Beach Road

“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 I

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 their 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 Co

“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.

“And in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Patrick Roche and Robert Walco,” says the forewoman, “we find the defendant, Dante Halleyville, not guilty.”

The courtroom convulses, and the cops straighten their backs against the walls. Ten seconds stand between Dante and the rest of his life.

“And what is the jury’s decision in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Michael Walker?” asks Rothstein.

“The jury finds the defendant, Dante Halleyville, not guilty.”

The gray-haired woman says those final two resounding words with extra emphasis, but before the last syllable is all the way out, the room splits open. Marie and Clarence must feel as though they’re watching Dante rise from the dead, and Feifer’s mom, who lets out an awful wail, must feel as if she’s seeing Eric get murdered again right in front of her eyes. The cheering and cursing, screaming and jubilation are way too close to each other, and the room teeters on the verge of violence.

But none of that means a thing to Dante. He springs out of the chair and pulls us up with him as he throws his huge fists into the air, tilts his head back, and roars. Kate gets the first hug. I get the second, and then we’re at the center of a wet, hot mosh pit of pressed bodies; then the whole hot circle hops up and down and emits a chant.

“Halleyville! Halleyville! Halleyville!”

When Kate and I extricate ourselves enough to take in the rest of the room, it looks as spent as Times Square three hours after the ball drops on the new year. Kate and I jump inside the phalanx of sheriffs who circle Dante, and as they usher us out a side door, my eyes lock with Spielberg’s screenwriter, Alan Shales.

In this wild moment, Dante, Shales, and I are all linked. Dante is free to play ball again; after my squandered decade, I have a career; and Shales’s script is going to get made. If Dante had been convicted, there would have been no movie. But now, suddenly, all three of us have a future.