To whom?

There was a knock on the door, and Vinnie jumped up and disappeared into the foyer. Lenny drew his pistol and held it in his lap. Presently, a room service waiter appeared wheeling a table on which was a bottle of champagne, a cheese board, and a bowl of fruit. The waiter said, "Compliments of the manager, sir." Bellarosa motioned to Vinnie, who tipped the waiter, who bowed and backed out.

Bellarosa said to me, "You want some champagne?"

"No."

"You wanna call your wife back and tell her what you need?"

"No."

"I'll dial it for you. Here…" He picked up the telephone. "You go in your room for privacy. Here, I'll get her."

"Later, Frank. Hang up."

He shrugged and hung up the phone.

Vinnie turned on the television to the five-o'clock news. I hadn't expected a lead story, but there was the anchorman, Jeff Jones, saying, "Our top story, Frank Bellarosa, reputed head of the largest of New York's five crime families, was arrested at his palatial Long Island mansion early this morning by the FBI. Bellarosa was charged in a sealed sixteen-count federal indictment in the murder of Juan Carranza, an alleged Colombian drug lord who was killed in a mob-style rubout on the Garden State Parkway on January fourteenth of this year." Jeff Jones went on, reading the news off the teleprompter as if it were all news to him. Where do they get these guys? Jones said, "And in a startling development, Judge Sarah Rosen released Bellarosa on five million dollars' bail after the reputed gang leader's attorney, John Sutter, offered himself as an alibi witness for his client."

Jones babbled on a bit about this. I wondered if Susan recalled the morning of January fourteenth. It didn't matter if she did or not, since I knew she would cover me so I could cover Frank Bellarosa. Oh, what tangled webs we weave, and so forth. Mr Salem taught me that in sixth grade.

Jeff Jones was saying now, "We have Barry Freeman live at Frank Bellarosa's Long Island estate. Barry?"

The scene flashed to Alhambra's gates, and Barry Freeman said, "This is the home of Frank Bellarosa. Many of the estates here on Long Island's Gold Coast have names, and this house, sitting on two hundred acres of trees, meadows, and gardens, is called Alhambra. And here at the main gates of the estate is the guard booth – there behind me – which is actually a gatehouse in which live two, maybe more of Bellarosa's bodyguards."

The camera panned in on the gatehouse and Freeman said, "We've pushed the buzzer outside there and we've hollered and shaken the gates, but no one wants to talk to us."

The camera's telescopic lens moved in, up the long driveway, and the screen was filled with a fuzzy picture of the main house. Freeman said, "In this mansion lives Frank the Bishop Bellarosa and his wife, Anna." I heard Frank's voice say, "What the fuck's this got to do with anything?" Freeman went on for a while, describing the lifestyle of the rich and infamous resident of Alhambra. Freeman said, "Bellarosa is known to his friends and to the media as Dandy Don."

Bellarosa said, "Nobody better call me that to my face." Vinnie and Lenny chuckled. Clearly they were excited about their boss's television fame.

The scene now flashed back to Freeman, who said, "We've asked a few residents on this private road about the man who is their neighbour, but no one has any comment." He continued, "We don't think the don has returned home from Manhattan yet, so we're waiting here at his gate to see if we can speak to him when he does."

Bellarosa commented, "You got a long wait, asshole."

Barry Freeman said, "Back to you, Jeff."

The anchor, Jeff Jones, said, "Thanks, Barry, and we'll get right back to you if Frank Bellarosa shows up. Meanwhile, this was the scene this morning at the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Jenny Alvarez reports." The screen showed the video tape of that morning: Frank Bellarosa and John Sutter making their way down the steps of the courthouse as savage reporters yelled questions at us. My blue Hermes tie looked sort of aqua on camera, and my hair was a bit messy, but my expression was a lawyerly one of quiet optimism. I noticed now that the snippy female reporter who had given me a hard time on the lower steps was on my case even then as we first left the courthouse, but she hadn't really registered in my mind at the time. I saw, too, by her microphone, that the station I was watching was her station. I guess that was Jenny Alvarez. She was yelling at me, "Mr Sutter? Mr Sutter? Mr Sutter?"

Obviously, she had been fascinated by me the moment she laid eyes on me.

Actually, she wasn't bad-looking herself.

But neither Frank nor I had said much as we descended the steps, and the scene shifted to the lower steps where we got stuck for a while. And there was Great Caesar, with the majestic classical columns of the courthouse behind him, puffing on his stogie, wisecracking and hamming it up for the cameras. I hadn't noticed when I was there, but from the camera's perspective I could see a line of federal marshals on the top steps of the courthouse, including my buddy, Wyatt Earp.

Frank commented to the three of us, "I gotta lose some weight. Look how that jacket's pulling."

Vinnie said, "You look great, boss."

Lenny agreed, "Terrific. Fuckin'-ay-terrific."

It was my turn. "You could drop ten pounds."

"Yeah? Maybe it's just the suit."

I turned my attention back to the television. You could hear a few questions and a few answers, but mostly it was just entertainment, a street happening, impromptu theatre. Then, however, Ms Snippy's cameraman got a close-up of her bugging me again. "Mr Sutter, Mr Ferragamo has five witnesses who put Frank Bellarosa at the scene of the murder. Are you saying they're all liars. Or are you the liar?"

And stupid John replied, "Ferragamo's witnesses are liars, and he knows they are liars. This whole thing is a frame-up, a personal vendetta against my client, and an attempt to start trouble between -" 'Trouble between who?" asked Ms Snippy. "Rival mobs?" And so it went. Frank didn't say anything, but I had the feeling he wished this wasn't going out over the air to Little Italy, Little Colombia, Little Jamaica, Chinatown, and other quaint little neighbourhoods where exotic people with big grudges, big guns, and extreme paranoia might decide to engage in what was called a drug-related murder.

I turned my attention back to the television. The classical columns and crowded steps of the courthouse were gone, and the background was now grey stone. And there was Ms Alvarez live, apparently recently returned from her engagement in lower Manhattan. In fact, she had changed from the morning's neat suit and was now wearing a clingy, red fuck-me dress and holding a bulbous phallic symbol to her lips. But did she put it in her mouth? No. She spoke into it. "And this is Stanhope Hall. Or at least its walls and towering gates. And over there, right behind the gates, is the gatehouse where an old woman tried to shoo us away a little while ago."

Funny, but I hadn't recognized the place at first. It was odd that you could sometimes believe in the imagist world of television, but when the person or place was someone or something you knew personally, it didn't look real; the perspective was wrong, the colours were off. The very diminution of size made the person or place nearly unrecognizable. But there it was: the gateway to Stanhope Hall on television.

Ms Alvarez did ten seconds of travelogue, then said, "You can't see the fifty-room mansion from here, but in that mansion lives John Whitman Sutter and Susan Stanhope Sutter."

This was not at all accurate, of course. Susan had lived in the mansion once, but had stepped down in the world. I'll write to Ms Alvarez. Anyway, Jenny Alvarez went on about blue bloods, high society, Susan's parentage, and all that nonsense, then she came to the point, which was, "Why would John Sutter, a respected and successful attorney with the old Wall Street firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, with rich and powerful friends and clients, defend Frank the Bishop Bellarosa on a charge of murder? What is the connection between these two men, between these two families? Did John Sutter, in fact, see Frank Bellarosa on the morning of January fourteenth when Alphonse Ferragamo charges that Bellarosa murdered Juan Carranza in New Jersey? Is that why Sutter chose to take on this case? Or is there more to it?"