The Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  What a nice man. I wondered what he was up to. I said, “It’s your decision, Frank.”

  “No, it’s your decision now. I don’t want you to feel pressured. No problem either way. You want, I’ll drop you off at the train station. You go home.”

  I guess it was time for me to bail out or take an oath of loyalty. The man was a manipulator. But I already knew that. I said, “Maybe you’re right. You don’t need me anymore.”

  He patted my shoulder. “Right. I don’t need you. I like you.”

  Just when I think I’ve got this guy figured out, I don’t. So we went to the Plaza Hotel.

  What I didn’t know was that half the Mafia in New York were going to show up that night.

  Twenty-nine

  The Plaza is my favorite hotel in New York, and I was glad that Frank and I shared the same taste in something, since I was apparently going to be there awhile.

  We checked into a large three-bedroom suite overlooking Central Park. The staff seemed to appreciate who we were—or who Bellarosa was—but they were not as obvious about it as the paesanos at Giulio’s, and no one seemed particularly nervous.

  Frank Bellarosa, Vinnie Adamo, Lenny Patrelli, and John Whitman Sutter sat in the spacious living room of the suite. Room service delivered coffee and sambuca, and Pellegrino water for me (which I discovered is an antidote for Italian overindulgence). By now it was twenty minutes to five, and I assumed we all wanted to catch the five-o’clock news on television. I said to Frank, “Do you want to call your wife before five?”

  “Oh, yeah.’’ He picked up the telephone on the end table and dialed. “Anna? Oh . . .’’ He chuckled. “How you doin’ there? Didn’t recognize your voice. Yeah. I’m okay. I’m in the Plaza.”

  He listened for a few seconds, then said, “Yeah. Out on bail. No big deal. Your husband did a terrific job.’’ He winked at me, then listened a bit more and said, “Yeah, well, we went for a little lunch, saw some people. First chance I had to call. . . . No, don’t wake her. Let her sleep. I’ll call later.’’ He listened again, then said, “Yeah. He’s here with me.’’ He nodded his head while my wife spoke to him, then said to her, “You want to talk to him?’’ Bellarosa glanced at me, then said into the phone, “Okay. Maybe he’ll talk to you later. Listen, we got to stay here a few days. . . . Yeah. Pack some stuff for him, and tell Anna I want my blue suit and gray suit, the ones I had made in Rome. . . . Yeah. And shirts, ties, underwear, and stuff. Give everything to Anthony and let him send somebody here with it. Tonight. Okay?. . . . Turn the news on. See what they got to say, but don’t believe a word of it. . . . Yeah.’’ He laughed, then listened. “Yeah. . . . Okay. . . . Okay. . . . See you later.’’ He hung up, then almost as an afterthought, he said to me, “Your wife sends her love.”

  To whom?

  There was a knock on the door, and Vinnie jumped up and disappeared into the foyer. Lenny drew his pistol and held it in his lap. Presently, a room service waiter appeared wheeling a table on which was a bottle of champagne, a cheese board, and a bowl of fruit. The waiter said, “Compliments of the manager, sir.”

  Bellarosa motioned to Vinnie, who tipped the waiter, who bowed and backed out. Bellarosa said to me, “You want some champagne?”

  “No.”

  “You wanna call your wife back and tell her what you need?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll dial it for you. Here . . .’’ He picked up the telephone. “You go in your room for privacy. Here, I’ll get her.”

  “Later, Frank. Hang up.”

  He shrugged and hung up the phone.

  Vinnie turned on the television to the five-o’clock news. I hadn’t expected a lead story, but there was the anchorman, Jeff Jones, saying, “Our top story, Frank Bellarosa, reputed head of the largest of New York’s five crime families, was arrested at his palatial Long Island mansion early this morning by the FBI. Bellarosa was charged in a sealed sixteen-count federal indictment in the murder of Juan Carranza, an alleged Colombian drug lord who was killed in a mob-style rubout on the Garden State Parkway on January fourteenth of this year.”

  Jeff Jones went on, reading the news off the teleprompter as if it were all news to him. Where do they get these guys? Jones said, “And in a startling development, Judge Sarah Rosen released Bellarosa on five million dollars’ bail after the reputed gang leader’s attorney, John Sutter, offered himself as an alibi witness for his client.”

