The Beach House Read online

  "No."

  "You just wanted some fresh air?"

  "No."

  "Am I getting warm?"

  "No."

  Most no's aren't too good, but these were about as good as no's could be. I sat on the cool flagstone and leaned back against the red wooden door of our house. I touched Pauline's arm. It felt electric against mine. She took my hand in hers, and my mouth went dry.

  "But as I was talking to Macklin, something became really clear to me," she whispered.

  "What was that, Pauline?" I whispered back.

  "How much I care about you."

  I looked at Pauline again and did what I'd probably wanted to do for a long time. I kissed Pauline gently on the lips. Her lips were soft and fit perfectly on mine. We stayed that way for a sweet moment before we pulled back and looked at each other.

  "That was worth the wait," I said.

  "You shouldn't have waited, Jack."

  "I promise I won't wait as long for the next one."

  We started kissing again and haven't really stopped since.

  Now I appreciate that for those of you who have stayed with me this far, there's nothing too surprising about this romantic development. You probably saw it coming. But I didn't.

  Not until I walked across the lawn that night. Not because I didn't want it to happen. I wanted it to happen from the first moment Pauline walked into my tiny office. I wanted it so badly, I was afraid to even hope for it.

  "You're a good person. And sweet," Pauline said as we hugged on the front porch.

  "Try not to hold it against me."

  "I won't." She showed me a blanket she'd brought out from the house.

  "Let's go down to the beach, Jack. There's something else I've been wanting to do with you for a long time."

  Part Four

  THE GRADUATE

  Chapter 64

  THE SUN SPILLING OUT OVER QUEENS and the East River may not be as symphonic as it is rising out of the Atlantic, but it's nothing to sneeze at. Neither was being able to reach out and slide my arm around Pauline as she slept peacefully beside me. I had thought we would be good together, but I had no idea how good it could be. For the first time in my life, I was in love.

  At the end of the summer I abandoned Mack in Montauk and moved in with Pauline on Avenue B. Every day for the next five months I rode the subway to the top of Manhattan to complete my requirements for a degree from Columbia Law School.

  Although the summer had dampened my enthusiasm for practicing law, I wasn't simply going through the motions. Inspired by rage and disgust, the way some of my classmates were by ambition, I worked harder than I ever had in my life. The inquest left me perversely intrigued with litigation, and I studied Trial Techniques by Thomas Mauet as if it were the Bible. I did the same with Cases and Materials on Evidence and Constitutional Law.

  I worked so hard on all my other course work, too, that when the final grades were posted, I learned I'd graduated third in my class.

  Although my employment prospects were murky, I figured I'd earned a break. So while some other third-year students were still jostling for associate positions in white-glove law firms or studying for the bar, I was enjoying life in the East Village. It was a good place to cultivate my soul and try to figure out what an angry, overeducated twenty-nine-year-old should do next.

  My unsettled state of mind was compounded by a piece of mail I received from Huntsville, Texas. The Mudman had taken me up on my offer to stay in touch. He sent grim news about the prospect of ever getting his DNA analysis for a retrial. Nothing he had told me, however, prepared me for the next letter I got from him.

  The execution date had been set.

  Chapter 65

  THE FIRST TIME I ever saw the Mudman was on a bitterly cold February morning. It was shortly before he was put to death by the state of Texas. We were separated by a Plexiglas window between the viewing room and the death chamber.

  Pauline and I had flown to Dallas the morning before, rented a car, and made the three-hour drive to Huntsville. At the last minute prison officials rescinded their permission for a private visit. Since we were on the Mudman's personal visitor list, we were permitted to view the execution.

  Along with the great aunt of the victim and an even more elderly prison reporter who sat beside us on the three-plank viewing stand, we didn't see the Mudman until after his wheelchair was rolled into the death chamber just before 8:00 A.M.

  The Mudman had been on death row for twenty years. They'd taken a terrible toll. The last photograph I had seen of the six-three former bouncer was almost twenty-one years old now, and although he was still a huge man and close to three hundred pounds, he was a prematurely old one. His long hair and beard had gone stone white. Degenerative arthritis in his hips had put him in a wheelchair three years before.

