Beach Road

by James Patterson

  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.”

  Chapter 12

  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.

  Chapter 13

  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.

  Chapter 14

  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.

  Chapter 15

  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.

  Once I start regretting how I screwed things up with Kate, it’s only a matter of a couple more sips before I revisit The Moment. Boston Garden, February 11, 1995. Barely more than a minute to play and the T-wolves are down by twenty-three. A part of the game so meaningless it’s called “garbage time.” I come down on a teammate’s ankle, blow out my left knee, and my pro career is over before I hit the famed parquet floor.

  That’s how it works with me and Dr. Jameson. First I think about losing Kate Costello. Then I think about losing basketball.

  See, first I had nothing. That was okay because in the beginning everyone has nothing. Then I found basketball, and through basketball I found Kate. Now, Kate would deny that. Women always do. But you and I, Doc, we’re not children. We both know I never would have gotten within ten feet of Kate Costello without basketball. I mean, look at her!

  Then I lost Kate. And then I lost basketball. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.

  So here’s the question I’ve been asking myself for ten years: how the hell am I going to get her back without it?

  Doc, you still there?

  Chapter 16

  Kate

  UNTIL THIS GOD-AWFUL, godforsaken morning in early September, the only funeral for a young person I’d ever attended was, I think, Wendell Taylor’s. Wendell was a big, lovable bear who played bass for Save the Whales, a local band that made it pretty good and had begun to tour around New England.

  Two Thanksgivings ago, Wendell was driving back from a benefit show in Providence. When he fell asleep at the wheel, he was six miles from his bed, and the telephone pole he hit was the only unmovable object for two hundred yards in either direction. It took the EMS ninety minutes to cut him out of his van.

  That Wendell was such a decent guy and was so thrilled to actually be making a living from his music made the whole thing incredibly sad. Yet somehow his funeral, full of funny and teary testimonials from friends from as far back as kindergarten, made people feel better.

  The funeral for Rochie, Feifer, and Walco, which takes place in a squat stone church just east of town, doesn’t do anyone a lick of good.

  Instead of cathartic tears, there’s clenched rage, a lot of it directed at the conspicuously absent owner of the house where the murders took place. To the thousand or so stuffed into that church Sunday morning, Walco and Feif and Rochie died for some movie star’s vanity.

  I know it’s not quite that simple. From what I hear, Feif, Walco, and Rochie hung out at the court all summer and enjoyed the scene as much as anyone. Still, it would have been nice of Smitty Wilson to show up and pay his respects, don’t ya think?

  There is one cathartic moment this morning, but it’s an ugly one. Before the service begins, Walco’s younger brother spots a photographer across the street. Turns out that the Daily News is less cynical about Mr. Wilson than we are. They think there’s enough of a chance of him showing up to send a guy with a telephoto lens.

  Walco’s brother and his pals trash his camera pretty bad, and it would have been a lot worse if the police weren’t there.

  That scene, I come to think later on, that violent altercation, was what some people might call an omen.

  Chapter 17

  Kate

  IT JUST KEPT getting worse and worse the day of the funerals.

  I don’t belong here anymore, I think to myself, and I want to run out of the Walcos’ house, but I’m not brave enough.

  The line of neighbors waiting to offer their condolences to Mary and Richard Walco starts in the dining room in front of the breakfront, snakes along three living room walls, then runs past the front door and most of the way down the bedroom hallway. Clutching Mary Catherine’s tiny hand for dear life, I thread my way through the heavy-hearted gathering as if the carpet were strewn with mines and make my way to the end of the line.

  All morning I’ve clung to my niece like a life preserver.

 
; But MC, who thank goodness knows nothing of human misery, has no intention of staying put and breaks out of my grip and zigzags blithely around the room. She finally gloms on to her mom.

  When MC scampers off, all the gloom of this dreadful day floods into the space she’s left behind.

  I steady myself against one yellow-wallpapered wall and wait my turn, trying to will myself into invisibility. It’s not a skill I’ve mastered over the years. Then there’s an alarming tap on my shoulder.

  I turn. It’s Tom.

  And as soon as I see him, I realize he is the land mine I was hoping Mary Catherine would protect me from.

  Before I can say a word, he moves in for a tentative hug that I don’t reciprocate. “It’s awful, Kate,” he mumbles. He looks awful too, as if he hasn’t slept in about ten days.

  “Terrible” is what I manage to say. No more than that. Tom doesn’t deserve more. Ten years ago he broke my heart, blew it apart, and didn’t even seem to care that much. I’d heard the rumor that he was running around on me and partying hard. I hadn’t believed the rumor. But in the end I sure did.

  “It’s still good to see you, Kate.”

  “Spare me, Tom.”

  I see the hurt in his face and now I feel bad. Mary, mother of God! What is it with me? After five years together, he breaks up with me ON THE PHONE, and now I feel bad.

  The whole thing has me so contorted, I want to run out into the street and scream like a crazy person.

  But of course I don’t. Not good girl Kate Costello. I stand there with a dim-witted little smile plastered on my face, as if we have been enjoying innocuous pleasantries, and finally, he turns away.

  Then I take a deep breath, give myself a stern talking-to about the need to get over myself, and wait my turn to offer some consoling words to the thousand-times-more-wretched Mary Walco.

  One strange and disturbing thing: I hear virtually the same line half a dozen times while I’m standing there waiting to see Mary—Somebody’s got to get those bastards for this.