Beach Road Read online

  “I’m live in Queens,” says a perky blonde, “directly across from St. John’s Law School, alma mater of Tom Dunleavy, cocounsel in the capital murder trial of Dante Halleyville. According to documents just obtained by Fox, Dunleavy, a star basketball player at St. John’s, was accepted into the law school despite grades a full point below the admission minimum.”

  “Quite a scoop,” says Macklin, snorting.

  “Despite graduating in the bottom fifth of his class,” continues the reporter, “Dunleavy was hired by the Brooklyn Public Defender’s Office, where he received mediocre evaluations.

  “The most troubling allegation, however, is that in 1997, Dunleavy had someone take the Law Boards for him.

  “According to copies of the test obtained by Fox and examined by independent handwriting experts, Dunleavy’s exams, on which he scored surprisingly well for a student with his grades, were taken by someone who is right-handed. Dunleavy, a two-time All-American, is left-handed.

  “If this is true, Dante Halleyville, who faces capital punishment and whose trial begins in forty-eight hours, has put his life in the hands of someone who is not even a lawyer.”

  Chapter 86

  Tom

  AT 9:00 P.M. the following night, the somber-faced clerk for Suffolk County Supreme Court judge Richard Rothstein waves me, Kate, and District Attorney Dominic Ioli into his well-appointed chambers, where we take our seats at a long mahogany table.

  Ioli, a loquacious career pol with a full head of gray hair, makes a couple stabs at idle chatter, but when he sees we’re in no mood, he abandons the effort and thumbs through his Times. I know this much about Dominic Ioli—he’s a whole lot smarter than he looks, and he rarely loses.

  When Judge Rothstein strides in, wearing khakis and a button-down white shirt, his penetrating black eyes and long sharp nose tell me I’m exactly the kind of dumb Irish jock he’s got no time or use for.

  Bypassing pleasantries, he turns to Ioli and asks, “What’s your office’s position on this, Dominic?”

  “We haven’t had time to fully assess the charges,” he says, “but I don’t think it matters. Whatever decision this court makes should be beyond reproach. If defense stays on, we leave the door wide open for appeal. Assigning new counsel will require a delay, but it’s better to spend that time now than to have to come back and do this all over again.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” says Rothstein, and turns his eyes on me. “Dunleavy?”

  I’m prepared to argue forcefully, but I have no intention of getting down on my knees for anyone. “Your Honor, the grades and evaluations are what they are,” I say in an offhanded tone. “But I’m sure in your career you’ve come across at least a couple of excellent attorneys who weren’t brilliant law students. For all I know, the district attorney is one of them.”

  Encouraged by the hint of a smile in Rothstein’s eyes, I barge ahead.

  “So the only charge that matters is that I had someone take the Law Boards for me, and that’s absolutely false. Here’s a copy of X-rays of my left wrist, taken the night before I took the boards, and here’s a record of my visit to Saint Vincent’s emergency room April 5, 1997.

  “I was playing a pickup game at the Cage in the Village that night and took a hard fall. I could have gotten a medical extension, but I’d spent months preparing and, frankly, at that point, wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer. I decided to take them right-handed and let the scores decide for me.”

  “You telling me you passed the bar writing with your wrong hand, Dunleavy?”

  “I don’t have a wrong hand. I’m ambidextrous.”

  “The multiple choice maybe, but the essay?”

  “It’s the truth,” I say, looking straight into his eyes. “Take it or leave it.”

  “We’ll see,” says Rothstein, and slides a legal pad across the table. Then he reaches behind him and blindly grabs a book off the shelf.

  “You’re in luck, Dunleavy—Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll dictate the first line, you jot it down right-handed as fast as you can. Ready?”

  “It’s been seven years since I’ve had to do this.”

  “What do you care? You don’t have a wrong hand. Ready?”

  “Yup.”

  “‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,’” reads Rothstein with pleasure, “‘came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’”

  I scribble furiously and slide the pad back.

