Beach Road (3 page)

“Keep your affection, Dunleavy,” says Marjorie. “A couple more of these, you’ll be pawing my ass.”
As the Grey Goose does its work, I’m thinking about whether or not I should tell Billy, off the record of
course, about the events of the afternoon. For the most part, so little happens to us townies, it seems
ungenerous not to share a good tale.

So trying to strike the right balance of modesty and humor, I give it a shot. When I get to the part when
Michael Walker puts the gun to Feifer’s head, I say, “I thought for sure I was going to be scrubbing blood
off Wilson’s million-dollar court.”
Belnap doesn’t smile. “Was Wilson there?” he asks.

“No. I hear he’s afraid to set foot down there.”
“I believe that.”
I’m wrapping it up, describing Walker’s last face-saving threat, when a scratchy voice barks out of the two-
way radio lying next to Belnap’s half-full glass. He picks up the radio and listens.

“Three bodies in East Hampton,” says Belnap, draining the rest of his drink in one gulp. “You coming?”

Tom
“THREE MALES, EARLY twenties,” says Belnap as he drives. “A jogger just called it in.”
I want to ask from where, but the hard way Belnap stares through the windshield and the way the car
squeals around corners discourage me from any questions.

I must have lived a sheltered life, because this is my first ride in a squad car. Despite the frantic
flashing and wailing, it seems eerily calm inside. Not that I feel calm. Anything but.

Three dead bodies in East Hampton? Outside a car crash, it’s unheard of.

The roads out here are wooded and windy, and the powerful beams of Belnap’s cruiser barely dent the
dark. When we finally reach the end of Quonset and burst into the glaring light of Route 27, it feels like
coming up from the bottom of a deep, cold lake and breaking through the surface.

A quarter of a mile later, just before the beach, we are braking hard again and turning back into the
darkness. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust enough to see we’re on Beach Road.

In the dark the hulking houses seem threatening. We’re really flying now, hitting eighty-five as we pass the
golf course.

A quarter of a mile later, Belnap brakes so hard I come up into my harness, and he swerves between a pair
of tall white gates-T. Smitty Wilson’s white gates.

“That’s right,” says Billy, staring straight ahead. “Back at the scene of your latest heroics.”
The driveway is empty, and not a single car is parked beside the court, something I haven’t seen in months.
Even when it’s pouring rain, there’d be a crowd partying in their cars. But on Saturday night, Labor Day
weekend, the place is as deserted as if it were Christmas Eve.

“This is bad, Tom,” says Belnap, the master of understatement. “Nobody gets murdered out here. Just
doesn’t happen.”

Tom
IT’S EERIE AND creepy too.

Exaggerating the emptiness around the court is all the light that is being pumped in. For night games, eight
high-watt halogens have been set on tall, elegant silver poles. They’re the same lights used on movie sets,
and they’re blazing tonight.

A police cruiser and ambulance have beaten us out here.

Belnap makes me stay by the car as he hustles down to where two ambulances are backed into the dunes.

From the hood of his cruiser, I hear an uninterrupted wail of sirens, and then I see a posse of cop cars race
up Beach Road from both sides.

Pairs of headlamps converge at the tall gate at the bottom of the hill and snake their way toward me up
the driveway.

The next five minutes bring at least a dozen more cruisers and three more ambulances. In that same
ominous rush come the department’s two detectives in their black Crown Vics. Plus the K-9 and Forensics
units in separate vans.

Then the cop cars stop arriving and the sirens stop wailing, and I can hear the ocean waves again. The
whole vibe is as strange and unnatural as a small child’s wake.

For the next few minutes, I stay by the car, the one person there not in the crowd ringing the crime scene,
and just by looking at the backs, the postures, I can tell that this is far heavier than what the cops are used
to, and I can feel the anger. A few years ago a millionaire was murdered in his bed within a mile of here,
but that was different. These bodies aren’t summer people.

The way the cops are acting, these are three of their own-maybe even cops.

When the volunteer firemen show up, I figure I’ve stayed put long enough. After all, I’m not exactly a
stranger here. For good or bad, everybody knows Tom Dunleavy.

