James Patterson - Beach Road

“Thanks for coming in,” I tell him.

“Keep your thanks, Connie. The in-laws have been over since Friday night. I was praying you’d call.”

We trade the sun-filled parking lot for beige linoleum corridors, which are even quieter than usual. We head to Krauss’s office, where he reads me the ballistics report on Rodriguez.

When he’s finished, I say, “Now do me a favor, Kraussie, and call up Michael Walker’s report.”

Walker is the teenager we found murdered in his bed three blocks away, about a month before. I’m thinking that maybe the two are connected. I know there are superficial similarities between the two, but I’m after something more specific and telling than the fact that both were essentially executed at close range at night in the same neighborhood.

But as Kraussie reads off the two lists of bullet calibers, bore size, etc., nothing matches up. Even the style and make of the silencers are different.

“The logic is different too,” says Krauss. “I mean, it’s not that hard to understand why Walker, prime suspect in a triple homicide, might get his ticket punched. But a messenger who had never been in any kind of trouble? That’s some domestic thing, or who knows what.”

“Or maybe they’re so different they have to be connected.”

We each grab a report and read through them again in the deep, depressing silence you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere other than a morgue on a Sunday afternoon.

Neither of us can find a damn thing worth discussing, and finally it’s the ocean-floor silence, so deep it’s deafening, that drives us back out into the sunshine and our so-called lives.

ON MONDAY EVENING Kate and I go to Barnes Pharmacy to check out the new January mags. Like any media-savvy couple, we grab copies of Vanity Fair, New York, and The New Yorker and hustle them back to my car.

At Sam’s we get a table in the back room and spread out our glossy booty, the luxe, shiny covers sparkling like showroom sheet metal. Kate grabs New York and slides Vanity Fair to me. On page 188, Dante looks up at me through prison bars. It’s a devastating photograph, capturing Dante’s youth and fear, and also the false bravado that attempts to conceal it.

In all of the magazines, his face has been lit to make his skin appear darker. Race and the Hamptons are a winning newsstand combination, and they’re milking it for all it’s worth.

On top of everything else, it’s kind of nice to be here with Kate. Almost like a date. For the next hour, we read our mags and slide them back and forth, stopping only for a bite of artichoke-and-bacon pie or a gulp of cold beer. The New Yorker piece, accompanied by a stark black-and-white photograph that makes Dante look like a dancer or a pop star, is quite short, but Dominick Dunne’s, in Vanity Fair, and Pete Hamill’s, in New York, are ten thousand words easy, and both are fair, even sympathetic, to Dante. Every major theme Kate planted on the phone, from racism to an overzealous prosecution team to the rumored drug use of the victims, has bloomed into stylish, glossy print. To see it all spread out on the table, particularly since so much of it is little more than rumor, is a bit overwhelming.

Even more so is the amount of space given to the “courageous pair of young Montauk-born-and-raised attorneys” who have made the brave decision to represent the accused killer of their old friends.

I had no idea Kate and I were going to be such a big part of the story.

Dunne describes us as “a red-haired Jackie and a burlier JFK” and writes that “even Dunleavy’s Boston terrier, Wingo, is ridiculously photogenic.” According to Hamill, “their chemistry is not imagined. In their teens and early twenties, the two were a couple for more than five years.” Both Vanity Fair and New York run the same snapshot of us taken after a St. John’s victory in 1992.

“It’s a good thing everyone in town hates us already,” I say. “Because this is beyond embarrassing.”

We pay up and untie Wingo from the bench out front. Wingo seems to be adjusting quite well to sudden fame but is bothered by a foul burning smell in the air. As we walk to the lot behind the restaurant, a pumper truck from the East Hampton Fire Department races by.

The smell gets stronger, and when we round the corner of the white stone building, we see that what the local firemen have just put out was my car. Or what’s left of it.

All the windows have been smashed, the roof ripped off, and on the passenger seat is a soggy, charred stack of glossy magazines.

WHETHER IN DOWNTOWN Baghdad or downtown East Hampton, a burned-out shell of a car is a riveting sight, even if the smoking remains are yours. For a while, Kate, Wingo, and I stare at it, transfixed. When it gets chilly, we retreat to Sam’s again, where we have a pair of Maker’s Marks on the rocks, and I give Clarence a call.

“A bunch of rednecks out here,” says Clarence when we return to the scene and he sees what’s left of my once-trendy convertible.

Then we all pile into his big yellow wagon, and he gives us a lift to Mack’s place in Montauk.

“Tom loved that old car,” Kate says to him, “but he hardly seems fazed at all. I’ve got to admit, I’m almost impressed.”

“Hey, it’s just a car. A thing, ” I say, pandering for a little more of Kate’s respect.

The truth is, even I’m surprised by how little I care about the car. More than that, seeing it smoking in the lot made me feel kind of righteous.

Once we’re on the road, Clarence is somber, and his face and posture still bear the terrible effect of Dante’s arrest and the upcoming trial.

“Clarence, it may not look like it,” I say, “but things are turning our way.”

“How you figure that?”

“Those magazines burning on my front seat are filled with stories that are going to help us win this case. Even my car is going to make a great picture and will open people’s eyes to what’s happening out here.”

But nothing I say registers on Clarence’s face. It’s as if whatever optimism he has been able to muster and cling to over the course of a hard lifetime has been exposed as bunk.

On this Monday night in January, the Ditch Plains neighborhood is quiet and dark. Not Mack’s place, though! It’s lit up like a Christmas tree, and when we pull up, Mack stands in the doorway in his raggy plaid bathrobe. Two police cars are just leaving.

“Oh, no!” cries Kate, and jumps out of the car. But Mack, who’s got his walking stick in one hand and a scotch in the other, won’t hear of it.

“It’s nothing at all, darling girl,” he says. “Just a pebble through the window. At my age, I’m grateful for whatever attention I can get.”

Despite Mack’s protests, I insist on leaving Wingo with the two of them. A sweet-natured pooch who hasn’t met a face he didn’t want to lick isn’t much of a watchdog, but at least he’ll make some noise.

Then I get back into the car with Clarence. “You hear that shite Mack was saying to Kate on the porch,” I say with my best Irish brogue. “No big deal, darlin’ girl. Just a pebble. It’s the same shameless tripe I was saying about my car ten minutes ago. That son of a bitch is after my girl, Clarence, and we’ve got the same strategy.”

“You better keep an eye on the old goat,” says Clarence, almost smiling. “I hear he’s been stockpiling Viagra. Buys it over the Internet in bulk.”

“That’s not even close to being funny.”

I DON’T LIKE leaving Kate at Mack’s, but she insisted she’ll be okay, that they’ll be okay. The thing is, I wish that Kate would stay with me tonight. I’ve felt that way for a while, and it’s driving me a little crazy, but especially after what’s just happened.