Beach Road (12 page)

But I’m thinking,
A surfer with two bodyguards. How rad is that.

It’s almost funny, except, as I tried to point out, this is a public beach. Also, I’m lying in the public
sand.

So I grab the foot in my face and twist it around like little Linda Blair’s head in
The Exorcist.

The ankle makes a satisfyingly unnatural sound; then the cartilage around the bully bodyguard’s knee
cracks, and a scream comes out of his mouth. I don’t see him fall because I’ve already turned my
attention to his colleague, and the two of us pretty much break even until some of the other surfers
pull us apart.

Break even
might have been a slight exaggeration on my part. When I get back to my car one eye is closed
already. And back at my house, a half hour later, there’s some blood in it. But I’d be feeling worse if I
let those jerks scare me off my own beach.

Besides, one eye still works fine, so I go back to the notes from my last interview with Dante.

In addition to the aching ribs and the eye, I must have taken a blow to the head, because I swear a woman
who looks exactly like Kate Costello just walked into my backyard. The woman in question wears blue
jeans, a white Penguin shirt, and black Converse sneakers, and she comes over to where I’m sitting at a
wooden table and takes the chair next to mine.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

“A couple of bodyguards.”
“Belonging to whom?”
“Oh, some guy on Beach Road I tried to talk to about the murders this morning.”
Kate wrinkles her nose and sighs. “You haven’t changed, have you?”
“Actually, I have, Kate.”
Then this woman, who I’m pretty sure actually is Kate Costello, says, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to
help you defend Dante Halleyville.”
And as I sit there too stunned to reply, she continues, “The thing is, you’ve got to say yes because I quit my
job yesterday and moved out here.”
“You know there’s no pay, right? No perks. No medical insurance. Nothing.”
“I’m feeling healthy.”
“So did I when I woke up.”
“Sorry about that.”
“And you’re okay working as an equal with someone who couldn’t even get hired by Walmark, Reid and
Blundell?”
And then Kate nearly smiles. “I consider your unworthiness of Walmark, Reid and Blundell an important
point in your favor.”

Kate

HE’S JUST A
kid.

A very tall kid who looks frightened.

Those are my first unformed thoughts when Dante Halleyville, bending at the waist so as not to bang his
head, steps into the tiny attorney’s room where Tom and I are waiting. Now I’m thinking that it’s one thing
for an eighteen-year-old to hold his own with men on a basketball court but another to do it at a fifteen-
hundred-man maximum-security jail. And Dante’s eyes definitely reveal he’s as terrified as my kid, or
your kid, or any kid would be who suddenly found himself locked up in this terrible place.

“I’ve got good news,” says Tom. “This is Kate Costello. Kate is a top New York lawyer. She’s just taken
temporary leave from her job at a major firm to help with your case.”
Dante, who has already gotten way too much bad news, only grimaces. “You’re not backing out on me,
are you, Tom?”
“No way,” says Tom, straining to make himself understood better. “Defending you is all I’m doing and all
I will be doing until you’re out of here. But now you’ve got yourself a legal team-a shaky ex-jock and an
A-list attorney. And Kate is from Montauk, so she’s local too,” he says, reaching out for Dante’s hand.
“It’s all good, Dante.”
Dante grabs for Tom’s hand and they embrace, and then Dante very shyly makes eye contact with me for
the first time.

“Thanks, Kate. I appreciate it.”
“It’s good to meet you, Dante,” I say, and already feel more invested in this case than any I’ve handled in
the last few years. Very strange, but true.

The first thing Tom and I do is talk with Dante about the murder of Michael Walker. He’s close to tears
when he tells us about his friend, and it’s difficult to believe he had anything to do with the killing. Still, I’ve
met some very convincing liars and con artists in my day, and Dante Halleyville has everything to lose.

“I got another piece of good news,” says Tom. “I tracked down the guy who was at the basketball court
that night-a Cuban named Manny Rodriguez. We couldn’t talk for long, but he told me he saw
something that night, something heavy. And now that I know where he works, it won’t be hard to find him
again.”

As Dante’s young face brightens slightly, I can see all the courage that’s been required to keep it
together in this place, and my heart goes out to him. I think,
I like this kid. So will the right jury.

