Beach Wedding(15)

“Holy shit,” I said again, thinking about what was about to happen. “This is gonna be huge, Dad. A guy this famous is murdered at the party of the summer at his own house! The media is gonna go nuts!”

“You got that right, son,” my dad said. “You got that right.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Drive your grounded ass back home,” my dad said as he suddenly screeched back onto the road.

“Then what?” I said as he whipped a U-ey.

“Then I’m going to figure out who killed Noah Sutton, put them in jail, and call it a day.”



20

On January 7, 2000, an excessively gloomy day six months after my conversation on Meadow Lane with my dad, I got off a bus in front of the headstone-gray entrance of the Arthur M. Cromarty Criminal Courts Building in Riverhead, Long Island.

I thought I had an idea about what was coming when I’d woken up that cold morning, but as I turned up the lapels of my overcoat and looked through the lightly falling snow at the mob in front of the courthouse, I realized I was dead wrong.

It was like the building was under siege. There had to be at least two hundred media people on the windswept concrete plaza out in front of the ugly modern courthouse. They all stood around the outdoor press conference podium that had a mass of twisting microphone cords on it thick enough to hold up a bridge.

Across from it in the media pen stood a black forest of camera tripods, ladders, and stepladders. After a moment, I realized it was for all the photographers to shoot over and around each other like they were tiered rows of Revolutionary War–era soldiers.

A news van passed me as I was about to cross the street, and as I skirted the courthouse’s packed parking lot, I saw that there were about thirty more of them already there. The networks had actually brought in those crisis bus type vehicles you see at NASCAR races.

Gaping at the massive media encampment and the coliseum-like atmosphere, I suddenly realized the full enormity of what was going on, and the tiny butterflies I had in my stomach when I’d gotten out of bed that morning became the size of pterodactyls.

Because the heavy eyes of the entire world were now upon two people, I knew.

Noah Sutton’s beautiful widow, Hailey Sutton.

And my dad.



21

One month after Noah Sutton’s death, my dad had arrested Hailey Sutton and charged her with second-degree murder.

And nothing had been the same since.

The pundits were already calling it the East Coast equivalent of the OJ trial. For three weeks straight, the “Sutton Slay,” as it was referred to now, was the top story of almost every major news outlet. The cable networks especially just couldn’t get enough. It seemed like the case was on the cover of the New York Post or the New York Times every single day.

We never saw my dad. He came home to shower and to sleep. The phone rang off the hook with interview offers from the media. Mickey had opened the door one Saturday morning to see a 60 Minutes producer standing there with Morley Safer personally asking for an interview that Dad declined.

No wonder the piranhas were in a frenzy. One of the juiciest aspects of the case was the alleged affair angle. It was rumored in the press that Hailey Sutton had been sleeping with a contractor named Mark Disenzo, who had been working on the beach house the year before. A mob-connected contractor, the papers were not so reluctant to point out.

Disenzo, a thuggish though handsome guy, would probably have been a media star by now if it weren’t for the fact that he, too, was dead.

A month almost to the day of Noah’s murder, he wiped out on his motorcycle on the Verrazzano Bridge doing a hundred and thirty. My father had looked into it, and I overheard him tell one of his investigators that there had been more coke in Disenzo’s system than blood when he spun out and hit the rail.

No doubt about it, the case had pretty much redefined the term sensational. When my dad announced Hailey’s arrest at a press conference at the end of July, the networks had actually interrupted their broadcasts. They’d even cut away from a Mets day game. A Time magazine cover with Hailey’s face on it appeared the next week.

Though my dad’s lips were airtight about the case, there had been leaks, and they were doozies.

Apparently, there were no witnesses and no murder weapon but there was DNA evidence. A hoodie allegedly belonging to Hailey had been found in the garbage of a neighboring property. It was speculated that on it was blood splatter belonging to Noah.

There was also apparently some extremely damaging testimony to come out from Hailey’s maid, Jailene Mercado, who was holed up at an undisclosed location. Jailene was a forty-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic, and the Spanish network Telemundo had gotten in on the media frenzy by promising her her own TV talk show.

I looked at the hordes of journalists standing outside in the cold.

“Now, this,” I mumbled to myself as I blew into my hands, “is how to do a bring-your-kid-to-work day.”



22

I bought a bottle of water and a doughnut from a food truck and stood with the crushing crowd of reporters out in the cold near the courthouse’s front entrance. I’d already had my sister, Erin, call in sick for me at school. My dad had told all of us to stay the hell away from the trial, but there was no way I was missing this. No way that I wasn’t going to be there to see what happened and to support my dad.