Beach Road Read online

  I’d forgotten how tedious this kind of work can be. Hartstein, my professor at St. John’s, used to call it “ass in the chair” work because that’s what it comes down to, the willingness to keep asking questions and the persistence to go through events again and again even if it only yields a few crumbs of new, probably useless, information.

  And it’s twice as hard in here because Dante and I have to do it without caffeine or sugar.

  Nevertheless, we keep on slogging, turning our attention to what he and Michael Walker saw and heard when they arrived to meet Feifer that night. These few minutes are the key to everything, and I keep pressing Dante for more details. But it’s not until our third time through that Dante recalls smelling a cigar. Okay, that could be something.

  And in the midst of his fourth pass, he sits up straight in his chair and says, “There was a guy on the bench.”

  My posture suddenly improves too. “Someone was there?”

  “You know that bench at the far side of the court? A guy was sleeping on it when we arrived. And five minutes later, when we ran past it, he was gone.”

  “You sure about that, Dante? This is important.”

  “Positive. Hispanic-looking dude, Mexican, or maybe Colombian. About thirty, long black hair in a ponytail.”

  Chapter 44

  Tom

  A CIGAR. MAYBE belonging to one of the killers.

  The news that somebody else may have been at the murder scene who could confirm or add to Dante’s story, who maybe saw the three kids killed.

  Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.

  The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York. I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly pressed.

  At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable white-shoe law firms—Walmark, Reid and Blundell.

  Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I push through the gleaming brass doors and catch an elevator to the thirty-seventh floor.

  But that just gets me to the wrong side of another barrier, as daunting in its way as the walls that ring the Riverhead jail. Instead of barbed wire and concrete, it’s a giant piece of polished mahogany so immense it must have arrived from the rain forest in the hold of a tanker and been hoisted to its new, unlikely home by a cloud-scraping crane.

  Instead of an armed sentry, there’s a stunning blond receptionist wearing a headset and looking like a cyborg.

  “Good morning. I’m here to see Kate Costello,” I say.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  To the receptionist, that’s the same as a no. Maybe worse. She directs me toward a leather purgatory, where for the next twenty minutes I sweat into a thirty-thousand-dollar couch. Last night, coming here unannounced seemed a stroke of genius, and during the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Montauk, my confidence never flagged. Well, not too much anyway.

  But witty conversations with yourself and mock rehearsals can never duplicate the tension of the actual moment—and now Kate strides toward me, low heels clicking like little hammers on the marble floor.

  I wonder if she knows how little her austere navy suit does to conceal her beauty. And does she care?

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, and before I say a word, I’m back at the bottom of the hole I dug with Kate ten years ago.

  “I need your help to defend Dante Halleyville.”

  This is the point where I figured Kate would invite me back to her office, but all she does is stare through me. So I make my pitch right there in the lobby, laying it out as succinctly as I can. What I say makes perfect sense to me, but I have no idea how it’s being received. I stare into Kate’s bright blue eyes but can’t read them, and when I stop to catch my breath, she cuts me off.

  “Tom,” she says, “don’t ever come here again.”

  Then she spins and walks down the hall, the clicking of her heels sounding even chillier than when she arrived. She never looks back.

  Chapter 45

  Kate

  I RETREAT FROM Tom Dunleavy’s totally unexpected ambush to the sanctuary of my office. I know that sounds superficial. It’s just a room. But I’ve only had it a month, and the elegant furniture and dazzling East River view haven’t lost the power to make me feel better the instant I step inside.

  Thirty-one e-mails have come in since nine last night. Eight are related to the cease-and-desist letter I messengered to the lead attorney for Pixmen Entertainment last night. Our client, Watermark, Inc., considers Pixmen’s new logo too close to one used by one of their divisions, and my letter accused them of trademark infringement and raised the prospect of aggressive legal action, including a possible freeze on all Pixmen income for the last fourteen months.

  In an e-mail sent at 3:43 a.m., Pixmen’s attorney reports that the logo has been deleted from all outgoing product, and e-mails from Watermark’s attorneys express their satisfaction and gratitude. Persuasively threatening cataclysmic doom is one of the cheap thrills of my job.

  A dozen other e-mails are the fallout of an embarrassing feature in American Lawyer about rising female legal stars. Many are from headhunters, but the most interesting is from the president of Columbia University, who asks if I have time to serve on the committee to find the new dean of the law school. Yes, I will find the time.

  At exactly 9:00 a.m., Mitchell Susser arrives to brief me on the upcoming insider-trading trial of former Credit Mercantile managing partner Franklin Wolfe. An earlier trial, handled by one of our senior partners, ended in a hung jury, and I’ve been assigned the retrial.

  “Relax, Mitch,” I say, not that it does much good. Susser, a brand-new hire who was Law Review at Harvard, has been reviewing the trial transcripts. “Wolfe,” he says, “spends way too much time implausibly denying activity that isn’t clearly illegal. It costs him his credibility and gains him almost nothing. I think a second trial is a great opportunity.”