  As the warden and prison chaplain looked on, a guard placed a pair of reading glasses on the Mudman. Then the guard held a piece of paper level with the Mudman's chest. Although he was somewhat sedated, he proceeded to read.

  "This prison and my government," he said in his surprisingly high-pitched voice, "has already taken the best years of my life. This morning they will take everything I have left. They will commit a murder. God have mercy on their souls."

  He turned his head and saw me in the front row. He gave me a grateful smile, and it had a gentleness that touched me deeply. I had to choke back a sob, and Pauline grabbed my arm.

  The next minutes proceeded with nightmarish momentum. As sheets of freezing rain pelted the corrugated roof, the chaplain read the Twenty-third Psalm. Then guards hoisted the Mudman out of his chair and onto the gurney.

  His white-haired frailty, the prison-issue wheelchair, and the practiced diligence of the guards combined to give the misleading impression that we were witnessing a medical procedure that would make a sick man well. That impression was reinforced when an orderly pushed up the white sleeve on Mudman's massive right arm. He found a vein, wiped the area with a cotton swab, and inserted an IV.

  When the warden, a surprisingly kind-looking man in his late fifties, saw that the IV was attached, he raised his right arm. That signaled the release of the first poisonous dose.

  Less than thirty seconds later he raised the arm again, ordering the release of the hydrochloride that would end Mudman's life.

  The whole time this was going on, Mudman's eyes were locked on mine. In his last letter, he'd asked if I would be a witness to his execution. He wanted me there so that he could look into one pair of eyes he knew believed in his innocence. I had done my best to be worthy of his steely gaze.

  In his last minute on earth, Mudman had tried to sing the beginning of an old Allman Brothers song he had loved since he was a kid. "Going to the country, baby, do you want to go? / Going to the country, baby, do you want to go?" Somehow, he managed to get it out.

  The hydrochloride finally hit him. It knocked the air out of his huge chest as violently as if he'd been punched. He lurched forward so hard against his straps, it sent his glasses flying off his head and onto the concrete floor.

  The prison doctor declared the Mudman dead by state-ordered execution at 8:17 A.M.

  Pauline and I left the prison in silence. I felt hollowed-out and empty. It was almost as bad as the night I saw Peter on the beach. I felt that I had failed them both.

  "That man was innocent," I said to Pauline as we rode back to Dallas from Huntsville. "And Barry Neubauer is a murderer. There has to be something we can do to that son of a bitch. A dose of hydrochloride would be nice."

  She reached over and took my hand, held it gently. Then she sang very softly. "Going to the country / Baby, do you want to go?"

  Chapter 66

  ON A THURSDAY MORNING in early May, I fell into the ruminative routine I'd been honing since I had returned from Texas. I went out and bought the papers, made Pauline some coffee, and kissed her good-bye as she left for her new job at the boutique law firm MacMilan and Hart. Then, after twenty minutes of push-
ups and crunches on the living-room carpet, I hit the street.

  First, I checked in with Philip K, a former senior magazine editor. He was a recovering heroin addict and now a regular at a methadone outpatient clinic who ran a tidy used-book store from a card table inside the northeast corner of Tompkins Square Park. An aesthete and a snob, Philip sold only books he deemed worthy of being read. Many mornings there would be no more than three or four battered volumes on the table.

  That morning, Philip was touting a coffee-stained paperback novel called Night Dogs. I gave him his asking price and carried it in my back pocket to a Second Avenue diner, where I started it at the counter with my coffee and matzo brei.

  Although unpierced and untattooed, I was becoming an East Villager in subtler ways. I'd acquired a taste for pierogi and blintzes and other sweet Eastern European foods sold in narrow, enduring eateries from Second to Avenue C. I loved the dark local bars whose jukeboxes were stocked with songs I'd never heard before. Mack loved them, too, and every once in a while he'd take the bus and join me and Pauline on a local pub crawl.

