Beach Road (23 page)

The sand is damp and cool, and the moonlight looks like a white carpet rolling toward us on the light surf.

Before the beach narrows, I find a spot near the cliffs to lay out a blanket, and Kate pulls me to the center
of it. She stares into my eyes. Her eyes, straight out of sleep, look so naked and beautiful, and the wind
whips her red hair around her face.

“Who
are
you, Tom?”

“I thought court was adjourned.”
“Really, Tom,” says Kate, and she looks as if she’s about to cry.

“A person who’s changed. A person who’s made mistakes. They’re behind me now.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because this whole thing has been as much about you as Dante. Because I’ve been in love with you since
I was fifteen, Kate.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean, Tom. Please. I’m enough of a sucker to believe them. Twice. I still
remember when you called me on the phone to tell me that you
didn’t
love me. You were so cold. Maybe you don’t remember.”

“Ahh, Kate, if there’s no way I can ever win your trust again,” I say, a sickening desperation climbing
into my throat, “you got to tell me now because I don’t know what else I can do. Back then, you
know what it really was.

I didn’t feel worthy of you, Kate.

”

Maybe it’s the desperation in my voice that convinces her. I don’t know, but she pulls down my neck and
kisses me on the mouth.

“I’m warning you,” she whispers in my ear, “screw up again and you’ll answer to Macklin. You love me,
Tom?”
“Kate, you know I do.”
She pulls her T-shirt over her head, and her shorts drop to her feet, and with her white freckled shoulders
and red hair Kate looks more beautiful than the woman in that painting standing on the seashell. I reach
out one hand, and when I touch the tiny silver ring cut through her left nipple, her mouth drops open and
her head falls back with pleasure.

“When did you get the piercing?” I whisper, reaching for her again.

“Which one, Tom?”

Kate
IT FEELS AWFUL to be this happy, even happy at all, while Dante sits in jail, his life in the hands of a
fallible jury. But what can I do? I’m just a person, and people can’t control the way they feel, and I feel
happy. But I feel horrible about it too.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Tom and I are still on that beach blanket, but now it’s spread out on his
living room floor, and I’m leaning back against the base of his couch with the
New York Times
on my lap, looking for articles I might have underestimated the first couple times.

Tom sits next to me doing the same thing, and Wingo lies between us, snoozing on his side. The three of us
have been sitting like this for the last thirty-six hours, and even with the weight of the verdict hanging over
us and the shades pulled tight against the photographers and camera crews camped out across the street, it
feels as if we’ve been together for years, not just two days. But of course, in a way we have. I’m trying to
keep the past out of this, but when it does bubble up, it’s mostly the good stuff, not the breakup. The past
ten years have humbled him, at least a little, and I like him more for it.

I get up to replace
Exile on Main Street
with
Let It Bleed
while Tom puts the dishes in the sink and opens a tin for Wingo. While Wingo is engrossed, Tom sits
back down and touches the bottom of my foot with the top of his. That’s all it takes to get us groping
between each other’s legs and pulling off our clothes.

Like I said, we’re just people, but it still feels wrong-and I’m relieved when we lead the press caravan
back to Riverhead early Monday morning.

Tom and I are assigned a small room down the corridor from Judge Rothstein’s chambers. We spend the
day there, second-guessing, for the hundredth time, every strategic decision and line of questioning, each of
us assuring the other without much effect that we did the right thing. We don’t hear a word from the jury
all day, and at 5:30 p.m. they are bused back to the Ramada Inn and we head back to Tom’s living room
floor.

Tuesday is just as slow.

Same thing Wednesday.

But to be honest, I’m enjoying being with Tom.

Thursday morning our hopes soar when the jury requests transcripts of Marie’s testimony, and then
plummet in the afternoon when they ask for Nikki Robinson’s. I’m rereading her transcripts when
Rothstein’s clerk sticks his bald head in the door.

“The jury has reached a verdict,” he says.

Tom
THE FIRST TO arrive are Macklin and Marie, Marie so hollowed out by days of constant worry that she
leans on poor Mack for support. Then come the parents of Feifer, Walco, and Roche, and their friends,
who rush in like volunteer firefighters who have dropped whatever they were doing to answer the alarm.

