"Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?" asked Volpi as he reached the porch.
"Does it matter what I think, Frank?"
"Not really. Where have you been tonight?"
"Here. Why?"
"Someone just torched Sammy Giamalva's house to the ground," he said. "Professional. We're pretty sure with him in it."
I felt as if I'd been hit with the kitchen skillet. I thought of the photographs of Sammy in his kitchen – the ones that were dropped off at the Memory. Sammy, with a cigarette in his mouth and a cup of coffee in his hand. It showed a live-wire twenty-three-year-old getting stoked to do something he loved. A portrait of the stylist as a young man.
Then I flashed on the tiny pairs of numbers scribbled in pencil under each photo.
I suddenly realized they were odds, and that Sammy's (6-5) were the shortest.
Volpi was still in my face.
"Is there anyone who can confirm you've been here for the last couple of hours?"
"What is it, Frank, you really think I burned down Sammy's house? With my family gone, I'm turning on my friends?" As mad as I was, it was nothing compared to my panic about the danger I'd put my friends in.
"Mind if Officer Jordan and I have a look around?" Volpi asked.
"Actually, I do," I said, but Jordan was already heading for the garage.
"Hey!" I called. "You can't go in there."
I followed and stood beside him as he pulled up the door and swept his flashlight over the cluttered space. The beam moved slowly over the deep blue sheen of Peter's motorcycle.
"That's one pretty scooter," he said with a smirk. "Almost twenty grand, isn't it?"
"What you're doing here is illegal," I said. "C'mon, huh? Get out of the garage."
He bent to open the immaculate little BMW toolbox. What the hell was he looking for?
I stepped forward and grabbed his arm. "I'd appreciate it if you'd leave right now. Get away from the bike."
Jordan came out of his crouch and jumped into my chest, knocking me back into Frank Volpi, who had followed us into the garage. Volpi immediately grabbed my arms. He let Jordan take it from there.
If the first punch didn't rebreak my almost-healed rib, the second definitely did.
"You're under arrest for interfering with a police investigation and assaulting a police officer," said Volpi. He grinned as he cuffed me and dragged me out to the car. He didn't bother to read me my rights, and I got the message: I didn't have any.
Chapter 55
"WAKEE, WAKEE."
A tin cup rattling over steel bars startled me from a dream in which I was trying to save Peter and Sammy. I jumped up and frantically scanned the cell. Then I saw Mack's shit-eating grin, the small grease-stained paper bag under his arm, and the old metal camping cup in his hand, which he must have spent all morning searching for.
"Get out of bed, you lazy so-and-so. I just bailed you out."
"Good to see you, Macklin. And thanks for that little prison-riot vignette."
I threw on my clothes, and Paul Infante, the cop who'd worked the overnight shift, appeared in front of the cell. He extended a key attached to his belt by a long, thin chain, and the big bolt toppled over with an echoing clang. He pulled the heavy door toward him, and I stepped back out into the world.
"Jack 'Hurricane' Mullen," said Macklin, clapping me on the shoulder. "Not even six hours in the East Hampton Hilton could break this man."
"Can it, Macklin."
Upstairs, Infante gave me an envelope with my watch and wallet in it, and I signed a summons pledging to appear in court for interfering with a police investigation. The assault charge had been dropped.
"We should go visit Sammy's mom this afternoon," Mack said somberly. "We're the only ones who know how she feels."
"I suppose they're going to say that was an accident, too," I said. "Maybe a suicide." I described the visit from Volpi and Jordan, how unbelievably brazen and cocky they'd been.
"Can they get away with it?" I asked him.
"Sure. Looks like they just did."
As I pulled out of the driveway, I plucked the bag of Dreesen's doughnuts off Mack's lap. There were three inside – dark, soft, and sprinkled with cinnamon. If it's possible, I think spending my first night in jail made them taste even better,
"So, tell me something," said Mack, snatching the last doughnut before it reached my lips, "you still feel like the man who's going to bring the goddamned system to its knees?"
Chapter 56
I WAS ABOUT TO FIND OUT. The inquiry into my brother's death was held in the gymnasium of the Montauk Middle School. They couldn't have picked a worse spot. For years Peter and I used to play Sunday pickup games there. Every Sunday. Walking to my seat with Mack, I could still hear the deep smack of basketballs echoing off the whitewashed cinder block.
As I took a seat, I remembered the very first weekend we ever snuck inside the gym as kids. Fenton got hold of a key, and after stashing our bikes in the woods, we crowded around him as he slipped it into the lock. Miraculously, it fit. We stepped through the small side door into the hushed, voluminous darkness more awed than if we'd just snuck into St. Patrick's Cathedral. Hank found the switch, and the entire trespassed interior, with its gleaming hardwood floor and white fiberglass backboards, lit up like a Technicolor dream.
On the morning of the inquest, at least two hundred folding chairs were set up in long rows across the court. The people who sat in them had all been there before, as either graduating students or proud parents, or both.
Marci had saved Mack and me the last two seats in the front row. I looked around and saw Fenton and Molly, Hank and his wife, an incredible number of friends from town. But not poor Sammy Giamalva, of course. We didn't have to wait very long for the action to begin.
"Hear ye! Hear ye!" proclaimed the bailiff who had driven up that morning from Riverhead. "All persons having business before the Supreme Court of Suffolk County, please give your attention to the Honorable Judge Robert P. Lillian."
In his stark black robe, the judge looked like a commencement-day speaker. He entered the gym from the small cafeteria directly behind it and took his elevated seat. Spectatorwise, it may have been a local crowd, but at the business end, the manpower balance tilted heavily in the opposite direction. Sitting shoulder to shoulder at a long, thin table facing the judge were three Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel senior partners, led by none other than Bill Montrose. Sitting behind them, like proud sons, were three of the firm's most promising associates.
At the opposing table sat twenty-four-year-old assistant district attorney Nadia Alper. And four empty chairs. Alper sucked at a jumbo Coke and jotted notes on a yellow pad.
"She doesn't even have a cut man," observed Mack.
Lillian, a short, sturdy man in his late fifties, informed us from his judicial pulpit that although there was no defendant, the daylong inquest would proceed like a juryless trial. Witnesses would be called to testify under oath; limited cross-examination would be permitted as he deemed relevant. In other words, he was God.
Lillian turned the floor over to Neubauer's legal team, and Montrose summoned one Tricia Powell, a blowsy, dark-haired woman in her twenties.
I had never seen Powell before, and wondered where she fit in.
With Montrose's guidance, Tricia Powell testified that she had been a guest at the Neubauers' Memorial Day weekend party. Near the end of the evening she had strolled down to the water.
"See anyone on your walk?" questioned Montrose.
"Not until I got to the beach," said Powell. "That's when I saw Peter Mullen."
I flinched in my seat. This was the first indication in two months that anyone had seen Peter after his dinner break. It sent a ripple of whispers through the gym.
"What was he doing when you saw him?" asked Montrose.