  Macklin was such a natural hipster, he seemed more at home in the Village than I did. Wearing this funky fedora I'd bought him, he looked like Henry Miller come back from the dead for one last tour of bohemia.

  Speaking of fedoras, I was buying my clothes secondhand now. That morning nothing I was wearing cost more than six dollars, so after breakfast and fifty pages of Philip's latest, I decided to wander over to Ferdi's Vintage on Seventh, where I'd made some of my better finds.

  I had just started going through the rack of shirts in the back when a little guy with short hair and a goatee, both dyed peroxide white, walked in.

  I watched him rummage through the old suits. It made me miss Sammy. He was around the same height and build. He even had the same cocky carriage.

  The resemblance was so uncanny that I began to wonder if we didn't all have clones walking the streets in various cities around the world.

  The skinny guy must have sensed my gaze because he turned to face me. I began to sputter an apology when his startled expression gave him away.

  "Sammy!"

  He threw a punch, and I found myself on the floor, looking up at the tattered tails of old shirts.

  Chapter 67

  SAMMY WAS ALIVE? He couldn't be. But, goddamnit, he was!

  I was up about as fast as I'd gone down. I ran out of Ferdi's and saw him sprinting west on Seventh. He cut south on First and vanished from sight. He was moving as if he'd just seen a ghost, but so was I.

  There was a gay bar on the corner, its front window shrouded with dark red curtains. When I opened the door, the light from First Avenue caught Sammy scrambling out the back.

  "Sammy, stop!" I yelled. "I have to talk to you."

  I started after him through the shadows until I nearly collided with a massive bartender who had nimbly jumped from behind the bar. He was blocking my path.

  "I'm just trying to talk to an old friend I thought was dead."

  "Aren't we all, honey," he said. "But sometimes we got to take no for an answer."

  I turned and dashed back out the front door. Sammy was crossing First, one block south. The shock I'd felt when I first saw him was turning to anger.

  I hurried after him. By the time I saw the back of his white head again, he'd slowed to a brisk walk.

  I kept him barely in sight all the way up Sixth Street, past the Indian curry parlors, the old Ukrainian church, and a Guatemalan gift shop. Then I followed him across Second and Third, around Cooper Union, and through the punk skateboarders doing ollies in the shadow of the bright anthracite cube on Astor Place.

  Now Sammy headed up the canyon of Fourth, his white head bobbing in the swarm of e-commerce worker bees just released for lunch.

  Every time he peered back over his shoulder, I dropped to one knee or ducked into a shop. Separated by about a ten-second lag, I crossed Fourteenth by Circuit City, then traversed Union Square, where I nearly lost him in the swarm of chic, black-clad women clamoring for fresh fruit and veggies.

  The reality that Sammy was alive was just starting to sink in. What happened at his house that night? Who died in the fire? Why had Sammy run away? And what was he doing in New York?

  I put my questions on hold and focused on the back of Sammy's blond head. A block short of Paragon he turned west again. I followed him toward Chelsea, where all the bars are gay and window-front mannequins have shaved heads and hold hands.

  At the corner of Eighth and Eighteenth, near Covenant House, I got cut off by movers delivering a pair of Art Deco couches. By the time I maneuvered around them, Sammy had vanished once again.

  Chapter 68

  AFTER HE LEFT UNION SQUARE, Sammy snuck another backward peek and spotted Jack a little more than a block behind, near City Bakery.

  Without changing his pace, he proceeded west. Just before Seventh, he ducked under a low cement stairway and waited for his old townie friend to hustle past.

  Once Jack had crossed the avenue, Sammy sprinted uptown. He didn't look back for five blocks. Then he turned west one last time. At the end of the next cross-block was a small park. He found a bench in the corner and stretched out on his back.

  For an hour he lay in the shadows as invisible as the homeless. He listened to the whoosh of the cabs shooting up Tenth four abreast and the cries of the toddlers brought into the park and released like pigeons by their large, calm Caribbean nannies.

