Beach Road Read online

  Chapter 18

  Kate

  I OFFER WALCO’S mom the little that I can, and then I cast about the room for a red-haired toddler in a black velvet dress.

  I see MC in the corner, still with her mom, and then spot my precious pal Macklin Mullen and his handsome grandson Jack over by the makeshift bar. Jack, a lawyer like myself, wanders off as I approach. Okay, fine. I was going to congratulate him on getting married, but whatever.

  Mack is sipping a whiskey and leaning heavily on a gnarled black-thorn shillelagh, but when we throw ourselves into each other’s arms, his embrace is as warm and vigorous as ever.

  “I was fervently hoping that would never end, Katie,” he says when we finally release each other.

  “For God’s sake, Macklin, cheer me up.”

  “I was about to ask you to do the same thing, darling girl. Three boys dead—tragic, pointless, and mystifying. Where you been keeping yourself all this time? I know about your many accomplishments, of course, but I’ve been waiting to toast you in person. Actually, I’ve been waiting to get you drunk! Why in Christ have you been such a stranger?”

  “The standard explanation includes long hours, parents in Sarasota, and brothers scattered with the wind. The pathetic truth, I’m afraid, is I didn’t want to run into Tom Dunleavy. Who, by the way, I just ran into.”

  “The truth is always pathetic, isn’t it? That’s why I avoid it like the plague myself. In any case, now that you’ve gotten over the dreaded encounter with Dunleavy, why don’t you come out here and put the little shit out of business? Not that it would be much of an accomplishment. I hear he bills about a hundred hours a year.”

  “Better yet, why don’t I just forgive him and move on? It’s been almost a decade.”

  “Forgive? Move on? Kate Costello, have you forgotten that you’re Irish?”

  “Macklin, you’ve made me laugh,” I say, and just then, none other than Mary Catherine wobbles across the room and flings herself at my legs.

  “Drivel aside, Mack, this is the true problem for me and Montauk. Of my two favorite people, one is twenty months old, the other eighty-four.”

  “But, Kate, we’re both just hitting our strides. This shillelagh nonsense is nothing but a corny piece of atmosphere.”

  Chapter 19

  Tom

  THE NEXT DAY, to sweat out the funeral, I head to the beach, my four-legged personal trainer, Wingo, nipping at my heels. It’s the first Monday after Labor Day, the unofficial start of townie summer, and most of the insufferable New Yorkers are gone.

  On a cool, brilliantly sunny day, the greatest stretch of beach in North America is empty.

  Running on the damp, packed sand close to the water is no more difficult than running on the track behind the high school. To punish myself, though, I stay on the soft stuff that sucks at your feet with every step.

  In five minutes, everything that’s attached to me hurts—legs, lungs, back, head—so I pick up the pace.

  In another five minutes, I can smell the whiskey from last night as the sweat pours off my face. Five minutes after that, my hangover has nearly vanished.

  Later that afternoon, Wingo and I are recovering from our midday workout, me on the couch and Wingo asleep at my feet, when a knock on the front door rouses us. It’s about four, still plenty of light outside, and a black sedan is parked on the gravel driveway.

  At the door is young master Van Buren, the detective who ran the show on the beach the other night.

  Barely thirty, he made detective early this summer. Considering his age, it was quite a coup. He leapfrogged half a dozen pretty decent cops with more seniority, including Belnap, and it didn’t win him any friends in the station house. So guess what Barney’s nickname is?

  “Tom, I don’t need to tell you why I’m here,” he says.

  “I’m surprised it took this long.”

  Still dehydrated from my run, I grab a beer and offer him something, just to hear him say no.

  “Why don’t we sit outside while we still can,” I say, and then because of the force with which he rejected my first offer, or because I’m acting like a prick for no good reason, I repeat it. “Sure I can’t get you that beer? It’s almost five.”

  Van Buren ignores me and takes out a brand-new orange notebook he must have just bought for the occasion at the stationery store in Montauk.

  “Tom, people say you did a good job getting that kid to put down his gun the other day. What confuses me is why you didn’t call the police.”

