The Beach House

Chapter 106

I ESCORTED CAMPION back to the witness chair. Suddenly she looked younger and more relaxed. She'd even stopped glancing over at Barry for approval, or disapproval. Or whatever it was she got from him.

"You still okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine. Let's keep going."

I gestured toward the wall of photographs.

"Other than the faces and bodies, Campion, is there anything else you recognize in the pictures?"

"The rooms. The pictures were all shot at our house. The house I grew up in. The beach house my family has owned for nearly a hundred years."

"Different rooms or the same one?" I asked.

"Mostly different."

"One thing I can't quite figure out," I said, "is where the photographer hid."

"It depends on the shot, but there are any number of places. Lots of nooks and cra

"But how would the photographer know where to hide and be able to get himself there again and again without being detected?"

There was a crash behind me, and when I twisted to face it, Neubauer, having destroyed the card table with his full-stretch lunge, was crawling across the floor toward his wife. As Fen-ton and Hank pounced on him, a black tomahawk flew across the room, leaving a nasty black mark on the wall six inches from Campion's head. It was Stella Fitzharding's left shoe.

"Your husband and friend seem quite certain you were the one helping the blackmailers, Mrs. Neubauer," I said. Unscathed by either attack, Campion sat on the stand as calmly as when she arrived.

"I was," she said.

"You were blackmailing your own husband, Mrs. Neubauer?" I asked. "But as controlling partner of Mayflower Enterprises, you had more to lose than he did."

"I guess we would have to agree, Jack, that there are some things more important than money. At first I merely wanted to document it," Campion explained. "Have a record of what was going on in a house that has been in my family for a century. But then I couldn't resist the thought of watching my husband squirm."

"Peter didn't know about the blackmailing, did he?"

"He never would have gone along with it. He didn't hate Barry enough. Peter didn't hate anyone except himself. That was his loveliest flaw."

"Wouldn't it have been easier to simply divorce your husband?"

"Easier perhaps, but definitely not safer. As you've noticed by now, when Barry gets upset, people start washing up onshore."

I covered my mouth with a hand and took in a breath. Then I asked my next question, a big one. "Isn't that why you needed pictures even more incriminating than the ones up on the wall, Campion?"

Her back stiffened. "I'm not sure I follow," she said, nervously fingering the black crystal amulet on her necklace.

I moved in closer to Campion. "I think you do. It's one thing catching Barry having illicit sex with young boys and girls. But if, for example, you had pictures of him committing murder? Isn't that why you set up Peter?"

"I didn't know Barry was going to kill Peter that night. How could I?"

"Of course you did. You just told us – 'when Barry gets upset, people start washing up onshore.' In fact, you sent Sammy to cover the murder."

"But there are no pictures!" she pleaded. "I don't have any pictures!"

I held up an envelope.

"But I do, Campion. I have the pictures right here."

Chapter 107

ALL OF THE COURTROOM TECHNIQUES I'd tried so hard to master through the winter and spring deserted me in a frantic, anxious rush. I quickly opened the envelope instead of milking the moment for what it was worth. My heart was pumping. All my senses were razor-sharp. I held several photographs from the envelope in my fist.

I riffled through the photographs, then slapped them up on the wall with the others. They were probably the last seven shots Sammy had ever taken, and in a terrible way they were his masterpieces.

Each was printed horizontally on nineteen-by-twenty-two paper and was as black and murky as Sammy's pornography was bright. Taped to the wall in a dark jagged row, they looked less like photographs than expressionist paintings swirling violently with rage and fear and death.

Like so much of the pornography, the action was three-on-one. But the lust was now replaced by fury, the pelvic thrusts by whaling fists and feet.

There, I could see the blurred face of Neubauer's platinum Cartier watch as he swung a blackjack at Peter's neck.

And there, while two other burly shapes pi

There was a face half-hidden in the shadows – but I could tell it was Frank Volpi's. He'd lied about being there, but of course, why wouldn't he lie? Everyone else had.

The last picture was the most hellish. I slapped it up on the wall and watched Molly's lens zoom in. I knew it would be engraved on my retina forever.

At the instant that particular picture was taken, there must have been a break in the cloud cover. As Peter lay broken at the feet of his murderers, his face was momentarily illuminated.

It was like a candlelit face in a Caravaggio, the face of a young man who knew that he was down to his last few seconds and that no one was going to save him. The horror in his eyes was too much, and even though I'd seen the photograph before, I had to look away.

"Is there any end to this shameless grandstanding?" screamed Montrose. "In all of these pictures, you can see only a single face, and that's the victim's."

"The prosecutor will approach the bench," snapped Macklin. "Right now."

When I got there, he was as angry as I'd ever seen him. "Montrose is right. These pictures are useless, and you know it. What the hell are you doing, Jack? Do you have a point to make?"

"Fuck Montrose. And Neubauer. And fuck you." I spat out the words. Then I started to cry. I just lost it. "I don't care whether these pictures have value as evidence. They show Peter getting beaten to death on a beach by Neubauer and two goons, one of whom is Volpi. If I have to see it in my head for the rest of my life, then so do they. Peter didn't kill himself, he didn't drown – he was murdered, Mack. That's what it shows."

Macklin reached up and grabbed my wet face with both huge hands. He squeezed it hard as if it were a bleeding wound he was trying to staunch.

"Jack. Listen to me," he said with a heartbreaking smile. "You're doing a fine job, better than that. Don't let it get away from you now, son. Do you have anything to finish off these bastards? Please say yes, Jack."

Chapter 108

DON'T LET IT GET AWAY FROM YOU NOW.

When Peter and I were kids, our father told us a story about a huge rat that got into his and my mother's apartment in Hell's Kitchen. It was a freezing December morning. He had my mother, who was pregnant with me, sit in a coffee shop across the street.

Then my father borrowed a shovel from the super and walked back up the five flights to face the rat. He found it in the living room at the end of the railroad flat, scurrying along the wall, trying to nose a way out. It was the size of a small cat, at least ten pounds, with a shiny orange-brown pelt.

Brandishing the shovel, my father backed it into a corner. The rat tried to get past, making feints left and right, but when he saw that it was no use, he bared his teeth and waited. When my father cocked the shovel over his right shoulder like a Louisville Slugger, the rat leaped at him!

With a desperate swing, my father knocked it out of the air like a furry, gray-tailed softball. The rat bounced off the wall hard enough to knock over half the books on the shelves. My father barely had time to recock the shovel before the rat was flying back at him. Again the shovel caught it flush. Again the rat crashed into the wall. My father knocked it out of the air two more times before he could kill it.