Beach Road (19 page)

Surrounding the divided crowd are at least fifty cops, and in this instance, it doesn’t seem unwarranted.
Officers from the Sheriff’s Department stand shoulder to shoulder along the front and back walls, behind
the jury box, and on both sides of the judge’s podium.

Except for the journalists in the front two rows, there are few exceptions to the racial seating pattern. One is
Macklin, the octogenarian exception to most rules. He sits defiantly between Marie and Clarence, and woe
to the man who tries to move him. Hanging just as tough one row back are Jeff and Sean.

Tom, rifling through a stack of file cards, barely looks up when the twelve jurors and two alternates
solemnly take their positions.

But neither of us can ignore the loud gasp when Dante, escorted by a pair of county sheriffs, enters the
courtroom. He wears an inexpensive blue blazer and dress pants, both a size too small-he’s grown an
inch in prison. He stares at the ground until he is seated between us.

“You guys good?” Dante asks in the quietest voice I can imagine coming out of his large body.

“Not just good,” I tell him. “We’re the best. And we’re ready.”
Dante’s slight smile, when it comes, is priceless.

Twenty minutes behind schedule, the sharp nasal voice of the bailiff finally rings through the courtroom.
“Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having business before the Suffolk County Supreme Court and Honorable
Judge Richard Rothstein will now rise!”

Tom
SUFFOLK COUNTY DA Dominic Ioli pushes his chair back from the prosecution table and then carefully
folds his reading glasses into a leather case. Only after they’re safely tucked away in the jacket pocket of
his new gray suit coat does he stand and face the two rows of jurors.

“Ladies and gentlemen, over the next several weeks you’re going to hear about the cold-blooded murder of
four young men last summer. Before this trial is over, the state will have proven beyond any reasonable
doubt that the defendant seated on my left, Dante Halleyville, carefully and deliberately planned and
carried out all four heinous crimes.

“We will prove that in the first three murders, Mr. Halleyville acted with Michael Walker, and that eleven
days later, he turned that same weapon on his best friend and accomplice.”
Ioli has logged his share of court time, and you can hear it in his measured delivery. As Ioli refers to “a gun
and a hat and a body of evidence that places the defendant at both crime scenes,” I glance back at the
divided sea of faces staring from opposite sides of the courtroom. I scan the expressions of Jeff, Sean,
Clarence, and Mack, and linger on Marie.

”
Murder
is too gentle a word,” bellows Ioli, bringing me back to his speech. “The more accurate word, the
only
word that captures the horror of these crimes, is
execution.

”

As Ioli winds down, I look around for one last piece of incentive, this time in the row of journalists and
brand-name lawyers the networks have flown in as talking heads.

Sitting beside Alan Dershowitz, in a rumpled suit, and Gerry Spence, in a fringed suede jacket, is Ronnie
Montgomery. For a second, we lock eyes.

The moment makes me think of Cecil Felderson, a fellow benchwarmer in my short time playing with the
Timberwolves. According to Cecil, who hoarded his resentments like gold, “the worst thing of all, the thing
that sticks in your craw more than anything, is having to listen to some guy say ‘I told you so.’”
With one haughty look at us and our tiny office, Montgomery wrote me off as an amateur and a loser,
hopelessly out of my depth. Now I can either prove him right and hear about it, one way or another, for the
rest of my life, or I can prove him wrong and shut him, and everybody else, the fuck up.

I rise from my seat.

Kate
I DON’T KNOW who’s more nervous right now, Tom or me, but somehow I think it might be me. This is it,
a bigger, more important trial than either of us has any right to be involved in probably ever in our careers,
but certainly right now.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Tom, turning to face the jury, “I have only one request of each one of
you this morning, and it’s harder than it sounds. I ask you
to listen.

“For as long as it takes for justice to be delivered to the nineteen-year-old sitting behind me, I need you to
listen with a sharp, open, and critical mind.”
Tom looked green on the drive over, and he hasn’t said a dozen words all morning, but suddenly his game
face is screwed on tight. “Because if you do, if you just listen, the prosecution’s case will collapse like a
house of cards.

