately held companies in the world, and one of the great summer houses on the eastern seaboard.

I started dating her the summer before, when I was working at Jepson's. She had stopped by to check on her father's luxo-cruiser. I don't know what got into me – but I asked her out. I guess she liked the rich girl-working boy scenario, and I probably did, too. Mostly, though, I liked Dana: she was smart, funny, centered, and focused. She was also easy to talk to, and I trusted her. Best of all, she wasn't a snob or a typical spoiled rich kid, which was some kind of miracle, given her pedigree.

Eastward ho! The old train rattled on, stopping at all the suburban sprawl towns with their 7-Elevens and Indian names like Patchogue and Ronkonkoma, where my tired college pal got off. Real towns. Not the weekend-tourist villages those on board couldn't wait to cavort in.

I apologize if my yuppie tirade is wearing thin, particularly since I had on the same kind of clothes and my prospects were probably better than most. But one difference between us was that for me, Montauk and the Hamptons were real places, not just a way of keeping a conversation going in a singles bar.

It's where my brother and I were born. Where our mother died too young. And where our octogenarian hipster grandfather showed no sign of slowing down.

Half the passengers scrambled out in Westhampton. The rest got off a couple of stops later, in East Hampton.

When the train finally wheezed to a stop in Montauk right on time at four minutes past midnight, I was the only one left in my car.

And something outside the window seemed very wrong.

Chapter 4

MY FIRST THOUGHT was that there were too many people waiting to meet the train at that hour.

I stepped off expecting to see Dana's Range Rover in the middle of the black, empty lot and Dana sitting cross-legged on the still-warm hood all by her lonesome.

But Dana was standing right there at the end of the well-lit platform, and she didn't seem happy to see me. Her eyes were swollen and she looked as if she'd been crying for days.

More alarming was that my father and grandfather were with her. My father, who never looks all that good these days, was ashen-faced. My grandfather looked hurt and angry, a pissed-off eighty-six-year-old Irishman looking for someone to punch.

Off to the side were an East Hampton cop named Billy Belrap and a young reporter from the East Hampton Star scribbling feverishly in a notebook. Behind them the pulsing red bar of Belnap's cruiser streaked the scene with the coldblooded light of catastrophe.

The only one missing was my brother, Peter. How could that be? Peter had spent his whole life careening from one near disaster to the next with hardly a scratch. When Peter was five, a neighbor found him lying unconscious on top of his bicycle on the side of the road. Our neighbor carried him to our house and laid him on the couch. We were about to call the ambulance when Peter sat up, as if from a nap. That was also the year he kept falling out of trees.

But now the faces on the platform were telling me that my brother, Peter, with his risky combination of carelessness and balls, had run out of lives. He'd driven his motorcycle off the Shadmoor Cliffs, or fallen asleep in bed smoking a cigarette, or chased a ball into traffic and gotten run over like a golden retriever.

My legs went weak as Dana wrapped her arms around my neck and put her wet face against mine. "Jack, I'm so sorry. It's Peter. Oh, Jack, I'm sorry."

After Dana let go, I hugged my father, but it just wouldn't take. He was too far gone into his own pain and misery. We were both mumbling words that couldn't express what we were feeling.

Thank God for Mack, I thought as my grandfather put his arms around me. When I was little, my grandfather had been a large, thickly muscled man. In his mid-forties, he tipped the scales at a Mullen family record of 237 pounds and needed little provocation to throw it around. In the past twenty years, he'd shed more than a third of that weight, but he still possessed enormous hands and big, thick bones, and he embraced me with such shocking ferocity that it almost knocked out my wind.

He clutched me for dear life, and whispered in my ear: "Jack, they say Peter went swimming and drowned. It's the single biggest piece of crap I've ever heard."

Chapter 5

THE MULLENS CLIMBED INTO THE BACK of the police cruiser, and Dana sat up front with Belnap.

As I looked at her through the scuffed-up Plexiglas, she seemed a million miles away. She turned and whispered, "Oh, Jack," then stalled, unable to finish her thought.

Light flashing but no siren, we pulled out of the deserted lot and sped westward through the quiet center of town.

"Last night was the big Memorial Day weekend party," said my grandfather, breaking the awful silence, "and Peter was parking cars as usual. About nine he grabs some supper. But when the party breaks up and it's time to retrieve the cars, Peter's nowhere to be found.

