Jane had another hour in the lab, but said she could meet after and gave me directions to her house in Riverhead. "If you get there first, could you take Iris for a little walk?" she asked. "The keys are under the second-to-last flowerpot. And don't worry, she's a sweetheart."
I made a point of getting there early, and Iris, a sleek, pale-eyed weimaraner, was beside herself with gratitude. She may have been the size of a Doberman, but Iris was a lover, not a fighter. When I opened the door, she jumped and yelped and skated round the wooden floor on slippery nails.
For the next fifteen minutes she yanked me around the tiny subdivision, peeing on its invisible canine boundaries. That pretty much bonded us for life, and we were sitting contentedly shoulder to shoulder on the front porch when Jane's blue Volvo pulled in.
Inside her kitchen, Jane poured dry cereal for Iris, coffee for me, and a glass of tawny port for herself. In the past decade, her beanpole gawkiness had turned into athletic grace, but she had the same force field of intelligence.
"There's been a little dip in Long Island 's output of suspicious deaths lately," said Jane. "So I've had a lot of time to spend with Peter." She pulled at Iris's translucent ears and looked at me intently.
"So what did you find?" I asked her.
"For one thing," said Jane, "Peter didn't drown."
Chapter 24
JANE REACHED into a battered leather knapsack and dropped a folder labeled "Mullen, Peter 5/29" on the table. Then she pulled out a clear plastic sleeve of color slides and held one of them up to the kitchen light.
"Take a look at these," she said, squinting. "They're photographs of cells I scraped off the inside of Peter's lungs. See the shape and the color at the edge?" The pictures showed a cluster of small circular cells about the size of a dime and tinted pink.
Jane removed a second set of slides. "These are from the lung tissue of a man who got pulled out of Long Island Sound five days before Peter. The cells were nearly twice as large and much darker. That's because the drowning victim struggles to breathe and inhales water into the lungs. Cells like Peter's are what we find in bodies dumped into the ocean after they've stopped breathing."
"How did he die, then?"
"Just what it looks like," she said, carefully tucking the slides back in their sleeves. "He was beaten to death."
She reopened the fat manila folder and grabbed a stack of black-and-white prints. "I know you saw Peter that night on the beach, but the cold water holds down the swelling and limits the discoloration. In these, I have to warn you, he looks a lot worse."
Jane handed me the pictures. Peter's shattered, misshapen face was unrecognizable. It was all I could do not to look away. On the beach his beauty was largely intact. In the photos, his skin was an awful gray. The bruises made him look like a human punching bag.
Jane dug deeper into her pile and fished out the X rays. They documented the assault in terms of fractured bones. There were dozens. With the tip of her pen, she singled out a clean break at the top of Peter's spine.
"This is what killed him," she said.
I shook my head in disbelief. The anger that had been building for the past two weeks was getting impossible to control.
"So what do you have to do to prove someone was murdered, pull a bullet out of their head?" I asked in disgust.
"It's a good question, Jack. I sent my initial report to the East Hampton Police Department and the district attorney's office two weeks ago and I haven't heard a thing."
I cursed out Frank Volpi all the way back from Jane's. He had the reports on Peter and he hadn't done a goddamned thing. He was still talking about a drowning, a suicide. How the hell could they cover up something like that? Who was I up against?
When I got home late that night, Mack was snoring on the living-room couch. I slipped off my grandfather's glasses and shoes, spread a light blanket over him, and tucked him in for the night. I couldn't bear to wake him and tell him what I'd found.
Then it hit me. I went into the kitchen and called Burt Kearns, the reporter from the East Hampton Star who'd slipped me his number at my father's funeral. Ten minutes later Kearns stood at the door with a tape recorder and two reporter's notepads.
"Christ," I said, "you're faster than Chinese food."
Chapter 25
KEARNS MUST HAVE WORKED right through the night. When I went to the front porch to get the Star, I saw that the shit had really hit the fan. Finally. It was all over the front page. A thirty-six-point, four-column headline with the same question I'd been asking: how did peter mullen die?
Beneath it was everything I had unloaded on Kearns in the kitchen the night before: from the absurdity of Peter's, or anyone's, choosing to go swimming that night to the overwhelming and so far ignored evidence of a vicious beating. The story also broadly hinted at the possibility of an affair between Peter and Campion Neubauer.
Running throughout the extensive story was a guilty-sounding chorus of "no comment," "did not return repeated phone calls," and "refused to respond" from Detective Volpi and the startled representatives of Campion and Barry, and Mayflower Enterprises. The power couple was still on the road working to smooth over the Boontaag toy company takeover, and apparently Peter's death didn't justify a simple change in their itinerary.
The aggressive reporting was supported by a righteous editorial calling for an inquiry into Peter's death. "The failure of the East Hampton P.D. to question Barry and Campion Neubauer about a death which took place on their property while the victim was working at their party is ludicrous." It concluded, "This is a disturbing reminder of the often glaring inequities in our criminal justice system."
I read the story through once, then I went and got Mack and read it to him. "It's a start," he snorted.
For the next week the story roiled the East End like a summer storm. You couldn't walk into a restaurant or shop without hearing charged suspicions being aired. Of course, Fenton, Marci, Molly, Hank, Sammy, and I were doing our share to keep Peter's story on people's minds. What had started as a quest for me was turning into an obsession.
The news coverage didn't stop with our local weekly. New York magazine sent a reporter and a photographer, and two New York TV stations ran nearly identical segments with a trench-coated reporter treading the moonlit beach where Peter's body washed ashore.
One evening I received a call from Dominick Dunne, the reporter-novelist whose daughter had been murdered years ago and who had emerged as a crusty talking head during the O.J. marathon. "My editors at Vanity Fair art begging me to do this story," he told me, "but I hate the Hamptons in the summer."
"I do, too, but you should do the story anyway. My brother was murdered."
"You're probably right. I'm sorry if I was flip. In the meantime, I just wanted to tell you not to let the bastards get away with it." He reminded me of Mack.
At Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel, I threw myself into the Mudman case. The injustice of his scheduled execution and the cover-up of Peter's murder had become connected in my mind. I prepared a two-hundred-page response to the judge's reaction to our latest request for DNA testing in Texas. The senior associate glowed and said it was the best work he'd ever seen from summer help.
No wonder. It was why I had wanted to be a lawyer in the first place.
Chapter 26
FENTON GIDLEY WAS BAITING LINES on the deck of his boat when the Fixer pulled up alongside in a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. He cut the engine and called to the burly, sandy-haired fisherman who happened to be Jack Mullen's best friend.