“The district attorney of Suffolk County has just told you that this is an open-and-shut case and that
he has a mountain of evidence against Dante Halleyville. Ladies and gentlemen,
nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only did Dante Halleyville have no motive to commit these murders, he had enormous incentive
not
to commit them.

“For the past half a dozen years Dante Halleyville has concentrated all his considerable energy, talent, and
determination on becoming the top schoolboy basketball player in the country. Lofty as that goal was, he
accomplished it. Dante Halleyville succeeded so well that pro scouts guaranteed him that whenever he
chose to enter the NBA draft he would be among the very top selections, maybe even number one.
Growing up under extremely difficult circumstances and surrounded by family members who made one
disastrous choice after another, Dante never took his eye off his goal. Not once, until these false charges,
has Dante been in any kind of trouble, either at Bridgehampton High School or in his neighborhood, with
the law.

“So why now, when he is so close to achieving his dream, would he commit such self-destructive
crimes? The answer-
he wouldn’t.

It’s as simple as that. He wouldn’t do it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your selection as jurors was random, but the next few weeks could be the most
important in your lives. The future of a fellow human being is in your hands. Not just the life of an
innocent nineteen-year-old, but of a truly remarkable young man. And both Dante and you will have to
live with your decision for the rest of your lives.

”
Someone
did kill those young men on Beach Road. And in that Brooklyn apartment. Murdered them in cold
blood. Whoever committed these horrible crimes will eventually be apprehended and brought to
justice, but that person was not and
could not
have been Dante Halleyville.

“So I ask you to listen carefully and dispassionately and critically to everything presented to you in this
courtroom. Don’t let anyone but yourself decide how strong or weak the prosecution’s case is. I have faith
that you can and will do that. Thanks.”
When Tom turns away from the jury, three hundred bodies readjust themselves in their seats. In addition
to the rustling, you can almost feel the surprise, and it runs from Judge Rothstein in his pulpit to the last
beer-bellied cop leaning against the far wall. This inexperienced lawyer, with mediocre credentials and crap
grades, can handle himself in a courtroom.

Kate
TOM SITS, AND Melvin Howard, Ioli’s assistant DA, stands. Howard is a tall, thin man in his early fifties
with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and antique wire-rimmed spectacles. He’s also African American,
and none of these things is coincidental.

For the same transparently cynical reasons that my old firm chose me to help Randall Kane fend off
sexual harassment charges brought by his female employees, the prosecution has selected a black man,
with the mild-mannered appearance of a college professor, to prosecute Dante Halleyville. The selection is
an attempt to tell the jury that this case is not about race, but about crime, a vicious murder that should
outrage blacks as much as whites.

And just because this strategy is obvious and self-serving doesn’t mean it won’t work.

“In addition to
listening,
” Melvin Howard begins as he tapes a twelve-by-fourteen-inch color photograph to a large easel set up
directly in front of the jury, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to
look
too.”

He slowly attaches three more photographs to the easel-and when he steps out of the way, the jurors
push back in their chairs, trying to get as far away from the lurid images as possible.

“These are crime scene photographs of each of the four victims, and it’s your sworn duty
not
to look away.”

Caught in the white light of the flash, the skin of the victims is a ghostly white; the lips blue-gray; the raw,
burned edges where the bullets entered the foreheads orange; the ample blood that poured down into eyes
and cheeks, over chins and down the necks of shirts a deep maroon, a red so deep it looks almost black.

“This man here, with the bullet hole between his eyes, is Eric Feifer. He was twenty-three years of age, and
before the defendant executed him on August thirtieth, Mr. Feifer was a professional-level surfer.

“This young man is Robert Walco, also twenty-three. While other kids were going to college and business
school, he put in ten-hour days with a shovel. The result of his sweat and labor was a successful
landscaping business he owned with his dad, Richard Walco.

“And this is Patrick Roche, twenty-five, a painter who paid the bills by moonlighting as a bartender, and
whose good nature earned him the affection of just about everyone who knew him.

“Finally, this is Michael Walker, and no matter what else you might say about him, he was seventeen years
old, a high school senior.

”
Don’t look away.