"His absence is noted, but since it's not exactly unheard-of, no one gives it much mind. Two hours ago, Dr. Elizabeth Possidente is walking her rottweiler. The dog starts acting crazy. She runs after him and almost trips over Peter's body where it washed up at the edge of the Neubauer property. He's still there, Jack. I wouldn't let them move the body till you got here."

I listened to my grandfather's low, gravelly voice. To me, it's the most comforting, intelligible voice in the world, but I could barely take in a word.

I felt equally disconnected from the passing scenes outside the window. Plaza Sporting Goods, the Memory Motel, John's Drive-Inn, and Puff 'n' Putt looked nothing like I remembered. The colors were wrong, too bright and hot. The whole town looked radioactive.

For the rest of the trip, I sat on the hump of the transmission between my father, John Samuel Sanders Mullen, and my grandfather, Macklin Reid Mullen, feeling the heartbroken sadness of one and the heartbroken rage of the other. We didn't move, didn't speak. Images of Peter were flashing in my head as though there were a projector there.

Belnap's cruiser finally swerved off Bluff Road and sped through the open gates of the Neubauer compound, where it turned away from the house and made its way slowly down an unpaved road. It stopped a hundred yards from where the surf, whitecapped and furious, pounded the shore. The place where my brother had died.

Chapter 6

THE PLATFORM at the train station had been too crowded. The beach was just the opposite. I stepped unsteadily onto a lovely stretch of moonlit sand. There were no police photographers documenting the scene, no investigators sifting for clues. Only the crashing waves showed any urgency.

My chest was tight. My vision was warped, as if I were taking in this scene through a long, thin tunnel. "Let me see Peter," I said.

My grandfather led me across the sand to the ambulance. Hank Lauricella, a close friend who volunteered for EMS two nights a week, opened the rear door and I stepped in.

There was Peter…

The back of the van was as bright as an operating room, but all the light in the world isn't enough to see your kid brother stretched out naked and dead on a steel gurney. Aside from husband and wife, there's more bad blood between brothers than any other familial pairing. But there wasn't any between us, and that's not rosy, revisionist history. The seven-year age difference, and the even bigger difference in our natures, made us less competitive; and because our mother died so young and a lot of our father died with her, there wasn't much to compete for anyway.

The power of beauty is as absurd as it is undeniable. I stared at his body on the stretcher. Even in death it was obvious why every girl Peter ever smiled at since the age of fourteen smiled back. He looked like one of those Renaissance sculptures. His hair and eyes were jet black. He had our mother's chain of Saint Nicholas around his neck, and in his left earlobe was a small gold hoop he'd worn since he was eleven.

I was so intent on finding some enduring trace of Peter in his face that it took a while to see how battered his body was. When Hank saw it finally register, he silently guided me through the damage. Large bruises on Peter's chest, ribs, arms, and legs; discoloration on his forehead and the back of his neck. Hank showed me the twisted broken fingers and how the knuckles on both hands were scraped raw.

By the time Hank was done, I felt sick to my stomach and so dizzy that I had to grab the rail of the gurney to keep from falling.

Chapter 7

WHEN I FINALLY STEPPED BACK out onto the beach, I felt as if I had spent the night in that ambulance. The train ride from the city seemed like a memory from a previous life.

Dana sat alone on the sand, looking weirdly out of place on her own property. I bent over and she put her arms around me. "I really want to stay with you tonight," she said. "Please let me, Jack."

I was glad she did. I held on to her hand as we followed my father and grandfather back toward Belnap's cruiser.

As we were about to get in, Frank Volpi, East Hampton 's longtime chief detective, walked toward us from the direction of the house.

"Sam, Macklin, Jack. I'm sorry."

"Then why aren't you trying to find out who killed him?" asked Mack, staring at him cold and hard.

"At the moment, there's nothing to indicate this was anything but a horrible accident, Mack."

"Have you seen his body, Frank?" I asked softly.

"A bad storm just went through here, Jack."

"You think Peter decided to go for a swim in the middle of work?" I asked. "In this kind of surf? C'mon, Detective."

"Peter was kind of a crazy. So, yes, I think it's possible." With the sanctimonious tone of a social worker, he added, "At the same time, I don't think we can rule out suicide."

