Beach Road (9 page)

“Got a game plan, Parcells?” Jeff has always worshipped Parcells and even looks like him a little.

“I was about to ask you the same thing, baby brother. What I hear, you need a plan more than me.
An
escape
plan.”

“You could be right.”
There’s a punt on the screen, and the pigskin seems to hang forever in the fall air.

“All I did was help a scared kid turn himself in,” I say to Jeff. I don’t tell him that I’ve been asked to
represent that kid. Or that I’m actually considering it.

“What about Walco, Rochie, and Feifer? You don’t think they were scared? I don’t get what you’re up to,
Tom.”
“I’m not sure I do either. I think it has something to do with meeting Dante’s grandmother. Seeing where
they lived, how they lived. Oh, and one other small detail-the kid didn’t do it.”
Jeff doesn’t seem to hear me, but maybe he does because he flicks off the projector.

“Between you and me,” he says, “season hasn’t started and I’m already sick to death of football. Let’s
grab a beer, bro.”
“See, there’s a plan,” I say, and grin, but Jeff doesn’t smile back.

Tom
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Jeff stops in Amagansett and parks in the lot behind McKendrick’s, the one
bar most likely to be full of townies on a Wednesday night. But I guess that’s the point. Or the plan. Make
peace with the locals.

We enter through the back door and grab a booth by the pool table, so it takes a minute or so for the place
to fall silent.

When Jeff is sure that everyone knows we’re here, he sends me to the bar for our beer. He wants me to see
exactly what I could be getting myself into, wants me to feel the hate up close and personal.

Chucky Watkins, a crazy Irish laborer who used to work for Walco now and then, is sitting at a table as I
shoulder my way to the bar. “Guess you’re afraid to come here without your football-coach chaperone?”
“Kev,” I say, ignoring Watkins, “a pitcher of Bass when you get a chance.”

”
When you get a chance, Kev,
” says Pete Zacannino, mocking me from the corner. By the way, a week ago, every face in this room
was a pretty good friend of mine.

Kevin, who’s a particularly good guy, hands me the beer and two mugs, and I’m ferrying back to the table
when Martell, another former pal, sticks out his foot, causing half my pitcher to spill onto the floor. Snorts
of laughter erupt from one end of the bar to the other.

“You all right, Tom?” asks Jeff from the back booth. A week ago, with Jeff or alone, I’d have cracked the
pitcher over Martell’s skull if only to see what would happen next.

“No problem, Jeff,” I shout back at the room. “I just seem to have spilled a little of our beer, and I’m going
to go back to the bar now and ask Kev if he would be so kind as to refill it.”
When I finally get back to our booth, Jeff takes an enormous gulp of beer and says, “Welcome to your
new life, buddy.”
I know what Jeff’s trying to do, and I love him for it. But for some reason, knee-jerk contrariness or just
blind stupidity, it must not sink in. Because three beers later, I stand up and unplug the jukebox in the
middle of a Stones song. Then, with a full mug in my left hand, I address the multitudes.

“I’m glad all you rednecks are here tonight because I have an announcement. As you all apparently know,
I helped Dante Halleyville turn himself in. In the process, I’ve gotten to know him and his grandmother
Marie. And guess what? I like and admire them both a hell of a lot. Because of that and other reasons, I’ve
decided to represent him. You heard correct. I’m going to be Dante Halleyville’s lawyer, and as his lawyer,
I’ll do everything I can to get him off. Thanks very much for coming. Good night. And get home safely.”
A couple of seconds later, Chucky Watkins and Martell come at me. Something goes off inside me, and
this is a side of Tom Dunleavy most of these guys know. I hit Watkins full in the face with the beer mug,
and he goes down like a shot and stays down. I think his nose is broken. It could be worse.

”
C’mon!
” I yell at Martell, but he just backs away from me. I may not be Dante Halleyville’s size, but I’m six
three and over two hundred, and I know how to scrap.

