Beach Wedding(48)

“Prisoner name,” said a hard-faced female clerk behind a desk as I walked in through a door that said Processing.

“Gittenger. Louis Gittenger,” I said.

This cold-case target from my Xavier Kelsey files was a bit of an outlier since he had no firsthand knowledge of Noah or of the night of the murder. But Gittenger had dated and even lived with Hailey Sutton in the first few years after Noah’s murder. His perspective into the whole thing as a confidant of Hailey’s could be very interesting, I knew.

Gittenger arrived ten minutes later escorted by a prison guard.

I introduced myself and we sat at a concrete picnic table in the center of the sunny yard. Gittenger was a slim nice-looking guy of about fifty. He had freshly cut hair and bright brown eyes, and even in his prison jumpsuit he looked the part of the high-end Manhattan real-estate broker he used to be. He had a very calm and confident way about him.

Which made some sense, I thought, as he was in jail for being a con man.

Gittenger’s simple yet effective scam was to take out a mortgage on a property, usually a million-dollar listing on the Upper East Side, and forge documents to say that he actually owned it free and clear. Then with those false documents, he would take out a home equity loan with a different bank. He had stolen over eleven million bucks before all the cards started to fall.

“And you want to know something really funny? I didn’t have any of the money when I got popped,” he said, smoothing a hand over the warm concrete tabletop. “Not a dime. I gambled away the whole eleven million. I hope they never let me out of here. It wouldn’t just be better for society, it would be better for me. I’m my own worst enemy.”

“So, what was dating Hailey Sutton like?”

“In a word? Fun. We made each other laugh. We’d actually been coworkers in the early nineties before she bagged Sutton. And the sex. Yow. Electric.”

“Did she have any contact with the Sutton family when you knew her?”

“Not that I recall. She’s a major shareholder in Cold Springs Chemical, so I remember her going to some meetings. But Hailey never considered me the type of boyfriend to bring home to meet the family.”

“How about the contractor, Mark Disenzo?” I said as I remembered Chef Pete’s theory. “Did she ever talk about him?”

I watched as Gittenger’s eyes lit up like Fourth of July sparklers.

“So, Kelsey got my letter after all.”

I quickly tried to remember a letter in Gittenger’s file. Nothing came to mind, but I went with it anyway.

“Why do you think I’m here?” I said.

He nodded.

“One night when she was talking to her mother, I rifled through her stuff in a file cabinet in her office. I found a DVD. You know what was on it?”

I shook my head.

“The security video from the gas station. She and Disenzo were in her Porsche at the Mobil on Hampton Road in Southampton Village. I looked at the time signature. Date 7/5/99. Time 8:11 a.m. I thought about taking it, then thought again as I heard her coming up the stairs.”

“So, you’re saying Hailey was with Disenzo the morning after the murder?”

“Yes. During the famous missing time, she was with Disenzo. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“You sure?” I said.

“I get it. I’m a convicted con man. But I’m good with numbers, as you may have guessed,” he said, smiling. “And that’s what I saw.”

“You think this means Hailey got Disenzo to do it?” I said.

“I do,” Gittenger said. “I really do.”

“Did you stop dating her then?” I said.

“No way. Are you kidding? We were having a blast playing house. Plus she had a whole lot of that Sutton money, and frankly, I wanted to get at it with both hands.”

“Did you?”

“No,” he laughed. “Not even close. She was tight with her money all right. Every time I tried to get her to invest in some real estate, she’d ask me about my strategies and bring up six points as to why she wouldn’t do it. Good points, too. She could read a spreadsheet faster than a CPA. Shrewd.”

“How’d it end?”

“Sadly and abruptly. One day she said I had to move out, and then she just stopped answering my phone calls. That was right around when the Feds started their case against me, so I’m thinking she might have been told by them that I was about to be indicted.”

“That’s where the fairy tale ended,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gittenger said, laughing. “I romanced the Evil Queen and then I ended up in the dungeon.”



65

Viv and Angelina met me at the West Hampton Airport Enterprise, where I returned the car. I didn’t see any corrupt crazy cops trailing us to the beach house, which was good.

When we got back to the house, we went across the backyard and straight down the stairs to the beach again.

Viv had already gone over the latest wedding-related affair we were to attend that evening, dinner for the bride Emmaline’s whole family, including her father and mother, William and Bea Fullerton, who were arriving from London.

Tom was arranging a beach clambake for us all, and as we got closer to the water, we spotted an army of caterers already out there atop the bluff. They were putting out Irish linen–covered tables and setting up striped cabanas and string lights. The serving tables were resting on hay bales, and rumor had it that there would be fireworks.