"Peter wouldn't kill himself," said Mack, taking that possibility off the table forever. "You're an asshole to suggest it."

"Belnap clocked him weaving through traffic at ninety miles per hour just before the party. That sounds like someone with a death wish to me."

"That's interesting, Frank," said Mack, "because to me it just sounds like more of your bullshit." Macklin looked dangerously close to hitting him.

"Are you interviewing anyone?" I asked, trying to intercede. "See if there were any witnesses? There must be a guest list. C'mon, Frank, this is Peter who died here."

"You know the people on that list, Jack. You can't interview their gardeners without a court order."

"Then get one," said Mack, "and how about Barry and Campion? Do they have anything to say?"

"They're extremely upset, of course, and extend their condolences. But they left town on business this morning. I can't see what would be accomplished by changing their itinerary."

"No, I suppose you can't. By the way, Frank, are you still a detective, or have you graduated to full-time messenger boy?"

Volpi's face and neck flushed red. "What's that supposed to mean, Mack?"

"What part of the question can't you understand?" said my grandfather.

Chapter 8

A YEAR AFTER MY PARENTS ARRIVED in Montauk, my father built the small three-bedroom house halfway between town and the lighthouse. We moved in when I was two, and Peter was born there five years later. Although he'd spent at least half his nights over the past few years at one girlfriend or another's place, he never officially moved out.

This might have been a problem if my mother, Katherine, had still been around, but for a long time it had been a curfewless house of men.

My father and Mack staggered off to their beds as soon as we got in the door. Dana and I grabbed the Jameson and a couple of thick glasses. We climbed the steep, wooden stairs to Peter's old bedroom.

"I'm right behind you," Dana whispered. I reached back and took her hand, held it tight.

"I'm glad."

I was struck again by how spare Peter kept the room. A pale wooden desk and bureau against one wall faced two twin beds. Except for the tiny and oblique detail of a stamp-size black-and-white photograph of the great bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker that Peter had taped above his bed, we could have been in a Motel 6.

Maybe Peter kept it that way because he didn't want to think of himself as living there anymore. It made me feel even worse, as if he didn't think that he had a real home anywhere.

Dana put on one of Peter's old Sonny Rollins CDs. I pushed the twin beds together and we stretched out on them. We wrapped our arms around each other.

"I can't believe any of this," I said in a daze.

"I know," Dana whispered, and held me tighter.

The whiskey had unclenched my brain enough to know that nothing made sense. Zero. There was no way my brother chose to go swimming that night. For Peter, staying warm was about the closest thing he had to a religion. Even without the heavy waves, the fifty-degree water was enough to keep him out.

It was even less likely he'd killed himself. I didn't know how he could have afforded it, but he'd just bought a $19,000 motorcycle. He'd waited six months to get the exact shade of blue he wanted, and it had less than three thousand miles on it. You don't wash a motorcycle twice a day when you're contemplating suicide.

On top of that, he was scheduled to do a print shoot the next week for Helmut Lang jeans. He had called at work and told me that one of photographer Herb Ritts's assistants had spotted him at the Talkhouse and had sent him a contract. Peter was trying hard to downplay it, but he wasn't fooling anyone, especially not me.

Dana refilled my glass and kissed me on the forehead. I took a long gulp of whiskey. I thought about how as kids, Peter and I used to wrestle in this room, playing a game called king of the bed. I realized now that half the time brothers wrestle, it's just an excuse to hug each other.

Then I told Dana about a fall afternoon, maybe twelve years ago. I was probably babbling, but she let me go on.

"On Saturdays a group of us would play touch football in the field behind the middle school. That day I brought along Peter for the first time.

"Even though he was about five years younger than anyone else, I vouched for him. Bill Conway, one of the two teenagers who ran the game, grudgingly consented to let him play.

"Anyway, Peter was the last guy taken on our side, and our quarterback never threw the ball anywhere near him all afternoon. Peter was so grateful to be included in the big-kids game, he never complained.

"With the sun fading fast, the game was tied. We were down to our last possession. In the huddle I told Livolsi to throw the ball to Peter. The other team had stopped covering him an hour ago. For some reason, Livolsi actually listened to me. On the last play of the game, he sent all the other receivers one way and Peter the other. Then he dropped back and hurled the ball half the length of the field. Peter was this tiny figure standing all alone in the dusk on one side of the end zone.