  We’re considering which of our defendant-preppers would make the best pretrial coach when Tony Reid, the “Reid” of Walmark, Reid and Blundell, sticks his eminent gray head into the room. Beside him is Randall Kane, arguably the firm’s most valuable client.

  “Got a minute, Kate?” he asks rhetorically.

  Susser sweeps up his papers and bolts, and Tony Reid and Kane take his place in the seating area at the far end of my office. “Of course, you know Randy, Kate.”

  I don’t need to have met Kane to know him. In the process of making Bancroft Subsidiaries one of the fastest-growing corporations in the world, Kane has become an iconic business leader, the embodiment of the hard-charging CEO. With a proposal jotted down on a napkin, a colleague in another division just got him a six-million-dollar advance for a business book.

  But as Reid explains with exactly the right degree of urgency, all that could be jeopardized by a just-filed class-action lawsuit. It charges Bancroft with tolerating a work environment hostile to women and allowing a pattern of widespread sexual harassment. The suit names Kane directly.

  “I know I don’t need to tell you,” says Reid, “that this opportunistic litigation is nothing but thinly veiled extortion.” Based on my own experience with class-action lawyers, that’s probably true. Sophisticated ambulance-chasers, these lawyers come up with a target, prepare a suit, and
then trawl for victims.

  “I’m not rolling over on this one, Kate,” says Kane. “It’s total crap! Three of Bancroft’s eight senior vice presidents are women, and the company was cofounded by my wife. They’ve got the wrong guy. If I have to, I’ll take it all the way to trial.”

  “I can’t believe that will be necessary,” I say, “but I assure you our response will be aggressive.”

  “You bet it will!” says Randall Kane.

  The rest of the day is wall-to-wall briefings, meetings, and conference calls. The company dining room delivers a chef’s salad for lunch and sushi for dinner, and when I turn off the light at 11:00 p.m., I’m not the last person to leave.

  The lovely fall night reminds me of the lovely fall day I’ve missed, and I decide to walk awhile before catching a cab.

  I’m taking my first steps toward mostly deserted Park Avenue—when a tall figure rises from the shadows of the small stone plaza beside our office building.

  Chapter 46

  Kate

  WALKING STIFFLY, THE man hurries toward me, then stops before he reaches the brightly lit sidewalk.

  “Half day?” he asks.

  It’s Tom!

  “How long you been here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’ve always sucked at math.”

  I’m shocked to see him again but, much as I hate to admit it, kind of impressed. Tom’s always been too charming by half but has never seemed the kind of guy capable of sitting on a stone bench for fifteen hours. Hell, one of our problems was that I never knew what Tom was capable of.

  “Kate, you have got to hear me out. Can I please buy you a drink?” In the streetlight now, he looks exhausted, and his eyes plead. “This is a matter of life and death. That may sound lame to you, but not to Dante Halleyville.”

  “A cup of coffee,” I say.

  “Really? That’s the best news I’ve had in ten years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, hoping I caught my smile in time.

  The least intimate place I can think of is a Starbucks around the corner, where Tom wolfs a muffin in three or four bites and gulps down a bottle of water.

  “Here’s my spiel, Kate, the one I didn’t get a chance to give you this morning. Dante Halleyville has never had one good thing happen in his entire life. When he was twelve, his father was stabbed in front of him, and he watched him bleed to death because in his neighborhood ambulances get there a lot slower than on Beach Road. His mother—a crack addict, prostitute, and thief—wasn’t much better than no mother at all. She’d been in and out of jail even before his father died. So how does Dante deal with all this? He sees he has a talent that can take him out of this world and help everyone in his family. He can play ball.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “I mean really play, Kate. A whole different level than me. The Michael Jordan–Magic Johnson level. He makes himself the best schoolboy player in the country. He’s easily good enough to go hardship and enter the League out of high school, but out of respect for his grandmother Marie, he agrees to go to college. Three weeks ago, he’s framed for four murders he had nothing to do with, Kate. Now the state of New York is seeking the death penalty. The least he deserves is a great lawyer.”

  “What are you?”

  “I don’t know what I am, Kate, but we both know it’s not a great lawyer. On a good day, I’m an okay lawyer trying his ass off. He needs a brilliant lawyer trying her ass off.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Kate, it’s a figure of speech.”

  It’s a good pitch. Tom didn’t waste those fifteen hours—but I don’t even think about it. The bastard could charm the birds out of the trees, but I’m not falling for it. Not TWICE. It’s a big world. He can find another sucker.

  “Sorry, Tom. I can’t do it. But keep trying your ass off—you might surprise yourself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tom, it’s a figure of speech. And thanks for the coffee.”

  Chapter 47

  Tom

  COME WHAT MAY, I am definitely on the case now, and in the spotlight again.

  Since Lucy and the Montauk Bakery don’t want my business anymore, me and Wingnut, who by the way was named after the great Knicks reserve player Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo but answers to anything with a wing in it, have been forced to refine our morning routine. Now we start our workday at that Honduran-owned grocery where no one knows our names. There I can sit alone at the outdoor table ten feet from Route 27 and try to figure out how to keep New York from executing an innocent eighteen-year-old kid.