  “Now I know why you went to your right so well, Dunleavy,” says Rothstein, the smile in his eyes moving down to his thin lips. “Your handwriting’s better than mine. By the way, I made a couple phone calls this afternoon, and it turns out this rumor came out of the offices of Ronnie Montgomery. I’ll see you in court tomorrow morning.”

  “But, Your Honor,” says Ioli.

  “I’ll see you too, Dominic.”

  Chapter 87

  Kate

  DRAINED BY THE test in Rothstein’s chambers, Tom slowly drives my car through Riverhead toward the Sunrise Highway. Neither of us says a word.

  The full moon lights up the road, and some of that light spills onto the front seat where Tom’s right hand lies on the armrest between us.

  To be honest, I’ve always loved Tom’s strong hands, with their thick, raised veins running from his battered knuckles to his wrists. In two decades of basketball, every finger has been dislocated so many times that not one of them is straight. They’ve become a kind of relief map of his life revealing everything he’s been through.

  Without really thinking about it, I lay my hand on his.

  Tom’s hand jumps, and he looks at me, stunned. Then, just as quickly, he turns away. Why’d I do it? I’m not really sure. It could have been for the balls and charm he showed winning over Rothstein and pulling victory out of his hat one more time, or maybe it’s everything the two of us have been through in the last year. Or, I’ve just wanted to do it for months.

  But I don’t regret it—and to let Tom know it was no accident but an intentional piece of insanity, I wrap my fingers around his.

  For the next half hour, the car is filled with a very different kind of quiet. “I’ll pick you up at seven thirty” is the only thing Tom says the whole way, but by the time he pulls up in front of Mack’s house, I feel as if we’ve been talking for hours.

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” I say, and hop out of the car. “You did good, Tom. I’m proud of you.”

  And that makes Tom smile in a way that I haven’t seen since we were both kids.

  Part Four

  Cold Play

  Chapter 88

  Kate

  AT 8:15 A.M. the sprawling parking lot in front of the Arthur M. Cromarty Court Complex is overrun with media. TV news trucks occupy the half-dozen rows closest to the courthouse; thick black cable stretches over the cement in every possible direction.

  Network and cable reporters, comfortably rumpled from the waist down and impeccably dressed and groomed above it, their faces caked with makeup, stand inside circles of white-hot light and file their first remotes.

  Tom and I weave our way through the chaos and park. Then we walk briskly toward the entrance of the complex, hurrying to get safely inside before getting grabbed by the journalistic mob.

  Our timing is good, because at that moment every TV camera in the lot is aimed at an elegant black man standing dramatically on the courthouse steps. As we hustle past, I see that it’s none other than T. Smitty Wilson. I guess he’s finally come to pay his respects.

  Inside, three hundred or more spectators pack forty rows, and they are split straight down the middle of the courtroom. Dante’s supporters, who have arrived from as far away as California, fill the left half of the room. On the right are those who have traveled a much shorter distance to support the families of the victims. I’ve known most of them my entire life.

  Surrounding the divided crowd are at least fifty cops, and in this instance, it doesn’t seem unwarranted. Officers from
the Sheriff’s Department stand shoulder to shoulder along the front and back walls, behind the jury box, and on both sides of the judge’s podium.

  Except for the journalists in the front two rows, there are few exceptions to the racial seating pattern. One is Macklin, the octogenarian exception to most rules. He sits defiantly between Marie and Clarence, and woe to the man who tries to move him. Hanging just as tough one row back are Jeff and Sean.

  Tom, rifling through a stack of file cards, barely looks up when the twelve jurors and two alternates solemnly take their positions.

  But neither of us can ignore the loud gasp when Dante, escorted by a pair of county sheriffs, enters the courtroom. He wears an inexpensive blue blazer and dress pants, both a size too small—he’s grown an inch in prison. He stares at the ground until he is seated between us.

