Nelson DeMille: The Gate House

Heartsick and drained, I got on a plane and returned to London, feeling that I’d done the right thing, the way people do who come home for a death in the family.

Over the next few months, I learned that I knew eleven people who’d died in the Twin Towers; mostly former neighbors and business associates, but also a close friend who left a wife and three young children.

And now, nine months after 9/11, I was back again. Things seemed to have returned to normal, but not really.

I sipped my coffee and cognac and looked around at the piles of paper. There was a lot to go through, and I hoped that Ethel would hold on a while longer, and that Mr. Nasim wasn’t planning on getting his encumbered gatehouse into his possession the minute Ethel’s life tenancy expired. I needed to speak to Mr. Nasim about that; speaking to Ethel about hanging on until I tidied up my papers might seem insensitive and selfish.

Because the night was cool, and because I didn’t have a paper shredder, I had a fire going in the dining room fireplace. Now and then, I’d feed the fire with some letter or photo that I wouldn’t want my children to see if I suddenly croaked.

In that category were these photos of their mother whose nakedness revealed a lot more about her head than about her body. Susan was, and I’m sure still is, a bit nutty. But to be honest, I didn’t mind that at all, and that wasn’t the source of our marital problems. Our problem, obviously, was Susan’s affair with the Mafia don next door. And then to complicate things further, she shot and killed him. Three shots. One in the groin. Ouch .

I gathered the photos and turned in my chair toward the fireplace. We all have trouble parting with things like this, but I can tell you, as a lawyer and as a man, no good can come of saving anything you wouldn’t want your family or your enemies to see. Or your next significant other, for that matter.

I stared into the fire and watched the flames dancing against the soot-blackened brick, but I held on to the photos.

So, she shot her lover, Frank “the Bishop” Bellarosa, capo di tutti capi , boss of all bosses, and got away with it – legally, at least – due to some circumstances that the Justice Department found mitigating and extenuating.

Fact is, the Justice Department took a dive on the case because they’d made the mistake of allowing Mrs. Sutter unobstructed access to don Bellarosa, who was under house arrest in his villa down the road, and who was also singing his black heart out to them, and thus needed to be kept happy with another man’s wife.

I’m still a little pissed off at the whole thing, as you might guess, but basically I’m over it.

Meanwhile, I needed to decide if this trip was a death vigil, or perhaps something more permanent. I had kept up with my CLE – continuing legal education – and I was still a member of the New York State Bar, so I hadn’t burned all my bridges, and theoretically I was employable here. In my last life, I had been a partner in my father’s old firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, still located at 23 Wall Street, a historic building that was once bombed by Anarchists at the turn of the last century, which seems almost quaint in light of 9/11.

For the last seven years in London, I’d worked for the aforementioned British law firm, and I was their American tax guy who explained that screwing the Internal Revenue Service was an American tradition. This was payback for me because the IRS had screwed up my life, while my wife was screwing the Mafia don. These two seemingly disparate problems were actually related, as I had found out the hard way.

I guess I’d hit a patch of rough road back then, a little adversity in an otherwise charmed and privileged life. But adversity builds character, and to be honest, it wasn’t all Susan’s fault, or Frank Bellarosa’s fault, or the fault of the IRS, or my stuffed-shirt law partners; it was partly my own fault because I, too, was involved with Frank Bellarosa. A little legal work. Like representing him on a murder charge. Not the kind of thing I normally did as a Wall Street lawyer, and certainly not the kind of case that Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds would approve of. Therefore, I’d handled this case out of my Locust Valley, Long Island, office, but that wasn’t much cover when the newspapers got hold of it.

Thinking back on this, I couldn’t help but know I was committing professional and social suicide when I took a Mafia don as a client. But it was a challenge, and I was bored, and Susan, who approved of and encouraged my association with Frank Bellarosa, said I needed a challenge. I guess Susan was bored, too, and as I found out, she had her own agenda regarding Frank Bellarosa.

And speaking of Susan, I had discovered through my son, Edward, that, quote, “Mom has bought our house back.”

Bad grammar aside – I sent this kid to great schools – what Edward meant was that Susan had reacquired the large guest cottage on the Stanhope estate. This so-called cottage – it has six bedrooms – had been our marital residence for nearly twenty years, and is located about a quarter mile up the main drive of the estate. In other words, Susan and I were now neighbors.

The guest cottage and ten acres of property had been carved out of the two hundred sixty acres of the Stanhope estate by Susan’s father, William, who’s an insufferable prick, and deeded to Susan as a wedding gift. Since I was the groom, I always wondered why my name wasn’t on the deed. But you need to understand old money to answer that. You also need to understand pricks like William. Not to mention his ditsy wife, Susan’s mother, Charlotte. These two characters are unfortunately still alive and well, living and golfing in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where Susan had been living since the unfortunate gun mishap that took her lover’s life ten years ago.

Before Susan left for South Carolina, she’d sold the guest cottage to a yuppie corporate transfer couple from someplace west of the Hudson. You know your marriage is in trouble when your wife sells the house and moves to another state. In truth, however, it was I who ended the marriage. Susan wanted us to stay together, making the obvious point that her lover was dead, and thus we needn’t worry about bumping into him at a party. In fact, she claimed that was why she’d killed him; so we could be together.

That wasn’t quite it, but it sounded nice. In retrospect, we probably could have stayed together, but I was too angry at being cuckolded, and my male ego had taken a major hit. I mean, not only did our friends, family, and children know that Susan was fucking a Mafia don, but the whole damned country knew when it hit the tabloids: “Dead Don Diddled Lawyer’s Heiress Wife.” Or something like that.

It may have worked out for us if, as Susan had suggested, I’d killed her lover myself. But I wouldn’t have gotten off as easily as she had. Even if I’d somehow beaten the murder rap – crime of passion – I’d have some explaining to do to don Bellarosa’s friends and family.

So she sold the house, leaving me homeless, except, of course, for the Yale Club in Manhattan, where I am always welcome. But Susan, in a rare display of thoughtfulness, suggested to me that Ethel Allard, recently widowed, could use some company in the gatehouse. That actually wasn’t a bad idea, and since Ethel could also use a few bucks in rent, and a handyman to replace her recently deceased husband, I’d moved into the extra bedroom and stored my belongings in the basement, where they’d sat for this past decade.

By spring of the following year, I’d made a financial settlement with my partners and used the money to buy the forty-six-foot Morgan, which I christened Paumanok II . By that time, my membership in the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club had been terminated by mutual consent, so I sailed from the public marina where I’d bought the boat and began my three-year odyssey at sea.