  I can tell Van Buren doesn’t expect an answer. He’s simply letting me know that he can be a prick too.

  “Obviously, I should have, but I could tell the kid had no intention of using it.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I was closer. Believe me, he was more scared than Feif.”

  “You know what kind of gun it was?”

  “I don’t know guns, Barney.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “I barely looked at it. In fact, I made it a point not to. I tried to pretend that me and Walker were just two people having a conversation. Ignoring the gun made that a lot easier.”

  “You know any reason Michael Walker or Dante Halleyville might want to kill Feifer, Walco, or Roche?”

  “No. There isn’t any.”

  “Why’s that, Tom?”

  “They barely knew each other.”

  The young detective pursed his lips and shook his head. “No one’s seen them since the murder.”

  “Really.”

  “Plus, we got reason to think Dante and Walker were at the scene that night.”

  I start shaking my head a little at the news. “That makes no sense. There’s no way they’d go back there after what happened that afternoon.”

  “Not if they were smart,” says Van Buren. “But, Tom, these boys weren’t smart. They could be killers.”

  Chapter 20

  Tom

  WOW! HALF AN hour after Barney Fife Van Buren leaves with his little orange notebook in hand, Wingo sounds the alarm again. More company.

  When I look through the front-door window, all I see is torso, which means it’s Clarence, and that’s not good news either.

  Clarence, who drives a cab in town and does some college scouting, has been a close friend since he steered me to St. John’s fifteen years ago. Because there’s as much downtime for a Hampton cabbie as for a Montauk lawyer, he comes by my office two or three times a week. The six-foot-six Clarence is also Dante’s cousin, and I know from his worried expression that’s why he’s here. This cannot be good.

  “I just got a call from him,” says Clarence. “Boy is scared out of his mind. Thinks they’re going to kill him.”

  “Who? Who’s going to kill him?”

  “He’s not sure.”

  I pull two beers out of the fridge and Clarence takes one.

  “Where the hell is he? Van Buren just left here. He says Dante and Walker bolted. It looks bad.”

  “I know it does, Tom.”

  With the sun on the way down, we sit at the counter in the kitchen.

  “Van Buren also implied that Dante and Walker were at the murder scene that night.”

  “They got a witness?” asks Clarence.

  “I can’t tell. He was being cute about it. Why the hell would Dante and Walker be going back there after what happened?”

  “Dante says he can explain everything. But right now we got to get him to turn himself in. That’s why I’m here. He respects you, Tom. You talk to him, he’ll listen.”

  Clarence stares at me. “Tom, please? I’ve never once asked you for a favor.”

  “He tell you where they are?”

  Clarence shook his head and looked hurt. “Wouldn’t even give me a number.”

  I spread my hands wide. “What do you want to do, Clarence? Wait here and hope he calls again?”

  “He says we should talk to his grandma. Dante says if Marie says it’s cool, he’ll give us a call.”
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  Chapter 21

  Tom

  I CAN FEEL right then and there that this is going real bad in a big hurry, and I should not be involved. But I go with Clarence anyway.

  We climb into his big yellow Buick station wagon and head west through Amagansett and East Hampton, and just before the start of Bridgehampton’s two-block downtown, we turn right at the monument and go north on 114.

  Stay on it long enough, the road leads to Sag Harbor, but along the way is the one enduring pocket of poverty left in the Hamptons. It’s called Kings Highway but is often referred to as Black Hampton. One minute you’re passing multimillion-dollar estates, the next minute shotgun shacks and trailer homes, old rotting cars on blocks like in the Ozarks or Appalachia.

  Dante and his grandmother live off the dirt road leading to the town dump, and when we pull up to her trailer, the woman who comes to the door has Dante’s cheekbones and lively brown eyes but none of his height. In fact, she’s as compact and round as Dante is long and lean.

  “Don’t stand out there in the cold,” says Marie.

  The sitting room in the trailer is dark and a little grim. The only light comes from a single low-watt table lamp, and the desperation in the close air is a palpable thing. It’s hard to imagine that both she and Dante can live in here together.

