“Not tonight.”
“Don’t like martinis?”
“I adore them.”
“Then what?”
“I’m a decadent do-gooder, Roberto, but I’m not easy.”
He laughs. I’m such a funny girl-when I want to be.
Chapter 62. Tom
ABOUT THE SAME time that Kate catches her whirlybird to Manhattan, I squeeze into a tiny seat in a fourth-grade Amagansett homeroom smelling of chalk and sour milk.
Like her, I have a role to play, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s much of a stretch.
As I take in the scene, more adults enter the classroom and wedge themselves into small chairs, and despite how rich most of them are, there’s none of the usual posturing. The leader closes the door and signals me, and I walk to the front of the room and clear my throat.
“My name is John,” I say, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
The crowd murmurs with self-recognition and support as I lay out a familiar story.
“My father gave me my first glass of beer when I was eleven,” I say, which happens to be true. “The next night, I went out with my pals and got gloriously drunk.” Also true, but from here on, I’m winging it.
“It felt so perfect I spent the next twenty years trying to re-create that feeling. Never happened, but as you know, it didn’t keep me from trying.”
There are more murmurs and empathetic nods and maybe I actually belong here-I’m hardly a model of sobriety. But I try not to think about that and keep my performance marching along.
“Six years ago, my wife walked out and I ended up in the hospital. That’s when I went to my first meeting, and thank God, I’ve been sober since. But lately my life and work have gotten much more stressful.” I assume some of the people in the room know me or the work I’m referring to, but Amagansett is a different world from Montauk, and I don’t recognize anyone personally.
“In the last couple of weeks, I’ve felt myself inching closer to the precipice, so I came here tonight,” I say, which is also true in a way. “It’s hard for me to admit-but I need a little help.”
When the meeting comes to a close, I have a set of new friends, and a handful of them linger in the parking lot. They don’t want to leave here and be alone just yet. So they lean on their Beamers and Benzes and trade war stories. And guys being guys, it gets competitive.
When one describes being escorted by two cops from the delivery room the morning his son was born, another tops him-or bottoms him-by passing out at his old man’s funeral. I’m starting to feel kind of sane, actually.
“What was your poison?” asks a gray-bearded Hollywood producer who owns one of the homes on Beach Road. He catches me off guard.
“Specifically?” I ask, buying time as I frantically canvass my brain.
“Yeah, specifically,” he says, snorting, provoking a round of laughs.
“White Russians,” I spit out. “I know it sounds funny, but it wasn’t. I’d go through two bottles of vodka a night. How about you?”
“I was shooting three thousand dollars a week, and one of my problems was I could afford it.”
“You cop from Loco?” I ask, and as soon as I do, I know I’ve crossed some kind of line.
Suddenly the lot goes quiet, and the producer fixes me with a stare. Scrambling, I say, “I ask because that’s the crazy fuck I used to cop from.”
“Oh, yeah?” says the producer, leaning toward me from the hood of his black Range Rover. “Then get your stories straight. You an alkie or a junkie?”
“Junkie,” I say, looking down at the cement. “I don’t know you guys, so I made that shit up about the drinking.”
“Come over here,” he says.
If he looks at my arms for tracks, I’m busted, but I have no choice.
I step closer to his car, and for what seems like a full minute, he stares into my eyes. Then he pushes off his car, grabs my shoulders, and digs his gray beard into my neck.
“Kid,” he says, “if I can beat it, you can too. And don’t go anywhere near that fucker Loco. What I hear, he was the one who offed those kids on the beach last summer.”
Chapter 63. Tom
AT THE OFFICE the next morning, Kate and I lay out our notes like fishermen dumping their catch on a Montauk wharf. In a month of digging, some straightforward and a lot of it shamelessly underhanded, we have managed to complicate the case against Dante in half a dozen ways. According to Kate, every new wrinkle should make it easier to cast doubt about what really happened that night.
“For the prosecution, this is going to be about the fear of young black males,” she says. “Well, now we can flip the stereotype. If what we have is accurate, then in the weeks before their death, the white kids were messing up. And they weren’t doing coke or ecstasy or pills, but crack, the blackest and most ghetto drug of all. Then there’s this mysterious dealer, Loco.”
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“Try to confirm what we have. Look for more. Look for Loco. But in the meantime, we’re also going to share what we have.”
“Share?”
Kate pulls a white shoe box out of her gym bag and places it on the table. With the same sense of ceremony as a samurai unsheathing a sword, she takes out an old-fashioned Rolodex. “In here are the numbers of every top reporter and editor in New York,” she says. “It’s the most valuable thing I took with me from Walmark, Reid and Blundell.”
For the rest of the day, Kate works the phone, pitching Dante’s story to one top editor after another, from the murders and his arrest to his background and the upcoming trial.
“This case has everything,” she tells Vanity Fair’s Betsey Hall, then editor Graydon Carter. “Celebrities, gangsters, billionaires. There’s race, class, and an eighteen-year-old future NBA star who’s facing the death penalty. And it’s all happening in the Hamptons.”
In fact, it is a huge story, and before the afternoon is over, we’re negotiating with half a dozen major magazines clamoring for special access to both Dante and us.
“The cat is out of the bag,” says Kate when the last call has been made and her Rolodex is tucked away. “Now, God help us.”
Part Three. Down and Out in the Hamptons
Chapter 64. Raiborne
WHEN I NEED to work something out, I don’t go to a shrink like Tony Soprano. I wander into Fort Greene Park and sit down across from an impenetrable Methuselah of a chess hustler named Ezekiel Whitaker. That way I can think instead of talk, and sit outside instead of being cooped up in a shade-drawn room.
It suits me better, particularly on an Indian summer Sunday afternoon with the last brown leaves rustling sweetly in this Brooklyn park.
“Your move,” says Zeke impatiently as soon as my butt hits the stone bench. For Zeke, time is money, just like a shrink. Zeke has a face that looks as if it were carved out of hard wood and the long, graceful fingers of a former migrant fruit picker, and me and him, we’ve been going at it alfresco for years. So I know I got my work cut out for me.
But when I snatch his rook right out from under his haughty nose ten minutes into the game, I have to crow about it.
“You sure you’re feeling all right, brother man?” I ask. “Cold? Flu? Alzheimer’s?”
I should have kept my mouth shut, because of course, that’s when my mind leaves the board and circles back to work and the name chalked on the dirty blackboard of the precinct house. Instead of concentrating on how I might solidify my position on this chessboard and teach this old goat some much-needed humility, I think about Manny Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s unsolved murder has been eating at me for weeks. Every time I walk into the precinct, his name admonishes me from the board.