Beach Road (14 page)

Tom
ABOUT THE SAME time that Kate catches her whirlybird to Manhattan, I squeeze into a tiny seat in a
fourth-grade Amagansett homeroom smelling of chalk and sour milk.

Like her, I have a role to play, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s much of a stretch.

As I take in the scene, more adults enter the classroom and wedge themselves into small chairs, and despite
how rich most of them are, there’s none of the usual posturing. The leader closes the door and signals me,
and I walk to the front of the room and clear my throat.

“My name is John,” I say, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
The crowd murmurs with self-recognition and support as I lay out a familiar story.

“My father gave me my first glass of beer when I was eleven,” I say, which happens to be true. “The next
night, I went out with my pals and got gloriously drunk.” Also true, but from here on, I’m winging it.

“It felt so perfect I spent the next twenty years trying to re-create that feeling. Never happened, but as you
know, it didn’t keep me from trying.”
There are more murmurs and empathetic nods and maybe I actually belong here-I’m hardly a model of
sobriety. But I try not to think about that and keep my performance marching along.

“Six years ago, my wife walked out and I ended up in the hospital. That’s when I went to my first meeting,
and thank God, I’ve been sober since. But lately my life and work have gotten much more stressful.” I
assume some of the people in the room know me or the work I’m referring to, but Amagansett is a
different world from Montauk, and I don’t recognize anyone personally.

“In the last couple of weeks, I’ve felt myself inching closer to the precipice, so I came here tonight,” I say,
which is also true in a way. “It’s hard for me to admit-but I need a little help.”
When the meeting comes to a close, I have a set of new friends, and a handful of them linger in the
parking lot. They don’t want to leave here and be alone just yet. So they lean on their Beamers and Benzes
and trade war stories. And guys being guys, it gets competitive.

When one describes being escorted by two cops from the delivery room the morning his son was born,
another tops him-or bottoms him-by passing out at his old man’s funeral. I’m starting to feel kind of
sane, actually.

“What was your poison?” asks a gray-bearded Hollywood producer who owns one of the homes on Beach
Road. He catches me off guard.

“Specifically?” I ask, buying time as I frantically canvass my brain.

“Yeah,
specifically,
” he says, snorting, provoking a round of laughs.

“White Russians,” I spit out. “I know it sounds funny, but it wasn’t. I’d go through two bottles of vodka a
night. How about you?”
“I was shooting three thousand dollars a week, and one of my problems was I could afford it.”
“You cop from Loco?” I ask, and as soon as I do, I know I’ve crossed some kind of line.

Suddenly the lot goes quiet, and the producer fixes me with a stare. Scrambling, I say, “I ask because
that’s the crazy fuck I used to cop from.”
“Oh, yeah?” says the producer, leaning toward me from the hood of his black Range Rover. “Then get
your stories straight. You an alkie or a junkie?”
“Junkie,” I say, looking down at the cement. “I don’t know you guys, so I made that shit up about the
drinking.”
“Come over here,” he says.

If he looks at my arms for tracks, I’m busted, but I have no choice.

I step closer to his car, and for what seems like a full minute, he stares into my eyes. Then he pushes off his
car, grabs my shoulders, and digs his gray beard into my neck.

“Kid,” he says, “if I can beat it, you can too. And don’t go anywhere near that fucker Loco. What I hear,
he was the one who offed those kids on the beach last summer.”

Tom
AT THE OFFICE the next morning, Kate and I lay out our notes like fishermen dumping their catch on a
Montauk wharf. In a month of digging, some straightforward and a lot of it shamelessly underhanded, we
have managed to complicate the case against Dante in half a dozen ways. According to Kate, every new
wrinkle should make it easier to cast doubt about what really happened that night.

“For the prosecution, this is going to be about the fear of young black males,” she says. “Well, now we
can flip the stereotype. If what we have is accurate, then in the weeks before their death, the white
kids were messing up. And they weren’t doing coke or ecstasy or pills, but
crack,
the blackest and most ghetto drug of all. Then there’s this mysterious dealer, Loco.”

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“Try to confirm what we have. Look for more. Look for
Loco.