  Since I’ve taken on Dante Halleyville’s case, my days pass in a blur and end wherever I fall asleep over my notebooks. I am nothing if not dedicated, and a little crazy.

  As I sit in the steep October-morning light, pickups roll in and out and traffic streams west on 27, ten feet from my nose, but I’m too preoccupied to be distracted. When Dante dredged up that “witness” on the bench from his memory, he gave me a tantalizing lead. But I’m having a hard time following up on it.

  If there’s a person out there who can corroborate Dante’s version of events or saw the real killers, the state has no case. But I barely have a description, let alone a name.

  Maybe Artis LaFontaine, dealer, pimp, whatever he is, stayed at the basketball court long enough to see the guy arrive, but I have no idea how to get in touch with him. If I went to the police, they might have him on their radar, but I hate to do that unless I absolutely have to.

  As I take a pull of coffee, a yellow VW Bug rolls by. Yellow is the color du jour, I guess, and that makes me think of Artis’s canary-yellow convertible.

  There can’t be that many places where a person can buy a $400,000 Ferrari, right?

  I flip open my cell and start using up my minutes. The dealership in Hempstead refers me to an exotic-car dealership on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. They refer me to a dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Two hours later, still at my outdoor office on the side of the road, I’m talking to Bree Elizabeth Pedi. Bree Elizabeth is the top salesperson at the Miami Auto Emporium in South Beach. “Of course I know Artis. He’s putting my kids through college.”

  I persuade Pedi to give Artis a call, and a couple minutes later, Artis is on the line, but he’s chillier than I expect. “If you’re calling about that night at the basketball court, I wasn’t there.”

  “Artis, if I have to, I’ll subpoena you.”

  “First you got to find me.”

  “Dante’s facing the death penalty. You know something, and you’re going to keep it to yourself?”

  “You don’t know Loco. I’ll do time rather than testify against him. But as long as you understand that I was NOT THERE, I might be able to help.”

  I describe the man lying on the bench, and Artis knows who I’m talking about right away.

  “You’re looking for Manny Rodriguez,” he says. “Like everyone else, he’s an aspiring rapper. He told me he works for a tiny label called Cold Ground, Inc. I bet they’re in the phone book.”

  Chapter 48

  Tom

  OKAY, SO NOW I’m an amateur detective. And I’m back in Manhattan because Cold Ground, Inc., turns out to be in a funky postwar building right below Union Square.

  A mirrored elevator drops me on seven, where a thumping bass line pulls me down a maroon-and-yellow hallway and the scent of reefer takes me the rest of the way.

  Inside the last door on the left, a little hip-hop factory is chugging industriously. What had been the living room of a one-bedroom apartment is now a recording studio.

  Behind a glass wall a baby-faced rapper, his immaculate Yankee cap precisely askew, rhythmically spits rhymes into a brass microphone.

  I ice him and vanish

  No trace of what I done

  Finding me is harder

  Than finding a smoking gun

  The artist looks no more than seventeen and neither does his girl, who sits on the leather couch on the other side of
the glass with an infant on her lap dressed just like his dad, right down to the cockeyed cap and retro Nikes. A dozen others are scattered around, and whether dazzlingly elongated or powerfully compact, they all seem like the fullest expression of who they are.

  Who is in charge? No one that I can tell, and there’s no desk or receptionist in front.

  “Manny’s making dupes,” says a tall woman named Erica, and she nods helpfully when a cable-thin guy with a jet-black ponytail steps out of a back room.

  In Manny’s arms is a stack of what look like pizza boxes. “Got to deliver these to another studio,” he says, heading out the door. “Come and we’ll talk on the way.”

  In a crosstown cab, Manny lays down the plotlines of his frenetic life. “I was born in Havana,” he says. “My father was a doctor. A good one, which meant he made a hundred dollars a month. One morning, after a great big breakfast, I got on an eight-foot sailboat, pushed off from the beach, and just kept going. Twenty hours later, I almost drowned swimming to shore fifty miles south of Miami. I was wearing this watch. If I died, I died, but I had to come to America.”

  Three years later, Manny says he’s a break away from becoming the Cuban-American Eminem. “I’m dope, and I’m not the only one who knows it.”

  I suspect he’s confused about why I’m here, but I’ll set him straight in a minute. We get off on West Twenty-first Street in front of a Chelsea townhouse, and he drops his tapes at another apartment-turned-recording-studio.

  “I’m not going to be doing this much longer,” he tells me.

  I offer to buy him lunch around the corner at the Empire Diner, and we take a seat at a black-lacquered table overlooking Tenth Avenue.

  “So what label you with?” Manny asks once our orders are in.

  “I’m not with a label, Manny. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing Dante Halleyville. He’s falsely charged with killing three people at Smitty Wilson’s court in East Hampton. I know you were there that night. I’m hoping you saw something that can save his life.”