  “You guys good?” Dante asks in the quietest voice I can imagine coming out of his large body.

  “Not just good,” I tell him. “We’re the best. And we’re ready.”

  Dante’s slight smile, when it comes, is priceless.

  Twenty minutes behind schedule, the sharp nasal voice of the bailiff finally rings through the courtroom. “Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having business before the Suffolk County Supreme Court and Honorable Judge Richard Rothstein will now rise!”

  Chapter 89

  Tom

  SUFFOLK COUNTY DA Dominic Ioli pushes his chair back from the prosecution table and then carefully folds his reading glasses into a leather case. Only after they’re safely tucked away in the jacket pocket of his new gray suit coat does he stand and face the two rows of jurors.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, over the next several weeks you’re going to hear about the cold-blooded murder of four young men last summer. Before this trial is over, the state will have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the defendant seated on my left, Dante Halleyville, carefully and deliberately planned and carried out all four heinous crimes.

  “We will prove that in the first three murders, Mr. Halleyville acted with Michael Walker, and that eleven days later, he turned that same weapon on his best friend and accomplice.”

  Ioli has logged his share of court time, and you can hear it in his measured delivery. As Ioli refers to “a gun and a hat and a body of evidence that places the defendant at both crime scenes,” I glance back at the divided sea of faces staring from opposite sides of the courtroom. I scan the expressions of Jeff, Sean, Clarence, and Mack, and linger on Marie.

  “Murder is too gentle a word,” bellows Ioli, bringing me back to his speech. “The more accurate word, the only word that captures the horror of these crimes, is execution.”

  As Ioli winds down, I look around for one last piece of incentive, this time in the row of journalists and brand-name lawyers the networks have flown in as talking heads.

  Sitting beside Alan Dershowitz, in a rumpled suit, and Gerry Spence, in a fringed suede jacket, is Ronnie Montgomery. For a second, we lock eyes.

  The moment makes me think of Cecil Felderson, a fellow benchwarmer in my short time playing with the Timberwolves. According to Cecil, who hoarded his resentments like gold, “the worst thing of all, the thing that sticks in your craw more than anything, is having to listen to some guy say ‘I told you so.’”

  With one haughty look at us and our tiny office, Montgomery wrote me off as an amateur and a loser, hopelessly out of my depth. Now I can either prove him right and hear about it, one way or another, for the rest of my life, or I can prove him wrong and shut him, and everybody else, the fuck up.

  I rise from my seat.

  Chapter 90

  Kate

  I DON’T KNOW who’s more nervous right now, Tom or me, but somehow I think it might be me. This is it, a bigger, more important trial than either of us has any right to be involved in probably ever in our careers, but certainly right now.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Tom, turning to face the jury, “I have only one request of each one of you this morning, and it’s harder than it sounds. I ask you to listen.

  “For as long as it takes for justice to be delivered to the nineteen-year-old sitting behind me, I need you to listen with a sharp, open, and critical mind.”

  Tom looked green on the drive over, and he hasn’t said a dozen words all morning, but suddenly his game face is screwed on tight. “Because if you do, if you just listen, the prosecution’s case will collapse like a house of cards.

  “The district attorney of Suffolk County has just told you that this is an open-and-shut case and that he has a mountain of evidence against Dante Halleyville. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Dante Halleyville have no motive to commit these murders, he had enormous incentive not to commit them.

  “For the past half a dozen years Dante Halleyville has concentrated all his considerable energy, talent, and determination on becoming the top schoolboy basketball player in the country. Lofty as that goal was, he accomplished it. Dante Halleyville succeeded so well that pro scouts guaranteed him that whenever he chose to enter the NBA draft he would be among the very top selections, maybe even number one. Growing up under extremely difficult circumstances and surrounded by family members who made one disastrous choice after another, Dante never took his eye off his goal. Not once, until these false charges, has Dante been in any kind of trouble, either at Bridgehampton High School or in his neighborhood, with the law.