But in the meantime, we’re also going to
share
what we have.”

“Share?”
Kate pulls a white shoe box out of her gym bag and places it on the table. With the same sense of
ceremony as a samurai unsheathing a sword, she takes out an old-fashioned Rolodex. “In here are the
numbers of every top reporter and editor in New York,” she says. “It’s the most valuable thing I took with
me from Walmark, Reid and Blundell.”
For the rest of the day, Kate works the phone, pitching Dante’s story to one top editor after another, from
the murders and his arrest to his background and the upcoming trial.

“This case has everything,” she tells
Vanity Fair
’s Betsey Hall, then editor Graydon Carter. “Celebrities, gangsters, billionaires. There’s race, class, and
an eighteen-year-old future NBA star who’s facing the death penalty. And it’s all happening
in the Hamptons.

”

In fact, it
is
a huge story, and before the afternoon is over, we’re negotiating with half a dozen major magazines
clamoring for special access to both Dante and us.

“The cat is out of the bag,” says Kate when the last call has been made and her Rolodex is tucked away.
“Now, God help us.”

Part Three
Down and Out in the Hamptons

Raiborne
WHEN I NEED to work something out, I don’t go to a shrink like Tony Soprano. I wander into Fort Greene
Park and sit down across from an impenetrable Methuselah of a chess hustler named Ezekiel Whitaker.
That way I can think instead of talk, and sit outside instead of being cooped up in a shade-drawn room.

It suits me better, particularly on an Indian summer Sunday afternoon with the last brown leaves rustling
sweetly in this Brooklyn park.

“Your move,” says Zeke impatiently as soon as my butt hits the stone bench. For Zeke, time is money, just
like a shrink. Zeke has a face that looks as if it were carved out of hard wood and the long, graceful fingers
of a former migrant fruit picker, and me and him, we’ve been going at it alfresco for years. So I know I got
my work cut out for me.

But when I snatch his rook right out from under his haughty nose ten minutes into the game, I have to
crow about it.

“You sure you’re feeling all right, brother man?” I ask. “Cold? Flu? Alzheimer’s?”

I should have kept my mouth shut, because of course, that’s when my mind leaves the board and
circles back to work and the name chalked on the dirty blackboard of the precinct house. Instead of
concentrating on how I might solidify my position on this chessboard and teach this old goat some
much-needed humility, I think about
Manny Rodriguez.

Rodriguez’s unsolved murder has been eating at me for weeks. Every time I walk into the precinct, his
name admonishes me from the board.

I never for a second bought that story the papers put out about a feud between Glock, Inc., and Cold
Ground, Inc. Thing is, rappers are too hotheaded to make good assassins, and this killer didn’t leave a
trace. Not only that, but Rodriguez, who picked up lunch and ran out in the rain to put quarters in the
meter, was too low on the food chain to make any sense as a target.

Rodriguez was a gofer, or as us chess masters like to say, a pawn, and as I ponder that, Zeke reaches
across the board with the precision of a pickpocket and plucks my queen off her square.

“Take her, Zeke. I never liked the bitch anyway.”
Now a win is out of the question, a draw unlikely, and the board looks like a big rusty steel trap waiting to
clamp shut on my ass. If I had any dignity I’d resign, but I came here to think about Rodriguez anyway,
so I’ll let Zeke earn his money while I try to earn mine. As I do that, Zeke sweeps through my ranks like
Sherman went through Georgia. He picks off my last bishop and knight, and when my castle drops among
all my other casualties, he says, “I guess you don’t have to worry yourself about my deteriorating mind no
more, Connie.”
“That’s a relief.”
The end is swift but not particularly merciful, and like always, it reminds me of some Latin rumba-check,
check, check, checkmate.

I pry open my wallet and hand Zeke a twenty and still feel better than I have in weeks-because I finally
got an idea about who might have killed Manny Rodriguez.

Raiborne
I HATE CALLING “Corpseman” Krauss on a weekend, but not so much that I don’t do it. He agrees to
drive in from Queens, and when I pull into the fenced-in lot behind the morgue, he’s already there, sitting
cross-legged on the hood of his Volvo. Except for the burning ciggie hanging from his mouth, Krauss looks
like a little Buddha.

