Beach Road

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.”

Chapter 43. 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.”

Chapter 44. 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 stu

“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 una

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.