Beach Wedding(17)

No one knew. But there they sat behind Hailey, supporting her 100 percent.

After fifteen minutes, Judge Edward Mathiassen entered the chamber. A short dignified-looking man with neatly parted white hair and a neatly trimmed white mustache, Mathiassen had already garnered some gripes from the media as well as the defense attorneys for not allowing a camera in the courtroom.

For that reason alone, he seemed somewhat sane to me.

Mathiassen wasn’t through clearing his throat to get the proceeding underway when Hailey’s lawyer Byron Seager leapt to his feet.

“Your Honor,” he said, “may we please approach the bench?”

What? I thought.

“Already?” Mathiassen said.

Seager gave him his best Honest Abe apple pie–eating smile.

“Yes, Your Honor, if you would humor us.”

There was a low murmuring through the room as all of Hailey’s lawyers and my dad huddled by the side of the judge’s bench. They spoke for a while, and things seemed to get heated at one point. But then they dispersed back to their tables.

“Bailiff, please let in the potential jurors for the voir dire,” Mathiassen said.

The door behind me opened, and everyone turned as thirty potential jurors marched in and headed for the jury box.



24

I was in my dad’s study reading one of his law books when he finally came back home that night around seven.

“Terry, what are you doing in here?”

“What happened today at the beginning, Dad?”

He paused for a moment and then finally smiled and shook his head at me.

“Why do all my kids have to be nuts?” he said.

My dad and I had been tight ever since I was little. I was, after all, probably the quietest of my loud family, and I would often follow him around like a puppy. I was also usually the only willing participant in whatever chore or activity he needed some help with.

Plus we were both big fans of mystery shows. On Saturday afternoons when everybody else went out to play, I’d sit by his feet and watch whatever reruns were on with him. Episodes of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and lots of detective shows like Perry Mason.

As we watched, my dad would lecture as to what he would have done to prosecute the cases and how the detectives would have fared in real life if they had to bring the cases to trial.

Everybody else groaned when my dad did this, but not me. He had been so proud of me in freshman year when I joined the mock trial team that he would even come to our practices and coach us.

“So, what happened?” I said.

He poured himself a drink. His drink. Pabst Blue Ribbon served in a wineglass. It was a nod to his own father, our grandpop, who had been born in Ireland and had been a cop in the Bronx and would drink it at cookouts when he came to visit. “We’re in the Hamptons,” he would say, and the wineglass was “to class the place up, dontcha know.”

“Terry, I don’t know why I should tell you any of this, but I will as long as you promise to keep it to yourself.”

“Of course, Dad. What happened?”

“Well, son, frankly, we were sandbagged. Our evidence was stolen. Hailey’s hoodie as well as the two bullets recovered from Noah’s skull mysteriously grew legs. The cops lost them. Put the word lost there in quotes.”

“What! No! When?”

“Three days ago. There was some kind of break-in at the evidence room and everything we had on Hailey walked out the front door of the Village of Southampton Police Department. The hoodie, the bullets, all of it.”

“No! Unbelievable! Somebody stole it? Who?”

“Who knows? Though it is unbelievable. And yet true. One of your patented unsolved mysteries.”

“This is a disaster!”

“Not completely.”

“How?”

“At the sidebar, the defense complained that we hadn’t sent them our discovery. When I told them the evidence had been stolen, they immediately asked for a dismissal, but the judge denied it. He actually did us a solid. He’s allowing the autopsy to be put into evidence even though we don’t have the actual bullets anymore.”

“But aren’t you toast now? The DNA evidence on the hoodie? That was your ace in the hole!”

My dad smiled.

“Don’t worry, kid. We still have a few tricks up our sleeve.”



25

“Would you please state your name for the jury?” said my dad.

It was Monday of the following week. The jury had been selected, the opening statements made, and the full courtroom was on the edge of its collective seat as the real trial officially began.

It was so quiet and tense that when someone opened the door to the hall behind me just about every head shot back anxiously toward it.

“Would you please state your name for the jury?” my dad said again as my intimidating court officer buddy, Bald Jimmy, silently closed the door behind him.

“Jailene Mercado,” Hailey Sutton’s maid said.

The papers had been right about Ms. Mercado. She was a nice-looking lady, though more than a little overweight. In a black turtleneck and houndstooth skirt with her burgundy-highlighted brown hair tight in a bun, she looked very polished and professional.

“Ms. Mercado, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a maid. I worked for Noah Sutton for seven years. Since 1992.”