  Jones babbled on a bit about this. I wondered if Susan recalled the morning of January fourteenth. It didn’t matter if she did or not, since I knew she would cover me so I could cover Frank Bellarosa. Oh, what tangled webs we weave, and so forth. Mr. Salem taught me that in sixth grade.

  Jeff Jones was saying now, “We have Barry Freeman live at Frank Bellarosa’s Long Island estate. Barry?”

  The scene flashed to Alhambra’s gates, and Barry Freeman said, “This is the home of Frank Bellarosa. Many of the estates here on Long Island’s Gold Coast have names, and this house, sitting on two hundred acres of trees, meadows, and gardens, is called Alhambra. And here at the main gates of the estate is the guard booth—there behind me—which is actually a gatehouse in which live two, maybe more of Bellarosa’s bodyguards.”

  The camera panned in on the gatehouse and Freeman said, “We’ve pushed the buzzer outside there and we’ve hollered and shaken the gates, but no one wants to talk to us.”

  The camera’s telescopic lens moved in, up the long driveway, and the screen was filled with a fuzzy picture of the main house. Freeman said, “In this mansion lives Frank the Bishop Bellarosa and his wife, Anna.”

  I heard Frank’s voice say, “What the fuck’s this got to do with anything?”

  Freeman went on for a while, describing the lifestyle of the rich and infamous resident of Alhambra. Freeman said, “Bellarosa is known to his friends and to the media as Dandy Don.”

  Bellarosa said, “Nobody better call me that to my face.”

  Vinnie and Lenny chuckled. Clearly they were excited about their boss’s television fame.

  The scene now flashed back to Freeman, who said, “We’ve asked a few residents on this private road about the man who is their neighbor, but no one has any comment.’’ He continued, “We don’t think the don has returned home from Manhattan yet, so we’re waiting here at his gate to see if we can speak to him when he does.”

  Bellarosa commented, “You got a long wait, asshole.”

  Barry Freeman said, “Back to you, Jeff.”

  The anchor, Jeff Jones, said, “Thanks, Barry, and we’ll get right back to you if Frank Bellarosa shows up. Meanwhile, this was the scene this morning at the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Jenny Alvarez reports.”

  The screen showed the videotape of that morning: Frank Bellarosa and John Sutter making their way down the steps of the courthouse as savage reporters yelled questions at us. My blue Hermès tie looked sort of aqua on camera, and my hair was a bit messy, but my expression was a lawyerly one of quiet optimism. I noticed now that the snippy female reporter who had given me a hard time on the lower steps was on my case even then as we first left the courthouse, but she hadn’t really registered in my mind at the time. I saw, too, by her microphone, that the station I was watching was her station. I guess that was Jenny Alvarez. She was yelling at me, “Mr. Sutter? Mr. Sutter? Mr. Sutter?”

  Obviously, she had been fascinated by me the moment she laid eyes on me. Actually, she wasn’t bad-looking herself.

  But neither Frank nor I had said much as we descended the steps, and the scene shifted to the lower steps where we got stuck for a while. And there was Great Caesar, with the majestic classical columns of the courthouse behind him, puffing on his stogie, wisecracking and hamming it up for the cameras. I hadn’t noticed when I was there, but from the camera’s perspective, I could see a line of federal marshals on the top steps of the courthouse, including my buddy, Wyatt Earp.

  Frank commented to the three of us, “I gotta lose some weight. Look h
ow that jacket’s pulling.”

  Vinnie said, “You look great, boss.”

  Lenny agreed, “Terrific. Fuckin’-ay-terrific.”

  It was my turn. “You could drop ten pounds.”

  “Yeah? Maybe it’s just the suit.”

  I turned my attention back to the television. You could hear a few questions and a few answers, but mostly it was just entertainment, a street happening, impromptu theater. Then, however, Ms. Snippy’s cameraman got a close-up of her bugging me again. “Mr. Sutter, Mr. Ferragamo has five witnesses who put Frank Bellarosa at the scene of the murder. Are you saying they’re all liars? Or are you the liar?”

  And stupid John replied, “Ferragamo’s witnesses are liars, and he knows they are liars. This whole thing is a frame-up, a personal vendetta against my client, and an attempt to start trouble between—”

  “Trouble between who?’’ asked Ms. Snippy. “Rival mobs?”