“C’mon! Anybody!” I yell at the other cowards in the room. “Take your best shot! Somebody?”
But only Jeff comes forward. He tucks me under his beefy arm and pushes me toward the back door.

“Same old Tommy,” he says, once we’re in his truck. “Same hothead.”
I stare out the windshield, still steaming as Jeff steps on the gas and we roar out of the parking lot.

“Not at all,” I say. “I’ve mellowed.”

Tom
THE NEXT DAY, at the Riverhead Correctional Facility, I place my wallet, watch, and keys in a small
locker, then step through a series of heavy barred doors, one clanging shut behind me as another slides
open in front.

The difference between the life of a visitor and those locked inside is so vast it chills me to the bone. It’s
like crossing from the land of the living into the land of the dead. Or having a day pass to hell.

To the right, a long, hopeless corridor leads to the various wings of the overflowing fifteen-hundred-bed jail.

I’m led to the left into a warren of airless little rooms set aside for inmates and their lawyers.

I wait patiently in one of them until Dante is led into the room. He’s been inside a little less than a week but
already seems harder and more distant. There’s no trace of a smile.

But then he clasps my hand and bumps my chest and says, “Good to see you, Tom. It means a lot.”
“It means a lot to me too, Dante,” I say, surprisingly touched by his greeting. “I need the work.”

“That’s what Clarence says.” And his two-hundred-watt smile finally cracks through the shell.

This kid is no murderer. Anyone should be able to see that, even the local police.

I really do need the work too. It feels like the first day of high school as I take out a new pack of legal pads
and a box of pens.

“Other than the fact that I will believe everything you tell me,” I say, “today’s going to be like being in that
box with the detectives, because we’re going through that day and that night again and again. And we’re
doing it until every detail you can remember is on these pads.”
I have him start by telling me everything he knows about Kevin Sledge, Gary McCauley, and Dave Bond,
his three other teammates that day. He tells me where they live, work, and hang out. He gives me their cell
phone numbers and tells me how to track them down if they try to avoid me.

“All have been in some scrapes,” says Dante, “but that doesn’t mean much where I’m from. McCauley’s
on probation for drugs, and Bond served ten months right in here for armed robbery. But the real gangster
is Kevin, who has never spent a day in jail.”
“How did they react to Michael pulling the gun?”
“They thought it was wack. Even Kevin.”
We talk about what happened the night of the murder. Unfortunately, his grandmother was visiting
relatives in Brooklyn, so she hadn’t seen him before or after the shootings. Dante swears to me that he
didn’t know where Michael Walker was hiding.

I’d forgotten how tedious this kind of work can be. Hartstein, my professor at St. John’s, used to call it “ass
in the chair” work because that’s what it comes down to, the willingness to keep asking questions and the
persistence to go through events again and again even if it only yields a few crumbs of new, probably
useless, information.

And it’s twice as hard in here because Dante and I have to do it without caffeine or sugar.

Nevertheless, we keep on slogging, turning our attention to what he and Michael Walker saw and
heard when they arrived to meet Feifer that night. These few minutes are the key to everything, and I
keep pressing Dante for more details. But it’s not until our third time through that Dante recalls
smelling a cigar.

Okay, that could be something.

And in the midst of his fourth pass, he sits up straight in his chair and says, “There was a guy on the
bench.”
My posture suddenly improves too. “Someone was there?”
“You know that bench at the far side of the court? A guy was sleeping on it when we arrived. And five
minutes later, when we ran past it, he was gone.”
“You sure about that, Dante? This is important.”
“Positive. Hispanic-looking dude, Mexican, or maybe Colombian. About thirty, long black hair in a
ponytail.”

Tom
A CIGAR. MAYBE belonging to one of the killers.

The news that somebody else may have been at the murder scene who could confirm or add to
Dante’s story, who maybe saw the three kids killed.

Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the
next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so
suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.

The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the
quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York.
I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly
pressed.