But halfway to the ambulance, Mickey Harrison, a sergeant who played hoops with me in high school,
steps up and puts both hands firmly on my chest.

“Tommy, you don’t want to go any closer right now. Trust me.”
It’s too late. As he restrains me, the circle breaks, and I glimpse the shapes the cops are scurrying around.

It’s dark down here, and at first the shapes make no sense. They’re too high, or too short, with no
connection to familiar human outlines.

I squint into the shadows, my mind still unable to process the images. Then a cop from Forensics drops into
a crouch, and there’s a powerful flash from his camera.

It sets off a second flash at the very middle of the scene, and before it fades to black again, I see the white
circle of Feifer’s bleached hair.

“Oh, Jesus God,” I say, and Mickey Harrison takes my arm at the elbow.

Then, almost immediately, another shock. The bodies aren’t lying side by side. They’re stacked, one
on top of the other,
in a heap.

Feif is in the middle on his back. Robert Walco is lying on top of him facedown, and Rochie is on the
bottom turned on his side.

Now there’s a voice cutting through the others, maybe Billy Belnap’s, but the way I’m suddenly feeling I
can’t tell for sure. “You think Dante and his nigger friends could have done this?”
I don’t actually hear the response because I’m down on my knees puking into the damp sand.

Kate
“HEY, MARY C, how you doing?” I hear as I arrive at the nightmare scene, the murder scene on a beach I
think of as being partly my own since I spent so much time here as a kid.

“Not too good. You?” I say, not even sure who I’m talking at, or why I’m bothering to answer the guy’s
stupid question.

An hour after a Montauk volunteer fireman hears the call go out on his police scanner, at least two
hundred local folk are milling on the beach below the Wilson estate, and I’m one of them. I haven’t lived
out here for a dozen years, but I guess being a Montauk townie isn’t something that ever goes away,
because I’m as anxious and scared as my former neighbors.

Above where I’m standing, three ambulances are parked in the dunes, surrounded by the entire East
Hampton Police Department.

Over the next ten minutes or so, terrible rumors sweep down the hill like mud slides, confirming or
correcting or replacing the names of the dead that people have already heard. Desperate parents call
children, rejoicing when they answer, panicking when they don’t. I think of red-haired Mary Catherine
streaking across the lawn earlier today, and of how vulnerable parents become the second their child is
born.

We have known for hours that all three of the victims are young males, but the police are withholding the
names until they can notify the families.

But the people out on the beach know too many of the cops inside the crime scene tape, and when
someone gets a call from his brother-in-law up on the hill, we find out that the dead kids are Walco,
Rochie, and Feifer. The news hits all of us like a hand grenade.

In the summer there might be ten thousand people living in Montauk, but the number who live here year-
round is probably a tenth of that, and at times like this we’re one big family. It’s one of the reasons I left,
and one of the things I miss the most. Out here, the person who lives next door is not an indifferent
stranger, but a genuine neighbor who actually cares about your life and feels your triumphs and tragedies,
and because of that, people are sobbing and shrieking and trying to comfort one another.

The three dead boys were ten years younger than me, and I haven’t spent much time here lately, yet I still
know that Walco’s girlfriend is pregnant, and that Rochie’s mother is sick with stomach cancer. Long
before Feifer became a surfer stud, I was his babysitter, for God’s sake. I remember that he wouldn’t go to
sleep without a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Grief turns to rage as more details of the killings trickle down the hill. All three were shot point-blank
between the eyes. All three had rope burns on their wrists. And when the bodies were found, they were piled
on top of each other like garbage left at the town dump. We all know enough about these kids to know
they weren’t angels. We also know they weren’t criminals. So what the hell happened here tonight.

I turn away from the row of ten-million-dollar beach houses and back to the ambulances. Among the two
dozen cops milling around them is a handful of locals who for one reason or another have been allowed to
get close to the crime scene.

As I watch, one of these, a large, heavyset man, drapes an arm over the shoulder of a tall, much-
thinner man beside him.

Shit,
I think to myself.

