Beach Road

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Tom, turning to face the jury, “I have only one request of each one of you this morning, and it’s harder than it sounds. I ask you to listen.

“For as long as it takes for justice to be delivered to the nineteen-year-old sitting behind me, I need you to listen with a sharp, open, and critical mind.”

Tom looked green on the drive over, and he hasn’t said a dozen words all morning, but suddenly his game face is screwed on tight. “Because if you do, if you just listen, the prosecution’s case will collapse like a house of cards.

“The district attorney of Suffolk County has just told you that this is an open-and-shut case and that he has a mountain of evidence against Dante Halleyville. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Dante Halleyville have no motive to commit these murders, he had enormous incentive not to commit them.

“For the past half a dozen years Dante Halleyville has concentrated all his considerable energy, talent, and determination on becoming the top schoolboy basketball player in the country. Lofty as that goal was, he accomplished it. Dante Halleyville succeeded so well that pro scouts guaranteed him that whenever he chose to enter the NBA draft he would be among the very top selections, maybe even number one. Growing up under extremely difficult circumstances and surrounded by family members who made one disastrous choice after another, Dante never took his eye off his goal. Not once, until these false charges, has Dante been in any kind of trouble, either at Bridgehampton High School or in his neighborhood, with the law.

“So why now, when he is so close to achieving his dream, would he commit such self-destructive crimes? The answer-he wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. He wouldn’t do it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your selection as jurors was random, but the next few weeks could be the most important in your lives. The future of a fellow human being is in your hands. Not just the life of an innocent nineteen-year-old, but of a truly remarkable young man. And both Dante and you will have to live with your decision for the rest of your lives.

“Someone did kill those young men on Beach Road. And in that Brooklyn apartment. Murdered them in cold blood. Whoever committed these horrible crimes will eventually be apprehended and brought to justice, but that person was not and could not have been Dante Halleyville.

“So I ask you to listen carefully and dispassionately and critically to everything presented to you in this courtroom. Don’t let anyone but yourself decide how strong or weak the prosecution’s case is. I have faith that you can and will do that. Thanks.”

When Tom turns away from the jury, three hundred bodies readjust themselves in their seats. In addition to the rustling, you can almost feel the surprise, and it runs from Judge Rothstein in his pulpit to the last beer-bellied cop leaning against the far wall. This inexperienced lawyer, with mediocre credentials and crap grades, can handle himself in a courtroom.

Chapter 91. Kate

TOM SITS, AND Melvin Howard, Ioli’s assistant DA, stands. Howard is a tall, thin man in his early fifties with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and antique wire-rimmed spectacles. He’s also African American, and none of these things is coincidental.

For the same transparently cynical reasons that my old firm chose me to help Randall Kane fend off sexual harassment charges brought by his female employees, the prosecution has selected a black man, with the mild- mannered appearance of a college professor, to prosecute Dante Halleyville. The selection is an attempt to tell the jury that this case is not about race, but about crime, a vicious murder that should outrage blacks as much as whites.

And just because this strategy is obvious and self-serving doesn’t mean it won’t work.

“In addition to listening,” Melvin Howard begins as he tapes a twelve-by-fourteen- inch color photograph to a large easel set up directly in front of the jury, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to look too.”

He slowly attaches three more photographs to the easel-and when he steps out of the way, the jurors push back in their chairs, trying to get as far away from the lurid images as possible.

“These are crime scene photographs of each of the four victims, and it’s your sworn duty not to look away.”

Caught in the white light of the flash, the skin of the victims is a ghostly white; the lips blue-gray; the raw, burned edges where the bullets entered the foreheads orange; the ample blood that poured down into eyes and cheeks, over chins and down the necks of shirts a deep maroon, a red so deep it looks almost black.

“This man here, with the bullet hole between his eyes, is Eric Feifer. He was twenty-three years of age, and before the defendant executed him on August thirtieth, Mr. Feifer was a professional-level surfer.

“This young man is Robert Walco, also twenty-three. While other kids were going to college and business school, he put in ten-hour days with a shovel. The result of his sweat and labor was a successful landscaping business he owned with his dad, Richard Walco.

“And this is Patrick Roche, twenty-five, a painter who paid the bills by moonlighting as a bartender, and whose good nature earned him the affection of just about everyone who knew him.

“Finally, this is Michael Walker, and no matter what else you might say about him, he was seventeen years old, a high school senior.

“Don’t look away. The victims couldn’t. The killer and his accomplice wouldn’t let them. In fact, the killer took sadistic pleasure in making sure that each of these four victims saw exactly what was happening to them as they were shot at such close range that the barrel of the gun singed the skin of their foreheads.

“And the killer got exactly what he wanted because you can still read the shock and the fear and the pain in their eyes.

“In ten years, I’ve prosecuted eleven murder cases, but I’ve never seen crime scene photographs like these. I’ve never seen head-on executions like these. And I’ve never seen eyes like these either. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t assume this is run-of-the-mill horror. This is very different. This is what evil looks like up close.”

Then Melvin Howard turns away from the jury and stares directly at Dante.

Chapter 92. Tom

ON THIS STIFLING early June morning, with the temperature on its way to the midnineties, the state initiates its pursuit of justice by calling drug-dealer Artis LaFontaine’s former girlfriend, Mammy Richardson, to the stand. Mammy was at the basketball court when Feif and Dante came to blows. She saw it all.

A large, pretty woman in her early thirties, Mammy cut a striking figure at Wilson ’s estate last summer, and as strong rays slant in through the courtroom’s only window, she steps into the booth in a cream-colored pantsuit that she fills to bursting.

“Directing your attention to last August thirtieth, Ms. Richardson, do you recall where you were that afternoon?”

“Watching a basketball game at Smitty Wilson’s estate,” says Richardson, clearly enjoying her cameo, a trill of excitement in her voice.

“Could you tell us who was playing in this game?”

“Young fellas from Bridgehampton taking on an older squad from Montauk.”

“Was it a friendly game?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Way both squads were going at it, you’d think it was game seven of the NBA finals.”

“Ms. Richardson, do you have any idea why a weekend pickup game would be so intense?”

“Objection!” snapped Kate. “The witness isn’t a mind reader.”

“Sustained.”