"Unfortunately, Livolsi himself was not a future Hall of Famer. His pass was way off. Peter chased after it and, at the last instant, left his feet and stretched out parallel to the ground like some dude in one of those slow-motion NFL films. I swear to you, not one person who was there will ever forget it. Livolsi mentions it every time I see him. Dana, he was nine. He weighed fifty-eight pounds. The guy could do anything he ever tried. He could have been anything he wanted to be, Dana. He had it all."

"I know, Jack," she whispered.

"Dana, that wasn't the best part. The best part was the ride home. Peter was so happy, I could feel it. Neither of us said a word. We didn't have to. His big brother said he could do it, and Peter did it. I don't care what anyone says, it never gets any better than that. The whole way home we shared that peace and lightness you get only after doing something really hard. Our bikes floated. We hardly had to pedal."

I barely got out the last few words. I started to cry, and once I got started I couldn't stop for twenty minutes. Then I got so cold, my teeth chattered. I couldn't believe I was never going to see Peter again.

Chapter 9

STANDING IN THE FRAGRANT SHADOW of a tall evergreen, a large man with a nasty scar, Rory Hoffman watched as the EMS van led the caravan of vehicles off the beach. As the red taillights snaked through the trees, he clucked his tongue and softly shook his head. What a fucking mess. A disaster of the first order.

His official title was head of security, but he had attended to these delicate matters for so long and with such efficiency that he was referred to as "the Fixer." Hoffman considered the moniker grandiose and misleading. He was more like the maid, or the cleaning service.

And now here I am to clean up this nasty-ass mess.

He knew this wouldn't be easy. It never was. Among the petty insights he'd culled in his tenure was that violence always leaves a stain. And while with skill and diligence you might be able to get the stain out, the effort will leave its own telltale residue. It meant your work was never quite done.

The Fixer left the cover of the trees for the gravel driveway, the white stones pushing through the thin soles of his driving shoes. He snuffed out a laugh at the marketing élan of that one. Need to hawk a pair of shoes so flimsy that you can barely walk in them? Call them driving shoes. Genius. And he was wearing them.

He reached the point where the cars had gotten on the driveway. Then he followed their tracks back onto the sand. Half the beach seemed to have spilled into his silk socks. Under the full moon, the ocean was putting on quite a show. Very Shakespearean, as if the whole planet were caught up in the momentum of the so-called tragedy on the beach.

Although the moon was bright, he flipped on a flashlight and searched among the dunes for footprints. The beaches themselves were public. There was no way you could keep people off them entirely. Although for the most part the no trespassing signs were observed, you never knew who might have intruded.

The north side looked good. Perhaps tonight would be the exception to the rule. The scene might actually be clean.

The first ten yards of dunes turned up empty. Then he saw a cigarette butt, and another. Not good. Very bad, actually.

He had the sense of being watched, and when he closed his eyes his prominent nose picked up the scent of sulfur still hanging in the air from a struck match. Oh, Jesus.

Boot-shaped footprints led him to a stand of bushes in the dunes. Behind them were more prints, and more cigarette butts. Whoever had been there had been camping out awhile.

He crouched and scooped three of the butts into a little plastic Baggie, the kind cops used – or were supposed to anyway.

That's when his flashlight picked out a crushed bright yellow box in the sand. Kodak.

Christ, someone had been shooting film!

Chapter 10

THE NEXT MORNING my eyeballs hurt. So did everything else above and below. What didn't actually ache just felt lousy. And that was in the two-second reprieve before I remembered what had happened to my brother.

I rubbed my eyes. That's when I saw that Dana was gone. There was a note taped to the lamp: "Jack, I didn't want to wake you. Thanks for letting me stay. It meant a lot to me. I miss you already. Love, Dana." She was smart and beautiful, and I was lucky to have her. It's just that I was having a little trouble feeling lucky that morning.

I walked gingerly downstairs and took my place at the kitchen table with two grieving old men in bathrobes. We weren't a pretty sight.

"Dana's gone."

"I had coffee with her," said Mack. "She was crying a lot."

