“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.
Chapter 106
Kate
JOYOUS NEIGHBORS AND friends carrying food and drink show up at Marie’s an hour after the verdict, but the celebration doesn’t officially begin until Dante, a foaming bottle of champagne in one hand, scissors in the other, snips through the tangle of yellow police tape that sealed his bedroom for nearly a year. When the last sticky piece has been ripped away, he and his pals rush into the room like a liberating army.
“This is for my homeboy Dunleavy,” says Dante, donning the black-and-blue cap of Tom’s old team, the Minnesota T-wolves.
Then he tosses the other twenty-eight—the Miami Heat cap is still in a plastic bag in Riverhead somewhere—to his crew, and for the rest of the party, wherever I turn, brand-new gleaming caps bob jauntily above the fray.
As for me, I haven’t been dry-eyed ten minutes since the verdict came down. All I have to do is see Marie gaze up at her grandson, or Tom and Jeff with their arms around each other, or the relief on Clarence’s exhausted face for the tears to flow again. After a while, I don’t even bother wiping them away.
Now Macklin bangs on the kitchen table and shouts, “Order in the court! I said, order in the court!” And the room erupts in a riot of whistles, catcalls, and stomping feet.
“Anyone recognize this?” he says, waving a familiar wooden stick and sounding at least a couple drinks to the good. “Let’s just say that tight-ass Rothstein will have to find something else to beat on his poor pew. Because I wasn’t leaving that courtroom without a souvenir.
“Goddamn it, Dante. I’m proud of you,” says Macklin. “I don’t know how you hung so tough, but based on what I see in your grandmother, I’m not surprised. I hope someday you can look back on this bullshit and feel you got something out of it. Anything. And now I want to hear from the brilliant and gorgeous Kate Costello.”
When the room twists toward me and cheers, I open my mouth to see what will fall out.
“To Dante!” I say, raising my champagne. “And your long-overdue freedom! And to Marie! And your long-overdue freedom! I’m so relieved Tom and I didn’t let you down. I love you both.” Then I lose it again as Dante and Marie rescue me in their arms.
“What my partner was trying to say, Dante,” says Tom, picking up my toast like a dropped baton, “is you’ll be getting our bill in the morning.”
The highly emotional toasts and festivities roll on without letting up. I go over and stand by Macklin and Marie while Tom steps outside to join the revelers dancing in the yard to Outkast, Nelly, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye. Half an hour later, a peal of thunder rips through the joyous din, and the clouds that have been swelling all afternoon spill open.
The downpour sends half the neighborhood running for cover back into Marie’s six-hundred-square-foot trailer. Soon after that, Tom, his brow creased with worry, taps me on the shoulder.
“It’s Sean. Seems my nephew just got dumped by his girl. I didn’t even know he had one, but I guess he did, because he’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff.”
“You need to go talk to him?”
“I think so.”
“Well, give him a hug for me.”
“I will. And when I get back, I have a surprise.”
“I don’t know if I can take any more surprises right now.”
“It’s a good one. I promise,” says Tom, then gestures toward Mack and Marie. “Am I hallucinating, or are those two holding hands?”
Chapter 107
Loco
WHEN BOY WONDER comes around the back of that shitty little trailer and walks across the muddy yard, he looks so different it sends a quicksilver shiver up my spine.
It’s like I can barely recognize him, and I have this awful feeling that when he gets to Costello’s car, where I have been waiting for forty-five minutes like he asked, he’s not going to recognize me either. Or if he does, it’s going to be like we’re nothing but acquaintances and the last eight years never happened.
Boy Wonder is such a cunning bastard, that was probably his plan from the beginning. I don’t mean since this afternoon or last summer, I mean from the very beginning, eight years ago, when he came to the Village Police Station at three in the morning and bailed me out after the cops busted me for selling weed on the beach. I don’t know what he did or how he did it, but somehow he got the chief of police to drop the whole thing and fixed it so completely even my folks never found out. But now that I think about it, I bet he set me up with the cops in the first place so he could come in and bail my ass out and I’d owe him from the start.
A week later, he took me to Nick and Tony’s and picked out a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine that he barely touched. He kept filling mine though, and on the ride home, when I could barely sit up, he made what he called “a modest little proposal.” I should leave the high school kids to the amateurs and instead help him take over the whole Hampton drug trade. “It’s nothing but funny money to these assholes,” he said. “Besides, we’ve been staring at rich people our whole lives. It’s time to join the country club.”
I was all of seventeen at the time, a high school junior. What did I know? But the Boy Wonder knew exactly what he was about, and with him doing the thinking and me the heavy lifting, it wasn’t long before the money arrived in sacks.