“Thanks for coming in,” I tell him.

“Keep your thanks, Connie. The in-laws have been over since Friday night. I was praying you’d call.”
We trade the sun-filled parking lot for beige linoleum corridors, which are even quieter than usual. We head
to Krauss’s office, where he reads me the ballistics report on Rodriguez.

When he’s finished, I say, “Now do me a favor, Kraussie, and call up Michael Walker’s report.”
Walker is the teenager we found murdered in his bed three blocks away, about a month before. I’m
thinking that maybe the two are connected. I know there are superficial similarities between the two, but
I’m after something more specific and telling than the fact that both were essentially executed at close
range at night in the same neighborhood.

But as Kraussie reads off the two lists of bullet calibers, bore size, etc., nothing matches up. Even the style
and make of the silencers are different.

“The logic is different too,” says Krauss. “I mean, it’s not that hard to understand why Walker, prime
suspect in a triple homicide, might get his ticket punched. But a messenger who had never been in any kind
of trouble? That’s some domestic thing, or who knows what.”
“Or maybe they’re so different they have to be connected.”
We each grab a report and read through them again in the deep, depressing silence you’d be hard-pressed
to find anywhere other than a morgue on a Sunday afternoon.

Neither of us can find a damn thing worth discussing, and finally it’s the ocean-floor silence, so deep it’s
deafening, that drives us back out into the sunshine and our so-called lives.

Tom

ON MONDAY EVENING Kate and I go to Barnes Pharmacy to check out the new January mags.
Like any media-savvy couple, we grab copies of
Vanity Fair, New York,
and
The New Yorker
and hustle them back to my car.

At Sam’s we get a table in the back room and spread out our glossy booty, the luxe, shiny covers
sparkling like showroom sheet metal. Kate grabs
New York
and slides
Vanity Fair
to me. On page 188, Dante looks up at me through prison bars. It’s a devastating photograph,
capturing Dante’s youth and fear, and also the false bravado that attempts to conceal it.

In all of the magazines, his face has been lit to make his skin appear darker. Race and the Hamptons are a
winning newsstand combination, and they’re milking it for all it’s worth.

On top of everything else, it’s kind of nice to be here with Kate. Almost like a date. For the next hour,
we read our mags and slide them back and forth, stopping only for a bite of artichoke-and-bacon pie
or a gulp of cold beer. The
New Yorker
piece, accompanied by a stark black-and-white photograph that makes Dante look like a dancer or a
pop star, is quite short, but Dominick Dunne’s, in
Vanity Fair,
and Pete Hamill’s, in
New York,
are ten thousand words easy, and both are fair, even sympathetic, to Dante. Every major theme Kate
planted on the phone, from racism to an overzealous prosecution team to the rumored drug use of the
victims, has bloomed into stylish, glossy print. To see it all spread out on the table, particularly since so
much of it is little more than rumor, is a bit overwhelming.

Even more so is the amount of space given to the “courageous pair of young Montauk-born-and-raised
attorneys” who have made the brave decision to represent the accused killer of their old friends.

I had no idea Kate and I were going to be such a big part of the story.

Dunne describes us as “a red-haired Jackie and a burlier JFK” and writes that “even Dunleavy’s
Boston terrier, Wingo, is ridiculously photogenic.” According to Hamill, “their chemistry is not
imagined. In their teens and early twenties, the two were a couple for more than five years.” Both
Vanity Fair
and
New York
run the same snapshot of us taken after a St. John’s victory in 1992.

“It’s a good thing everyone in town hates us already,” I say. “Because this is beyond embarrassing.”
We pay up and untie Wingo from the bench out front. Wingo seems to be adjusting quite well to sudden
fame but is bothered by a foul burning smell in the air. As we walk to the lot behind the restaurant, a
pumper truck from the East Hampton Fire Department races by.

The smell gets stronger, and when we round the corner of the white stone building, we see that what the
local firemen have just put out was
my car.

Or what’s left of it.

All the windows have been smashed, the roof ripped off, and on the passenger seat is a soggy, charred
stack of glossy magazines.