Beach Wedding(16)
I’d finished my doughnut and was licking at the last of the chocolate stuck to the waxed paper when I saw the reporters getting all riled up. Something was definitely about to happen. They’d been standing around, stamping their feet, shooting the breeze with one another, and then all of a sudden, they were all moving en masse, grabbing their cameras, running toward the street at the end of the plaza.
As I watched, a Chevy Suburban with tinted windows pulled up to the curb across from the courthouse, and all of its doors popped open at once. Then Hailey Sutton emerged from the vehicle in the midst of three bodyguards.
The clicking paparazzi camera flash packs strobed off Hailey and her entourage like white heat lightning as they crossed the gloomy plaza. There was something strangely graceful in the way the massive body of backward-walking, hollering reporters and techs moved in sync with Hailey and her forward-moving entourage. With the soundtrack of the cha-cha-ing castanet-like clicks of all the cameras, there was a sort of festive ritual quality to the whole scene.
Yeah, I thought, watching in awe.
The running of the bullshitters.
And even though we were on opposite sides in this, I couldn’t deny how striking Hailey looked between her bodyguards and the paparazzi. Wearing Chanel shades and an immaculate white wool coat, she looked like she had stepped out of Vogue.
As the plaza media tango passed by me for the door, I quickly deep-sixed the water bottle into an overflowing garbage can when I saw who was coming up behind the crowd.
The short, feisty fiftysomething woman crossing the street, schlepping several case-file-filled bags, gave me an eye roll as I stepped up to her.
“Hey, Mrs. Fisker, let me help you,” I said as I took one of the overflowing bags from my dad’s secretary.
“Terence Rourke, you awful brat! What are you doing here? Don’t you have school?” she said as she hurried for the farthest door to the left away from the reporters.
“My mock trial coach gave me permission. Can you help me get in?” I said as I opened the courthouse door for her.
“As if I don’t have enough to do. Take this bag here. I’ll try, I guess. C’mon.”
“He’s with me, Jimmy,” Mrs. Fisker said to a bald mean-looking court officer, holding a clipboard beyond the metal detectors.
Jimmy looked at me and rolled his eyes as he reluctantly let us by.
“Okay, you’re in,” she said. “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. Trial’s upstairs in 3A. Run! Tuck yourself in at the back and look like you belong there.”
23
Courtroom 3A was a high-ceilinged room paneled in pale yellow wood. It looked like a chamber-music hall or even a modern church with the packed gallery benches standing in for pews.
After I scored a space along the wall five feet from the door and craned my neck out to see over the heads, I got another good look at Hailey.
Her lawyers had probably advised her to dress as approachably as possible, but the navy blue designer sheath dress she was wearing accentuated her silhouette such that she looked nothing short of stunning. All really good-looking women have a kind of haughty air about them, and Hailey had that in spades.
Speaking of standouts, I thought as I looked at her lawyers.
She had three of them, Justin Mortain, Bruno Tully, and Byron Seager, and they were all from one of the country’s top law firms.
Mortain was a famous criminal lawyer who had defended a popular director from doing time for a drunk driving fatality, and Tully had been an adviser to two presidents.
But Byron Seager was the most concerning.
I’d already seen him in two TV interviews, and he radiated decency and balance and charm. He was witty, sincere and had a kind of boyish, small-town look to him. Except he wasn’t what he appeared. At only thirty-one, the Jimmy Stewart look-alike was the finest, most ruthless mercenary trial lawyer in the country. He had already somehow saved a car company and a Wall Street bank from existential-level lawsuits that they completely deserved to lose.
What was even more discouraging for my dad and his case was that all of Noah Sutton’s billionaire family—his son, Julian (from his first marriage), his two brothers, Nelson and Henry, and his sister, Brooke—were sitting directly behind Hailey and her dream team.
Dark-haired Nelson Sutton, the eldest in the family, was tall and barrel-chested and had a kind of brawny, almost thuggish look to him, more like a cement truck driver than a billionaire.
The remaining siblings, on the other hand, thoroughly looked the part. Brooke was dressed to the nines, her salon-perfect hair and makeup and dark stylish pantsuit and jewelry all effortlessly on point.
Henry was even more photogenic and wealthy seeming. Almost as handsome as Noah with highlights of blond in his thick brown hair, Henry could have easily played himself when they made the movie.
No doubt about it. My dad had not counted on that. He, like anyone, had assumed the rich and famous Sutton family would be eager to see justice served in the case of their brother’s violent murder.
Especially considering the fact that the accused was none other than his brand-spanking-new sketchy younger wife.
He’d thought wrong.
From almost the outset, the Sutton family had made it well known to the press that they felt the whole incident was nothing other than a tragic murder by an unknown assailant and urged that Hailey not be prosecuted.
Why this was the case wasn’t easy to figure out. They didn’t like Noah so much? Or maybe that after the three-ring media circus of the funeral, they simply wanted to save their extremely famous and powerful family from yet another trial? Yet another trip through the tabloid media mud?