“How are you holding up?” I ask.

“It’s kind of rough,” says Dante slowly, “and some people can’t take it. Last night, about three in the
morning, these bells go off and a shout comes over the intercom: ‘
Hang-up in cell eight!
‘ That’s what they say when an inmate tries to hang himself, and it happens so often the guards carry
a special tool on their belts to cut them down.

“I’m in block nine, across the way, so I see the guard race into a cell and cut some guy down from where
he’s hanging. I don’t know if they got him in time. I don’t think so.”
I haven’t read through the materials yet, but Tom and I stay with Dante all afternoon to keep him
company and give him a chance to get to know me a little. I tell him about cases I’ve worked on and why
I got sick of it, and Tom recounts some NBA lowlights-like the night Michael Jordan dunked the ball off
his head. “I wanted to ask the ref to stop the game and give me the ball,” says Tom, “but I didn’t think it
would go over too well with my coach.”
Dante cracks up, and for a second I catch a glimpse of his smile, which is so pure it’s heartbreaking. But at
six, when our time is up, his face clouds over again. It feels awful to leave him here.

It’s after eight when we get back to Montauk, but Tom wants to show me the office. Our office. He grabs
the newspapers lying on the first step and leads me up a steep, creaking staircase. His attic space-with
dormer walls slanting down on both sides so he can only stand up straight in half of it-is a far cry from
Walmark, Reid and Blundell, but I kind of like it. It feels like rooms I had in college. Hopeful and genuine,
like starting over.

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” says Tom, “every piece in the room is original IKEA.”

Tom leafs through the
Times
while I look around. “Remember,” he says, “when I used to just read the Sports? Now all I read is the
Metro section. It’s the only part that seems connected to anything I under-”

He stops midsentence-and looks as though he’s been kicked in the stomach.

“What? What’s the matter?” I say, and walk around to look for myself.

Near the top of the page is a picture of a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Candles have been set out and
lit in front of a makeshift shrine, an attempt to mark and protest one more pointless street killing in the
neighborhood.

Beneath the picture is a story with the headline
HIP-HOP FEUD CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM.

The name of the vic is right there in the first paragraph, staring up at both of us-
Manny Rodriguez.

Tom

I AM QUICKLY learning that misery
does
love company. And let’s hope two lawyers without a chance in hell are better than one.

When Kate and I pull into the lot behind East Hampton High School, all that’s left of the sudden
November dusk is a violet smudge in a desolate sky. We park behind the gym and wait, doing our best to
ignore the awkward reunion feeling of sitting next to each other in pretty much the exact spot where we
met almost twenty years before.

“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” I finally say, and regret it immediately.

“Still quoting Yogi,” says Kate.

“Only when it’s absolutely appropriate.”
A parade of students, all looking ridiculously young, pushes through the rear doors of the gym, and each
drives off in one of the cars or SUVs parked or idling in the lot.

“Where’s our girl?” Kate asks.

“Don’t know. Our luck, she has the flu.”
“Our luck, she was run over by a semi this morning.”
At six thirty, when only a couple of cars are left, Lisa Feifer-Eric’s kid sister-steps through the door into
the chilly air. Like her brother, Lisa is thin and graceful, the star on the girls’ state-championship lacrosse
team. She moves across the empty lot with the relaxed shuffle of a spent athlete.

As she drops her gym bag on the roof of her old Jeep and unlocks the door, Kate and I get out of our car.

“We can’t waste time feeling sorry for ourselves about Rodriguez.” Kate had told me that first thing in
the morning when she walked into the office. By then she had already read through my interviews
with Dante and thought there were several areas worth pursuing. “It’s not our job to find out who
actually killed Feifer, Walco, Rochie, and Walker. But it would sure help if we could steer the jury
somewhere else.

We’ve definitely got to find out more about the deceased.”

“You mean, dig up dirt on the dead?”
“If that’s how you want to put it,” Kate said, “that’s fine with me. Feifer, Walco, and Rochie were my
friends too. But now our only loyalty is to Dante. So we have to dig, unmercifully, and see where it leads.
And if it pisses certain people off, so be it.”
“Certain people are already pissed off.”
“So be it.”