For the trial itself, the courtroom was split down the middle, Dante’s supporters and Montauk
sympathizers, but because so many of Dante’s people arrived from outside the area, today’s crowd is
made up of mostly Montauk people. Dante is represented by only a small, tight band of stalwarts-
Clarence and Jeff, Sean in a
FREE DANTE
shirt, and a dozen or so of Dante’s high school friends and teammates.

When the room is almost packed, the press pour in and fill their assigned rows up front.

The sketch artists have just set up their easels when Dante is led in one last time in handcuffs. Dante’s so
nervous he can barely meet our eyes, and when he sits between us and clasps our hands beneath the table,
his hands are trembling and wet. Mine too.

“Hang in there, buddy,” I whisper. “The truth is on our side.”
An hour ago, when they reached their verdict, the jurors asked to be taken back to their rooms to shower
and change. Now they file into the courtroom in their Sunday best, the men in blazers and ties, the women
in skirts and blouses. Soon after they take their seats, Steven Spielberg and George Clooney rush in
fashionably late in their expensive yet casual clothes. Other than Shales, the screenwriter, A-list attendance
had gotten spotty as the trial slogged on.

But no one wants to miss the last ten minutes.

Tom

SUDDENLY IT’S ALL going down
too fast.

The bailiff cries, “All rise.” Rothstein sweeps in and mounts his pedestal, and the jury forewoman, a
tiny lady in her sixties with big plastic lenses, stands to face him.

“Has the jury reached a decision on all four charges?” asks Rothstein.

“We have, Your Honor.”
Dante looks straight ahead, his eyes focused on a secret spot inside himself, and his wet grip tightens. So
does Kate’s.

“And how do you find?” asks Rothstein.

I steal a glance at Marie’s tortured face, and then, turning away from it, see the more composed features
of Brooklyn detective Connie Raiborne, who is sitting right behind her. I guess he didn’t want to miss the
verdict either.

“In the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Eric Feifer,” says the elderly forewoman, her
voice strong and clear, “the jury finds the defendant, Dante Halleyville,
not guilty.

”

My hand inside Dante’s feels like it’s been caught in a machine, and behind us, anguished cries compete
with hallelujahs and amens. Rothstein does his best to silence both with his gavel.

“And in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Patrick Roche and Robert Walco,” says the
forewoman, “we find the defendant, Dante Halleyville,
not guilty.

”

The courtroom convulses, and the cops straighten their backs against the walls. Ten seconds stand between
Dante and the rest of his life.

“And what is the jury’s decision in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Michael Walker?” asks
Rothstein.

“The jury finds the defendant, Dante Halleyville,
not guilty.

”

The gray-haired woman says those final two resounding words with extra emphasis, but before the last
syllable is all the way out, the room splits open. Marie and Clarence must feel as though they’re watching
Dante rise from the dead, and Feifer’s mom, who lets out an awful wail, must feel as if she’s seeing Eric get
murdered again right in front of her eyes. The cheering and cursing, screaming and jubilation are way too
close to each other, and the room teeters on the verge of violence.

But none of that means a thing to Dante. He springs out of the chair and pulls us up with him as he throws
his huge fists into the air, tilts his head back, and roars. Kate gets the first hug. I get the second, and then
we’re at the center of a wet, hot mosh pit of pressed bodies; then the whole hot circle hops up and down
and emits a chant.

“Halleyville! Halleyville! Halleyville!”
When Kate and I extricate ourselves enough to take in the rest of the room, it looks as spent as Times
Square three hours after the ball drops on the new year. Kate and I jump inside the phalanx of sheriffs
who circle Dante, and as they usher us out a side door, my eyes lock with Spielberg’s screenwriter, Alan
Shales.

In this wild moment, Dante, Shales, and I are all linked. Dante is free to play ball again; after my
squandered decade, I have a career; and Shales’s script is going to get made. If Dante had been convicted,
there would have been no movie. But now, suddenly, all three of us have a future.

