“In this case, as in so many others, race is nothing but a smoke screen. I know you’re not going to be distracted or misled. You’re going to see the prosecution’s case for what it is. Because there is not one piece of credible evidence connecting Dante to these murders, you’re going to come to the only conclusion you can—which is that the prosecution has proved nothing beyond a reasonable doubt.
“And then, Madam Forewoman, you’re going to say the two words that Dante Halleyville has being waiting to hear for a year—not guilty.
“If you don’t do that, you will be helping the murderers get away with a fifth murder, the murder of a remarkable young man, a very good friend of mine named Dante Halleyville.”
Chapter 100
Kate
TOM COLLAPSES IN his chair, and the jurors stare at him stone-faced. Five of the jurors are African Americans and eight are women, but talking about race is a risk, particularly to a jury that’s mostly white.
Howard can’t wait to make us pay for it. “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Melvin Howard. I’m fifty-two years of age, and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve been black the whole time.
“In Alabama, where my people are from, my grandparents were the grandchildren of slaves, and when my parents were coming up, black people couldn’t use the same bathrooms as white folks or eat at the same restaurants. But none of that disgraceful history has one iota to do with Dante Halleyville or this trial, and Mr. Dunleavy knows it.”
Tom didn’t say it did. In fact, he was saying the opposite, but Howard is twisting it anyway, doing whatever he thinks will work. But all that matters is how it plays to the twelve folks in the good seats, and when I look in their eyes I can’t read a thing. I’m proud of what Tom has done, but I’m nervous too.
“Race and police corruption?” asks Howard sarcastically. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Now where have I heard that before?” And then he looks at the end of the press row where Ronnie Montgomery is sitting and holds his mock stare.
“Oh, now I remember. It was from the tabloid trial of the century, the murder trial of Lorenzo Lewis. About the only thing missing is a snappy little slogan, like ‘if the hat’s too red, their case is dead.’
“But how many people still think Lorenzo’s innocent today? Not even his golfing buddies in Arizona. So don’t let yourself be conned like that jury, ladies and gentlemen, unless you want to be remembered the same way.
“Now is the time for you to see through the nonsense and the imaginative conspiracy theories and focus on the evidence. For starters, we got a murder weapon with Michael Walker’s prints all over it, recovered at a Southampton diner three hours after Dante Halleyville stops there. Although the defense tried very hard to put words in his mouth, Dr. Ewald Olson, one of the nation’s top forensic scientists, has testified those prints could only belong to Michael Walker, and that gun killed all four of those young men.
“Now let me say something about a highly decorated East Hampton police officer named Hugo Lindgren.” In Riverhead every other family has a relative who’s a cop or corrections officer, and Howard is about to appeal directly to their defensive loyalties.
“By irresponsibly dragging his reputation through the mud, they have impugned not only an officer who has earned seventeen commendations in his nine years on the force, but by extension all policemen and corrections officers who risk their lives every day so that we can go about our business in safety.
“According to the defense, it’s evidence of a conspiracy that one cop should be so involved in every aspect of the biggest murder case in East Hampton in a hundred years. Good cops like Lindgren spend their whole career waiting for cases like this. It’s only natural that he would become obsessed with it. And remember, the East Hampton PD is a small unit, so for one officer to be involved a couple of times over the course of an investigation is hardly suspicious. It’s surprising to me his name didn’t come up more often.
“The defense, in its desperation, has said a couple other things that are simply untrue and need to be corrected.
“One is that it’s suspicious that the call about the gun came from the pay phone at the Princess Diner. Maybe most of us have cell phones now, but what if the caller was a busboy working the overnight shift at the restaurant that night for minimum wage? Not everyone can afford a cell phone. The second is the implication that the gun was found after the defendant told police he had been to the diner that night and that the defendant volunteered that information. Neither is true. Lindgren was nowhere near the room where the defendant was interviewed, and the police found out Halleyville had been at the diner after the gun was found.
“Bear in mind, also, that the one person who places that officer in Dante’s room is Dante’s grandmother Marie Scott. Marie Scott may be a very good woman, and I’m sure she is, and she swore to tell this court the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help her, God. But she’s also a human being, and who of us can say with any certainty exactly what they would do or say to save the life of their flesh and blood?”
Howard is sweating at least as much as Tom, but when he stops it’s only for a drink of water.