I looked at my father, and there was almost no reaction. One look at him in the morning light and it was clear to me he'd never be the same. It was as if he had aged twenty years overnight.

Mack seemed as steady as ever, almost stronger, as if fortified by the tragic turn of events. "I'll make you some eggs," he said, springing from his chair.

It's not that my grandfather wasn't devastated by Peter's death. If anything, Peter had been his favorite. But to my grandfather, life, for better or worse, is a holy war, and he was girding himself for another battle.

He peeled off five pieces of bacon and dropped them in a cast-iron skillet as old and gnarly as he was. Soon the room was filled with greasy music.

That morning I realized that my father had never really gotten over the death of my mother. His heart wasn't in his construction company, and he had no desire to chase the biggest building boom in Hamptons history. He watched his fellow tradesmen move from pickups to Tahoes and leave him in the dust. Not that he cared.

My grandfather, on the other hand, had actually gained momentum as he got older. After retiring as an ironworker in his early sixties, he spent a summer reading and farting around. Then he went back to school and became a paralegal. In the past twenty years he had become something of a legend in courtrooms and firms all over the eastern half of Long Island. A lot of people believed he knew the law better than most circuit judges. He insisted that this wasn't nearly as impressive as it sounded.

His love of the law was half the reason I was at Columbia, and he was immensely proud I'd come that far. Sharing a couple of pints with him at the Shagwong included the repeated embarrassment of his introducing me as "the most overeducated Mullen in the history of Ireland and America." I could see by the way he looked at me that morning, however, that he considered all that hypothetical schoolboy stuff compared to this.

"There is no way Peter killed himself," I said. "Volpi is a moron."

"Or doesn't give a shit," said Mack.

To my father, the issue of how Peter died was almost moot. His last moments would have been less terrifying if it was suicide. To Macklin, it was everything.

"The kid got laid more than God. Why would he kill himself?"

Mack broke three eggs on top of the bacon and let them sizzle sunny-side up. When they started to blacken around the edges, he skillfully worked a spatula under it all and flipped the whole thing without spilling a yellow drop. He let it fry for another thirty seconds before sliding the whole greasy construct onto my plate.

It was approaching summer, but this was cold, blustery, off-season food. It was exactly what I needed. After three cups of black coffee, I pushed my chair from the table and announced that I was going to talk to Volpi.

"You want me to come with you?"

"No, thanks, Mack."

"Well, don't do anything stupid. Keep your head. You hear me, Jack?"

"Listen to him," said my father, "the bleeding voice of reason."

For a second, I almost thought he was going to smile.

Chapter 11

SOMEONE MUST HAVE DRIVEN Peter's motorcycle to the house during the night. It sat in the driveway like a giant lizard warming itself in the sun. It was typical of Peter to go into hock for a rolling sculpture. Even if we got a fair price for it, we'd owe the bank a couple of thousand. But I had to admit, it was a thing of beauty, and the license plate got a smile out of me: 4NIC8. Yep, that was Peter.

I climbed into the old black pickup with mullen construction painted on the door and drove to the small brick building on 27 that houses the East Hampton Police Department. I parked next to Frank Volpi's black Jeep.

Tommy Harrison was the sergeant at the desk. He shook my hand and told me how sorry he was about Peter. "I liked your brother a lot, Jack."

"That's what I'm here to talk to Volpi about."

Harrison went back to get Volpi, then returned a couple of minutes later with a sheepish expression.

"The detective is a lot busier than I thought. He thinks he'll be tied up all afternoon."

"If it's okay, Tommy, I'll wait. It's important."

Forty minutes later the desk sergeant told me the same thing. I walked outside. Then I entered the headquarters of the East Hampton Police Department one more time. Through the back door.

Volpi's office was halfway down the hall. I didn't bother to knock.

The detective looked up from a Post spread out on his lap. The foam of his latte covered the tips of his mustache. In East Hampton even the cops sip cappuccinos.

"No rest for the weary, huh, Frank?"

"I take enough shit in this town without having to take more from you. Get the hell out of here! Get lost."

"Give me one reason why Peter would go swimming in the middle of his shift, then I'll let you get back to 'Page Six' and your mocha blend."

"I already told you. Because he was a stoned-out little punk."

"And why would he kill himself? Peter had it all going for him."

