Beach Road (13 page)

Sean smiles in welcome as I step into the light. He puts on a spacey CD I don’t recognize.

The other customer, a tall, skinny guy with wire-rimmed glasses, glances at me then looks away. Nothing
changes. He’s pushing fifty but has the self-conscious slouch of an eighteen-year-old. The guy is working
the back of the alphabet, so I start on the other end and move happily from AC/DC to the Clash to
Fleetwood Mac.

When he leaves, I take a reissue of
Rumors
up to the register.

“Classic,” says Sean.

“You approve? I was sure you’d think it was too girly and lame.”
“What are you talking about, Kate? I was playing it an hour ago. Me and the cross-eyed cat couldn’t get
enough of it.”
“Also, the title seemed kind of appropriate,” I say.

“You lost me.”
“You know, have you heard any?”
Sean seems a little disappointed, but I’m not sure if it’s the subject matter or my attempt at humor.

“Is that really why you’re here?”
“It is, Sean.”
“You mean information about Feifer, Walco, and Rochie?” asks Sean.

“Or anything that might help explain why someone would want to kill them.”
“Even if I did-I’m not sure I’d tell you.”
“Because people told you not to.”
Sean looks at me as if I just insulted him in the worst possible way. “I could care less about that bullshit.
But these dudes were my pals, and they’re not here to defend themselves.”
“We’re just trying to figure out who killed them, Sean. If you’re a friend, I’d think you want to know too.”
“Spare me the lecture, Kate,” says Sean. But then he flashes one of those gracious Dunleavy smiles. “So
you going to buy this CD, or you loitering?”
“I’m buying.”
I take my CD out to a dark bench a couple doors down and claw at the cellophane as I take in the elegant
street and cool, fragrant air. East Hampton is one of the prettiest towns you’ll ever see. It’s the people who
can be ugly sometimes.

Beside the bench is a mailbox. Looking closely, I see I’m not the only Sounds customer to make this
their first stop. The blue surface is covered with hundreds of tiny little peeled-off CD titles, and now
Rumors
is part of the graffiti montage.

Rumors
is even better than I remembered, and when I get to Mack’s place, I sit in the car in the driveway until
I’ve heard the whole thing.

When I finally go inside, Mack is snoring on the living room couch, and my beeping cell doesn’t faze him
at all.

It’s
Sean,
and he’s
whispering.

“I have heard something, Kate, and from people I trust-which is that in the last few weeks, Feif,
Walco, and Rochie were all hitting the pipe. This summer, crack was all the rage out here, particularly
on Beach Road. Supposedly, all three of them got into it. Once you hit the pipe, you can go from zero
to a hundred in a weekend. That’s what I know. So how’d you like the CD?”

“Great. Thanks. For
everything,
Sean.”

I hang up and look over at my sleeping host. Grateful that Mack still hasn’t stirred, I pull the blanket up to
his chin and head upstairs.

So they say the dead boys were hitting the pipe. I wonder if it’s true.

Tom
THE CALL FROM my nephew Sean seems to break the frustrating logjam on the case, because the very
next afternoon, eighteen-year-old Jarvis Maloney climbs the creaking stairs to our office. He is the first
visitor we’ve had in a week, and Wingo is beside himself, not to mention all over Jarvis.

“I’ve got something that might not mean anything,” he says. “But Coach told me I should tell you about it
right away.”
Every summer, the village of East Hampton shows its appreciation for the influx of free-spending visitors
by siccing a teenage army of meter maids on them. Dressed in brown pants and white shirts, they hump up
and down Main Street chalking tires, reading dates on registration and inspection stickers, writing tickets,
and basically printing money for the town. Jarvis, a jug-headed high school senior, who also happens to
play noseguard for the East Hampton High School football team, was a member of last summer’s
infantry, and once we get Wingo off him, he shares what’s on his mind.

“About nine o’clock on the Saturday night that Feifer, Walco, and Rochie were murdered, I ticketed a car
at Georgica Beach. Actually, I wrote two tickets-one for not having a valid 2003 beach sticker and
another for the missing emissions sticker. Only reason it stuck in my mind was the car-a maroon nine-
eleven with seven hundred miles on the odometer.

“The next day, I’m shooting the breeze with my buddy who works the early shift. We had a little
competition about who ticketed the sweetest car, and I throw out the Porsche. He says
he ticketed it too,
at the same spot, early the next morning. That means it was sitting there all night, right next to where
the bodies were found. Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean a thing, but Coach says I should tell
you.”

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.”

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.

”

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 to 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.