Beach Wedding(54)

I actually grabbed my head as she said the words Hailey Sutton’s trial.

“So, who took them?” Kelsey said.

“Nobody knew,” Sonya said. “That is, until I went out on a date with an old partner of mine.”

“Who?”

“Dennis Tapley.”

“What?” I yelled in the dark.

“Tapley, the current Suffolk County police chief?” Kelsey asked.

“Yes.”

“What does Tapley have to do with it?” Kelsey said.

“Tapley showed it to me.”

“Tapley showed what to you?”

“The missing evidence bag and envelope.”

I closed my eyes.

“Bullshit. The Southampton police evidence bag and envelope from Hailey’s trial?”

“Yes,” Sonya said. “He showed it to me.”

My heart felt like it had stopped, like I’d been hit in the chest with a baseball bat.

“How did he show it to you? Where were you?” Kelsey said.

“His wife was out of town, and we were at his family’s place out on Fire Island. We were stoned off our ass, and I started ribbing him, saying, ‘You’re not such a big deal, head of the Suffolk County cops. Big whoop.’

“He takes me into the bedroom, and we go into a closet with a gun locker in it, and he presses the code and out comes a big plastic evidence bag. It said Southampton PD on it, and inside of it was a hoodie. In with the hoodie there was another smaller bag you use for shell casings. In it were the two bullets that killed Noah Sutton.

“Then he just put a finger to my lips and put it back. It was funny because the next morning he didn’t even mention it. He was pie-eyed. But he really had them. Hell, he probably still has them. You want a bombshell, there’s your bombshell, Xavier. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

“Why would Tapley take the evidence?” Kelsey said. “Was Tapley hired to take it by Hailey?”

“Who knows?”

“But Tapley has it?” Xavier Kelsey said on the tape.

“Yes. As far as I know, it’s still out there at his vacation place.”

“When did you see it?”

“The exact date? I don’t know. Around the first week of January.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Kelsey asked.

“Now, now, Xavier. I’m an officer of the law. Do I need a reason to blow the whistle on corruption to expose a crime?” Sonya said.

“Yes, you do. People generally do, in my experience,” Kelsey said.

“Fine,” she said, letting out a long breath. “When Tapley got the commissionership, he was supposed to put me in as a precinct commander. He didn’t do it, so screw him. Turnaround is fair play. I hope he goes down.”

“A woman scorned,” Kelsey said.

“You said it, pal.”

There was the sound of a waiter asking them if they wanted more drinks and some more restaurant sounds, and that was it.

I clicked off the recorder and sat there staring at the concrete wall. There was a hum behind me and then the gurgle of the pool’s pump.

I thought about everything.

What I knew. Where this was headed.

But mostly I thought of what I was going to do now.

What I had to do.



PART FOUR

THE BEST MAN




74

On a clear and warm beautiful evening four days before my brother Tom’s wedding, I left the beach house and met up with Marvin Heller at Road F Beach again, and we headed west.

Around 6:00 p.m., we pulled into a full-service fifty-slip marina in East Moriches called Windemere. We came to a stop in the deserted parking lot, and I got out and grabbed the cooler that was in the back.

“You sure you don’t need some company on this?” Marvin said as I went up to the driver’s-side window.

“No, I’m good, Marvin,” I said. “I got this.”

“If you say so,” he said as he handed me an envelope that I folded and tucked into my shorts pocket.

After I watched him back out and head for the Montauk Highway, I walked with the cooler down the marina’s old gray wooden dock and stepped aboard the forty-foot fishing boat at the end of it.

The boat I’d rented was called the Blues King II, and it was a 2009 Luhrs tricked out into a fisherman’s dream with an in-deck fish box and a bait prep center and three 300-horsepower Verados off the stern.

I untied the lines and got up on the bridge and put out into Moriches Bay, and in ten minutes, I was passing through the heavy currents of the Moriches Inlet into the Atlantic.

About a mile out as I hooked a right to cruise west parallel to the Smith Point County Park beach, I began thinking about my father.

I remembered the time we’d gone deep-sea fishing, and Tom caught a remora, and Dad had taken it off the hook and stuck it fast with its suction cups to the deck. I smiled as I remembered how my blue-eyed old man would start singing out there on the water after a few beers. “Sweet Caroline” was a Sean Rourke standard. But my favorite was when he sang “The Streets of New York” by the Wolfe Tones, about an Irishman from Dublin who comes to New York to become a cop, just like our grandfather had done.

I thought about how my father taught me to throw a punch and to hit a baseball and to tie a tie and to shave and to drive. His big warm hand on my shoulder as we fished side by side.