  What were the odds, Sammy was thinking, of seeing Jack rifling the racks in a used-clothing store in the East Village? About the same as tripping over him in a leather bar? Well, the world was full of surprises, and guess what? Most suck. He'd have to be more careful. Really careful. Lately he'd had the feeling he was being followed.

  He cooled his heels long enough for two shifts of nannies to come and go. Then he edged out of the park and walked down Tenth on the leafy seminary blocks. He wandered through the shadow of the train crossing, where even in the early afternoon the leggy, wide-shouldered transvestites were trawling for commuters inclined to take the long way home.

  At Eighteenth he turned east past the taxi garages, and minutes later he entered his apartment. He had a sublet in one of Chelsea's block-long housing projects, and his was the only white face in the building. But, as his neighbors put it, it was a nice crib. Where else but the PJ's were you going to get a one-bedroom on the twenty-fourth floor with a little terrace for fourteen hundred a month? In Akron?

  He rode the empty elevator up to the twenty-fourth floor and thought about his chance encounter with Jack Mullen. Jesus! Maybe it was an omen to leave town, go to South Beach, and get a chair in an outré salon on Collins Avenue. He got off at twenty-four, which was also his age for three more days, and walked down the endless corridor, the one thing about the building that creeped him out.

  As he turned his key in the lock, two men emerged from the space by the incinerator chute. He recognized Frank Volpi. "Jeez, you need a haircut, Frank."

  Volpi pushed Sammy's face against the door, and the other asshole kicked him in the side. The second guy was one of the creeps who had killed Peter. Suddenly he knew he wasn't going to make it to South Beach.

  Maybe that's why he decided not to give them a goddamned thing. For the next hour, Volpi and the other guy took turns trying to break him, and it was something they had a real talent for. But Sammy stuck to his vow. Maybe out of respect for Peter, or even Jack. They barely got a sound out of him.

  Not when they stuck his head in the backed-up toilet. Not when they cooked his hand over the flames of the gas stove. Not even when they took him out to the shiny concrete balcony overlooking Eighteenth Street.

  And threw him off.

  Chapter 69

  THIRTY MINUTES AFTER I LOST SAMMY, I was still wandering through Chelsea in a daze. I finally retreated to a booth in a coffee shop on Ninth. I decided to count my blessings. It had been a while since someone I thought was dead wasn't.

  After the
coffee, I headed back to Ferdi's. Maybe Sammy had bought some clothes there before. Maybe he used a credit card or left a phone number. Not likely, but it was the only thing I could think of, and I needed to walk.

  At the corner of Eighteenth, a young mother sat on the edge of a large cement planter. She was making bird noises and hoisting her infant over her head.

  One second it was urban Madonna-and-child bliss. The next, the mother was screaming at the sky, grabbing her baby, and running for her life.

  I looked up.

  At first I thought a large, black plastic garbage bag had gotten blown out of a high-floor window. As it fell, I could make out the windmilling arms and legs and the flash of white. I think I knew it was Sammy before he hit the sidewalk.

  The horrible, moist whapp of the impact stunned everybody on the street. For a few heartbeats, Chelsea was far quieter than it ever is on a sunny weekday afternoon.

  A white Lexus parked nearby flashed its headlights in panic. Then its burglar alarm began to wail.

  A neighborhood kid pedaled over on a shiny BMX bicycle, stared at the crumpled stranger and the red stain flowering beneath him, and raced away. I got there next and had about a minute alone with him. The name on the driver's license in his wallet was Vincenzo Nicolo. But it was Sammy. The bruises on his arms and face looked as bad as those on Peter's body. There were raw burns on his hands. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

  A minute later I was only one face in a ring of morbid curiosity. In five, the rubberneckers were three deep. When I heard the howl of approaching police sirens, I slipped back through the crowd and walked away.

  I was even glad Sammy had hit me. At least I had the chance to touch him one last time before he died.

  Chapter 70

  AN HOUR LATER my legs had finally stopped shaking and I stood in the corner of an empty, chained-off lot on Avenue D. I pulled the tarp off the Beemer.