  And so it went.

  Frank didn’t say anything, but I had the feeling he wished this wasn’t going out over the air to Little Italy, Little Colombia, Little Jamaica, Chinatown, and other quaint little neighborhoods where exotic people with big grudges, big guns, and extreme paranoia might decide to engage in what was called a drug-related murder.

  I turned my attention back to the television. The classical columns and crowded steps of the courthouse were gone, and the background was now gray stone. And there was Ms. Alvarez live, apparently recently returned from her engagement in lower Manhattan. In fact, she had changed from the morning’s neat suit and was now wearing a clingy, red fuck-me dress and holding a bulbous phallic symbol to her lips. But did she put it in her mouth? No. She spoke into it. “And this is Stanhope Hall. Or at least its walls and towering gates. And over there, right behind the gates, is the gatehouse where an old woman tried to shoo us away a little while ago.”

  Funny, but I hadn’t recognized the place at first. It was odd that you could sometimes believe in the imagist world of television, but when the person or place was someone or something you knew personally, it didn’t look real; the perspective was wrong, the colors were off. The very diminution of size made the person or place nearly unrecognizable. But there it was: the gateway to Stanhope Hall on television.

  Ms. Alvarez did ten seconds of travelogue, then said, “You can’t see the fifty-room mansion from here, but in that mansion live John Whitman Sutter and Susan Stanhope Sutter.”

  This was not at all accurate, of course. Susan had lived in the mansion once, but had stepped down in the world. I’ll write to Ms. Alvarez.

  Anyway, Jenny Alvarez went on about blue bloods, high society, Susan’s parentage, and all that nonsense, then she came to the point, which was, “Why would John Sutter, a respected and successful attorney with the old Wall Street firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, with rich and powerful friends and clients, defend Frank the Bishop Bellarosa on a charge of murder? What is the connection between these two men, between these two families? Did John Sutter, in fact, see Frank Bellarosa on the morning of January fourteenth when Alphonse Ferragamo charges that Bellarosa murdered Juan Carranza in New Jersey? Is that why Sutter chose to take on this case? Or is there more to it?”

  There’s more to it, Ms. Snippy.

  Bellarosa asked, “Where’d they get all that shit on you, Counselor?”

  “I handed out press kits on myself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just kidding, Frank.”

  Ms. Alvarez was still at it. Where she got all that shit was from Mr. Mancuso and/or Mr. Ferragamo. This was called payback time, aka “Fuck you, Sutter.’’ Thanks, boys.

  Frank Bellarosa said, half jokingly, “Hey, who’s the fucking star of this show? Me or you? I didn’t know you were a big shot.”

  I stood and walked toward my bedroom.

  “Where you goin’?”

  “The back’ouse.”

  “Can’t you hold it? You’re gonna miss this.”

  “I won’t miss it at all.’’ I went into my bedroom and into the bathroom. I peeled off my jacket and washed my hands and face. “Good Lord . . .’’ Well, aside from my personal reasons for being here, the fact remained that Frank Bellarosa was not guilty of the murder of Juan Carranza. “Not guilty,’’ I said aloud. “Not guilty.”

  I looked in the mirror and held eye contact with myself. “You fucked up, Sutter. Oh, you really fucked up this time, Golden Boy. Come on, admit it.”

  “No,’’ I replied, “I did what I had to do. What I wanted to do. This is a growing experience, John. A learning experience. I feel fine.”

  “Tell me that in a week or two.”

  I am the only man I know who can get the best of me in an argument, so I turned away before I said something I’d regret.

  I dropped my clothes on the bathroom floor and stepped into the shower. Oh, that felt good. The three best things in life are steak, showers, and sex. I let the water cascade over my tired body.

  By tomorrow morning, this story would be spread all over the newspapers. The Daily News, New York’s premier chronicle of the Mafia, would headline it, and so would the Post. USA Today would give it some play, and the Wall Street Journal, while not seeing any real news value to the story per se, would report it. My fear there was that they would decide that the story was not Frank Bellarosa, but John Sutter of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds. In fact, they might massacre me. Woe is me.

