James Patterson - Beach Road

“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.”

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.”

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.

I never for a second bought that story the papers put out about a feud between Glock, Inc., and Cold Ground, Inc. Thing is, rappers are too hotheaded to make good assassins, and this killer didn’t leave a trace. Not only that, but Rodriguez, who picked up lunch and ran out in the rain to put quarters in the meter, was too low on the food chain to make any sense as a target.

Rodriguez was a gofer, or as us chess masters like to say, a pawn, and as I ponder that, Zeke reaches across the board with the precision of a pickpocket and plucks my queen off her square.

“Take her, Zeke. I never liked the bitch anyway.”

Now a win is out of the question, a draw unlikely, and the board looks like a big rusty steel trap waiting to clamp shut on my ass. If I had any dignity I’d resign, but I came here to think about Rodriguez anyway, so I’ll let Zeke earn his money while I try to earn mine. As I do that, Zeke sweeps through my ranks like Sherman went through Georgia. He picks off my last bishop and knight, and when my castle drops among all my other casualties, he says, “I guess you don’t have to worry yourself about my deteriorating mind no more, Connie.”

“That’s a relief.”

The end is swift but not particularly merciful, and like always, it reminds me of some Latin rumba-check, check, check, checkmate.

I pry open my wallet and hand Zeke a twenty and still feel better than I have in weeks-because I finally got an idea about who might have killed Manny Rodriguez.

I HATE CALLING “Corpseman” Krauss on a weekend, but not so much that I don’t do it. He agrees to drive in from Queens, and when I pull into the fenced-in lot behind the morgue, he’s already there, sitting cross-legged on the hood of his Volvo. Except for the burning ciggie hanging from his mouth, Krauss looks like a little Buddha.