Beach Wedding(42)

“Strike two.”



55

Running late for my next interview, I was already out of the car and halfway across the drive toward a little house on a wooded lot in Farmingville when I noticed the large dog on the porch. It was a dalmatian, I saw, and stopped in my tracks as I heard it start to growl.

“Dempsey, who do you think you’re kidding?” the former Sutton family chef, Peter Morales, said to his dog as he pushed open his screen door.

After insisting that I call him Pete, the pudgy affable middle-aged Hispanic dude brought me through a huge vegetable garden around to his backyard, where some lawn chairs were arranged around a firepit. As I sat, I noticed that beyond the backyard was a vast cemetery. We both turned as Dempsey arrived in a jingle and lay at Pete’s feet.

“Been here about two years,” Pete said. “My wife is superstitious about the graveyard and still not right with it, but look.”

He gestured out at the fading gold light on the cemetery lawn and the headstones and the treetops.

“Look at how they keep the grass. And it’s so peaceful. I don’t drink anymore, so I like to come out here and chillax.”

From his Kelsey file, I’d read how Pete had been a very young man the night Noah had been shot. Only nineteen years old. He’d originally been from some hellhole neighborhood in the South Bronx but had started out in NYC restaurants as a dishwasher and prep cook when he was fifteen. By eighteen, he had been the line cook at a new place down in SoHo when Noah came in one night and visited the kitchen to compliment him on the meal. Six months later, Pete was working for him for the summer out at the Glass House and living there. His file said that he ran the grill at the Spring Lake golf club now.

Pete grinned as he looked over at me.

“So, you’re writing a book about Noah Sutton, huh? About time someone did. They told us if we talked to anyone at the time, we’d be sued. They were extremely serious about it.”

“Who’s they?”

“Hailey Sutton’s lawyers. They were such pricks. Especially this one obnoxious skinny white guy with a thousand-dollar suit and a Boston accent. He said he’d go after our families. I felt like going after him with a piece of pipe. Man, those snotty Red Sox fan types boil my blood.”

“Me, too. Go Yankees,” I said and laughed.

“Exactly. I’m so pumped you’re doing this. I watch all these true-crime shows and wonder, where the heck is the Sutton Slay? Let me ask you, have you spoken to anyone in the family yet?”

“No, just some staff. I thought I’d start on the outside and work my way in.”

“That’s a good strategy. I wouldn’t think they’d want to talk to you. Especially Hailey.”

“What was she like?”

“We hated her. When Noah first brought her home, she was cool with everyone just like he was. But after the marriage, she became lady-in-waiting Sutton, and we were given new itineraries and rules. No member of the staff shall speak to Mr. and Mrs. Sutton without being spoken to first. Imagine? I wanted to pack up my knives about a week after she moved in. Who else have you contacted?”

“Darren Ross.”

“Ah, that little creep. I hated that guy. What a little bootlicker. Hailey and him got along swell. Who else?”

“Jeff MacBay.”

“Jeffie, yes. I liked him. Weird but nice. Like a little kid trapped in a big guy’s body. We were roomies when we went to Noah’s apartment in the city and down in Palm. How is he?”

“He’s married up in Westchester. He’s an architect now.”

“Really? Wow. What did he tell you? Anything?”

“Truthfully, not much.”

“Okay, so what do you want to know from me?”

“What everybody wants to know,” I said, staring at the headstones. “What happened that night?”



56

“I wish I knew, man,” Pete said. “I wasn’t even there that night. The guests weren’t the only ones having a good time. I’d gotten lucky and had gone back to one of the catering waitresses’ houses in the Bays. This little Italian girl. No, wait. She was Portuguese. I remember now. Amanda was her name. Hot!”

I actually knew that already from my files.

“What do you think the deal was, Pete?” I said. “The staff knows everything. What do you think happened?”

“Okay, here’s what I think. For my money, I think it was the contractor, Mark Di-something.”

“Mark Disenzo?” I said.

“That’s the guy. Something to do with him. He did it himself or had a buddy do it. Always hanging around after hours, waiting on Hailey. Had a real thing for her. Rumor had it that they were together before Hailey married Noah. Which was why he got the job. Why else hire a firm all the way from Brooklyn?”

I stared at Pete. That was new.

“So you think Disenzo shot Noah? You don’t think it was Hailey?”

“I mean, it could have been her, sure. But out of everybody who was around at the time, if you took a vote and said who here is actually capable of putting two bullets in another human being’s head? Disenzo would win in a landslide.”

Pete patted his dog.

“He was mobbed up or at least sounded like he was. He fronted like a Gambino or something. He had this mean, really deep gravelly voice. His fuggedaboudits and the vicious way he treated his guys who were working on the addition seemed pretty freaking authentic to me.”