  And by tomorrow morning, anyone in Lattingtown, Locust Valley, or the other Gold Coast communities who had missed the story in the above-mentioned newspapers, or missed it on the radio, or somehow missed it on New York’s dozen or so TV news shows, could read it in the local Long Island newspaper, Newsday, with special emphasis on the local boy, John Sutter. I saw the headline: GOLD COAST TWIT IN DEEP SHIT . Well, maybe not in those words. But Newsday was a left-of-center sort of publication in a heavily Republican county, and they delighted in being antagonistic toward the nearly extinct gentry. They would have fun with this one.

  I tried to imagine how this would sit with my partners, my staff, and my two secretaries when they discovered that Mr. Sutter had expanded the scope of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds into criminal law. As the water flowed over my head, I had this mental image of my mother and father flipping through the International Herald Tribune, somewhere in darkest Europe, looking for depressing stories of famine and political repression, and stumbling upon an odd little article about Mr. Frank Bellarosa, Mafia gang leader in New York. Mother would say, “Isn’t that the fellow who lives next to our son, what’s-his-name?’’ And Father would reply, “Yes, I believe . . . well, look, here is a mention of John Sutter. That must be our John.’’ And Mother would say, “It must be. Did I tell you about that darling little café I saw yesterday in Montmartre?”

  Of course my friends at The Creek would be somewhat more interested. I pictured Lester, Martin Vandermeer, Randall Potter, Allen DePauw, and a few others sitting around the lounge, nodding knowingly, or perhaps shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, or doing whatever they thought everyone else thought was appropriate, and Lester would say, “If only John had had more strength of character. I feel sorry for Susan and the kids.”

  Jim and Sally Roosevelt, though, were real friends, and nonjudgmental people. I could count on them to tell me straight out what they thought and felt about me. Therefore, I would avoid them for about a month.

  Then there were my relatives, my aunts and uncles such as Cornelia and Arthur, and my too many cousins, and their spouses, and the whole crew of silly people I had to associate with because of things like Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Well, Thanksgiving was three months away, I didn’t know about any upcoming weddings, and no one seemed about to croak (though after today I wouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Cornelia did). And if they all snubbed me, I wouldn’t care one whit, but they were more likely to pester me for details of my secret life as a Mafia mouthpiece.

  And of course, there were Caro
lyn and Edward. I was glad I’d tipped them off about this, so when they heard it from other sources, they could say, “Yes, we know all about that. We support our father in whatever he does.’’ What great kids. Anyway, I guessed that Carolyn would be outwardly cool, but inwardly worried. That girl keeps everything in. Edward would start a scrapbook. But I’m not concerned about the judgment of children, my own included.

  As for my sister, Emily, she had passed through her own midlife rejection of upper-middle-class values and had already reached the other side. I knew she would be there waiting for me when I arrived at my destination, and bless her, she wouldn’t want to know anything about my journey, only that I’d made it.

  Ethel Allard. Now there was a tough call. If I had to put major money on that, I would say she was secretly pleased that another blue blood had been exposed as morally corrupt. Especially me, since she could never find a chink in my shining armor. I mean, I never beat my wife (except at her own suggestion), I didn’t owe money to tradesmen, didn’t use the gatehouse to screw women, I went to church, hardly ever got drunk, and I treated her reasonably well. “But,’’ she would ask, “what good have you done lately, Mr. John Sutter?’’ Not much, Ethel. Oh, well.

  I’m only glad that George isn’t alive to see this, for surely it would have killed him. And if it didn’t, he would have annoyed me with his superior and disapproving attitude, and I would have killed him myself.

  But, you know, there’s a bright spot even in a pile of horse manure. For instance, the Reverend Mr. Hunnings would be secretly and sneeringly happy that I was shown up for what I was: a gangster groupie who probably dealt drugs to support his alcohol habit. And I liked the idea that he was probably happy. I was happy that he was happy. I couldn’t wait to get to church next Sunday to put my envelope in the collection plate with a thousand dollars in it.

  Then there were the women; Sally Grace Roosevelt, for one, who had found Susan’s description of don Bellarosa so interesting. And there was Beryl Carlisle, who I was sure now would peel off her damp pants the moment I walked into the room. And there were women like the delicious Terri, who would take me a little more seriously after this.