Boy Wonder was smart about that too. Said that if we started living like pimps, the cops would be sniffing around us in months. So for eight years we lived like monks, nothing changing in our lives except the number in the bank accounts he’d opened in Antigua and Barbados.
Since then, it’s just been a matter of hanging on to what we took, or what Boy Wonder calls “our franchise.”
That’s been no problem either. Ruthlessness is one of Boy Wonder’s strong suits, right up there with cagey thinking, and I guess I’m no slouch in that department either. But I’ll tell you, it’s impossible to figure out what BW is thinking—always has been.
It’s coming down in buckets now, but BW ambles through the rain like it’s exactly what he needs to wash him clean. Maybe it is. I know better than
anyone what he is capable of doing and living with. I stood next to him as he put a bullet in Feifer, Walco, and Rochie, them bawling for their moms until the last second.
And for what? Stealing a thousand dollars’ worth of crack. Doing some small-time dealing. That’s all it was. More of a prank than stealing, since the next day Feif and Rochie came around with the cash, plus interest.
But BW wouldn’t let me take the money. He said we had to send a message. A strong message. It was psycho but cunning too, because he waits until after that fight at Smitty’s court where Walker pulls his piece on Feifer. That way we can pin the whole thing on the brothers, and I think, okay, maybe we can get away with this just like everything else.
But as Boy Wonder opens the door of the car, he seems so transformed and remote, his old name doesn’t seem to fit anymore. And when he slides behind the wheel and gives me his chilly “What’s up?” I fall back on what I called him for fifteen years before he showed up that night at the police station.
“Hell if I know,” I say. “What’s up with you, Tom?”
That gets his attention. Never using real names is even stricter with us than not spending money, and before he can catch it, he flashes the same hard look he gave Feifer, Walco, and Rochie right before he shot them through the eyes. Then he covers it with a smile and asks, “Why you calling me Tom, Sean?”
“Because the party’s over, Uncle. We’re done.”
Chapter 108
Tom
“MAYBE WE CAN still figure a way out,” I say, starting up Kate’s Jetta and carefully backing out of the muddy driveway. With every neighbor within miles celebrating at Marie’s, the street is deserted, and in the heavy rain, it looks more desolate than usual. “What makes you so sure it’s over, Nephew? What happened?”
“Raiborne happened,” says Sean. “Soon as the verdict came down, I bolted out of there, but when I get to my car, Raiborne is standing right next to it. The son of a bitch is waiting for me. He must have sprinted to get there first, but if he was breathing hard, he didn’t let me see it. He introduced himself. Said that as of three minutes ago the murder cases of Eric Feifer, Patrick Roche, Robert Walco, and Michael Walker were wide open again, along with the never-solved murder of Señor Manny Rodriguez. Then he smiles and says the only suspect he’s got for all five is a psychopathic drug dealer named Loco.
“When I ask him why he’s telling me, Raiborne looks at me cute and says, ‘Because I’m pretty sure you’re him, Sean. You’re Loco!’”
I’m on Route 41 now, but it’s raining so hard, I’m doing less than thirty. I slow down even more when I see the boarded-up Citgo, and just past it, I turn off onto another depressed little street.
I look over at Sean—and I smile. “Well, you don’t have to worry about Detective Raiborne anymore.”
“Really?”
“Really. He came to see me too. This afternoon at my place, just after Clarence picked up Kate and took her to Marie’s. He said he couldn’t figure out how I knew so much about the murders—that the gun was a plant, the prints and the call from Feifer staged, that Lindgren was dirty. Then he realized I must have been involved too.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I was going to ask if he’d ever been to Antigua, any of the islands. Had he ever thought of taking early retirement? But I knew it would be a waste of my time.”
“So what’d you do?” asks Sean, looking away because he already knows the answer.
“What I had to. And I’ll tell you, the guy’s an easy two hundred thirty pounds. I barely got him in the trunk.”
“Now you’re killing cops, Tom?”
“Didn’t have much choice,” I say as we hear the siren of an East Hampton cruiser racing north on Route 41 toward Marie’s place.
“How about letting Dante find his own lawyer? Or if you had to be the big star again, be in the spotlight with your girlfriend, how about letting him lose?”
The road, barely visible through the pounding rain, climbs past an abandoned trailer home.
“I guess you never heard of something called redemption, Nephew.”
“Guess not.”
“A chance to undo mistakes like mine comes once in a lifetime, Sean.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that, Uncle?”
“What do you mean?”
“To undo the past? Start over?”
“Oh, it’s never too late for redemption, Sean.”
Chapter 109
Tom
NOW IT’S RAINING so hard that even with the wipers flapping on the highest setting, I can hardly see the road. If I thought I could risk it, I’d pull over and wait for the rain to let up.