  “We’re here to help,” says Clarence, “and the first step is getting Dante to turn himself in.”

  “You’re here to help? How is that? Dante and Michael had nothing to do with these crimes,” says Marie. “NOTHING! Dante is very aware of the chance he has been given, and earned, and what that could mean.”

  “I know that,” says Clarence, heartbreak in his voice too. “But the police don’t. The longer he stays out, the worse it looks for him.”

  “My grandson could have entered the NBA draft,” says Marie as if she hasn’t heard a word Clarence said. “This home was filled with vultures waving cars and money under his nose, and Dante turned them all down. Dante told me that when he does go pro, he wants to buy me a new house and a new car. I asked him, What’s wrong with this house? What’s wrong with my car? I don’t need those things.”

  Marie fixes us with a hard stare. Her tiny place is immaculate, and you can see the defiant effort to create a semblance of middle-class stability. Barely visible on the wall directly behind Marie is a formal photograph of Dante, his older brother, and his parents all dressed up outside the Baptist Memorial Church in Riverhead. In the picture, Dante looks about ten, and I know from Clarence that soon after that picture was taken, Dante’s father was stabbed to death on the street and his mother went to jail for the first time. I also know that his brother, who many thought was almost as good a pro prospect as Dante, is serving a two-year sentence in a corrections center upstate.

  “Marie,” says Clarence, “you got to get Dante to give Tom a call. Tom used to be a heck of a ballplayer. Now he’s a heck of a lawyer. But he can’t help Dante if Dante won’t let him.”

  Marie stares at me, her face not revealing a thing. “This neighborhood is full of folks who used to be great ballplayers,” she says.

  Chapter 22

  Loco

  ON A SLEEPY midweek afternoon in the teeming metropolis that is downtown Montauk, Hugo Lindgren sits at the counter of John’s Pancake House, killing time like only a cop can, turning a free cup of coffee into a two-hour paid vacation.

  Since Lindgren’s all alone at the counter—the only “customer” in the whole place, in fact—I do the sociable thing and take the stool beside him. Now, how many other drug dealers would make a gesture like that?

  “Loco,” he mutters.

  As I sit, luminously green-eyed Erin Case comes over bearing a nearly empty pot of coffee.

  “Good afternoon, darlin’,” says Erin in her still-strong Ulster brogue. “What can I get you?”

  “I’d love a double-vanilla latte decaf, if it’s not any trouble.”

  “No trouble at all, darlin’. Got it right here,” says Erin, filling my mug with the dregs of the pot in her right hand. “You said double-vanilla latte decaf, right?”

  “Must be my lucky day.”

  “Every day’s your lucky day, darlin’!”

  Pancake John is getting ready to close up shop and flip the sign, so when Erin excuses herself to wipe the maple syrup off the red Naugahyde booths, me and Lindgren shyly return to our so-called coffee. And when Erin stoops under a table to pick up a fallen menu, I slide him my Newsday.

  “John Paul Newport’s column on Hillary,” I say. “It’s hilarious. Kind of thing your lieutenant might get a hoot out of too.”

  “Thanks, pal,” says Lindgren.

  He cracks the editorial section just enough to see two fat envelopes, then slides over his New York Post.

  “Crossword’s a bear today,” he says, “but maybe you’ll have better luck with it than I did.”

  “Coffee’s on me, Hugo,” I say, dropping five dollars on the counter as I head to the door.

  I don’t open my Post until I’m safely back in the Big Black Beast stationed in the middle of the empty parking lot.

  Then I read the note from Lindgren.

  Apparently some sharp-eyed civilian called in a tip to the cops this morning about a wanted fugitive looking a lot like Michael Walker. The suspect was leaving a Brooklyn gym last night, and the name of the establishment now fills the twenty-two letters set aside for nine across. And when I glance at the backseat, I see Hugo has also left me a little party favor—a brand-new, bright-red Miami Heat basketball cap.