“And there’s an important part of this case that the defense hasn’t even attempted to discredit or obscure, which is that on the morning before the murders, Michael Walker got a gun out of Dante’s car, brought it onto T. Smitty Wilson’s basketball court, and put it up against the head of one of the victims, Eric Feifer. As the witness told you, he didn’t just aim the weapon at Eric Feifer, he put the tip of the barrel right up against his head, and you’ve seen those grisly photographs so you know how close the killer held the gun to the victims’ heads when the shots were fired. And before Walker temporarily put that gun down, he announced, ‘This ain’t over, white boy, not by a long shot.’ Before the actual murder, there was a dress rehearsal to which fourteen men and women were invited.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a pretty simple case. You’ve got two defendants at the murder scene; you’ve got a murder weapon containing the fingerprints of one of them; you’ve got a hat with fingerprints that connects the defendant to the second murder scene. And now, thanks to the courage of Nikki Robinson, you have a powerful motive—revenge for a brutal rape.
“I want to thank all of you for the focus and commitment you have shown already. And thanks in advance for the concentration you will bring to the work that is still left. You’re almost home, ladies and gentlemen. Please, don’t take your eye off the ball now. Dante Halleyville is guilty of murder. If you value your safety and the safety of your loved ones, do not set him free.”
Chapter 101
Kate
FOR A COUPLE of quiet minutes spectators linger in their seats like moviegoers reading the closing credits. “We love you, Dante,” shouts Marie as two sheriffs approach the defense table to take him away. “It’s almost over, baby.”
“Yeah,” a guy in paint-splattered overalls calls from the door, “and then you fry!”
Tom and I shake Dante’s hand, which is still quivering; then the sheriffs put him back in handcuffs and lead him to the steel-cage elevator that will take him to the holding cell in the basement. On the opposite side of the room, another pair of sheriffs escorts the jury out a second door and walks them to a waiting bus. The bus will take them a quarter of a mile down the road to a Ramada Inn, where they’ll spend the weekend on the eleventh floor, sequestered from one another and the rest of the world.
After the jury’s bus pulls out, Tom and I slip out the same back door and hustle across the parking lot to where Clarence has left us his cab.
As we roll out the back exit in the yellow station wagon, TV reporters and other press are still waiting for us in front. By the time they realize what’s happened, we’re halfway to Sunrise Highway.
Neither of us says a whole lot during the drive home. Exhaustion is part of the reason, but mostly it’s shyness, or something like that. Suddenly alone together again, we’re not sure how to act
. Actually, I’m thinking about the old days, when we were younger. During our senior year in high school, Tom and I saw each other just about every day—beach bums forever. It was pretty much the same way through college, and I went to almost all of Tom’s home games when he was at St. John’s. That’s why the breakup was such a shocker for me. I still didn’t know if I was over the hurt.
Anyway, when Tom pulls into Macklin’s driveway and I quickly get out of the car, I can read the disappointment in his eyes.
I’m feeling it too, but I’m so bone tired I need to get to my room before I collapse. I unbutton my skirt before I reach the top of the steep stairs, pull the shades, and crawl into bed.
The relief at finding myself horizontal between clean white sheets lasts a minute. Then my mind hits Rewind and Play and the second-guessing starts. Did Tom have to mention race? Were we right not to put Dante on the stand? Why was I so easy on Nikki? I should have shredded her. How hard could we really have been trying if we didn’t track down Loco? Who are we kidding—thinking we could win this case?
Then sleep, the loveliest gift a person ever gave herself, pulls the black curtain down.
When I sit up in bed again, awakened by what sounds like a woodpecker tapping against a pane of glass, it’s three thirty in the morning. I’ve been asleep for more than nine hours.
There’s another click on the glass, and then another click, and I climb out of bed and step groggily to the window.
I fumble for the shade, give one little tug, and it flies past my face up toward the ceiling.
Standing in the backyard, a bicycle lying at his feet, and about to throw another pebble at the window, is the only boy who’s ever broken my heart.
When Tom’s face breaks into a grin, I realize I’m naked.
Chapter 102
Tom
HOW CAN AN ex-NBA player miss a target the size of a door less than fifteen feet away? The pebble bounces off the siding, hits the edge of the gutter, and lands in the grass near my feet.
I scoop another little piece of Mack’s driveway out of my pocket and try again. This time I actually hit the window, and then I hit it again.
I’m wondering how many direct hits it’s going to take when the shade flies up and Kate stands at the window, the moonlight shining on her freckled shoulders and full breasts. After a couple interminable seconds, Kate lifts a finger to her lips and smiles, and I can breathe again, at least until the back door swings open and she steps outside barefoot in cutoff shorts and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
We tiptoe past the National Enquirer photographer asleep in his rented Toyota and walk down the middle of a sleeping Montauk street toward the beach. We leave our shoes under the bench behind the East Deck and cut through the dunes.
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?”
Chapter 103
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.
Chapter 104
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 th
eir 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.
Chapter 105
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.
Beach Road Page 18
