An hour ago, when they reached their verdict, the jurors asked to be taken back to their rooms to shower and change. Now they file into the courtroom in their Sunday best, the men in blazers and ties, the women in skirts and blouses. Soon after they take their seats, Steven Spielberg and George Clooney rush in fashionably late in their expensive yet casual clothes. Other than Shales, the screenwriter, A-list attendance had gotten spotty as the trial slogged on.
But no one wants to miss the last ten minutes.
Chapter 105. Tom
SUDDENLY IT’S ALL going down too fast. The bailiff cries, “All rise.” Rothstein sweeps in and mounts his pedestal, and the jury forewoman, a tiny lady in her sixties with big plastic lenses, stands to face him.
“Has the jury reached a decision on all four charges?” asks Rothstein.
“We have, Your Honor.”
Dante looks straight ahead, his eyes focused on a secret spot inside himself, and his wet grip tightens. So does Kate’s.
“And how do you find?” asks Rothstein.
I steal a glance at Marie’s tortured face, and then, turning away from it, see the more composed features of Brooklyn detective Connie Raiborne, who is sitting right behind her. I guess he didn’t want to miss the verdict either.
“In the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Eric Feifer,” says the elderly forewoman, her voice strong and clear, “the jury finds the defendant, Dante Halleyville, not guilty.”
My hand inside Dante’s feels like it’s been caught in a machine, and behind us, anguished cries compete with hallelujahs and amens. Rothstein does his best to silence both with his gavel.
“And in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Patrick Roche and Robert Walco,” says the forewoman, “we find the defendant, Dante Halleyville, not guilty.”
The courtroom convulses, and the cops straighten their backs against the walls. Ten seconds stand between Dante and the rest of his life.
“And what is the jury’s decision in the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Michael Walker?” asks Rothstein.
“The jury finds the defendant, Dante Halleyville, not guilty.”
The gray-haired woman says those final two resounding words with extra emphasis, but before the last syllable is all the way out, the room splits open. Marie and Clarence must feel as though they’re watching Dante rise from the dead, and Feifer’s mom, who lets out an awful wail, must feel as if she’s seeing Eric get murdered again right in front of her eyes. The cheering and cursing, screaming and jubilation are way too close to each other, and the room teeters on the verge of violence.
But none of that means a thing to Dante. He springs out of the chair and pulls us up with him as he throws his huge fists into the air, tilts his head back, and roars. Kate gets the first hug. I get the second, and then we’re at the center of a wet, hot mosh pit of pressed bodies; then the whole hot circle hops up and down and emits a chant.
“Halleyville! Halleyville! Halleyville!”
When Kate and I extricate ourselves enough to take in the rest of the room, it looks as spent as Times Square three hours after the ball drops on the new year. Kate and I jump inside the phalanx of sheriffs who circle Dante, and as they usher us out a side door, my eyes lock with Spielberg’s screenwriter, Alan Shales.
In this wild moment, Dante, Shales, and I are all linked. Dante is free to play ball again; after my squandered decade, I have a career; and Shales’s script is going to get made. If Dante had been convicted, there would have been no movie. But now, suddenly, all three of us have a future.
Chapter 106. Kate
JOYOUS NEIGHBORS AND friends carrying food and drink show up at Marie’s an hour after the verdict, but the celebration doesn’t officially begin until Dante, a foaming bottle of champagne in one hand, scissors in the other, snips through the tangle of yellow police tape that sealed his bedroom for nearly a year. When the last sticky piece has been ripped away, he and his pals rush into the room like a liberating army.
“This is for my homeboy Dunleavy,” says Dante, donning the black-and-blue cap of Tom’s old team, the Minnesota T-wolves.
Then he tosses the other twenty-eight-the Miami Heat cap is still in a plastic bag in Riverhead somewhere-to his crew, and for the rest of the party, wherever I turn, brand-new gleaming caps bob jauntily above the fray.
As for me, I haven’t been dry-eyed ten minutes since the verdict came down. All I have to do is see Marie gaze up at her grandson, or Tom and Jeff with their arms around each other, or the relief on Clarence’s exhausted face for the tears to flow again. After a while, I don’t even bother wiping them away.
Now Macklin bangs on the kitchen table and shouts, “Order in the court! I said, order in the court!” And the room erupts in a riot of whistles, catcalls, and stomping feet.
“Anyone recognize this?” he says, waving a familiar wooden stick and sounding at least a couple drinks to the good. “Let’s just say that tight-ass Rothstein will have to find something else to beat on his poor pew. Because I wasn’t leaving that courtroom without a souvenir.
“Goddamn it, Dante. I’m proud of you,” says Macklin. “I don’t know how you hung so tough, but based on what I see in your grandmother, I’m not surprised. I hope someday you can look back on this bullshit and feel you got something out of it. Anything. And now I want to hear from the brilliant and gorgeous Kate Costello.”
When the room twists toward me and cheers, I open my mouth to see what will fall out.
“To Dante!” I say, raising my champagne. “And your long-overdue freedom! And to Marie! And your long-overdue freedom! I’m so relieved Tom and I didn’t let you down. I love you both.” Then I lose it again as Dante and Marie rescue me in their arms.
“What my partner was trying to say, Dante,” says Tom, picking up my toast like a dropped baton, “is you’ll be getting our bill in the morning.”
The highly emotional toasts and festivities roll on without letting up. I go over and stand by Macklin and Marie while Tom steps outside to join the revelers dancing in the yard to Outkast, Nelly, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye. Half an hour later, a peal of thunder rips through the joyous din, and the clouds that have been swelling all afternoon spill open.
The downpour sends half the neighborhood running for cover back into Marie’s six-hundred-square-foot trailer. Soon after that, Tom, his brow creased with worry, taps me on the shoulder.
“It’s Sean. Seems my nephew just got dumped by his girl. I didn’t even know he had one, but I guess he did, because he’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff.”
“You need to go talk to him?”
“I think so.”
“Well, give him a hug for me.”
“I will. And when I get back, I have a surprise.”
“I don’t know if I can take any more surprises right now.”
“It’s a good one. I promise,” says Tom, then gestures toward Mack and Marie. “Am I hallucinating, or are those two holding hands?”
Chapter 107. Loco
WHEN BOY WONDER comes around the back of that shitty little trailer and walks across the muddy yard, he looks so different it sends a quicksilver shiver up my spine.
It’s like I can barely recognize him, and I have this awful feeling that when he gets to Costello’s car, where I have been waiting for forty-five minutes like he asked, he’s not going to recognize me either. Or if he does, it’s going to be like we’re nothing but acquaintances and the last eight years never happened.
Boy Wonder is such a cunning bastard, that was probably his plan from the beginning. I don’t mean since this afternoon or last summer, I mean from the very beginning, eight years ago, when he came to the Village Police Station at three in the morning and bailed me out after the cops busted me for selling weed on the beach. I don’t know what he did or how he did it, but somehow he got the chief of police to drop the whole thing and fixed it so completely even my folks never found out. But now that I think about it, I bet he set me up with the cops in the first place so he could come in and bail my ass out and I’d owe him from the start.