Beach Road Read online

  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 t
o 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.”

  Part Three

  Down and Out in the Hamptons

  Chapter 64

  Raiborne

  WHEN I NEED to work something out, I don’t go to a shrink like Tony Soprano. I wander into Fort Greene Park and sit down across from an impenetrable Methuselah of a chess hustler named Ezekiel Whitaker. That way I can think instead of talk, and sit outside instead of being cooped up in a shade-drawn room.

  It suits me better, particularly on an Indian summer Sunday afternoon with the last brown leaves rustling sweetly
in this Brooklyn park.

  “Your move,” says Zeke impatiently as soon as my butt hits the stone bench. For Zeke, time is money, just like a shrink. Zeke has a face that looks as if it were carved out of hard wood and the long, graceful fingers of a former migrant fruit picker, and me and him, we’ve been going at it alfresco for years. So I know I got my work cut out for me.

  But when I snatch his rook right out from under his haughty nose ten minutes into the game, I have to crow about it.

  “You sure you’re feeling all right, brother man?” I ask. “Cold? Flu? Alzheimer’s?”

  I should have kept my mouth shut, because of course, that’s when my mind leaves the board and circles back to work and the name chalked on the dirty blackboard of the precinct house. Instead of concentrating on how I might solidify my position on this chessboard and teach this old goat some much-needed humility, I think about Manny Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s unsolved murder has been eating at me for weeks. Every time I walk into the precinct, his name admonishes me from the board.

  I never for a second bought that story the papers put out about a feud between Glock, Inc., and Cold Ground, Inc. Thing is, rappers are too hotheaded to make good assassins, and this killer didn’t leave a trace. Not only that, but Rodriguez, who picked up lunch and ran out in the rain to put quarters in the meter, was too low on the food chain to make any sense as a target.

  Rodriguez was a gofer, or as us chess masters like to say, a pawn, and as I ponder that, Zeke reaches across the board with the precision of a pickpocket and plucks my queen off her square.

  “Take her, Zeke. I never liked the bitch anyway.”

  Now a win is out of the question, a draw unlikely, and the board looks like a big rusty steel trap waiting to clamp shut on my ass. If I had any dignity I’d resign, but I came here to think about Rodriguez anyway, so I’ll let Zeke earn his money while I try to earn mine. As I do that, Zeke sweeps through my ranks like Sherman went through Georgia. He picks off my last bishop and knight, and when my castle drops among all my other casualties, he says, “I guess you don’t have to worry yourself about my deteriorating mind no more, Connie.”