"Because his best girl was screwing his best friend; because he was having a bad hair day; because he was tired of hearing what a saint his older brother was. You wanted one reason. You got three. Now go away!"

"That's it, Frank? Accident, suicide – who cares? Case closed."

"Sounds pretty good to me."

"When are you going to stop acting like a rent-a-cop for the rich, Frank?"

He jumped out of his chair, stuck his face in mine, grabbed my shirt, and pushed me hard against the wall. "I should kick your ass right now, you piece of shit."

I didn't delude myself about Volpi's ability to back up his words, but the way I felt, maybe then wasn't the best day to get in the ring with me. Even Volpi sensed it. He released his grip and sat down.

"Go home, Jack. Your brother was a good guy. Everybody liked Rabbit, including me. But he drowned."

"Bullshit! That's total crap, and you know it. Frank, if you're not interested in looking into this case, I'm sure the press will be. Considering all the boldface types at the party that night, Newsday will be interested. And the Daily News. Maybe the high and mighty New York Times.'"

Volpi's face hardened. "You really don't want to do that."

"Why not? What am I missing here?"

"Trust me on this one. You just don't. Leave it alone, Jack."

Chapter 12

I WAS FEELING A LITTLE NUTS, so I drove back out to the scene of the crime. The surf was down considerably, and it was still too rough for my brother to have considered swimming in it. Then I checked in on my father and grandfather. They were doing so bad, they were both in bed by 9:30. Dana had left a couple of messages for me.

I didn't get to the Memory Motel until after ten. By then almost every charter member of our highly exclusive club of born-and-bred townies was crowding a small round table at the rear of the bar.

Let me introduce you.

At the back of the table, under a chipped mirror, was Fenton Gidley. Fenton grew up four houses down from us, and we'd been best friends since before we learned how to walk. At six-three and 245 pounds, Fenton was a little bigger than he had been back then. He was offered a boxful of scholarships to play college football – Hofstra, Syracuse, even Ohio State. He took over his old man's fishing boat instead, heading out alone from Montauk Point for days at a time to hunt giant swordfish and tuna, which he sold to the Japanese.

On his left sat Marci Burt, who has planted and shaped shrubs for Calvin, Martha, Donna, and a handful of other less-fashionable multimillionaires. She and I were an item once – when we were thirteen. On Marci's right sat Molly Ferrer, who taught fourth grade and moonlighted for East Hampton 's Channel 70. Like Fenton, Marci and Molly were former classmates of mine at East Hampton High School.

Everyone at the table was sporting a surprisingly trendy coif, thanks to the man with almost no hair sitting opposite them-Sammy Giamalva, aka Sammy the Hairdresser. Sammy, who was five years younger than the rest of us, was Peter's best friend. Growing up, Sammy spent so much time at our house that he was like a member of the family. He still was.

When I arrived at the Memory, they each got up to lay a hug on me, and before I emerged from their warm, sad embraces, the final member of our crew and the most sincere person I know, Hank Lauricella, walked in.

Lauricella, a full-time chef and part-time EMS volunteer, was the one who got the call about Peter's body on the beach. The small, scarred table now held my five most dependable friends on the planet. They were as angry and as confused about Peter's death as I was.

"Accident, my cute behind," said Molly. "As if Peter, or anyone else, would go swimming in the middle of the night in that surf."

"What Volpi's really saying is, Peter did himself," said Sammy, the first openly gay person any of us ever knew. "We all know that didn't happen."

"Right. All this time we thought he was having more fun than the rest of us combined," Fenton said. "He was actually crying himself to sleep."

"Then what did happen?" asked Marci. "Nobody would want to hurt Peter. Maybe slap him upside the head a couple of times."

"Well, something sure happened. Except for Jack, none of you saw Peter's body," said Hank. "I sat next to Peter in a space smaller than this table for four hours that night. He looked like he was stomped to death. And Frank Volpi never even looked at him. Never stepped inside the ambulance."

"Volpi doesn't want to go near it," said Fenton. "He's scared shitless it goes right back to the folks who own him and the rest of this little village of ours."

"So maybe we all have to start asking around. Talk to anyone who might know something," I said. " Because obviously no one else cares."

"I'm for that," said Molly.

"I know just about everybody who worked at the party that night," said Fenton. "One of them must have seen something."

