Chucky Watkins, a crazy Irish laborer who used to work for Walco now and then, is sitting at a table as I shoulder my way to the bar. “Guess you’re afraid to come here without your football-coach chaperone?”
“Kev,” I say, ignoring Watkins, “a pitcher of Bass when you get a chance.”
“When you get a chance, Kev,” says Pete Zacannino, mocking me from the corner. By the way, a week ago, every face in this room was a pretty good friend of mine.
Kevin, who’s a particularly good guy, hands me the beer and two mugs, and I’m ferrying back to the table when Martell, another former pal, sticks out his foot, causing half my pitcher to spill onto the floor. Snorts of laughter erupt from one end of the bar to the other.
“You all right, Tom?” asks Jeff from the back booth. A week ago, with Jeff or alone, I’d have cracked the pitcher over Martell’s skull if only to see what would happen next.
“No problem, Jeff,” I shout back at the room. “I just seem to have spilled a little of our beer, and I’m going to go back to the bar now and ask Kev if he would be so kind as to refill it.”
When I finally get back to our booth, Jeff takes an enormous gulp of beer and says, “Welcome to your new life, buddy.”
I know what Jeff’s trying to do, and I love him for it. But for some reason, knee-jerk contrariness or just blind stupidity, it must not sink in. Because three beers later, I stand up and unplug the jukebox in the middle of a Stones song. Then, with a full mug in my left hand, I address the multitudes.
“I’m glad all you rednecks are here tonight because I have an announcement. As you all apparently know, I helped Dante Halleyville turn himself in. In the process, I’ve gotten to know him and his grandmother Marie. And guess what? I like and admire them both a hell of a lot. Because of that and other reasons, I’ve decided to represent him. You heard correct. I’m going to be Dante Halleyville’s lawyer, and as his lawyer, I’ll do everything I can to get him off. Thanks very much for coming. Good night. And get home safely.”
A couple of seconds later, Chucky Watkins and Martell come at me. Something goes off inside me, and this is a side of Tom Dunleavy most of these guys know. I hit Watkins full in the face with the beer mug, and he goes down like a shot and stays down. I think his nose is broken. It could be worse.
“C’mon!” I yell at Martell, but he just backs away from me. I may not be Dante Halleyville’s size, but I’m six three and over two hundred, and I know how to scrap.
“C’mon! Anybody!” I yell at the other cowards in the room. “Take your best shot! Somebody?”
But only Jeff comes forward. He tucks me under his beefy arm and pushes me toward the back door.
“Same old Tommy,” he says, once we’re in his truck. “Same hothead.”
I stare out the windshield, still steaming as Jeff steps on the gas and we roar out of the parking lot.
“Not at all,” I say. “I’ve mellowed.”
Chapter 43. Tom
THE NEXT DAY, at the Riverhead Correctional Facility, I place my wallet, watch, and keys in a small locker, then step through a series of heavy barred doors, one clanging shut behind me as another slides open in front.
The difference between the life of a visitor and those locked inside is so vast it chills me to the bone. It’s like crossing from the land of the living into the land of the dead. Or having a day pass to hell.
To the right, a long, hopeless corridor leads to the various wings of the overflowing fifteen-hundred-bed jail.
I’m led to the left into a warren of airless little rooms set aside for inmates and their lawyers.
I wait patiently in one of them until Dante is led into the room. He’s been inside a little less than a week but already seems harder and more distant. There’s no trace of a smile.
But then he clasps my hand and bumps my chest and says, “Good to see you, Tom. It means a lot.”
“It means a lot to me too, Dante,” I say, surprisingly touched by his greeting. “I need the work.”
“That’s what Clarence says.” And his two-hundred-watt smile finally cracks through the shell. This kid is no murderer. Anyone should be able to see that, even the local police.
I really do need the work too. It feels like the first day of high school as I take out a new pack of legal pads and a box of pens.
“Other than the fact that I will believe everything you tell me,” I say, “today’s going to be like being in that box with the detectives, because we’re going through that day and that night again and again. And we’re doing it until every detail you can remember is on these pads.”
I have him start by telling me everything he knows about Kevin Sledge, Gary McCauley, and Dave Bond, his three other teammates that day. He tells me where they live, work, and hang out. He gives me their cell phone numbers and tells me how to track them down if they try to avoid me.
“All have been in some scrapes,” says Dante, “but that doesn’t mean much where I’m from. McCauley’s on probation for drugs, and Bond served ten months right in here for armed robbery. But the real gangster is Kevin, who has never spent a day in jail.”
“How did they react to Michael pulling the gun?”
“They thought it was wack. Even Kevin.”
We talk about what happened the night of the murder. Unfortunately, his grandmother was visiting relatives in Brooklyn, so she hadn’t seen him before or after the shootings. Dante swears to me that he didn’t know where Michael Walker was hiding.
I’d forgotten how tedious this kind of work can be. Hartstein, my professor at St. John’s, used to call it “ass in the chair” work because that’s what it comes down to, the willingness to keep asking questions and the persistence to go through events again and again even if it only yields a few crumbs of new, probably useless, information.
And it’s twice as hard in here because Dante and I have to do it without caffeine or sugar.
Nevertheless, we keep on slogging, turning our attention to what he and Michael Walker saw and heard when they arrived to meet Feifer that night. These few minutes are the key to everything, and I keep pressing Dante for more details. But it’s not until our third time through that Dante recalls smelling a cigar. Okay, that could be something.
And in the midst of his fourth pass, he sits up straight in his chair and says, “There was a guy on the bench.”
My posture suddenly improves too. “Someone was there?”
“You know that bench at the far side of the court? A guy was sleeping on it when we arrived. And five minutes later, when we ran past it, he was gone.”
“You sure about that, Dante? This is important.”
“Positive. Hispanic-looking dude, Mexican, or maybe Colombian. About thirty, long black hair in a ponytail.”
Chapter 44. Tom
A CIGAR. MAYBE belonging to one of the killers.
The news that somebody else may have been at the murder scene who could confirm or add to Dante’s story, who maybe saw the three kids killed.
Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.
The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York. I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly pressed.
At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable white-shoe law firms-Walmark, Reid and Blundell.