Beach Road (10 page)

“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.

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.”

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.”

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.”
If Manny is disappointed that I’m not a talent scout looking to sign him to a huge deal, he keeps it to
himself. He looks at me hard, as if he’s running through his loop of images from that night.

“You’re the ballplayer,” he says. “I seen you there. You were a pro.”
“That’s right. For about ten minutes.”
“You got a tape recorder?” he asks.

“No, but I’ve got a pad. I’ll take careful notes for now.”
“Good. Let me hit the bathroom. Then maybe I got a story that could save that tall black boy.”

I wrestle my legal pad out of my case and hurriedly scribble a list of key questions in my barely legible
shorthand.

Stay calm,
I tell myself,
and
listen.

I’ve been lost in my notes, and Manny still isn’t back when the waiter drops the food on the table. I twist
around, and I see that the bathroom door is wide open.

I jump out of my chair and run like a maniac to the street.

I’m just in time to see Manny Rodriguez hop into a cab and roar away up Tenth Avenue. He finger-waves
out the back window at me.

Loco
THERE’S A GRAY, pebbly beach on the bay side of East Hampton where on Sunday afternoons the
Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Costa Ricans play volleyball. During the week, they put in seventy hours
mowing lawns, clipping hedges, and skimming pools. At night they cram into ranch houses that look
normal from the street but have been partitioned into thirty cubes. By Sunday afternoon, they’re ready to
explode.

These games are wild. You got drinking, gambling, salsa, and all kinds of over-the-top Latin drama. Every
three minutes or so two brown bantamweights are being pulled apart. Five minutes later they’re patting
each other on the back. Another five minutes, they’re swinging again.

I’m taking in this Latin soap opera from a peeling green bench fifty yards above the fray.

It’s six fifteen, and as always, I’m early.

It’s no accident. This is part of the gig, the required display of
fealty and respect.

Which is fine with me. It gives me time to light my cigar and watch the sailboats tack for home at the
Devon Yacht Club.

I should cut back. The Davidoff torpedo is my third this week. But what’s life without a vice? What’s
life
with
a vice? Did you know Freud smoked half a dozen cigars a day? He also died of mouth cancer, which I
like to think was poetic payback for telling the world that all every guy wants to do is kill his father
and boff his mom. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t need to know that.

Speaking of authority figures, a drumroll please, because here comes mine-
BW
-and he’s right on time, eleven minutes late.

With his three-hundred-dollar Helmut Lang jeans, torn and faded just right, and his God-knows-how-
expensive light-blue cashmere hoodie and week-old growth, he’s looking more like a goddamn weekender
every day. But who’s got the stones to tell him? Not me, bro, and they call me Loco for a reason.