"And moi," said Sammy. "I'm really good at poking around for dirt."

We held up our beers. "To Peter."

Chapter 13

THE TABLE SUDDENLY FELL SILENT. The change couldn't have been more pronounced if we had been union workers plotting a strike and someone from management had just stuck his head in the door. I turned and saw Dana at the bar.

Actually, the Memory isn't much of a bar. It's not much of a motel, either. Eighteen rooms with unobstructed views of John's Drive-Inn and the Getty station. Its one claim to notoriety is that back in the days when there were these big round black things known as records, a rock 'n' roll band by the name of the Rolling Stones stayed there once and wrote a song about it. The record it's on, Black and Blue, came out in 1976, and the cover is tacked on the wall along with the copy of the notes from the recording session.

We spent a lonely night at the Memory Motel,

It's by the ocean (sort of),

I guess you knew it well.

To be fair, the Memory also has a pretty great sign – the name spelled out over the entrance in jet black Gothic type. In any event, Dana, even dressed as she was that night in old blue jeans and a T-shirt, stood out as much as if Mick Jagger himself had shimmied in. I got up and went to the bar.

"I thought you might be here," she said. "I called your house a bunch of times. I had to go into New York this morning."

We found two seats at the end of the bar next to a middle-aged man doing a beer and a shot. He had an old St. Louis Cardinals hat pulled down low over his face.

"They really like me, don't they, Jack?" Dana said, and snuck a look at my friends.

"In their own quiet way."

"I'll go if you want me to. Really, Jack. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Are you?"

"Nope. That's why I'm glad you're here." I leaned in and kissed her. Who wouldn't? Her lips were so soft. Her eyes weren't just beautiful, they showed off how whip smart she was. I think I'd had a crush on Dana since she was about fourteen. I still couldn't believe that the two of us were together. My friends hadn't given her a chance yet, but they'd come around once they got to know her.

I emptied my wallet on the bar, waved good-bye to the crew, and escorted Dana out of the Memory. Instead of walking toward the street and her gleaming SUV, she led me away from the curb under an overhang to the end of the stone walkway.

Then Dana fumbled with a key until room eighteen lay open before us in all its splendor and possibility. "I hope you don't mind," she whispered, "but I took the liberty of reserving the honeymoon suite."

Chapter 14

WHAT THE FIXER REALLY WANTED was a Tanqueray No. Ten martini with a twist. By the time the bartender at the Memory stopped ignoring him, he had lowered his sights to a Budweiser and a shot of tequila.

By then he had found an empty, torn red-leather stool at the center of the bar, and with his vintage St. Louis Cardinals cap pulled down, he sipped his Bud and watched.

An occasional twist of his head gave him a view of the plotting mourners at the back table. Their faces were so sincere and open that he wondered how he and they could be members of the same species.

After a while he started working his gaze around the table, gauging who would give him the hardest time. The unshaved guy in the old jean jacket had the most size, about six-three and 250 pounds, he estimated. And he carried himself like an old ballplayer. The bitch who had arrived in the maroon Porsche looked tough. And, of course, Mullen could be dangerous, particularly in his current state. He was undoubtedly the smartest in the group, and the boy was hurting.

By the time the Mouseketeers were done drinking, laughing, and crying, he'd been sitting on the stool for almost three hours and his butt was numb. He watched Lauricella and Fenton leave in Lauricella's van, and Burt tear off in her Porsche. He was about to follow Molly Ferrer home for a little reconnaissance when he saw Dana and Jack slink out of the bar and into the darkness. "A hundred-million-dollar girl in a sixty-dollar-a-night motel," he muttered.

Dana Neubauer and Jack Mullen. Sooner or later, he was going to have to fix that, too, no doubt.

Chapter 15

PETER'S FUNERAL was the worst day of my life. For a week I wandered around in a daze – hollowed out, unreal, a ghost. When I went back to work, Pauline Grabowski came by to say how sorry she was about Peter's death, and I got a sweet condolence call from Mudman on death row. As for everybody else at Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel, it was strictly business as usual.

Every night after work, I went back to my apartment on 114th Street, two blocks south of Columbia. My roommates had left for the summer, and I lay on my mattress, the only piece of furniture left, and listened to the Yanks lose three in a row on a tiny transistor radio I had had since I was twelve.