I know Kate’s right, and I like the concept of
unmerciful
action on our part, but when Lisa Feifer turns around and sees us coming toward her, she looks at us
as if we’re muggers, or worse.

“Hi there, Lisa,” says Kate, in a voice that manages to sound natural. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”
“About what?”

”
Eric,
” says Kate. “You know that we’re representing Dante Halleyville.”

“How messed up is that? You were his babysitter. Now you’re defending the guy who put a bullet between
his eyes.”
“If we thought there was any chance Dante killed your brother, or Rochie, or Walco, we wouldn’t be doing
this.”
“Bullshit.”
“And if you know anything dangerous that Eric might have been involved in you’ve got to tell us. If you
don’t, Lisa, you’re just helping his real murderer get away with it.”
“No, that’s what you’re doing,” says Lisa, pushing past us and getting into her car. If we hadn’t jumped
back, she probably would have run us over as she tore out of the lot.

“So be it,” I say.

“Very good.” Kate nods. “You’re a fast learner.”

Tom
DIGGING FOR DIRT on your old pals in a town like Montauk is a lot easier said than done though.

Walco’s father slams the door in our face. Rochie’s brother grabs a shotgun and gives us thirty seconds to
get off his property. And Feifer’s mom, a sweet woman who volunteers three days a week at the Montauk
Public Library, unleashes a stream of curses foul and vicious enough to earn the approval of Dante’s most
hardened fellow inmates over at Riverhead.

We get the same obscene kiss-off from Feifer, Walco, and Rochie’s old friends and coworkers. Even ex-
girlfriends, whose hearts had been stomped on by the victims, become ferociously protective of their
memory at the sight of us.

Dante thinks being represented by locals is helping him, but right now it’s a hindrance, because to townies
our decision has made the whole thing personal. Just acknowledging Kate or me on the street is viewed as
giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Being treated like a pariah is harder on me than it is on Kate. She hasn’t lived here for years, and working
at Walmark, Reid and Blundell has thickened her skin.

But the lack of progress frays her nerves, and after a week and little to show for our efforts, my cramped
dormer office has lost its charm. Same goes for the absurdly loud creaking stairs leading to the chiropractor
next door. I, on the other hand, kind of like having Kate around. It gives me confidence. Makes the whole
thing feel real.

Another visitor to the chiropractor and Kate yells out, “This is like working in a theme-park haunted
house.”
“I’ll get you coffee,” I say.

It’s a half-hour round trip to the nearest deli whose owners are unlikely to poison us, so I’ve brought my
antique Mr. Coffee from home. But even the time-honored combination of caffeine and desperation
doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

“We need to find an outsider,” Kate finally says. “Somebody who grew up here but never fit in.”
“You mean, other than the two of us?”
“Somebody has to be willing to talk to us, Tom. C’mon, think. Who’s our Deep Throat?”
I think about her question for a bit. “How about Sean?” I finally say.

“He was a friend of all three of those guys. Plus he’s a
lifeguard,
for God’s sake. I was thinking of a little more of an outcast.”

“He’s not a social pariah, Kate. But he’s got the guts to go against the flow. People talk to Sean. He could
have heard something.”
“You think you’d have better luck talking to him alone?”
I shake my head. “Actually, I think you’d have a better chance, me being his uncle and everything. Plus,
he probably has a crush on you.”
Kate screws up her face. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t he?”

Kate
L.I. SOUNDS, WHERE Tom’s nephew Sean has been working since the lifeguard chairs came down, is one
of the few stores still open in East Hampton, and it’s not clear why to me.

At nine that night, there are exactly two people in the brightly lit, narrow space. Sean is up front by the
register, as his one potential customer browses the aisles. Sean’s a good-looking kid with long blond hair.
Actually, he looks more like Tom than Jeff.

I glance around the store. Sounds will always have a special place in my heart. Until they built the mall in
Bridgehampton, it was the only record store for thirty miles. With posters of Hendrix, Dylan, and Lennon
up on the walls and a staff of zealots preaching about the eternal difference between Good and Awful
music, it felt as serious as stepping into a church.