  “So why now, when he is so close to achieving his dream, would he commit such self-destructive crimes? The answer—he wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. He wouldn’t do it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your selection as jurors was random, but the next few weeks could be the most important in your lives. The future of a fellow human being is in your hands. Not just the life of an innocent nineteen-year-old, but of a truly remarkable young man. And both Dante and you will have to live with your decision for the rest of your lives.

  “Someone did kill those young men on Beach Road. And in that Brooklyn apartment. Murdered them in cold blood. Whoever committed these horrible crimes will eventually be apprehended and brought to justice, but that person was not and could not have been Dante Halleyville.

  “So I ask you to listen carefully and dispassionately and critically to everything presented to you in this courtroom. Don’t let anyone but yourself decide how strong or weak the prosecution’s case is. I have faith that you can and will do that. Thanks.”

  When Tom turns away from the jury, three hundred bodies readjust themselves in their seats. In addition to the rustling, you can almost feel the surprise, and it runs from Judge Rothstein in his pulpit to the last beer-bellied cop leaning against the far wall. This inexperienced lawyer, with mediocre credentials and crap grades, can handle himself in a courtroom.

  Chapter 91

  Kate

  TOM SITS, AND Melvin Howard, Ioli’s assistant DA, stands. Howard is a tall, thin man in his early fifties with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and antique wire-rimmed spectacles. He’s also African American, and none of these things is coincidental.

  For the same transparently cynical reasons that my old firm chose me to help Randall Kane fend off sexual harassment charges brought by his female employees, the prosecution has selected a black man, with the mild-mannered appearance of a college professor, to prosecute Dante Halleyville. The selection is an attempt to tell the jury that this case is not about race, but about crime, a vicious murder that should outrage blacks as much as whites.

  And just because this strategy is obvious and self-serving doesn’t mean it won’t work.

  “In addition to listening,” Melvin Howard begins as he tapes a twelve-by-fourteen-inch color photograph to a large easel set up directly in front of the jury, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to look too.”

  He slowly attaches three more photographs to the easel—and when he steps out of the way, the jurors push back in their chairs, trying to get as far away from the lurid images as possible.

&nbs
p; “These are crime scene photographs of each of the four victims, and it’s your sworn duty not to look away.”

  Caught in the white light of the flash, the skin of the victims is a ghostly white; the lips blue-gray; the raw, burned edges where the bullets entered the foreheads orange; the ample blood that poured down into eyes and cheeks, over chins and down the necks of shirts a deep maroon, a red so deep it looks almost black.

  “This man here, with the bullet hole between his eyes, is Eric Feifer. He was twenty-three years of age, and before the defendant executed him on August thirtieth, Mr. Feifer was a professional-level surfer.

  “This young man is Robert Walco, also twenty-three. While other kids were going to college and business school, he put in ten-hour days with a shovel. The result of his sweat and labor was a successful landscaping business he owned with his dad, Richard Walco.

  “And this is Patrick Roche, twenty-five, a painter who paid the bills by moonlighting as a bartender, and whose good nature earned him the affection of just about everyone who knew him.

  “Finally, this is Michael Walker, and no matter what else you might say about him, he was seventeen years old, a high school senior.

  “Don’t look away. The victims couldn’t. The killer and his accomplice wouldn’t let them. In fact, the killer took sadistic pleasure in making sure that each of these four victims saw exactly what was happening to them as they were shot at such close range that the barrel of the gun singed the skin of their foreheads.

  “And the killer got exactly what he wanted because you can still read the shock and the fear and the pain in their eyes.

  “In ten years, I’ve prosecuted eleven murder cases, but I’ve never seen crime scene photographs like these. I’ve never seen head-on executions like these. And I’ve never seen eyes like these either. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t assume this is run-of-the-mill horror. This is very different. This is what evil looks like up close.”