Friday night I hustled down to Penn Station and caught the last train out. Dana wasn't waiting in Montauk as I had hoped for the entire three-hour trip out there. Since the track stopped barely two miles from my house, I decided to hump it instead of calling home for a ride. I figured the walk would do me good.

In fifteen minutes I put the darkened windows of Montauk's three-block downtown behind me and climbed the long, steep hill out of town. The night was full of stars, and the crickets were noisier than the traffic. I wondered what had happened to Dana.

I walked by the stone ruin of the historical society and the stark-white sixties architecture of the town library, where I'd often stopped on my way home from school.

Peter and I had covered this stretch at least a thousand times, and every single crack in the pavement looked familiar. We'd walked it, run it, skateboarded it, and biked it in every extreme of Long Island weather, sometimes with Peter propped precariously on my handlebars. And although we weren't allowed to, we'd often hitchhiked. On account of all the carless Irish kids who come over every summer to pump gas, change sheets, and bus tables, Montauk is one of the last places left in the country where drivers still routinely pull over for strangers.

I walked off 27 onto Ditch Plains Road and made the sweeping turn by the beach parking lot. My father's pickup was in the driveway. I guess Mack wasn't done fleecing the pigeons in his weekly poker game.

If I was up when he got back, he'd dump his winnings on the kitchen table and I'd join him in a Rice Krispies nightcap.

All the lights were out, so I lifted the sticky garage door as quietly as possible and entered through the kitchen. I grabbed a beer and sat in the cool, pleasant dark. I called Dana, but all I got was the answering machine. What was that all about?

I sat in the darkened kitchen and thought of the last time Peter and I were together. Two weeks before he died, we had dinner at a trendy restaurant on East Second Street. We polished off two bottles of red wine and had ourselves a gas. Christ, he was such a happy kid. A little crazy, but good-natured. It didn't even bother me when the waitress wrote her phone number on the back of Peter's neck.

For some reason, I found myself thinking about my pro bono case at the office, the Mudman – his life on death row in Texas. What Peter and Mudman had in common was the minuscule regard that the powers that be had for their lives. The government valued Mudman's so lightly, they wouldn't bother to make sure they were executing the right man. And Peter's murder was so trifling, it didn't require solving.

My thoughts were suddenly shattered by a loud crash directly overhead. What the hell? Someone must have broken in through Peter's window and toppled over his dresser.

I grabbed the skillet off the top of the stove and sprinted up the stairs.

Chapter 16

THE DOOR TO PETER'S ROOM was shut, but the sound of moaning came from inside. I pushed against the door, met some resistance, then crashed through, stumbling over the outstretched legs of the body on the floor.

Even in the dark, I could see that it was my father.

I switched on the lights. He was in trouble. He was sick. Obviously, he'd collapsed and fallen, which had made the loud racket. He twisted violently on his back as if he were fighting someone only he could see. I hooked one arm under his neck and lifted his head off the floor, but like a child having a night terror, he couldn't see me. His eyes were aimed inward at the explosion in his chest.

"Dad, you're having a heart attack. I'm calling an ambulance." I ran for the phone. By the time I got back to him, his eyes were even more dilated and the pressure on his chest seemed worse. He couldn't take a breath.

"Hang on," I whispered. "The ambulance is on the way."

The color drained from his face, and he turned a sick, ghostly gray. Then he stopped breathing, and my father's eyes rolled up into his head. I held open his mouth and breathed into it.

Nothing.

One, two, three.

Nothing.

One, two, three.

Nothing.

Tires screeched in the driveway and there were loud footsteps on the stairs, then Hank was kneeling beside me.

"How long has he been like this?"

"Three, four minutes."

"Okay. There's a chance."

Hank had the portable deflbrillator lifepack with him. It was in a white plastic box about the size of a car battery. He hooked up my father, then threw the toggle that sent electrical current into his chest.

Now I was the one who couldn't breathe. I stood over my father, numb and disbelieving. This couldn't be happening. He must have come up to Peter's room to reminisce.

Each time Hank threw the switch, my father went into spasm.

But the line on the electrocardiogram showed no response.

After the third jolt of electricity, Hank looked at me in shock.

"Jack – he's gone."