The victims couldn’t. The killer and his accomplice wouldn’t let them. In fact, the killer took sadistic
pleasure in making sure that each of these four victims saw exactly what was happening to them as
they were shot at such close range that the barrel of the gun singed the skin of their foreheads.

“And the killer got exactly what he wanted because you can still read the shock and the fear and the pain
in their eyes.

“In ten years, I’ve prosecuted eleven murder cases, but I’ve never seen crime scene photographs like these.
I’ve never seen head-on executions like these. And I’ve never seen eyes like these either. Ladies and
gentlemen, don’t assume this is run-of-the-mill horror. This is very different. This is what evil looks like up
close.”
Then Melvin Howard turns away from the jury and stares directly at Dante.

Tom
ON THIS STIFLING early June morning, with the temperature on its way to the midnineties, the state
initiates its pursuit of justice by calling drug-dealer Artis LaFontaine’s former girlfriend, Mammy
Richardson, to the stand. Mammy was at the basketball court when Feif and Dante came to blows. She
saw it all.

A large, pretty woman in her early thirties, Mammy cut a striking figure at Wilson’s estate last summer, and
as strong rays slant in through the courtroom’s only window, she steps into the booth in a cream-colored
pantsuit that she fills to bursting.

“Directing your attention to last August thirtieth, Ms. Richardson, do you recall where you were that
afternoon?”
“Watching a basketball game at Smitty Wilson’s estate,” says Richardson, clearly enjoying her cameo, a
trill of excitement in her voice.

“Could you tell us who was playing in this game?”
“Young fellas from Bridgehampton taking on an older squad from Montauk.”
“Was it a friendly game?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Way both squads were going at it, you’d think it was game seven of the NBA finals.”
“Ms. Richardson, do you have any idea why a weekend pickup game would be so intense?”
“Objection!” snapped Kate. “The witness isn’t a mind reader.”
“Sustained.”
“Ms. Richardson, were the players on the Bridgehampton squad all African American?”
“Yeah,” says Richardson.

“And the Montauk team?”
“White.”
“Which team won the game, Ms. Richardson?”
“The white fellas.”
“And then what happened, Ms. Richardson?”
“That’s when the trouble happened. Some of the Montauk guys started showboating. One of the
Bridgehampton fellas didn’t appreciate it. He shoved somebody. They shoved back. Before anyone could
calm things down, one of the victims and the defendant were throwing down.”
“Throwing down?” asks Howard, feigning ignorance.

Richardson flashes him a look. “You know, scrapping.”
“How far away were you sitting from the court, Ms. Richardson?”
“Closer than I am to the jury right now.”
“About how big was Eric Feifer?”
“Six feet, and skinny. One hundred seventy pounds, tops.”
“You’ve got a pretty good eye, Ms. Richardson. According to the coroner’s report, Eric Feifer was five
eleven and weighed one hundred sixty-three pounds. And the defendant?”
“Anyone can see, he’s got some size on him.”
“Six foot nine inches and two hundred fifty-five pounds to be exact. How did Eric Feifer do in the fight?”
“That skinny white boy could fight. He put a whupping on Dante.”
“What happened next?”
“Michael Walker, one of Dante’s teammates, ran to his car and came back with a gun. Which he put
upside Eric Feifer’s head.”
“How far away did he hold the gun from Eric Feifer’s head?”
“He pressed it right up against it. Just like those pictures showed.”
“Objection,” shouts Kate like a fan screaming at the refs about a bad call. “Your Honor, the witness has
clearly been coached and has no right or authority to equate what she saw to the pictures taken of the
crime scene. This is grounds for a mistrial.”
“The jury will disregard Ms. Richardson’s last remark, and the stenographer will expunge it from the
record.”
Howard moves on. “Then what happened, Ms. Richardson?”
“Walker put the gun down.”
“Did Michael Walker say anything?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” says Kate, increasingly exasperated. “This is nothing but hearsay.”
“Overruled,” says Rothstein.

“What did Michael Walker say, Ms. Richardson?”
“‘This shit ain’t over, white boy. Not by a long shot.’”
“No further questions, Your Honor,” says Howard, and Kate is already up out of her chair.