Their backs are to me, but I know that the larger man is Jeff Dunleavy, the other his younger brother, Tom,
and now I feel a fresh jolt of pain, which I’m ashamed to say has nothing to do with the horrible murder of
three sweet-natured Montauk kids.

Tom
THE CURRENT CROP of East Hampton cops has never had to deal with a horrifying, almost scatological
crime scene like this, and it sure shows. There are actually too many cops, too many bodies, and too many
emotions, which are all way too close to the surface.

Finally, Van Buren, the youngest detective on the force, stakes off a ten-yard square around the bodies
and runs lights down from the court so Forensics can dust for prints and scrape for DNA.

I don’t want to bother Van Buren, so I approach Police Chief Bobby Flaherty, who I’ve known forever.

“Has Feif’s family been told yet?” I ask.

“I’m sending Rust,” he says, nodding toward a rookie cop who looks as green as I must have forty minutes
ago.

“Let me do it, Bobby. Okay? They should hear it from somebody they know.”
“It’s not going to help, Tom.”
“I just need a ride back to the marina. To pick up my car.”
The Feifers live by the junior high on a quiet cul-de-sac in one of Montauk’s last year-round
neighborhoods. It’s the kind of place where kids can still play baseball in the street without getting run over,
and where families like Feif’s chose to raise their kids precisely because they thought they wouldn’t have to
worry about some unspeakable thing like this ever happening.

Late as it is, the lights are still on in the den of the house, and I creep up near the picture window, quiet as a
burglar.

Vic and Allison Feifer and their teenage daughter, Lisa, share the big, comfortable couch, their faces lit by
the TV. A bag from Montauk Video hangs from a nearby chair, and maybe they’re watching a chick flick
because old man Feifer’s chin is on his chest, and Ali and Lisa are transfixed, not taking their eyes off the
screen even when they dig into the bowl of popcorn on the couch between them.

I know it’s never that simple, but they look like such a nice, contented family.

I take in a deep breath; then I ring the doorbell. I watch Lisa spring off the couch in her pink sweats and
white furry house slippers.

Lisa yanks the screen door open, eager to return to her movie. She tows me behind her into the den, not
even thinking about the unusualness of such a late visit.

But once I’m standing in front of them, my face gives me away. Allison reaches for my arm, and old man
Feif, still rousing himself from when I rang the doorbell, staggers to his stocking feet.

“It’s about Eric,” I say, forcing the words out. “I’m real sorry. They found his body tonight, along with
Rochie and Walco, at the Wilson estate on Beach Road. He was murdered. I’m so sorry to have to tell you
this.”
They’re only words, but they might as well be bullets. Before they are out of my mouth, Allison’s face has
shattered into pieces, and when she looks at her husband, they’re both so devastated all they can offer
each other is the shell of who they were just five minutes before.

Tom
ASK ME HOW long I spent at Feifer’s house, I’d have sworn it was close to an hour. According to my
kitchen clock, it was probably less than ten minutes.

Still, it’s all I can do to pull a bottle of whiskey off the shelf and carry it out back, where my pal Wingo is
waiting. Wingo knows right away I’m messed up. Instead of begging me to take him for a walk, he lays his
jaw on my lap and I pet him like there’s no tomorrow. For three of my friends, there isn’t.

I have a phone in my hand, but I can’t remember why. Oh, yeah,
Holly.

She’s a woman I’ve been going out with for the past few weeks. No big thing.

Unfortunately, I don’t want to call her. I just want to want to call her, in the same way that I want to
pretend she’s my girlfriend, even though we both know we’re only killing time.

Wingo’s a dog, not a pal. My girlfriend isn’t really my girlfriend. But the whiskey is the real thing, so I pour
out half a glass and gulp it down. Thank God that son of a bitch Dr. Jameson still makes house calls.

I’d feel better if I could cry, but I haven’t cried since I was ten, when my father died. So I take another
long gulp and then another, and then instead of thinking about every horrible thing that’s happened today,
I find myself thinking about Kate Costello. It’s been ten years since we broke up, and I still think about
Kate all the time, especially when something important happens, good or bad. Plus, I saw her tonight out
on Beach Road. As always, she looked beautiful, and even under the circumstances, seeing her was a jolt.