At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I
drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the
marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable
white-shoe law firms-Walmark, Reid and Blundell.

Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I push through the gleaming brass doors and catch an elevator to
the thirty-seventh floor.

But that just gets me to the
wrong side
of another barrier, as daunting in its way as the walls that ring the Riverhead jail. Instead of barbed
wire and concrete, it’s a giant piece of polished mahogany so immense it must have arrived from the
rain forest in the hold of a tanker and been hoisted to its new, unlikely home by a cloud-scraping
crane.

Instead of an armed sentry, there’s a stunning blond receptionist wearing a headset and looking like a
cyborg.

“Good morning. I’m here to see Kate Costello,” I say.

“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“I’m a friend.”
To the receptionist, that’s the same as a no. Maybe worse. She directs me toward a leather purgatory,
where for the next twenty minutes I sweat into a thirty-thousand-dollar couch. Last night, coming here
unannounced seemed a stroke of genius, and during the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Montauk,
my confidence never flagged. Well, not too much anyway.

But witty conversations with yourself and mock rehearsals can never duplicate the tension of the actual
moment-and now Kate strides toward me, low heels clicking like little hammers on the marble floor.

I wonder if she knows how little her austere navy suit does to conceal her beauty. And does she care.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and before I say a word, I’m back at the bottom of the hole I dug
with Kate ten years ago.

“I need your help to defend Dante Halleyville.”
This is the point where I figured Kate would invite me back to her office, but all she does is stare through
me. So I make my pitch right there in the lobby, laying it out as succinctly as I can. What I say makes
perfect sense to me, but I have no idea how it’s being received. I stare into Kate’s bright blue eyes but can’t
read them, and when I stop to catch my breath, she cuts me off.

“Tom,” she says, “don’t ever come here again.”
Then she spins and walks down the hall, the clicking of her heels sounding even chillier than when she
arrived. She never looks back.

Kate
I RETREAT FROM Tom Dunleavy’s totally unexpected ambush to the sanctuary of my office. I know
that sounds superficial. It’s just a room. But I’ve only had it a month, and the elegant furniture and
dazzling East River view haven’t lost the power to make me feel better the instant I step inside.

Thirty-one e-mails have come in since nine last night. Eight are related to the cease-and-desist letter I
messengered to the lead attorney for Pixmen Entertainment last night. Our client, Watermark, Inc.,
considers Pixmen’s new logo too close to one used by one of their divisions, and my letter accused them of
trademark infringement and raised the prospect of aggressive legal action, including a possible freeze on all
Pixmen income for the last fourteen months.

In an e-mail sent at 3:43 a.m., Pixmen’s attorney reports that the logo has been deleted from all outgoing
product, and e-mails from Watermark’s attorneys express their satisfaction and gratitude. Persuasively
threatening cataclysmic doom is one of the cheap thrills of my job.

A dozen other e-mails are the fallout of an embarrassing feature in
American Lawyer
about rising female legal stars. Many are from headhunters, but the most interesting is from the
president of Columbia University, who asks if I have time to serve on the committee to find the new
dean of the law school.

Yes, I will find the time.

At exactly 9:00 a.m., Mitchell Susser arrives to brief me on the upcoming insider-trading trial of former
Credit Mercantile managing partner Franklin Wolfe. An earlier trial, handled by one of our senior partners,
ended in a hung jury, and I’ve been assigned the retrial.

“Relax, Mitch,” I say, not that it does much good. Susser, a brand-new hire who was Law Review at
Harvard, has been reviewing the trial transcripts. “Wolfe,” he says, “spends way too much time
implausibly denying activity that isn’t clearly illegal. It costs him his credibility and gains him almost
nothing. I think a second trial is a great opportunity.”
We’re considering which of our defendant-preppers would make the best pretrial coach when Tony Reid,
the “Reid” of Walmark, Reid and Blundell, sticks his eminent gray head into the room. Beside him is
Randall Kane, arguably the firm’s most valuable client.