Kate
JOYOUS NEIGHBORS AND friends carrying food and drink show up at Marie’s an hour after the verdict,
but the celebration doesn’t officially begin until Dante, a foaming bottle of champagne in one hand,
scissors in the other, snips through the tangle of yellow police tape that sealed his bedroom for nearly a
year. When the last sticky piece has been ripped away, he and his pals rush into the room like a liberating
army.

“This is for my homeboy Dunleavy,” says Dante, donning the black-and-blue cap of Tom’s old team, the
Minnesota T-wolves.

Then he tosses the other twenty-eight-the Miami Heat cap is still in a plastic bag in Riverhead
somewhere-to his crew, and for the rest of the party, wherever I turn, brand-new gleaming caps bob
jauntily above the fray.

As for me, I haven’t been dry-eyed ten minutes since the verdict came down. All I have to do is see Marie
gaze up at her grandson, or Tom and Jeff with their arms around each other, or the relief on Clarence’s
exhausted face for the tears to flow again. After a while, I don’t even bother wiping them away.

Now Macklin bangs on the kitchen table and shouts, “Order in the court! I said, order in the court!” And
the room erupts in a riot of whistles, catcalls, and stomping feet.

“Anyone recognize this?” he says, waving a familiar wooden stick and sounding at least a couple drinks to
the good. “Let’s just say that tight-ass Rothstein will have to find something else to beat on his poor pew.
Because I wasn’t leaving that courtroom without a souvenir.

“Goddamn it, Dante. I’m proud of you,” says Macklin. “I don’t know how you hung so tough, but based
on what I see in your grandmother, I’m not surprised. I hope someday you can look back on this bullshit
and feel you got something out of it. Anything. And now I want to hear from the brilliant and gorgeous
Kate Costello.”
When the room twists toward me and cheers, I open my mouth to see what will fall out.

“To Dante!” I say, raising my champagne. “And your long-overdue freedom! And to Marie! And
your
long-overdue freedom! I’m so relieved Tom and I didn’t let you down. I love you both.” Then I lose it
again as Dante and Marie rescue me in their arms.

“What my partner was trying to say, Dante,” says Tom, picking up my toast like a dropped baton, “is
you’ll be getting our bill in the morning.”
The highly emotional toasts and festivities roll on without letting up. I go over and stand by Macklin and
Marie while Tom steps outside to join the revelers dancing in the yard to Outkast, Nelly, James Brown, and
Marvin Gaye. Half an hour later, a peal of thunder rips through the joyous din, and the clouds that have
been swelling all afternoon spill open.

The downpour sends half the neighborhood running for cover back into Marie’s six-hundred-square-foot
trailer. Soon after that, Tom, his brow creased with worry, taps me on the shoulder.

“It’s Sean. Seems my nephew just got dumped by his girl. I didn’t even know he had one, but I guess he
did, because he’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff.”
“You need to go talk to him?”
“I think so.”
“Well, give him a hug for me.”
“I will. And when I get back, I have a surprise.”
“I don’t know if I can take any more surprises right now.”
“It’s a good one. I promise,” says Tom, then gestures toward Mack and Marie. “Am I hallucinating, or are
those two holding hands?”

Loco
WHEN BOY WONDER comes around the back of that shitty little trailer and walks across the muddy
yard, he looks so different it sends a quicksilver shiver up my spine.

It’s like I can barely recognize him, and I have this awful feeling that when he gets to Costello’s car, where
I have been waiting for forty-five minutes like he asked, he’s not going to recognize me either. Or if he
does, it’s going to be like we’re nothing but acquaintances and the last eight years never happened.

Boy Wonder is such a cunning bastard, that was probably his plan from the beginning. I don’t mean since
this afternoon or last summer, I mean from the very beginning, eight years ago, when he came to the
Village Police Station at three in the morning and bailed me out after the cops busted me for selling weed
on the beach. I don’t know what he did or how he did it, but somehow he got the chief of police to drop the
whole thing and fixed it so completely even my folks never found out. But now that I think about it, I bet
he set me up with the cops in the first place so he could come in and bail my ass out and I’d owe him from
the start.