  I may have been underestimating Lindgren all these years. I know it’s only the Post and not the London Times, but who would have thought that a corrupt, degenerate excuse for a police officer had the balls or vocabulary to do the crossword in ink?

  Chapter 23

  Loco

  ON ACCOUNT OF the fact that I’m a whole lot brighter and craftier than I look, locating the Bed-Stuy Community Center is a piece of cake. The tricky part is finding a place to park where the Big Black Beast doesn’t draw too much attention to itself and I still have a halfway decent view of both entrances. This, after all, is a stakeout. Just not by the cops.

  After circling the block a couple times, I double-park half a dozen spaces past the community center. That’s right across the street from Carmine’s Pizzeria, so it looks as if I’m just sitting there enjoying my Pepsi and slice like any other self-respecting neighborhood goombah.

  I thought these boxing clubs were extinct, something out of a black-and-white Cagney flick. These days, tough kids don’t scrap. They strap. So mastering the sweet science is only going to get you killed.

  But maybe I’m wrong, because the place looks all renovated and spiffy, and folks are going in and out at a pretty good clip. Most of ’em have a strut too.

  If nothing else, banging on a heavy bag has got to be good stress management. And right now our man Michael Walker has got to be seriously stressing, what with an APB out for him in fifteen states and an outstanding warrant for triple homicide.

  While Walker works out, I blacken the end of the Graycliff Robusto I bought at the Tinder Box in East Hampton. And it looks like I picked it well. It’s nice and soft, and lights like a dream.

  The bad news is that I’m exactly three puffs into my delightful cigar when Walker slides out the back door in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a big gym bag slung over his bony shoulder.

  Now I’m fucked. If I put it out and relight it, the Graycliff will never taste the same. If I take it with me, it’s hardly going to be the relaxing experience I had in mind when I dropped fifteen dollars on it.

  So making the kind of difficult executive decision that earns me the big bucks, I open the sunroof and place the cigar gently in the ashtray. Then I follow Walker north toward Fulton Street.

  Staying half a block back, I see him take a quick left. Just as I round the corner, he looks both ways and ducks into a six-floor tenement about halfway down the block. Two minutes later, the lights go on
and the shades come down on the corner apartment four flights up.

  Gotcha!

  I’ve caught the fugitive.

  Chapter 24

  Loco

  AND GIVE THAT lucky man a cigar!

  I get back to the Big Black Beast, and everything, including my slowly burning Graycliff, is just like I left it. Seeing as we’re in Crooklyn, I pop in an old-school Eric B and Rakim CD and head for the Williamsburg Bridge.

  At 8:00 p.m. the Manhattan-bound lanes are flowing, and twenty minutes later, as my cigar burns down to the finish, I’m in Chinatown, Jake. Killing time.

  It’s a way different world down here, lots of tiny people scurrying over the packed sidewalks with feverish energy, and it never fails to get me jazzed. Makes me think of Saigon, Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter.

  I luck into a parking spot big enough for the Beast, a miracle down here, and wander around for a while until I find a familiar place, where I wash down a couple plates of sweet, soggy dim sum with a couple of sweet, soggy beers.

  After dinner for one, I walk around some more, killing time, then drive to even darker, quieter Tribeca.

  I park on Franklin, climb into the back, and stretch out on my foam mattresses.

  With my blacked-out windows cracked for ventilation, sleeping conditions are pretty damn good, and the next time I open my eyes it’s 3:30 a.m. and I have that pounding in my chest you get when your alarm rips you out of sleep in the middle of the night. I rub the gunk out of my eyes, and when the street comes back into focus, I see that the shadows fluttering over the cobblestones are rats. Is that what Frank meant about waking up in a city that never sleeps?

  Without stopping for coffee, I head back to Bed-Stuy, and half an hour after my alarm went off, I pick the lock in the vestibule of Michael Walker’s building. Then I climb the stairs two, three at a time to the fugitive’s roof.

  It’s cool and quiet up here, and at this hour Bed-Stuy looks peaceful as Bethlehem on a starry night, even beautiful.