“So what are we doing with Raiborne?” asks Sean, trying not to look at me, the way I’ve seen people look away from born-agains.
“Bury him,” I say. “At that old nigger cemetery up on the hill. Only seems right.”
The paved road becomes a dirt one. I know it well. Somehow I make out the half-grown-over opening in the bushes and beside it what’s left of a sign for the Heavenly Baptist Burial Grounds.
I push through the opening, the bushes flailing against the car windows, and up a dirt driveway. It’s rutted and soft, but going real slow and avoiding the worst parts, I get the car to the top of the rise, where it opens on a clearing lined with dozens of modest limestone headstones and markers.
I park beside a rotting bench, nod to Sean, and we step reluctantly into the downpour. With the soggy mud sucking at our shoes, we walk to the rear of the car. Heavy drops ping off the roof and trunk as Sean pushes the chrome lock and then steps out of the way as the chipped blue lid slowly lifts open, but of course, the only thing inside is Kate’s bald old spare and some gardening tools she uses around Macklin’s place.
“What the fuck?” says Sean, turning toward me and quickly pinning my arms.
But by then my gun is tight against his side, and as he stares at me with the same shocked expression the mortician had to wipe off Feif, Walco, and Rochie, I shoot him.
I’ll say one thing. Sean doesn’t cry for his mother like those other boys did. He must think I’m his mom the way he reaches for me and says, “Tom? What are you doing, Tom?”
I fire three more times, the barrel of the gun so tight against Sean’s big chest it works like a flesh-and-blood silencer, and the sound of the muffled shots barely reaches the soggy woods. That shuts him up, but his eyes are still wide open and it feels as if they’re staring at me. I feel Sean’s eyes on me until I get a small shovel from the trunk and dig a shallow grave. Then I start throwing dirt over his face. I find another spot to bury the gun; then I get back into the car.
I love being in a parked car when the rain is tap-dancing on the roof, and for a while I just sit there and watch it wash the grime off the windshield, just like I washed Sean off of me. And you know what? I still feel redeemed.
Chapter 110
Kate
MARIE’S TINY LIVING room is so crowded it’s kind of like swimming in the ocean. You go where the waves take you. One minute I’m listening to the very good-looking George Clooney rant about the American criminal justice system, the next I’m having an emotional heart-to-heart with Tom’s brother, Jeff, who tells me he’s been worried about Sean.
“He’s not been himself since the trial started,” says Jeff. “Anxious, depressed or something. And he never said a thing to me about a girl.”
“It’s a tough age,” I say, and try to reassure him, but before I have much of a chance, I’m pulled away as if by an undertow to a spot in a corner beside Lucinda Walker, Michael Walker’s mom. It’s awful standing in such a jubilant crowd with the mother of a murdered child, but Lucinda takes my hand.
“God bless you, Miss Costello,” she says. “You kept another innocent life from being destroyed. I never believed Dante killed my son or those others. Maybe now the police will concentrate on finding the real killers.”
As Lucinda talks about Dante and Marie, the front door opens an
d Tom wedges himself back into the packed party, and when he smiles at me across the room, my heart flies out to him. It scares me to think how close I came to not giving him a second chance. If not for this case, I might have never talked to him again.
“I feel like a salmon fighting his way upriver to spawn,” says Tom, sweat dripping off his nose.
“Hold that thought. How’s Sean?”
“More down than I’ve ever seen him. It’s sad, but I gave him my spiel and your hug. How about you, Kate? How’s my girl?”
“I had no idea being happy could be this exhausting.”
“What do you say the two of us get lost for a little while?”
“You got a place in mind?”
“Actually, I do. But that’s the surprise I told you about before.”
He leads me across the room toward Mack and Marie, and Marie hugs me so tight I laugh.
“Look at you two,” she says, her eyes dancing with joy. “You showed everyone. E-ver-y-one! The whole world!”
“Us? How about you two?” says Tom, and clinks his beer bottle against Mack’s glass.
“To twos,” says Macklin, putting his arm around Marie.
“Well, this couple’s heading home,” says Tom. “It’s been a great day but a really long one. We can barely stand up.”
The guest of honor is in the kitchen surrounded by high school buddies who beam at him in awe. Although around the same age as Dante, they seem five years younger. Dante won’t let us leave the house until he’s introduced them all.
“This big fella,” says Dante, pointing to a heavyset kid on his left, “is Charles Hall, C-H. These are the Cutty brothers, and this is Buford, but we call him Boo. They’re my boys.”
Tom and I give Dante one more hug, and then we’re out of there. Actually, the more I think about it, I am in the mood for a surprise.
Chapter 111
Kate