Beach Wedding(29)

“What, then?” Brody said, sitting up straighter.

“A trade,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“They want a trade,” I said. “The manuscript for Mr. Kelsey’s research on his last book. The one that he was working on when he died.”

“The Sutton Slay book?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Why would someone want all that crap?” Brody said.

I shrugged.

“Who knows? But this could mean a lot of money for you, Mr. Brody,” I said. “The missing novel of Xavier Kelsey markets itself. You and I both know that. You’d have publishers at your mercy. You could make headlines. It would be the book of the year.”

I saw a smile briefly play on his gold-digging lips.

“If it’s real,” he said.

I took out the rest of the manuscript, which included Kelsey’s handwritten outline, and stood and handed it to him. When I sat back down, I checked my watch and crossed my legs.

“Please, Mr. Brody. Everyone knows Kelsey handwrote all of his outlines. Have a look,” I said. “Take all the time you need.”



39

I looked up from the pages in my lap and pointed my face at the dusty Montauk-bound LIRR train window beside me. It had stopped raining and the sun was setting. It looked like we’d just come out of the tunnel into Queens.

“Let’s try it again there, buddy,” said a redheaded conductor hovering above me in the jostling aisle to my left. “Ticket, sir?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, almost knocking the papers to the floor as I fished my ticket out of my shorts’ pocket and handed it over.

“That must be something good you’re reading there,” the conductor said as he clipped and left.

“Unbelievable,” I said quietly to myself with a slow shake of my head as I finally slipped the pages back into the open cardboard file box sitting between my feet.

Suffice it to say, Brody had leapt on my offer to trade the novel manuscript and outline for the Sutton Slay files, which were worthless to Brody since Kelsey had never begun writing the actual book.

We’d just spent the afternoon sweating our way through the town-house basement, where the remains of Kelsey’s things had been stuffed.

The un-air-conditioned town-house basement.

But it had actually been worth the grime and sweat, I thought as I patted at the dusty lid of the old file box lovingly.

Because if I wanted to know more about my dad’s old case, I’d just found the mother lode.

In magazine interviews I had read, I learned that Kelsey’s writing process was to first gather as much information as possible. “Getting the groceries,” he had called it. For a full year, he would do nothing but research, absorbing everything humanly possible to know about a subject. Only then would he take another year to write, or what he called “weave together” all the material.

He died before he had begun the weaving process, apparently, because there was only a mound of research and his outline.

But what research!

In the box were neat rows of glossy binders, and in each binder were dossiers of information on everyone who had anything to do with the Sutton case. Some people were familiar but others I had never heard of. Ones that my father had never mentioned. All the suspects and witnesses. The police and all the lawyers. There was even a thick one about my father that I didn’t have the guts to crack. At least not yet.

The detail was just incredible. There were addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, places of business. There were even illegally obtained credit card statements and internal phone company records in some of them. All the information had obviously been compiled by some top-notch corporate detective agency Kelsey had hired. It didn’t say which one because all the letterheads had been redacted like in a CIA file.

What was getting me so excited as I sat there was that I knew I really had something here.

Looking at all the info, I realized that it wasn’t just research for a book. Instead, it was a detailed cold-case file that could contain the missing link to finally putting Hailey Sutton back on trial and vindicating my father.

One pretty much set up on a tee for an interested cop like myself to come along and solve.

I looked at the box and then out the window.

“I’m going to finish this, Pop,” I whispered as the speeding shadow of the evening train flickered over the sunset faces of the old buildings.

“If it’s the last thing I do,” I said.



40

The train in front of us broke down on the Montauk line north of Bay Shore, so it was actually quite dark when I finally got back to the house. I was walking through the shadows just before Sandhill Point’s massive circular driveway, dreading how much Viv was going to cream me, when I heard the sound.

I dropped the file box in the bushes near the front steps as the high whine, a kind of thunderous industrial trilling, suddenly came from the back of the house.

I sprinted across the crushed shells beneath the porte cochere’s elaborate arch and had just made it to the side lawn when I saw it.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Out of the night past the edge of the beach at about the height of an elevated subway train suddenly emerged a large helicopter. It was one of those corporate ones, big and fat and white with sleek red and blue pinstripes. I watched it flare up and hover and begin to descend.