“She’s a fashion model, right? Dated some guy in Guns ’N Roses?”
“Stone Temple Pilots, but close enough. Beautiful girl. Was on the cover of Vogue at fourteen and played the hottie in a couple teen flicks. Since then, she’s been in and out of rehab.”
“It sucks being rich and beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m just beautiful.”
“Trust me then. So, Mickey, I gotta see this girl. For whatever reason, she was at the murder scene.”
Chapter 60. Tom
I REINFORCE WITH Mickey that I need to talk to Teresa soon. Before she does something bad to herself or someone decides to do something bad to her. Still, I don’t expect him to report in before I’m halfway back to Montauk.
“Tom, you’re in luck. Teresa Semel just got back in town after a stint at Betty Ford. Hurry, maybe you can catch her while she’s still clean. What I hear, she’s replaced her heroin addiction with exercise. Spends all day at the Wellness Center.”
“The proper word’s dependency.”
“I mean it, Tom. The girl’s got a thousand-dollar-a-day Pilates habit.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Wellness Center myself, watching Teresa’s class through a green-tinted oval window.
Spaced evenly on the floor are five female acolytes. All exhibit near-perfect form as far as I can tell-but no one can match Teresa Semel’s desperate concentration.
Seeing her effort, I regret mocking her. Instead of sitting at home and feeling sorry for herself, she’s literally taking her demons to the mat and fighting them off one after another.
Informing the client that time is up is always a delicate moment in the service industry, and the instructor shuts down her hundred-dollar session with a cleansing breath and a round of congratulations.
The women collect themselves and their belongings and serenely slide out of the room.
Everyone except Teresa, who lingers on her mat as if terrified at the prospect of being left on her own with time on her hands. She actually seems relieved when I introduce myself.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the murders on the beach last summer,” I say. “I represent the young man charged with the killings.”
“Dante Halleyville,” Teresa says. “He didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just do,” she says as if the answer floated into her beautiful head like the message in a plastic eight ball.
“I’m here because your car was parked at the beach nearby that night.”
“I almost died that night too,” says Teresa. “Or maybe that was the night I got saved. I’d been so good, but that night I went out and copped. I met my connection in the parking lot. Shot up on a blanket on the beach. Slept there the whole night.”
“See anything? Hear anything?”
“No. That’s the point, isn’t it? The next morning I told Daddy, and twelve hours later, I was back in rehab.”
“Who’d you buy from?”
“As if there’s a choice,” says Teresa.
I don’t want to seem too eager, even though I am. “What do you mean?”
“There’s only one person you can cop from on Beach Road. It’s been that way as long as I can remember.”
“Does he have a name?”
“A nickname, anyway. Loco. As in crazy.”
Chapter 61. Kate
FIVE MINUTES AFTER we lift off from the East Hampton heliport, the guy seated next to me glances down at the traffic crawling west on 27 and flashes a high-watt smile. “I love catching the heli back to town,” he says. “An hour after going for a run on the beach I’m back in my apartment on Fifth Avenue sipping a martini. It makes the whole weekend.”
“And it’s even lovelier when it’s bumper to bumper for the poor slobs down below, right?”
“Caught me peeking,” he says with a chuckle. He’s in his late forties, tan and trim and dressed in the traveling uniform of the überclass-overly creased jeans, dress shirt, a cashmere blazer. On his wrist is a platinum Patek Philippe; on his sockless feet, Italian loafers.
“Fifteen seconds and you’ve seen right through me. It takes most people at least an hour.” He extends a hand and says, “Roberto Nuñez, a pleasure.”
“Katie. Lovely to meet you too, Roberto.”
In fact, I already knew his name and that he owns a South American investment boutique and is Mort Semel’s neighbor in the Hamptons. After Tom’s run-in with Semel’s bodyguards taught us how hard it would be to talk to Beach Road types, I called Ed Yourkewicz, the brother of a law school roommate. A helicopter pilot, Ed has recently gone from transporting emergency supplies between Baghdad and Fallujah to shuttling billionaires between Manhattan and the Hamptons.
Last week I e-mailed him a list of Beach Road residents and asked if on a less-than-full flight he could put me beside one of them for the forty-minute, thirty-five-hundred-dollar trip. He called this afternoon and told me to be at the southern tip of the airport at 6:55 p.m. “And don’t come a minute earlier unless you want to blow your cover.”
For the next ten minutes Roberto struggles in vain to capture and convey the miracle that is Roberto. There are the half-dozen homes, the Lamborghini and Maybach, the ceaseless stress of presiding over a “modest little empire,” and the desire, growing stronger by the day, to chuck it all for a “simpler, more real” life.
It’s a well-oiled monologue, and when he’s done he smiles shyly as if relieved it’s finally over and says, “Your turn, Katie. What do you do?”
“God, I dread that question. It’s so embarrassing. Try to enjoy my life, I guess. Try to help others enjoy it a little more too. I run a couple foundations-one helps inner-city kids land prep-school scholarships. The other involves a summer camp for the same kind of at-risk kids.”
“A do-gooder. How impressive.”
“At least by day.”
“And when the sun goes down? By the way, I love what you’re wearing.”
After getting Ed’s call, I had just enough time to race to the Bridgehampton mall and buy a black Lacoste shirt dress three sizes too small.
“The usual vices, I’m afraid. Can’t they invent some new ones?”
“Altruistic and naughty. You sound perfect.”
“Speaking of perfection, you know where an overbred philanthropist can score some ecstasy?”
Roberto purses his lips a second, and I think I’ve lost him. But, hey, he wants to be my friend, right?
“I imagine from the same person who supplies anything you might need along those lines, the outlandishly expensive Loco. I’m surprised you aren’t a client already. From what I hear he has a tidy monopoly on the high-end drug trade and is quite committed to maintaining it. Thus the nickname. On the plus side, he is utterly discreet and reliable and has paid off the local constabulary so there’s no need to fret about it.”
“Sounds like quite the impressive dude. You ever meet him?”
“No, and I intend to keep it that way. But give me your number and I’ll have something for you next weekend.”
Below us, the Long Island Expressway disappears into the Midtown Tunnel, and a second later all of Lower Manhattan springs up behind it.
“Why don’t you give me yours?” I say. “I’ll call Saturday afternoon.”
The width of Manhattan is traversed in a New York minute, and the helicopter drops onto a tiny strip of cement between the West Side Highway and the Hudson.
“I look forward to it,” says Roberto, handing me his card. It says Roberto Nuñez-human being. Good God almighty.
“In the meantime, is there any chance I can persuade you to join me for a martini? My butler makes a very good one,” he continues.